by Evan Currie
“Understood,” Roberts said.
“Besides, if we corner them, they’ll have to turn on us,” Eric said, sighing. “And we all know how we would fare if that happened.”
The captains all nodded soberly from the split display. For all the severe damage they could inflict on the enemy fleet, no one questioned what the ultimate outcome would be. If the gravity fields of the cruisers didn’t scramble the t-cannon shells when they reverted to normal space, it would be different; they could just stand off and blow the enemy out of space from twenty light-minutes out.
Without that trump card, however, and with the pulse torpedoes having limited effectiveness, they only had lasers and HVMs. Even on that level, Eric believed that the Terran vessels swung above their weight class, but in the end, numbers still counted.
While traced to many apocryphal sources, the idea that quality versus quantity generally favored quality had some truth to it, but it was also very true that quantity had a quality all its own.
The last thing we want to do here is replay the Eastern Front of World War II, casting ourselves in the role of the Germans.
The enemy had so far shown too little care for its own people not to have enough of them to literally burn. No matter how ruthless you were, you didn’t self-destruct and murder your own crewmembers unless there were a lot more back home. Trained people were just too valuable, in Eric’s estimation, and if anything about the Empire terrified him, it was that they considered those same specialists to be disposable.
It wasn’t just a measure of morality—though he refused to discount that—but more one of military practicality. If Earth were to treat her people with anywhere near the same disregard, they’d run out of specialists within a year. Even forgetting how hard it would be to recruit properly trained people, which wasn’t something to discount, it took time to establish those sorts of skills. Earth could only train so many in a year, and the Empire had killed hundreds of their own people with casual disregard.
That spoke either of far more people than Earth had access to, which seemed likely from what he’d seen of the Priminae population, but perhaps also of superior training methods. If they could churn out more people as needed, trained and experienced in their positions, then treating them so casually might make sense in terms of raw numbers.
In either case, Eric didn’t want a knockdown, drag-out war with an Empire that had either possibility.
Not until we can find a way to counter them, at least.
► “Am I cleared for duty?”
Doctor Rame spared the chief an exasperated look but still sighed audibly. “Yes, Chief, you’re clear for duty.”
“Good. I have work to do. Those damn Imperials are poking more holes in my ship.”
“Just report any more . . . incidents immediately,” Rame said firmly. “While I do not believe you were hallucinating, I want as many data points as I can manage just to be certain.”
“If I figure out who’s been spooking my teams, I swear I’m going to . . .” Dixon trailed off as a flash of gold flitted by his peripheral vision, and he spun around.
Rame eyed him for a moment as the engineer looked in all directions. “Are you alright, Chief?”
“Fine, fine,” Dixon said warily. “Just thought I saw . . .” He closed his eyes. “No. Never mind. I’ve got work to do.”
Rame watched him suspiciously as he left, but let the man go without comment. He waited a couple of beats before he walked over to the intercom and flipped the switch. “Bridge.”
It took a moment before a reply came back, but he had time now, so he waited patiently until the commander’s voice came back.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“I’ve finished examining the Marines and damage control team members,” he said. “No signs of any chemical or biological agents. Similarly, their blood workups were clean. No excess CO2 or the like in their system. I find it highly unlikely that they were hallucinating, Commander.”
“Where does that leave us?” Heath asked, a hint of bewilderment in her voice.
“I’m afraid, Commander, that isn’t my department. I have no idea what they’re seeing or hearing. I’m just relatively certain that it isn’t all in their heads.”
“Relatively certain?”
“Commander, we’re on a starship a thousand light-years from Earth engaging an alien empire in combat. ‘Relatively’ is as good as you’re going to get.”
Heath exhaled. “Understood, Doctor. Thank you.”
“Not at all, Commander. I’ve cleared the chief and his people for duty, by the way, so I would be expecting them to start logging time shortly.”
“Well, I can’t say we don’t need them,” Heath said. “You might want to prep for trouble, by the way, Doctor. The captain has a plan.”
“Oh dear.”
► Dixon stalked into the ready room, eyes falling on the men and women who were waiting there.
“Well?” he demanded. “What are you waiting for? Suit up!”
They scattered as they headed for their environmental gear, leaving Dixon to follow with a great deal less enthusiasm than he’d pretended. He didn’t know what the hell he had been seeing, but whenever he paused for a moment, that flash of gold and something like a child’s laughter—or sobbing again—continued to plague him.
Dixon wasn’t married, didn’t have any kids he was aware of, but he could now say without any doubt people who claim that a child’s laughter was a beautiful thing had never heard it while standing on a pitch-black, airless deck in the middle of combat.
Then he saw the flash of gold and resisted the urge to spin around to catch what it was. He knew he wouldn’t be fast enough.
Just get to work. Do the job. Forget this bullshit stuff until I can lay my hands around the neck of whoever is pulling this crap. Just get to work, do the job.
That became something of a mantra for him as he suited up, pulling the helmet on but not sealing it as he met up with the rest of the team who’d done much the same.
“Alright, the decks we’ll be working on for now have been sealed up, but that doesn’t mean they’re safe yet. We won’t need suit air, but keep a close watch on your pressure gauges. If the atmo starts dropping or you get an oxygen warning, I don’t care what you’re doing, you stop and seal your helmets. Got it?”
Everyone nodded.
“Let’s go.”
► The Odysseus was executing basic evasion maneuvers, though now that they’d closed to less than five light-seconds, the value of such was growing less by the passing moment.
Beams from the enemy vessels sliced through space, most missing, but the occasional hit scored a shudder through the target as armor was ablated despite the adaptive coating that reduced the effectiveness of energy weapons.
In turn, the Odysseus and Allies returned the favor with their own beam weapons and occasional HVM salvos. While the enemy was holding course, tied to their action by circumstance and need, they had successfully interposed and interlocked their gravity bulges at the rear of each vessel into an unpredictable warping of space-time that had the effect of turning aside light itself.
Lasers from the Odysseus Task Force and Priminae allies were bent aside, most scattering out to space to be uselessly attenuated against far vaster background energy signatures of the cosmos. A few banked off the unpredictable warpings of space-time, deflecting from one warp to another and then on up the skirt of the retreating warship unlucky to catch the fury of the mind-bending power of the beam.
Unfortunately, even in those cases, the best effect of the Terran-designed adaptive frequency laser was negated as they couldn’t hold the beams long enough to find the right absorption frequency.
So the war of maneuver, even if it had occasionally been an unintended and quite insane maneuver, had been reduced to a slugging match between giants.
Eric Weston was not amused.
He had little choice in the matter as the two groups of vessels continued to close on the stricken P
riminae warship.
Little choice but to haul back and let loose with another haymaker, hoping to land a hit.
► Chief Dixon looked around as he heard the clicking whine of the Odysseus laser capacitors discharging.
It was a distinctive sound, and it was louder than he expected it to be.
“Someone check the insulation panels along the forward capacitance coils,” he ordered. “The explosive decompression probably blew a few of them loose, if not right out into space.”
Tracking down all the little things that had been blasted around by the windstorm on this deck when the breach occurred would take days, and there was no way to know how much debris was blown right out of the ship when everything decompressed. Dixon suspected that a lot of office supplies were about to go missing, whether they were actually sucked out of the ship or not.
Not that he cared, frankly, but the thought amused him to a certain degree as he walked the corridors along the forward section that housed a fifth of the ship’s deep capacitance systems.
While the cores provided an insane level of power, lasers required more power on demand than even they could readily provide in the instant they had to be released. So the capacitance system drew energy off from the cores and, on command, fed them into the lasers in a span of time measured in milliseconds.
Power enough to run the entire Confederation for a day, all dumped into a single instant of hellish energy.
And the Odysseus fired dozens of beams every few minutes.
Sometimes the numbers were enough to stagger even Dixon.
He put those thoughts from his mind, however, as he located a few open sections of wall where the insulating panels had been blown clear. Unfortunately, they weren’t anywhere to be found in the local area, so he opened a link to the quartermaster’s depot.
“Hey, Chief Dixon here. Yeah. We’re going to need . . . oh, four, five . . . oh damn it, just send up a palette of insulation panels. The decompression wreaked all holy hell up here, and I don’t know where they wound up. Might find them later, I suppose. Right, thanks.”
He closed the connection and finished walking the length of the corridor to check down the junctions. The clicking whine was louder as the lasers discharged with regular timing, and Dixon was just glad that everything seemed to still be in fighting trim despite the general havoc that had rained down on the deck.
He was about to go back down to meet the palette he’d called for when an unfortunately familiar sobbing sound sent shivers across his skin, and he slowly turned around.
A hint of motion and a glint of gold caught his eye as something vanished around the corner up ahead.
“The hell?” Dixon grumbled, hating both that someone was messing with him and, more so, that it was working. “Oh screw it.”
He pulled the sidearm from his hip and started down the hall, following the sound of soft laughter. At the junction, he pressed against the wall before risking a glance around the corner. When he saw nothing, he broke cover and started down the corridor, gun leading the way.
He turned on his open-air comm. “I don’t know who’s down here, but come out, or I swear I’ll fill you full of holes when I find you.”
The laughter stopped for a moment, a soft whispery voice drifting back in response to his challenge. “Too late.”
“Okay, fuck you, whoever is doing this!” Dixon snarled, gun sweeping ahead of him as he walked. “Just you wait. I will find you, and you’ll wish I only keelhauled your ass when I do.”
The giggling returned in force, but this time behind him.
Dixon spun around, his gun seeking a target.
“Whoa, Chief!”
Barely restraining himself from firing as the Marines approaching dived for the ground, Dixon jerked the weapon up to the ceiling.
“What are you jokers doing here?” he shouted.
“Checking on you, Chief,” one of the Marines said from the ground. “Can we get up?”
Dixon stared blankly at them for a moment but didn’t say anything as another figure approached around the corner.
“What the hell are you lot doing on the ground?” the gunny yelled, looking down at the men on the deck, his body language screaming disgust.
“Trying not to be ventilated, Gunny.”
The gunny looked up at the Chief, then to the pistol in his hand. “What did they do this time, Chief?”
“Hey!”
“Shut up, Marine,” the gunny growled, walking through the men on the ground to stand beside the chief. He switched his comm over to a private channel. “You okay, Chief?”
“Yeah.” Dixon lowered his weapon, sliding it back into the holster. “Just a little freaked out.”
“Same thing?”
Dixon just nodded.
The gunny was silent for a bit. “One of my Marines was so damn spooked, he almost fragged his own team. I don’t know what this is about, but we need to figure it out. This can’t stand, especially not while the captain is trying to fight this beast.”
“You don’t need to tell me that, Gunny. Whatever it is, I have a job down here that can’t be put off,” Dixon said. “I’m not letting some damn spook scare me off.”
“Spook, Chief?”
“I don’t know what it is. Looks short, can’t be five feet tall, wearing some kind of golden armor. Old-school stuff too. I mean like out of the history books old.”
“That lines up with what my Marine reported. He said it looked a kid bleeding pretty bad. Something out of a horror movie crossed with a history documentary.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Dixon said unconvincingly, “but if this keeps up, I’m honestly going to start wondering if this ship is haunted.”
“You know better than that, Chief. Someone is messing with us,” the gunny said firmly. “We figure out who, then we make them wish they were never born.”
“I’m right there with you on that,” Dixon said with feeling. “Trust me.”
The gunny nodded, swapping back to the common channel. “Alright, Chief, I’m going to assign a team to watch your back. I know they can be annoying at times, but I’d like them back without any extra holes in them, okay?”
“I’ll do my best.”
The Marines shifted and looked at each other as the gunny walked past them.
“If you have to shoot someone, Greg here has been a pain lately,” he said over his shoulder with a gesture at a private. “Aim for him.”
► With less than five light-seconds between the Odysseus, her allies, and the Imperial squadron, the numbers seemed to be falling faster with every passing moment.
Eric found himself leaning forward in his station, eyes on the big display ahead, waiting for the moment. He didn’t know quite when it would show itself, but he knew it was coming. The enemy had tied themselves to a vulnerable maneuver, and even though they held the numerical advantage, he knew that they would have to open the formation and slow their acceleration as they prepared to retrieve their ship from the Tetanna.
“There,” he said suddenly. “Do you see it, Steph?”
“Got it, Raze. It’s small,” Steph warned.
Eric smiled nastily. “Go for it.”
In the pit, Steph matched his smile, though it went unnoticed. Only Eric knew it was there, and he knew it from the trust of long experience working with the younger man.
“Aye aye, Skipper,” he said, sinking deeper into the gestalt he felt with the ship through the NIC System. Steph idly opened a fleet-wide comm. “All ships, Odysseus is going active. Cover us; we’re going in.”
Then he pushed the ship’s reactors back to the redline and beyond as the general quarters and combat alarms began to sound on every deck.
The Warrior King was going into battle one more time.
CHAPTER 21
► “Get back!”
Rider snarled as he yanked Dow out of the way by the armor, just as a beam cut through and splashed off the wall behind them.
The Marine looked up fr
om the ground, his faceless helm not showing any emotions, but his body language screaming everything.
“Thanks, boss,” Dow gasped as he watched Rider break cover briefly to fire a burst down the corridor.
“Don’t mention it,” Rider said as he ducked back just ahead of another pair of beams vaping chunks out of the ceramic corridor bulkheads. “Just learn to duck on your own. I won’t be here every time.”
“Wilco, boss.”
Rider let out a breath, noticing that his suit’s thermostat was starting to climb despite the cooling tech being turned up as high as it would go. The exterior air was best compared to an oven, and the temperature wasn’t getting any lower with the constant barrages of lasers from the defending Imperials.
“Well,” he said, “we’re pinned down good and tight, but on the flip side, I’d say we’ve slowed their advance nicely. Hope the colonel can do something with it, because we’re going no farther unless something changes.”
“Anyone have any smokers left?” Dow asked from where he was crouched.
The Marines all shook their heads.
“No, we blew our last one ten minutes ago,” Kensey said. “Down to my last frag too, and my ammo’s not much better.”
“Same here,” Ram spoke up, “and I think my suit is about to cook me. Not feeling too good, Rider.”
Rider ducked into the other Marines’ armor code, checking the suit telemetry on his own HUD.
“Shit, Ram! You need to pull back. Your armor is about to boil off its coolant, and once that’s gone, you’re toast in that thing.”
“I can hold on a bit longer,” Ramirez said stubbornly.
Rider grimaced, but he didn’t challenge the other Marine on that, though he didn’t really think it was true. They were all about to cook, in fact, and Ram’s condition wasn’t much worse than his own. He was sweating profusely in the armor, and his own coolant had started to boil a few minutes earlier.
Even so, he had a little while before he would pass out from heatstroke, but not as long as he might need. We have to get this done.
