The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (31 page)

People, the few that were left on the beleaguered ship, were scurrying around trying to do three and four jobs at once, while the powerful ship slowly died around them, but they still had a duty to the world they’d left behind and the people who had died on it.

“Serra, line up an attack run for the closest enemy ship.”

The young woman nodded tiredly, too worn out now to respond in the affirmative, but bent to her work. Kierna wasn’t
about to criticize her on her lack of protocol, not when she was doing a miraculous job at least two grades over her head.

Seeing how tired his weapons chief was made the force of his own fatigue slap Kierna in the face, but he refused to allow himself to succumb to it as he stood there in the middle of his wrecked command deck and clung stubbornly to the projected helm controls that he had been forced to take over from the body of their previous commander.

“Captain…”

Kierna looked over his shoulder, eyeing the man who was standing the communications post. “What is it, Beh?”

Cornal Behhan Hann was a low-ranked hand who normally handled damage control and maintenance, certainly not the complexities of the communications station. However, the normal officer who would stand there was dead, and most of those both alive and qualified to stand that post had other places to be at the moment, so Behhan had been half drafted, half volunteered into place.

“I…I’m not sure. We’re being hit by laser pulses, Captain.”

Kierna blinked, frowning. “I didn’t feel any more decks blowing out, Cornal,” he said grimly.

“That’s just it…They’re low powered, Captain. Really just high-intensity light…”

“Show me,” the captain ordered.

“Yes, Captain,” the man said, grateful that the problem wasn’t on his shoulders anymore.

Kierna called up the energy spikes as soon as Beh had sent them to his station and eyed them critically. Behhan was right—they were little more than light, powerful enough to register as lasers, but nothing more than that. He tapped up the vectors and ordered the computer to plot their origin points, along with the location of all ships at that time.

“Laser code,” he said softly a second later.

“Captain?”

He waved his hand, shutting up the speaker. Laser code wasn’t used very often, it was more for kids to play with than anything else, but it was standard and Kierna had learned it once, a long time ago. Luckily, he didn’t have to translate it himself. The computer had a full library of it on board, as long as that section hadn’t been damaged.

It hadn’t, and in a few moments, Kierna was looking at the translated message.

“Chaos blood,” he muttered a moment later.

A shocked silence filled the bustle of the bridge, people looking over at him as his curse reached them.

He ignored the looks and shook his head. “Prepare to withdraw from contact.”

PRIMINAE VESSEL VULK
Interstellar Space, Ranquil Region

▸JOHAN WATCHED THE graphical image of the
Heralc
as it began to arc away from the battle, and nodded appreciatively to the communications officer. “Good work, Kanna.”

“Captain!” the officer at the helm called then, his voice tense. “They’re grouping in on us.”

Johan returned his attention to the projections as the computer began tracing a projected line of laser light in the space crossing their path just to the rear. The beam crawled along as the computer projected its course in both directions as it calculated the beam’s origin and destination, but Johan ignored it.

The beam had missed, and it wasn’t anywhere near their projected vectors, so it didn’t matter for the moment.

The fact that it had come close enough to be detected and plotted, though, did matter. Lasers were notoriously hard to detect unless you had the misfortune of running directly into one, or had one run into you, it really didn’t matter which. In fact, only the most powerful lasers were detectable at any real range unless you were directly in their path. Detection methods varied from analyzing the flare when they intersected
random particulate matter that floated throughout even the emptiest regions of space all the way to detecting and analyzing the unique spectral flare that even the most tightly beamed laser gave off. In either case, detecting a laser beam was almost always a matter of seeing it too late. Either it had missed you or it hadn’t—there wasn’t really a lot you could do about a beam you’d already found.

However, if you survived detecting a given beam, there were things you could do about future attacks.

“Evasive maneuvers!”

And running was always a good option.

The
Vulk
twisted in space, carving a path though the airless void that was impossibly complex and devilishly quick, the Drasin twisting and screaming at their heels. The four remaining ships had teamed together, undoubtedly hoping to deny the
Vulk
and her crew the opportunity of taking them piecemeal.

Johan had seen enough from the battle records that survived the first wave of Drasin attacks to know that his ship was more than a match for a Drasin cruiser, one-on-one. Given that the
Vulk
outmassed the average Drasin cruiser by a ratio of almost ten to one, that wasn’t a surprise.

Its mass of firepower, however, only exceeded the recorded Drasin beam by approximately two to one, so the extra mass was a vital necessity. Size, though, did have other advantages. The
Cerekus
, during the last moments of the Battle of Ranquil, had taken damage that would have destroyed any prewar fleet of Priminae ships. The
Heralc
, from what Johan had seen on his sensors, had exceeded even that.

The Lympa’an-type warships were large enough to absorb damage and remain in fighting trim, able to inflict heavy damage even with the majority of the vessel blown out from under its captain’s feet.

Johan would, of course, prefer to avoid that situation, if he possibly could.

“Return fire. Continue evasive maneuvers. Prepare for detailed vector changes,” he ordered as he punched a series of vectors into the projected interface, then shot his orders over to the helm and weapons stations.

Combat in dimension drive wasn’t something that his people had ever really practiced, at least not in recent memory. There were, however, files on the subject buried deep in the classified files that had only recently been opened to him.

They were complicated matters of math and tactics, often an alien subject to Johan, but he did understand the basic precept of combat at FTL velocities.

Ships were faster than light; lasers were not. That was the core tactical center of everything the old files had on dimension drive tactics, and it was what he had to work with now. Basically, there were two ways to hit the enemy with a laser.

First, you could fly your ship so close that your dimensional fields practically, or actually did, come into contact with each other. In this case, your laser would cross the distance between the two ships at light-speed relative to your current velocities, or fairly close, and strike the enemy in much the same way as normal space battles were conducted.

The advantages of this were obvious, of course, but so were the disadvantages. At eighty times the speed of light, the standard frequency shift of Priminae dimensional drives in interstellar space, collisions were uniformly fatal unless you and your enemy were moving on practically parallel courses.

The ancient files Johan had read described battles in which more ships were destroyed by collision than enemy fire. Of course, those ships normally took out at least one enemy ship when they died, but that wasn’t the way Johan would
prefer to go. Especially since the Priminae people didn’t have enough ships to defend them already.

The other primary tactic was deception. It basically amounted to a war of maneuver that depended on outguessing and outthinking the enemy.

Johan was going to start with that option.

“Acknowledge your orders,” he snapped after he’d sent the vector data to the two stations that had to be operating in near-perfect sync to make his plan work.

“Orders understood,” both the helm and weapons snapped together, bringing a smile to Johan’s face.

So far so good.

“Then execute stage on my order,” he said seriously, hiding all hint of his smile.

Outside, the rush of interstellar gas and particulates flashed against the
Vulk
’s sheilds as they dashed through the “empty” void, the four Drasin baying at their heels like angry hounds. Johan ignored both, though, watching his tactical display and not the real-space screens.

Then it was time.

“Stage one! Now!”

NACS ODYSSEY
Ranquil System

▸“THERE’S SOME HEAVY power being thrown around out there, Captain.”

Eric Weston nodded, not looking up from his display. He could see what Lieutenant Winger was seeing, though she probably understood it better then he, but for the moment, there wasn’t much to do about it.

The
Odyssey
was under full “sail,” her passive sensor arrays extended all around the ship like glittering silver sails on an ancient schooner. The apparently flimsy materials of the arrays were surprisingly tough, but after this trip, Eric knew that they’d probably have to toss most of the material despite its engineered strength.

Each “sail” was a carefully engineered reflector that directed incoming energy of most types, even extremely high and low bands, to a central reception point that housed multiple sensors receivers. The entire system operated much like a parabolic dish the size of a couple of football fields, though the resolution was actually better than that hypothetical structure would be, thanks to a few advances in molecular engineering.

Even so, they were only passive, and they couldn’t give him anything that wasn’t already long over with.

Well, almost anything.

Tachyons themselves didn’t reflect particularly well, their velocity being too high and their mass being nonexistent, so they mostly just tunneled right through matter like it wasn’t there or were absorbed into heavier materials as they gave up their energy and reverted to normal matter.

They did, however, tend to rip electrons from matter as they tore through. Not many, as they were so tiny that they didn’t often run into an actual atom, but enough for their passage to be read by the lines of woven sensors built directly into the huge sails.