Homeworld (Odyssey One) (83 page)

A warning alarm went off, making him curse as he spotted the approaching cruisers he’d missed. They were coming in on his starboard flank, and that had already taken a lot of hits. He didn’t know how much more the
Odyssey
could endure.

Eric fired the ship’s thrusters again, forcing the ship around to bring the forward mounted main weapons to bear, but it was running too slow.

The first laser raked low, turning the hangar bay to slagged metal. Eric shook that off. It didn’t matter anymore; no one was going to be landing there ever again. The next one was more of a problem, though, as the ship was bearing higher. Eric grimaced in anticipation of the burning beam.

And then the Drasin cruiser exploded in space.

He cast about, even as he finished bringing the ship’s prow around to bear and opened fire with the main guns. He started swearing again when he saw his saviors.

“I told you to evacuate with the
Enterprise
!” he snapped over the tacnet into which he was plugged.

“Well, you’re very welcome and fuck you very much, boss,” Stephanos said in a far too cheerful voice.

“I don’t want you guys here,” Eric gritted out. “This one’s mine.”

“Don’t be selfish, boss. Plenty of glory to go around.”

“There’s no glory here, you idiot!” he yelled, barely noting that the
Odyssey
was lashing out at the Drasin around them, seemingly just as angry as her Captain. “Who do you think is going to remember this fight?”

It was in the open, the words he’d tried to avoid even to himself.

When the dust settled, there was a good chance that there would be no one left to write the history. What glory was there when no one was left to remember your last stand?

“I’m not going anywhere, boss,” Steph said. “Just be happy that we only had four planes. At least Cardsharp is clear. The Angels stand with Raziel.”

Eric snorted. “Fine. Form up.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Steph crowed. “You heard the man, Angels! Form up on Angel Lead. Raziel, you have Lead.”

“Roger that,” Eric said sourly. “I have lead.”

The four remaining Archangels fell into an arrow formation along the flanks of Angel Lead, the N.A.C.S.
Odyssey
and her captain, Eric “Raziel” Weston. The bizarre grouping tore a swath of destruction as they covered the retreat of the evacuation shuttles, hammering the enemy with everything in their respective craft until it was clear that they were not something that could be ignored.

With the Angels covering him from the flanks, Eric put everything the
Odyssey
had into the enemy force, impossible though the situation seemed to be. Cruisers burned in his peripheral vision, enemy fighters vanishing like matches in an inferno, but in the end there were always more. So many more.

In the close-quarters range they were fighting, it was only a matter of time. No fancy maneuvers could be made;
there was no way to run silent and run deep. The
Odyssey
was a sitting duck. He’d knowingly sailed his ship into the shallows where she was all but defenseless, and he hoped that someday, somehow, the
Odyssey
would forgive him for that.

It was the only way to get as many people out as possible, though, and he hoped that was enough.

The next laser blast hit the
Odyssey
head on, vaporizing the main laser emitter along with most of the HVM banks. The bulk of the hull protected him, but he could hear a whistling of air and reached up to close his visor down as he switched to suit oxygen.

“Raziel to Archangels, I’ve lost atmosphere and positive control. Too many circuits burned out,” he said quietly. “It was my honor to lead you one last time. Godspeed.”

“Damn it, Raz, get the hell out of there!” Steph growled. “You’ve got suit air, damn it! We’ll find a way to pick you up!”

“No, I think I have an appointment to keep,” Eric said. “Raziel out.”

He closed the comm and powered the engines. He’d lost directional thrusters used for the relatively slow-speed maneuvering of orbital dynamics, but he still had control over the main engines and the turkey feathers used to redirect thrust.

The
Odyssey
rumbled to life, surging forward under full power and maximum CM.

Eric picked a spot with several enemy ships grouped together, heading for the escaping shuttles, and flew it by eye. The
Odyssey
, already fast in a dead sprint, had lost much of its mass in the battle. It crossed the distance shockingly fast, slamming its forward spars into the first cruisers. They snapped off
in pieces until the cruiser met the partially slagged prow of the
Odyssey
, the two meeting with a crunch.

The power of the
Odyssey
slammed the first into the next, and then the next, and again until Eric had four of them speared on the front of his ship like some insane fisherman spearing his in the sea. He didn’t slack up the throttle, but kept up the pressure as the
Odyssey
shouldered through a dozen more, shoving them aside and leaving them scattered in her wake.

Eric smiled and closed his eyes as the forward cameras burned out upon hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. Everything began to burn.

“Goddamn it, Eric!” Steph couldn’t look away as the
Odyssey
began to burn up in the atmosphere. “It didn’t have to go this way.”

“What do we do, boss?” Knight asked from behind, the shock clear in his voice.

“We either fight here and now,” Steph said, “or we run now, and fight later.”

Burner hesitated, then spoke up. “Live to fight another day, boss.”

Steph bit back the urge to curse, but nodded. “Alright. We’re joining the shuttles.”

The fighters formed up, heading out into deeper space.

“No one better be landing these buckets with a single round of ammo left,” Steph said. “Not one. You get me?”

“We got you, boss!”

Commodore Wolfe watched as the
Odyssey
vanished over the horizon of the blue-white world. He smiled sadly at the image.

“Farewell, friend.”

The Drasin were turning back their attentions in his direction, so he knew that he’d soon be following his friend into the next world, but that was fine with him. He was ready for it.

The outer perimeter was breached and he grinned as their lasers started to chop Liberty to pieces.

The broke the second perimeter and more security alarms sounded, but he just ignored them.

His weapons were gone, cut out by the force of the enemy, slagged to their component materials and left to cool in the vacuum of space.

Most of his weapons.

He had one left, one that Admiral Gracen had been holding in reserve.

When they breached the third perimeter and he began to feel a woozy loss of focus, he knew that they were close enough, and he used it.

“What can I say?” he said over an open comm, still grinning as the enemy’s secret weapon caused him to collapse. “It’s a trap.”

Three seconds later the station’s CM field inverted, and Wolfe was slammed into the deck hard enough to split his skull and break every bone in his body. He died before the rest happened, the slow, creaking collapse of the station as it fell in on itself, the sudden panicked attempt at flight by the alien ships as they were dragged in.

He saw none of it, but somehow that grin was still on his face right up until Station Liberty collapsed into a singularity
that sucked eight Drasin cruisers and countless fighters in along with it. It only held stable for an instant, then exploded outwards as it destabilized, destroying another dozen more ships in the process.

When it was over, however, there were only Drasin ships in orbit over the Earth.

And they began to launch pods down to the surface.

EPILOGUE

ADMIRAL ELIZABETH GRACEN was far from a happy woman.

She’d spent the entire trip from Sol to Ranquil in a sullen silence, only seen by her attendants. She wasn’t ready for what she had to do, hadn’t been prepared for it. She should have died on the Liberty; she’d spent days preparing herself for just that.

Now here she was, in orbit of an alien world, on an alien ship no less, and she didn’t even know if Earth still existed.

“Admiral?”

“What is it?” she asked dully to her most junior aide, who had probably drawn the short straw and had to come speak with her.