Homeworld (Odyssey One) (68 page)

And we’re about to walk right up to the mob leaders and kick them in the nuts
. Steph bared his teeth as he led his fighters right into the enemy lines.

The DPU slugs struck first, announcing their arrival with the directed force of small nuclear weapons. Each slammed into their target, and the kinetic energy of the strike turned large sections of the small craft to plasma as the hole Steph asked for began to open.

Unlike lasers, slugs didn’t need to be held on target for two seconds. Either they hit, or they missed. Either way, you didn’t need to worry about them once you fired, and none of the Archangels were the worrying type in the first place.

“Plow the road!” Steph called, his whole body vibrating as he held the firing stud down and the whole fighter shook wildly around him.

The fighters arrayed themselves in a diamond formation, Steph at the center and just ahead while he was flanked by the others at the compass points to his aft. Every fighter burned through their supply of DPU slugs in a matter of seconds of full auto fire, accelerating into the mess they were making.

“Shields!”

Steph followed his own orders, hand swiping a bank of switches even as he spoke. The “soft” points of the Archangels had all been refitted with heavy heat shields to protect against reentry when they had been converted to orbital and space-based use. The shields slid out, covering the cockpit, sensor points, and a few other sections of the fuselage just as the Archangels blew through the expanding remnants of the enemy line.

They were pelted by small bits of debris, enough to destroy each of them a dozen times over if they weren’t already redlining their CM generators recklessly. They were doing just that, however, so it felt like a light steel rain on the rooftop, just enough to chill their hot blood as they exploded out the other side of the enemy fighter line.

Steph’s shields were the first to retract, or rather he was the first one crazy enough to retract them. Crazy being a very fluid talking point when the alternative was flying deaf, dumb, and blind.

Ahead of him lay the flight’s true targets.

“Check in,” he ordered, eyes glancing down to the telemetry signals he was picking up.

“Burner, clear.”

“Cardsharp, deal me in, sir.”

“Black Knight, on station.”

“Dread, clear and ready, sir.”

“Alright, halo your targets and engage when ready. Remember, code word is Fury,” Steph said. “Split!”

The team acknowledged the order and the formation split apart in a starburst maneuver, exploding out in all directions.

Steph mentally tagged and haloed every enemy cruiser he could spot, trusting that the computers would sort out the target overlap. In just seconds his screens lit up with a series of angry red halos surrounding equally angry red contacts, and he flipped a switch to bring his missiles online and wind up the internal launcher.

“Angel One, go,” he intoned. “Weapons free. Fox Three.”

He flipped open the last safety catch, thumbed down the button underneath, and then squeezed the trigger stud and held it in place. On full automatic, an Archangel class fighter
could eject all six of the HVMs in each revolving cradle into space in a little under two seconds.

The two cylinders of six shooters spun at high speed, ejecting each missile out in a split second. Before the last one had even fired up its rocket motor, Steph was pulling hard back on the stick while keeping the throttle full open.

“Archangel lead, clear!” he called over the net. “All missiles away!”

He could see the icons that represented the rest of his team behind him doing the same, their own missiles running hot and straight in space as they called out their own confirmation and followed him. On full burn, with the CM generators redlined, an Archangel fighter could make changes in direction and speed that would baffle light itself, and now they were all intent on proving it.

In their wake, the
sixty
high-velocity missiles they’d put into space wound up and redlined their own CM fields as the rocket motors in each ignited. They lanced across space, more like a beam weapons than any projectile imaginable, and slammed into
sixty
separate Drasin cruisers.

The lighter missiles of the Archangels were of the ship-killer variety, but even with the inverse CM pulse used to magnify the effect of their impact, most weren’t enough to outright destroy their targets. They did destroy a half dozen or so outright, from what Steph could tell, probably crippled twice that, but…most important-, it became very clear, very quickly that they’d managed to outright
piss
the rest off to the nth degree.

With the fleet, or a sizeable chunk of it, shifting vectors to pursue, Steph just grinned.

“Mission Fury accomplished. Let’s get the
hell
out of here!”

“Captain, signal from Archangel lead,” Winger said. “Mission accomplished.”

“Yes, I think we can see that,” Eric replied, grinning tightly as he leaned back and turned his head slightly to where Roberts was watching. “These things, these Drasin, they’re not just drones. They can be goaded.”

“So I see, Captain.”

“There’s emotion in them, saw it in our first encounter…hints at least,” Eric said. “Just nothing we’d recognize as humanity, I suppose. Anger, that they have, though.”

“Anger is something that can be used against you,” Roberts nodded.

“One more lesson for us to teach them before we die.”

Roberts grimaced, not liking the direction the Captain’s thoughts were leading. “Given up, sir?”

“We all die, Commander. Today might be our day, but no, I haven’t given up,” Eric said a moment later. “Not quite yet.”

“Good.”

“Make for Mars, Lieutenant Commander,” Eric called out, his voice pitched louder. “Get us in formation with the
Enterprise
.”

“Yes sir, but…what about the Archangels?”

“They’ll be right behind us. Don’t worry about them.”

“Yes, sir.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Imperial Destroyer
Demigod
, Approaching Sol Space

“SIGNALS COMING FROM within the system, sir. Drasin signature.”

Well,
Ivanth supposed,
at least we’ve located the missing drones. What is it about this system that drives them to this?

He remembered too well that the last time he had been in range of this system, he’d lost every drone ship under his command, including far too many nearly irreplaceable second-generation ships. Drone ships that had thrown off every spec of security coding and went haring off against the species holed up in the system, defying every order he issued.

It should have been impossible, unthinkable.

Somehow, it wasn’t.

The last thing that Ivanth ever wanted was to be within five stars of an uncontrolled drone task group. They were more than merely lethal. They were horror unleashed, a force of nature that eclipsed all others in his mind. Better to fry in a star storm or be blasted into atoms by a pulsar. The Drasin were both thorough and…somehow
personal
.

“This is odd, sir.”

Ivanth shook his thoughts from his mind and made his way over to the scanning station, leaning over the young officer’s shoulder. “What is it?”

“We’re missing at least twenty-five hundred cruisers, correct, sir?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m only detecting a little over one thousand here.”

Ivanth straightened, scowling at the screen. “Where in the singular abyss did the rest go?”

“That’s what’s odd, sir. I am scanning debris from what looks like….”

“No…” Ivanth shook his head. “No, this I will not believe. To destroy a few tens of ships, yes, fine. I watched that, I suppose I must believe it…but
nothing
, absolutely
nothing
, destroys that many of those drone ships in the little time they’ve had.”

“Signature in the region reads similar to…a stellar pulsar, Commander.”

The confusion in the man’s voice didn’t surprise Ivanth in the slightest. While a stellar pulsar could do the sort of damage they were scanning, there were none anywhere in range of this system. If there had been, there would be no reason for anyone or anything to be interested in the system. It would have already been razed clean by pulsar radiation.

“The more I see of this abyss-cursed system, the more I am convinced that the drones have the right idea,” he growled, irritated and generally put out. “Stand station. We’ll watch the battle, confirm the destruction of the system, and then report back to the Empire what happened out here.”

“Yes, Commander.”