The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (79 page)

“Engineering, go.”

“All stations, all departments, report go for maneuvering, Captain,” Commander Roberts reported calmly, his tone merely serving to underscore the rising tension.

“Tactical,” Eric said, “estimate for enemy squadron’s location and fire all tubes.”

“Aye, sir. Targeting estimated location…firing all tubes,” Waters replied.

A full brace of pulse torpedoes erupted from the
Odyssey
in staggered launch, the extreme range of the shot making it necessary to stagger the launch so the charged-particle weapons wouldn’t spread too much before they arrived on the far end of their track. After the last torpedo had left the
Odyssey
, Eric counted slowly to five.

He didn’t have to say anything, as Daniels had apparently been counting as well.

“Coming about to new course, CM field forming up, engaging maximum thrust,” Lieutenant Daniels said calmly as the deck of the
Odyssey
seemed to tilt under them.

The CM field was forming, but until it fully charged, they hung onto the edges of their seats as the big ship twisted in space and began to accelerate.

“Start a countdown clock for when the closest ship detects our CM field,” Eric ordered.

“Aye, sir. Clock initiated.”

All right, time to get lucky.
If they didn’t get suspicious and paint the
Odyssey
with a tacyon pulse, Eric knew that they now had a window—a window that was closing fast—but it might just be enough for them to slip past the dogs and make a run for open space.
We found what we came here to find, that and so damned much more. Now we just have to live to report back. Earth and the Priminae
need
this information. We will not fail now.

“Velocity increasing,” Daniels reported. “Engines coming up to flank speed.”

“Understood,” Eric replied. “Inform the engine room we’re breaking records today.”

“Aye, sir.” Daniels smiled. “I’ll let them know.”

“Belay that.” Eric shook his head. “I’ll tell them myself.”

He stood up. “Commander, you have the bridge. Call the relief watch and get everyone some food. We have time.”

“Aye, sir.” Roberts nodded. “I have the bridge until the relief arrives.”

Weston nodded to the commander before striding off the bridge.

“Chief of the deck?” Weston asked as he drifted through the engineering decks, gesturing for the crews to remain as they were.

“He’s back with the reactors, sir,” a man offered. “I’ll go get him.”

“Never mind, I’ll head down there myself. Don’t bother him.” Eric shook his head. “His job is more important than mine right now.”

“Uh…yes, sir…I mean, no, sir,” the man stuttered. “I mean…”

Eric just kicked off and drifted past him. “I know what you mean, sailor. As you were.”

“Yes, sir.”

Eric glided along the rails, sticking to the safe areas that were marked off with yellow lines. He made his way to the reactor control rooms and stopped when he arrived just outside the control sector, waiting while the chief finished up what he was doing.

The man wrapped up what he was doing, triple-checking the reactor pile’s temperature, then finally turned in Eric’s direction.

“What brings you down to mechanic’s country, Captain?”

“Had a few minutes, felt like slumming it, Sam.” Weston smiled easily. He liked the slightly irascible yet generally easygoing chief who, unlike most on board, seemed to know that there was a time and place for protocol and a time and place to toss it out the airlock.

“Sure you did.” Wilson chuckled. “Well, slum away, Cap.”

Eric smiled. “Wanted to drop fair warning on you, Chief. We’re going to be stress-testing your engines.”

Wilson nodded. “Yeah, I guessed as much.”

“Don’t spare the fuel, OK, Chief? We’re going to need to break records on this run,” Eric said softly, shaking his head. “If you’ve got to fly this heap apart, fly it apart.”

“We do this, the
Odyssey
is spending the next six months at the commodore’s base for complete refit, you know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” Eric confirmed, “but we’ve got intel that has to get out, Chief.
Has
to get out.”

Wilson nodded slowly. “I get you, sir. Me and my reactors won’t be letting you down.”

“Never thought you would,” Eric said, “just wanted to give fair warning of what was coming.”

“Fair enough,” Wilson said. “Consider me warned, Cap. We’re big boys down here. We’ve got our eyes wide open.”

“Keep them that way, and open up the reactor some more while you’re at it,” Eric said as he drifted back from the control room. “We’re going to need everything you’ve got down here.”

“You want us to get out and push? There’s one or two guys down here I could spare.”

“I’ll let you know if it comes to that.” Eric grinned, tossing the chief an easy wave as he kicked off and began working his way back toward the front of the section. “As you were, Chief.”

“We’ll catch you on the other side, Cap,” Wilson promised.

Eric nodded, then began pulling himself along as he headed back to the habitat decks.

Back in the habs, the corridors felt empty as he made his way to the cafeteria, though he knew that it was mostly just his imagination. After sending out all the shuttles and ground crews, along with the Archangels, Eric could have sworn the halls echoed a little deeper with his footsteps than when the ship’s full complement was on board.

He would have felt better with the Angels aboard, considering the coming fight, but that was just more psychological nonsense. There wasn’t a thing they could do in this one, not
if he wanted to recover them when the fight was done. Even with CM, the Archangel airframe didn’t have the delta-v to manage a fight and still catch up with the
Odyssey
at full burn.

No, it was better that they weren’t on board.
At least if we don’t make it out of here, we won’t have taken everyone down with us.

The men in line at the cafeteria made way for him as he walked up, and Eric nodded gratefully to them. Most times, he wouldn’t cut in line, but he wanted to be back on the bridge before the relief watch was replaced, so he took a deep mug of coffee and snagged a slice of cake as he went by.

Eric liked to walk through the ship, particularly when tensions were bound to be raised. He remembered being stationed on the
Enterprise
during the war. Her captain of the day was an irascible old son of a bitch, but come hellfire or high water in the lower decks, he would always be found calmly wandering about the ship as if there were nothing wrong in the whole of the world.

The old man wasn’t the sort Eric would ever emulate, except in that one area. He could still remember nervously waiting in the ready room, knowing his first air battle was coming, and seeing the old man walk by and stop to chat with the CAG like nothing remotely wrong was in the air.

It was the only thing he’d ever admired about the old man back in the day.

Since Eric had acquired more rank, well, he’d found a few other things he respected about the old man, but it was the effect he had when he took a walk that Eric remembered best. Sometimes seeing the old man of the ship meant more than all the speeches in the universe.

He stepped back onto the bridge while the relief watch was still there and nodded to the lieutenant commander
standing watch, waving him off when he offered to hand command back over.

“As you were,” Eric said. “I just want to do some quick calculations before things get fun.”

The man nodded, returning to his post while Eric took a seat at his own station and checked the latest from the sensor feeds. The
Odyssey
course change had long since been detected, of course; there was no way they could hide their new direction, after all, but the enemy was precisely where he knew they would be. A few less than before they’d opened fire with the torpedoes, but right where he’d figured they would be.

There was no shock to that, however; plotting their response to his move was literally a no-brainer. If they hadn’t been where he was expecting, he’d have been really shocked. Given their obvious intent to intercept the
Odyssey
, there was really only one thing they could do.

The math of space travel just didn’t leave them any choice any more than it left the
Odyssey
room for any magnificent tricky maneuvers to flourish their way out of what was coming. From this point until they were actually engaged in combat, Eric knew that he could predict their every move almost to the second. Once they were joined in tactical maneuvers, of course, that certainty would fly out the window.

Eric was coding evasive protocols when Commander Roberts arrived back on the bridge and relieved the watch commander. Over the next few minutes, the rest of the first watch arrived and took over their stations, leaving them with the full watch back on duty with twenty minutes remaining to the opening shots of the initial engagement. Eric let them settle in before he spoke again, knowing that there was no hurry at all.

Finally, with ten minutes to extreme laser engagement range, he gave his first order of the coming battle.

“Sound general quarters,” he said, “and bring us to battle stations, Commander.”

“Aye, Captain. Battle stations, aye!”

The alarms sounded through the ship, really just making official what everyone on board already knew. The crew was already suited up for the most part, so in the outer sections of the ship, all that happened was men and women racking their helmets shut and connecting to shipboard air.

With the range closing, Eric kept the
Odyssey
on a steady course. The benefits of playing games with their maneuvering path now would be countered by the effect it would have on their escape velocity.

There’s a time to be fancy and a time to just run like hell.

“Lead element is entering extreme laser range, Captain.”

“Steady on.”

“Aye, sir. Steady on.”

As he’d proven in the past, Eric knew that timing was the key to space combat. At planetary distances, even light was a tad sluggish, and there simply were
no
weapons that moved faster than light—not within the gravity effect of a star or large planet, at least. So knowing that it was possible for the enemy to have already fired on him really only meant that Eric had to adjust his course sometime in the next twenty or thirty seconds.

He had time to consider his actions, time to plot a little, even time to pray if he wanted to.

Ten seconds later, Eric nodded. “Adjust course to evasive alpha, on your board.”

“Aye, sir. Evasive alpha entered.”

“Go ahead and engage.”

“Course engaged.”

The
Odyssey
used a drive system that allowed for thrust vectoring, a system originally designed for fighter jets over a century earlier. The design allowed it to redirect the direction of the main engines’ thrust as part of the maneuvering system, allowing for better control during high-velocity maneuvering.

It wasn’t a system Eric used often. Mostly, the
Odyssey
was an arrow he pointed in a direction before letting the string loose. Courses were normally calculated to take advantage of gravitational wells along the trajectory plot, running mostly ballistic courses for least time and best fuel consumption.

The designers, however, had included the much less efficient but higher performance vectored thrust system into the
Odyssey
’s design. So when the preprogrammed evasion course was entered into the shipboard computers, massive “turkey feather” deflectors were swung into place over the engine exhaust to push the high-velocity particles aside.

The
Odyssey
twisted in space, its path veering into a corkscrew pattern with about a radius of three light-seconds.

Eric doubled-checked the course, satisfying himself that they were still accelerating along their previous course with almost 93 percent of the power being aimed in the direction he needed. The remaining 7 percent was now dedicated to making the
Odyssey
devilishly hard to hit at the current range.

It didn’t take long for one of their pursuers to take a shot at beating those odds, however.

“Coronal burn off a laser, Captain!”

“Analyze and adapt our armor to match.”

“Aye, sir.”

Adapting the armor to one ship out of twenty was hardly a great advantage, but 5 percent was better than nothing, he supposed.

Actually, a bit better than 5 percent…
Eric noted calmly.
There are only eight enemy ships in range.

He smiled and chuckled loud enough to garner surprised and confused looks from the others on the bridge, amused by his own thoughts.

Only eight. As if that really mattered.

Luckily, no one knew how sarcastic his inner thoughts were; they just saw the captain laughing almost literally in the face of death. Eric decided that it was better that they not know that much, at least not until they’d made it clear of the current mousetrap.

“Enemy ships still closing,” Winger said quietly into the silence.