Deathstalker Rebellion

He turned and left the bridge, Frost falling in beside him. As he passed the Communications station, the Comm Officer murmured, 'Good to have you back, Captain.' Silence had to hide a smile. The door slid shut behind him, and Silence let out his breath in a long sigh. He stopped and leaned back against the corridor bulkhead. His head ached sickly, and his hands were shaking again.

'I need a drink,' he said tiredly.

'No you don't,' said Frost.

'Look, who's hangover is this, anyway?'

'You didn't need any help hauling the Second out of his chair,' said Frost calmly. 'And with only one hand, too. I'm impressed.'

'So am I,' said Silence. He pushed himself away from the bulkhead and strode off down the corridor. Frost fell in beside him again, and they didn't say any more until they were safely back in the Captain's quarters. It was no secret that the Security Officer had the whole ship bugged from stem to stern. Silence debugged his quarters on a regular basis, and since he had access to better tech than Stelmach, he was just about keeping ahead. Silence sank into his favorite seat, and Frost pulled up a chair opposite. Silence looked thoughtfully at the half-empty wine bottle and then looked away. Maybe later.

'So, Investigator, it would seem our short time in the Madness Maze changed us more than we realized. For a moment there, the Second seemed to weigh nothing at all. I could have ripped him apart with my bare hands. And part of me wanted to.'

'I wonder if I'll get stronger, too,' said Frost. 'Or perhaps there are other surprises in store for me. I wonder what we might have become, if we'd made it all the way through the Maze…'

'You can always ask the rebels, if we ever get another bash at them. They made it all the way through.'

'Either way, I think this is something else we should keep strictly to ourselves, Captain.'

'I couldn't agree more, Investigator. Let us talk of safer things. What do you think could have happened on Gehenna, that their only call for help was a voice in an automated beacon? Under normal conditions, all they had to do was call on an open channel, and an Empire starcruiser would have been there within hours. That's standard, no matter where in the Empire you are. Of course, we are right out on the Rim, but even so… Could it be the first rebel attack?'

'I doubt it, Captain. First, they don't look anywhere near organized enough to mount a major attack. Secondly, I don't think they've got the resources to mount anything major yet. And thirdly… I've got a bad feeling about this. To take out a planetary Base so quickly and so thoroughly that they only had time to fire off a beacon would require weaponry of immense power. Perhaps greater power than either the rebels or the Empire could muster.'

'So what are we talking about here? The Hadenmen? Shub?'

'Perhaps. But I can't help thinking the last time a Base fell silent, we ended up on Unseeli.'

'Where we discovered a crashed alien starship of a technology unknown to the Empire and quite possibly superior to anything we have, and a Base full of dead people.' Silence scowled thoughtfully. 'You think it could be those aliens again?'

'Could be,' said Frost. She smiled briefly. 'And I'm just in the mood to kick some alien ass.'

'I've never known you when you weren't, Investigator. Personally, I'm just glad of a good excuse to put off our return to Golgotha. Possible alien attack is one of the few acceptable excuses we could come up with. But I have to say, I don't like the idea of our losing another planetary Base. It leaves us vulnerable to all kinds of things. And there's always the chance this is some kind of trap, designed to pull in unsuspecting ships.'

'Then, we'd better get there first,' said Frost. 'We are, after all, expendable.'

'You speak for yourself,' said Silence.

The Dauntless dropped out of hyperspace and settled into orbit around the planet Gehenna, the world of eternal fires. It burned like a blazing coal in the dark; continent-wide flames leaping and flaring but never dying down. Long ago something set light to the surface of the planet, and through some kind of chain reaction the fire had spread till it covered all the world. The poles had melted and the oceans had evaporated, and all that remained was the flames. The surface burned, consuming itself slowly but inexorably. There was evidence that Gehenna had once been inhabited by an alien civilization, but no trace remained of the aliens or their works. Only a handful of strange stone bunkers, huge and impressive but utterly empty, buried deep in the bedrock, away from the all-consuming fires. If they had any secrets, they remained a mystery. No one knew what had happened to the alien civilization: whether they were destroyed by some outside force, or whether they did it to themselves. Whether the fire came first, or was just an aftereffect of whatever destroyed an entire species so thoroughly that not even a hint remained of what they might have been.

The Empire was of course very interested in something that could set an entire planet alight. It would make one hell of a weapon, and Lionstone wanted it. So she gave orders for a Base to be established there, right in the heart of the flames, protected by the strongest force Screen the Empire scientists could provide. According to the Dauntless's records, the scientists in the Base had been working there for nine years and were still no nearer to finding any answers.

Silence led the away team himself. Partly because if the Base had been compromised, he needed to be right there on the spot making decisions, but mostly because he didn't want to go. He still felt like shit, his crew were still sneaking sidelong glances at him when they thought he wasn't looking, and he wasn't at all sure he was up to making command decisions when people's lives might be on the line. But that was why, in the end, he had to go. If he didn't, he might as well resign his Captaincy, and he wasn't ready to do that just yet. So he led the away team. And prayed he was up to it. Frost accompanied him, of course, as the ship's Investigator. More surprisingly, Security Officer Stelmach insisted on coming along, too. Probably because he didn't trust the other two out of his sight. The rest of the team consisted of six marines chosen by lot, and Communications Officer Eden Cross. He'd worked at Gehenna Base briefly, two years ago. He didn't seem at all happy to be paying the place a return visit.

Cross was average height, average weight, dark-skinned and tight-lipped. He hadn't been one of those who conspicuously ostracized the Captain, but he rarely had much to say outside his duties anyway. Though he'd become almost eloquent when it came to trying to find reasons he couldn't or shouldn't be part of the away team. Silence approved of that. He didn't want mindlessly loyal people with him in dangerous situations. He wanted people who were scared, on their toes. Survivors. Interestingly enough, Cross hadn't been a Communications Officer all that long. He'd been passed from one position to another, usually at his own request, apparently because he just got bored after a while, no matter what he was doing. He was an overachiever, in a Service where uniformity was prized above all. He'd either make Captain before he was thirty, or burn out early. As it was, Silence made him pilot of the pinnace that would take them down to Gehenna's surface. Cross would get them down safely or die trying. It wasn't in his nature to do any less.

Silence gripped the arms of his seat tightly as the pinnace dropped like a stone toward the planet below. He accessed the pinnace's sensors through his comm implant, and temperature readings sprang into life before his eyes. He watched blankly as the figures rose in sudden spurts, starting high and moving rapidly from incredible to unbelievable. Silence cut off the figures. They made him nervous. The long slender ship slammed through the overheated atmosphere, rocking and bucking as it plunged into the roaring flames that leapt miles above the endlessly burning surface. Silence made himself let go of the seat's arms. The pinnace's outer hull would protect them against any temperature to be found on a solid world, and there was always the force Screen. The pinnace could handle anything Gehenna could throw at it.

Theoretically.

Silence wasn't convinced. There were already too many unanswered questions about Gehenna, of which the emergency beacon was only the latest. He tried to stir uncomfortably in his seat, but the hard suit wouldn't let him. He'd put on the protective suit before he got into the pinnace, like everyone else. He wouldn't need it till the pinnace landed, but getting into a hard suit was difficult enough at the best of times, when you had plenty of room to move around in. It would have been impossible for a crew of ten to manage in the cramped confines of a pinnace.

A hard suit was part space suit, part armor, and part weapons. It was designed to keep the bearer alive, no matter how inimical conditions got. Once all the systems were connected, the suit guaranteed to keep the wearer cool and calm, no matter what was happening outside it. They tended to be slow and awkward and about as subtle as a flying half brick, but they got the job done. They'd been pretty much superseded by portable force shields and Screens, but they still had no equal for where someone needed to make hands-on investigations. Radiation-proof,