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

of pressed metal that were obviously sections of the outer shell of warbirds. There were replacement engines – huge and shiny and hanging in steel wire hammocks to protect them from vibrations if the battleship suffered a direct hit somewhere nearby. There were several vehicles stashed in there – small one-man ATVs for travelling around the launch deck and other areas within the ship. And there was one large tractor that had probably been used to move the warbirds in the hangar or to drag them out onto the launch deck. It made you think of the scale of the operation that had been carried out when the Celestia was in combat. Much as I would have liked to try out the big tractor – who doesn’t imagine themselves driving trucks when they’re a kid? – my current plan called for speed. Not getting caught was a key factor.

The ATVs were electric vehicles with four broad tyres. They had a seat like a motorcycle and handlebars to steer them, but you could attach a trailer to the back of them to shift gear around the ship. It looked as if the robots had maintained and charged these just like everything else on the ship.

On one of the shelves in the warehouse, I also found a pilot’s helmet and I just had to try it on. Bikers should always wear a helmet. That was my excuse. The foam inside it smelled a bit musty, but I didn’t let this put me off. Kids also dream of being Warbird pilots.

I lowered one of the warbird engines onto the bed of a trailer and hitched the trailer to the back of the ATV. The slow movement and squeaking of tyres gave me an idea that this might be on the limit of the weight the little vehicle could pull. I tossed the metal net that had held the engine into the trailer as well. I found a machine gun similar to the one carried by the crab-bots and bolted it on the back of the ATV. I could use it to fire at anything that came after me. But only after I’d unhitched the trailer. Until then I would have to use a rocket launcher, so I armed two of these and wedged them in beside the machine gun. I drove the ATV and its trailer into a big freight elevator and took it up to the launch deck level.

I knew when the elevator doors opened, I’d be confronted by at least two of the crab-bots with their big machine guns. They would be guarding the massive double doors that opened onto the launch deck. I would have to deal with the crab-bots before I could open the doors. And blowing up the robots and opening the big hull doors would tell the red robot where I was – if it didn’t know already. I picked up the first rocket launcher and hefted it up onto my shoulder.

The elevator doors slid open. The crab-bots must have heard the elevator approaching because one of them was halfway across the hanger. I targeted this one first. The explosion sent its legs flying outwards to all points of the compass and its gun arced upwards and then came clattering down on the far side of the hangar. I wasn’t sure how many points a crab-bot was worth – probably not many, they’re just heavily armed drones and they’re pretty easy targets. The second one, alerted to my presence, turned its gun turret and began to fire. I ducked behind the engine on the trailer. I picked up the second rocket launcher and fired it as soon as the targeting viewfinder lit up green. The explosion took out the machine gun and one of the crab-bot’s legs. It scuttled around lopsidedly on its remaining legs making an agitated whining sound. I reloaded and finished it off with a second missile. I felt better for having blown something up.

You know when something is so big and so obvious that you miss it? That was what the hangar doors were like. The whole wall opposite me was an expanse of grey metal covered by a framework of more grey metal that formed two massive ‘X’ shapes. It wasn’t immediately apparent that this wall could split and open up like the drapes in a theatre. When they did part, they would reveal an immense scarred circular stage – one of the Celestia’s six landing pads.

The hangar itself must have been five or six storeys high – it was difficult to judge the scale of the place. There was a vehicle parked to the right of where I was standing and it took me a moment to realise that the front of it was actually a full-size commercial tractor. The kind of rig that hauls groceries from the factory to the city. This brought home to me how big the space was. You could have raced the truck around the hangar – and it would have taken you some time to complete the circuit. The truck reminded me of one of those tractors they use to manoeuvre spacecraft once they’ve landed at the spaceport. I guess this vehicle was something else the robots had been maintaining while they waited for their human masters to return.

The hangar was a big open space like a factory floor. The deck was marked out with yellow lines – parking bays for up to a dozen Warbirds. All but one of the bays was empty. There was just one Warbird strapped down to the deck. It was missing an engine and there was no cover on the cockpit. Maybe mechanics had been working on it when the ship was hit. The floors in the other empty bays sat flush with the hangar floor, but under the broken Warbird the floor had been dropped to create a maintenance pit almost twenty feet deep. They could probably drop the damaged propulsion unit of a Warbird down and swap