The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (38 page)

“Yes, Chief,” the men responded quickly, nodding as they checked their suits again.

Corrin gave the section a quick once-over, then nodded curtly as she kicked off the wall and propelled herself back out and into the main corridor outside.

The men exchanged relieved looks for a moment, until her voice came floating back.

“Don’t let me catch you unsuited after a battle stations call again, or I’ll make you wish you were exposed to hard vacuum!”

Jenkins paled and redoubled his efforts to get into his suit while the others finished checking their own and their buddies’.

“We’re maneuvering again,” Cardsharp said, pulling an ace of spades literally out of the air as it sailed past her position.

“A-yup.” Stephanos nodded, not looking up as he completed his checklist.

“Captain’s let Daniels loose of the leash from the feel of it,” Paladin replied, dealing out another card to Centurion.

“A-yup.”

“Is that all you’re going to say?” Racer complained from her perch on the nose of her fighter.

“A-yup.” Stephanos didn’t look up, but twisted his head to one side as a joker spun past his position and clattered off the far wall behind him.

“Eyes in the back of his head,” Paladin complained, shaking his head.

“Top of his head from the looks of that.” Racer grinned. “Must be what makes him a good pilot.”

“Must be,” Paladin agreed. “Lord knows it’s not his skill.”

The pilots of the Archangel squadron chuckled at that, but their flight leader didn’t rise to the bait as he continued to read something off his data plaque.

After a few moments, the pilots shrugged and went back to their game.

It seemed to Weston that there were days when you just didn’t get a chance to catch your breath. The
Odyssey
thrummed powerfully under his body as they moved to put themselves in the path of the threat that was approaching.

“Captain, the bandits are maneuvering fast. I’ll need the main engine thrust to keep the first between us and the second.”

“Understood. Hold for my command,” Weston replied.

“Aye, sir. Holding,” Daniels responded instantly.

“Mr. Waters, do you have a firing solution?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You may engage the enemy. Four-pulse burst, if you please.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Four pulse, firing…now.”

And that wouldn’t be the last time, Weston knew.

A lot of the crew was in love with the massively energy-intensive application of antimatter production known among the NAC System Defense Agency as “pulse torpedoes.” How could you not admire something that was at once a marvel and a monster? At least, that’s the way Greene saw it. Others had their own point of view because it was easily the greediest of energy-using systems aboard already energy-poor spacecraft. The magnetically bundled pebbles of anti-hydrogen had originally been intended for power production and thrust on board ships intended to be used for in-system transport. Preproduction test prototypes of the reactors and thrust mechanisms in question had literally gone up in smoke, though precious little of it, when the reactors lost positive control of the mix rate and self-annihilated.

With the antimatter beam drive declared a failure, but the weapon potential proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, the military moved in quickly and swept up the design specs and lead researchers in a flurry of prewar paranoia, and the concept vanished from the public view for almost twenty years.

In fact, it still hadn’t reemerged into the general view of the public when Capt. Eric Weston was given command of the first interstellar drive vessel (IDV) eighteen years after the spectacular failure of one of the
Odyssey
’s first true progenitors. The AM beam drive had been replaced with a more conventional chemical thrust system that burned hydrogen and oxygen to achieve thrust and used a nuclear fission pile as the primary source of power, but deep inside the
Odyssey
, there were still traces of the old experiments that brought her ancestors to such a black end.

The tokamak particle accelerators that were integral to the ship’s smooth running could also generate minute quantities of antimatter, which were used in several shipboard systems, including the counter-mass system (though only as a byproduct of the anti-mass field itself), power generation, and of course, the forward pulse torpedo launchers.

Each tube launcher charged power from the capacitors surrounding it and funneled in sufficient amounts of anti-hydrogen to ensure a military-grade explosive reaction, then carefully tied those particulate pieces of energy together with a powerful electromagnetic field.

Once loaded and charged, every moment that passed with those weapons sitting in the tubes was another moment off the lives of the technicians monitoring the fields and praying that the captain would finally give the order to fire the hellish little specs of death, even if they would have to turn around and recharge the tubes immediately after.

So when the command for a four-torpedo burst finally came down, a sigh of semirelief and semidisappointment sounded in the fire control room as the men and women manning the systems let four devils out of their pentagrams.

“Burst away, Captain,” Waters said a moment later, and Weston felt an unseemly emotion—satisfaction.

He wasn’t the sort to take much of that in violence, his career nothwithstanding, but the enemy they’d found was one that Eric had little sympathy or empathy for. “Excellent, Mr. Waters. Daniels, you have the conn.”

“Aye, sir, I have the conn,” Daniels confirmed, tapping orders into his interface.

The ship began to rumble around them as he reversed thrust on one of the outriggers, twisting the big ship in space, then fired off the main engines at full burn. The
Odyssey
leapt forward on command, dashing off at a tangent from the enemy ships, looking to keep them guessing and to keep the farther enemy ship from getting a clear shot at the same time.

“Adjust all plates to match forward armor,” Eric ordered, noting that Daniels’s maneuvering was bringing them around and exposing other parts of the ship to potential fire.

“Aye, sir.” Waters nodded. “Adjusted.”

“Ms. Winger, update location and vectors of enemy ships every ten seconds, if you please.”

“Aye, sir.” Michelle nodded, punching in a command. “Send to your display?”

“Yes, please.” Eric nodded. “Thank you.”

The new information hit his display only seconds later, showing updates on the enemy, both from the last-confirmed
numbers, which were just under two minutes out of date, and the updated projections based on extrapolation.

Trying to second-guess alien minds when the information he had was almost two minutes out of date and the ships in question were all moving the better side of a third of light-speed was an interesting intellectual exercise, to say the least. That didn’t mean that Eric felt he was any good at it as he frowned at the numbers and tried to make sense of the enemy’s actions.

They had to know that the system they were invading was better defended than the last time, which made the situation all the more confusing. Sending two, or four, ships in alone was suicide. Yet the active tachyon blast that had “outed” the
Odyssey
’s position had also brought back a nice echo from the rest of the system, and there didn’t seem to be any others in hiding out there.

So, the question he had to ask was, were they incredibly clever and planning something he hadn’t forseen, or were they incredibly stupid?

Eric suspected that even if it wasn’t the former, however, the latter was unlikely to the extreme.

“Pulse torpedoes will contact projected enemy positions in…twenty seconds.”

Eric nodded at Waters’s announcement. “Very good. Daniels, prepare to bring us around for another shot.”

“Aye, sir.”

PRIMINAE VESSEL HERALC
Ranquil System

▸“
ODYSSEY
IS CIRCLING.”

Kierna could see that, though he didn’t understand it any more than did his weapons officer. He didn’t say as much, of course, merely nodding sagely as he watched the numbers.

The
Odyssey
had swept out and away from the enemy, aborting their headlong charge, and had fired some sort of fast-moving projectiles into the Drasin ships. The energy readings from the projectiles were very low, as were the mass readings, so he wasn’t certain what good they would do, but the
Odyssey
did have a reputation, so he’d wait and see.