The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (62 page)

“With full CM, we’ve got maybe eight hours’ flight time in atmo,” Steph spoke up. “What kind of mission window are we looking at, here?”

“Unknown and open-ended,” Reed grimaced as he answered.

“We don’t have enough pilots to keep an effective CAP on this planet, even if the window were small,” Steph said, having expected an answer like that. “Engagement window against a single ballistic object entering atmo is going to be thirty seconds, maybe? There’s no way we can go from scramble to intercept in time, not even if we live in our cockpits.”

Steph and the remaining pilots of the Archangel fleet glanced at each other seriously for a moment, but Reed could see that was all it took. They’d willingly be living in their cockpits for the foreseeable future; it wasn’t like they hadn’t done it before.

“Can you arrange in-flight fueling?”

Reed was stumped for a moment, then just shrugged. “I’ll have Ithan Chans kick that up the line. We may be able to work something out.”

“We know that their orbiters have the precision needed,” Steph pushed, “and what they lack in experience, my team will make up. Get some orbiters into the air with H and O2 to spare, and we’ll be able to pull longer flights.”

“I’ll see what we can do,” Reed repeated his position. “Until I get word from the Priminae, I can’t promise anything.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What we will have is near total scanner saturation of space within two or three light-seconds of the planet,” Reed went on. “Planetary Defense is hoping that they’ll be able to beat the detection threshold of the drones with that kind of power behind them and at least give us a few minutes’ warning on inbound tracks. They’ll also be engaging from orbit, so hopefully they’ll be cutting down on anything that actually hits the atmosphere.”

“What about actual rocks and such? You know, legitimate shooting stars?” Cardsharp asked.

“Compared to Earth, space is pretty clean around here,” Reed answered. “They have a lot less space junk than we do, but what little there is should be easily detected by Planetary Defense and ruled out as a threat. I’ve advised them to slag anything they detect that doesn’t respond to an IFF challenge, but I don’t know if they’ll take it that seriously or not.”

“If my whole bloody planet were at risk, I think I’d be taking it pretty damned seriously.” Cardsharp grunted.

“No argument there, but that’s not our call,” Reed countered. “I’m going to be assigning men to support the local militia, who’ll be standing ready to scramble to any impact sites on a moment’s notice. You may be called upon for close
air support, so consider the mission needs carefully and talk it over with the ground crews.”

“Yes, sir,” Steph responded, already thinking about the load out he’d need on his birds. “UAVs?”

“Carnivores are already in the air,” Reed answered. “They’re armed and ready to engage ground targets, but they’re not designed to take out ballistic inbounds.”

The pilots all nodded. Traditionally, ballistic defenses were ground based. The Archangels were known to be reasonably effective at taking out ICBMs, if needed, but carnivore drones were primarily designed as downlooking support platforms. They only carried a limited number of munitions, and those were rarely of the air-to-air variety. They’d probably need them badly if any of the Drasin survived to kiss dirt, anyway.

“Our best ETA for the first ballistic drones is that they’ll hit upper atmo in twelve hours,” Reed said grimly. “Starting six hours from now, I want every man and woman sleeping at the controls of their equipment, just like my team and Brinks’s soldiers will be sleeping in their armor. Am I understood?”

“Sir!” The pilots snapped to attention as one, the word coming out forcefully and without a shred of uncertainty.

“Outstanding. You have six hours before you’re chained to your planes, pilots,” Reed informed them. “Get some chow, read a book, or get whatever pre-mission fumbling you lot do done. We’ll shortly be at war for the fate of this world, and while that may be old hat to some of you, it feels a mite important to me, so I don’t want to screw this up. Dismissed.”

The pilots nodded and broke up, most heading for the crews servicing their planes while Steph remained behind.

“Any idea how many we’re really dealing with here?” he asked softly.

Reed shook his head. “Unfortunately, no.”

“Well, damn.”

“Yeah, that about covers it, Commander.”

“We don’t have enough manpower to properly cover this world, Colonel,” Steph said again. “You know that, right?”

“I am aware, yes.”

“Have you informed the Primmies?”

Reed scowled at Steph. “Don’t use that word. Call them Priminae or nothing at all. You get into that habit and it’ll spread faster.”

“Right, sorry.” Steph shrugged, uncaring. “You did tell them, though, right?”

“Yes, I did. They’re going to put some of their own craft into the air, jury-rigged with versions of their ‘gravity impeller’ cannons.”

“Oh, fuck me.” Steph grimaced, rubbing his face. “Amateur flyers with weapons of mass destruction.”

“I’m not sure that I’d qualify them quite that high, but essentially, yes,” Reed said dryly.

“I saw what those things did in practice,” Steph countered. “And those were handheld!”

“The vehicle-mounted versions won’t be significantly more powerful, apparently,” Reed said. “Size and weight are big concerns, so they optimized the handheld ones pretty well.”

Steph snorted. “Optimized, huh? Not sure that’s what I’d call it.”

“Just stay out of their crosshairs, OK? We’ve already lost too many of you.” Reed sighed tiredly. It had been a long week and wasn’t shaping up to be any better in the foreseeable future. He could ill afford to lose anyone, let alone some of the most irreplaceable men and women in the NAC armed forces. He needed them badly, but couldn’t afford to spend them. It was not a good situation to be in, and that was stating things mildly to the extreme.

“Understood, sir.” Steph nodded in agreement.

For him, Reed supposed that it was simpler; he’d already lost men and women to this alien sector of space. He didn’t begrudge the Priminae the sacrifice his people had been called on to make, but that didn’t mean he felt good about it, either. He and his were combat flyers, the sort of people who had a taste of something they could only get while doing things normal people just didn’t understand. Reed suspected that they considered the risk of dying out here to be acceptable if it let them do what they were trained to do.

All the fun, none of the cleanup
, he thought grimly, smiling at his own dark thoughts. At least out there they weren’t tearing the living hell out of Earth.

There were, however, only so many of them left. The Archangels were artifacts of a war no one wanted to remember at the moment back home. Since the discovery of the Priminae and the Drasin, there was some talk of spooling up recruiting again, but it was just talk so far. Until that happened, the men and women currently standing here on the alien world whose air he was breathing…Well, they were the last of the kind.

And they are being picked off one at a time out here.

In the end, attrition was one enemy that not even the famed Archangel fleet could beat.

Steph nodded to the colonel one more time, stepping back from the table. “I’m going to check on my plane and the others.”

“You do that, Commander,” Reed said, glancing up as Steph started to walk away. “Commander?”

“Sir?” Steph glanced back.

“Good luck.”

“Sir.” He nodded, then turned his back to the table and headed for where his plane was parked downfield.

NACS ODYSSEY, UNCHARTED DYSON CONSTRUCT

▸ERIC WESTON STOOD along one wall of what had been their primary cartography lab until just recently, watching the experts performing analysis. As the central hub for basically all stellar mapping for the ship, the large room was the nexus for every data trunk line to the shipboard scanners and scopes. Literally every piece of information scanned by the
Odyssey
ran through this one room to be processed and cataloged.

Since the ship’s entry into the Dyson construct, however, the room had been subject to a hostile takeover by Engineering. Generally speaking, engineering officers didn’t have a lot of interest in most of the data brought in through the sensors—not the raw data, at least. Certainly, none of them were either ignorant of astronomy, nor were they truly disinterested, but by and large, they were more than willing to wait for the finished product of the astronomers’ work.

Not today, apparently.

Arriving in Engineering earlier had been like walking into a ghost town. Oh, the ship was still fully staffed, all on-duty people were where they had to be, but during times like
this, Eric was used to seeing as much as twice the normal shift working the stations below decks. He’d had to actually hunt someone down this time to learn where everyone had gone.

He’d been shocked to arrive at the cartography lab only to find that the room was literally standing room only, and not a lot of that. Still, he’d shuffled into a place where he could see what the big draw was and found that most of Engineering was poring over the raw data from the scopes showing the interior of the swarm.

Not a real surprise—most of the ship was doing the same, to be frank.

The difference here was that all the data on the central display holograph was from real-time computer-generated feeds that showed the layering as the scopes continued to take more and more exposures to improve the resolution of the overall imagery.

“It can’t be purely ballistic,” one woman was arguing. “The plates must be tractored together somehow to keep them from eventually drifting out of their orbit.”

“Of course it’s not purely ballistic,” a man countered sarcastically. “I’m merely saying that any species with this level of accomplishment is surely beyond any of our magnetic tractor technology. Each slab must have artificial gravity, and so they likely have some form of gravity drive as well.”

“That could explain the swarm’s precision,” another conceded, “but that does bring up an interesting hypothesis.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, if they have gravity warp drives on each plate…Does that mean that the swarms are capable of being moved from one star to another?” he asked. “Certainly, with the technology we now suspect they have, they could easily create an
Alcubierre drive, which wouldn’t be constrained by any notion of size and mass we’d be limited by.”

That shut the room up in a hurry, and Eric didn’t blame any of them for their shock. The very concept of a construct this huge being…
mobile
…Well, it shook him deep down just as badly. The
Odyssey
used a conventional chemical rocket drive system, something completely useless for interstellar travel and very nearly worthless for even interplanetary travel, if not for the invention of the CM technology.

Eric was knowledgeable enough to recognize the term Alcubierre drive, however, and knew that they were talking about a completely different beast. The Alcubierre drive, otherwise known as a warp drive, was based on the manipulation of gravity to warp space around a ship. In effect, it created a never-ending “hill” for the ship to glide down, constantly picking up speed until the drive was stopped or reversed. With such a system, it was conceivable to move plates like those that made up the Dyson swarm, much to his growing horror.

“Let’s not buy trouble before we have to,” the first woman, a lieutenant commander from Engineering named Naomi Sears, said with one hand up in a “stop” gesture. “We haven’t detected nearly enough matter inside, or outside, the swarm to indicate that the swarm is
not
native to this system. They must have built it on-site, using the planets and material already here.”

“Unless that’s the reason for the swarm,” a younger lieutenant spoke up, frowning. “What if it’s a mobile scrap yard, so to speak? Move into a system, then use the system’s own star to power factories that convert local materials into warships, or whatever.”

“Unlikely.” Sears shook her head. “If that were the case, I believe that we would have seen a great many more of the Drasin cruisers already.”