Homeworld (Odyssey One) (20 page)

With the ship threatening to fly itself apart, he found himself wishing for a lot of things that he just couldn’t quite manage on his own, but Sun knew too well that wishes were for the weak and the doomed. He refused to be weak, and he prayed that he was not doomed, so he was left with the trust he had for his ship and his crew.

It has always been enough in the past. It will be enough now.

“Preparing to drop from FTL!”

The ship shuddered slightly, bringing a grimace to his face as the CM gradients shifted again. That change in absolute velocity shouldn’t have even been noticeable in the ship. That wasn’t how the CM drive worked.

The gradients must be out of alignment. Bow or aft, some part of the ship is too close to the field center. Damn.

It seemed a minor issue perhaps, but Sun was well aware that the tidal forces of the CM gradients could cause extreme
wear on the structure of the ship. As objects got closer to the center of the CM gradient, gravity would affect the
Weifang
more powerfully, and similarly as the object moved away from the gradient the effect would be lessened.

The real danger was in the
difference
between the two, and if the object strayed too close to a tightly compacted and powerful CM field…. Well, the scientific term was
spaghettification.

Suffice to say, every shudder and every tremor Sun felt through the decks made him cringe precisely because he knew what was causing it and how badly things could go.

The
Weifang
dropped to a near stop in relativistic space, extending her passive sensors for monitoring duty while her captain and crew set about a hurried schedule of maintenance.

Sun himself pulled himself down the tubes that led from the Command deck of the big ship to the engineering sections, finding the whole deck in a state of barely controlled chaos.

“Pan,” he said as he located the head engineer, “the coils are out of alignment.”

“I am aware of that, Captain,” the stocky man growled, not looking up. “I am doing my best, but we need absolute references to put them right, and those are back home.”

Sun’s lips tightened, but he knew that his man was telling nothing but the flat truth. Due to the effect of tidal forces on the ship, even when everything was perfectly aligned few of the shipboard instruments could be trusted to remain perfectly intact. When nanometers counted, they had nothing on board that could be trusted past an accuracy of a few micrometers.

“Do your best.”

“It’s our lives on the line too, Captain. We’re not doing our worst, I promise you.” Pan looked up, clearly frustrated
by the situation. He took a breath. “Sorry. The alignment was out slightly, favoring the bow generators. We’re dialing back to the aft. A couple more hops and we’ll have it within safety levels.”

“Right,” Sun said. “Just hold us together long enough to do that. Two more hops. I’ll give you three. Get it dialed in, because if we’ve not detected pursuit by then…I’m taking the
Weifang
home. All speed.”

Pan nodded. “Understood, Captain.”

Sun twisted and pulled himself out of the engineering section, heading back for the command level.

We should have stayed home.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Gliese 581

THE N.A.C.S.
ODYSSEY
floated at rest relative to the star system, maintaining station just beyond the heliopause of the red dwarf star. The sails were fully extended as the ship took a long, deep drink of the photons emitting from the system.

“No doubt about it, Commander.”

“Damn.” Roberts swore softly.

The evidence on the screens was pretty much incontrovertible, but he really wished he was seeing things.

“Those damn bugs are taking over everywhere,” he muttered, shaking his head.

The fourth planet of the system, one of a few extra solar worlds discovered before the T-Drive was invented and predicted as a potential life-bearing planet, was now
crawling
with a form of life on which he’d wished he had never laid eyes.

The Drasin were in the process of annihilating a world that had no apparent links to the Priminae, or to Earth for that matter. He didn’t know what their goals were, but it was pretty clear by this point that prosecuting a war with a specific target wasn’t one of them.

“Stay on watch. Hold this station unless something changes,” he ordered. “Daniels, you have the con.”

“Aye, sir. I have the con,” Daniels responded, then frowned. “What are you going to do, Commander?”

“Wake the Captain.”

The chime wasn’t the most pleasant sound in the world to wake up to, but Eric had awakened to far worse in the past. Gunfire was always a sure way to go from dead to the world to more alive than you’d ever been, assuming none of the bullets actually struck you. Better than a cup of coffee as a pick-me-up, though a tad harsh on the nerves.

He tossed off the light blanket and wiped his eyes for a moment, then reached over and pulled on a pair of tan uniform pants. “I’m up. May as well come in.”

Roberts appeared as the heavy swinging door was pulled open. “Sir, we arrived on station a couple hours ago and began observing the system.”

“Any sign of the Block ship?” Eric asked, yawning as he grabbed his uniform jacket and shrugged it on.

“No sir. However we have at least one infested world and signs that another may have been taken by the Drasin as well.”

Eric went from drowsy to wide-eyed in an instant, reflecting in the back of his mind that bad news was almost as good as gunfire that way. “Shit.”

“Yes, sir,” Roberts agreed simply.

“Any signs of their cruisers?” Eric asked, buttoning up the jacket.

“Thankfully, no. It looks like they left the drones on the ground to complete the destruction of the world they’d targeted and moved on.”

“Right. That fits their pattern,” Eric said as he walked over to the sink to wash up. “No hint of the
Weifang
? You’re sure?”

“As sure as we can be. A full survey of the system would take more time than we’ve had,” Roberts told him, though Eric knew that already. “There’s no sign of any current fighting at least.”

Current meaning that there had been no fighting in the past few hours, since their data had to be at least a few hours old. Eric tried to remember how far from the star the local heliopause was, but couldn’t. It didn’t matter really, he supposed. Certainly he wasn’t trying to make any intricate battle plans at the moment, so a “few hours” was close enough.

“So either they made it here and escaped, made it here and were destroyed, or broke down somewhere along the way,” Eric summed up. “Sound about right?”

“Their destination might have been misinformation,” Roberts added, “in which case they could have gone to any of another dozen stars similar to this.”

“Right, point,” Eric conceded. “Let’s assume that they came here and escaped because, to be brutally honest, that’s our worst-case scenario.”

Roberts grimaced, but nodded. He didn’t like the statement that anyone escaping from those things was the worst-case scenario, but it was the truth. If they’d been destroyed here at Gliese, then it was over. If they didn’t arrive, then they weren’t the
Odyssey
’s problem. If, however, they had been here and escaped with a dozen Drasin cruisers on their backsides, things were very much in the brown stuff.

The pair left the Captain’s quarters, heading for the bridge of the
Odyssey
.

“Captain on deck!”

“As you were,” Eric said as he strode toward the command station, a half step ahead of Roberts. “Anything new to report?”

“Nothing in the last half hour, sir.”

“Good. Keep a couple eyes on the system, but I want the rest of our gear focused outward.”

Winger twisted around to look at him, expression clearly skeptical. “Outward, Captain?”

He nodded. “Check your inbox, Michelle. I sent you some notes on where the Priminae assigned a couple of their warships to investigate. I want you to scan in that direction, look for tachyon disruption especially. Anything out of the ordinary.”

The instrument specialist nodded, expression clearing slightly, but still showed hesitance as she turned back to her work. Not that Eric blamed her, to be honest. Space, especially interstellar space, was a
big
place. Beyond a few light-hours of their position, none of their standard instrumentation was of any tactical use. That left nothing but the tachyon-based gear, and everyone on board knew that even that wasn’t of the most utility when dealing with mid- to long-range scans.

It took a pretty potent burst of tachyons to show up on their gear, something that generally didn’t happen over more than a couple light-days or so. Beyond that most tachyon sources were ephemeral, often
too
powerful to be detected. It was a bizarre contradiction in tachyon physics, but the higher
a tachyon particle’s energy state, the less distance it would travel before degrading into its composite quarks and gluons.

So the odds of getting any useful information from those sensors was pretty low, all things considered, but it would still require tying up all their reflector sails in the attempt. It probably seemed like sacrilege to turn their back on what was happening in-system for odds that seemingly low to someone like Michelle Winger, but she’d just have to get used to it.