by Evan Currie
It was clearly a child, the proportions all wrong for anything else. Slightly gangly arms and legs, a body that seemed to be lost in the armor the figure wore, and a head just a little too large, proportionally, for an adult.
Though the helmet might be affecting my thoughts there, Gracen admitted to herself as she examined the figure closely.
The armor was ancient, either Greek or Roman, or possibly some melding of the two. She was familiar enough with that historic period to recognize elements of both, but Gracen was also aware that both cultures had developed a vast array of variations between them. The attire was clearly pre–Roman Empire, however, of that she was certain.
The shield that rested on the floor a short distance away was Greek, beyond any shadow of a doubt. A classic hoplite, commonly recognized as the Spartan shield. It looked far too heavy for the boy to carry normally, let alone into battle.
“Admiral,” Eric said, distracting her slightly, causing her eyes to flicker over to the man standing beside her in a space-black casual uniform. “Allow me to present Odysseus. Odysseus, this is the Admiral.”
Gracen’s gaze flicked back, and she started as she saw that in her split second of distraction, the armored figure had somehow managed to silently get to his feet, turn to face them, and throw up a perfect modern salute, which he then followed up with a thump of his fist over his heart.
“Admiral!” the slightly too-high voice said with the intensity she would have expected from a boot-camp graduate.
“Odysseus,” she said softly, taking in the boy’s face and committing the features to memory.
The eyes, she realized, reminded her of the commodore’s more than anything. In a startled moment of recognition, Gracen suddenly saw several features she knew in that face. Features of the commodore, some of his command . . . especially Commander Michaels, unless she was mistaken, and . . . herself?
And another item caught her attention.
Why is he wearing glitter-pink eye shadow?
“I like pink,” the boy replied, as though she had spoken aloud, his voice solemn.
“Ah . . . I . . . see?” Gracen said, swallowing as she glanced at Eric, who shrugged slightly. “Pleasure to . . . meet you?” she said uncertainly. “Odysseus, is it?”
“Yes ma’am,” the boy said firmly. “Odysseus, the warrior king. You named me.”
“I suppose I did, yes.” She nodded, cocking her head slightly. “Do you like your name?”
That seemed to set the boy back for a moment, his face closing up as he slowly appeared to consider the question deeply. Finally, he looked back at her. “I don’t know. Am I supposed to?”
“Some people do, some don’t,” Eric said. “There’s nothing deep in the question, Odysseus, just what it sounded like.”
“Oh,” the boy said, thinking again for a moment.
Gracen found herself unsure about how to take in the whole situation, which was ethereal and entirely unreal. And yet she couldn’t seem to disassociate herself from this being. The boy in front of her was somehow . . . a starship?
Worse, to her mind at least, he was one of the most powerful starships in the recorded history of two cultures, one of which had been a spacefaring civilization since before their acknowledged history. And this vessel was one of the most important symbols of human strength in the galaxy.
Yet the ship seemed honestly confused as to whether it liked its name.
There is so much wrong with this, I don’t know where to begin.
Gracen had to forcibly keep herself under control, unwilling to start publicly ranting or raving about impossibilities. She would save that for the privacy of her quarters, preferably with a bottle of gin to fuel the moment. For now, she refused to be made, or make herself, a spectacle.
“I think . . . ,” the boy said, looking up at her through the surprisingly intense eyes that were surrounded by luminous glitter, “I think I like the name. That’s good, right?”
Gracen noted that the boy looked to Eric, expression uncertain but more open than he had been.
“Yes, I would say that’s good,” Eric said with a very slight smile. “Names can have a big impact on our lives . . . or they can have no impact at all.”
“Strange.” The boy, Odysseus, frowned. “If they’re important sometimes, why aren’t they always important?”
“People are strange, Odysseus,” Gracen answered before she could stop to analyze her own thoughts any more. “Some people let their name define them. Others choose to define their name through their actions. We all approach life in surprisingly different ways, so you can’t expect one person to react in the same way as another.”
Odysseus seemed genuinely bothered by that. “That seems . . . wrong. Math describes the universe, doesn’t it?”
“It seems to,” Eric said.
Math was far from Gracen’s personal specialty, though she was competent in the concepts she dealt with as part of her position, of course. She also knew that Eric could do interception calculations in his head faster than any computer, though admittedly not as precisely. As a fighter pilot, he had always held this key advantage over the vast majority of his opponents.
Often he would be leaning in the right direction by the time the computer spat out the precise numbers needed to resolve a situation, giving him as much as two or three extra seconds over his opponents. Eternity in a dogfight, the difference between life and death.
The sort of math Odysseus was referring to was well over both their heads, however, and Gracen was aware of that.
“Math is reliable, but people aren’t?” Odysseus frowned. “But people are ruled by math, deep down? I don’t understand.”
Gracen started to respond, but Eric’s hand brushed her shoulder. As she glanced over, he nodded behind her and she acceded to the suggestion, drawing away from Odysseus at the commodore’s direction.
“Every conversation with him eventually ends up like this,” Eric said softly as they walked. “He’s learning, and fast, but he experiences the universe from more perspectives than we do. Every set of eyes on the ship are his eyes. The ship’s computers seem to be his brain, as much as . . . I don’t know. We know when he’s accessing the computers, since our security systems can track when he calls up files. But he clearly has a brain of his own too.”
“He can see through the ship’s scanners, then?” Gracen asked, her own tone matching the commodore’s.
“Yes. He thinks in deep math. Only a handful on board can keep up with him in regards to the equations, but he’s still developing what we would call intuition. Every now and then I can get ahead of him just because I get a feeling of where the math is going faster than he can. I think it drives him a little nuts when that happens.”
Gracen glanced a little sourly at Eric’s clear amusement. “Please don’t antagonize the warship that can glass the surface of planets.”
“Well, good news there,” Eric said. “He can’t override our hardline safety systems. I wouldn’t want to rely on the software systems, but our heavy stuff all requires bridging a real circuit to release them for combat.”
“Thank God for small favors,” Gracen muttered.
She glanced over her shoulder, remembering what the commodore had told her earlier. “Wait, he can read minds?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“So why . . . ?”
“Are we being quiet?” Eric asked, and she nodded confirmation. “Odysseus recognizes our desire for privacy, even if he doesn’t understand it. If we’re quiet, he mostly won’t answer questions we don’t ask, or comment on our conversation later.”
“But he’s still . . . ?” She let the question trail off as Eric gave her a knowing look.
“Every thought is automatically scanned, as I understand it,” Eric said, “though I shouldn’t say ‘scanned’ exactly. He doesn’t process them as external thoughts. Every thought you have, he has at the same time, as though it’s his own. Keeping in mind that we’re really still trying to figure all
this out ourselves”—Eric frowned seriously—“I’ve spoken with Rame and a few others about trying to better comprehend what’s going on. As best we can determine, people within Odysseus’ range of influence are like . . . neurons firing in his brain. We’re independent, but we’re also part of him.”
“That is . . . both fascinating and incredibly disturbing,” Gracen admitted.
“I can’t imagine it’s any better for him. From his point of view, he has to be thinking what we might call suicidal thoughts quite often.”
“What?” Gracen asked sharply.
“How many times have you thought about how to eliminate him since you came on board?” Eric asked pointedly.
Gracen paled, considering that.
If her thoughts were interpreted by Odysseus as his own . . . then . . . ?
She groaned, pinching her nose.
“My brain hurts,” she grumbled.
“Understandable.” Eric chuckled. “Most people who deal with Odysseus seem to have that reaction.”
“Most?” Gracen asked dryly.
“Steph thinks he’s a great kid.” Eric rolled his eyes. “There’s always been something wrong about Steph. I love him, don’t get me wrong, but he’s nuts.”
“I seem to recall more than a few people saying the same of you in your jacket, Commodore. The part about you being nuts, at least.”
Eric just gestured casually, not worried about any notations like that in his record. “I was a US Marine. If we weren’t nuts, we weren’t doing the job right.”
Gracen snorted, and then her mind was brought back in line with the current situation.
“Damn it, we don’t need this right now,” she hissed. “I can’t clear you or this ship for missions, Eric.”
“I know.”
“But we can’t lose an entire Heroic either. What the hell are we going to do?” She wiped her hand down her face in exasperation. “If I don’t clear this ship for duty, I’m going to have to explain this before the Naval Council, and there is no way I’m doing that without a hell of a lot more information and corroborating evidence backing me up. Commodore, you bring me the worst migraines.”
“Sorry about that, Admiral,” Eric said, not sounding apologetic in the least. “We have some time before you have to make that decision, thankfully. Full repairs will take some more time. I’d say we’d be here another couple weeks if the ship weren’t on a priority run.”
“How long actually, then?” Gracen asked dryly.
“Few more days, but we can be creative with the paperwork.”
“Do it,” she ordered. “I’ll find some way to explain why you’re not out in the black. But damn it, Commodore, get this figured out. I don’t care how you do it, but we need the Odysseus in the line.”
“Understood, ma’am.”
“She’s gone.”
Eric sighed but didn’t jump as the voice came from where no one had been standing just an instant earlier. “I know, and what have I told you about sneaking up on people like that?”
“Sorry.”
Eric wished he had a better idea of how to deal with kids, but then again he had no idea if Odysseus was actually as young as he seemed. He couldn’t help but compare the entity to a child, but he was also aware of how potentially dangerous that line of thinking was.
“She didn’t like me,” Odysseus told him, the boy’s voice a little flat.
“She doesn’t know you,” Eric corrected. “She didn’t like that we can’t deploy until we have a better understanding of what happened.”
“I will be fully prepared for battle within two days, five hours, and forty-three minutes according to the current schedule,” Odysseus responded with just a hint of indignation. “We may deploy at any time. The remaining repairs can be handled while under way.”
“There’s more here than repairs, and you know it,” Eric told the boy sternly, wondering when he’d become babysitter or, so much worse, a daddy.
Odysseus was silent for a long moment before reluctantly conceding the point.
“My presence compromises crew efficiency.”
Eric nodded. “Yes it does.”
“Perhaps the thoughts are right. I should . . . go away,” Odysseus said, his tone suddenly soft.
Eric stamped down on his knee-jerk reactions, though he knew that Odysseus would have thought every one of them at the same moment as well. He knew all the arguments, both logical and emotional, that had raged among those exposed to Odysseus on board the ship. He couldn’t stop the boy, entity, whatever . . . Eric couldn’t stop him from interacting with the crew, and Odysseus seemed much more desirous of interaction than either Central or Gaia.
His existence, while still confusing to most of the crew, was well on its way to becoming a well-known and almost accepted part of shipboard operations.
There was still a lot of misinformation surrounding the entity, of course, which ranged from a ghost haunting the ship to an alien invader. Sometimes, to be honest, Eric didn’t know which of the two he leaned toward.
“I think,” he said slowly, running the thoughts through his mind carefully, more for his own benefit than that of his companion, “that you could be a great benefit to the efficiency of the crew, in time.”
That much was the truth, of course. He’d seen how the boy had managed to play with the ship’s functions, making his namesake a veritable powerhouse the likes of which should never have been physically possible.
Still, the boy’s aim sort of sucked, of course, and Lord knew the kid didn’t have a clue how to operate the ship in combat.
Those were all skills that could be taught, however, and Eric had found himself excited to do just that.
“Perhaps,” Odysseus replied after a moment. “I . . . I was excited for battle, you know.”
“I do. What do you feel now?”
“I don’t know. The fight . . . hurt,” Odysseus admitted. “It hurt bad. Did I do that to others?”
Moments like that were when Eric rather wished that his mind wasn’t an open book to the entity at his side. Lying would be so much easier.
“Yes, maybe not in exactly the same ways, but yes you did,” Eric said. “Or, the ship did, at my orders.”
“Why?”
“That’s a question no human has ever had a good answer for, not on the level you want at least. I can tell you why we did those specific actions, but you already have the answers. You want to know why we do violence at all, and I don’t have an answer for that.”
“I thought I was the mind reader.”
“You are, but you’re also asking questions every young soldier asks himself sooner or later.”
“What answer do they come to?”
“Everyone comes to their own,” Eric said, “but most tend to reach some variation of a single response.”
“Which is?”
“We fight for the man standing beside us,” Eric answered instantly. “The men and women who stand and fall at our side. Home, nations, ideologies—they all come in a distant second, sometimes even farther down the list. In the moment, all those things bleed away, and when the bullets fly, we fight for the women and men who are right there with us, in the mud and in the blood.”
Odysseus was silent for a long time before fading away, apparently either satisfied with the answer or going away to mull it over.
Eric hoped the entity would be satisfied.
Gracen’s mind whirled as she sat quietly in the bolstered seat of the courier vessel as it left the Forge facility.
She could always count on the commodore to bring her a migraine, she reflected as they passed through the solar corona and into the open space of the Ranquil System.
“Admiral,” the ship’s captain, Commander Nikala, called back to her. “Automated message from Admiral Tanner. He wishes to invite you for a dinner before we return to Earth space.”
“Negative, Commander. Please issue my regrets to the admiral, but we won’t have time to divert to Ranquil.”
&nb
sp; “The admiral seems to have anticipated that, ma’am. He’s suggesting a meeting on the Priminae flagship, a Heroic Class just cleared from the Forge. They’re offering to meet and pace us on our way out of the system.”
Gracen considered that for a moment, realizing that Tanner had to know at least part of the story now. The commodore had needed him to help cover up the oddities in the Odysseus’ situation.
“Very well, arrange to rendezvous with the Heroic. I’ll meet with the admiral for that meal.”
“Aye ma’am.”
If nothing else, she supposed, the dinner discussion should be fascinating.
CHAPTER 4
AEV Bellerophon, Ranquil System
“The commodore’s shuttle has landed, Captain.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Captain Jason Roberts said, standing up. “Commander, you have the bridge.”
“Aye Captain,” his first officer responded automatically, “I have the bridge.”
Jason made his way from the command deck, moving up through the ship’s other decks via the lifts to the exterior, where the shuttle bays were located. He was unhurried, knowing that it took some time to move a shuttle inside and then to pressurize the connections to allow people to disembark.
He hoped that the commodore had some answers.
The rumors that had been floating around were getting out of hand, no matter how absurd they were. Jason was well aware that even the least likely of rumors would be able to disrupt shipboard operations if enough people started to believe it might be true.
The idea that the Odyssey was haunted—of all the insane and inane things—was, of course, the most ludicrous thing he’d heard in a damn long time, but crews could be superstitious in absurd ways. He still remembered those fools painting “containment circles” in the pulse torpedo containment areas. Eric had taught him that you were better to leave the harmless superstitions be, but stamping on the troublesome ones had to be a priority.
Why hasn’t he stamped out this damn ghost rumor?
The lift opened on the flight deck, and he almost immediately saw Commodore Weston’s shuttle, secured into place and being offloaded on the other side of the sealed observation deck. He settled in to wait for the commodore to get through the pressure seals.
