Homeworld (Odyssey One) (54 page)

Spies were best described as whiny little bitches at the best of times, and that was when they were working. When they weren’t, they were the dullest people he’d ever met, and Eric had no desire to ever meet another, if he could avoid it. The movie heroics of master spies like James Bond may have once been based in reality, but in the world of electronic
intelligence, the average master spy was somehow less cool than a teenage computer cracker, although the spy did have better personal hygiene.
Usually.

He watched the Chinese captain order a light meal and a drink, letting the man find a table and get a decent ways into his meal before approaching. He pushed his acting ability to the limit, pretending to “notice” the man from across the room, and openly stared at him for a while with a puzzled look on his face.

Finally, Eric got up and carried his drink with him over to the seat that Sun Ang Wen had chosen, catching the man’s attention with a gesture to the empty seat across from him.

“May I?”

The Chinese captain eyed him warily, and Eric saw the recognition filter through quickly. He wasn’t surprised to be recognized. His positions had been very public since his time with the Company, and that was before he took over the
Odyssey
and made contact with actual aliens.
A certain definition of alien, of course.

“Please,” Sun said in very lightly accented English.

Eric sat down. “Captain Sun Ang Wen, am I right?”

Sun nodded warily, eyes flicking around the room. Eric smiled, knowing that he was looking for any sign of the person he had actually been set up to meet. The last person any Block captain would expect a BID Agent to put him up with would be Eric “Raziel” Weston, not after the Archangels’ last mission into Chinese territory just before the end of the war.

I think we’re still wanted on warrants there for “war crimes,”
Eric mused.

That had been an ugly mission, a military base working on biological weapons, situated right in the middle of Beijing. The Company had flipped a Chinese national with security
clearance and gotten a strike team into the facility with the intent to take it out clean, but they’d been burned before they got the job done.

Just not before they got out a download of what the facility had been working on, however.

The thoughts of what those weapons might have done still gave him chills, but the job itself had been damned near as bad. There was no way to make it clean; that option had been burned when the Operator team was executed on site as spies. That was the official story from the Block, anyway. The radio reports from the incident made it clear that the team had given better than they’d taken, and fought to the last man.

The order came down then that the facility had to be eliminated, and it had to be done fast. They couldn’t give the Chinese time to move the facility, or even any of the projects, and while the U.S. Marines Corps were well known for being the people to call if you absolutely, positively wanted something destroyed overnight…when it had to be taken out in an hour or your money back, you called the Archangels.

The mission hadn’t been pretty at all. They’d used Thermite penetrators to drop smart weapons right into the labs, incinerating everything inside in a flash fry that had the side effect of lighting several nearby factories up at the same time. Actual body count was unknown, but despite it being after dark, it was probably pretty bad since the Block had their factories running day and night at that time.

Suffice to say, Eric wasn’t welcome in Bejing any longer.

“Captain Weston,” Sun said, nodding surprisingly politely. “I’m surprised to see you away from the
Odyssey
.”

“Aw, she’ll be fine without me for a while,” Eric said, smiling.

Sun looked momentarily confused, and Eric recalled that the Chinese didn’t have a tradition of assigning a gender to their ships.

“Ah, yes, I’m sure that she will be,” Sun said, his expression a little perplexed but gently amused. “I merely expected that you would be busy after the battle.”

Eric nodded, though he wouldn’t call it much of a battle. Aside from the initial skirmish, it had been a slaughter.

“Yes, well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Sun’s eyes shifted, widening and hardening at the same time, as he realized that just maybe he was meeting with the person he had been set up to see. “I’m sorry, but I do not believe that would be appropriate.”

“Your government will have been…quietly notified of what I’m going to tell you already, but it’ll be public within a day or so,” Eric said. “Still, it isn’t something we want spreading around until we can’t keep a cover on things anymore. The Drasin are coming, Captain. They’ll be here within two days at our best guess.”

Sun straightened up, his entire manner becoming more alert. “Why would you come to me with this?”

“Because I need your help,” Eric said candidly. “At least, I think I do.”

“I do not understand.”

“We don’t have hard numbers yet, but the current estimate is that they’re coming in force,” Eric said. “More ships than we have munitions to combat.”

Sun stared, his expression saying it all. Horror, guilt, shock. Eric didn’t have to read his mind to know what he was thinking, and honestly he wasn’t above using it to manipulate the man a little. He’d rather prefer not to, but if he had to…he’d lose sleep over it later.

Sun dropped his eyes, staring at the tabletop for a long moment. “I don’t know what I can do to help.”

Eric sighed. “Well, honestly, I think I owe you an apology, Captain.”

“I…do not understand,” Sun said again, this time even more confused.

“We were tracking you,” Eric said. “You were in FTL and we couldn’t contact you to tell you that you were being followed, so I ordered a strike against your ship.”

Sun gaped. What the man across from him was admitting to was tantamount to a declaration of war. Then he considered it and his face fell. “I wish that you had been successful, Captain. We should not have come home.”

Eric shrugged, as he’d figured that this day was coming anyway. Maybe not quite as soon, but it was almost a certainty that the trigger men out there wanted the
Odyssey
destroyed—and whatever species deployed her—out of the way. Sooner or later they were going to find the Earth, and they just didn’t seem like the talking and negotiating sort to him.

He wasn’t going to tell Sun that, however, because he needed the man to
want
to help him.

“I was hoping to get your attention,” Eric admitted, “so we only engaged with conventional weapons, but your ship didn’t even seem to notice.”

“It is the bending of space,” Sun said. “Very difficult to penetrate while at full power.”

“Apparently.” Eric sighed visibly. “When you passed us, we engaged the Drasin coming up behind you with pulse weapons. You’re familiar with them?”

Sun nodded without thinking, effectively admitting to knowing a fair bit more about Confederate technology
than was publically available. Eric only smiled slightly, and continued.

“The antimatter pellets blew out their warp,” he said, “dropping them from FTL in a crash we’ve never seen before. If I’d known that it would do that, I would have taken your ship out of warp the same way.”

Sun nodded, his expression fascinated. “So you can disable a ship moving past light speed?”

“So it would seem,” Eric said. “What interested me, however, was that when they crashed from FTL, we saw them unleash a burst of energy and high-energy particles.”

Sun sat back, nodding slowly. “Ah. Yes, your assault must have blown out their compensation system. It would have released many very dangerous particles into space, Captain.”

“That’s an understatement,” Eric leaned in. “I saw at least two of the Drasin incinerated by their own allies’ drives. I need to know something….”

Sun’s eyes narrowed, his face closing up. “What?”

“Can you do it intentionally with your ship?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

P.L.A.S.F.
Weifang

CAPTAIN SUN ANG Wen had returned to the
Weifang
after a personally confusing and conflicting conversation with his opposing number from the Confederation. He was surprised, actually, as the captain of the
Odyssey
didn’t match up with his reputation in China and other Block nations.

That probably shouldn’t have been as surprising as it seemed, he supposed. He already knew that national propaganda had a tendency to exaggerate certain things. He’d seen some of the ludicrous material put out by the West concerning the war, and deep down he knew that his own government was hardly any better.

Weston seemed like a reasonable enough type in person, and a far cry from the slavering war criminal some people had painted him as in the Block. What he was asking, however, was terrifying on so many levels.

Sun was certain that of his crew, only a small handful even knew that what Weston was asking was remotely possible, and of those maybe three could make it happen. The high-energy particles released by an uncompensated ship coming down from a long FTL journey were enough to sterilize an
entire hemisphere of a planet. He knew because he’d read the reports on the possibility of using the ship’s drives as a weapon against the Confederacy.

Luckily no one was quite that insane, at least so far as he knew.

For one thing, it couldn’t be done with an unmanned ship. Not yet at any rate, since the drives were complex beasts that required fairly constant adjustments if they were to remain in operating order. Long FTL runs were hard on them, and they had to be aligned often or risk blowing out the entire system and being forced from FTL in an uncompensated crash.

Doing so with a
manned
ship would most likely be fatal in most circumstances. It wasn’t the crash itself that was the problem, but some of the radiation and high-energy particles would blow back into the ship and destroy the drives. He hadn’t told that to Captain Weston, not that he’d told the man much at all. A successfully induced crash would be survivable only if there were search and rescue quickly available to pick up the crew, because the ship would be going nowhere in a hurry after that.

At best we’ll have thrusters if we do this,
Sun supposed darkly as he sat alone in his cabin, staring at his computer terminal while doing most of the math in his head.

He didn’t trust his computer not to inform on him to the PLASF generals, to be quite honest, particularly not with something like this. He hadn’t made any promises to the Confederate captain, as the idea seemed
insane
on the surface of it. It wasn’t until Weston had broken down a little and offered up an idea of just how many ships constituted the enemy “fleet” that Sun was even willing to consider the possibility of such a plan.

Thousands of those things. It’s impossible, no matter what clever tricks or technical wizardry we pull from our sleeves…we cannot beat those kinds of numbers.

That didn’t mean he was going to sit in orbit and die, however.

Against those kinds of numbers, Weston’s plan wasn’t as insane as it sounded. The math worked, though he could wish that it worked better than it did, but it worked.