The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (74 page)

“Roger that.”

One problem with powered armor and suits in general was the fact that you really couldn’t do simple things like scratch an itch or wipe away sweat. Right at that moment, there was nothing Crowley wanted to do more than wipe the sweat from his face. It was the one part of his body that wasn’t covered in a wicking material that both pulled moisture away from his skin and gave him a little friction to scratch against.

Unfortunately, the face had to be left clear so he could access and control all the HUD-based systems, so all he could do was turn down the temperature and have some air blown through to clear the fog.

That done, Crowley accessed the overhead intel from the drones. He spotted the closest section of heavy resistance and tagged it for immediate response.

“Gamma Team, Gamma Actual. Friendly fire inbound.”

He waited a beat for his team to answer in the affirmative, then fired his thrusters as he jumped straight up. His armor had the power to kick itself twenty meters into the air in a jump; with thruster power and a mild CM hit, he could do a lot better than that. His leap arched just under forty meters, clearing the debris with a high enough angle to come down right in the center of the hostile grouping.

Men threw themselves down as he roared in, landing in a crouch to absorb the impact, and extended his weapons out in opposite directions. The rotary cannon spun up quickly, then began roaring in thunderous counterpoint to the near-silent operation of the laser firing from the other side.

He swiveled, turning in full circles as his armor computer tagged the drones and took over the firing sequence for him. Gapping the fire so it would hit the enemy while simultaneously
not
hitting his teammates was a problem beyond human reflexes at the speed the engagement was progressing. IFF fire control, however, was capable of making decisions in literal nanoseconds, so while Crowley maintained control over the absolute fire/hold decision, he passed the timing of the decision over to the computer.

The roar of the cannon never even stuttered audibly, his pass moving so fast that the deliberate breaks in fire were so quick that they couldn’t be noted by human hearing alone. Three full circles later, the area around him was motionless, and Crowley too slowed to a stop.

“Everyone all right?” he asked across the team channel.

Men slowly stirred, looking up to make sure that there weren’t any more bullets or beams flying overhead.

“LT,” one of them muttered as he climbed to his head, “most people don’t consider
themselves
to be incoming
artillery
!”

“Was I wrong?” Crowley grinned.

“I know I’m never going to look at that hunk of junk the same way again.”

Crowley walked over to the man, literally towering over the normal-powered armor the corporal was wearing, and looked down at him. “If you want, me and this ‘hunk of junk’ can just sit the fight out from here on through.”

“Uh…No, sir, that won’t be necessary. It’s a nice shiny hunk of junk and all,” the corporal offered, probably grinning like a loon under the helm.

Crowley rolled his eyes. “Right. All right, on your feet, boys. Work isn’t done yet.”

The squad got to their feet and assembled behind Crowley and the EXO-12 as he looked up the next segment of hot spots showing on the overhead map of the area.

“Cleanup on aisle three, let’s move out.”

The entity known to the Priminae as “Central” wondered briefly if what it was experiencing would qualify as pain. The Drasin were carving out chunks of the earth at various points around the city of Mons Systema, destroying whatever they touched and somehow even managing to disrupt the local electromagnetic field. The effect was something the entity had only previously experienced when dealing with the Drasin attack thwarted previously by the Terran forces.

How can they be doing this?
The entity had no idea. It had never encountered anything that could apparently destroy the resonance of the planetary magnetic field in the way these
things
did.

The only thing the ancient being could be certain of, the one thing that it
knew
, was that they had to be
stopped
.

While this time his own people were reacting with more effectiveness and power, he recognized that, once more, it would not be them who decided the outcome of this battle.

This must not continue. The Priminae must stand on their own.
Central was firm on that decision.
There are no consequences worse than extinction.

Bermont was a few hundred meters from where Crowley was forming up with his team, ducking under a burst of plasma that was clearly aimed to take his head off. They had been moving through a clockwise sweep of the sector when the Drasin swarmed up out of the ground, almost overrunning their position before they could react.

The split second of forewarning provided by their helmets’ thermal response and the overwatch from the drones was just enough to allow them to jump back by the numbers and take cover. They returned fire from cover, hunkering down behind the debris, bullets, and plasma blasts crossing wildly between the two groups.

“Grenade!” Bermont called out, palming a cylinder from his gear.

He flung the weapon into the open zone, arming it in the air from his suit HUD. It exploded three feet from the ground, in the center of the target group. The shock wave from the explosive was easily visible in the squad’s HUD, shattering the Drasin and slamming their remains into the debris along the sides.

“Move out!”

They jumped the cover, advancing with weapons firing on the few remaining drone soldiers. A plasma burst exploded past Bermont, slapping one of his men down. He flinched, but didn’t turn to look until they’d finished off the threat.

“Man down!” he called, turning back then.

The plasma had vaporized the armor plate when it struck, the explosive force enough to throw the man back several feet, but he seemed intact.

“I’m alive,” the man groaned, rolling over.

Bermont forced him back, checking the damage. “Inner trauma plate is intact. You got lucky.”

“Lucky? Hell, I feel like I just got hit by a truck.”

“Yeah, that plasma may not weigh anything, but it sure packs a nice punch when it reacts with your armor, huh?” Bermont said with forced cheer as he noted that the man’s armor was basically shot to hell, computer response was patchy, and if the lack of power hadn’t automatically activated the armor’s passive external speakers, he wouldn’t even be able to talk with him.

“Yeah.”

“OK, you’re done for the day, Jeff,” Bermont said, signaling a medevac drone.

“I can still move!” The man, Jeff Styles, started to get up again.

“Yeah, but you can’t keep up. You’re done,” Bermont said, patting the guy on the shoulder. “Grab some chow when you get back to base. If we don’t get things under control here, you’ll have enough work soon enough, anyway.”

The medevac drone dropped into their midst, so Bermont quickly grabbed the cable from the drone and slapped it onto the eyebolts in the downed man’s armor. The drone took up the slack as soon as it was cleared and pulled the man clear.

Bermont casually cradled his rifle as he remained crouched with his squad around him. “All right. We’ve got another sector cleared. We’ll move on to the next.”

“Where the hell are they all coming from, Boss? The damned thing only hit here a couple hours ago now!” one of the men complained.

“These things put bunnies to shame, boys. Give them just a few weeks at most and they’ll eat a planet out from under you,” Bermont reminded them. “Since they break down
entirely when killed and become completely inert, we haven’t been able to figure out how they do what they do, or how fast.”

He sighed. “Mil intel thinks that it’s some sort of nanotech, and if they’re right, then we could easily be looking at a geometric progression. One dozen now, five dozen in an hour, five hundred dozen in a day. We have to hammer them back now and keep hammering until the boss can get Savoy’s combat engineers over here to clear this chaff from our AO. Good to go?”

“Good to go!”

“All right, move out!”

They continued the clockwise patrol, circling toward the next group of hostile contacts on the overwatch map. Bermont knew he’d talked a good game, but also was aware that unless they got the chaff cleared away so that they could get into the impact zone, they’d have no shot at containing the problem before it became an irreversible threat. All they were doing at this point was pissing into the wind, and that wind was rapidly turning into a hurricane.

If we don’t get this crap cleared in a hurry, this windstorm is going to huff and puff our little house right down.

NACS ODYSSEY BRIDGE, UNCHARTED DYSON CONSTRUCT

▸ERIC GLARED AT the screens, wishing they’d show anything but what they were showing. He felt both better and worse after having some rest, since he was now awake, but then he found himself staring at
this
and his stomach felt like it had dropped down into his ankles.
Have I gotten us all killed?

“So that’s it, then,” he said finally.

“Yes, sir,” Roberts said quietly from his side. “We backtracked the orbits. They moved those plates after we slung around the sun. They’re tracking us, no doubt in my mind.”

“How?” Eric couldn’t understand it.

It wasn’t that he had faith in the cam-plate settings that hid them; it was that Eric
knew
that they were basically perfect camouflage for the
Odyssey
. Without active beams, which the
Odyssey
would certainly detect, there was practically no chance of her being detected at stellar ranges. At the very worst, the ship would appear as a miniscule black dot on the very best sensor arrays, and even then only if they passed in front of a contrasting surface. Granted, Eric knew that they were in a worst-case scenario for being detected at the moment. The
plates of the Dyson construct were lit by the sun they orbited around, giving sensor arrays something to contrast the
Odyssey
against. In theory, at least. In practice, however, physics were impossibly against that happening at the distances involved.