Odyssey One 5: Warrior King (14 page)

Penae was beginning to wonder if a single small craft was remotely worth this amount of hassle, but orders were orders.

“A hit!”

He snapped his attention back to the tactical station. An officer there was practically cheering. “We hit them, Subaltern!”

Though difficult to tell through the mess that was obscuring the parasite’s scanners, the enemy ship did appear to be maneuvering poorly and losing altitude. Penae leaned forward, hoping that this was the end.

►►►

Shuttle
Eagle One

► The shuttle felt like it had been hammered by a giant fist, and Stephen’s stomach was suddenly in his throat as they lost altitude in a hurry. The claxons that sounded were such that he couldn’t hear himself think, but that was fine because thinking was one thing he just didn’t have time for.

His hands and mouth moved on instinct, following procedures he’d trained in so many times that they’d all long since blurred into one long montage.

“Hit the fire extinguishers,” he ordered. “We’re losing altitude. Milla, seal up your helmet.”

Milla did as she was told, first hitting the whole bank of controls that sent the signal to flood affected areas with halon gas extinguishers, then grabbing for her helmet, pulling it on over her head, and linking it to her flight suit. The seal was automatic, a Priminae design, leaving her with an additional level of protection in case the shuttle cockpit was breached.

“What about you?” she asked, her voice now acquiring a mechanical tone from the helmet communications system.

“No time,” he said, eyes dead ahead. “I’ll put it on if we live.”

Steph supposed that he really should have already been wearing it, but honestly, the helmet seemed superfluous. Any sort of damage that might require it would almost certainly end them both before lack of oxygen could.

He opened the comm. “
Odysseus
Control,
Eagle One
. I am declaring an emergency. We are going down on the inner moon of the gas giant we were approaching. I say again, I am declaring an emergency.
Eagle One
out.”

A flip of a switch and confirming squeeze of a firing stud on his control stick sent that recorded message firing out on a rocket set to play on a loop. Steph figured the rocket would have enough power to get into orbit, given the small size of the moon and low gravity, but didn’t have time to be sure.

Ahead of them loomed a massive cone wall, and he was fighting the shuttle to try to maneuver around it.

“Whatever hit us must have fried the control surfaces or somehow shorted out all the relays and redundant systems,” he said. “And I thought this thing was a pig
before
.”

He was fighting the shuttle every inch of the way and figured that the damage had been done mainly to the control surfaces, because he was getting
some
response. If the relays were out, they’d have been a flying brick with wings.

“Brace position!” Steph called as he narrowly missed the slope of the volcano, the land falling away again for a moment as the shuttle screamed through the thin atmosphere and dropped through a low valley surrounded by smoke and fumes.

The
Eagle
hit hard, tailfirst, as Steph just managed to lift the nose a few meters at the last moment. The shuttle slammed into the alien turf with enough force to crack the fuselage in half and then entered a spin. Steph hung on to the controls as long as he could, feathering the CM generators and using the thrusters to keep them nose first while slowing the ship.

Then all went dark as the power gave out.

In the blackness, the CM field failed, and with that everything went to hell.

Stephen was jerked sideways and then snapped back into his bolster as the straps bit into his arms and body viciously. His hands were torn from the controls, and then there was a huge crunch as the light of consciousness went out just as the power had.

►►►

PC Parasite
Five

► Penae half rose from his station as they saw the craft slam into the surface of the moon, the thrill of finally nailing the slippery bastard surging through him.

“Bring us to station, standard overwatch position,” he ordered, looking over to the scanner station. “Do we have any readings from the craft?”

The scanner tech nodded. “Two living signals, Subaltern. No weapon signatures. The craft has suffered a near-total power loss.”

Penae snorted. “An impact like that? I imagine it has.”

He considered the situation for a moment. “Very well. See if we can quantum lock onto the craft. It’s probably not intact enough to grab in one piece, but let’s try.”

“As you say, Subaltern.”

►►►

Shuttle
Eagle One

► “Wake up, Stephan.”

Returning to consciousness was always a mixed blessing in Steph’s experience. He was alive, that was always a good thing, but the reason he knew that he was alive was because there was no way being dead could hurt this badly in any sane or fair universe.

The thought that the universe might not
be
that sane or fair was pushed forcibly out of mind as he groaned and levered himself up. His seat restraints were undone. He assumed Milla had done that, because if they’d snapped in the crash, he would probably be paste on the walls.

“Where’s my helmet?” he asked.

Milla hesitated, then shook her head slightly from side to side. “Bad news, Stephan. It was shaken loose and damaged in the crash.”

Steph’s eyes found the cracked polycarbonate shell, and he grimaced. “Damn.”

“It is worse. There is a leak,” Milla added.

“Alright, I’ll make do,” Steph said, grabbing a ventilator mask from an emergency overhead compartment and strapping it over his face before running the hose down to his suit’s air. “It’s not space. I can live without an enclosed system.”

“As you say,” Milla replied, though her tone didn’t show much confidence in her words.

He climbed over the tilted chair and braced himself on dead consoles so he could look out the windows of the shuttle. “I don’t see anything out there. How long was I out?”

“Several minutes, at least,” Milla said. “However, I lost consciousness as well, so I could not say for certain.”

“Right, okay. Standard capture protocol,” he said.

Milla looked confused. “Capture protocol?”

Steph winced, both from the headache and her lack of knowledge. “Pull the computer core and blow it. Destroy your personal computer, everything that contains any sort of memory. We’re using basic emergency gear from here on out. If they get us, that’s
all
they get.”

Milla nodded, and the two got to work.

►►►

PC Parasite
Five

► “Subaltern, we are ready to attempt a quantum lock on the target.”

“Good,” Penae said, annoyed that it had taken that long, though the craft was pretty badly broken up.

“Subaltern!” The scanner officer turned around. “Explosions on the craft!”

Penae grimaced, wondering if he and his forces were going to lose everything due to some crash damage. It would be a victory of sorts, but only technically. “How large?”

“Very small, focused charges.”

“Charges? Not caused by crash damage?” he asked.

“Almost certainly not.”

Penae grunted, lips twisting. “They’re blowing their computers, then. Disciplined, structured, and with plans for all contingencies.”

“Subaltern?”

“Continue with the quantum lock,” he ordered. “We don’t need their computers. We have them.”

►►►

Shuttle
Eagle One

► Wisps of acrid smoke were floating through the shuttle cockpit as Steph kicked open the emergency locker and pulled out the kit he found there.

It wasn’t much, unfortunately, just a small survival pack with some food, water, medical supplies, a radio, and a sidearm. Better than nothing, but only marginally.

He looked pensively to the sealed door that led back to the troop section of the shuttle.

“What is it?” Milla asked, noting his stare.

“I think that the Marines keep a ready action kit in the shuttle,” he said.

Milla shook her head. “That section is likely breached. Without your helmet . . .”

“I’ll be fine,” Steph asserted, grabbing a pair of goggles from the emergency supplies and fitting them over his eyes. “I’ve got air, eye protection, and my suit is otherwise intact. It’s not a vacuum out there, just very noxious. Besides, it’s not like we have a choice.”

“We can sit here,” she urged. “You launched a beacon. The
Odysseus
is not far away . . .”

The shuttle shifted then, sending them careening into one another and then into the bulkhead behind Milla with a thud.

“What was
that
?” Steph looked around wildly.

Milla grimaced. “I believe that was an attempt to establish a quantum lock with us.”

“Oh, just
perfect
,” Steph groaned. “Discussion’s over. Time to go.”

He waited for her to steady herself, then climbed over to the door and grabbed the emergency release latch. A tug blew the door’s seals, and Steph yanked it back, letting the door clang into the far wall as air hissed and streamers of fumes curled around them.

He led the way through the hatch into the troop section, whistling under his mask as he looked through the gaping splits in the fuselage out to the dark red-and-orange vista beyond.

“I think it’s over here,” he said, jumping over a wide split in the floor and pausing to check his ribs with a free hand before climbing, face contorting in pain, over wrecked seating to a large locker beyond.

The locker took some persuading to open, but with effort, they got in.

“Well,” Steph said as he drew out an assault rifle, “I’d rather have my Archangel, but this’ll do. God bless the Marines. Paranoid bastards.”

Milla stared at him for a moment, but Steph couldn’t make out her expression under the slightly darkened visor of her helmet. He handed her a rifle, along with a couple mags, and then reached for another.

“Carry what we can. We’re going to have to abandon the ship,” he said firmly. “I don’t know how long it’ll be before the
Odysseus
can get to us, but I’m not giving in to these bastards without a fight.”

Milla felt less certain than he seemed to be, but she wasn’t going to argue with him. This situation was beyond her wildest nightmares, yet strangely comforting as well. The Drasin were worse to her, but she knew just how bad they were. The enemy out beyond the hull of the shuttle were unknowns. That was both more fearsome and somehow less fearsome in ways she just didn’t understand.

She took the rifle, trying to remember everything she’d learned about Terran weapons since her rescue at the hands of the
Odyssey
and crew as she awkwardly cradled the gun in her arms.

Steph was considerably more at ease, if only because he wasn’t letting himself get bogged down in what might happen. He stayed focused on the next step, not what might or might not happen in the unlikely event that they lived through the next few minutes.

The shuttle shifted again, throwing them around as it began to lift off the surface of the moon. Steph pushed Milla to the back. He threw the emergency release levers on the rear hatch, blowing the portal open automatically, and waved her on.

“Jump!”

Milla hesitated only briefly before throwing herself out and landing in a sprawl on the rock-strewn slope beyond. The shuttle was a few meters up before Steph followed her, landing hard and sprawling to a stop a short distance away from her.

Beads of sweat immediately formed on his exposed skin as Steph rolled to his feet and checked his gear. The ground was smoking, tendrils rising from under rocks and through the dirt as he looked up at the pieces of the shuttle being lofted into the air above him.

Steph shouldered his rifle, seriously considering firing on the ship for a moment. But that would be a futile gesture at best. He glanced over to where Milla was getting to her feet and lowered his weapon.

“How’s your suit?” he asked, concerned.

“Integrity is good,” she said. “Temperature is rising.”

“Yeah, it’s a sauna out here,” Steph said, looking around. “What’s your air count?”

Milla checked her system briefly. “I have six hours, roughly.”

That wasn’t much, Steph knew well. He figured he had about the same, probably a little less, and he wondered if surrendering to the enemy would’ve been a better plan than taking their chances out on an alien moon. Surrender wasn’t in his nature, however. He’d seen too many people come back from POW camps in the war and had no illusions of what his fellow man could do to him. He therefore had no desire to see what aliens could do.

“Steph?” Milla called to him.

“What?” He turned back to her, finding her looking at the bottoms of her feet one at a time.

“I do not think the suit will hold for six hours.” She pointed to where her boots were smoking.

“Crap,” Steph growled, checking his own boots.

The ground was hot enough that it was starting to affect the composites they were wearing. He cast a glance around, looking for an alternative, but frankly, there weren’t many to pick from. Finally, he spotted a smooth plateau some distance off and pointed that way.

“Come on, let’s move.”

CHAPTER 13

AEV
Odysseus

► The
Odysseus
was running at flank speed, putting off turnaround as long as it could as it plunged toward the gas giant. Eric was almost physically having to prevent himself from pacing the command deck, something he’d never had to worry about when he’d had a fighter strapped to his back. But making the crew nervous wouldn’t do anyone any good, especially not Steph or Milla.

The alien ship was burning on a turnaround of its own, but Eric wasn’t sure the opposing crew had their hearts in it. Their acceleration seemed lower than it should have been, and he realized it was possible that the enemy vessel had taken a bit more damage than he thought in the passing engagement.

It made little sense for the attackers to put off the fight if they were actually intent on a second engagement. The only thing Eric could come up with was that they were running repairs and wanted the extra time.

Certainly, the
Odysseus
itself could do with a few extra days, or weeks, and a good shipyard.

The enemy lasers had every inch the power he’d come to expect from Priminae-level beams, but they also clearly shared the same weakness the Priminae weapons had had until they’d traded tech with Earth. Overwhelming power, but single-frequency beams. Easy enough to adapt to and rarely perfectly suited to any given target. The
Odysseus
could maximize power efficiency by focusing its own beams on a narrow band that would be absorbed by the target.

That made its lasers hundreds of times more effective.

Unfortunately, the little pocket destroyers didn’t use the same beam frequencies as the mother ship, so the
Odysseus
had been mauled in the passing engagement as well.

Repair crews had the situation under control, and the
Odysseus
was still combat ready, but Eric would’ve preferred retrieving his people and withdrawing from the fight without any further multigigawatt exchanges.

He stood looking over the massive central display as the gas giant hung ahead of them and the
Odysseus
reversed warp. There was a momentary shiver through the ship as it began to “fall” in the opposite direction, but the moment passed quickly. The vagaries of the warp drive were such that everything within the drive’s field was affected equally. Every molecule, every atom, every quark. They all began to accelerate in a given direction without any sense of motion at all for the crew.

Inertia still existed, of course, but it wasn’t relevant for the purposes of the drive.

“Captain.” Perez called him over. “We’ve got an emergency call from Commander Michaels.”

“Damn! How long ago?”

“Time stamp is . . . fifteen minutes,” Perez replied. “He says he’s going down on the inner moon.”

“Alright.” Eric looked around. “We’ve got a vector. Lay it in. I want us warping space to that moon like it already happened!”

►►►

PC Parasite
Five

► “Troublesome . . . ,” Penae growled, eyes on the scanners.

The pair of intermittent signals that showed the two life signs they were pursuing had blinked out again, leaving them guessing blindly as to where they were going. Their scrapped vessel was trailing behind his ship, quantum locked for the duration, but the two crew members had escaped, much to Penae’s ire.

“We’re going to have to put men on the ground,” he said. “Inform the troopers; we’re dispatching them to the surface.”

“As you order, Subaltern.”

The moon was an inhospitable spot for any sort of stay, yet was the very thing you wanted if evading advanced scanners was your intent. Penae didn’t know if the pilot had picked it for that reason or just gotten lucky, but either way, he hoped that this pursuit would turn out to be worth his time.

With the
Piar Cohn
unresponsive, again likely caused by the massive interference in the atmosphere of the volcanic moon, he was on his own for the moment. That was refreshing in some ways, but wouldn’t be if he didn’t have something to show when the ship returned to the
Cohn
.

“Troopers are ready to deploy, Subaltern.”

Penae nodded. “Bring us in closer, and give them the countdown.”

“As you say, Subaltern.”

►►►

Moon Surface

► Feet pounding into the ash, Steph and Milla ran across the volcanic grit, heading for the solid plateau ahead. They could both feel the ship above them, even without looking. A warp field reverberated through everything in its range. Even in space, approaching one left a voyager feeling like there was a deep rumble coming from somewhere nearby.

Within an atmosphere, the tremble wasn’t just a feeling. The volcanic ash vibrated around them as they ran, dancing more violently as the ship dropped from its high altitude.

“I see it!” Milla called out.

“Keep your eyes on the ground ahead of us,” Steph scolded. “All we can do is run. It doesn’t matter what they do!”

Despite saying that, Steph risked a glance over his shoulder.

The frigate loomed large behind them, dropping fast and coming to an unnatural stop a few dozen meters over the surface the way only a warp-drive vessel could. Dust and debris were sucked up by the space warp that held the ship against the moon’s gravity, smoke from the volcano curling down as the light from the distant star scattered off the hull in an iridescent rainbow.

Steph would have been more awed if not for the gleaming light shining from under the ship and the sight of figures in hard suits, likely armor, dropping to the surface.

Maybe I’ll get that chance to surrender after all,
he thought wryly—not that he intended to make it so easy on them.

He and Milla hit the plateau at a dead run, suddenly feeling the ash give way to stone as running got easier and their trudging, plodding steps turned into long hops in the lower gravity.

“Be careful,” Milla called as she steadied herself and caught Steph as he nearly catapulted himself across the surface. “We are now pushing against a solid surface. Jumping will be dangerous, or the landing may be, at least.”

“Jumping too,” Steph grunted as he shuffled his steps. “We’re not in a fighter here.”

Milla blinked. “What? I do not understand.”

“In a fighter, altitude and speed are life,” he said. “You want to get high and fast if you want to live. We’re on the ground here, though, and jumping only makes us easier to target. Stay low, stay slow, until I say otherwise.”

Milla nodded, the motion mostly hidden under her helmet. She glanced at Steph, noting the redness of his exposed skin and the sweat beads evaporating in the low pressure of the atmosphere.

“Are you alright?” she asked softly. “Your skin . . .”

“I’ll live.” Steph shook his head, waving her off. “We’ll run out of air before the atmosphere gets me.”

“I believe that is precisely
when
the atmosphere will get you,” Milla told him dryly.

He laughed, a rasping sound. Some of the chemicals in the atmosphere were slipping past the seal of the oxygen mask.

“You have a point there,” he acknowledged, putting a hand on the mask to press it tighter before he took a deep draw on the oxygen and glanced back. “You can surrender to them if you want. SOP allows that long before the situation gets this bad.”

Milla looked back briefly and then up into the dark sky above them. The gas giant was rising on the horizon. She thought the view of the planet would be stunning in an hour, if they were still around to see it.

“The
Odysseus
will be coming,” she said, her voice not quite certain.

“Oh, you’re damn right the
Odysseus
is coming,” Steph assured her. “Raze don’t leave people behind.”

Milla looked at him as they started moving again. “Raze?”

“Raziel,” he answered, shuffling along. “Secret of God. That was his call sign, back in the day.”

“I do not understand.”

They could feel the intense vibration of the enemy ship’s drive as it hovered over the surface, but they weren’t willing to look over their shoulders as they shuffled.

“Back then, the war was still cold,” Steph said, coughing. “The Archangels were still known as Project Double A. Some of the tech we . . . they were using, well, it was stolen from the Block.”

He grinned mirthlessly under his mask. “It was funny, in a way. They sent their best to us to be educated, we trained them in the latest technologies for decades, and they took it home. Then they invented the holy grail of transportation technology, counter-mass . . . so we stole it from them.”

Milla shook her head. “That is a very strange way to be.”

“Spy versus spy is old hat on Earth. We would have cheerfully bought CM technology from them, but the Block started developing Mantis fighters instead of passenger jets. Military tech was fair game to spies, especially back then. Lots of economic tension between the Block and the USA and other western nations. The Block had huge economies, but new fabrication systems were tanking the sweatshop labor a lot of their member nations depended on.”

He laughed, a little painfully, but continued to speak since the talk kept Milla’s mind—and his—off the situation while they moved. “It was stupid, in a funny way. Those sweatshops were the places that built the machines that in turn put them out of business. High-efficiency community fabrication units: cheap machines that built even cheaper products. The Block got desperate, watching their economy swirling down the crapper, and the one other thing they were
really
good at was building weapons.”

“This way of thinking is very strange,” Milla declared.

“Welcome to Earth.” Steph chuckled. “Third rock from the Sun. Anyway, Project Double A was how we played catch-up. Eric was the boss man on the project, lead test pilot . . .”

Steph hesitated, glancing behind them. He could see the men on the ground now. They were moving around slowly and spreading out from the ship in a half-crescent formation, heading toward the plateau.

“And a couple other things that are still classified,” Steph rasped out, laughing.

Milla didn’t get the joke, but Steph wasn’t going to fully explain what he meant.

“The war got very hot, very fast,” he went on as they shuffled, putting a random boulder behind them. “Mantis fighters hammered us over Japan. Nothing we had back then could touch them. CM fighters were just too fast, too maneuverable. We lost eighty percent of Japan, and most of our forces were beat all the way back to Iwo Jima.”

He glanced over at Milla, his eyes visible behind the goggles. “That may not mean much to you, but to the USA it was a big deal. To Eric, it was holy ground. He wasn’t going to let them take Iwo Jima. Project Double A went green ahead of schedule, and the fighting over the Pacific got real hot, real fast, and real bloody. Project Double A became the Archangels, and Eric Stanton Weston became Raziel, Secret of God and patron saint of the West Pacific.”

“Lofty titles,” Milla acknowledged.

“Those were ugly times.” Steph coughed, lifting the mask up to spit out phlegm before resealing it to take another breath. “Hope was a big thing. We became symbols, more powerful in how people perceived us than our actual effect on the battlefield.”

“I . . . understand,” Milla said, thinking about how people on Ranquil had reacted to the
Odyssey
.

“So that’s how I know Raze is coming,” Steph said. “He’s a Marine to the core. Symbols mean more to him than reality sometimes.”

“I . . . do
not
understand,” she said.

“Semper fi,” Steph told her. “Forever faithful. He’s coming. Keep moving.”

►►►

AEV
Odysseus

► “We’re hitting turnaround, Captain!”

Eric nodded. “Do it.”

The
Odysseus
’ reactors didn’t whine the way the
Odyssey
’s systems would have, but the computers monitoring her telltales were
screaming
as they hit turnover. Half the systems went dead, their power being redirected entirely to the drives. Given the sheer level of power output by the
Odysseus
’ reactors, the fact that they were actually
shutting down
systems to conserve power at the moment made Eric’s head swim.