The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (45 page)

“Great. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” Cade muttered after he’d gotten himself under control, shaking the paint can slightly to hear the rattle.

He pushed off the wall and looked back to the large pane of transparent aluminum that separated him from the others in the control room and saw that they were all pointing at
the large grate that covered the magnetic containment tubes directly below and above his position.

“What the hell?” He frowned, noting a trace of color on the grates.

It took him a moment to catch on, and when he did, he had to laugh.

Supplementing the magnetic containment.

Right.

Cade Harlan shook up the can and traced over the lines he saw below him, brightening them up, and let the quick-dry paint do its job. When he was done, he kicked off and sailed back to the door.

It opened this time, letting him pass through into the control room, where the others were laughing and Petty Officer Tate took the can from him and clapped him on the back. “Nice job, Crewman. Now we’ll be safe.”

Harlan laughed. “Where the hell did that tradition come from, anyway, PO?”

Tate shrugged. “Seemed obvious to us, kid. Those torps are the fucking stuff of hell itself. We all feel better if we’ve got something a bit more powerful than magnetic containment holding them in place.”

Harlan just shook his head, but he was grinning as the mood in the control room buoyed him up. Suddenly, things didn’t seem so tense anymore, so he supposed that it must have worked, after all.

Back in the sealed tube room, the quick-drying paint finished its job and brightly marked a large circle with a star enclosed.

After all, what better to hold back the demons of hell than a pentagram?

PRIMINAE VESSEL VULK

▸“THE
ODYSSEY
HAS altered course, Captain.”

Johan looked up, a frown crossing his features. Lately, it seemed that the only expression that did cross his features was a frown.

“Show me,” he ordered.

The new line traced across the projection then, showing the new course and its intersection with the Drasin line. Only, it didn’t intersect with where the Drasin were going to be; it intersected with where they had already been.

“Are you certain?” Johan asked on reflex, wishing he’d bit it back.

“Yes, sir.”

He puzzled at the line, then looked to the fuzzy patch that indicated the current Drasin position and their course.

Finally, Johan Maran templed his fingers. “What is going on? Am I missing something? Or is Captain Weston?”

In the end, he didn’t see anything he could do differently, however, and continued with his current plans as they stood. The
Odyssey
could take care of herself, and while he would
have appreciated their added firepower, he didn’t think he would need it.

Two Drasin cruisers against one Lympa’an Class warship should be a workable battle.

“Ignore them,” he said after a moment. “Stay on course and confirm the status of all our laser crystals.”

“Yes, Captain.”

ARCHANGEL SQUADRON

▸“EQUALIZE CM FIELDS at 20 percent power,” Stephanos ordered, tapping in an adjustment to his controls.

The fleet called back acknowledgments, setting their counter-mass fields to an energy-conservation setting, then feeding the excess power from their reactors into charging the superconducting capacitors that would be used when they entered into combat maneuvering.

The enemy fighters were ahead of them, about five light-seconds closer to the elliptic plane than they were, and either unaware of the Archangel’s launch or uncaring of it. Either way, Stephanos was going to make certain that they understood the gravity of their error.

For all of the two seconds they had to consider it.

The three staggered diamond formations of the squadron had drifted a few kilometers apart as they raced down along the course they’d launched on, vectored to intercept the Drasin at the end of an acceleration curve, and on board each fighter, the pilot was running through the last pre-combat checklist.

Each of them carried ten hypervelocity missiles, each massing one-quarter ton apiece, and the CM systems on each of those had to be charged and confirmed before they could be launched. Much the same way the four linked lasers in the Archangel’s wings had to be primed, their tubes “pre-exited” so that they’d fire on command when needed.

Stephanos didn’t expect to need the lasers much; they hadn’t proved exceedingly valuable in battle against the Drasin before. The small fighters simply weren’t capable of carrying the expensive and bulky heterodyne systems that allowed the
Odyssey
to adapt its laser fire to specific armor reflection frequencies.

The only system on board that didn’t need some per-combat preparation was the forward 80mm. The electromagnetic accelerators were pretty much an on-command system and would fire in almost any environment.

“Three minutes,” Stephanos announced as the clock ticked on by. “Wing Leaders, check in with final numbers.”

PRIMINAE VESSEL VULK

▸“FIGHTERS.”

The single word was quiet and uttered with little emotion, yet managed to convey a sense of curiosity, just the same. The light-speed sensors had just detected the fighter group as it launched from the
Odyssey
, and they were presumably en route to engage the Drasin force.

Why fighters?

Johan Maran was beginning to feel like he needed a diagram to understand the captain of the
Odyssey
. Captain Weston had met the enemy with fighters before, during the Battle of Ranquil, but he had a reason to leave his fighters to do battle then. He had to slip between the other ship and the planet, otherwise the Drasin would have destroyed Ranquil.

So what was he doing now?

The only thing in the direction he was going was…

“Pulse the Drasin formation again!” Johan snapped. “I want a confirmation on the cruisers’ location.”

ARCHANGEL SQUADRON

▸“ARCHANGEL LEAD, GOING Fox Actual,” Stephanos announced, watching the enhanced graphics of his helmet show him the Drasin ships.

With the naked eye, there was nothing to see out there. The ships were dark enough to be blots against the black of space, and their drives were pouring radiation in the other direction. Still, they weren’t looking to hide themselves particularly well, so they gave off waste radiation in the form of heat, some gamma bursts, and even the occasional flashes of visible light for the Archangel’s sensor arrays to pick up, then compile into a very pretty image that was filled in from archive images of the enemy fighters.