The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (81 page)

▸THE
ODYSSEY
SHIFTED course, angling slightly away from the pursuing ships. Eric knew that they had just pulled away from the enemy ships a little more, but in exchange, they’d also extended the time they’d be exposing their rear end to the enemy lasers. He would have preferred to close sharper and make them scramble to catch them when they blew past, but that would expose the
Odyssey
to fire from the entire squadron of ships instead of the eight currently close enough to be a threat.

“One minute to our closest pass!”

“Understood, Lieutenant. Commander!” Eric called.

“Chief Corrin,” Roberts growled, “we’re running out of time.”

A few more seconds passed before Roberts looked up sharply. “Lines are patched to the control rooms, Ensign Waters. Are they showing on your screens?”

“I’ve got them!” the ensign called. “Hold one.”

He tapped furiously on his controls, then spoke in his earpiece in quiet tones. Finally, Waters half turned and nodded.
“HVN and pulse torpedo rooms are both manned and online, sir,” he said, then flushed. “However, the torpedoes are not charged. Containment was shot, so they flushed the system.”

Eric winced, but nodded. As much as he wished to have the powerful pulse weapons on tap, it was better not to have them than to be missing the entire forward section of the
Odyssey
. “Understood. Have containment restored and charge the banks.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“HVM launchers are to stand by for target assignment,” Eric went on. “We’ll fire as we pass.”

“Yes, sir. Launchers to stand by.”

The range fell with increasing speed as they got closer and closer, the enemy ships already well into their pursuit arc so they wouldn’t lose too much velocity on the
Odyssey
as she passed. That actually put them out just a little ahead of the
Odyssey
’s position as Captain Weston put the firing plan into action.

The
Odyssey
tipped its bow into the enemy position, still accelerating at full power, and on her captain’s orders went to rapid-fire launch on all HVM banks. The second generation of the high-velocity missiles were a marked improvement over the first-gen devices used on the
Odyssey
’s initial mission, but the basic technology had been unchanged.

The hundred-kilogram weapons were essentially chunks of steel with a rocket motor, a CM generator, and a high-powered capacitor attached. They launched on magnetic rails from the
Odyssey
, then immediately went to full power on the CM field as they left the ship’s influence. The rocket motors roared into action at the same time, accelerating the weapons to better than 0.8c in just seconds.

They flashed across the intervening space, almost as fast as a laser but infinitely more massive.

The enemy ships had only seconds to react, which wasn’t enough for the closest ones. The HVM devices were already locked onto targets and had precoded terminal instructions, causing the second-generation weapons to do something no one on Earth had really considered a need to do in the past. They reversed the CM field just before impact, and one hundred kilos of mass became over ten thousand for a few thousandths of a second just as they slammed into their targets.

The resulting kinetic conversion annihilated three Drasin ships before the rest began firing back, lasers vaporizing the weapons before they could go terminal. Two more made it through the wall of light that attempted to defend the squadron, and two more Drasin ships vanished in a fury of energy that blinded everyone in range for several more seconds.

The
Odyssey
ceased fire when the first explosions effectively destroyed their targeting capability, twisting back onto their escape path, and now began to power away from the pursuit ships for the first time. Behind them, the remaining ships of the pursuing squadron emerged from the fires they’d just flown through, no hesitation evident in their pursuit, no break in their determination.

On board the
Odyssey
, Eric knew that now it was a race. They
Odyssey
had the velocity advantage—they’d been building delta-v all along—while the enemy squadron had initially been accelerating
into
the gravity well as they closed on the
Odyssey
. Now the
Odyssey
’s path would cause them to pull slowly away from the pursuing ships, but for all that, it wouldn’t be a speedy or painless process.

Eric opened a channel to the flight deck. “Flight Deck, Bridge.”

“Flight Deck, here, Captain. We’re ready with the first two.”

“Launch when ready.”

“Aye, sir. Launching.”

Winger was the first person on the bridge to notice. “Sir…Two objects were just launched from the rear hangars.”

“I know, Lieutenant. My orders.”

“Uh…yes, sir.”

“Helm, make our evasion pattern Lima Bravo.”

“Lima Bravo, aye, sir.”

Lima Bravo put the
Odyssey
into a skewed swerve, flattening her trajectory and presenting a tighter profile to the pursuing forces. Eric could see Roberts shooting him a confused glance from where he was still handling damage control, but didn’t have time to fill in his second just then.

“Holy!” Winger swore. “Those two objects just exploded behind us, sir.”

“Helm, straight-line max acceleration!” he ordered. “Run for the border, Daniels!”

“Aye, sir!”

The
Odyssey
stopped its dodging, putting its full power into escaping the pursuers and the star that lay behind them.

“Laser bloom!” Winger called, sounding surprised. “Directly astern, Captain.”

Roberts chuckled, shaking his head. “Chaff, sir?”

“Got it in one, Commander.”

“Nice.” Roberts nodded in appreciation.

Eric considered the benefit to be derived from the tactic, figuring that he may have another ten seconds of defense from the field of chaff he’d arranged for the flight crews to scatter behind them. It was an expensive loss of a drone, but it was the only way to steer the debris into place before blowing it across their path.

The chaff itself consisted of laser reflective foam, foil, scrap metal—basically whatever the crews could cram into and onto a carnivore drone. Detonated in the
Odyssey
’s wake, it would create an ablative shield to absorb laser fire, at least for a short time. Given the power of the enemy weapons, Eric had little doubt that the time would be very short, indeed, but he would take every second he could buy.

Even if it did cost him a multimillion-dollar drone.

Or two.

“Helm, change back to Epsilon pattern, Delta variation.”

“Epsilon Delta, aye, sir.”

The
Odyssey
once more skewed off course, corkscrewing into a wide pattern as pursuing ships caught up to the chaff field and burned through it.

Everything is timing.

Eric smiled at the thought, leaning forward almost eagerly. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d already lost some of his crew, and would almost certainly lose more even if their escape were successful, he knew that he would be truly enjoying the game.

It was a classic ship-handling problem, from even before spaceflight. Evading a pursuing force while under fire, a particularly nasty variation given that he couldn’t effectively fire back without sacrificing at least some of his acceleration in the process.

Chase guns. We need chase guns.

The problem was, of course, to outguess your enemy while they were, in turn, trying to outguess you. They needed to shoot where you would be, and you needed to avoid being where they were shooting. As the chase continued, the odds would slowly swing in favor of the pursued, since the time elapsed between a shot being fired and it arriving on target would slowly increase.

In fact, for a chase on this scale, it wasn’t such a slow increase. It was almost exponential, in fact, given the fact that it took an equal amount of time to gain targeting data as it did for the weapon to traverse the distance, doubling the delay. Of course, that only held true as long as the enemy wasn’t using FTL sensors, which Eric was frankly expecting anytime…

“Captain, we’ve been painted. Tacyon burst.”

Like, say, now.

He sighed, but wasn’t remotely surprised. It was as predictable as their course changes, something the enemy essentially
had
to do. Timing had been a bit of a question, but really only within a few seconds. As soon as the targeting delay became a significant factor, Eric knew they’d paint the
Odyssey
. There was no point being sneaky anymore; after all, it was pretty clear that both sides were pretty much in the open.

It did have one upside, though
, Eric supposed as he looked through the new data they were getting from the tacyon sensors. The
Odyssey
now had a pretty good lock on the enemy, as well as a real-time view of the Dyson plates up ahead. Active pulses were like that—anyone with the gear to detect them would be able to use them.

He mentally adjusted a couple of his strategies now that he saw the real-time formation of the ships behind the
Odyssey
, but mostly it just confirmed what he’d already known.

This will be a long chase
, Eric thought distastefully.
Or a very, very short one.

“Status on pulse torpedoes.”

“Tok is still charging. We’ll have the banks charged in thirty minutes,” Waters replied.

“HVM stores?”

“Moving munitions from the magazines to the firing tubes now, Captain. We can fire another round in three minutes.”

“Thank you, Ensign,” Eric said. “Helm…Eridani pattern.”

“Eridani Prime, aye, Captain.”

“Coronal bloom!” Winger called as the ship shuddered.

“Where did we take it?” Eric grimaced, reflecting that at least this time he hadn’t been thrown around.

“Hold one, Captain. Data is unclear,” Roberts said. “Aft section, certainly, but we’re not showing any red lights.”

That was surprising, given the power of the enemy weapons, Eric reflected.
Maybe the compromise adaptations to the armor did some good.

“Sir, I’m showing some serious degradation in our maneuvering controls,” Daniels spoke up warily.

Or maybe we just took the hits somewhere we don’t have many sensors to report back.
Eric grimaced. “Commander, get someone to eyeball the vectored thrust system.”

“Aye, sir.”

That took only a few moments to come back, and the news wasn’t great.

“You called it, sir.” Roberts sighed. “Burned up a quarter of the vectoring deflectors. No way to repair them while under way.”

“Understand and concur,” Eric said, mostly for the recorders to catch. “Lieutenant Daniels, you’ll have to compensate for the loss with the maneuvering thrusters.”

“Aye, sir. It won’t be as fast.”

“I am aware of that. Do what you can.”

“Aye, aye.”

The loss of the thrust vectoring assemblies, more commonly known as “turkey feathers,” wasn’t a significant loss to the top speed of the
Odyssey
, but it certainly had a massive impact on her high-speed maneuvering capabilities.
They could compensate with the maneuvering thrusters to a degree, but Eric knew that they had just lost a lot of their fluidity of motion. He ordered another pattern change and proceeded to hang on to his seat to try to look like he wasn’t merely along for the ride.

The chase proceeded along those lines, settling into a routine that would have been boring if it hadn’t been terrifying. The
Odyssey
ran and dodged while the pursuers chased and fired, generally missing as the range continued to open slowly and the light-speed delay continued to favor the
Odyssey
more and more.

The HVM banks were reloaded, but Eric didn’t dare flip the ship to bring them to bear on the enemy, as he would lose precious minutes of acceleration while shooting back.

“Flight Deck to Bridge.”

Eric flipped open the comm. “Go.”

“We have two more birds loaded, Captain.”

“Launch when ready.”

“Aye, sir.”

Eric called for a new evasion pattern while opening up a note program on his screens and adding the words
chaff launcher
to the list he was keeping there.

Granted, it wouldn’t be incredibly useful in most situations, but when you had fire coming from a known vector, it would be a great comfort being able to put an additional defense between you and your attacker.

I hope that, next time, I compile a list of “suggestions” for the boys in the shipyards it isn’t due to quite so pressing a set of circumstances, however.

“ETA to inner Dyson swarm?” he asked, looking up at the plot.

“We’re eight light-seconds away, at current speed and acceleration”—Daniels glanced down briefly—“just over ten seconds.”

Eric felt his blood chill. He honestly hadn’t realized how fast they were going. The relatavisitic effects were going to play holy havoc with the
Odyssey
’s instrumentation, and he honestly didn’t have the foggiest notion what they would do, if anything, to her crew.

He shook away the worry—he didn’t have time for it—and looked over to the sensor station. “Lieutenant Winger, keep a close eye on the swarm. They may have had time to prepare a reception.”

“Aye, sir. I’ve been keeping watch,” she admitted, “but so far, nothing other than an attempt to shift the plate to block us. I passed that along to the helm.”

“No problem avoiding it, sir,” Daniels picked up the thread, “they can’t move those things on a whim. The risks of collision are too high.”

“Good. Once we’re through the plates, maneuver to put them between us and our pursuers,” Eric ordered, “if you can do it without slamming us into the outer swarm.”

“Aye, sir.”

The
Odyssey
exploded through the gap between the plates at better than 0.8c, well above her best-rated cruising speed and dangerously fast to be going in what was now a very crowded section of space. Daniels’s precoded maneuvering set had them turning even before they cleared the thousand-kilometer-thick plates, angling both to put some defenses between them and the enemy and to hit the gaps in the outer swarm.