Odyssey One 5: Warrior King (3 page)

For a moment, a sunrise shone brightly over a portion of the ragged and fallen world, and then it was gone.

Eric let the silence hold for a moment longer, taking a breath before speaking.

“Helm, make course for the heliopause. Full power to wave drives.”

“Aye Captain,” Steph confirmed as he tapped in the command he’d already prepared. “Wave drives to full power. We are on course for the heliopause. ETA . . . eight hours, sir.”

Eric nodded. “Thank you.”

Eight hours was a fraction of the time the voyage used to take. The wave drive did away with many of the problems that used to plague the reaction drive of the
Odyssey
, including issues that arose from relativistic effects on its systems. The
Odysseus
sat securely in the middle of a warped section of space-time and simply surfed the wave while remaining in a stable state of “Earth standard” space-time.

The math made his head ache, and Eric was no slouch in mathematics, but the end result was a much faster propulsion drive that had far fewer maintenance problems than the
Odyssey
’s reaction drives had ever had. The propulsion system wasn’t even an alien design, or at least it was a design that humans had come up with independently before the Priminae offered to build ships for Earth.

The Chinese scientists from the Eastern Block had built a somewhat cruder version on their own, which was one reason why many of the officers serving in even the
Odysseus
’ engineering section were Chinese or other nationalities allied with the Block.

That, he hated to admit, was going to take some getting used to.

Eric had spent too many years looking at Block officers over the proverbial, and sometimes literal, rails of his guns.

I may be getting too old for this,
Eric thought.

Times changed. That was a rule set in the very foundation of the universe, but men had limitations in their flexibility.

“Commander, you have command,” he said as he got up from his station. “I’ll be . . . on the flight deck.”

“Aye sir, I have the conn,” Miram confirmed, shifting stations.

►►►

► “Marines! Left face!” the gunny bellowed as the ranks swiveled. “Forward MARCH!”

Eric stayed quietly out of sight as the Marines marched off the flight deck, having finished their own ceremony of respect for those lost on Mars. He wished he’d been on deck with them, but the captain had to be in command when nuclear weapons were to be authorized, and nothing less would have been visible over the horizon of the now-dead planet.

When the ranks were far enough away that his arrival wouldn’t throw a monkey wrench into their motions, Eric stepped out onto the deck and walked across to where the colonel in charge of the
Odysseus
’ Marines stood looking out over the receding curve of Mars.

“Colonel,” Eric said, announcing himself. “Good ceremony?”

“Define ‘good,’ Captain,” Deirdre Conner said, her tone a little flat.

The raw wounds of the invasion hadn’t yet begun to heal for most, and Mars was and probably would remain a symbol of that pain. Eric wouldn’t have had to read her file to know that the colonel had lost someone, possibly multiple someones.

“Did my Marines acquit themselves properly?” he asked.

Deirdre smiled crookedly. “Your Marines, Captain?”

“On this ship, you are all my Marines, Colonel.”

“
Your
Marines performed perfectly, Captain.”

“Then it was a
good
ceremony, Colonel.”

He glanced over at the stocky woman in the Marine dress blue uniform. Deirdre Conner was a redhead with clear Irish roots, but somewhere along the line had picked up genes for a darker skin tone than was normally associated with Celtic blood. She’d enlisted late in the war before the Confederation Accords had been signed, crossing the border from Canada to sign up with the Corps.

That had happened frequently in those days. Canadian forces had taken a lot of hits when they’d moved to support Australian and British military in the South Pacific. Later in the war, they were willing but lacked any significant weight of metal to put men in the field.

The same dynamic happened in the south too. Mexicans, Panamanians, and various other nationalities all walked into Marine recruiting offices in such a steady stream that the phenomenon was used as evidence in support of the Confederate Charter. By the end of the war, Marines were by far the single largest service in the Confederation, and the most diverse.

“It’s been a while, Deirdre,” Eric said finally into the silence. “I was surprised to see your name on the candidate list.”

“Oh?” She glanced archly at him. “Really now?”

Eric put up his hands in mock defense. “Claws in, hellcat. I just didn’t expect that you’d put in for space duty. Last I heard, you were on the short list to take command at Parris Island. Never expected you to pass on that.”

Deirdre was quiet for a short moment. “The invasion changed a lot of things. You know that better than most. Word came down that you were getting the go-ahead to track down the ones who set those things on us. That had better be true.”

Eric tilted his head slightly. “Technically that’s classified, at least until we leave Sol space, but that’s the basic mission brief, Colonel.”

“That’s why I put in the transfer request.”

Eric nodded slowly. “I can respect that. Just remember, Deirdre, we are professionals. Revenge is for the weak and the lost. We serve a higher calling.”

“There is no higher calling than the Corps, Captain.”

“Ooo rah, Colonel.”

►►►

► The
Odysseus
barreled through the solar system, hurtling at velocities that until only years earlier would have been all but unthinkable. The
Odyssey
would have survived such speeds, but her forward armor plates would have needed to be pulled and replaced because of micrometeorite impacts.

Eric stepped out of the ship’s transfer car onto the flight deck situated inverse to the bridge on what was considered the ship’s ventral surface. Since the singularity was the source of the primary gravity impetus on the ship, many of the decks were laid out around it, making changing decks something of a challenge if you had to travel via manual access points.

The two largest orientations were above and below. While the
Odysseus
’ sides did curve around the ship’s singularities, the effect there was less pronounced. Basically, the lower decks were actually upside down compared with the top decks. Decks along the flanks of the ship were angled slightly as well, but Priminae gravity technology kept most of the changes controllable.

Eric walked through the open blast doors and onto the flight deck, eyes skipping past the large intra-atmospheric airframes that dominated the open space until he found what he was looking for.

The fighter had seen better days.

Her scars had been earned in honorable combat, however, and while Eric knew that his old bird was no longer deemed flightworthy by the Confederation, he was also pretty sure she had a few hours left in her.

Times change,
he thought again as he stripped off his uniform tunic and pulled a large tracked tool case over beside the nose of the Archangel, snapping it open while he mentally tallied what needed to be fixed for the ship to pass inspection.

He’d handed his personal fighter over to Jennifer “Cardsharp” Samuels when pressure from the Drasin had put the squadron in a pinch for warm bodies that could qualify on NICS. When the Confederation gave her the
Bellerophon
to pilot and subsequently elected to retire the entire squadron, Eric had pulled some strings and damn well gotten his fighter
back
.

Maybe it was the last of its kind and obsolete, but if that was the case, then so was he.

“Well, let’s get these plates replaced,” Eric told the fighter as he grabbed a cutting torch and got ready to pop the welds that held the armor in place. “Then we’ll see what kind of mess you’re in under all those scrapes and dings.”

“Talking to your machine, boss. Not a good sign.”

Eric snorted, not even bothering to look around. “You’re supposed to be on the bridge.”

“Write me up,” Steph said as he walked around. “The ship is tracking true, all systems green. Figured the lieutenant could use a few more hours on her book.”

“Kindness of your heart, is it?” Eric asked as he used the laser torch to zap a weld.

“You know me, boss. I’m a giver.”

“Of course you are.” Eric rolled his eyes. “Put on a pair of goggles, would you? Last thing we need to do is blind our chief pilot.”

Steph chuckled and grabbed a pair of laser-filtering glasses. “Nice to see you again too.”

Eric shook his head slightly, but went back to cutting out the battle-scarred panel, talking with his friend as he worked.

It had been too long since either of them had had the opportunity to do just that.

CHAPTER 3

► Transitioning to Ranquil from Sol was just as disturbing as one might imagine having one’s atoms split apart and tossed across space-time would be.

Oh, that wasn’t
really
what the drive did, thankfully—just what it felt like.

The transition was actually more akin to being boiled than being disintegrated, which, as Eric thought about it, sounded
so
much worse. The transition drive stimulated a direct phase shift from solid matter to a tachyon state, a form of matter so unstable as to be virtually nonexistent in the universe. The change lasted only an infinitesimal period of time, by the end of which the phase shift reversed and the ship and contents returned to their normal state, dozens of light-years away from where they had started.

The process was, in a very real sense, true teleportation without any of the moral ambiguities of trying to construct an energy-conversion system. Unfortunately, transitioning didn’t work reliably near significant gravity wells.

The system
would
charge and initiate a phase change, but as Eric had himself proven during a series of trials of the new Heroic Class, gravity wells could scatter the tachyons and prevent reformation.

Eric had given himself many a nightmare by
winning
that series of mock combat exercises, and probably taken a few years off the lives of some politicians who had thought the transition technology made Earth’s forces effectively invincible. Since gravity could scatter tachyons, and thus prevent proper reintegration, putting too much trust in transition technology when you were dealing with ships literally
powered
by gravity fields . . . well, it wasn’t the smartest thing in the world. The things a singularity drive could do to an emerging transition would not be possible in any fair universe.

“Captain, we’re being challenged,” Ensign Sams announced.

Eric looked up, mildly surprised as he checked the time stamp.

“Already? Okay, I’m impressed,” he admitted. “They’ve improved their detection net. Who is it?”

“The Priminae vessel
Posdan
, Captain.”

“Is she a Heroic?” Eric asked, frowning. He didn’t think so, but it was hard sometimes to keep the Priminae naming convention in his mind.

“No sir, pre-Alliance design. Similar, but no transition technology, adaptive armor, or multiclass lasers.”

“Ah.”

It was one of the original “giants with clubs” that both the Priminae and the Drasin had fielded and that the
Odyssey
had spent so many hours trying to avoid during their first battles.

“Well, send our bona fides,” he ordered. “How close is she?”

“Eighteen light-seconds and closing, on a combat intercept course.”

“Light off our colors.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

►►►

Priminae Vessel
Posdan

► Captain Kian of the
Posdan
stepped onto the command deck of his ship, looking around at others who were already at their positions.

Not bad. Reaction times are getting better,
he thought.

They should be, he knew. The crew had been drilling nearly constantly, working to improve what had once been an honestly disgraceful apathy that had infected the fleet.

“Report.”

“New contact, Captain. Likely transitional signature,” the instrument specialist replied. “We’re waiting on challenge response.”

Kian relaxed slightly, nodding. A transitional signature meant it was a returning Heroic or, most likely, one of the Terran ships. It was almost certainly
not
a Drasin vessel or squadron at any rate, so the
Posdan
was unlikely to be going into combat.

As much as he hated to admit it, that was a good thing.

His ship, as much as he loved it, could hardly go toe-to-toe with a small Drasin squadron. The most likely outcome of such a conflict was mutually assured destruction, and that was really the best he could realistically hope for. His orders in such an event were to fall back as much as he could without risking the safety of the planet, delaying the enemy until one or more of the Heroics were in position to intercept.

His
Posdan
was less than two cycles old and already obsolete, a realization that chafed Kian slightly.

“Challenge response. It’s the—”

The word of who it was died in the specialist’s throat as the image on the screen burst into blue, silver, and white light.

“The
Odysseus
,” Kian said with a twist of his lips. “Return our colors and signal my welcome to Captain Weston and his crew.”

“Shall I transmit safe passage through the defenses?”

Kian shook his head. “Confirm their challenge response with the admiral first. Procedure.”

“Yes Captain.”

►►►

AEV
Odysseus
, Ranquil Orbit

► “Who’s the pilot?” Eric asked as he walked the deck toward the intra-atmospheric shuttle.

“Major McQuarrie, sir,” his aide, Lieutenant Lyssa Myriano, answered.

“Don’t know him. Good?”

“Marine aviator, decorated.
He
was never shot down over Beijing,” she replied, her tone slightly amused.

Eric shot Lyssa an arch look. “Most lieutenants would be wary of tweaking their captain so casually.”

“Yes sir,” she said primly.

Eric smiled a little ruefully. “Good to have you with us on this one, Lyssa. When I saw you’d re-upped, I knew I wanted you on the
Odysseus
.”

“Good to be here, sir.”

The first time he’d met Lyssa had been in Central Park. It hadn’t really been a good time for either of them, as she had been an NYPD officer and he had been firing off a multikiloton alien weapon. Gun laws hadn’t been high on either of their minds at the time, however, and he was happy to have her in the service once more.

We need every good hand we can get.

A lot of good people had died during the Drasin event, which was hard to call an invasion considering the Drasin were almost more of a force of nature than an army. After the long battle was over, though, recruitment levels went through the roof. The Alliance Black Navy had
far
more people applying now than it had ships to crew.

That was going to change, and soon. For now, the Heroics still had priority for crew selection—within reason—despite the higher demand across the fleet. Eric hadn’t hesitated when it came to selecting his crew, or his new aide.

He and Lyssa stepped onto the shuttle, dropping into the heavily bolstered seats and strapping in tight.

“Admiral Tanner is unassuming,” he said casually. “He comes across more like a grunt than an officer, right up until you see how his people treat him. Show respect, but don’t dance around. He’ll answer questions straight if you ask them straight.”

“Yes sir,” Lyssa answered. “And the Elders?”

“They’re . . . different.” Frankly, he didn’t know how to describe the likes of Elder Corusc. “Think . . . realistic pacifists,” he said finally. “
Very
uninterested in conflict of any type, but not to the point of cultural suicide. Not sure how they’d deal with any threat below Drasin levels, honestly.”

“That’s not comforting.”

Eric shrugged as the turbines on the shuttle whined to life. “That’s the universe in which we live, Lieutenant. Deal with it.”

“Yes sir.”

They shifted as the shuttle was pulled out of its lockdown position and moved into the ready one slot for launch. Clearance took only a few moments. Then the turbines’ whine climbed to a roar as Eric and Lyssa were slammed to the side of their seats by acceleration as the shuttle flung itself out into the void.

►►►

IBC
Piar Cohn
, Deep Black

► At maximum nonmilitary cruise, the
Piar Cohn
barreled through space at just over a thousand lights. That wasn’t the fastest speed in the Empire, but it was respectable, and in a pinch Aymes knew his ship could pull another two hundred without overly stressing the wave-generation system. More than that and there was a fair to good chance of them blowing something irreplaceable and never seeing home again.

He was standing in the forward officers’ lounge, one of the few places on the ship that offered a “view,” such as it was. The thickly armored screens ahead of him were transparent, so he could look out at the visible moving stars, all blueshifted as the
Cohn
raced toward them.

Occasionally, a particularly close stellar body, ten light-years away or so, would streak past dramatically, but for the most part there was more of an ordered procession to be observed than a rampant rush into the future.

“Captain.”

Aymes didn’t turn around at the voice. He continued to watch the procession. “Yes First?”

“We are approaching the first checkpoint, sir. Long-range instruments detect no sign of the targets.”

Aymes nodded slowly. Not really anything unexpected there.

“Proceed as scheduled. I’ll make further decisions once we’ve got better scans.”

“Yes Captain.”

They wouldn’t find any sign of the Drasin at their first stop, Aymes would bank on that. No useful sign, at least. The Drasin left unmistakable carnage behind them, marked into the very worlds of every system they touched, but what the
Cohn
was looking for was any information on where they had
gone
.

That wasn’t going to be located so easily.

Still, he and his crew had to check by the numbers, just to be certain. The risks were too great to do otherwise.

He shuddered to think of what would have happened if the Drasin had been lost with a sufficient breeding group of first-generation drones. As it was, the havoc they would wreak was nearly incalculable, but if they had sufficient resources to propagate a new first generation . . . well, not even the Empire would be safe, he’d bet.

Frankly, Aymes thought that the Department of War was flat-out insane for unleashing such things on the universe. What good were systems that had been emptied of their most viable worlds? Certainly, the Drasin made for excellent terror weapons and a shatteringly impressive strategic threat, but from what he’d read, the orders for the last series of incursions into Oather space had been anything but strategic.

Should have cut through the small colonies immediately, gone straight to the homeworlds. Turn one or two of those into Drasin fodder and the rest would have capitulated to the Empire in days—weeks at the outside,
Aymes thought, annoyed by the unprofessional nature of the action.

Someone had let their emotions and bloodlust get the best of them, he supposed. Or, perhaps more likely, they were going to use the whole exercise as an example to some of the outlying Imperial worlds. Show them what happened to those who tried to keep to old and antiquated ways.

If that was the case, however, Aymes figured that plan had backfired most spectacularly. The Drasin were loose. And the Oathers, apparently not nearly as defenseless as they should have been, now had allies.

Imperial communications corporations were working overtime to cover up any hint of the failure. If word got out, ideas would not be far behind.

And there were few things as dangerous as ideas.

►►►

Priminae Capital, Ranquil

► “Welcome, Captain!”

Eric smiled as he walked under the looming fuselage of the shuttle, extending a hand to Rael Tanner in greeting. The admiral cut a slight figure, but Eric was well aware that judging him by his size or his subtle temper would be a mistake. He was the commander in chief of the Priminae Navy and overall commander of their entire military, a position that held very little respect or accolades from the locals. Winning his position may not have been the challenge it would have been on Earth, but keeping his position nonetheless showed tenacious dedication to duty over all other things.

“Admiral, a pleasure as always.”

“More so for me, Captain. The reports of your passing were deeply saddening.”