“Any residual heat?”

  “None.”

  “Meaning this didn’t happen any time in the last few days.”

  “No, sir.”

  Grisham cast his mind back to the Kijol incendiary deployment on Xaros. It seemed as if the aliens had executed a similar attack here on Ovintus.

  He exchanged a glance with Deneuve. From her expression, she was thinking along the same lines.

  “Scan for signs of an installation,” said Grisham.

  A few moments later, Lopez announced the result. “I’m reading signs of metal alloy in the place affected by the incendiaries, sir.”

  “How much metal alloy?”

  “Lots of it,” said Lopez. “Across an area about thirty klicks by thirty.”

  From out of the blue, Grisham was struck by the feeling that he’d once again been sent on a mission that would unearth something both unexpected and significant.

  He took a deep breath and tightened his grip on the controls. It was time to head in for a closer look.

  FOUR

  Thirty minutes later, Grisham brought the Marauder to a standstill, half a million kilometres from Ovintus. Lopez and Bishop focused on the planet’s surface for a time, before declaring that the distance was still too great for them to build a clear picture.

  “How close do you need us to be?” asked Grisham. He had enough experience to know exactly what answer he was going to receive.

  “A hundred thousand klicks, sir,” said Lopez.

  “A hundred thousand it is,” said Grisham.

  He slid the control bars to the ends of their guide slots and the whine of the Marauder’s Charos drive was transformed into a roar. The velocity gauge climbed, and the distance gauge fell.

  After a journey of twenty-seven minutes, Grisham hauled back on the controls and the warship came to a stop. Here, the sensor view of Ovintus was appreciably better and he could make out the surface mountains, along with several snaking lines which may once have been rivers, millions of years in the planet’s past.

  He studied the incendiary-affected area of the surface. The Kijol weapons – or at least, Grisham assumed they’d belonged to the Kijol – had ravaged a large section of red-sand desert, along with a rising plain of rock to the north and some foothills east. The sheen he’d noticed from a million kilometres was even more pronounced from a hundred thousand, as the rough glass reflected light from the Daxin star.

  In the centre of the glass, a large dark patch was not reflective at all. This was an area of alloy and it hadn’t occurred naturally. Grisham narrowed his eyes. A sandstorm was blowing across what remained of the installation. It wasn’t savage enough to shroud everything, but it made the details indistinct.

  “Tell me what happened,” said Grisham.

  “Give me a couple of minutes, sir,” said Lopez.

  Grisham nodded, not taking his eyes off the feed. His own first impression was that this had once been an installation of some importance. Most of the central area was flat, while misshapen grey mounds at the northern and southern ends had surely once been buildings. At almost thirty kilometres square, the facility would have certainly been of high strategic importance.

  “Here we go,” said Lopez, taking a breath. “We’re looking at a military complex rather than a mining operation. We’re too far away to perform a composition match on the alloys, but the colour is identical to that of other Kijol alloys used for military purposes. The installation was struck by multiple incendiaries and the lack of residual heat indicates the attack happened at least three weeks ago. Maybe much longer than three weeks. There are no signs of Kijol warships on the ground, though multiple transports were abandoned and caught in the incendiaries.”

  “What about surface-to-air launchers?” asked Grisham.

  “It’s almost certain the Kijol installed defensive emplacements, sir, and the usual targeting range is about fifty thousand klicks. The incendiaries have made the surface too much of a mess to detect the location of missile launchers. It’s possible some or all of them were neutralised by the heat.”

  “Or none of them,” said Grisham.

  “Yes, sir, that’s a possibility too.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Grisham. “So, from what we learned on Xaros, it seems likely the species of aliens we encountered there attacked this base here on Ovintus and that attack was so successful the Kijol felt the only way they could respond was by incinerating everything.”

  “There are no visible traces of anything that isn’t Kijol, sir,” said Lopez. “However, we’re scanning from a long distance and incendiaries are damned good at covering things up.”

  “You’re sending all this back to base?” asked Grisham.

  “Yes, sir,” said Bishop. “Travel time for the comms transmission is two-point-five days.”

  “I understand that. Keep sending the updates,” said Grisham.

  He frowned as he considered his next steps. The Kijol had been attacked, that much was clear. Also, the sighting elsewhere of the Eternus battleship - with its mineral particles and hull scarring which started this mission to Ovintus – suggested that the Kijol had finished with the planet. The enemy weren’t known to back down from a fight, so if they were gone from Ovintus it meant – in theory – that no threats remained.

  “What advantage can we take from this situation?” Grisham wondered aloud. He had a thought. “Have you run a sweep for comms receptors? The Kijol often install their critical hardware underground. Maybe some of it survived.”

  “Yes, sir, I’ve run a sweep,” said Lopez. “There are no receptors, but that doesn’t mean there are no comms transmitters. Those would be well-hidden from anything that isn’t a Kijol warship.”

  “Would the Kijol have withdrawn if any of their hardware remained operational?” asked Deneuve.

  “No,” said Grisham. “And if they weren’t sure the incendiaries would do the trick, they could have issued a code to disable everything that survived the heat.”

  He returned to his thought from moments ago that the Kijol didn’t run from a fight. During the meeting on Bastion station, Danner had referred to intel suggesting the enemy needed to end their war with the Human Federation as quickly as possible in order to focus elsewhere, or to gain control of humanity’s shipyards.

  Maybe the Kijol burned this installation to the ground and fled before they lost other major assets, like that Eternus battleship.

  Of course, it was all speculation and the thoughts in Grisham’s head became circular as he tried to guess the unknown. The frustration made him clench his teeth.

  “What are you thinking, Captain?” asked Deneuve.

  “I’m thinking about many things, but mostly about the surface launchers, Commander. I’d like to take a closer look at the installation, even if it’s just to learn more about what happened here.”

  Grisham had been on the wrong end of a Kijol surface launcher before. They fired modified Olin warheads that flew fast and could cripple even a new gen Tibor like the Marauder in a single hit if they detonated in the wrong place. Grisham was keen to learn what he could from past events at Ovintus, but he wasn’t going to be reckless.

  “We could approach low from a couple of thousand klicks away,” he mused.

  “I doubt a surface-launched missile could adjust to hit a target flying below a thousand-metre altitude,” said Deneuve. “Not unless that target was unlucky enough to be flying directly overhead.”

  “Everything’s a risk,” said Grisham.

  “Then it’s decided?”

  “Yes.”

  Grisham’s eyes went from the sensor feeds to the tactical and back again. He had a choice between a long circuit of the planet so that the Marauder could approach the surface far from the likely position of any surface batteries, or another lightspeed jump to the planet’s blindside. The first option would require twenty minutes on the Charos drive, while the second option would take less than fifteen.

  “Lieutenant Adler, we’re heading back into lightspeed,” said Grisham. “Target our re-entry to local space on the far side of Ovintus at a ten-thousand-klick altitude. We’ll fly low around the planet and see what we can see.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Adler. “The Charos drive will fire in eight minutes.”

  “Lieutenant Lopez, Lieutenant Bishop, please continue your scans.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Eight minutes passed and the sensor officers located nothing new. The Marauder entered and exited lightspeed in the blink of an eye, emerging at an altitude just below ten thousand kilometres. Reds and yellows were the predominant hues on the surface and this area of the planet was in darkness.

  “We’re heading in,” said Grisham, bringing the propulsion to maximum output.

  “This current trajectory will bring us to the planet’s surface three thousand kilometres from the target installation, sir,” said Bishop.

  As the Marauder approached the upper reaches of the planet’s atmosphere, Grisham reduced velocity. While he doubted any hostile spaceships remained in or around Ovintus, he didn’t want to fly across the surface leaving a thick trail of heat smoke as a sign of his passing.

  The altitude gauge fell, and Grisham levelled out the warship at eight hundred metres. Directly below, the ground was parched and rocky. The Marauder’s external monitors indicated the air temperature was minus thirty Celsius and a strong wind funnelled the sand between countless boulders, forming rivers of fast-moving grit. Given the size of the Marauder, at six hundred metres in length, the gap between its underside and the planet’s surface seemed incredibly small.

  Grisham wasn’t concerned. The warship was nimble enough and he wasn’t intending to travel at such a velocity that he might impact with the ground. Even a collision would be no disaster. The Marauder’s Ghost clusters were protected by sliding hatches in the hull, while the Gatlers and sensors were within near-flush, armoured turrets that were designed to take a beating.

  “I’ve added a course overlay onto the tactical screen, Captain,” said Lopez. “The scans we took earlier indicate the ground is low-lying for most of the way. There’s a mountain range you’ll have to climb over, but otherwise it should be plain sailing.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Grisham.

  He guided the Marauder across the planet’s surface. Despite the darkness, the sensor feed was clear all the way to the horizon. Holding a velocity that would bring the warship to the Kijol installation in less than fifteen minutes, Grisham kept his eyes glued to the sensors. Ovintus was desolate, but compared to many other worlds, it wasn’t so bad. At least there were colours other than the usual greys.

  “I reckon there was life here before,” said Lopez. “Maybe not anytime in the last few hundred million years, but at some point.”

  “Nothing could live here,” said Kinsey.

  “Nothing could live here now,” said Lopez. “Stars change. They become hotter or colder, and their planets live or die because of it.”

  Despite the mission, Grisham was fascinated and he felt a shiver of the ages. He’d grown up reading about the endless mysteries of space, and watched countless series on TV about planetary exploration. The stories were part of why he’d joined the military – to see those places for himself. And then the war had started, shortly after he’d finished his training. Soon after that, Grisham’s superiors had identified him as a man of talent and his climb through the ranks had been rapid.

  And then it went downhill.

  Grisham cursed inwardly that his reminiscing had so quickly turned to Maynard. He ignored Deneuve looking his way – she seemed to have a preternatural knack of picking up on times when he was angry – and concentrated on the feeds.

  “The mountains are a couple of hundred klicks ahead, sir,” warned Lopez. “Once we’re over those, it’ll be another thousand klicks to the installation.”

  “Acknowledged,” said Grisham.

  He could see the mountains, looming on the far horizon. They were pointed like sharpened teeth and rose to eight thousand metres in places. Between the warship and those mountains, the darkness of night ended abruptly and the colours on the forward feed seemed so pronounced as to be almost artificial.

  Below the Marauder, stone gave way to red-coloured sand, piled high in dunes. The wind was still blowing strongly, forming the sand into lashing whips and bringing constant change to the desert.

  A short time later, the ground rose steadily, red stone emerging from red sand. The Marauder was now flying through the planet’s day and the extreme lows of the night-time temperature turned into extreme highs – as much as seventy Celsius, according to the hull monitors.

  Grisham piloted the warship higher as the mountains loomed. There were huge gaps between the peaks and he guided the Marauder carefully between them. He could have simply increased altitude until he was above them all, but he was enjoying this test of his skills.

  The mountains extended a hundred kilometres from one side to the other and he could see from the portside and starboard sensors that they stretched for hundreds more north and south. Banking around the peaks had carried the warship a few kilometres off the route line and Grisham adjusted to bring it back on course.

  One of the higher peaks rose in front of the Marauder and, because the mountains were almost behind him, Grisham chose to go over. The warship climbed easily and, in moments, the land beyond the mountain range was revealed to be a mixture of deserts and huge outcrops of stone. It was as lonely a vista as Grisham could remember.

  Then, a red light appeared on his console, indicating that the two forward Gatlers were firing. Acting without conscious thought, Grisham threw the Marauder to starboard. His eyes jumped to the forward feed, where six lines of grey smoke were racing through the air, each describing a different arc as the missiles adjusted course to follow the spaceship.

  “Scramblers: deployed,” said Deneuve.

  The Gatlers knocked out one missile, then a second. The bank to starboard had brought the portside Gatlers into play and they fired also. Scramblers were hurled from their topside launchers and began their transmission routines designed to fool enemy guidance systems.

  It was too little and too late, though the margins were tight. All bar one of the incoming missiles were neutralised, but that final one impacted with the Marauder, striking it on the portside midsection nearest the stern. Grisham watched in fury as what seemed like half of his warship was ripped out in the blast and scattered across the Ovintus sky.

  FIVE

  Within a second of the blast, it was clear the Marauder wasn’t going to make it back to the repair yard under its own steam. The propulsion howled with unimaginable stress and the warship hardly responded to the controls. In front of Grisham, the few status lights which weren’t red, were amber.

  “Damnit, we’re going down,” he said.

  The portside sensors had failed and the other feeds were flickering in a way which made Grisham think they’d go offline at any moment. He knew that no other missiles remained in that first wave, but a second wave was a distinct possibility.

  In spite of everything, Grisham’s mind remained calm, and it seemed as if the world around him was running in slow motion, while his brain operated at full speed.

  From the approach paths of those missiles, the Marauder’s climb over the mountain had evidently brought it high enough that a distant ground launcher had locked and fired. Grisham knew he’d screwed up, but he had better things to do right now than consider his failings. His warship was in a bad way and he needed to bring it below the launcher’s horizon. That wasn’t going to be difficult, since the propulsion output gauge was showing four percent. The Marauder required five percent propulsion output just to stay in the air and that meant it was going to crash, whatever miracles Grisham could do with the controls.

  “Keep those feeds online!” he yelled. “And get me something more from the engines! Lieutenant Bishop, send a distress call to base!”

  “There’s not a chance I can draw anything extra from the propulsion, sir,” said Adler, with chilling certainty. “This vessel is done.”

  “I’m trying to stabilise the feeds,” said Lopez. She cursed once and then again.

  “Sir, the distress call has failed to transmit!” said Bishop.

  “Try again,” said Grisham.

  “I am trying, sir. I’ve got a red light on the main comms hardware and another on the two primary hull antennae.”

  “Try the backups,” snarled Grisham.

  Shouting wouldn’t fix broken hardware and Lieutenant Bishop knew what he was doing, so Grisham left him to it. His eyes went to the altimeter. The gauge was reading four thousand metres and falling.

  Shit. The life support.

  The life support light couldn’t decide if it wanted to be red or amber. If it failed, the coming impact might well kill everyone onboard, particularly if the engine output fell any further. Grisham’s eyes darted onto the propulsion output reading, just as it changed to three percent.

  All the feeds went offline for a full two seconds and then they came back at a low resolution. The visual stream was jerky, like the backend computer could no longer handle the data. Outside, a line of mountains rose into the sky a few kilometres starboard, while the ground was coming closer with each passing moment.

  “Still got amber on the life support,” said Deneuve. “Set us down now, Captain. While the hardware is active.”

  Grisham had a sudden realisation. When the Marauder hit the ground, its underside deployment chutes would become blocked. The crew would likely be able to exit the warship through the escape hatches situated around the hull, but they might be unable to reach the ground. Not that making it to the ground would improve the chances of survival, what with the comms team being unable to transmit that distress call.

  “I’m going to land us on the topside plating,” said Grisham. “If this vessel has enough power to roll.”

  He pulled on the controls and the propulsion note didn’t change at all. The Marauder tilted to starboard, but not nearly enough for it to roll. Grisham looked desperately for a solution and found one that might just work.