The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (28 page)

Maran didn’t pay any attention to the routine vagaries of the dimensional drive, instead focusing on the sensor projection at his side, intently searching for any sign of the contact.

Unless they were approaching incredibly fast, with an insanely powerful drive, they should be coming into contact within moments.

Then there they were.

His bridge was already reporting in: “Multiple contacts! Drive readings indicate Koruun-type transports, Captain.”

That was a relief. He’d expected something much, much worse. “Isolate individual drive specs. I want to know which ones.”

“Yes, sir.”

Maran eyed the specs, still frowning. The Koruun transports had big, powerful drives, but even as many as he was seeing on his projections wouldn’t be enough to scramble a drive frequency. There had to be someone else out there—probably multiple someones, in fact—to have sufficiently
scrambled the frequency so that the
Vulk
couldn’t recognize it from in-system.

“Contact the lead ship.”

NACS ODYSSEY
High Orbit, Planet Ranquil

▸THE FLASH-TRAFFIC MESSAGE from the Priminae Admiralty for Weston was a transcript from the
Vulk
, transmitting from several light-minutes beyond the system heliopause. Captain Maran had reported that there were incoming refugees from a Drasin attack on another fringe system.

Eric sighed, shaking his head.

“Captain?” Roberts asked, walking over.

“So much for peace having broken out,” Eric said, tapping the display over so that the angle was visible to the commander.

Roberts grimaced. “They lost another planet?”

Eric nodded, flipping through the report. “Looks like they mangled the Drasin this time, though. They’ve got their industry cranking out some heavy weapons.”

“It’s about time, sir,” Roberts said, his voice just a notch beneath “scathing.”

Eric personally agreed with the commander, but didn’t allow himself the luxury of wallowing in that “superiority” complex. It would be counterproductive, and he had to maintain good relations with the military representatives of the Priminae people. People like Admiral Tanner and
Commander Jehan had enough problems—and guilt—because of their people’s deficiencies. Adding to either would only serve to alienate them.

“Do we have incoming hostiles as well?”

“Unknown,” Eric said absently. “The
Vulk
is still investigating. The refugees were pursued by the Drasin, however, but they report that the vessel
Heralc
turned back some time ago to harass the pursuers.”

Roberts grunted slightly, nodding.

One ship trying to harass and harry several pursuers was at a severe disadvantage, Eric and Jason both knew. The only course of action that was really possible in such a case was a violent, aggressive assault that gave the enemy no choice but to shift their focus. Anything else and the enemy would just ignore you or, at best, split up and send the bulk of their force after the original target, anyway.

“What do we do, Captain?” Roberts asked then.

Eric shook his head. “Nothing much we can do.”

Again, Roberts nodded. The
Odyssey
was deep inside the gravity well of the star and would never be able to reach a safe distance for transition before the enemy, if any, were already well into the system.

They could, of course, evacuate the system. They probably had time for that, but the deal that Ambassador Corusc had signed with the Confederation militated against it. The NAC wasn’t required to lend naval support, of course—the politicians back home hadn’t been willing, or crazy enough, to agree to that—but it did establish an embassy with the Priminae people and loan military advisors to them under full knowledge of wartime conditions.

Defending the embassy was Eric’s primary duty as long as he was in-system, and unless matters became hopeless, he was
content to accomplish that in the most direct fashion available to him.

To defend the embassy, he’d simply have to defend the planet it was sitting on.

To that end, he gave the order to roll up the reactors and put all weapons capacitors on full charge.

“Nothing we haven’t seen before, right, Commander?” At least, so far.

“Aye, aye, sir.” Roberts nodded and turned back to his job.

EMBASSY OFFICES
Planet Ranquil

▸“AMBASSADOR.”

Julia LaFontaine nodded gracefully as she rose to her feet from behind her workspace and smiled at the older man who had appeared. “Elder.”

“I have been sent to deliver a message,” he told her gravely.

Julia dropped her smile immediately, becoming quite grave herself. Elder Corusc wasn’t the highest member of the local government—though she was still having a lot of trouble trying to determine exactly how the government was organized—but she knew full well that he was well above “messenger” level.

“What message, Elder?”

“There has been a detection of many ships entering the range of our system, Ambassador,” he told her seriously.

Julia paled. “Drasin?”

“Not yet. However, the ships we have identified are the survivors of another lost world,” he said softly.

She winced sympathetically.

It was hard, actually, to comprehend the sheer scale of this war. The loss of planets, billions of people, it wasn’t real to her
as much as she tried to make it so. Julia had seen her fair share of atrocity, of course, though most of it was secondhand in the war crimes tribunals that had been echoes of the last war. However, at their worst, they were bare blips on any chart she could imagine when comparing them to what had happened out here.

So why
, she wondered,
do the deaths of thousands feel more real, more urgent, to me than the deaths of billions?

The old quote from almost two centuries earlier leapt unbidden into her mind.

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic
.

For all that, though, Julia wondered guiltily if part of it was that they weren’t her people, weren’t from her world, that made it such a nonevent to her.

She forced that thought away, shaking her head. “Is there anything I can do, Elder?”

“Shit,” Reed cursed, shaking his head as he looked at the message that had flashed across his terminal. “Not good.”

“What is it, Colonel?”

He looked up, noting that Master Chief Wilson had been close enough to hear.

“We might have incoming unfriendlies,” he said, his lips curling.

Wilson shook his head. “Not good, sir.”

“I’m aware of that,” Reed replied.

It wasn’t even remotely good, in fact. The men had only started being trained a couple of weeks earlier and were still in a state of near culture shock. They had truly been unready to accept the level of force that Reed’s men were applying to
the training, and the rough-and-ready Colonials were showing signs of crumbling under the training from the hardened Green Berets.

Reed’s men had been scaling it down automatically, but then were forced to turn the pressure up when they accidently went too far. It was a frustrating process of trial and error as they retrained themselves to read an utterly alien mindset on the fly. Things were starting to come out of the crapper, but only just, and they needed more time.

“
Ask me for anything but time
,” Reed quoted, shaking his head.

“If we had time, we wouldn’t need anything else, sir,” Wilson replied dryly.

Unfortunately, the former SEAL was right. Reed nodded tiredly, rising to his feet. “Kevin!”

“Sir!”

The young attaché, an ensign trained under the rules of the Confederation naval tradition, snapped into the office almost instantly. Reed wondered if the young man waited, listening, outside the door for a call, but pushed it aside after a moment.

“Get a message to Major Brinks,” he ordered. “He’s out on maneuvers, right?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Tell him to have his men back here ASAP, and then go down to the museum and tell them to make everything ready for combat.”

“Yes, sir.” The attaché saluted, then vanished.

“Eager little beaver,” Wilson said with a smile.

“He does his job,” Reed replied. “You’d better go and tell the others that we might have company coming.”

“You got it, Colonel.”

Reed hesitated a moment. “You’d best ask Ithan Chans to come in as you leave.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wilson left, leaving Reed considering his options for a few moments before the slim woman stepped into the office.

“Yes, Colonel?” she asked, her expression tense but confused as she tried to determine what was going on.

“Yes, thank you, Ithan,” Reed told her seriously. “I’m going to need you to start talking to your military. Get them ready to work with us.”

“Colonel?”

“It’s the Drasin, Ithan Chans,” he said. “It looks like they’re back.”

Milla blanched white, literally frozen in place for a long moment before she shuddered and nodded woodenly.

“Y…Yes, Colonel. I will begin contacting others now.” She swallowed hard.

“Thank you,” he said, gesturing to the door. “Dismissed.”