Grisham’s heart rate was falling and he felt himself recovering, though not so much that he wanted to find out if he could beat his previous best up those steps. “We’ll have to act fast.” He smiled. “But that’s nothing new.”

  Maxwell nodded, but he didn’t say anything. He indicated that Corporal Fine should join the rest of the squad – who were guarding the stairs and the other approaches - and then waited near the rear wall of the control room in case he was needed.

  Grisham turned his attention to other matters. He looked across at Deneuve and Lopez.

  “We’ll need to be lucky for a second time,” said Deneuve. “If these consoles require security codes, we won’t be taking a shot at that Achirus.” She thumbed over her shoulder in what was probably a random direction. “In case you were wondering, Private Diaz and Private Lowe found the switch that way.”

  “I’m glad they did,” said Grisham.

  As he was speaking, the console finished its boot process and a menu appeared on a small screen installed on the top panel.

  “We’re straight in!” said Lopez.

  “Hell yes!” said Grisham.

  He felt suddenly invigorated and leaned forward in his seat to read the display. Many of the functions Grisham recognized from past encounters with Kijol hardware. He pushed one of the buttons with his fingertip. The huge screen in front of the two consoles flickered once, twice and then glowed a uniform grey. It was ready to display feeds from the battery sensors.

  “Let’s see what’s going on outside,” said Grisham. “Lieutenant Lopez, bring up the feeds.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Feeds coming up,” said Lopez.

  Surface-to-air installations were usually fitted with high-grade sensor hardware, in order that they could rapidly identify enemy vessels and target them with missiles. The battery here on Ovintus was no exception and Lopez obtained a crystal-clear feed of the Achirus warship, which remained in the air over the base.

  “We’re low to the ground, so the sensors can’t see the surface buildings, except for the tops of the tallest few,” said Lopez. “But there’s the cruiser.”

  “If it’s in our sensor arc, it should be in our firing arc too,” said Grisham. He looked down at the panel and tried to figure out how to access the targeting systems. “We need to override the automated threat identification systems – then we might be able to target the Achirus manually. Its crew won’t be expecting the attack, so hopefully we’ll be able to hit it with at least one missile.”

  “One strike won’t bring down that cruiser, Captain,” said Deneuve.

  “I know, Commander.” Grisham closed his eyes and took stock of his thoughts. “It’s all we have. The last attack of the cornered animal before it’s killed.”

  “I wouldn’t normally ask this, sir,” said Maxwell. “But is this the right thing to do? The base might be infested with those aliens. Wouldn’t it be best if the cruiser activated those incendiaries? We should be safe out here in this battery – unless the Kijol decide they’re going to bomb the perimeter as well.”

  Grisham was suddenly torn. It had seemed like such a perfect idea, to use the Kijol’s own missiles against them – especially after one of those missiles had wrecked the Marauder. “Like I said to Commander Deneuve – what else do we have?”

  “Private Chau found a way to the surface. Maybe we could head outside and see what comes from it.”

  “Lieutenant Lopez, this battery should be fitted with internal monitors,” said Grisham. “Show me what’s on them.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lopez.

  The feed of the Achirus was replaced by dozens of individual feeds from inside the battery. Lopez quickly selected a half-dozen.

  “Shit,” said Grisham. “Corpses.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lopez. “This feed on the left is the station where we came in, and this one here is from one of the missile loading areas.”

  The Kijol corpses weren’t doing much of anything, other than standing with the infinite patience of the dead.

  “No sign of those bad aliens anywhere,” said Lieutenant Adler, staring over Lopez’s shoulder.

  “They don’t appear on HF sensors,” Grisham reminded him. “It’s possible the Kijol hardware isn’t any more effective.”

  “There’s no way we’re going to cut a path back through all those bodies,” said Maxwell.

  “Which leaves the surface as our only escape route,” said Grisham. “Like you said earlier.”

  “I prefer desert to corpses, sir.”

  “Before we go anywhere, I want to find out if we have an option to launch missiles at the Achirus,” said Grisham. “That cruiser is too valuable a target for us to ignore. If we can bring it down, we’ll leave this battery and head for the surface.”

  He pushed buttons on the console and stared at the readouts which appeared on the compact screen next to the input panel. When he kept his helmet sensor focused on the Kijol text for a couple of seconds, the computer in his suit interpreted the words for him. Much of the text on the display was status codes, the meaning of which he could only guess at.

  “Six missiles might not be enough, sir,” said Deneuve on the crew channel. “Even if we can figure out how to launch them.”

  “I know, Commander.”

  “If we fail to bring the enemy craft down, we’ll be eating missiles.”

  “I know,” snapped Grisham.

  “I’m making sure you’re aware of the risks, sir. That’s one enemy warship up there. If we survive and make it home, we’ll be the crew that destroys a dozen in the future. We’ll be selling ourselves cheap if we die here.”

  Grisham smiled. “I understand what you’re saying, Commander. I’m not planning to throw our lives away. Not after everything that’s happened so far.” He had an idea. “Are we able to link to the other perimeter batteries?”

  “No, sir,” said Lopez. “We have no visibility of the other emplacements, and all comms are routed through the hubs on the main installation.”

  “That’s what I guessed,” said Grisham sourly. “So we’ll have our six missiles and no more.”

  “Captain, the cruiser is in motion!” said Lopez. “It’s heading to the northern end of the installation.”

  “The Achirus has just deployed a cannister,” said Grisham, his eyes on the feed. “And there goes a second. The installation is about to go up in flames.”

  “We’re safe here, right?” said Private Lowe.

  “The incendiaries won’t reach us in this battery, Private,” said Grisham, unsure when Lowe had returned to the control room. “Not unless the Kijol already deployed a cannister in a nearby subterranean bay we’re unaware of. Even then, the doors to this emplacement were built to withstand a lot of heat. They’ll hold.”

  As Grisham was speaking, the cruiser climbed vertically, its rate of acceleration suggesting it was under maximum thrust.

  “Here we go,” said Commander Deneuve.

  In the direction of the Kijol installation, a wall of flame rose into the sky. The fires climbed, their orange colour so intense it was almost white. Grisham stared as the incendiaries burned and spread. The surface had been incinerated once before and now the Kijol were doing it again. He was sure that beneath the ground – unseen by the battery’s sensors – the plasma would be carbonizing the countless bodies which had remained unaffected by the last incendiary attack. The Kijol had screwed up before and Grisham doubted they’d do so again. This time, they’d burn everything.

  “They aren’t going to stop at destroying the installation,” Grisham said. “They’re going to destroy the batteries too.”

  “With more incendiaries?” asked Maxwell.

  “No – with missiles,” said Grisham. “We have to find out how to manually target that warship.”

  “Sir, the cruiser is heading east,” said Lopez. “This battery is outside the north-western corner of the main installation.”

  The Achirus was at a ten-kilometre altitude. It flew a short distance east and launched a salvo of missiles from its underside clusters without slowing. Orange streaks sped towards the ground. The target was hidden by the raging flames that still engulfed the base, but Grisham was sure the Kijol had destroyed one of the surface batteries. The cruiser continued east and launched another dozen missiles.

  “Let’s hope they go clockwise all the way,” said Corporal Barkley. “That’ll make us their near-last target.”

  Grisham wasn’t relying on the Kijol playing ball. He urged his crew to find the manual override for the battery and got on with the same task himself. Unfortunately, the Kijol hadn’t made the override easy to find and Grisham wasn’t even sure if the option existed. Since technology was almost entirely automated, there was little need for manual intervention. In theory, however, a manual override was easy to include and there were a few rare circumstances where the facility might be needed. It was this hope that Grisham clung to.

  Every so often, he glanced up at the feeds and every time he did so, the cruiser was firing missiles. The incendiary fires were dwindling, but the cruiser’s targets remained out of sight over the horizon. Having destroyed several targets north-east of the main installation, the Achirus flew south.

  “Uh, Captain,” said Lieutenant Lopez. “There’s a warning light for one of the internal doors. It’s being bombarded with access codes. The security system has tried to block inputs to the door panel, but the codes are still coming in.”

  “A security breaker,” said Maxwell. “Like we saw on Xaros.”

  “Which door?” asked Grisham. “And is there any indication how long before the intrusion attempt might be successful?”

  “It’s one of the doors leading from below,” said Lopez. “Here’s the feed.”

  The stream was from an area of the battery which Grisham hadn’t explored, and the monitor was installed in one of the corners above the door. A wide passage was filled with corpses and that was all the feed showed.

  “We need to seal it with charges,” said Maxwell. He shouted an order and Private Chau dashed into the control room. “Do you recognize where that is, Private Chau?”

  “I think I went past that place earlier, Sergeant,” said Chau, peering at the feed. “It’s about five or six minutes from here.” He pointed at the floor. “A few levels down.”

  “Go there and take Private Diaz with you,” said Maxwell.

  “The security system is reporting a second intrusion attempt,” said Lieutenant Lopez. “No, make that three intrusion attempts. Bringing up the feeds.”

  Grisham only spared those feeds a brief glance. He saw yet more corpses, but no sign of the aliens controlling them. It was more evidence that the Kijol sensor hardware was incapable of detecting this foe.

  “So, am I going to seal those doors, Sergeant?” asked Chau.

  “No,” said Maxwell. “We’ll defend this position.”

  “We could go to the surface,” said Private Franklin hopefully. “The Achirus will kill everything inside this battery for us.”

  “They’ll kill us too,” said Maxwell, clearly fighting with impatience and frustration. “You think that Kijol crew are going to fly right overhead and not see us?”

  “We could bury ourselves in the sand, Sergeant,” said Franklin.

  “That won’t work, Private,” said Lopez. “Most of the sand near this battery was turned to glass by the last incendiary deployment. Anyway, even if there was enough sand, we’d leave plenty of detectable signs by digging ourselves in.”

  Grisham was also fighting with frustration. Every time he tried something different, it took his suit computer a couple of seconds to interpret the readout on the console screen. He was beginning to understand the different codes – with the assistance of a help file the Kijol had thoughtfully installed – but it was slow going.

  “How’re you getting on, Commander Deneuve?” he asked.

  “Not well,” she admitted. “I’m sure there’s a way, I just can’t find it.”

  “The Achirus has finished with the north-east and eastern batteries,” said Lopez. “It’s heading west and the next enemy target will be south of our position.”

  “Can you estimate how many batteries the cruiser will have to destroy before it reaches us – assuming it heads north instead of south?” asked Grisham.

  “Six or seven,” said Lopez. “The enemy warship is having to wait for the reload on its underside clusters. We might have two or three minutes, unless they turn south, in which case we’ll have longer.”

  “Our best chance is to launch at the last possible moment,” said Deneuve. “There’s a possibility the enemy Dasor turrets won’t have time to lock and fire.”

  “It’s our only hope,” said Grisham.

  The cruiser fired upon another emplacement, hovered for a short time and then launched yet more of its missiles.

  “That leaves another four or five,” said Lopez. “If I’ve guessed right.”

  Time was running out and Grisham knew he was allowing all these little interruptions to gather into one major distraction – a distraction that was keeping him from concentrating on the single most important task. He tuned everything out and focused only on the console.

  “The cruiser has destroyed another battery,” said Lopez a short time later. “And we have a fourth intrusion attempt on one of our internal doors.”

  From his periphery, Grisham watched the Achirus fly north-west from its last target. He knew then that its crew were planning to eliminate all the batteries this way before they went south. The seconds were counting down and not many remained.

  “That’s another battery gone,” said Lopez. “That leaves two or three before we become the target. If you’re going to find that override, now’s a good time to do it.”

  Grisham had always worked well in situations of extreme duress and this was one of those occasions. He found a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, implementing it was going to take some time.

  The Achirus fired its next salvo, while Grisham worked furiously to ready the battery for a launch.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “The Kijol didn’t delete the test mode from the control software,” said Grisham, talking fast while his hands moved across the controls. “I’m switching us over.”

  “In test mode, the launcher will target anything,” said Commander Deneuve excitedly. “It won’t recognize the cruiser as a friendly.”

  “That’s the hope, Commander,” said Grisham.

  This was how the HF hardware worked, but he didn’t have any proof that the Kijol weapons systems were set up the same way. Still, the enemy had included a test mode and surely there was a reason for it.

  “Test mode activated,” said Grisham.

  Instantly, the cruiser appeared as an available target. He selected it and the backend computer acknowledged. Then, it asked Grisham to confirm his selection. He did so.

  “The Achirus has destroyed another emplacement,” said Lopez. “It’ll be our turn soon.”

  “I hear you, Lieutenant,” said Grisham.

  He looked directly at the feed. The cruiser was about ten kilometres south-east and still at a ten-kilometre altitude. In order to completely obliterate this battery and anything living inside it, the warship would need to be directly overhead, so its missiles could penetrate all the way to the bottom of the emplacement.

  At least, that’s what Grisham was pinning his hopes on.

  The Achirus hovered for a few seconds and then flew a short distance north-west. It fired at its next target and then slowed to a standstill, with its entire portside flank visible.

  “I think we’re next, sir,” said Lopez.

  “I agree,” said Grisham. “We get one chance at this.”

  “The time is now, sir,” said Adler.

  “The enemy vessel is nine klicks from our launch position, Lieutenant,” said Grisham. “The closer it comes, the greater the chance our missiles will hit their target.”

  He knew he was pushing to the limit and beyond. At nine kilometres, the chance of several successful detonations was high. And yet, this was a new generation Achirus. Perhaps its battle computer and sensor hardware were new also. Maybe they’d react a fraction of a second quicker than he was expecting.

  The sound of Private Vaughan’s repeater firing came from somewhere close by. The soldiers began calling out warnings on the squad comms. Grisham didn’t turn to look. All his attention was on the Achirus. The enemy vessel didn’t move and Grisham bared his teeth in a snarl.

  “Come on,” he said.

  The cruiser accelerated on a heading that would take it directly over the missile battery. Grisham’s eyes were wide and he didn’t dare blink.

  “Now,” said Deneuve on the crew channel.

  Grisham didn’t wait any longer. He pushed his finger onto the launch button. Less than a second later, a clunking boom came from somewhere deep within the battery and a low alarm sounded within the control room.

  “Warheads away,” said Deneuve.

  Six immense missiles accelerated from their launch tubes. They raced through the sandstorm, curving tightly in the air as they went. Grisham thought he saw the white tracers of Dasor fire, but then the missiles struck. The explosion was immense and he guessed that five of the warheads had successfully detonated. Huge pieces of armour plating were torn from the cruiser and a vast chunk of its stern blew out.

  “Yes!” shouted Lieutenant Adler.

  Grisham didn’t say anything. He was sure the cruiser had been terminally damaged, but he needed a sight of its hull. At the moment, the burning plasma was making it impossible to judge the status of the enemy vessel.

  “It’s coming down,” said Commander Deneuve.

  She was right. The cruiser’s engines had either partially or completely failed and it was descending in a gentle arc towards the surface.

  “It’s going to miss us,” said Lopez.

  “Not by much,” said Adler.