Katadromiko 2, orbiting Dresse, Dresse system
Zaphir stepped quickly out into the corridor, stood to her full height and watched as the door sank back into place. Suddenly feeling very exposed, she hurried off aft towards the nearest emergency stairway.
Using the tube trains would be way too risky, so they’d decided the safest way to get to hangar 171 was on foot, using stairways and service corridors. It was around two and a half kilometres through the ship and the chances of getting all that way undetected were low. So Bache had decided that checking ahead of her on the internal cameras and talking her through the route was the way to make it a lot safer.
‘Stairway on the left,’ Bache’s voice whispered in her ear. ‘Go down to deck ninety-two.’
‘I thought the hangar was on deck ninety-one,’ she whispered back.
‘It is, but deck ninety-two is mostly taken up by equipment storage and is a lot more likely to be deserted than one of the main hangar decks.’
‘Ah, okay,’ she said, quietly opening and closing the stairway door before listening for any noise above or below.
‘Stairway is clear going down, turning the cameras off now,’ said Bache.
She made her way down quickly and silently, stopping every so often to listen again. Down and down she went, floor after floor and about halfway down her earpiece started buzzing.
‘Bache, I’m getting interference on the comms,’ she whispered.
‘Th…….urn…of…….int……..oms…eep….go…g,’ was the garbled reply.
She got the gist of it though. Internal communications had been turned off and the small headset she was using that normally piggybacked onto this system as you moved further away had now run out of its limited range.
‘Ah crap,’ she mumbled under her breath.
Continuing down a little more cautiously now, she removed the headset and stuffed it in a pocket to enable her to hear her surroundings more clearly.
Finally reaching deck 92, the first thing she noticed was the smell of machinery oil was strong here and the background hum of the ship was considerably more invasive.
‘No one would want to be down here then,’ she said to herself, trying to allay her fear of discovery. She slowly approached the door, which had a small circular window that presented a peculiar fisheye view of the corridor beyond. Watching for a few moments, she detected no movement, so she cracked the door slightly and peeked through the narrow gap.
She could see nothing, but the whine of vehicle motors was unmistakable somewhere in the distance.
‘Who the hell would be driving around down here?’ she asked herself, as she opened the door a little wider and stuck her head out just far enough for one eye to see down the wide passageway.
In the distance, she could see a column of military fighting vehicles being moved from their internal garaging into what must be one of the larger external hangars and of course it was the way Zaphir needed to go.
‘Wherever they’re going involves a ground offensive then,’ she said to herself. ‘Unless they’re just stealing the equipment.’
Closing the door again, she descended to the level she actually wanted and repeated the process. The smell of oil was gone here, but strangely replaced by the pungent odour of burning plastics.
The reason was just the other side of the door. Two marine armoured suits lay crumpled in the corridor, both still smoking from recent and fatal action. Zaphir recoiled away from the window when she noticed blood dripping from the helmet of one of them.
She descended again.
‘This one better be deserted,’ she moaned, glancing left and right through the fisheye window.
Again, after detecting no movement, she cracked the door and peered both ways. She shivered as the coldness of this level surprised her and nipped at any unprotected skin.
‘Shit, it’s cold here,’ she grumbled, now ruing the decision to leave her jacket in the control room.
The passage was clear in both directions though and hugging her rifle close to her chest, she turned right out the door and hurried off into the cold. She kept close to the right-hand wall, periodically glancing over her shoulder as she ran. Every couple of hundred metres she’d stop behind a bulkhead and listen, the steam of her breath fogging around her.
She knew the emergency stairwells were every five hundred metres and the fourth one would be the one she needed. The drone store and hangar should be just down the corridor to the left on the level above.
Zaphir soon realised the reason for the coldness as she passed storeroom after storeroom of frozen foodstuffs. Her stomach rumbled at the thought and she decided to pop back down here afterwards and find supplies to take back to the control room. Anything would be better than the dried rations in the cupboards there.
Finally reaching the fourth staircase, she caught her breath and ascended the one level back to where she wanted to be. Praying there wouldn’t be any dead soldiers lying outside, she went through her usual peeping routine. Thankfully, it seemed clear.
She smiled as she noticed the door opposite read Hangar 172, so Bache had been correct, the hangar was indeed to the left. She was also thankful the burning smell of death hadn’t permeated this far up the corridor as she made her way purposefully towards hangar 171.
She stopped suddenly twenty metres from the hangar airlock as a whirring noise from inside surprised her. Flattening herself quickly behind a bulkhead pillar, she watched in horror as the door slid slowly away and two Gata soldiers emerged warily. They checked both directions up and down the corridor were clear before walking off in the other direction.
Zaphir breathed a sigh of relief and while their backs were to her, she quickly ran on tiptoes and slid through the airlock door just before it closed. Opening the second door, she waited to see if anything moved. It didn’t, so she stepped cautiously into the hangar.
Inside the lighting was low and as the second airlock door clunked shut behind her it took her eyes a while to adjust. When she was confident she wouldn’t walk into anything, she ventured deeper into the hangar.
The first thing she saw were four jump drones removed from their racks and lined up on trolleys in front of the atmosphere shield. Circling around them, she noticed something about their shape was different. It was difficult to see in the low lighting. Bending down, she read the lettering on the side of some sort of cylinder recently and perhaps slightly amateurishly strapped to the underside of the drone.
She gasped as she recognised the coding. These were nuclear warheads, the most powerful and destructive ones too. One of these could lay waste to half a continent and they were about to send four somewhere.