Secrets of the Sphere (Battlecruiser Alamo Book 27) Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  SECRETS OF THE SPHERE

  Battlecruiser Alamo: Book 27

  Richard Tongue

  Battlecruiser Alamo #27: Secrets of the Sphere

  Copyright © 2017 by Richard Tongue, All Rights Reserved

  First Kindle Edition: September 2017

  Cover By Keith Draws

  With thanks to Ellen Clarke and Rene Douville

  All characters and events portrayed within this ebook are fictitious; any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Join the Triplanetary Universe Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/A9MdX

  Prologue

   “Captain Orlova?” a stunned Clarke asked, looking up at the weather-worn woman walking into their improvised camp. “We thought...” He looked across at Mortimer, and said, “I don't know what we thought. I'm pleased to meet you.”

   Mortimer looked up from her work, her hand close to the pistol at her belt, and said, “Don't take this personally, Captain, but do you have any proof that you are who you claim to be?”

   Orlova frowned, paused for a second, then said, “Did they ever manage to correct that guidance control failure on Thruster Nine? It always used to burn a quarter-second too long.”

   Clarke's eyes widened, and he replied, “Not to my knowledge, ma'am. Last time I flew Alamo, we were still having to compensate for it manually.” Looking back at Mortimer, he said, “You'd have to have actually flown the old bird to know that, Ronnie. It isn't in the official specs. If she isn't Captain Orlova, then she's sat in the chair at least once. That's enough for me.” Turning to Orlova, he asked, “What are you doing out here, ma'am?”

   “Never mind that for a moment. How bad is the damage to your ship?”

   “Total write-off,” Mortimer replied. “I'm surprised we both walked away from the crash. Do you know anything about the missile that brought us down?”

   “Communications?” Orlova pressed. “Have you any way of contacting Alamo?”

   “All knocked out,” Clarke replied. “We got the beacon going, though, and...”

   Rising to her feet, Orlova yelled, “You activated a broadcast beacon? After coming under enemy fire? What the hell were you thinking?”

   “That we're eight thousand miles from home, that it's a long walk back, and that we've got no other way of sending any sort of a message back to Captain Salazar,” Mortimer replied. “We weren't exactly overloaded with options, Captain.”

   “Damn,” she replied, looking around at the horizon. “We've got to get out of here. Right now.”

   “Where the hell are you planning to run?” a mystified Mortimer asked. “We've got the biggest desert I've ever seen to the north, wasteland to the south, and unless you can walk at the speed of sound, the only hope we've got...”

   “Arm yourselves!” Orlova said, racing towards the wreckage of the flyer. “That's an order!”

   Clarke looked at Mortimer, then drew his pistol from his holster, looking across the horizon while Mortimer tugged out her datapad, calling up a short-range sensor scan of the local area, seeking the source of Orlova's paranoia. She shook her head, playing with the controls, while Clarke moved over to Orlova.

   “Nothing in range, Captain,” he reported. “We've got time. And if anyone was watching, they'll certainly have seen us come down. Do you know who launched that missile?”

   “Did you fly over a mountain range, lots of cracks and valleys, an oasis with a few buildings scattered around?” At his nod, she continued, “That's where your missile came from. And that's where the people…” She paused, looking up, and after a second, Clarke heard a low howl, an electronic whine, off in the distance. Orlova tugged a pistol free of the twisted remnants of the weapons locker, slamming a magazine in position with practiced ease before moving into cover behind the remnants of the port engine.

   “What is it?” he asked, sliding in beside her, as Mortimer scrambled into position on the far side of the wreck, sweeping the sky with binoculars.

   “Incoming. Any moment.”

   “My sensor's still blank,” Mortimer insisted, jabbing at the screen. “Wait one. Damn, they're moving fast. Two contacts, three hundred miles an hour along the ground. How the hell...”

   “Subsurface magnetic tracks,” she replied. “Damn it, I was afraid of this.” She turned to the beacon, and said, “Too late to turn this off, but there might be something I can do. Hold them as long as you can.”

   “Aye, ma'am,” Clarke said, as Mortimer ran to his side, taking the position vacated by Orlova. He looked across at her, then back at Orlova as she leaned over the communications console. “You think there's any point trying to get out of here?”

   “Where to?” she replied.

   “Good point.” He could hear the whine growing louder now, the vehicles getting closer. “Damn it, if we had one plasma rifle...”

   “Not much we're going to do with these things,” Mortimer said. “John, this is pointless. We're not going to do anyone any good making some sort of glorious last stand.”

   “No surrender,” Orlova pressed. “Buy me some time. We've got to warn Alamo.”

   “With a one-pulse beacon?” Mortimer asked. “We should never have activated the damned thing, but now that we have...”

   “No surrender!” Orlova replied, savage eyes turning to Mortimer. “Fight until you're out of ammunition. Then, and only then, you can yield.”

   “After we've made them nice and mad,” she said, turning to Clarke. “John, you're...”

   “She's the ranking officer,” Clarke replied. “And that's enough for me.”

   “Crazy…,” Mortimer muttered, settling back into firing stance. As abruptly as it began, the noise ceased, the desert air silent once again. Then the sound of marching boots resounded, a dozen figures moving over the dunes in the distance, a shining silver bullet resting on the desert floor, dust rising in a long trail behind it. He looked at Mortimer, shook his head, then dropped down into firing position, tugging the trigger to send a bullet slamming into the ground before them. Catching his cue, Mortimer fired a second shot on the far side, and the approaching troops hesitated, fanning out across the desert, their advance now more cautious than before.

   “They're still coming,” Clarke said, turning to Orlova. “How long, Captain?”

   “Two minutes. Just two minutes.”

   “That armor looks tough,” Mortimer replied. “Combat grade. Our bullets won't get through it.” Grimacing, she added, “And without a network to back us up, the internal guidance won't work either. It'd take the luckiest shot in history to bring one down.”

   “We don't have to bring them down,” Clarke said. “Just hold them off.” He looked at the wrecked flyer, then added, “Out of interest, what would happen if we tried to fire the eng
ine?”

   “A rather satisfactory explosion.”

   “Captain,” he said, turning to Orlova, “Whatever it is you are doing, how long do you need it to work?”

   “Fifteen seconds,” she replied.

   “Right,” he said, tapping Mortimer on the shoulder. “Stall them.”

   “What with, harsh language?”

   “If you think that'll work.”

   With a brief grin, he ducked into the battered remains of the cockpit, a bullet slamming into the dust by his side, and reached for the controls, his hands dancing over the ruined console as he struggled to bring the emergency reactor to full power. The desert echoed to the sound of gunshots, a staccato series of cracks as Mortimer struggled to hold off the superior foe while Clarke finished his work.

   “Ready,” he said. “Main engine will fire in one minute. Captain...”

   “Ready here!” Orlova said. “Everyone run like hell as soon as the ship blows. There might be a chance for us to get clear in the aftermath.”

   “Some hope,” Mortimer muttered. “They're coming over the final dune now.”

   Tapping the final control, Clarke said, “Twenty seconds! Get moving!”

   Without waiting for the others, he dropped to the ground, swinging clear of the wreckage, and sprinted for the desert, weaving from side to side as bullets cracked through the air all around him. If they'd wanted to kill him, he'd be dead. That much was obvious. They wanted him alive, a weapon he could use against them. He counted down the seconds in his head, waiting for the engines to fire.

   As it turned out, he was three seconds slow. All the safety systems had been disabled by the crash, and the resultant explosion sent a tower of flame and smoke racing to the sky, the force of the blast knocking him from his feet, sending him tumbling down a dune, burying him in the soft sand. Thinking quickly he dug himself deeper, lying still in the ground as he heard voices all around him, angry curses in unintelligible languages, and then finally the noise of the enemy vehicle moving away. Somehow, amazingly, he'd escaped capture, and after waiting for what he hoped was ten minutes, he dug himself out of the sand, pushing himself to his feet.

   He reached up to his forehead, the hand coming back covered in blood from an unexpected wound, and pulled out his first aid pack as he scrambled up the dune, keeping his other hand close to his pistol. The scene that greeted him at the top was one of utter devastation, a crater where the flyer once was, flickering flames still rising from the debris. All of the enemy troops were gone, but so were Mortimer and Orlova. He'd escaped. They hadn't.

   And now he was alone in the desert with no supplies, no communicator, and a head wound.

   An oasis in the desert, by the mountains to the south. If he was right, that was about eighty miles away. Ripping the sleeve from his shirt to tie around his head, he looked towards his goal, fingers of rock reaching for heaven. Three days. Maybe. If he lived that long.

  Chapter 1

   Lieutenant-Captain Pavel Salazar looked over the portable sensor display, watching the glare of the heat source as the flyer exploded. He glanced across at Kristen Harper, sitting at the controls, and frowned, reaching over to adjust the resolution, hoping to spot some sign of survivors. The display had been flooded with contacts in the final moments before the detonation, flashes that had to be a battle in progress, but the explosion had left nothing in its wake. Just as he was about to give up, Harper pointed at a corner of the screen, a triumphant smile on her face.

   “There,” she said. “Bottom right quadrant. Something moving, a human figure.”

   “That doesn't mean anything,” Lieutenant Carpenter, Alamo's Science Officer, gloomily replied. “It could easily be one of the attackers. It's almost more likely.” Shaking her head, she said, “They must have tried a takeoff, and something went wrong. Perhaps they'd suffered more damage than they thought. Without a telemetry track, we might never know.”

   “Captain?” a tentative voice said, the figure of Midshipman Koslowski peering into the tent. “There's something about the disaster beacon I don't understand. For the first three minutes, it was transmitting Alamo's identification code, but at the last second, it switched over to another one. I don't recognize the sequence.” She pulled out her datapad, tapped a button, and a loud wail filled the tent, a series of pulses that had Harper and Salazar looking at each other in shared recognition.

   “Monitor,” Harper said. “That's Monitor's emergency code.”

   Nodding, Salazar replied, “They found someone. A survivor. Out there on the sphere.” Without another word, he stepped out onto the plain, walking towards the improvised runway, a team of engineers working on a second flyer under the supervision of Alamo's Deck Officer, Lieutenant Lombardo. The veteran turned to him as he approached, his face dour.

   “I know what you're about to ask me, boss.”

   “How long?”

   “She can be ready for takeoff any time.” Turning to the craft, he added, “She's fueled and ready to go. I had a feeling you'd be wanting her as soon as Flyer One went down.” He paused, then said, “Skipper, I don't know if this is such a good idea.”

   “We've got people out there in need of help,” Salazar replied. “I'm not going to leave them out in the desert to rot, not if there is even a chance that they are still alive. Besides, if someone from Monitor is out there, then they've got the answers to a lot of the questions we have about the Sphere. They've been out here for months.” He looked up, sweeping his hands at the landscape all around. As far as the eyes could see, terrain rolled all around them, as though they sat at the base of huge green bowl.

   Even after weeks, the thought of the unexplored territory waiting for them still took his breath away, untold millions of square miles with trillions of beings. Civilizations primitive enough to go back to the earliest days of mankind, and advanced enough to seem like gods. And they were stranded there, effectively, seeking the secret of the wormhole network that might send them back to their own galaxy. Though increasingly, Salazar was of the opinion that they would have to make the Sphere their permanent home, a thought that attracted him as much as it repelled him. There would always be something new to see, a new world to explore, even if he only did it on foot.

   “Captain,” Lombardo pressed. “Flyer One was brought down by enemy action. We know that now. There's no way that we can guarantee that the same won't happen to Flyer Two. You're a better pilot than Clarke, but even you can't out-fly a surface-to-air missile.” He looked over the lines of the plane, and added, “Given time, I suppose I might be able to add some sort of countermeasure system, but without knowing who was shooting at us...”

   “Besides,” Carpenter added, “The performance of that craft is marginal at best. Adding any more weight would compromise our chances of rescuing any survivors.” She paused, turned to Salazar, and asked, “You're going anyway, aren't you, sir?”

   “I am,” he replied.

   Frowning, Lombardo replied, “Sir, I must formally protest.” He looked down at the ground, and added, “You know that I would follow you to hell and back, Captain, but your place is here with your crew, not flying off ten thousand miles to rescue people who are in all probability already dead. Let me take her up instead. I'm checked out on the bird, and I helped to build her.”

   “It has to be me,” Salazar said, “for two reasons. First, I'm the best-qualified atmospheric pilot we've got. Clarke was good, but you're right about the missiles. It's going to take something pretty special to get through them...”

   “Lieutenant Murphy can be down here in an hour,” Lombardo said. “She's had the same training as you, and...”

   “Second,” Salazar pressed, “with only one exception, there isn't anyone else here with as much surface experience as I have.” He looked at Harper, and added, “Before you say anything, Kris, you're staying here.”

   “Like hell,” she replied. “If you think that I'm
going to kick my heels back on the deck while you fly off into the middle...”

   “How's that leg of yours?” Salazar asked, gesturing at the cast that still covered her, a relic of her last encounter with the forces of the Hegemony. “Kris, you can't walk without a stick. If we go into action, then...”

   “Damn it, Pavel, I'll...”

   “Lieutenant Harper, that's an order,” he replied. “Besides, if this goes wrong, you're the best choice to lead the rescue party. Whatever form that might take.” Looking at the ship, he added, “She can take six if she has to...”

   “Not necessarily,” Lombardo said. “With that much weight, you'll struggle to hold altitude. Susan's right. Her performance is marginal. If you gave me a little time, I might be able to do something about that, maybe rig some sort of booster system, but as things stand...”

   “We haven't got time to waste,” Salazar said.

   “Pavel,” Lombardo replied, softly, “it'll take the best part of twelve hours just to get out that far, even at top speed. And you won't be able to push her that hard, not if you want to save something for combat maneuvers. I know that you want to get our people home, but there's no point throwing your life away.”

   “Every second might count, Art. If we've got someone out there shooting down our planes, we need to know why. And you saw the speed on that vehicle. Three hundred miles an hour, and it looked to me as though it could go a lot faster. They could have an attack force already on the way, and we need to know about it if they do.” Taking a deep breath, he added, “This isn't just about Clarke or the others. There's a clear and present danger to the safety of our people, and I'm not planning to let that go.”

   “Then I'll go with you,” Lombardo replied. Before Salazar could protest, he held up a hand, and said, “I'm the best-qualified engineer you've got out here, and I built the damned thing. Nobody knows how to get more out of that bird than I do, and you know it. Besides, it won't exactly be the first time that I've gone hunting.”