The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (78 page)

“All accounted for, save Crowley and his beast.”

“I’ve got him on overwatch. He’s hanging off the side of a building about thirty meters northwest of your position, eighty meters above you.”

Bermont looked up and nodded. “Roger that. I see him, looks like one ugly Christmas decoration from here.”

“You do know I’m copied into this channel, right?” Crowley asked tiredly.

“No, but I was hoping.”

“All right, fun is fun, but you may want to grab some cover as soon as you can. Savoy’s team is orbiting the AO now, and they’re going to hit that pit with everything they’ve got just as soon the Priminae finish clearing the debris and give them a clear shot.”

“Copy,” Bermont said. “Better late than never, sir.”

The slab continued to slide up and away until they were clear of the pit, and then Bermont caught the strike warning flash across their HUDs. High above them, Savoy’s shuttle banked into an attack run, followed by four carnivore drones.

“Bruisers inbound,” the pilot announced as the missiles launched.

An even dozen contrails roared into the ground, but before they even finished forming the hole, the world shook around them as the high-powered strikes tore through the ground and threw flames, smoke, and debris skyward.

Bermont and the others grabbed some cover until the sky finished falling, then crawled back out of their burrows.

“I can’t believe we survived that,” Bermont said, looking down at the grenade he was still holding.

The warning light flicked off his HUD as he deactivated it, and he glanced around the group that was standing by him. Other grenade lights dropped off as the others deactivated their explosives as well.

“So…uh,” Matthews spoke up, “how do you suppose we tell this story?”

“I don’t know about you”—Bermont shook his head as he began to trudge away from the battleground and toward the designated landing zone marked on his HUD—“but I’m not bragging to
anyone
that I was ready to blow my own ass up just so some dogs wouldn’t get lunch.”

NACS ODYSSEY
Interior, Uncharted Dyson Construct

▸“HERE THEY COME, Captain.”

Eric nodded, taking a sip from his coffee mug as he considered the motion of the ships. The Drasin ships were—or rather, had—launched from the plate they had gathered at. The sight of twenty Drasin cruisers coming his way was in no way calculated to make him relax, but Eric didn’t intend to show it. He could see by the plots that they were more than an hour from making contact at extreme engagement range, and there was really no sense in getting worked up just yet.

“What about the bogies?” he asked lightly.

“Bogeys One and Two have detached from the Dyson plate,” Winger answered. “They do not appear to be accelerating at this time.”

“Damn,” Eric said softly. He’d been hoping to see them up a little closer, maybe get an idea of their capabilities while he had the chance.

He was fairly certain that these ships belonged to the fourth entities he’d been speculating on since he’d seen what the Drasin did to Port Feuilles and the other systems they’d torn to shreds. The Drasin didn’t make sense to him
as a species: everything from their “life cycle” to how very well they seemed to be adapted to taking on the Priminae just screamed “weapon” to him. The appearance of these bogies within a clearly Drasin-controlled area like this just confirmed it in his eyes.

What both intrigued and terrified him, however, was the profile and silhouettes they had gathered on the new entries into this little drama. They both seemed very familiar to Eric and his bridge crew, and that familiarity was something he had to get his ship out of here to report.

“All right, sound general quarters.”

“Aye, sir,” Roberts said. “General quarters!”

“Sounding general quarters!”

The alarms went off, calling the men and women of the
Odyssey
to their stations as the ship was rigged and prepared for war.

“Armor settings, sir?”

“Maintain full stealth. It’s not time to let them know we see them coming just yet,” Eric replied.

“Aye, sir. Full stealth.”

They were still almost four light-minutes apart—highly unlikely that the enemy would open fire at that range—so he felt pretty confident that they could act fat and dumb for a little longer with minimal risk. With twenty Drasin ships, however, he knew that the
Odyssey
wasn’t getting out of this one with armor modifications and guns blazing.

Since each ship almost certainly had a different laser frequency, all it would take would be for two or more of them to bracket the
Odyssey
and it would be game over. Even the
Odyssey
’s best general armor setting wouldn’t stand against a laser burst from one of the insanely overpowered laser mounts on the enemy ships.

No, this is one fight we can’t win.

Unfortunately, almost all the aces were sitting squarely in the enemy’s hands this time around. In fact, the only cards Eric was holding that he could play were the fact that the enemy really didn’t know who they were tracking or that the
Odyssey
had realized that they were being watched.

“Movement on the bogies, Captain.”

“Heading?”

“They’re bringing up the rear of the enemy formation, but they’re coming this way as well.”

Eric smiled slowly.
Well now, I guess I get a close-up look at you guys, after all. Thank you for that.

Two more ships didn’t change the odds all that much, as far as he was concerned; the
Odyssey
was already so badly out-gunned it was almost ridiculous. What the new addition did do, in his eyes, was give them the chance to get a closer look at the bogies.

Eric licked his lips, now feeling a little nervous as he mentally began replotting his maneuvers. Getting intelligence was what had gotten them into this mess in the first place, but getting that same intel was possibly the most important thing any of them could ever do. The Drasin were beyond a threat to the Priminae, in his opinion; they were a menace to every living thing in the galaxy, as far as he was concerned. As was any species that had anything to do with them. There was simply no excuse to use the singular degree of force they employed, not against worlds that had no real way of resisting and certainly not as a standard operating procedure.

On Earth, the biggest weapon had always been nuclear. Long before the end of the twentieth century, in fact, Terran nations had built and emplaced more than enough nuclear
weapons to annihilate all human life from the face of the planet several times over.

For all that, however, nuclear weapons had been used in combat precisely twice.

Originally, they had been used specifically to force an end to World War II. Since that time, nuclear weapons had been used exclusively as a threat, a method of preventing conflict—or at least preventing a certain scale of conflict. Strategic weapons were used to advance an overall strategy to win a war, as opposed to tactical weapons that were intended to win battles.

As violent and vicious as Terran wars were, Eric knew that people on Earth understood the difference between tactical and strategic weapons. The Drasin either employed—or in fact,
were
—strategic weapons, in his opinion. But they had deployed themselves
tactically
. The use of strategic weapons as a tactical option was the single-most insane thing Eric had ever seen, or ever hoped to see again. There were some things that just should not even be considered.

The very idea that there were people out here, in the black of the galaxy, who thought that way…It curdled his blood.

“Stand by the course,” he ordered after a moment, flicking a switch to put him in contact with Engineering. “Chief, I’m going to be asking for full military power soon enough.”

“Aye, sir,” the chief replied. “We’ll start spinning up the reactors. It’ll be waiting when you call on it, Captain.”

“I know it will, thank you.” Eric cut the connection, then turned to where Waters was waiting. “Ensign, have the torpedo room start spinning up the tok. We’re going to need them charged before this party kicks off.”

“Aye, sir. They’ve been standing by,” Waters said. “Tok is winding up now.”

The ranges were closing faster now, and for Eric, it was now actually a pretty straightforward math problem.

Unfortunately, the enemy had stripped them of most of the bag of tricks in this situation. The
Odyssey
couldn’t hide from them, her electronic warfare drones were worthless, so there were no fancy tricks waiting at the end of this ride. Since the enemy could track them through stealth, by their mass and its effect on space-time, the options available to them were positively archaic. Basically, their options boiled down to two: they could run, or they could fight.

Which really meant that they could run, since fighting was a dead end with capital DEAD.

With that in mind, Eric just had to figure out the best time to make their bolt, and in what direction to head when he did. When they dropped stealth and powered up the CM generators, the plus side was that the gravity array would lose track of them when the apparent mass of the
Odyssey
bled away. That would give them between two to three minutes in which they were effectively invisible—the time it took for the energy signature of the CM field to reach the closest sensors after their mass signature vanished.

Two, maybe three minutes for the rest of our lives.
Eric knew that what he did with that window would decide if the
Odyssey
survived its second mission or if they died out in the middle of nowhere amid an engineering miracle.

“Stand by to the roll ship,” he ordered, his eyes on the tracks.

“Aye, sir! Standing by,” Daniels replied automatically.

“Make your heading niner-two-fiver-break-four-seven to the negative eighteen,” he called out. “Engage new course on my mark.”

“Aye, sir. New heading entered. Niner-two-fiver-break-four-seven, eighteen degrees downbubble,” Daniels repeated. “Waiting final orders to engage.”

“Ensign Waters, status on the pulse torpedoes?”

“All tubes armed, ready to fire.”

“Stagger firing frequency to allow for a…half-degree-arc range at three light-minutes,” he ordered.

“Aye, aye, Cap.” Waters leaned in, tapping in a series of commands. “Firing frequency is being adapted now.”

“Daniels, five seconds after we fire, I want you to bring the CM to full power and engage the new course. Don’t spare the engines or the fuel.”

“Understood, Captain.” Daniels grinned a little. “We’ll break records.”

“I’m counting on it, Lieutenant.”

Eric turned his attention back to the plot, watching the numbers fall with increasing speed. The enemy ships were accelerating, which meant that they were closer to the
Odyssey
than the numbers indicated, but he still had a little bit of leeway in his calculations. Plus, if the enemy ships committed themselves to a pursuit vector now, they’d be caught all the more off balance when the
Odyssey
changed course.

He watched the projections, mentally adjusting for what he knew about the Drasin’s capability.

They have a higher top end than the
Odyssey,
but I’ve never seen them maneuver quite as sharply as we can. Let them commit, then we mess them up on the way out.

He was reasonably certain that they could skirt the enemy ships. He couldn’t avoid engaging them entirely, but it would be a passing engagement. Eric thought—no, he hoped—that they could keep the engagement short since any prolonged
fight would favor the superior numbers of the enemy squadron.

We’ll be showing them our flank for at least…twenty minutes.
He shook his head. That was a long time to be dodging lasers, especially beams that could punch through the hull of the
Odyssey
with even a glancing strike.
Best reflection is useless, but we have one or two cards we can play.

Eric took a deep breath and relaxed slowly into his seat. “All stations, go, no go, for maneuvering.”

“Helm, go for maneuvering,” Daniels answered immediately.

“Tactical, go…”