CROSSFIRE - Atlantis DSV - New Cape Quest

and had quickly headed for the base transit hub which eventually led him to the main gantry
that served as the direct accessway to Atlantis. When the elevator doors finally opened at
the bottom of that facility, the view that met him was nothing less than astonishing.
The observation tower at the top of the gantry looked out directly over the ruined hull
of the DSV, its six-inch-thick view ports offering an expansive view of the upper most
reconstruction works. For several long minutes, he had simply stood at the portal and
watched in silence, studying the work that had already been done to the ship. Vast sections
of the outer hull‟s plate work that had been destroyed by the detonation of the subduction
warheads had been stripped away, and huge clamps and feeder tanks were hooked in to the
thick, flesh-like bioskin which had been cut back and pulled away. Even under the
illumination of the twelve titanic light towers above, it was hard to make out much in the way
of detail through the gloom.
The entire operation felt surreally like a giant operating theatre, the patient covered in
frames, lights, clamps and coverings that concealed the rest of her towering flanks. Robotic
drones worked efficiently through the mess of damaged and rebuilt support frames, loading
and unloading cargo pallets from a constant and steady stream of DSRVs that hovered
around the site. Most impressive of all was the single, massive crane that had been erected
over the ship‟s shelter decks, supported by a temporary and ungainly set of hefty
construction scaffolds which were used to hoist and manoeuvre the larger sections of hull
that were being replaced.
Ainsley moved on, slowly strolling through the boarding tunnel that adjoined with the
ship somewhere forward of the main hangar bays, all the while reflecting on those dark
moments that had reduced the great ship to this.
...He stopped in surprise as he looked around at where he then stood. Plainly, it was
one of the starboard cross-corridors on Atlantis, but he had never even remembered walking
through an airlock. It took him several moments to realise, as he turned and looked back up
his path, that the gantry had been physically built in to the ship‟s internal decks, and the only
reason he didn‟t even notice was that the deck he now stood on had been completely rebuilt.
He ran his hand across the cool metal of the bulkhead as he read the frame code: D-
Deck, frame seven, starboard cross-junction. There was a sobering moment of silence as he
paused in his walk and drew a breath, smelling the stale air. It smelt rank of oils, fuel and
industrial lubricants. The air was still, too, the long and dim passages that extended in to the
bowels of the ship before him ringing dully of the distant sound of generators, twisting metal
and tools.
Ainsley reminded himself sorely that five hundred and eighty three people had died in
those halls. Many had perished instantly in the moment that the Alliance missiles struck the
ship, ripping open her hull like claws through an animal. Others had died in the fires that had
washed through the corridor he now stood in, and many more like it. He didn‟t have to walk
far before he rounded a corner and was stopped by a transverse bulkhead, the corridor
abruptly ending at a tightly sealed pressure door. Ainsley had no way of knowing what was
behind that bulkhead, whether it was simply an unsecured and damaged section of the ship,
or a complete hull breach with seven thousand pounds per square inch of pressure behind it.
The stairwell next to that bulkhead, however, seemed intact.
The flight deck was traditionally the busiest part of any warship, be it a surface
aircraft carrier like those that for so long defined traditional naval powers, or modern
subcarriers like Atlantis or Commonwealth. No matter the time of day or night, ground crews
would work around the clock to keep fighters maintained, armed, fuelled and returned to
flight lines for deployments that could be ordered with as little as five minute‟s notice... or
even less.
Few things, then, were as genuinely spooky as an abandoned flight deck hangar,
and absolutely none were as large as the one which sat in the bowels of Atlantis. The flight
deck of the DSV was so massive that one could probably fill it with grandstands and still
have an area large enough to play a game of professional football. Two hundred meters
long, eighty meters wide, the operational decks alone spanned six decks, and that didn‟t
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