Odyssey One 5: Warrior King (9 page)

“On your orders, Captain.”

“You have my orders, and my permission.”

►►►

Shuttle
Eagle One

► “The primary vessel is altering course.”

“Toward us?” Steph asked.

“No. I am getting a redshift on their signal through the passive scanners,” Milla answered. “They are moving away from the planet.”

Steph bit his lip, thinking about it, then shook his head.

“Must have spotted the
Odysseus
,” he decided. “Well, nothing we can do for them right now. We have our own problems.”

Turbulence rocked the shuttle as Steph took them into another cloud bank, heading south as
Eagle One
began circumnavigating the gas giant.

“Light off our radar,” he said. “Look for turbulence behind us.”

Milla nodded, killing the stealth cutouts they’d been running and bringing the shuttle’s powerful radar online. She flipped the system over into Doppler mode and started running scans all around them.

“As you said,” Milla noted, “strong turbulence behind us. They have entered the atmosphere in pursuit.”

“Only one of them, Milla.” Stephen sighed. “He’s just bird-dogging us so that we can’t sneak around the hunters.”

“Can we get away?”

“I don’t know, but we’re going to have fun trying,” Steph said with a grin.

Milla grimaced. “You, Stephan, enjoy the very strangest things.”

He pushed the shuttle deeper down into the atmosphere, not bothering to try and mask his turbulence signature. Evading them was the ideal, but since that wasn’t going to happen, Steph was more than happy to take second best—keeping them right where he could see them.

►►►

PC (
Piar Cohn
) Parasite
Five

► Subaltern Penae Girar glared at the scope that showed the path of the craft he was pursuing. He was tracking the ship by atmospheric disturbances, and the profile on all active scans was almost nonexistent. Penae had never seen anything like it. Even a ship as small as the one they were tracking should have a
much
larger profile.

Catching this one will be difficult, even with three parasites.

He was dealing with a small—very small—and apparently maneuverable craft. The pilot hadn’t done much yet to stand out as either good or bad, but Penae had to assume that the prey was at least competent.

“Check the signal relay,” Penae ordered his second.

“All scans are mirrored to
Three
and
Eight
,” the second confirmed. “They see what we see.”

“Good. Tighten the noose. This one can’t run for long.”

CHAPTER 9

AEV
Odysseus

► “Something odd about that tachyon pulse, Captain.” Ensign Perez frowned at his station, running pattern recognition on what they’d picked up from the pulse.

Tachyon pulses were a double-edged sword. Since they were effectively instantaneous in how fast they traveled and spacefarers would often know their source, anyone in the system could use a pulse to pick up locational data. As soon as the bogey had lit off, it had given both itself
and
the
Odysseus
a real-time peek at the situation.

“What is it, Ensign?”

“There seems to be interference around the target ship, sir.”

Eric cocked his head to one side. “Interference, Ensign?”

Nothing “interfered” with tachyons, aside from perhaps gravity. They were extremely high-energy particles that generally moved too fast for any sort of interference to be visible on human scales. Gravity did affect tachyons, of course, but there was unlikely to be any source of gravity in the area remotely
chaotic
enough to be considered interference.

“I don’t really know what to make of it, Captain,” Perez admitted. “It looks like the ship is breaking apart.”

Now
that
got Eric’s attention, and he stepped away from his console to approach the signals section of the bridge.

“Show me,” he ordered.

“Yes sir,” Perez said, calling up the data to his main screen. “As you can see, there’s something strange about the signal here.”

“I see it.” Eric nodded, noting that it did look like the ship was breaking up. “How long before we get light-speed signals?”

Perez glanced at the ship’s clock. “A little over an hour, sir.”

Eric shook his head. “That’s not going to cut it. Alright, stand by for tachyon pulse. One ping only.”

“Aye sir, one ping only.”

“What’s our current course?” Eric turned, looking over to where Kinder was working the helm.

“We are warping space for the gas giant, sir. One-third power.”

“Stand by for full military power.”

“Aye sir, standing by.”

“Perez, sound them out.”

“Aye sir, one ping,” Perez answered, sending the command to loose a burst of focused tachyons.

The FTL particles appeared and vanished in the same instant, lighting up the system briefly as the command crew watched.

“We’ve lost sight of
Eagle One
, sir. I don’t see them anywhere,” Perez said, “but it looks like . . . Sir, I’m showing at least eight additional ships now in that vicinity. Mass looks like . . . pocket destroyers, sir?”

“Where the hell did they come from?” Eric muttered, shaking his head and trying not to think about what had just happened to his friend Steph.

“I don’t know, sir. Light-speed scanners still show only the one ship on target, and we’re over an hour away from scanning the current situation.”

“Not for long,” Eric said firmly. “Helm, full military power. All flank to intercept.”

“Aye sir, all flank to intercept!”

►►►

► The
Odysseus
was built around two massive gravity sinks, functionally identical to quantum singularities but held right at the edge of stability. A stable singularity would swallow the ship while an unstable one would just blow itself out while probably irradiating the
Odysseus
and everyone on board.

As the ship began tapping full power from the twin singularities, the systems began winding space-time around the
Odysseus
. A deep, sharp sink appeared ahead of the ship as a bulge began to build up behind it. As one pushed and the other pulled, the
Odysseus
began to fall through space toward the gas giant.

►►►

IBC
Piar Cohn

► “We have been lit, Captain,” the chief signals officer said.

Aymes nodded absently but didn’t reply to the man for a moment. He’d seen the burst hit their scanners, knew the signature well enough. It was unsurprising, expected even, but the signature itself was curious.

“I don’t recognize that signature, Chief,” Aymes said finally. “Does it match Oather signals?”

“No Captain. Close, but not a precise match.”

“That is what is beginning to worry me,” Aymes said.

“Captain, they’ve begun running their drives. Powerful signals, no course telemetry yet.”

“No need to worry about that,” Aymes said. “There is only one place that they could be going that would matter to us right now. They are coming for us.”

Indeed, he was well aware that any other course didn’t make any difference. If they were running, he’d let them run. His mission wasn’t to antagonize the Oathers any more than they already had been. He and the
Cohn
were here to track the Drasin. That threat had to be secured.

The Oathers could come later.

It was more likely, however, that the target vessel and its presumed Oather crew were coming straight for the
Piar Cohn
. There was little reason to light off their reactors and twist space as urgently as they clearly were, except to come head on to try to save their little friend playing games in the gas giant.

That suited Aymes just fine.

His mission might not be to aggravate the Oathers, but he wouldn’t shed any tears over them if they happened to find their end here in this forsaken system.

“It’s better this way,” he murmured.

“Captain?”

“I was just saying, Commander,” he told his alternate, “that this may be the best of all possible outcomes.”

“Our orders were not to engage the Oathers.”

“True. However, I believe that they are about to engage us . . .” Aymes lifted his right hand, palm up. “And less witnesses to our mission is a good thing.”

“As you say, my Captain.”

“Dispatch orders to our parasite destroyers,” Aymes said. “Spread them out. Give me an Alep Six formation. All weapons are to be considered available.”

“Captain . . .” The alternate turned to look at him.

“
All
weapons, Altern Commander.”

“Yes Captain.”

The order was probably overkill, Aymes knew, but this arm of the galaxy was dark territory to the Empire right now. He wasn’t going to underestimate anything here, not if he could help it.

Not even Oathers.

►►►

AEV
Odysseus

► “Captain, we have a real-time lock,” Lieutenant Waters offered. “We can hit them with t-cannons.”

Eric considered the idea for a moment, then shook his head, “No, Lieutenant. For one, we don’t have eyes on Commander Michaels and Lieutenant Chans . . . and I’d rather not expose our trump card until we can be sure we’ve locked them all down.”

“Yes sir.”

“Besides, we don’t know they’re hostile yet,” Eric said. “Our ROE allow for first strike against the Drasin, no quarter, but not against unconfirmed targets.”

“Yes sir. Sorry sir.”

“Don’t apologize, Lieutenant. It was a good suggestion, just not one we can implement right now,” Eric said. “For now, we play it straight.”

“Aye sir.”

Commander Heath walked over to Eric’s side, speaking quietly. “Does playing it straight mean we fly right at each other and try to blast one another out of space like men? Because if it does, as the ship’s ranking woman, I would like to enter an objection for the record.”

Eric shot her an amused look, surprised by the humor from the normally uptight commander.

“I think we’ll try hailing them once we’re within a reasonable communications delay,” he said. “Unfortunately, without the Priminae FTL relays, we can’t talk until we’re much closer.”

“If we’re within reasonable range to talk, we’re going to be well within reasonable range to shoot each other,” Miram said softly. “But you already know that, of course, sir.”

“If you wanted a safe job, Commander, you picked the wrong line of work.”

Miram let out a breath. “I picked the right line of work, Captain.”

“Good,” Eric said. “Get the damage-control teams moving, if they’re not already.”

“Yes sir.”

Eric watched the commander move away, wondering how Miram would hold up under fire. She seemed together, but you didn’t know how someone would react to combat until the chips were in the air. While the Heroics did have priority on new recruits, the demand was still such that he’d had to take several people based on how their files looked rather than how he
knew
they could perform. He was lucky to have held on to as much of his crew as he had, and at least the replacements looked good on paper.

This was the worst part of ship-to-ship combat, something he rarely had to deal with as a fighter jock.

The waiting.

It was infinitely worse in space, he’d learned on the
Odyssey
.

In the middle of
active
combat, they often had time to break for coffee and a meal while waiting for the enemies’ next move. It was the very definition of insanity as far as he was concerned. Right now they could read that the enemy ship was powering hard, pulling out of the gas giant’s gravity well and heading upwell of the local star, right at the
Odysseus
.

Similarly, the
Odysseus
was warping space hard
downwell
, on an intercept course.

Two immensely powerful starships, both moving as fast as anyone dared this deep inside a gravity well, heading right for one another—and he was debating whether he should take a fifteen-minute power nap so he would be refreshed when the action started.

If gods exist, they must be laughing at us right now. We are so very insignificant by every possible metric of the universe, and yet we insist on making ourselves the center of everything.

Eric stood up. “Commander.”

“Yes sir?”

“You have the bridge. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

“Aye Captain,” Miram said. “I have the bridge.”

Eric nodded curtly and walked off the command deck of the
Odysseus
.

►►►

Shuttle
Eagle One

► Milla’s stomach lurched as the shuttle seemed to drop out from under them, plummeting through the atmosphere of the gas giant for a thousand meters before it restabilized and started climbing again. Steph was calmly seated beside her, looking like nothing had just happened as he worked the controls.

“Keep on the Doppler,” he said without looking over at her. “See if you can spot our pursuers.”

“Y-yes sir,” Milla blurted, refocusing on the task at hand.

The shuttle had a full scanner suite, but as deep in the atmosphere as they were currently flying, the radar systems were still the most effective.

The vessel pursuing them was, surprisingly, in Milla’s opinion, not particularly stealthy. The metallic composite of the hull reflected radar quite well, something that a similar Priminae ship would not do. However, she was having almost more luck tracking the atmospheric distortion of its passing than the ship itself.

“They are still pursuing, two kilometers above us, on our six, yes?”

“Six, copy,” Steph said. “Not trying to shake them yet. Don’t have a lot of places to hide here.”

“Then what is the plan?”

“When we make a run for it,” Steph said, “we’re going to need as much confusion as possible to buy us some lead time.”

“But we could do that now, yes?”

“Yes, but not until I know where all our pursuers are,” Steph said firmly. “If they left even one of those parasites in orbit, we’ll never get clear. I need them all down here with us when I make the break, otherwise it’s for nothing.”

Milla wasn’t sure she understood, but she nodded anyway.

“Just watch the radar,” Steph said. “Need to know when the other two come into sight.”

“I understand. I will inform you,” Milla said. “What happens then?”

“Good,” Steph said, glancing over at her and flashing a smile. “And that, my dear Miss Chans, is when the fun begins.”

►►►