First Admiral 02 The Burning Sun (10 page)

“Alliance Star-Cruiser exiting Trionic Web ahead of us!” the Scanner Technician yelled as the Clements was hit once more, “it’s the Vanguard!”

“That’s more like it!” Gallus cheered.

She knew the Ship Commander of the Vanguard. He was another experienced Thexxian commander who had served against the Bardomil. The Vanguard would have the Bardomil back over the frontier before they could snap their fingers, Gallus thought.

Still scampering away from the Flying Devils, Gallus considered dropping the Clements into the Trionic Web, but then considered a more aggressive course of action.

“Navigator,” she called out, “let’s take these heroes for a little ride shall we?” she lurched about in her Command Chair, “set course to the Vanguard, please.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Navigator smiled.

Gallus was going to lead the four Flying Devils straight into the path of the approaching Vanguard. A brief course deviation later and Gallus was feeling a lot happier about the situation she now found herself in.

Switching her screen to a rear view, Gallus could see the Bardomil laser bolts rushing towards the Clements, but missing. Like fireworks, the laser shots zipped past the Clements as she dodged and weaved her way towards the bigger Alliance vessel. With each flash, Gallus’ heart seemed to leap into her mouth, but she knew that with every passing second she was leading them closer to the Vanguard.

Seconds later, the rear-ward image on the screen showed dozens of the Alliance’s, wedge-shaped, single-seat Eagle fighters swarming past the Clements and rushing in to attack the Flying Devils.

The four Bardomil craft had no real chance against the Eagles. The first pass from the Eagles slammed the rapid fire, low–yield pulsar-bolts into their hulls at the rate of five per second. Before their crews could even realise what was happening, two of the Flying Devils had vanished in great blossoms of red roaring flame. The two surviving Devils tried desperately to swing around, but were instantly caught in a hail of deadly white-hot pulsar-bolts. The bolts slammed into the hulls of the Flying Devils like a torrent smashing them to space dust in a few moments.

“Right, Navigator, bring her about,” Gallus ordered as the last of the Flying Devils perished in a cataclysmic explosion, “and send a message to Vanguard, say ‘thanks for the assist’ and sign it Gallus.”

Feeling the Clements swing around Gallus watched on her screen as the contingent of Eagles from the Vanguard swept on towards the frontier.

“Message from Vanguard, ma’am, ‘our pleasure, do you have any more friends that want to play’ and it is signed Falkus.”

“Falkus Targianen, you old space pirate,” Gallus laughed at the message from her old friend, “send reply ‘unwelcome visitors at frontier’ and give them the coordinates,” Gallus ordered.

“Aye, ma’am,” the Communications Officer smiled as Gallus settled back into her Command Chair.

“Navigator, let’s go and see how rough the big boys play,” Gallus smiled as she looked forward to the Vanguard hammering these Bardomil out of existence.

In the shadow of the big Star-Cruiser, the Ranger-class patrol vessel Clements sped back towards the frontier.

When Vanguard and the Clements arrived, the battle was all but over. The surviving Harpoons were already scampering away from the rampaging Eagles, whilst the solitary M-Cruiser was trying to execute a lumbering turn. It was already doomed as the faster and more agile Eagles hammered their low-yield pulsar-bolts into the Bardomil vessel’s vulnerable hull. Gallus arrived just in time to witness the M-Cruiser’s death throes as the Eagles strafed along its cylindrical fuselage. The low-yield bolts tore lumps of metal and debris from its hull as they sped over the doomed craft. In the final moments, an Eagle shot along the top of the fuselage causing plumes of flame and destruction to sprout up like orange and red summer flowers. When the Eagle had passed over, the M-Cruiser seemed to collapse in on itself. Both of the gull-wings fell in against the fuselage just before the whole vessel exploded.

“Gotcha!” Gallus cheered along with the rest of her crew as they watched the huge conflagration of the M-Cruiser tearing itself apart.

Having dispatched the M-Cruiser, the Vanguard slowly set off in pursuit of its own Eagles. Meanwhile, the Clements stayed behind and began to investigate the area where the Bardomil had been so interested in the rocks. After ten minutes of exhaustive scanner sweeps, Gallus Takkrienen was still no clearer as to what the Bardomil had been up to.

“Anything?” Gallus asked the Scanner Technician, not sure whether she wanted to find something out of the ordinary or not.

“Nothing, ma’am,” the Scanner Technician reported bleakly, “There’s nothing out there but a whole bunch of rocks.”

“Whatever they were up to, I think we might have stopped them,” Gallus sighed hopefully, “right Navigator, get that Trion Drive warmed up they’ll want a report of this at Fleet.”

A few moments later, the Clements disappeared into the Trionic Web with a blinding flash leaving the rock fields to their lonely unending orbits. When the Clements had disappeared, the emitter weapon that had only just survived the destruction of the M-Cruiser detached itself from the large rock it had been clinging to and turned metallic silver and fluid once more. Then, resuming its original rock-like structure and colour, the weapon opened four small vents in its outer body work. At some unspoken command the vents spurted fire and flames for a few moments as the small guidance and drive engines sent the small, but deadly, weapon on its long and lonely odyssey to its target.

Chapter 13

Planet Earth

John Caudwell sat in the opulently decorated lounge bar of one of the most exclusive and expensive, hotels in London. In front of him, on the elegant green marble table, stood a large glass of some cheap imported cola flooded to the point of watery tastelessness by a dozen roughly-shaped cubes of ice, and a shrivelled excuse for a slice of lemon.

The tall elegant glass was coated with a heavy mist of condensation that told John that the cola was chilled to well below room temperature. That was just fine by John, who enjoyed watching the little rivulets of moisture creep slowly down the side of the glass carving a cola-dark furrow through the white sheen. Once again, lost in his known thoughts, John wondered what on earth was happening to him. The calmness and serenity of the quiet lounge bar was quite at odds with his troubled mind. The soft subdued lighting greatly at odds with the seething cauldron of his thoughts.

Life had never been this complicated before, he considered, and took a sip of the watered-down cola. Somehow, something had changed, and in John’s mind the responsibility for that change lay squarely with Elizabeth’s literary success. Before the success of her book, they had managed to get along with each other. Now that she had a great deal of “her money” she had become an entirely different person. The mood swings, the temper tantrums, the fights about nothing and the rages were something that John had suspected Elizabeth was capable of. He had just never seen such a torrent of unbridled rage and anger directed at him, and he had never expected to see it from Elizabeth.

Elizabeth wanted to pack Billy off to some ridiculously expensive private school up in the Scottish Highlands; which would at least keep him out of the way of the arguments and rows. That was probably for the best, John thought. Elizabeth had coddled and cosseted the boy since the loss of their daughter, and it was about time he got sent out into the big wide world to learn how to be a man. It was a tough life out there, and John wanted to see his son toughened up to face it. He also wanted to make sure that Billy Caudwell didn’t make the same mistakes that he had made in life. John, after almost sixteen years, was still not quite sure that Elizabeth’s “accidental pregnancy” hadn’t been a deliberate trap.

Well, whatever the truth, he had walked into that trap, and he was going to make sure that Billy worked hard at school, got good grades, went to University and had a good career. After that it was very much up to Billy himself, but John would make sure that no opportunistic female would trap his son the way he had been trapped. He hated having to do it, but it was for the boy’s own good, John had convinced himself. At fifteen years old, John had been bringing girlfriends home to his parents, but at the same age, Billy was showing very little interest in the young girls at school, and that was just fine by John.

But, if truth were to be told, John was also jealous of his son. John had made many mistakes in his life. Now, Billy was likely to be able to achieve all the things that John had been denied. And, a part of John hated Billy for that. Sure, John dearly loved his son, and he was so proud of what Billy had achieved, but a part of him also hated and resented the young boy who would have the opportunities in life that he himself had squandered or had been denied by circumstances.

It was something that annoyed and angered John, because he did feel guilty for resenting his own son. His duty as a father was to support and encourage his son, and John did the best he could. John would sacrifice, sweat, slave, bleed and die, if necessary, for his only son. But, he had no idea how to speak to the boy. Having never really been close to his own father, John didn’t exactly know how to communicate with his son. As a result, the boy was far closer to his paternal grandfather than he was to his father. John remembered that he too had been closer to his grandfather than he had been to his father. Again, this was something that John resented deep down. It seemed to be the curse of the Caudwell males never to have close relationships with their fathers.

He knew he was hard on young Billy at times, and that sometimes he didn’t get it right. Sometimes the anger of his own failures crept through, and he lashed out verbally at young Billy. But, it was a hard cruel world out there, and Billy needed to be equipped to handle it. Life wasn’t fair and Billy had to understand that. A part of John actually believed that the inconsistencies would make Billy a stronger person. The other part of him knew that he was pretending to himself, and made him feel accordingly guilty and ashamed. That was one of the drawbacks of being a father, you just couldn’t be right all the time.

In the left inside pocket of his newly-purchased, finely-tailored pinstripe suit jacket, John Caudwell carried his own personal copy of the newly signed contract with Nakamura Corporation. In the expensive buff envelope next to his new Mont Blanc fountain pen, a gift from Mister Nakamura himself, was the answer to all his prayers and the source of his ongoing worries. John had just sold his idea, a prototype three-dimensional music and video player, to the Nakamura Corporation. They had paid, at the current exchange rate, just over fourteen million pounds, plus a two percent royalty on every unit sold. Sales projections from Nakamura had indicated that in the first year alone they expected to sell over one hundred and fifty million units worldwide. At the equivalent price of sixty pounds per unit, this would give John in the region of one hundred and forty million pounds in royalties in his first year. As production costs fell, given the huge numbers of units produced by the Japanese factories, the price to the customer would fall. Cheaper units would then generate greater sales, which would boost John’s earnings even further.

That was a colossal sum of money for an ordinary working man from Southern Scotland. Given that John had only just quit his mind-numbingly boring job in a plastics factory, where he stood at a machine for eight hours solid and worked three shifts a week; he had pulled off quite a coup. Although his newly-acquired expensive Accountant had warned him that Her Majesty’s Exchequer would want a large share of his hard-earned income.

Spreading the contract out on the table, John looked at the piece of paper that had just made him richer than his wildest dreams. Still, he was confused. Looking blankly at a piece of paper that was worth fourteen million pounds, John couldn’t believe how complicated his life had become in such a short space of time. It had been just over a year since he had woken up one morning with a blinding headache and ideas in his head for the most fantastic machines he had ever dreamt of. Having served an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic in his youth, before joining the police force, John had a pretty good idea as to what was and was not technologically possible. And, the ideas and blueprints running through his mind were just too fantastical to be technologically viable in his lifetime, or even on this planet.

Current technology was producing large cumbersome video cassette recorders and the first word processing machines that everyone said would soon make typewriters obsolete. But, John had visions of huge networks that everyone on Earth could be connected to by small computers in their homes. That was the stuff of science fiction writers surely, he had convinced himself. He visualised homes where a central computer could control and coordinate all the automated functions of the household. Central heating, light switches, drawing the curtains, even robotic cleaning machines that would operate when the householders were not at home.

All these visions flashed through John’s mind. But, more disturbing were the visions he had about military hardware. He saw in his mind’s eye vast warships in space with weapons of unbelievably destructive ability at their command. They could travel billions and billions of kilometres in the blink of an eye. They had weapons that could lay waste to cities and wipe out entire populations. But, the most troubling of his visions was of a weapon that he seemed to have called a Trionic Cannon. John had never in his life heard of such a thing.

Being a relatively level-headed and unimaginative child, he had never dwelt on science fiction or little green men or Martian invaders, which made this sudden splash of scientific creativity all the more troubling. John had been far more interested in cars and mechanical machines when he had been younger, not Death Rays and Space Rockets.

Unknown to John, the night before the raging headache, his son, Billy, had implanted the Mind Profile of one of Garmauria’s greatest scientists and inventors into his brain. Billy had scoured the historical records and archives and found a rich industrialist named Mallor Sharpal. Sharpal had been a technological genius who had been at the forefront of Trion technology and had subsequently made a huge fortune providing weapons systems to the military. Sharpal had developed and built the first proto-type Trionic Cannon.