Into the Black: Odyssey One (52 page)

When all four shots had been fired, Eric immediately snapped his next command to the helm.

“Alter course, four-one-one-mark-positive-twelve. Thrusters only, Lieutenant. Keep us above the ecliptic, this time.”

“Aye-Aye Captain. Course to Four-One-One-Mark-Plus-Twelve. Thrusters only,” came the automatic repetition.

Around them the rumble of thrusters and groan from the ship itself, as they once again shifted course.

“Stick and move, Lieutenant,” Eric told Daniels. “Stick and move.”

“Yes Sir.”

*****

“I think we just registered the Odyssey, Admiral!”

“Where is she?” Rael came over.

“The green icon, Admiral.”

Tanner looked up at the display, noting the information appended to the icon, “what are they shooting at, Ithan?”

“We have a soft reflection in that area, Admiral, but I’m not certain. We’ll have to wait for the light-speed return.”

Tanner grimaced, but nodded in reluctant acceptance.

*****

Seventy-five light-seconds was a long distance for anything to travel, even light itself, when you consider that most cultures take centuries or longer to realize that it even did travel. For anything substantially slower that distance was a prohibitively long way.

For the four Pulse torpedoes from the Odyssey, however, it took just over eighty seconds to cross the void and arrive at their target. The range meant a relatively shorter gap between their arrival and the light and energy they projected, which to the alien warship meant that much less time to react.

The Alien Command saw them coming, though, and opened fire with lasers again, only to have much the same effect. Firing light at an energy weapon was very nearly pointless, and this reaction had been expected, so the order went out at the same time and fighters began to pour from the big ship.

The problem, such as it was, was that the reaction time had been calculated on a ten second period in which they could react. In each previous time, that was what the enemy weapons had given them.

This time, they had a little less than eight.

The first of the fighters were just sliding into place as a screen, when the initial strike smashed into their formation, obliterating the formation and the vast majority of the fighters, and opening a hole in them for the remaining three.

Fired sequentially, the Pulse Torpedoes exhibited much smaller degrees of variance in their course while in flight, their like charges not being able to push them apart in a ‘shotgun’ like spread affect. Instead, they flew straight and true, which is why a sequential attack is preferred against single targets, at any range.

The remaining three shots slammed into the ship, even as its fighters scrambled to leave its decks, ripping the alien war craft to pieces in an explosion of light and energy as its reactor containment was annihilated.

*****

Seventy-four seconds after they had struck, the Odyssey’s Bridge surged with the exhilarated rush of the kill, as the catastrophic display of light and energy etched itself on their sensors.

“It’s a kill, Sir!”

Eric nodded grimly, eyes already watching the screens for the next one, “we’ve got four more out there, people. Find them before they find us.”

“Aye-Aye Captain,” they said together, the energy of the moment carrying their enthusiasm.

That enthusiasm, however, wore thin as the minutes turned slowly to an hour and still there was nothing on the screens, as they gently cut through the system, on a ballistic course.

The empty space of a star system made the battlefields of Earth look like a child’s playpen, by comparison. Even discounting all the, rather large, solid objects that one could hide behind, it was impossible to scan more than a small percentage of the skies. And, even if you could, there was every chance that you wouldn’t know what you were looking at, when you saw it.

It made for a very ironic way of literally being ‘bored to death’.

*****

“That’s two,” the Ithan breathed in near disbelief.

Tanner didn’t blame her; it was beyond belief that any one ship could stand up to the force that had ground the best fleet his people had been able to mount, to dust. The Odyssey and Captain Weston were marvels beyond marvels, as far as he was concerned.

Now if only the Forge would finish their work, so HE could do something productive.

Anything productive.

The Admiral gritted his teeth, a decidedly uncivilized snarl showing them to anyone with the courage to face him.

Had it not been for the Odyssey, fighting a war that was not theirs, this planet would be dead, before the Forge could have become a factor at all.

On such whimsical flickers of the universe, rested the fate of an entire world.

*****

“Radio pulse!” Waters’ voice was excited as he looked at the signal.

“Tracking its source now, Captain,” Lamont answered the question he had yet to formulate. “We got a clearer bead on this one. The Electronic Warfare department is narrowing it down to a tighter tangent.”

“Thank you, Susan,” Eric said clearly. “My compliments to them. Mr. Daniels, bring our bow around, if you please?”

“Aye-Aye Captain, coming around. Thrusters only.” Came the answer.

The Odyssey rumbled and moaned as she came around again, her nose dipping down into the gravity well of the red giant star, toward the source of the last transmission.

“We’re lined up, Sir.”

“Very well, Lieutenant. Take us ahead…, dead slow.”

“Dead slow, Aye Captain.”

*****

A chirp sounded through the lab, startling the young tech as he looked around for the cause.

“Relax,” Palin told him. “I inserted a command into the system to alert me, if we detected another radio transmission. Call it up, would you please?”

“Ah… Yes Doctor,” Evan replied, tapping out a command.

A new signal, audibly identical to the others, as far as Evan was concerned, filled the room and Palin frowned and leaned back as he closed his eyes.

“Doctor?”

“Shh…,” Palin said softly. “Place it on a continuous loop, if you please?”

“Uh… Yes Sir.”

The file played, over and over again, as Evan watched Palin rock in his chair, with his eyes closed.

“It’s very close to the last one, but quite different from the first,” the linguist said, frowning. “There are three sequences that repeat in both. But they have slight differences from each other…, something familiar there…, but it escapes me at the moment.”

The technician shrugged helplessly, not knowing what he could possibly say.

“Play all three…, no, just the last two. Continuous loop.”

“Yes Doctor.”

*****

The tension mounted again as they Bridge staff found themselves all staring at the displays that constituted everything that their passive arrays could feed them. In this game of cat and mouse, or hide and seek, the first side to see the other would be the victor and they were determined that they would not miss the enemy for the lack of a pair of eyes.

“Nothing yet, Captain,” Waters said unnecessarily, eyes glued to the board.

Eric just grunted in response, his own eyes watching the Captain’s displays. The enemy had to be there somewhere, though perhaps they learned from their last mistakes.

He expanded his display’s range to look outside the cone, the RDF tangent had indicated, looking for anything suspicious.

“Damn it…,” Waters cursed under his breath. “It’s all the interference from the star, Captain. It’s making it damn near impossible to see anything.”

“I know that, Mr. Waters. Just keep looking,” Weston said calmly, though he noted that the young man had a good point.

Whether on purpose or by accident, this one had managed to set itself between the system’s primary and the Odyssey. Normally this might aid them, by providing a bright background in which to look for a dark ship, however, the interference generated by the star was wreaking havoc on the delicate reception systems.

Something about that just wasn’t sitting right with Eric, either. What were the odds of the enemy just happening to appear there, at that angle?

Slim to none was Weston’s guess and he opened his mouth to order them to break off, but then frowned and held his peace. Sometimes you went with your gut, but usually the numbers were the best path. Knowing when to draw the line was the hardest skill one could master, and Eric didn’t think it was the time, just yet.

Their best bet was purely visual-based sensors; however those were relatively easy to spoof in this situation, as the Odyssey herself had proven, with the ‘black hole’ settings on their adaptive armor.

“She could be right there…,” Waters whispered. “Right out there, just waiting…”

Eric Weston was about to respond when the comm went off, blaring, as someone dialled into the bridge. He slapped the controls, cutting the noise off and snarled into the device. “God dammit, whoever this is I’m a little busy right now…”

“Captain! Captain!” A very excited voice came over the speakers, causing Weston to frown.

“Doctor Palin?” He asked. “How did you get access to this line?”

“Yes Captain, I just made a discovery…!”

“Doctor, if you don’t mind, I’m in the middle of a battle up here…”

“What? Oh, yes, yes… but you see it’s a coordinate system!”

Eric closed his eyes, rubbing them with his right hand. “What?”

“The transmissions, Captain! They were reporting a series of coordinates!” Palin babbled on. “It’s fascinating, you see they use a trinary numbering system and…”

“Doctor! I’m busy up here…, Wait,” Weston trailed off, frowning. “Coordinates? Are you sure?”

“Yes Captain. Quite sure.”

“I’ll have to talk to you, later. Weston out,” Eric cut the line as he looked around, trying to make a choice as his gut and his mind argued two different courses.

Slowly he lifted a hand, his mouth opening and closing, finally he straightened in his seat, slapped open a ship-wide channel, and started snapping orders.

“All stations, this is Captain Weston. We are about to go to full military power. All Stations, I say again, Full Military Power.”

“Lamont, contact engineering. I want all systems to full power,” he ordered. “Waters, do we have enough for a full power tachyon pulse?”

Waters blinked, checking his controls, “yes Sir, but only if we kill re-charge on two of our tubes.”

“Do it,” Weston ordered. “And for God’s sake, kill the black hole settings! Bring the armor back to maximum general deflection!”

“Aye-Aye Captain!”

*****

The big ship began to hum as her core leapt back to life, power feeding into previously dormant systems, as she gave up any pretext at hiding, her dull, black exterior suddenly shifting and changing, until she was visually an almost pure white.

At the same time, her running lights came online, casting out the shadows that had covered up her name and numbers, causing the NAC Odyssey, to roar to life even as she announced her resurrection with a sudden blast of tachyons.

The massless little particles jumped out from the ship, spreading far and wide as they went out in every direction, looking for things to bounce off of. Omni-directionally, her detection range was limited, as the Odyssey simply didn’t have enough power to generate that many tachyons, but this time it didn’t matter.

*****

“Mother of God.”

Roberts didn’t look up to see who had said that, in fact, he nearly seconded the statement himself.

“How’d they get so close?” Someone else demanded.

That was a good question, Roberts knew. One that he couldn’t answer, though to be honest, he was more interested in how Captain Weston had guessed they were there.

On the screen, previously blank, there were now three icons in hostile blood red, all closing on the Odyssey, from less than sixty light-seconds.

Chapter 35

“Hostile contacts, port and starboard!” Waters yelled out automatically as the lights came back to full power, from their minimal status. “They’re moving dead slow, Captain!”

“That won’t last!” Weston snapped. “Ahead, All flank!”

“All Flank, Aye Sir!” Daniels snapped, slamming the controls hard forward.

“Sir! We have another one along our course!” Waters warned his Captain.

“I’m aware of that, Mr. Waters,” Eric told him. “Bring all forward weapons online and give me a narrow arc tachyon ping, as soon as we have power.”

“Aye-Aye, Sir.”

Weston gripped the arms of his chair tightly as the numbers started to drop, the Odyssey racing against the enemy to see who would get their ship to full power first. If he was lucky, he’d taken them by surprise, with the sudden surge to full military power, but there was no way to tell how quickly they could respond. If they were on the ball, or if their technology was faster than his, the Odyssey was in a seriously bad situation.

“The enemy is accelerating,” Waters sounded calmer now, which was good.

“Trying to catch us in a pincer, Ensign,” Weston said, calmer than he felt.

“Aye Sir.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eric said after a moment, looking at his displays. “Our acceleration curve is almost as good as theirs and we’ve got the jump on them. Just pay attention to the one in front of us.”

“Aye Sir,” Waters said looking up. “Captain, if they hit us with their lasers, even our best general armor setting isn’t likely to…”

“I’m aware of that too, Ensign,” Weston cut him off. “Don’t forget, they’re still sixty light seconds out and they don’t know our acceleration curve. No way can they predict where we’re going to be when their lasers strike.”

“Aye Sir,” Waters sounded relieved.

Weston decided not to remind him that the craft down angle, from them was staring at an essentially stable target and wouldn’t need to do much prediction. The tense look in the man’s shoulders told him that he didn’t need to; Waters had figured that out on his own.

Eric’s eyes glanced to the clock.

Thirty seconds.

*****