Battleship Raider by Paul Tomlinson (book recommendations website .txt) 📗

off a smell like compost as my boots disturbed it. No plants grew down there, there was no light for them, but fungi seemed to thrive, standing out starkly white or burnt orange or red.

I’ve walked in forests before, up near the mountains, and found them to be quiet, tranquil places where a man can gather his thoughts. The jungle, in contrast, seemed to have a nightclub sound system installed. The trees creaked loudly as they swayed and their foliage created an ocean-like whooshing sound way above me. Over this were layered the echoing whoops, squawks and screeches of unseen birds and warring tribes of monkey-like creatures shouting about some distant danger or bellowing that this was their territory. It took a while for your ears to become accustomed to the din and begin filtering it out.

I consulted the screen on my watch. It told me I was close. I looked around me but there was just more jungle. No indication of anything out of the ordinary. No weathered signs pointing ‘This way to buried treasure.’ And then it was there again, the unmistakable glint of sunlight on metal.

The expanse of metal in front of me was scarred and pitted and the jungle had done its best to cover it with moss and vines, but it was obviously manmade and part of something immense. It disappeared back into the trees so that I could only see perhaps a hundred yards of it in either direction. The canopy of trees overhead was leaning over to shield it so that it would be invisible from the air. Perhaps Old Jack had been right and it had lain undisturbed for the best part of forty years. And if he was right about that, maybe he had also told the truth about the main part of the Celestia still being sealed, protecting her contents.

“Show me the Celestia,” I said.

Trixie projected an image into the air in front of me. The battleship Celesta. To get all of her into the frame, the photographer must have been miles away from her. From that distance, her hull looked smooth and sleek. Floating through space like a great grey whale. Zooming in, you could see that she was formed from thousands of boxy structures, her skin uneven like a whale covered in barnacles. The battleship wasn’t a sleek missile, she looked like she’d been put together from a child’s building bricks – all of them in shades of grey. And then closer still, you could sense that one of those rectangular structures was bigger than an office block.

If the Celestia was a whale, the engines were at the end of her tail in two massive, bulbous pods. The command centre was on top, sticking up like a dorsal fin. Along one side were half-a-dozen round landing platforms and the closed bays that held the Warbirds. They would have streamed out of her, or back towards her, like pilot fish. This ship had been a carrier. Originally she would have been home to fifty Warbirds, but her complement had dwindled to about twenty craft at the time that she was destroyed. All of her fighters would have been engaged in the skirmish going on around Saphira,  except for a one or two that might have been in the hangar being repaired.

I wondered what those spaceside fighter pilots felt when they saw their mothership – their home – torpedoed and drifting towards the planet. They must have held their breath, waiting to see the Celestia fire her engines and pull away from the planet. Instead, they would have seen escape pods and life ships blasting out into space, carrying all those who had been able to abandon ship. All hope would have faded as they watched her pulled closer and closer to Saphira. And their last glimpse would have been the orange-red glow of her hull burning as it entered the atmosphere. What happened to those fighter pilots? Where could they go after their fuel was exhausted?

Celestia, like all the big battleships, had been constructed in a spaceside dockyard. She had never entered a planet’s atmosphere and wasn’t designed to. Thrusters used to manoeuvre her in space would have been all but useless as she fell. And even if the crew could have controlled her descent, she had no landing gear.

I don’t know how long she held together, how much time those trapped inside had to contemplate their fate. Jack Sterling said the battleship broke into at least three pieces while it was falling. From the ground it must have looked like a meteor shower – just pale ribbons of light arcing downwards in the night sky.

Depending on their angle of descent, those pieces could have plunged nose-first or belly-first into the jungle, ploughing through the canopy and flattening the trees. The cherry-red heat of the hull would have ignited leaves and wood sending up clouds of smoke and steam. The sound must have been deafening: a deep rumble that shook the ground like an earthquake, the rending of metal and splintering of trees. The Celestia would have torn up the ground like a massive snowplough, sending a tidal wave of soil and other debris forwards and outwards and upwards, the dark scar she left behind her smouldering and smoking.

Weakened by the passage through the atmosphere, the chunks of battleship would have buckled under the initial impact, fractures appearing in the hull. As they scraped across the ground, pieces would have been torn free and hurled left and right.

After the wreckage of the battleship came to rest, there must have been silence. A world in shock. But then the jungle would have started breathing again, doing what all living things do. Healing the wound. Surviving. And, eventually, hiding all trace of the Celestia’s impact.

According to Old Jack, the three largest pieces of the battleship had travelled in convoy until the unevenness of the ground sent each of them along different courses.

“You wants the middle section,” Jack Sterling had said,