Far Strike by Anthony James

Author:Anthony James [James, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-03T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Without slowing, Nation plotted the best way to proceed. The map showed an alternative route to the airlifts and he took two quick turns, hoping he wouldn’t stumble upon any more of the enemy. After a short time, he located what looked like a bank of four huge airlifts, each with its own illuminated control panel. He paused, wondering if he should take the risk and try to get one open.

BK> The orbital is going to come down in approximately two minutes.

The small matter of the imminent catastrophic impact with Sandix-2 had slipped Nation’s mind during the confrontation in the armoury.

JN> Has Lieutenant Meade been able to pin down the exact place it’ll hit?

BK> Yes. Twenty klicks directly east.

JN> It’s travelling east to west, isn’t it?

BK> There’s a good chance it’ll come straight through us, Joe. It might hit the facility, the Scion-ZK and the Rampage.

JN> Does that mean we’re all screwed?

BK> It could skip up and go over the top of us. It’s travelling fast enough. Whatever happens, there’s going to be a crater.

Nation closed out of the neural link. Keller’s news left him feeling suddenly drained – the inevitability of it all, no matter how hard he tried to alter the future, was soul-crushing.

I thought we’d pull something out of the bag to make this mission work.

He shook his head angrily. While he was alive, he could still spit in the eye of whatever fate thought it had in store for him. With his rage bubbling, Nation turned the number cruncher onto the lift. To his surprise, the furthest door opened within a second, revealing a lift car big enough to carry fifty humans or a dozen of the aliens in command of the Scion-ZK.

The interior was lit in the same faint blue as everywhere else onboard and it was accompanied by the same smell of frozen meat. It was like this whole spaceship was a butcher’s storage facility and Nation didn’t like the idea of it too much.

He brushed the thought aside and turned his attention towards the interior control panel for the lift. It was a much more intricate affair than anything he’d seen on the Trivar capital ship, Xur’kd, and Nation’s language module was able to produce a very rough translation of the symbols.

On a whim, he pushed his fingertip against the screen and a side view appeared, showing the lift shaft and the different floors. It didn’t appear as though the bridge was directly accessed from here, but one level in particular caught his eye, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.

Propulsion, he thought. Let’s have a look there.

He pressed his finger against the panel again and the lift door closed without a sound. He experienced a sensation of movement and the internal display updated to show the lift climbing rapidly up the shaft. At some point during the ascent, Nation’s sensor array detected a sudden drop in temperature and by the time the lift came to a halt, it was well below zero degrees.

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