Odyssey One 5: Warrior King (26 page)

“We’re taking hits along our flanks!”

“Hold to target!” cried Roberts. “Cut them in half!”

The
Bellerophon
bore down through the center of the enemy formation, lasers adapted and fully powered. The beams vaporized armor and superstructure with ease, continuing on through the inner decks as the
Bell
shrugged off fire from all sides.

When the beam cored through to the enemy ship’s singularity drive, it struck one of the magnetic stabilizers and that was the end.

The vessel shuddered at first, acceleration dying while it hurtled along its previous course. Then suddenly the hull collapsed in on itself.

“Hard to port! Their core just destabilized!” shouted Roberts instantly. He wasn’t his former commander. He had no intention of playing chicken with a black hole.

The
Bell
pivoted in space, pulling hard to port as ordered while the enemy ship continued on its previous course as it was slowly eaten by its own core.

A triple blast of lasers bore through the
Bell
’s hull in passing, serving notice that the fight wasn’t over by a long shot.

“Damage control to decks three, four, and five!” Roberts’ first officer, Sarah O’Neill, called out over the noise on the bridge. “Sir, we’ve got incoming, starboard side.”

“I see them. Evasion pattern Delta Niner!”

The
Bellerophon
and enemy vessels swerved around the drifting wreck of the
Hood
, exchanging fire as air and crew streamed from the massive rents in the hull.

For now, Roberts didn’t wish to know the butcher’s bill on this fight, let alone what it would be when they were done.

►►►

IBC
Shion Thon
, Flagship, Third Reconnaissance Squadron

► “Navarch . . . we’re receiving communication from the enemy ship.”

“Now?”
Misrem asked, somewhat bemused. Talking was normally done before or after the fight, not during. “Put it through.”

“As you command.”

There was nothing for a moment, then a sound she didn’t recognize at first. It took her longer than she would later admit to before she did, in fact, recognize the sound. She felt a chill run down her spine as clearly insane laughter echoed in her ears.

“They’re out of their minds,” she said, wonder actually entering her voice. “Are we sure that’s coming from the ship we’re targeting?”

“Confirmed, My Lady,” her communications officer said, his tone sickly. “They’re the source.”

She shook her head. “That’s insane . . .
They’re
insane.”

“My Lady,” her second broke in, “if they’re insane . . . they won’t change course.”

Misrem’s eyes fell to the numbers, showing that they were almost at the point of no return, where they no longer would have the impulse to pull away on their own. She swallowed, hating what she was about to do, but finally slashed the air with her hand.

“Evasive action! Turn aside!”

►►►

AEV
Odysseus

► “You lose.” Steph grinned as the big ship turned aside, showing her flank.

He turned his own controls and leaned the
Odysseus
into the evading ship’s course, not enough to put the vessels back on a collision course but hopefully close enough to execute the next move.

“Chief, it’s all you,” he said as he flew, flinching as the
Odysseus
took a raking blast he chose not to evade in order to get position on the target.

“Roger, Commander. Hold on tight, we’re matching their resonance . . .”

The drives of the
Odysseus
flared, surging the vessel beyond flank speed for a moment, actually causing the space warp to reach out and interfere with the passing starship. Eric looked around, alarmed as the power on his secure command deck flickered and dimmed.

“What the hell—?”

An explosion tore through the enemy ship, and her acceleration suddenly died.

“We blew her drive emitters, Cap,” Steph said. “Chief, we good?”

“Just don’t ask me to do that again,” the chief’s voice came back, “but yeah, we’re good.”

“Stephan!” Milla called out. “Watch for the parasites! There are too many!”

Steph redirected his focus beyond his target, and his eyes widened as he realized just how many of the parasite ships had been launched by the enemy task group. “Oh,
crap
!”

Dozens of them were swarming on course to intercept the
Odysseus
, and still more were heading for the
Boudicca
and the
Bell
, lasers glaring hotly from each and every frigate.

A web of laser trace beams tightened around the
Odysseus
, forcing Steph to wrench the big ship in ways he was sure no one had planned for during the design phase. Even so, there was no way he could avoid them all, and alarms began to sound as patches of armor were vaporized where the beams came into contact.

“Hold on,” Steph mumbled, more for his benefit than anyone else’s.

He put the
Odysseus
into a flat spin, using the gravity wells generated by the ship’s drives to deflect and attenuate some of the beams as he searched for a way out.

Eric linked into the command channel behind Steph and accessed the squadron battle network. “Rogues . . . engage parasites at will.”

►►►

AEV
Song-Jiang

► “Target the parasites and go to autofire on t-cannons,” Captain Su Lynn Jing ordered from her position as she quickly confirmed the targeting solutions before her ship broke from the dark.

The
Song-Jiang
’s cannons pivoted to targets, and the silent puffs of subatomic particles erupted from the waveguides, sending their packages onward.

Su Lynn caught sight of the
Aladdin
and the
Kid
as the other two ships entered the fray, their own cannons tearing into the parasites with ease. The transition cannons might not have been as effective as desired against the larger vessels with their singularity cores, but the parasites had no such power source.

Without gravity cores to twist and disrupt the transition, the atomic warheads reintegrated perfectly and blew instants later, turning one parasite ship after another into expanding debris and plasma.

“Fire the magazines dry,” she said. “If there’s anything left when we finish the parasites, retarget to the cruisers. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

Professional eyes swept the battle. Su Lynn forced down the revulsion she felt as she surveyed the damage. Death was reigning on this field, as it did on every other one she had seen in her career, but the scale here was horrifying. Even forgetting the enemy dead, the
Song-Jiang
’s computers were reporting dozens, if not hundreds, of bodies drifting around the
Hood
and the Heroics.

Men and women had been pulled into the void through hull breaches. Some of them had their suits intact with transponders that still showed life signs. But most either hadn’t had on protective gear or saw their gear’s life-saving properties destroyed in the event that blew them out into space.

The
Odysseus
had taken frightful levels of damage, but was still fighting, as had the
Bellerophon
. It was only then that she noticed that the
Boudicca
had gotten mixed up with a small element of enemy cruisers and didn’t seem to be faring too well.

“Commander,” she said, “look to the
Boudicca
.”

“Damn,” her first officer, Commander Kiran Hiro, swore. “They’re going to need some help.”

“New priority target,” Su Lynn announced.

“New target, aye!”

“Let’s try to give the
Boudicca
some cover,” she said to Kiran. “I think we have enough left in our magazines for that.”

“Aye aye, ma’am. We have firing solutions at the ready, but they’re not going to be as clean as taking on parasites.”

“Clean or not, we’re going in.”

►►►

AEV
Odysseus

► Steph turned and jerked the
Odysseus
through the debris field left by the transition-cannon assault from the Rogues while Milla burned anything too fast to dodge and too large to ignore.

Eric tried to focus on the battle as a whole, noting that while the weight of metal turned scrap was certainly on their side of the fight, they were still outmassed and outnumbered by the Imperial ships. The momentum of battle was turning against them.

We need to end this, and end it now, or we’re going to lose this fight.

Damage reports were pouring in. The
Odysseus
had been hit by so many lasers that he honestly figured that if he were still commanding the
Odyssey
, they’d have been turned to plasma a dozen times over. Of course, if he were commanding the
Odyssey
, he’d have been able to sneak up on the enemy and likely get away clean.

“Lieutenant Chans,” he said, “bring our transition cannons back into the game, fire the magazines dry. I’ll take a lucky hit right about now.”

“Aye Capitaine,” Milla murmured, hastily calling up firing solutions for the ships around them. “Firing t-cannons and lasers.”

Eric turned to Miram. “Have the
Kid
try to clear out the edges of the fight with torpedoes. Just do
not
let them fire anywhere near us or the other Heroics.”

“Understood, Capitaine.” Miram smirked at him as he glanced sharply at her pronunciation of his title.

“Just do it,” he growled.

There were downsides to having a first officer with a newly discovered sense of humor, he decided.

CHAPTER 24

AEV
Boudicca

► Cardsharp grunted through gritted teeth as she whipped her ship through the raking enemy fire, trying to simultaneously avoid as much of it as possible while keeping the
Boudicca
’s main guns lined up for return fire. The good news was that they were pretty much surrounded, so giving her gunner decent shots at the enemy was easy, but the flip side was that evading enemy beams became close to impossible.

Warning alarms had long since been filtered out of her conscious thoughts, along with everything else. She was focused so deeply on what she was doing that the captain had been alerted five times that her brain waves appeared oddly low.

After the second alert, he stopped bothering her about it.

“Point defense stations,” he called somewhere deep in the background. The words weren’t for her, so she didn’t bother listening to what else he had to say. But part of her noted that the point defense stations redirected their fire to one of the ships on their port side and a hole had opened up in the enemy formation.

Cardsharp didn’t think about it. She hit thrusters and spun the
Boudicca
on its axis before throwing all military power to the drive, accelerating the ship through the opening. Three of the smaller parasites closed in on the
Boudicca
’s port flank, which had lost half of its laser emitters some time earlier.

You shouldn’t harass a fine lady like the
Bo, Cardsharp thought savagely as she again hit the thrusters and put the ship into a flat spin that turned into a spiral, slamming the rear gravity bulge of the
Boudicca
into the closest of the three ships.

The bulge acted like a moving hill slamming into a car that had its transmission in neutral. The parasite ship slid off uncontrollably, rammed into one of its fellows, then ricocheted off in another direction as the
Bo
continued through the spin and slipped the rest of the way out through the hole, bringing her main guns to point back the way she’d come.

Cardsharp threw the drive into reverse then, backing the
Boudicca
out of the furball as its lasers savaged anything and everything that followed.

Dimly, she noted some of the enemy ships blowing up for no reason she could spot. While she would probably be extremely curious about that later, for the moment Cardsharp was just pleased to be free from the dog pile.

►►►

► Captain Alexander Dogavich of the AEV
Boudicca
hid a grimace as his chief helmsman, or woman as the case was, used the ship’s drives as a weapon with all the brute force and subtlety of some of the less reputable members of his old nation’s Spetsnaz.

He couldn’t decide if he was going to put her up for a commendation, given the sheer miraculous nature of some of the maneuvers she was executing, or have her charged with blatant recklessness. All he knew was that he wasn’t going to distract her with either option until the fighting was done, and as long as she still paid attention to his orders, the computers could go burn for all he cared.

“Captain, the
Song-Jiang
has engaged with transition cannons,” his communications officer said. “We’re being advised to stay clear of several fire lanes. Torpedoes inbound!”

“Send those to Lieutenant Commander Samuels!” he said, paling. “Mark no-fly zones on her MFD!”

“Roger that!”

Alexander checked the pilot’s multifunction display on his own repeater display as the new data appeared and highlighted several areas that the
Boudicca
would most
certainly
want to avoid in the coming moments. Luckily, they were all extremely thick with enemy activity, naturally, and he was fairly certain that Samuels wasn’t going to be tempted to get into another close quarters fight like that one anytime soon.

“Damage report,” he asked, leaning over to his first officer.

“We’re streaming atmosphere from practically every deck,” the commander said in clipped tones. “Without the Priminae generators, we’d have been dead a dozen times over by now.”

“I can see that,” Alexander replied. “Unfortunately, it appears clear that the enemy also has similar technology, and they still have us outnumbered. This is turning into a good old-fashioned Russian boxing match. It will come down to who bleeds out first, and while we may be cutting deeper, they’re cutting more. Try to get as many of those leaks plugged as possible. We need the power for lasers right now more than we need air.”

“We’ve got teams working on it, sir. We need time without being shot at to get it done though.”

“I will forward your request to the enemy, Commander.”

►►►

IBC
Piar Cohn

► Aymes had almost no words for the sheer level of fighting that had erupted around him and his ship. The
Cohn
hadn’t escaped the carnage unscathed either. Though bleeding atmosphere from a dozen deep burns in its hull, the ship had managed to evade the initial barrage of charged antimatter. That maneuver had put the
Cohn
on the edge of the fighting.

He was now quite certain these were the same species who had been encountered at the Drasin megastructure. The smaller frigates made that clear. They were much closer in configuration and capabilities to the ship that had been scanned there.

That still demanded the answer of where, exactly, they had come from. They were certainly not Oathers either in technical skill or fighting prowess. He’d have been tempted to compare them to Imperials in their fighting, but Imperial crews weren’t remotely as insane as these people.

Most Imperial crews.

Aymes still couldn’t believe that the navarch had ordered her ships into a toe-to-toe match with the enemy, though he understood the tactic and it was starting to work in her favor. The numbers Third Recon brought to the fight would certainly have won the day against the three battle cruisers they’d originally tracked, and he rather believed that even the four destroyers and their antimatter weapons would not be quite enough to turn the tides, but the cost . . . by the endless abyss, the cost!

“Track the navarch’s ship,” he ordered his scanner tech. “Are they intact?”

“Streaming air, Captain, but no signs of breaking up. No drive power, however.”

Aymes grimaced. The
last
thing he wanted to do was bring his ship
anywhere
near a stricken ship that might have an unstable core, but he wasn’t certain he had much choice. “Give me a least-time intercept course.”

“As you order, Captain.”

If his subordinate’s tone was a little shaky, Aymes was inclined to ignore it. He wasn’t entirely confident his own was all that steady either.

►►►

AEV
Odysseus

► It was hard to tell who was winning, Eric decided as he looked across the black field of battle and stared at the long list of transponders calling for help in the darkness. The enemy was tenacious, doggedly holding to the fight with courage enough for anyone, but he was in no particular mood to be impressed.

He was still angry. He could feel the emotions deep down in his gut, and Eric was now certain that he blamed the Empire. That anger would have worried him—would worry him later, he had little doubt—but for now he was inclined to let it bubble under the surface, where it was effectively keeping him from becoming sick at the destruction surrounding him.

Pulse torpedoes had effectively cleaned up whatever parasite ships the barrage of transition-cannon fire had missed and torn a few more of the cruisers to gutted hulks in the process. That lifted some of the weight off the
Odysseus
and the
Bell
, but they were still making their way through the backside of one of the heaviest bits of fighting he’d ever seen.

Even the Drasin hadn’t been like this, not even when they’d come in by the hundreds at the tail end of the invasion.

“We’re breaking through, Captain,” Miram told him.

Eric nodded.

The two forces had flung themselves at one another at relativistic speeds. Even decelerating massively just before contact hadn’t slowed them nearly enough to come to a stop relative to one another. The passing engagement was about to be over, and there would be a brief time to calculate their next option before they were again committed.

“I need damage reports for every ship we’ve still got,” he said. “Continue deceleration at maximum rates, and bring our guns around to maintain fire.”

“Aye Captain.”

►►►

► The field of ships cleared as the Alliance task force broke through the fighting, now plunging through the scattered debris of death and destruction they had wrought.

The
Odysseus
,
Bellerophon
, and
Boudicca
turned on command, accelerating toward the enemy ships, but it shortly became clear that not all of the enemy were intent on doing the same. Some did, while others continued to accelerate away. Most seemed uncertain.

Amid the confusion, the
Odysseus
’ scanners tracked one ship maneuvering in close to one of the disabled vessels and apparently docking.

►►►

IBC
Piar Cohn

► “Connections secured, Captain.”

“Good,” Aymes said. “Get as many people over to the
Cohn
as possible, and
find
the navarch. Alive or dead, I want her on this ship!”

He didn’t listen for a confirmation, instead intently watching the mess unfolding around him. The enemy were still organized—that was clear by their uniform maneuvering despite damage—but the Imperial forces appeared uncertain about what to do. When the navarch’s ship lost contact, they’d been cut off from the command structure.

This wasn’t normally a problem, but in the chaos of battle it seemed that at least two other key members of the squadron’s command had been killed. In the midst of the fighting, everyone knew their jobs well enough, so the absence in command wasn’t felt. But now that they were out of the immediate threat, the breakdown that resulted would be fatal if Aymes didn’t find someone who could command enough respect, or fear, to get everyone pointing in the same direction.

They’d left more men and material strewn across several light-seconds of space than he’d have ever believed possible, and he was the captain who’d given warnings about just how dangerous this new culture really was. They were the anomaly culture, there was no question about that, and that meant that they had survived the Drasin’s berserker attack.

So they were tough, smart, and most likely extremely angry.

Aymes didn’t know for certain if the anomalies knew the Empire had held the Drasin’s leash, but they had to at least have
some
idea of it. They must have acquired scans from the megastructure the same as he had, and there was no hiding Imperial design.

This is going to be a costly expansion,
he thought with deadly certainty.

No one had calculated that there would be a fighting culture in the path of the Empire’s movement into Oather territory, and now there was no going back. The Empire was going to pay for every system in this galactic arm in blood and metal.

He was very glad he wouldn’t be in the place of those analysts once the realities of Imperial expansion became as clear to everyone else as they were to him.

For now, however, he just hoped to get his ship and the rest of the squadron out of this situation as intact as possible.

For that he desperately needed the navarch, or at least her second.

►►►

IBC
Shion Thon,
Flagship, Third Reconnaissance Squadron

► Rescue teams braved evacuated compartments in the navarch’s ship, throwing hot patches over what holes they could find just so they could push people through and to the
Cohn
as quickly as possible. No one knew what had happened to cripple the ship, but everyone was terrified that it was something that would destabilize the core.