The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (49 page)

▸COMDR. STEPHEN “STEPHANOS” Michaels hit the retro-rockets on his fighter as he whipped past the hulking Priminae warship, flipping the sleek craft of war end for end, and then threw full power to his reactors to kill his momentum.

The Archangel changed its acceleration in an instant, slamming from 0.4c to relative zero in under two minutes, then continued to accelerate until it was matching the lumbering warship three thousand meters to his port side. Stephanos checked his instruments, running comparison tests with the reports from Cardsharp and Paladin’s flight data, then keyed open the squadron tactical frequency.

“Maintain a two thousand–meter distance from the Priminae warship, Angels,” he ordered. “That should keep us well clear of her gravity well.”

Confirmations came back over the network as the other fighters repeated his maneuver, ten transponders suddenly arresting their motion relative to him as they all formed up around the large ship.

The Drasin were sweeping around, their fighters showing abilities approximately in keeping with the Terran
counterparts, though they seemed either unable or unwilling to engage in radical braking maneuvers of the ilk Stephanos and his team had just executed.

“Looks like the explosion shook them up some, sir.”

“Negative, Burner,” Stephanos replied, his voice quiet as he focused on the numbers. “They’re just regrouping.”

Indeed, that’s what he was seeing on his instruments as the remaining Drasin fighters, almost thirty of them, circled back around and came in for another run.

“Here they come, Angels!” Stephanos growled, tapping out a weapons query to the flight computers.

The answer came back quickly and wasn’t quite what he might have hoped. He’d used his forward 80mm quite a lot, trusting the gimbal-mounted weapon to both track and kill the enemy fighters at the ranges they were dealing with, but many in the flight had relied more heavily on their havoc HVM missiles, and the numbers were running low.

He was down to three thousand rounds in his forward cannon, and five of his twelve havocs were expended. The gigawatt lasers on his wings were powerful against human craft and missiles, but in the last battle with the Drasin, they had proven to be a minor factor at best, which meant that he was going to be bingo for weapons after another engagement.

The rest of the squad was generally worse off.

“Line up your shots,” Stephanos ordered calmly, not letting his thoughts reach his voice. “Make ’em count. The engagement time is going to favor the enemy this time.”

Again, the team acknowledged his orders while he haloed five of the inbound fighters in his HUD, then transferred the markers over to the tactical network, effectively stating, “These are
mine
,” to the other flight members. Moments later, similar marks began appearing across his HUD, and Stephanos
nodded silently in approval as the incoming targets were quickly split up.

The Drasin were coming back around on another intercept vector, increasing their speed to combat velocity, and that was going to make the engagement window very, very narrow, indeed.

In fact, despite how little he had left, Stephanos didn’t think that a lack of weapons was going to be the problem this time around.

The problem was that they might not have sufficient time to launch all their birds before the Drasin closed to terminal approach.

“This is Lead,” he said over the tactical net. “Go to rapid fire on havocs, and prepare to engage on my command.”

PRIMINAE VESSEL VULK

▸“REPORT ON DAMAGE!”

“Captain”—the young man turned, looking back at Captain Maran as he wiped a stray trail of blood from his fore-head—“the Maintenance Department reports that they can’t bring the asymmetric fields back to full power. The impact strained the generators past their ability to repair.”

Maran grimaced. “Tell them to get those fields back up. We won’t survive another impact like that.”

“Yes, sir!”

Maran turned away, wiping his eyes again as a trickle of blood from his forehead got into his eyes.

“Here, sir.” An ithan wearing medical planets on her shoulders handed him a cloth as she leaned over his console and applied directed healing treatments.

The sharp pain of the cut vanished quickly, leaving only a dull throb in its place, and Maran used the damp cloth to wipe the remaining blood from his face before handing it back to the young woman. “Thank you, Ithan.”

She nodded and accepted the cloth back as he passed it off and turned back to his controls.

“Corun!”

“Captain!”

“Adjust fire zone to intercept incoming fighters. Recode all computers to track those targets. Forget about the Drasin ships—they’re too far away to matter. I want all available lasers retasked to intercept those fighters.”

“Yes, Captain!”

“And, Corun!”

“Captain?”

“Try not to hit the Terrans.”

“Sir!”

Maran looked around, picking out another officer in an instant as the young medical ithan chased him across the bridge, trying to apply deep heal to his head injury.

“Mackin,” he said softly, coming up beside his third-in-command, “we need to start thinking about clearing as many people to the evacuation centers as possible.”

“Captain?”

Maran shook his head. “I don’t think we can stop them all.”

ARCHANGEL SQUADRON

▸“HOLD YOUR FIRE.”

Stephanos watched the incoming ships as they entered into the Archangel’s range, watching the numbers as his locks formed up, but still held the missiles back.

“Sir, they’re getting close.”

“Hold your fire,” he repeated himself, his voice tense. “I want them all.”

“We’re not going to get them all, Steph,” Burner replied grimly. “They’ve got more ships than we have birds.”

Stephanos nodded grimly, conceding the point. The remaining eleven Archangels had precisely twenty-eight havocs left, and the enemy had at least thirty fighters still dedicated to their kamikaze operations.

A nerve tingler snapped him out of his reverie, though, as the Drasin closed to less than one million kilometers, and he nodded grimly.

“All Archangels, rapid fire on havocs! Take ’em out, boys!”

In the fuselage of each Archangel, up to twelve havoc missiles were nestled in twin rotary dispensers that whined up as the motors attached to them were fed full power. The hefty
HVM weapons spun in their holders until the clamps were released on each in turn, and they were thrown clear out into space.

Once spun up, each rotary dispenser could clear its racks in less than ten seconds.

The Archangels put twenty-seven HVM missiles into space in just under eight. Each weapon was tracking on a preset target, tiny reaction thrusters making minute adjustments as the kinetic kill weapons powered up their CM fields, and then the space between Archangel and Drasin was suddenly slashed by lines of lethal power accelerated to 0.8c.

At seven hundred thousand kilometers, space was suddenly lit up by the release of multiple megatons of kinetic power, and the battle was joined again. Yet, through all the power and all the dying, the enemy kept right on coming.

“Weapons free!” Stephanos yelled. “Ventilate ’em!”

Missiles already expended, the fighters opened up with their remaining arms, loosing thousands of 80mm rounds and hundreds of gigawatts of laser energy into space as they poured everything they had into the oncoming enemy.

Through the multimegaton explosions, through the 80mm hail, and through the crossing beams of gigawatt level lasers, they came. One Drasin, then two, four, eight exploded, and still, the force came in. Through it all, time slowed for Stephanos as he watched the enemy come on, and he knew then that no matter what you had on your side, if the enemy were willing to court death, he had an advantage that could so very easily prove insurmountable.

The Priminae ship opened up, its massive terawatt lasers cutting swathes of destruction across the vacuum, and even more of the enemy ships vanished into balls of expanding gas and energy. Five more, then ten, and fifteen.

Fully 90 percent of the enemy’s surviving force died in that last-ditch locked phalanx of fire, and still, they rushed onward into the breach.

“They’re getting through!” Cardsharp yelled over the network.

She was right, Stephanos could see it. Three fighters were through the wall of light and steel they had cut in the space between them, still accelerating even now. His HUD displayed their speed emotionlessly, as well as the speed of the Priminae ship, and Steph did the math in his head in those last few seconds.

They’d impact at a relative velocity of 0.73c.

If the Priminae ship survived, Stephanos could hardly imagine anything in the entire universe that could harm it.

PRIMINAE VESSEL VULK