Homeworld (Odyssey One) (82 page)

He walked over to his station and took a careful seat, unused to what had once been a second skin to him.

“Sir?” Roberts blinked. “What…?”

Eric smiled. “Don’t worry about it, Commander. It’s time.”

“Are you sure, sir?”

Eric nodded. “Yeah. Signal the evacuation.”

Roberts took a deep sigh, but nodded and turned back to his station.

“All hands, all hands. This is an evacuation order. Please go directly to the hangar to board your assigned shuttle. I say again, this is an evacuation order. Go directly to the hangar and board your assigned shuttle. That is all.”

Everyone was twisting around, eyes wide as they looked at the captain and the first officer. Eric looked back evenly. “That goes for all of you, too. Now isn’t your time to fight.”

“Sir, respectfully, I’ll stay,” Waters said. “You need someone to run the weapons.”

“And fly the ship,” Daniels said. “I’m staying.”

Eric smiled and let the sentiment spread until most of them had made up excuses to stay, and the rest just simply refused to leave. Then he lost his smile and slapped his hand down.

“No one stays. I have it covered,” he said, leaning back in his seat and making an old familiar gesture.

The NICS needles slipped into the scar tissue on his neck like old friends, the slight pinch reminding him of better times. Eric felt the induction interface take hold as the needles began to read and intercept his neural signals and the ship began to speak to him in a way he’d never felt from anything quite so complex. The
Odyssey
was larger, more complex, and more powerful than any fighter could be, and he had to fight to keep from being overwhelmed. Eric immediately locked out the control stations around the bridge, but left the telemetry feeds alone.

“I’m in command, and I am in control,” he said seriously, looking around. “You have your orders.”

“Sir…” Roberts said, pausing. “Captain, you can’t run this ship by yourself.”

“Not for very long,” Eric agreed. “I won’t need very long. Now get moving while you still can. This fight may be ending, but the war hasn’t. You all need to live to fight the rest of the way. Go on.”

He paused, and no one moved.

“I said
GO!
” he roared, shaking them from their stupors.

One by one the command staff broke positions and filed off the bridge. Roberts paused at the door, staring back for a minute, but then he too was gone and Eric was alone.

Fitting, I suppose. The first time I stood on this deck, I was wearing the same clothes.

Fitting, probably, and certainly amusing.

Eric smiled wildly as he nudged the engines, killing their acceleration as he waited for the shuttles to get away.

It’s going to be a fun ride, my friend,
he thought softly to the ship around him.
Almost as much fun as we’ve had together in the past, I’ll bet. One last hurrah.

CHAPTER THIRTY

THE BLUE-GREEN world infested by the scarlet band had an array of defenses that bordered on the ludicrous.

It cost more than a dozen ships on the initial approach, and the price of the battle just went up from there. In close, the stinging blows of high-velocity weapons served as a reminder that even the simplest of weapons could be deadly in the right circumstances.

Out in deep space, away from the interference of local gravity field, those sorts of weapons were less than worthless. Even the energy of lasers could be bent and shrugged aside by a full powered warp of space-time, so these slugs of metal were less than nothing there.

Here, however, in close quarters of a planetary gravity, the rules changed.

A stream of fast-moving metal slugs could tear away the armor and inner workings of a ship in moments, leaving nothing left to finish the mission if the planned force was inadequate to the task.

Combined with heavier slugs that could punch through a ship’s armor in one blow, penetrating weapons that exploded
on a timed delay, and potent lasers that were able to slag even the resistant armor of a Drasin warship—you had a very dangerous environment in which to operate, indeed.

None of that slowed the Drasin, however. The ships’ minds had known coming in that this was one battle for which they would have to pay dearly to win, and they had accepted that. There was no real choice, not with the scarlet band being so entrenched here. Some things had to be done, no matter the cost.

So the surviving ships struck out, their lasers burning through the devices that had flung weapons at them and their kin. They destroyed everything that appeared remotely to be a threat, then turned their focus on the central threat that had made itself clear.

It sat in high orbit over the blue-green world, a brilliant reflecting tower in space.

It was the last bastion against them here, and it was time for this world to fall into eternity.

“Launch the shuttles!” Wolfe roared over the station wide comm. “They’ve breached the second perimeter. Station defenses won’t hold them off much longer!”

Lights were raging all around him, some green, some yellow, but most were now an angry red, spreading constantly.

The ones showing the status of the hangar, however, were slowly turning from red to green as shuttles departed. Wolfe watched them go, directing the station lasers to clear a path for them.

They had to make it to the edge of cislunar space if they wanted a chance to get away, and he intended to buy them that
chance and anything else he could manage. Liberty station was a ghost now, hollow and empty, but still angry and with one last thing to do before it could cross over to the next world.

Wolfe had a permanently etched grin, the angry kind that showed all his teeth, “Come on you bastards! Pay attention to me, those little birds are nothing to you….”

Some of the fighters didn’t agree. They were circling in on the escaping shuttles. Wolfe directed point defense in their direction, blowing several right out of space, but there were too many and a shuttle broke up, burning from the blazing heat of their lasers. The remaining ships pressed past. They didn’t have time to slow, and there was no one left to pick up if they had.

The station’s massive capacitors whined and clicked as they charged and discharged, throwing around enough energy to power a city on Earth for a month with every cycle. All around him space was burning, and Commodore Wolfe stood in the center of it with a near maniacal grin on his face.

There was something irresistibly military about the last stand, he decided.

He could imagine better ends, but he’d accept this one happily if it made a difference.

It’ll only make a difference if some of them get clear, though,
he thought desperately as another cruiser swung around and came after the shuttles.

“No! Come on! Over here, you prick!” he screamed, directing fire at the cruiser only to be ignored as fighters dove in to absorb the lasers instead.

Wolfe refused to close his eyes as the cruiser swept in on the shuttles, lining up for the kill, and he was never so happy as when the cruiser erupted into plasma and debris before him.

“Liberty shuttles, get clear of the combat zone,” Eric Weston ordered over the comms. “The
Odyssey
will provide cover.”

“It took you long enough to get here!” Wolfe swore over the open comm, still grinning. “But it’s damn good to see you.”

Eric was sweating in his flight suit. The focus it took to keep control of the
Odyssey
was immense. It wasn’t that it was a big ship—the
Odyssey
was mostly computer controlled anyway, and you couldn’t run something this size purely by hand anymore. No, the problem was that his NICS interface was of an older type, more intended for fine tuning of motions, and he was using it to initiate and control.

I wish I’d had time to practice this.

Wolfe’s voice over the comm confused him. He’d expected that Admiral Gracen would be on the station, but Eric didn’t have time to worry about that.

He unleashed his PD weapons on the dozen or so Drasin fighters that were raking the
Odyssey
’s flanks with their lasers. He supposed that the big ship was almost entirely evacuated of air by now, but he’d shut those alarms off long ago.

It didn’t matter now if there was air in the habitats of the
Odyssey
. There was no one left to breathe it.

Eric twisted the ship around on thrusters, using full CM to make the ship
fly
, and swept the main lasers across half a dozen cruisers in close formation. They weren’t destroyed, but the
tons
of material vaporized from their armor and hull had to have something important in it and he didn’t have time to be thorough just yet.

The shuttles slipped out under his guard, firing their burners and generating maximum CM as they accelerated out toward the edge of cislunar space where the Prim cruisers and the
Enterprise
were waiting for them.

Eric didn’t know what they were going to do when they escaped. It was something he didn’t envy them. Maybe Earth could hold out on the ground, for a while at least, but unless they got a lot of help from the Priminae, he didn’t think it would matter.

In any case, it won’t be my concern.