Odysseus Awakening

by Evan Currie

  A barrage of laser fire met the Odysseus as she charged into the midst of the enemy vessels, beams hitting a gravity wave powerful enough to scatter even photons to the black as the warship opened fire in turn.

  Knowing the amplitude of their warp field, Milla had prepared her firing equations carefully. The beams that lanced out from the Odysseus were not immune to the big ship’s warp field, but instead used it. They hit the warp field and were turned aside, just as the enemy beams had been, but in doing so were put onto their true vector.

  A spider web of beams powerful enough to decimate continents raked enemy vessels and vented their oxygen to the black in a devastating instant of combat. Dozens of the Odysseus’ own beams were also attenuated and turned away by the enemy warp fields, but far more struck home.

  Imperials ships died in fire and ice in seconds.

  Then the Odysseus was in the middle of the Imperial formation, her flanks open to their guns, and they returned fire.

  White knight armor settings reflected away as much as ninety-seven percent of the lazed energy, but these were Imperial lasers. Even Priminae weapons could do significant damage with only three percent power striking true, and the Imperial versions were significantly more powerful.

  ► “Breaches!” Heath announced from where she was now focused on coordinating damage control. “Decks thirty through fifty, more reports coming in!”

  Eric winced. There was nothing for him to say just then, as the ball was in motion, and all the power on Earth could not stop or reverse it. He had a repeater display showing him much of the same intel Heath was receiving, though without the interflow of information that made her job possible. For now, they weren’t doing all that bad.

  There were a lot of breaches, but they were still shallow, basically just through the armor. That wouldn’t last once they started taking a few hits in spots the armor was already damaged and more energy was absorbed than deflected away.

  The hum of the Odysseus’ lasers was now clearly audible, though the distant click of their discharge was still more imagined than real. That meant that they were running well above the rated limit for continuous fire, and Eric just hoped that everything would hold up long enough to see the ship through the fight, one way or the other.

  “Stand by!” Steph announced. “We’re coming around hard!”

  Eric gripped his station tightly despite knowing that, in all truth, it was a useless gesture. If the inertial compensation systems failed at all, they were all paste on the walls. The announcement was more pro forma, he supposed, or more likely, intended for Lieutenant Chans so she could prepare for the new conditions.

  The commander spun the ship on a proverbial dime, sweeping her hull behind the shielding positive gravity warp even as he twisted the negative warp about to intersect with an enemy destroyer who hadn’t fled quite fast enough.

  Eric’s eyes widened in horror as he watched the enemy ship’s armor and hull twist and then buckle under the strain of the Odysseus’ singularity sink. The smaller ship was being torn apart by the sheer of the artificial gravity well that the Odysseus used for propulsion.

  “Holy hell!” he blurted in shock. “I didn’t think there was enough power in the warp to do that.”

  “There is not,” Milla answered, even as she had her weapons firing at maximum and on automatic now. No human could possibly keep up with the maneuvers that Steph was putting the ship through, let alone fire accurately through the shifting gravity warp. “I have never seen the like, Capitaine.”

  “We’re running juiced for some reason, Raze,” Steph said from where he was furiously working the stick controls, his voice bearing the detached tone of someone deep into a NICS interface trance. “Don’t know where it’s coming from, but figured I’d use it while we could.”

  “Do it,” Eric ordered, ignoring the cold pit that had formed in his gut, climbed up his throat, and threatened to lodge itself there. “Let them have everything we can deliver. HVMs, flush the rest of them. Cannons on the destroyers, fire at will.”

  “Aye Capitaine,” Milla said, keying in the command. “Firing now.”

  ► HVMs were far more vulnerable to gravity warping than lasers, even considering their CM fields. As they launched from the ship via gravitational mass drivers, the heavy weapons were twisted strongly in space as their counter-mass fields powered up, then lanced off in seemingly random directions as the solid fuel cores ignited.

  Over the relative short range of the now knife-range engagement, the HVMs didn’t have enough time to get up to their full speed, but the increase in hits more than made up for it as the Odysseus could hardly miss at the ranges involved.

  As the ten-ton HVMs slammed into their targets, the CM field generators reversed polarity just before blowing themselves out and hammered the Imperial ships with an iron rain that punched through advanced armor composites like tissue paper.

  In the morass of lasers and missiles exchanging back and forth, the minute tachyon bursts of the t-cannons went entirely unnoticed as the Odysseus opened up with all batteries. Unremarked by all except the destroyers they had targeted as the nuclear fire gutted the vessels from within, the higher scanner fidelity allowed the gunners to pick the shots and lob munitions through areas of lesser interference from the singularity cores.

  Imperial ships answered by redoubling laser fire, raking the Odysseus along its already damaged flanks.

  Pikes of light burned deep into the ship as the armor finally failed entirely in large sections of the vessel. Deck after deck vanished, boiling away under the heat of enemy fire.

  Then, just seconds after entering the formation, the Odysseus erupted out the other side, spewing air and trailing steam and ice as her guts opened to deep space.

  ► “We’re through!”

  “Accelerate clear of here,” Eric ordered, leaning forward, “and someone get me a full damage report.”

  “Being compiled now, sir,” Heath responded. “It’s not good.”

  “It’s going to get worse,” Eric said grimly. “We only survived because they figured no one would be stupid or crazy enough to try what we just did.”

  He glowered at the screens showing damage reports from so many decks of his ship. “That they were right just made it worse. How badly were systems damaged?”

  “Fire control is still solid, Capitaine,” Milla announced, sounding too calm for Eric’s liking.

  He looked at her intently for a moment, then surreptitiously checked her biometrics from his station. Everyone on board was tracked, particularly those on the bridge, because any sudden health issues could, and often would, be fatal in deep space.

  Her heart was hammering, and he could see her hands tremble from his station, which made him feel better. A person who wasn’t completely terrified after what they’d just done was not someone he wanted to entrust with weapons control. Similarly, someone who couldn’t control their fear would be even worse. Eric knew the power of fear and respected the discipline it took to tame it. He turned his attention to the helm.

  “Helm controls, Steph?” he asked.

  “We’re good, Raze,” Steph said in the laconic way he always did when he was in the “zone.”

  Everyone dealt with fear in different ways. Eric knew that if he checked Steph’s biometrics, they’d tell him that the young commander was on the verge of falling asleep. Eric was certain his blood work would tell a different story, though. Most people shook as they were coming off adrenaline, but Steph just seemed to get calmer the more of it pumped through his veins.

  “Remember to breathe, Steph,” Eric said before moving on. “Comms?”

  “We’re still up, sir,” the communications technician responded.

  Wow.

  Considering what they’d been hammered by, Eric was honestly stunned that they weren’t looking at major system damages.

  They’d probably lost massive pieces of most of those systems, but the Odysseus’ redundancies were taking up the slack and then some. Even
so, that they were still combat functional, never mind effective, at this point was nothing less than amazing.

  “New data coming in, sir,” the lieutenant at the scanner station said, sounding more stunned than afraid.

  He supposed he could understand that without any problem.

  “What is it?”

  “The Priminae engaged the enemy as we entered the formation,” the young woman said, voice shaking a little.

  Probably why we lived through that, Eric supposed. “Understood. What are the Belle and the Bo doing?”

  “Moving to engage from range, sir.”

  Eric smiled. “Well, they’re smarter than us, then.”

  Steph snorted and a few people tittered nervously, breaking the mood a little as Eric tried to figure out what he was going to do next.

  It’s always a pain when you survive something you figured was going to kill you, he thought with dark amusement. You never have a plan to take advantage of your good luck.

  It was both sad and telling, Eric supposed, that he had enough experience with that sort of situation to have begun drawing conclusions from the patterns. Time to do what he always had in the past, only hopefully now with more skill and experience.

  Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.

  “Steph,” he spoke up, “start bringing us about.”

  “Aye sir,” the commander said without hesitation, though Eric could feel incredulous stares from other quarters at the order.

  “Now is not the time to look weak,” he said for their benefit. “Now is the time to make the enemy think we intended to do what we just did.”

  “Right,” Steph’s laconic tones floated back to him. “Better they think we’re completely out of our damned minds than that we had a malfunction.”

  “I’d rather the enemy thought I was insane than mortal,” Eric said.

  “Mission accomplished on that one hell of a long time ago, Raze.”

  ► Air and other debris streamed from multiple gaping wounds as the Odysseus began to reverse acceleration and come about. Ice crystals left a wake as the big ship passed, glinting in the starlight of the system primary, a beautiful display to mask the horrors within as damage control teams forced their way through compromised bulkheads and sometimes over and through the bodies of the dead to get to the breaches.

  “Cut that bulkhead out of the way, or we’ll never get a patch team through this mess,” Chief Dixon growled, resisting the urge to kick an offending section of wall out of the way.

  He probably could have kicked it loose. The weld keeping it on was only barely there, but if he missed his mark even slightly, he could slice his own suit open.

  The cutting team brought their portable lasers up and started to make short work of the bulkhead on his orders. The new cutters were a damn sight lighter and more powerful than what they’d had to work with before, but with that power came new dangers, especially as the team got closer to the outer hull and any potentially still active armor.

  Scattering one of the old cutters might have ablated a few thou off your suit if you weren’t careful, but the power of the new ones could easily cut through suit, flesh, and bone at a fraction of the power. So the chief watched the teams like a hawk, both with his own eyes and the overseer software he had patched into his visor. They were moving quickly but carefully, so he stood back and left them to it.

  There weren’t as many bodies as one might have thought, he noted with a sense of relief and shame.

  In combat, all nonessential crew were pulled back to the inner core of the ship. Out on the rings, the outermost corridors, the only crew who remained were generally fast-response damage control teams, and even they were sheltered and wore heavy suits during general quarters alerts.

  That didn’t save everybody, unfortunately.

  Some just got unlucky, a beam slicing right through the hull where they were stationed. Others were deeper in the ship when a beam burned in and were caught in the explosive decompression, sucked out into the ring decks or into the black itself.

  It would be hours, at best, before they got a crew tally and found out if they were missing anyone.

  Which we assuredly will be, judging from this mess. Dixon sighed as he surveyed the damage.

  He’d never have believed just how deep and wide the enemy beams had gone if someone had told him and he hadn’t seen it with his own two eyes.

  A deep, thudding vibration shook him through the deck, and he glanced over to see that the bulkhead had fallen silently in the near vacuum they were working in.

  “Alright, patch crew through the breach! I want atmo back in these decks within the hour, or we’ll never get this mess cleaned up!”

  He followed the crew through as they physically hauled the patch kit over the rubble with them. It had to be carried, as there wasn’t enough room to navigate a lift through the mess the enemy beams had torn in the decks. A pain, but the job was the job, he supposed.

  They got to the breach, and the cutter team moved to the front again, this time with their lasers tuned low enough to scour the raw armor plating clean and clear out jagged chunks of metal before the patch team took over again. Dixon felt his stomach lurch as he looked out on the endless abyss beyond the hole, but firmly kept his gut in its place. He didn’t have time to be sick.

  The hull patch was ceramic concrete in an inflatable truss, so they got it into place and put the air to the truss, then just stepped back to watch the whole thing unfold. It went from about three meters square to over four times that and was pushed up against the hole until everything was covered. Uncured, the patch was flexible enough to be molded to the hull. Then they hosed it down with the catalyzing agent and stepped back as the exothermic reaction cured the material, generating tremendous heat in the process, and left a solid piece of ceramic armor. The barrier wasn’t thick enough to do much against an enemy weapon, of course, but it was enough to protect the crew from the more common dangers of space.

  “Spray in the diffracting foam and seal this hole up,” Dixon ordered. “We’ve got three more breaches on this level before we can put the air back into the system.”

  It was going to be a long day on the Odysseus.

  ► With damage control teams working on nearly every deck of the wounded ship, Eric was trying to figure out what put them into such a mess in the first place.

  His original intent was something more along the lines of a war of maneuvers, using his three cruisers to draw out the enemy forces so that the Rogues could get their licks in. The unexpected supercharging of the Odysseus’ power plants—Where the hell had that come from?—had put an end to that plan in no uncertain terms.

  Now he had to figure out what had happened, keep it from happening again (unless they could control it, whatever it was), and try to find a way to get his battle plan back on the rails.

  Well, at least the enemy formation is pretty much shot to hell.

  Whatever coherence they’d had to begin with was now gone, not that he actually blamed the Imperials. A cruiser powered by a pair of planet-massed black holes was not something you wanted hammering through your formation, even if they didn’t hit anything. The near miss from the Odysseus’ cores could easily have caused frequency oscillations that, if they hit a sympathetic chord, could have potentially destroyed much of the region.

  That actually brought a point of curiosity to Eric’s mind. I wonder why they never weaponized their singularity technology. It’s rather terrifying and potentially far more destructive than even antimatter.

  He made a mental note, then shoved it aside. He had more important matters at hand.

  “Steph, are we on course?” he asked, frowning at the screens. “It looks . . . odd.”

  “That’s because I’m fighting her, Raze.” Steph sounded frustrated. “We’re showing strange flux in our warp fields.”

  “Are we losing stability?” Eric asked.

  That would be bad news. The gravity generators that molded space-time would be more than capable of di
srupting the Odysseus’ own cores if they lost stability controls. That would end very badly for the crew as well as anyone hoping to travel through this particular part of the star system for the next few decades.

  “No sign of that,” Steph said. “Honestly, it feels like I’m fighting a current or the jet stream, almost—”

  “Someone figure out what the hell is going on with our systems,” Eric growled. “We don’t have time for this right now.”

  “We have teams on it, Skipper,” the engineering chief assured him. “Just no luck yet.”

  “Tell them to make their own.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Eric walked over to the pilot’s pit and leaned on the back. “Can you hold it, Steph?”

  “No problem,” Steph said. “We’ve flown worse.”

  Eric nodded, pushing back and pretending he didn’t hear Steph’s next whispered words as the pilot patted the console in front of him.

  “Come on, buddy, hold it together. I know, it’s rough, but we can do this. Come on . . .”

  CHAPTER 12

  ► Druel stared at the telemetry repeaters in stunned silence.

  He wasn’t alone. The silence on the command deck was practically oppressive.

  “What in the abyss was THAT?” he blurted out finally, looking around. “Was that the plan? Tell me someone understood it?”

  His communications officer trembled in her seat. “No sir, that wasn’t the plan. I’m linked to their battle network now. The Odysseus encountered a malfunction.”

  “What kind of malfunction boosts a ship’s power output well over the theoretical maximum?” Druel asked.

  “They do not know, sir. Everything after that was the crew of the Odysseus”—she blinked, cocking her head to one side as she read the data crawl—“playing it by . . . ear? I’m not certain, Captain, but I believe that means they were improvising.”