The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (8 page)

“Yeah, LT,” another man wearing corporal’s insignia spoke up, “we were hoping you’d show us your new toy.”

Crowley eyed the group warily, trying to gauge their attitudes. He certainly didn’t mind explaining how the EXO-12 armor would work as part of a combined arms team, but he didn’t have the desire to put up with the kind of crap that Greene had laid on him earlier.

Finally, though, he sighed and nodded. “Sure. Come on over.”

If there were any ground action on this trip, after all, they’d have to work together as a unit. And while the briefing he’d placed in the computer was available to all of them, it was better to get a jump on such things. It was bad enough that they’d not been able to properly train with the EXO-12 on board ship.

He stepped down from his perch on the deactivated armor and pulled the cables from his programmer. He’d had to physically jack into the armor in order to review its core programming and make a few adjustments, a security measure in a world of wireless connectivity, and was almost happy with the adjustments he’d made to the armor’s sensor codes.

“The EXO-Twelve,” he said, waving a hand at the imposing machine. “It’s mostly the same package as your power suits, so don’t get too intimidated by its size.”

“It’s almost twice the fucking size,” someone said, looking up at the “head” on top of the armor. “It’s a walking tank!”

“No, it’s armor,” Crowley corrected, “We don’t have the control systems to make walking tanks feasible—yet.”

“Yet?”

“You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“What’s the difference?”

Jackson focused on the last question. “The difference is that you pilot a tank. You wear the EXO-Twelve. That way, the operator can use his own sense of balance to supplement the onboard gyros, and it also makes operation more intuitive.”

“What kind of tactical response are we talking about?”

Jackson looked surprised and looked around to find the speaker. It was another lieutenant whom he didn’t recognize. “Good question…?”

“Bermont,” Sean Bermont replied, pronouncing his name with the French habit of dropping the
t
at the end. “Sean Bermont.”

“Well, Lieutenant Bermont”—Crowley nodded—“the EXO-Twelve has a state-of-the-art interface that’s based on the fifth-gen power suit systems. I’m not sure if you’ve been issued those yet?”

They shook their heads.

“We’re still using the fourth-generation interface and optics,” Bermont replied.

“All right, then the differences aren’t too hard to explain. Unlike the fourth-gen systems, the fifth-gen optics are processed by the onboard computer so that you get a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view at all times.”

“Our suits do that,” Greene objected.

“I mean at
all
times, Sergeant.” Jackson smiled. “The operator can view the entire three-hundred-and-sixty-degree image at once instead of having the computer assign priorities to targets that are out of your immediate view.”

Greene shook his head. “That’s got to be a headache to control.”

“It’s not so bad once you get used to it, Sergeant.” Jackson shrugged. “The forward ninety degrees is shown in real time slash real view, while the rest of the circle is displayed in an increasingly compressed peripheral vision mode. It feels a little like looking down a tunnel at first, until you get used to the system.”

“Great. Permanent tunnel vision,” Greene cracked with a wry smile. “And this is a good thing?”

“It increases response time by 28 percent in our studies,” Crowley replied. “What I’m mainly worried about is how the sensors will handle nonhuman targets. They didn’t exactly spend a long time worrying about that particular possibility when they coded the targeting software.”

Bermont shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that. But if you want to get a real good firsthand technical opinion of the Drasin, I’d talk to Savoy.”

The other men nodded in agreement.

“Savoy?”

“Lieutenant Savoy. He and his geek squad handle a lot of our specialist missions,” Greene replied. “He’s the boy to talk to if you’ve got a question about those doggies and how they look on a computer screen.”

Crowley nodded. “I’ll do that.”

Weston was more than ready for the next step. Fueling had taken a couple of hours, since pumping the enormous reservoirs of the
Odyssey
full of liquid hydrogen was an incredibly long and involved process. It left the entire crew practically
vibrating with anticipation, so he was thankful that the climb to the edge of the sun’s influence had taken only a few more hours after that, and they were soon within the transition range.

“All systems report ready for transition, Captain.”

“Very good, Helm. Are we aligned for the initial transition?” Eric asked as a matter of course.

“Aye, sir,” Daniels responded with a curt nod. “The board is green.”

The routine of it all felt so false, like window-dressing on something so much larger than he could comprehend. They were about to become the fastest-moving people in history, yet again, and somehow it had all been boiled down to a checklist. Weston almost felt like there was something…
sacrilegious
about that, but in the end, all he could think was that they were about to start out on something nobody else had ever done before.

He slowly nodded and reached down to access the ship-wide.

“All hands, this is the captain. We have reached our initial transition point and will be powering the tachyon generators momentarily. Please ensure that all preparations are complete for transit. That is all.” Weston knew he had a good crew, a fire-tested crew, but he wondered what they were thinking now, knowing they were going back out for real. How many of them felt the same surge of excitement he did?

He closed the ship-wide and looked up. “Mr. Waters?”

“Aye, sir?” the young man asked without looking back.

“You may sound general quarter.”

“Aye, sir. General quarters.” Waters nodded, signaling the alert.

“Very well, Lieutenant,” Weston said, glancing back at Daniels, “you may engage when ready.”

“Aye, Captain. Beginning transition sequence…now,” Daniels responded then, keying in a command.

At first, there was nothing to indicate that anything had changed; then the humming whine of the powerful capacitors pouring the energy into the tachyon generator pierced the veil. A moment later, the bridge lights dimmed slightly as the power draw was fed from their main taps as well, and then everything went silent.

“Spires have transitioned, Captain. The effect will overtake the bridge…now.”

And then everything spun away into the void as the bridge crew gritted their teeth and held helplessly onto their seats as the black of space seemed to engulf them.

From the outside, the big ship just vanished in an instant, though sensors that were powerful enough would have registered a cloud appearing from the void and swallowing them like a ghost. To those inside the ship, the moment stretched out into an eternity, then ended as their bodies were swept away by the effect, and all that was left was the screaming.

MILITARY COMMAND AND CONTROL
Planet Ranquil

▸“ADMIRAL, WE JUST detected a tachyon event from the outer system.”

Is the moment arriving sooner than even I expected?
Adm. Rael Tanner asked himself. Perhaps it was just he had been hoping the moment would never come, that the people of Ranquil could expect some brief respite, some semblance of a normal life. The weight of all of those lives made him stooped sometimes, pressed down on his thoughts.

Tanner turned to examine the results of the sensor sweep, and frowned. “Direct the
Vulk
to identify.”

“Yes, Admiral,” the young woman replied diffidently, lightly pressing a series of commands into the projected control interface.

Far out in the outer system, the signal was received and a hulking mass of starship shifted its long orbit to intercept the center of the pulse they had recorded.

“
Vulk
reply, Admiral. They are changing orbit to locate and identify. Orders for Captain Maran?”

“Identify only at this time,” Tanner replied, taking his seat as the display was updated. “It may be a Drasin; however, the pattern is not a bow wake.”

“Yes, sir. Identify only.”

Tanner watched the screens, waiting for the
Vulk
to arrive on-site, and hoped that it was who, and what, he thought. The intervening months since the Battle of Ranquil had not been easy on any of the colonies. They had lost a total of fourteen of the outer worlds, with a combined population of nearly thirteen billion people.

That was a relatively low number compared to the forty billion that the Battle of Ranquil had saved; however, it wasn’t something that was easy to forget, just the same.

None of the central worlds had been lost, thanks be to the Maker. The initial attack on the central combine had been poised to pass through Ranquil, and when they had held them off, it had apparently thrown the Drasin battle plans out of order.

That was to the sole credit of Eric Weston and his crew, Tanner firmly believed, and he would very much like to see that man again.

He would like even more if Elder Corusc had managed to negotiate an arrangement for technology concepts, designs, and military aid from Weston’s fellows. The Drasin were still out there, and their attacks had begun a battle of attrition against the fledgling fleet the colonies had managed to construct.

They had managed to achieve parity with the Drasin. Power for power, a Colonial ship was at least the equal of a Drasin cruiser; however, they had lost as many of their newly commissioned ships as they had killed Drasin ships in the two
months of warfare that followed the Battle of Ranquil. In the past month, things had grown quiet, though, with no sightings of the alien ships at even the few surviving outer colonies.

The populace was now hoping that it was ending, the fear and despair having worn them down.

Celebrations were the norm within the habitats of the great cities now, but Tanner and his people didn’t join in. Neither, for that matter, did Nero and his slowly forming ground force.

Nero had once explained why the quiet brought such a sensation of dread to Tanner’s inner soul.

He had told Rael of a great storm that had once struck his farmstead as a child. For hours, the winds beat at the sturdy little home that Nero grew up in, ripping up pieces of the very ground around them and throwing it to the skies.

Then the silence came, and Nero thought it was over. His father refused to let him go out, told him to stay quiet and keep his head down.

That was when Nero learned of the heart of the storm, its very calmness the most lethal weapon in the storm’s arsenal. It could draw the unwary out and suck them to their deaths.

Tanner thought that they were now in the heart of their own storm and the Drasin would soon try to take advantage of the peace. Neither Tanner nor any of his captains would allow that.

But, thankfully, the moment was not now. They had a reprieve.

A few moments later, the young woman in charge of signals relaxed in her chair and, turning around with a smile, said, “Admiral, we have an identification on the source of the tachyons. It’s the
Odyssey
, sir.”