The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (47 page)

▸CAPT. JOHAN MARAN watched the details from his light-speed sensing systems with growing alarm.

“Target all weapons on the approaching Drasin fighter craft, Ithan,” he ordered grimly, wondering if what he was worried about was even possible.

“Yes, Captain.”

The answer was immediate, and the actions that followed only marginally less so, but Maran was still worried. The vectors he was reading off the Drasin fighters were difficult to interpret. They were using highly active evasion courses, after all, but unless he was losing his mind, they were going to actually engage his ship at close range.

Certainly, it looked that way.

Drasin fighters were exceedingly difficult to target, their maneuvering ability made them very elusive to larger weapons, and the few smaller lasers he had capable of locking onto a target that fast were of little use against the Drasin armor.

Now, if only the
Odyssey
’s fighters would get clear of his…

“Captain, new motion on the
Odyssey
’s fighters.”

Maran’s eyes widened, and he watched the signals of the fighter craft as they spread out, changing their pursuit vectors enough to clear themselves from his fire arc.

What? Are they mind readers, too?

Maran shook off the bizarre and largely unproductive thought and merely nodded in satisfaction.

“Fire on the Drasin with the main lasers. Full sweep.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Deep inside the cylinder of the Priminae warship, the large spinal-mounted laser crystals hummed at a frequency just above human hearing, sending shivers up and down the spines of those few who were close enough to that range to feel it instead. The ship’s reactors fed power to them at a steady rate, the prodigious energy requirements of the massive laser crystals being dwarfed by the output of the twin reactor system buried deep in the armored hull.

In seconds, they reached a critical point, and the massive crystals began to fluoresce. A second or so after that, a beam hotter than the inside of a star leapt out into the empty void and lanced across the endless sky.

ARCHANGEL SQUADRON

▸STEPHANOS IGNORED THE screams of triumph coming from the others around him as his system automatically clamped down on his sensors to avoid burning them out as the corona of the laser swept over him.

That was one powerful laser.

He shook his head, checking his sensors, and tried to determine what, if anything, it had accomplished.

Three of the alien fighters were unaccounted for, which was a pretty piss-poor use of energy, in his opinion, but probably a pretty good average for using the main gun of a capital ship to “swat” fighters.

Certainly, the
Odyssey
would never be able to match it against fighters actively trying to evade. The one time Eric had used her main guns against a fighter group, the Drasin had been so supremely overconfident that they hadn’t even bothered to evade, if they’d even acknowledged the
Odyssey
itself as a threat.

Unfortunately, whether it was good or not, there were still at least forty more fighters, all screaming through the vacuum on their mission.

And he did
not
like what their mission looked to be.

“Angel Lead,” he muttered grimly, his finger tightening on the firing stud for the forward 80mm autocannon, “guns, guns, guns!”

The high-powered projectiles flared in his enhanced viewers, crossing space silently and invisibly in the real world, but in his encapsulated environment, Stephanos could practically count each heavy round in the stream as the computer filled in their location, speed, and vectors.

Across the distances they were fighting at, things that moved at merely the speed of a bullet took time to arrive, but when they did, they delivered their kinetic impact loyally, and Stephanos watched in satisfaction as the stream of cannon rounds tore up the fighter, sending it spiraling out of control when he got a piece of its engines.

“Vent one,” he growled over the net, letting the flight recorders register his voice and log the event along with his comment while the others in the fleet continued pouring their weapons into the unflinching aliens.

PRIMINAE VESSEL VULK

▸“THEY DO NOT seem to be engaging the
Odyssey
’s fighters…”

Johan Maran nodded, frowning as he tried to determine what, if anything, that meant.

The Drasin were known, or at least purported by legend, to be single-minded killers. Destroyers of worlds and devourers of civilizations. Literally, the greatest horror in his people’s combined history, but like most of his generation, Maran had never really believed in the stories. They were told to teach lessons, they were fables, lessons in morality, and such things were always exaggerated to better make their point.

The Qirt didn’t actually lift the boulder because he believed he could. The Predatory Sora did not spare the helpless kin in return for a future favor. And the Drasin did
not
really exist.

And yet they did, and where some truth lay, could the rest be more than mere myth?

“Continue firing,” he ordered grimly, watching as the lead elements of the approaching Drasin fighters entered into the range of his smaller laser emplacements. “All available weapons.”

ARCHANGEL SQUADRON

▸“DAMN!” JENNIFER “CARDSHARP” Samuels growled, twisting her fighter into a tight spiral, her timing thrown off by the sudden dimming of her display as the Archangel threw up its sensor shielding in self-defense, blocking out the more dangerous frequencies of the laser’s corona as it passed over her.

“Lost my lock,” she said, matter-of-factly, though her calm words didn’t hide the frustration in her voice. “Moving to reacquire.”

“Negative, Cardsharp,” her wingman, Paladin, said as he came up. “I have tone, taking my shot.”

“Affirmative,” she replied reluctantly, pulling back on her throttle just enough to let Paladin slide out in front of her.

She watched the sleek form of the fighter move, barely a hundred meters away from her, sliding gracefully against the startlingly brilliant background of stars around them. While he stayed on his target, her job was to watch his back, which was just what Jennifer intended to, so she threw her sensor net wide and watched for trouble.

Not that there was any lack of trouble to be found, of course, but none of it seemed to be near her or Paladin at
the moment, relatively speaking, so she relaxed slightly as he murmured over the tactical network.

“Slippery little bastard,” he growled. “Lost tone…Hang tight, Jen, I’m going in.”

“Right behind you, Paladin.”

Paladin’s Archangel flared brilliantly in her enhanced environment display, his CM and reactor energies producing a brilliant glow that surrounded his fighter like a celestial halo, and he began to accelerate away.

She kicked in her own burners, her hand pushing the lever that controlled the CM field all the way up at the same time, and was pushed back into her seat as the former out-raced the latter by a few instants. Then the counter-mass field caught up with the thrust, and Jennifer was floating free in her cockpit again, following her wingman in as he chased the evading Drasin down toward the suddenly imposing bulk of the Priminae warship.

PRIMINAE VESSEL VULK