The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (75 page)

No, it would take active scans to pick up the
Odyssey
at these ranges.

Active scans that they would have detected.

“Best guess, sir? Gravity detection.” Roberts shrugged.

“You’re talking about equipment on a scale I can barely even imagine. The array that would take would be…” Eric trailed off, his eyes on the massive plates that currently surrounded the
Odyssey
. “The size of a…solar system.”

“Yeah,” Roberts said dryly. “That was my reaction too when it dawned on me.”

“Well, crap,” Eric muttered. “We’re flying through a massive gravity detection array…And we thought we were being sneaky.”

“Well, sir, I expect it’s actually used primarily to track any mass that might impact the plates.”

“Not much comfort, not when we’re facing down a small fleet at the end of this orbit.” Eric sighed, shaking his head. “Maybe I should have turned and ran at the start. They would have had more time to overtake us, but they wouldn’t have had time to gather a fleet, either.”

“Doesn’t matter now, sir.” Roberts shrugged. “What matters is…How do we handle things?”

“If they’re tracking us by gravity, they can’t know who we are,” Eric said. “They know what we mass, but without a profile to compare it to, they can’t possibly know anything more about us than that.”

“I’m not sure what that gives us,” Roberts admitted after a moment’s thought.

“If they know we’re a ship, they have to be assuming that we’re a Priminae vessel,” Eric said. “That means they’ll have developed their response protocols according to Priminae ships. Think about it, even if they’ve heard about the
Odyssey
already…They can’t be expecting us here.”

“Priminae vessels are faster, better armed, and generally all around more powerful than us, sir. The fact that they’re expecting a Prim isn’t making me feel any better,” Roberts told him dryly.

“Tell that to the Drasin ships we’ve splashed in our last three encounters.” Eric smiled nastily. “If they’re expecting a single Priminae vessel, we’ll tear them a whole bunch of new ones before they take us out.”

“That still leaves us as expanding gasses inside this god-damned sphere, sir.”

“I know that, Commander,” Eric said, “which is why that’s my GOTH plan.”

“Thanks for letting me in on that, sir, but I’d really like to hear Plan A now, if you don’t mind.”

Eric smiled. “Here’s what we’re going to do…”

He leaned forward, and the two started to chart out the
Odyssey
’s strategy for the contact coming in just a few hours.

At least they had time to plan. For that, he was grateful.

RANQUIL, TERRAN COMMAND AND CONTROL BUNKER

▸LIEUTENANT SAVOY WAS on the line to Reed, and Reed could almost hear the impatient tapping of his foot as he spoke.

“Sir, where’s the Primmy bird?” He sounded annoyed. “My team is sitting here on a pile of demo that we’d like to get to where we can put it to use.”

“What?” Colonel Reed said, surprised. “You should have been in the air five minutes ago.”

“We’re as grounded as Commander Stevens after he’s annoyed the captain one too many times in a day,” Savoy responded. “Check with the Prims, sir, ’cause we’re going nowhere fast.”

“Roger that. Hold tight.”

“Nothing else we can do here.”

Colonel Reed signed off and turned to the liaison officer. “Ithan, where is the shuttle I asked to pick up Lieutenant Savoy and his team?”

“It should have arrived,” she said, looking genuinely confused.

“It hasn’t.”

“I will check.”

Reed didn’t take the curt manner personally, nor did he worry overly about the way the liaison seemed to dismiss him. Keeping his cool was a prerequisite in his career choice; as a Green Beret trainer, you didn’t often get to work with the most polite folks around, so a thick skin was not just a good thing, it was a requirement.

When Milla came back, however, his patience was sorely tested.

“All shuttles are in use,” she told him, clearly nervous as she tried to avoid looking directly at him.

Through it all, however, Reed kept his cool and even managed not to yell, scream, or snarl at the woman.

“We need those men in the air ASAP,” he said calmly.

“Ay sap?”

All right, now I’m starting to lose my patience.
“As soon as possible.”

“I was told that the shuttle will be redirected as soon as it is available,” she offered, clearly knowing that her words weren’t going to be taken well.

“Damn it, woman!” Reed growled. “If we don’t get that demo team into place thirty minutes ago, my men and yours are going to be in a world of pain, son.”

Now she just stared blankly, clearly confused by the statement.

Reed just continued to railroad over the befuddled woman. There was, after all, a time and place for cultural sensitivity, but the morning before Armageddon wasn’t either.

“What I’m saying is shake one of those birds loose
now
.” He leaned in to the liaison, practically snarling at her.

“I am sorry, Colonel, but there are none free,” she said, grimacing.

“You had nothing
but
free birds just ten minutes ago!”

“A priority request came directly from Commander Nero, Colonel.”

Reed pushed his hair back, letting out a sigh of exasperation. “Can you please inform him that we have urgent need of an orbiter, immediately.”

“I already did so,” Milla told him.

“And…?”

“And he said that the orbiters would be free soon.”

“How soon?”

She shrugged helplessly, hands spreading uncertainly. “He said soon.”

Reed fell back to his “professional” demeanor as best he could. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to get any further through intimidation. He’d seen it before, but almost never in any place he was sent to train men. Normally, this sort of bureaucratic bullshit was something he only saw in developed nations like the United States.

Usually, a country without a strong military would have had its politicians strung up by their entrails long before they managed to create quite this much red tape.

BRAVO AO

▸“WHAT DO YOU
mean
the demo team has been delayed?” Bermont snarled as he pressed back into some cover, plasma bursts sizzling overhead. Fighting in the Priminae city was touchy at best, but things were rapidly getting out of hand. “Things are getting a little hot down here, sir!”

The colonel’s announcement wasn’t sitting well with the teams on the ground, unsurprisingly. Bermont was the one howling over the comms, but the rest of the teams knew what it meant just as well as he did.

The enemy they were dealing with was like nothing any of them had ever imagined. It had gone from a relatively low number, possibly as little as one, to what seemed an endless flood in just a few short hours. Bermont’s troops were just grunts for the most part, but none of them were particularly stupid. They knew that, without the fallen buildings cleared out of the road, all they could do was fight off the enemy’s disposable forces until eventually they were eliminated by the effect of attrition alone.

The Drasin were unreal—impossible, even. They knew there was no way that more than a small handful of viable
enemies could have possibly been intact after an impact of the nature they’d seen. Yet they’d already killed dozens of the dog-sized drone soldiers, and overwatch heat sensors were showing dozens more while the planted seismographic gear was showing rumblings of potentially hundreds more under the ground on which they stood. The last time he’d encountered them, the Drasin had engaged with armored units the size of large animals. Horses, maybe; elephants, more realistically. Bermont wondered if this time they were specifically limiting their size so as to increase their reproduction rate.

In the end, it hardly mattered in the short term. If he lived, he’d ask the question and hope someone from the geek squads could answer it. For the moment, however, he had bigger concerns.

“Listen, sir, we’re being overrun!” Bermont growled, emerging from cover to put another burst downrange. He didn’t bother to aim, his computer was tied into the over-watch system, and the smart rounds would handle the rest, which limited his exposure to enemy fire. “We nail a couple dozen of them for every one of us taken out of the fight, but they’re still
winning
!”

“How is that possible, Lieutenant? They can’t have those kinds of forces on-site, they just can’t,” Colonel Reed responded.

“You’ve read the reports, Colonel. They make more of themselves out of locally available materials.”

“Do you have any idea how much sheer energy it must take to create that many enemy drones this fast?”

“Well, maybe that’s why they’re only dog-sized this time around, sir. I don’t know, talk to the eggheads about it, but do it later, sir!” Bermont countered. “We need Savoy and his engineers!”

“I’m breaking one of our own birds loose,” Reed told him. “It’ll take a little time. Hold the line.”

“The line isn’t the problem, sir. I’m worried about the big hole they’re digging under our feet. Seismo is off the charts!”

“Copy that, Bravo. I’ll expedite.”

“You do that, sir,” Bermont muttered. “We’ll be right here…until we’re not. Bravo out.”

He killed the live comm, swapping back to the team tacnet. Bermont took a breath, getting a little control over himself. “All right. Boss man is shaking loose one of our birds to bring Savoy’s team up here, but we have to hold until they get here.”

“Lieutenant, from what I’m reading, we’re in serious danger of having the ground collapse right under us,” Corporal Matthews spoke up. “I’m getting warnings that match the signature of a sinkhole, sir.”

Crap.
Bermont slumped. “All right, Matt. How long do we have?”

“No way to tell, sir.”

“Gamma Actual, Bravo Actual,” he signaled.

“Go for Gamma,” Lieutenant Crowley came back.

“We need to fall back. The ground is not…I say again,
not
stable.”

“Roger that. Call the play.”

“Fall back to Zulu-Zulu-Sierra,” Bermont ordered. “We’ll regroup there and wait for the demo team.”

“Confirmed. Gamma is falling back.”

“Bravo as well,” Bermont said, swapping to the team channel. “All right, pull back by the numbers. We’re falling back to Zulu-Zulu-Sierra.”