The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (34 page)

▸“DEPLOY WEAPONS.”

Johan Maran had given the command without flinching, but he was the only one on the command deck who wasn’t shocked. Still, his weapons officer nodded and tapped in a command, and a moment later, a half dozen blinking lights floated away from the ship on the projected display.

“Deployed.”

Johan nodded, watching the lights for a moment as they floated oh so slowly away from his ship, then forced his attention back to the matter at hand.

“Continue on course,” he ordered. “Prepare a firing lock on the Drasin ahead.”

“Yes, Captain.”

He didn’t say it aloud, but everyone knew that the orders were just a formality. They had no choice, not with survival itself on the line.

The
Vulk
powered on through the emptiness of space, lumbering toward its enemy as it laid a trap in its wake for its pursuers. The big ship’s acceleration was the equal of
its quarry, however, so it wasn’t gaining any on them as the command crew watched the screens.

“Time to detonation?” Johan asked tensely.

The weapons officer checked the numbers, then looked up. “Forty cycles.”

Maran nodded, taking a breath.

Forty cycles was enough. More than enough, in fact, for the
Vulk
to get clear of the blast radius of the weapons-grade nuclear munitions. Like everything else on the
Vulk
and its brother ships, the prohibited weapons were considerably enhanced over those carried by the fleet’s previous incarnation of converted transports, but even with those enhancements, the
Vulk
was armored and hardened to survive much, much worse.

Maran tried not to focus on the thought of the weapons at his back, instead looking to the tactical situation he was flying into. On the projection, there were several dots of light and projected courses, one of which caught his eye immediately and made him wince.

“What is that blasted fool doing?” Johan growled, looking at the lines. “Status on the
Heralc
!”

“Damaged, Captain. Badly,” came the response, “however, they’re coming about to engage the Drasin.”

Captain Maran had to bite down the impulse to send a scathing message to his fellow captain, but instead considered it for a moment and finally shook his head as he settled back. “Fine. Signal the
Heralc
and inform them that we will catch the Drasin in a cross fire.”

That still left one wild card out there, he knew. The messages from the admiralty had made it clear that the
Odyssey
had departed orbit with the intentions of engaging any Drasin that made it into to their weapons’ range. They had, however,
also engaged their stealth measures, and the
Vulk
’s sensors weren’t reading them anywhere out there.

Given Captain Weston’s reputation among the people on Ranquil, however, Johan was unwilling to assume that the
Odyssey
wasn’t much closer than he might otherwise believe.

“What is the last-reported position of the
Odyssey
?” Johan asked, feeling more than a little tense about the entire matter.

NACS ODYSSEY
Ranquil System

▸WESTON WATCHED THE display plotters as the
Odyssey
clawed for “altitude” relative to the system elliptic, using only thrusters and minimal counter-mass power, trying to clear her line of fire from any well-meaning but pushy “friendlies.”

Inside the big ship, the crew was hanging on to anything that was available, since without the full power of the big ship’s CM generators, they could feel the g-forces of even the relatively weak thrusters. Anything that hadn’t been secured carefully was tossed to the back corners of whatever room it was in, resulting in the destruction of a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, but nothing that was particularly valuable or important.

The crew was well drilled for acceleration, but some things always slipped through the cracks.

One crewman was quickly dispatched to the medical labs when a half-secured tie snapped in the cafeteria and he was pelted with three hundred and fifty pounds of flour in twenty-five-pound tubs. Another walked himself into Dr. Rame’s tender care when he was caught off guard by the thruster burn
and sprained his arm while keeping himself from slamming into the back wall.

Relatively light damages and injuries, all things considered, for a hurriedly prepared thruster burn.

On the bridge, the main screen was now split into three sections, each displaying a different angle of the tactical map as the
Odyssey
continued to rise above the common plane of the other ships involved.

Space was, of course, a three-dimensional environment with no true up or down. However, for practical purposes, most common maneuvers were conducted along a very narrow plane of action that generally coincided with the system elliptic, or basically the plane that the majority of planets orbited on.

Eric wasn’t really certain why, at least not when it came to warfare, except perhaps the personal momentum that tended to infect even the most tactically minded person. Under normal conditions, one remained on the elliptic because the shortest distance between two points almost always followed it, and fuel was a concern when one traveled the immense distances involved in space travel.

For whatever reason, the other ships in the battle were remaining on that rough plane as they closed with each other, much like Eric would have had the Priminae warship not forced his hand. Tactically, the move “above” the elliptic would clear the
Odyssey
’s guns and give them an advantage in one respect.

In another respect, however, it was a tactical pain in the ass.

Due to the immense distances normally considered, even within a given star system, the elliptic was a relatively “flat,” or two-dimensional, plane. It allowed the tactical station to
project ship movements over a two-dimensional display with a relatively high level of accuracy and tactical precision.

Now, however, the display had to be projected in three separate cutaways to give any sense of perspective to the matter, and Eric was finding that he really didn’t like trying to think in three dimensions.

It was weird, actually, to realize that. He was a pilot—a fighter pilot, at that—and thinking tactically in three dimensions was integral to his training. However, those instincts were channeled to think in terms of plus or minus forty thousand feet or so, not plus or minus forty million kilometers!

The scale was warping his mind as he tried to keep it all pictured in his head at once. The lightning-fast calculations and instincts he’d developed for flying Archangel One were working against him now that he had the time to second-guess himself, and it was infuriating.

“Commander,” he said after a moment, looking over to where Jason was examining the screens with a similarly distressed look, “remind me to have a…
vigorous
discussion with Admiral Gracen about clearing a holographic projection system for bridge use.”

Roberts gave him a pained nod of agreement.

PRIMINAE VESSEL VULK
Ranquil System

▸“DETONATION, CAPTAIN!”

Johan Maran looked at the tactical projection and nodded gravely. The nuclear detonations were appearing on the scanners now, meaning they had detonated just under forty cycles previously. The leading edge of the radiation was now being reflected off the
Vulk
’s shields, and it wouldn’t be long before the main force of the expanding wave struck them.

“Brace for shield turbulence,” he ordered, his voice going out over the entire ship.

A few seconds later, the
Vulk
shuddered, then shook, then calmed again as the radiation passed and its energy stopped interacting with the
Vulk
’s energy fields. The entire event took only seconds, but it was unnerving, just the same. Ships in space didn’t normally suffer from any sort of turbulence. Any impact large enough to shake a ship was normally fatal; however, the energy shields did their job by absorbing, reflecting, and refracting dangerous radiation away from the ship, and certain laws of the natural world applied. In this case, in order to push the radiation away, the shields had to push against their projectors and the ship in an equal fashion.

Luckily, it ended as quickly as it had begun, and Captain Maran nodded grimly as he watched his projections. “Inform me when the scanners have reset from the pulse.”

“Yes, Captain.”

In the meantime, his forward scanners were still quite active, and they showed things coming to a head in short order. The
Heralc
would intercept the Drasin before the
Vulk
could close with them, and that was likely to be bad news for the damaged vessel.

“Drive Room,” he called out in a low voice.

“Yes, Captain?” the voice of the master engineer came back a moment later, sounding distant over the communication system.

“I need more acceleration,” he demanded.

“We can’t give you any more, Captain. We’re already beyond the recommended specifications as it stands.”

“Blow your engines, if you must,” Johan snapped, his frustrations coloring his voice. “But give me more acceleration. The
Heralc
will be engaged for twenty-two seconds before we can interfere. I will not lose a ship this close to home. Is this understood?”

There was a silence, until finally the voice came back. “Yes, Captain. I’ll see what we can do.”

Maran closed the connection then, satisfied that the man would try.

“Scanners clearing, Captain!”

One thing after another. Maran turned to the projections again, eyeing the information as the scanners began to coalesce into a distinct picture. He was forced to bite his tongue then, grimacing against the pain, in order to prevent an epithet from escaping his lips.

They were still there.

Through that nuclear hell, they had survived and were still closing.

NACS ODYSSEY
Ranquil System