Homeworld (Odyssey One) (32 page)

For once he’s not bringing his ship back beat to hell. I suppose that’s worth something.

Not as much as she’d like, however, not given the news they’d decoded from the laser comm the
Odyssey
had sent on ahead of her.

From the best they could tell, and Gracen had to admit that the evidence seemed solid, the Block’s little foray into deep space had been nothing short of a disaster.

The
Weifang
hadn’t made it back yet, one advantage of the transition drive over its counterparts, she supposed, but shortly after they did get home it would appear that unwanted guests would be knocking on the system’s proverbial door.

On the plus side, it appears that I can inform the research boys that their transition cannons are one hell of a resounding success. How many of those things can we get mounted and armed in three days?

Not enough.

That much was certain. Even if they could equip every ship and base with them, they didn’t have enough nuclear-fused shells with which to arm them. Weapons-grade fissionables weren’t exactly rare, but they weren’t common either. The Confederacy and the Block only kept enough on hand to generally make it clear that they could easily wipe each other out if either stepped too far out of line.

Which unfortunately didn’t take all that much, in all honesty.

The one-hundred-centimeter shells fired by the
Odyssey
’s long guns were pretty much one-offs for the moment. They’d manufactured enough to arm the
Odyssey
in order to test the system, as Captain Weston was, like it or not, the man who’d take the sharp end in any conflict they had in space. But they were counting on getting some feedback on the system from the crew of the
Odyssey
this time around before going to full manufacturing.

Still, that didn’t mean the Confederacy had no additional t-cannons. Liberty station had a few installed and a reasonably sized cache of munitions for them. They could rearm the
Odyssey
to full stores with no trouble, maybe a little more than that if they loaded down her flight decks.

They don’t need the decks much anyway. The
Enterprise
isn’t up to a full fighter compliment yet, and they have a priority on pilots and fighters. The Archangels have…what? Five left to their number, if I recall?

She’d have to look that up, but Gracen was certain it was an absurdly small number.

Too many damned fools playing politics there,
she knew all too well.
Though even I have to admit that the Archangel platform is in dire need of a rethink.

During the war, the design for the fighters had changed almost a dozen times in less than a decade. Reconfigurations
abounded to the point where there were as many as four or five variations active at one time within the squadron. It was one of the things that made them stand out from regular military units, along with the requirements to even apply for a position on the squad, of course.

The N.A.C.S.
Enterprise
would soon be receiving their last squadron of Vorpal Class strike fighters, craft that were specially designed as a space-based heavy-strike platform. Within their intended specialty, the computer models clearly favored the Vorpals over the more general purpose converted Air Superiority Strike Fighter that the Archangels used, even when you factored in the NICS-enhanced controls.

Gracen and a few others had quietly commissioned designs for a new iteration of the Archangel fighter, but now it appeared that there would be little chance for it to be brought into service before things well and truly hit the fan.

With the
Odyssey
dropping toward Earth at its best speed, the
Enterprise
now being recalled from outer system patrol (where the big ship had been conducting quiet flight tests of the Vorpal fighters where the Block couldn’t easily spy on them), and every combat system in the Confederacy going to high alert…well, things were about to get very,
very
interesting.

She knew that the Block had begun to slowly shift their own units to higher alert already, entirely in response to the new alert levels of Confederate forces, of course. It would be some time before the
Weifang
arrived back in system, as far as anyone could tell, but she honestly expected that by the time they arrived, whatever they had to say would be old news and largely irrelevant.

There is a certain humor there, I think. Bad news
literally
travels faster than light.

Admiral Gracen smiled, no real humor in her lips or her eyes. It wasn’t a joking matter, even if it was a funny one.

By the time the
Odyssey
approached Earth orbit, coming up on the planet from the trailing side on a trajectory set to sling around the moon and settle into LEO near Station Liberty, the war machine known as the North American Confederate Forces was indeed winding up to combat alertness. The
Odyssey
had to answer several automated challenges on the way through, and were even deep scanned at least once. Given that he manned possibly the most recognizable ship in the solar system, that seemed like overkill even to Eric, who was known to be a touch paranoid.

Even the passive scanners, running without the full sails, left the
Odyssey
with evidence of weapon systems at full power, tracking devices flooding the ship with RADAR, LIDAR, and other detection energies. No tachyon pings yet, but that was really only a matter of time at this point. No one wanted to waste power just yet, and Eric suspected that energy was instead being redirected to storage solutions as fast as possible.

While a ship like the
Odyssey
was limited in the methods she could use to store energy for quick use, mostly relying on capacitance systems, stationary bases like Liberty didn’t have that limitation. Massive flywheel installations could store energy in the vacuum with very little loss, even over long periods, and that was really only one of the systems in common use.

If they judge our defenses here against the
Odyssey’
s energy reserves,
Eric thought with grim satisfaction,
they’ll be in for one very nasty surprise.

“Comm from Admiral Gracen, sir. She wants to meet with you as soon as we dock.”

“Tell her I’ll be there,” Eric said simply. “We won’t have long, I suspect, Roberts. Try to give everyone some time off. If you can cycle them through Liberty, all the better. Just make sure that no one leaves the station. The
Odyssey
has to be ready to fight on a couple hours’ notice, no more.”

“Aye, sir, I’ll take care of it.”

“I have no doubts, Commander. Daniels, take us in to Liberty, if you would. Port speed.”

“Aye, Captain. Ahead dead slow.”

The
Odyssey
settled into a close orbit to the massive Liberty, the NAC’s first stop-and-shop to the universe, as it were. The orbital station had started out as something just a little larger than the
Odyssey
herself, actually, built roughly around the same time frame, but they hadn’t yet stopped working on the station.

The aforementioned flywheel installations were new, for example, massive chunks of meteoric steel wrapped around the station inside armored shells. They made Liberty look several times larger than it actually was, but the huge megaton wheels could store more energy in each installation than the
Odyssey
could in its entire system. Once they were brought up to speed, spinning at near the speed of light thanks to the CM technology that made most space travel practical, the manipulation of the local Higgs field could be inverted. That would allow each wheel to mass more than normal instead of less, making them far more efficient in returning power to the station.

Impractical for use on a ship, unfortunately, due to the gyroscopic nature of the devices, but they were excellent systems for stationary bases.

The
Odyssey
slid to a stop, retros shuddering to halt the big ship’s momentum relative to the station, and Eric rose from his chair.

“I have a meeting with an admiral. Best not to be late. Commander, you have the bridge.”

“Aye, sir, I have the bridge.”

The decks of Station Liberty were alternatively deserted or packed with men and women rushing about, depending on what section Eric was walking through. It was a jarring change from the normal general hubbub of activity. Eric ignored it all as best he could, though, and made his way deeper into the station toward the E-Ring.

Unlike the Pentagon, where the name originated, the E-Ring on Liberty was the innermost section of the station and the heaviest protected. Senior officers and planning sections were placed there in the designs in order to heighten both security and defense of the installation. In order to get access, Eric had already passed numerous body scanners and Marine guards. At the final gateway, however, he had to submit to biometrics checks while two armed Marines looked on with stony expressions.

Fingerprints, iris, and blood type checks were the quickest. They all had to cross reference with each other and his records and match; otherwise there was no way the lock was going to open for him. He knew that his blood was also being passed along to a DNA sequencer that would take a few minutes longer. And there were rumors that at least two more biometric systems were in use (but no one would admit to that).

It seemed like overkill, but during the war, Eric himself had worn false contacts to emulate an iris scan, and fingerprints were ludicrously easy to defeat. Blood type wasn’t terribly hard to fake either, but the scans caught a few people who were sloppy. The DNA test was the only thing that was, so far, concrete. He’d heard rumors that some retro-viral experiments were beating those, however, so he wasn’t going to complain.

If anything, the security probably needed to be tighter, though Eric was hoping that would soon change.

We need to get the Block with the program. Fighting amongst ourselves isn’t just stupid now, it’s suicidal. Get us all on the same side and this shit won’t be needed. I’d love to see a Drasin try and pass itself off as human.

Eric smiled grimly as the airlock to the E-Ring opened and he walked through.

Then the thought of the unknown species that seemed to be holding the Drasin’s leash floated through his mind and he grimaced.

They use Priminae designs, and the Prims are as human as I am to almost every test. I wouldn’t take bets against these new bastards being the same.

That was a bit of a misleading thought, though, and he knew it. Doctor Rame and many others had literally torn through the test results on the Priminae people from whom they’d gotten samples. They were human, as far as it went, but that didn’t mean they were indistinguishable from Terrans. Different antibodies were the first and clearest sign, but deeper in the DNA it was obvious that while they were indisputably human, they had diverged from the Earth population at least on the order of thirty- to forty-thousand years earlier.

Full DNA sequencing on that level, though, still took just a tad longer than a few minutes. When you weren’t looking for specific and well-known markers, it took weeks to do the job with any credible level of detail.

OK. Maybe the security won’t be overkill even when we get the Block to point their guns somewhere else,
Eric supposed, though a cynical part of him wondered if the word he used should have been
if
and not
when
.

“Captain Weston.”

Eric paused, looking up to see a woman in dress whites looking at him.

“That’s me,” he said, unnecessarily he was sure. She had to know exactly who he was for him to have even gotten this close.

“The admiral will see you immediately.”

“Yeah, I expected she would.”

The admiral’s office was simpler than it would be had Gracen worked Earth-side, though not by as much as many civilians would believe. The use of CM technology and the abundant energy reserves of the station allowed for basic artificial gravity without the necessity of complex systems like the
Odyssey
’s counter-rotating drum habitats. So while the office was a bit more Spartan than one might see in the Pentagon for a high-ranking official, there were some luxuries.