The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (60 page)

Cirrus grimaced. “That isn’t out of the question, from the last word I heard. OK, Ithan, you’re with me.”

“Me?” Miran squeaked. “For what?”

“Come on, quietly,” he hissed, “I want you to see if you can tell what it’s doing.”

“Shouldn’t we just…you know, stop it?” she asked, more than a little fearfully.

“With these?” he asked dryly, holding up his milosec laser. “I’ve heard of how well they work against drones. If we must, we will, but I’m hoping for another way.”

“And you want me to give it to you?” she asked, disbelieving.

“Do you see anyone else standing by my side?”

“But…Coranth, I don’t know…”

“Listen to me, Ithan,” he told her, deadly serious, “I’ve studied the conflict recordings from the Systema battle. If we run around the corner with lasers flaring, the most we’ll likely do is annoy it. Do you understand me?”

She swallowed. “Yes, Coranth.”

“So, quietly,” he said, “look around the corner and try and determine what it’s doing. Think about everything there, and tell me if there’s anything we can use to improve the odds in our favor.”

“Yes, Coranth.”

He nodded, stepping aside for her to edge closer to the corner. When she leaned a little too far and almost fell into the open, he caught her by her uniform and held her tightly, but otherwise left her hanging there where she could watch the Drasin in action while he tactfully ignored the near-convulsing shivers that were racking her body.

Seconds passed, turning into minutes. Then she gasped softly and grabbed his arm to pull herself back.

“We have to stop them!” she hissed.

“What? I thought you said that we have alternate circuits if they cut these?”

“We do, but that…that…” She grimaced. “The Drasin soldier is not cutting the circuits. It’s interfacing with them.”

His breath hissed through his teeth. “You think it can break our security?”

“Impossible. It’s a beast,” the crewman from earlier growled.

“Beasts don’t interface with computer systems,” Ithan Miran said. “This is something beyond my experience, Coranth. If it can interface, we have to assume that it at least believes it can break our security.”

Cirrus cringed, but couldn’t help but agree. “Right. I’ll call the bridge and let them know. Request more men and weapons as well.”

He opened a commlink to the command center. He realized his hands were shaking and hoped the others hadn’t noticed.

Capt. Syrenne Tianne scowled at her command displays, willing them to change, while knowing damned well they wouldn’t. The latest information explained why the tractor had accelerated toward Ranquil, to be sure, but it left her with a bad situation that was growing worse.

Like most of those who were charged with planning the defense of the colonies, she had studied the Battle of Systema and knew that the weapons she had on board were not likely to do anything against the invaders. The new gravity impeller design hadn’t been issued to ships for various reasons, most notably that they were still testing the lethally powerful systems, and they weren’t considered safe for use within the hulls of even large warships.

She called up the file on the impeller, just the same, checking the device specifications carefully before nodding in satisfaction and opening the comm.

“Engineering, here,” the voice on the other side spoke up instantly.

“I’m sending fabrication data to your account. I want these items manufactured and distributed to the security teams as quickly as possible.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Tianne closed the channel, considering the situation. The shipboard fabrication systems were fast, but the kind of schedule they were on would strain even those. It would take an hour or more to get the first units out of the fabs, and the need to construct carbon crystalline munitions would slow things down further.

In the meantime, she needed a way to buy time while the
Cerekus
continued its mission.

A flick of her finger opened another comm channel.

“Security officers here,” came the response.

“Send a demolitions team to Deck Nine, Sector Ten. Have them meet with Coranth Cirrus and place themselves under his command.”

“Yes, Captain.”

She closed the channel, knowing that, before this was over, the
Cerekus
was going to need yet another period in the Forge. There was something so very wrong with ordering the use of explosives within your own vessel, however, and it felt like a cold weight settling into the pit of her stomach.

I hope we don’t wind up blowing the ship out from under our feet just to spite the Drasin.

BRIDGE, NACS ODYSSEY, UNCHARTED DYSON CONSTRUCT

▸“WE’RE PENETRATING THE second swarm.”

The words were entirely unneeded in reality, but Eric knew they had to be said for the record. Like most of the crew, however, he was too busy staring in shocked awe at their screens to listen to the lieutenant’s statement. Still, “penetrating the second swarm” wasn’t something he’d ever expected to hear on the bridge.

As the
Odyssey
approached the second orbital swarm within the Dyson Cloud, the ship was able to detect more and more light through the cracks that existed between the plates that made up the loose shells. Once they penetrated the inner swarm, it was like moving from night to day. The brightness beyond made Eric squirm in his seat. The cold comfort the black of space provided was stripped away, and he felt exposed to the eyes of the universe.

Aside from directly aft, every single camera and scope on the
Odyssey
was returning a brilliant image of the inside of the Dyson construct. The closest areas had already been scoped carefully, but for the most part, all they could see was
what appeared to be solar collectors of some type or another. Endless kilometers of solar collectors, as far as their best scopes could see.

God. What the hell are they doing with all the power
?

“We’ve cleared the orbital plane of the swarm.”

Eric admired Michelle’s calm tone. The young woman was keeping the updates coming with a by-the-book assuredness that was probably helping others maintain calm almost as much as the sheer awe of what they were seeing rendered them frozen in place.

“Are we detecting anything within the inner orbits?” he asked softly.

“Compiling scope data now, sir,” she replied. “There are some shadows on the initial feeds that look suspicious, but I’ll need to layer images to get better resolution.”

He nodded, understanding the difficulties she was working under and was willing to wait. Without the active scanners, they were limited to the passive scopes, which actually wasn’t a deficit in signal
quality
due to the nature of the devices, but the scopes were slower as they were limited by the size that could be mounted on a ship like the
Odyssey
. Scanners were active systems, able to gather detailed data very quickly with relatively small receivers on the ship. The scopes, however, were very large and bulky systems that worked entirely passively. They offered the highest-resolution imagery possible, but took a while to build that data with repeated exposures over time.

With the
Odyssey
running practically every computer dedicated to the scopes, they were building very detailed imagery of the interior of the swarm, but there was no defeating physics in this aspect of the universe. Time was required to do the
job, and there simply wasn’t anything he could do about it but wait.

“Lieutenant Daniels, double-check ETA to transit,” he spoke softly, his eyes still glued to the external feeds.

Daniels had to shake himself from his own staring, checking his calculations based on the now confirmed data they had concerning the location of the system’s star. “Three days, Captain.”

Three days.

Three days while they were a sitting duck in the center of what had to be the single-largest population Eric had ever heard of.
Potentially, at least.

It was true. They didn’t have any confirmed sighting of the Drasin to this point, but there was no way something on this scale got built without an absolutely staggering number of hands, or mandibles, on hand to do the work. Eric checked the numbers himself, now that they had enough data points to get a sense of the scale.

Outer swarm is one-point-three astronomical units in diameter, inner swarm is “only” point-seven AU across. This is insanity. How could anyone build something like this in less than a hundred years?

The scale of the construction was almost too large for him to wrap his head around, would
be
beyond his ability to do so if Eric wasn’t aware of the cost of constructing the
Odyssey
. There were nations on Earth who couldn’t have afforded simply shipping the materials into orbit to build a ship like the
Odyssey
, not even if they dedicated their entire GDP to the project. The scale of the construct they were now
flying
the
Odyssey through
was so far beyond that Eric wondered if the NAC could afford to even consider planning something like this.

It has to be automated. Self-assembled, maybe.

That still left him with the question of what they were using all the power for. The Drasin had struck him as a strange, bizarre species ever since the end of his last mission. They reminded him more of a virus, a biological weapon, than a real, thinking species. He’d opined to the admiral that no thinking species would select for destruction the way the Drasin had, reproducing until they destroyed the very planet they existed on, and he still believed that.

The question here was, what kind of bioweapon would build something so complex and awe-inspiring as this Dyson Cloud they were currently sailing
through
?

There just seemed to be a discrepancy between what he had seen in the destroyed Priminae systems and what he was seeing here.

We’re going to need to check on the magnitude of the stars they assaulted, see if they’re building more of these constructs.

He hadn’t wanted to risk sending any other manned missions into those systems; the threat of garnering more attention from the Drasin had previously overruled any information they might have won from the expedition. Now, however, he wasn’t so certain.

If they can, and are, building things like this so close to Earth…We need to learn why, and what the hell they use them for.

He stood up. “Command, you have the bridge.”

“Aye, sir. I have the bridge,” Roberts replied.

Eric nodded and headed off the bridge, deciding to do a little deeper digging and consulting with a few of the
Odyssey
’s experts. There had to be some advantage to having a ship filled with some of the best minds the Confederacy could scrounge up, after all.

CEREKUS, RANQUIL SYSTEM