Odyssey One 5: Warrior King (24 page)

“T-cannons, standing by, aye sir,” Milla said from her station, not looking up from her console.

“Active scanners, stand ready.”

“Scanners are charged and standing by, Captain,” Sams said.

Eric smiled. “Well, then, you two . . . light them up.”

►►►

IBC
Shion Thon
, Flagship, Third Reconnaissance Squadron

► Navarch Plotu found herself intrigued by the new contact that was closing in on them confidently. Oh, the previous target they’d eliminated had certainly been courageous enough, but its tactics had plainly been intended to draw them out and away from the local planet. If not for that, she had no doubt that they would have tried to avoid contact.

Such was a natural and, more importantly,
sane
state of mind for an outnumbered vessel.

This new contact, however intense its gravity signature was, seemed all too eager for an engagement. That concerned her deeply, but she’d seen enough in her career to put her trust in her squadron, even over the unknown.

The imagery was still coming together, but in another few moments she’d have her first view of this new foe. From there she would be able to properly analyze the situation.

“Active scanner pulse,” her scanner tech called.

Or I will be able to see them right now.

“Signature separation, Captain—it’s three ships!”

Misrem leaned forward, lips pressing together as she smiled thinly and watched the image on the displays turn from one intense gravity signature to three still quite-powerful ships spreading out slowly from one another.

Oh, very impressive. Timing was perfect, and the flying skill
. . . She took a moment to admire the precision involved, both on the part of the pilots and the drive crews that had to keep those ships from interacting negatively with one another.

“Pity,” she said aloud, shaking her head.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” her second asked, glancing over.

“I just said that it is a pity,” she repeated. “All that marvelous precision in timing and maneuvering, and what did it really gain them? There are still only three ships, and they are about to run dead into Third Recon. ‘Dead’ being the operative word, yes?”

“Yes, My Lady.”

She was still smiling right up to the point that explosions rocked three of her vessels, crippling two outright and sending a third entirely into the next universe in the blink of an eye. Alarms—most of which she didn’t even recognize—screamed across every deck of her ship.

Misrem was in a state of disbelief.

“What the abyss was that?” she swore, right before issuing orders without fully understanding what was happening. “Evasion pattern, execute!”

►►►

AEV
Odysseus

► “Fire out,” Milla said from her station.

“Repeat,” Eric said sharply.

The
Odysseus
and her sister ships went to continuous fire with the transition cannons, sending barrage after barrage of nuclear devices instantly downrange. The FTL nature of the transition cannons made them a terrifying first-strike weapon, but it also meant that Eric couldn’t see the precise results of each shot without again painting the system with FTL scanners.

The task force had the power for that, but generating tachyons was fiddly work at best, so for the moment there was no way to maintain full real-time scans of the area—and even if they could, that would just provide his enemy with the same advantage.

“Fire out,” Milla called again. “Reloading.”

“Check fire,” Eric ordered. “Ensign Sams, paint the targets.”

“Check fire, aye,” Milla confirmed.

“Pulse out,” Sams answered. “Return . . . on screen.”

Eric looked up at the main display and instantly frowned. “Confirm scans.”

Sams bent closer to his station, frowning. “Pulse out. Return . . . scans confirmed, Captain.”

Eric shook his head. Something was very wrong.

“Lieutenant Chans,” he said softly, “confirm target priorities, please.”

“Aye Captain,” she said, sounding almost as perplexed as he was. “We fired five full barrages, spread across all lead elements of the enemy formation.”

“Then why am I seeing only one ship down . . . three others damaged, maybe?”

“Unknown, Captain. The cannons were on target, I am certain.”

Eric leaned back unhappily.

The transition cannons were finicky things, he knew. Ideally, they were the ultimate trump card. The ability to materialize a nuclear device
within
your enemy’s hull from light-minutes away, instantly no less, should be unbeatable. However, they’d just fired five full barrages from three Heroics and barely dented the enemy numbers.

Something
had clearly gone wrong with the system.

“Systems check?” He looked over.

“All clear.
Boudicca
and
Bellerophon
confirm, all systems green,” Milla stated.

If it’s not on our side, then it’s on theirs . . .
Eric thought about how one could defeat the transition cannons, something he had already proven to the brass back home could be done. Then he instantly grimaced. “Damn it.”

“Sir?” Miram asked.

“We never tested the system against a Heroic directly,” he said. “We should have.”

“Sir, why?”

“The singularity cores, Commander.” He shook his head. “The Drasin use a different power system, so the issue never showed up with them, but we’re trying to transition those shells right beside a rather intense gravity well. They’re not reforming, is my guess.”

Miram paled. “Sir . . . without the t-cannons . . .”

“We’re outnumbered, and one of our key trump cards isn’t quite the powerhouse we thought it was.” Eric exhaled deeply. “I know.”

►►►

IBC
Shion Thon
, Flagship, Third Reconnaissance Squadron

► “You will tell me just
what in the abyss
hit my squadron, and you will tell me
now
!” Misrem was very nearly in a fury, held in check only by the fact that they were facing combat and only a fool lost her temper before a real fight.

“We don’t know, My Lady. Something detonated within the hulls of the stricken vessels,” the analyst said shakily. “Scan data shows that the source of the explosions were most likely simple atomic devices. Small ones, but . . . inside a hull . . .”

She let him trail off. There really was no need to finish that statement. Even simple atomics were more than enough to cause severe damage to her vessels if they somehow got
inside
the hull.

That didn’t explain how the
abyss
they’d gotten there, however, and that was a question she needed the answer to
immediately
.

“No one has been on, or off, the ships since Imperial space,” she growled. “Are we dealing with sabotage?”

“We do not know,” the analyst insisted.

“Then
find out
!” she screamed. “If there are more of these devices in my squadron, I need them found and disabled—
now
!”

The analyst scrambled off, hurrying to pass on her orders and, no doubt, at least some of the responsibility. Misrem didn’t have time to worry about him as she turned her focus back to the scanners.

“Timing,” she murmured.

“My Lady?” her second asked tentatively.

“The timing: it’s too much,” she said. “Sabotage . . . How could they? But . . . what else?”

None of it made
any
sense. In fact, it made so very
little
sense that she was considering pulling her squadron back from combat and withdrawing from the system until they could get all the data from the incident analyzed properly. But she refrained from voicing such a command, because her forces were already effectively committed to at least a passing engagement, and there were only three enemy ships.

“How long until contact?” she snarled. At the very least, she wanted to deliver her displeasure directly to the enemy.

►►►

IBC
Piar Cohn

► Captain Aymes found himself studying the scanner records over and over as they hurtled through the black expanse, heading into the teeth of the enemy. The situation felt like one he’d experienced all too recently, and he had no doubt now.

These new contacts,
they
were the anomalies.

Three of them this time, so they weren’t dealing with a singular ship, some advanced prototype. No, this was an organized force that was putting real weight of metal into the black. They were a real threat, not like the Oathers.

He didn’t know who they were besides their likely connection to the anomaly recorded at the Drasin structure, but it was clear to him that the Empire had just contacted a potentially serious threat.

We need more information, damn it to the abyss. Where did these people come from?

He opened the squadron comm. “Navarch . . .”

“Not
now
!” the navarch barked, glowering at him through the screen.

“These are the anomalies, Navarch,” he said softly. “I am sure.”

She rolled her eyes. “And you believe I haven’t worked that out for myself? The only other possibility is that someone sabotaged my squadron back in Imperial space, Captain. Not an impossibility, perhaps. I have made enemies in the houses, but the timing reeks.”

Aymes tipped his head slightly, acknowledging that much to be true.

Sabotaging an Imperial squadron wasn’t mere military treason but was considered high treason against the crown. Nonetheless, the act had occurred in the past. Offhand, he couldn’t recall anything as simple as atomics being used, but there was always a first time, he supposed.

The timing issue, however, could not be easily surmounted.

“Saboteurs may have set their devices to detonate upon being scanned by FTL systems,” he offered as a possibility.

Her face darkened. “If so, I’ll personally end their lives. For now, however, we are committed to this engagement. Stand your station, Captain.”

“As you command, Navarch.”

CHAPTER 23

AEV
Hood

► Ian Shepherd stretched as much as his restraints would allow as he watched the telemetry feeds they were receiving from the
Odysseus
. The implications were disturbing, to say the least, and he was working to figure out how best to use his
Hood
given the new information.

“Adjust our course,” he ordered. “Increase thrusters to full military power, and bring us to bearing One Thirty-Eight Mark Nine, negative to the system plane.”

“One Three Eight Mark Nine. Negative, aye sir.”

His first officer looked over at him. “That’s going to bring us close, Captain.”

“I know, but pounding them with t-cannons now seems pointless,” Ian admitted. “We don’t have near the magazine capacity of a Heroic, and they barely scratched the enemy.”

“Yes sir. What’s the plan?”

Ian looked over the scans and telemetry. “Let’s get a passing engagement, get in close, and hammer them with torpedoes instead. See how they like a face full of antimatter.”

►►►

► The
Hood
was maneuvering primarily on thrusters and counter-mass, which meant that it couldn’t reach the same acceleration potential as its larger brethren, but that didn’t make the smaller ship slow by any means. With CM to full power, and burning reaction mass at military levels, the Rogue Class destroyer shifted course from the planned flanking maneuver and put itself on an interception tangent.

Ian’s reasoning was simple enough: his pulse torpedoes didn’t have
near
the overtake needed to intercept the enemy from a flank shot, to say nothing of trying to get them from the rear. When your target could accelerate at speeds that made
light
look over its shoulder, conventional weapons had certain limitations that had to be considered.

He laughed slightly, drawing looks from his crew, but he didn’t bother to explain. He didn’t think it was the time to reveal to them just how ridiculous it seemed to him to consider
antimatter
, of all things, to be a conventional weapon.

“We are on interception vector, as ordered, Captain.”

“Get me a firing solution, Weps,” he said. “Passive lock only.”

“Aye Skipper, passive lock only.”

Ian leaned over to his first officer. “Break the news to the magazines. I want the munitions out of containment and ready to fire.”

“Aye sir,” the young officer confirmed, not looking the least bit happy about it.

Not that Ian blamed him. Anything to do with antimatter was
not
something to be happy about. That stuff was proof that hell existed and could be brought into the universe by humans in all their foolhardy hubris.

►►►

IBC
Shion Thon
, Flagship, Third Reconnaissance Squadron

► “Contact in ten.”

Misrem waved the announcement off. She could read the numbers as well as anyone and better than most. The navarch already had the targets divided up and assigned, planning to hit all three ships at once with multiple beams. The scanners indicated that the armor on these contacts was similar, if not the same, as the shifting armor on the previous target they’d eliminated.

Given Aymes’ earlier encounter, she was confident that she understood the nature and inherent weakness Imperial technology simply could
not
overcome. Lasers were, individually, very specific by their nature. If you could scan a laser quickly enough, and adjust your armor’s reflection quotient to match, then defeating any given laser was simplicity itself.

She was honestly surprised that the Empire didn’t have this technology in their archives. The concept was obvious, and she was certainly looking at evidence that proved it was far from physically impossible.

However, the weakness was significant once you recognized it. Multiple lasers with different specific frequencies would ensure that all but one beam would have the intended effect. That would force the enemy to use much less effective general armor settings. Good armor then, certainly, but not the impenetrable sort it held the potential to be.

But no matter how this one was cut, they were going to be taking a massive amount of data scans back to the Empire. That alone might be worth the cost of mounting this particular expedition, she supposed. Might.

They had work to do.

“Establish targets,” she ordered. “Lead them with bracketing estimates, and fire when ready.”

“Yes, Navarch. Firing.”

►►►

► The remaining fully functional vessels of Third Recon fired as one, still several light-minutes out from their targets. They had slight odds of striking their targets, of course, but lasers would hold lethal power easily enough at that range, and a lucky hit was still a hit.

Eleven groups of beams sliced space, moving at a pedestrian three hundred million meters per second, barely outpacing the ships that fired them by some measures. The ships didn’t even slow their fire as they maintained the beams and swept them across space in a pattern intended to catch their targets no matter their maneuvers.

►►►

AEV
Hood

► “Lasers detected! Initiating evasive action!”

Ian’s stomach flipped a little as the
Hood
lifted its nose and climbed relative to the system plane, letting a terrifyingly powerful beam sweep under its position.

Detecting a laser was normally difficult in the extreme, but with the power put out by the bandit contacts, a blind man could have done it.

As the beam passed through particulates in space, it transferred a small degree of energy, normally vaporizing whatever it contacted. The light from that event would then shine out in all directions, giving scanners like those on the
Hood
a data point. Even two such data points, since a laser really couldn’t change course, were enough for the computers on the
Hood
to extrapolate the beam and then use augmented reality displays to draw it in for the crew to see.

The image looked very movielike to Ian as the beam swept across space like a giant sword lancing out of the black and vanishing back into it. All the scene needed was the requisite
pew pew pew
noises to complete the effect.

“Was that aimed at us?” he asked tersely, not looking up from the feed sent directly to his station.

“I don’t think so, Captain,” Weps said from the weapons and tactics station. “Judging from the beam’s angle, and other beams we’re scanning, that’s heading for the Heroics, sir.”

Great
.

On the plus side, they’d only almost been killed by
accident
, which would have sucked royally on his epitaph. On the negative side, they now knew that there were multiterawatts of laser energy heading right for the task force. Even if the
Hood
were to break silence and signal a warning, the lasers would arrive
well
ahead of such a message.

“Stay on target,” Ian murmured to himself.

“Pardon, Captain?” his first officer asked.

“Nothing,” he shook his head. “Proceed as planned. How long to firing range?”

“Thirty seconds, Captain.”

“Good. Signal the torpedo controls,” he said. “I want them to fire as we bear. Don’t wait for orders. Helm!”

“Sir!”

“As soon as we’ve purged our tubes, go to full thrust and get us out from in front of these maniacs,” Ian said before continuing to speak in a lower voice. “Firing full beams from this far out . . . crazy sons of . . .”

►►►

IBC
Shion Thon
, Flagship, Third Reconnaissance Squadron

► Waiting was the worst part of combat.

She’d despised it as a junior officer and she despised it as a navarch, but it was the quintessential defining factor of fighting in the void. Each side made moves based not on what their opponent had done but rather on what they
believed
their opponent had done. Since finding out if you were right or not often took significant amounts of time, you spent those moments plotting rather than reacting.

The beams they were even then firing wouldn’t react with the targets for a few more moments, and once they did, Misrem knew some time would pass before results were transmitted back. That delay was closing fast, however, and in short order the waiting would give way to the second-worst thing about combat.

The dying.

That mad scramble when each instantaneous slice of time turned into an eternity, and yet, somehow, with all those terrifying eternities strung together, there still wouldn’t be enough time to go around.

Misrem laughed.

A good fight made her so philosophical.

“Navarch, we’re scanning something . . . odd,” the scanner tech said.

That
was not what she wanted to hear right before a fight with an already decidedly odd enemy.

“Define ‘odd.’”

“I am not sure,” he admitted. “Perhaps nothing, but there is something occasionally eclipsing the starfield.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. We cannot get a parallax vector . . . It may be a very small object, quite close, or a very large one outside the system . . . I think it is close, however.”

Misrem strode over. “Show me. And why do you think it’s close?”

“It is blocking different stars too quickly,” he said. “If it is very far, it must be moving
very
fast.”

She watched the scanners as a star blinked out, then another, and the first came back as this . . .
shadow
and moved across the field.

“There’s something out there. Very well,” she said. “Go to active scans and find it.”

“As you command. Active scans engaging.”

►►►

AEV
Hood

► The alarms from the sudden scanner hit would have startled Ian right out of his seat if he hadn’t been solidly strapped into place.

“We’ve been spotted!”

“Flush the tubes!” he ordered. “Evasive action! Warp space, all flank!”

“Torpedoes away!” Weps called.

“Drive warp coming up; thirty seconds to full warp!”

“All thrusters! Get us moving
now
!” Ian snapped as the
Hood
started coming to life around him, systems all lighting up as they were brought from low power settings to full combat levels. “Lasers and HVMs
free
! Fire as we bear, all weapons!”

“Aye aye, Skipper,” Weps called. “All systems live, targeting solution locked. HVMs away!”

The
Hood
shuddered as the high-velocity missile banks were flushed, and Ian could more feel than hear the whine-click of laser capacitors discharging furiously.

The forces at his command didn’t have the power needed to sweep space wildly the way the enemy ships did, but they could put some serious wattage downrange. If they could just get a good bounce off the enemy armor with their hyperspectral systems, they’d be able to make the most of what they had.

“Even armor,” he said, eyes on the clock and the range. They had only seconds left now before a laser strike could reach them. “Go to white knight.”

►►►

IBC
Shion Thon
, Flagship, Third Reconnaissance Squadron

► The profile of the small ship in her sights was so far from what she’d expected that Misrem uncharacteristically hesitated from sheer surprise. That instant of indecision allowed the enemy captain to act before she did.

“They’ve fired on us . . . I think?” Her scanner tech didn’t sound convinced.

“What do you mean, you
think
?” Misrem demanded, but before she could get an answer, another alarm went off.

This one was a proximity warning calling her attention to her squadron, where one of the ships was breaking formation. Misrem forgot about the odd weapons fire for the moment and flipped to the squadron channel. “Aymes, get back in formation!”

“Break formation!” Captain Aymes was yelling over her transmission. “Break formation!”