The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (65 page)

“Nice tech,” he said, glancing over at Seran. “Anything I need to know about setting it before I take that first step?”

She glanced at him, checking his harness, and twisted a dial before slapping him firmly on the chest where the rig crossed. “You’re ready now, Mister Chief.”

He shot her a glare, which was promptly ignored, and shouldered his own weapon as he took a tentative step over the side. There was a brief moment of disorientation, almost entirely from the shift in visual perspective, and then he was standing on the side of the wall and feeling altogether too relaxed about it.

Feels just like walking normally
, he thought as he followed the lead element down, Seran stepping into place beside him. “This is completely weird.”

“What is?”

“Walking down the side of a wall.”

“It’s simply an extension of gravity-control technology, Mister Chief.”

“Look, lady,” he growled, “if you can’t call me Master Chief, then just Chief will be fine. Hell, call me Nate or Wilson, or any damn thing but Mister Chief.”

“I suppose I can do one of those. I do have a question, however,” Seran said quietly as they marched down the wall.

“What’s that?”

“What
is
a master chief, anyway?” she asked, sounding genuinely confused.

“Between you, me, and the monster we’re hunting?” He shrugged. “A master chief is the dumbest man in whatever squad he’s part of.”

“Really?”

“Lady,” Wilson said patiently, “we’re walking down the side of a crater impact hole, hunting alien monsters with prototype weapons.”

“Yes, but we are all doing that, no?”

“We’re all doing that, yes,” he admitted, “but I’m the only one here stupid enough to do it without knowing anything at all about the gear keeping me from falling to my death.”

“This is not what you call courage?”

“The difference between courage and stupidity is measured only by success and survival,” he answered. “So ask me again when we’re back topside.”

“You people from
Odyssey
are very strange,” she said, shaking her head.

Wilson shrugged. “We can discuss why we’re strange later. I think we’re coming up on our objective.”

Ahead of them, the smoke was beginning to thicken, clouding their vision and likely filling the air with noxious, if not outright poisonous, fumes. Luckily, they were all in
environmental gear of one type or another, letting them ignore the majority of those effects. The glow and heat shimmer, however, spoke of more serious problems ahead, and those had attracted his attention solidly.

The shaft they were in was only a few dozen meters across and nearly vertical on all sides. They’d descended probably thirty meters, with the heat increasing as they went. Wilson wasn’t certain they were going to be able to get much closer, but that wasn’t the biggest problem he was seeing.

“Am I the only one, or are you guys seeing things moving down there?”

PRIMINAE SYSTEM COMMAND

▸“MORE REPORTS COMING in from the ground teams, Commander.”

Nero nodded, calling up the reports for himself. Most of the teams had already reported in from the crash sites, all with pretty much the same basic information. Extremely deep impact craters, compared to their diameter, which indicated that the enemy had actually impacted harder than terminal velocity would indicate. Best guess so far was that they hadn’t been drone soldiers, exactly, but some sort of delivery vehicle designed to penetrate deep into the ground when they struck.

If that were the case, mission successful for the Drasin.

Phase one of the mission, at least
, Nero thought darkly, knowing that he already had men and women moving into the danger zones to attempt to put an end to the enemy mission before phase two got underway.

“We have eight teams investigating impact sites already, and more are likely to get through the orbital and high atmospheric defenses,” the ithan reminded him. “We’re simply not prepared to deal with this sort of assault.”

“I would have thought that the defense net would protect well against ballistic objects,” Nero grumbled.

“It does. It just doesn’t deal well with stealthed objects, sir.”

“We’ll need to speak with someone about improving that,” Nero muttered. “Nature may not attempt to hide its attempts to kill us, but our enemies do.”

The ithan didn’t respond, probably wisely given his boss’s current mood.

Nero took another look at the screens, then turned around and headed up to the top command level, where Rael was trying to coordinate the entire mess they were currently mired in. Mostly, that just amounted to watching helplessly while their teams went about their jobs, but Nero supposed it was the thought that mattered.

As long as the lack of action doesn’t get us all killed, that is.

“Rael,” he spoke when the admiral paused for a moment.

“What is it, Nero?”

“Operations on the ground are proceeding as expected,” he reported. “The objects we believed to be soldier drones apparently…were something else.”

Rael Tanner looked at him sharply. “What?”

“Uncertain. Drones would not have struck the surface as hard and fast as they did, however,” Nero said. “They appeared to have been deep-penetration devices, similar to the Terrans’ weapons of that nature.”

“Not possible.” Rael shook his head. “We have confirmed imagery of them before entry—they match the profile of a soldier drone.”

“Then, Rael, the solider drones have more capabilities than we thought.”

“This is not something I need to hear right now. I’m dealing with a lot already, Nero.” As if it were Nero’s fault.

“On the contrary, Admiral,” Nero said with a twist of his lips, “this is
precisely
the news you need to be dealing with right now. It just isn’t the news you
wanted
to be dealing with.”

Rael Tanner groaned, but Nero knew his old friend agreed. Just trying to ignore what was happening wouldn’t help anyone.

“Fine,” Tanner said. “I’ll see what I can learn and put some people on it. Go see to your ground teams.”

“Yes, Admiral.” As if he weren’t already doing just that. Sometimes Nero thought Tanner underestimated him.

TRAINING BASE, SITUATION ROOM

▸COLONEL REED GLARED at the telemetry from the suits he had in the field, not liking what he was seeing one whit. The master chief was at the bottom of a viper pit, staring at the vipers, and the best Reed could get off the telemetry was some obscure motion readings. Thermal was off the charts, video was obscured by mist and heat shimmer, and most of the rest were clearly being jammed. Whether that was intentional or accidental was just another one of the things he needed to know and didn’t.

The communications channel was one of the few systems in the suits’ telemetry suite that wasn’t being at least somewhat disrupted by the heat, rock, radiation, and other general elements in play at the impact site. Not really a surprise, given that they were digital systems that were designed to retransmit any missing information thousands of times per second if need be until a perfect signal and handshake response.

He queued in a message, sending it to the chief’s system but not directly to the chief, because he didn’t want to distract the man.

“Chief, when you get a moment, check your environment and try to get some drones down there. Suit telemetry is broken up. We’re not getting anything useful here.”

The message would wait in the armor’s queue until Wilson had a chance to access it, with only a small icon on the HUD to let him know it was there. Reed wanted better intel, but he’d prefer getting his best commo man back in one piece, so he wasn’t in a hurry to distract him.

A flick gesture pushed the chief’s file to one side as Reed called up the Archangels’ telemetry files in its place.

The special air superiority team was tearing across the skies over Ranquil, moving faster than most of Reed’s systems could track. In teams of two, composed of a lead element and a wingman, the Archangels were tearing the ever-living hell out of anything that moved through the upper atmosphere. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough of them, and while the Ranquil shuttles were trying, the local lasers were proving ineffective against the Drasin infiltrators.

I suppose that’s what I should call them
, Reed mused as he gestured the Archangel data aside.
They’re certainly not your average grunt soldiers, whatever else they may be.

He was growing more and more concerned about the ineffectiveness of his allies’ weaponry, however. He’d read the reports, but they’d been abstract until now, and honestly, Reed had questioned Eric Weston’s conclusions.

Now, however, he wasn’t so certain. The fact that they appeared perfectly adapted to their chosen mission might just be an example of very good intel and planning, but he’d never seen intel so good in his military career. Someone, something,
always
screwed up.

This time, however, they seemed perfectly adapted for a conflict with the Priminae people. Laser resistant, specifically
along the frequencies used by the Priminae, both in space and in the dirt. In a power-for-power slugging match it seemed almost even with the new warships the Priminae had fielded, but even then, the Drasin had counter moves to almost everything they could put into play.

Normally, if he were honest, Reed would just shrug it off as bad luck and an example of how big space really was. Statistically, it was incredibly unlikely to find another civilization in space that was at a comparable technical evolution to your own. It was just a fact in his mind that, on average, even twenty years of technical development more on one side or the other was likely to be a game changer, and in space, twenty
thousand
years was far,
far
more likely.

So, by that reasoning, it was not only possible but highly likely to find that one civilization had an overwhelming advantage over another.

Which made sense, right up until you threw the
Odyssey
into the mix.

How it was that the
Odyssey
, which came from a much lesser technical power base, could inflict the level of damage it had against the Drasin…Well, that was a really interesting and probably vitally important question. There was really only one answer that Reed could come up with, and that was the Drasin were tailor-made—literally—to engage the Priminae, and when faced with technology and weapons that, while less advanced, came from a very different branch of the research tree…Well, they showed the weakness inherent in specializing.