Odysseus Ascendant

by Evan Currie

Well, maybe not the very last, but certainly up there.

  “Yes sir?” he ventured, trying and failing not to sound like he was asking a question.

  It was the commodore’s grin, he decided. That was what put him off.

  Creepy.

  Lieutenant Chans wasn’t quite sure what had just happened. If she were to be asked about it, she wasn’t certain she could even remember how she got from the bridge to the cargo decks. She remembered the commodore intercepting her, a rush of motion and information, and the next thing she knew she was standing in the middle of what looked like a logistics depot after a hurricane.

  “Sir?” she ventured softly. “I’m confused. Why am I here? What is a drone?”

  “You’re here because this is your job for now,” Eric said, still grinning. “You’re going to supervise this lot, Lieutenant. Build me drones.”

  She nodded slowly. “Very well . . . but . . . what are drones?”

  The two she had just been introduced to stared at her, clearly stunned, but the commodore just seemed to find it all even more amusing somehow.

  “You’ll work it out,” he assured her. “I’ve sent the basic requirements to your files. Good luck. You have a week.”

  When he turned and strode off, Milla actually thought the situation had to be a joke of some sort. Only when he didn’t turn back around to tell her as much did she begin to have the sinking sensation that the commodore was actually serious.

  She looked around the mess she stood in the middle of, trying to figure out just what it was she was supposed to do.

  “What is a drone?” she asked again, trying not to sound plaintive.

  “Ma’am, a drone is an unmanned vehicle, either controlled remotely or by AI,” the nearby chief stated firmly.

  “Is that all?” Milla frowned, confused. “Why am I on this task?”

  She looked around the parts that lay scattered across the deck, eyes narrowing as she spotted a crewman handling something familiar.

  “Crewman! Careful with that!” Milla snapped, her voice suddenly sharp. “That is not something to trifle with.”

  The crewman stared back for a moment before slowly setting the odd sphere back into its case.

  “You know what that is, Lieutenant?” the other lieutenant asked cautiously.

  “Of course. It is a space-warp amplifier,” she answered. “Part of the drive system for a moderate to large shuttle.” Milla sighed. “Pardon me. I need to determine just what the specifications are that the commodore has left me with.”

  She turned and headed for a computer station, leaving the others to stare after her.

  “Maybe the commodore hasn’t entirely lost it after all,” the Chief allowed grudgingly before she was entirely out of earshot.

  Milla ignored the comment. At the computer station, she examined the files that had been left in her folders. The commodore had an interesting concept—one that her people had never used so far as she knew—that combined some of the strengths of both Priminae and Terran technology in ways that she was unused to seeing.

  The majority of this is straightforward, Milla realized as she looked it over.

  The control system would have to be a combined effort, but she was familiar enough with Priminae automation systems as well as Terran software now to integrate the code. The hardware was mostly compatible, based around a Priminae drive system with a Terran transition cannon as the primary weapon. In many ways, the design the commodore had thrown together was little more than a flying gun, but that was fine. She could do that.

  The final piece of the composite, however, was something entirely different.

  The man is insane.

  She had, reluctantly, come to some degree of acceptance concerning the Terran fascination with things that could utterly obliterate them from the universe. It was a specific and odd personality quirk for a species to engage in, playing with material that literally only existed to destroy parts of the normal universe. She had not, however, come to internalize said quirk herself.

  Milla sighed.

  At least he wants to get it off the Odysseus. That much is progress.

  Fine.

  Milla turned back around, eyes scanning the area again as she strode toward the chief and the lieutenant.

  “Chief,” Milla said.

  “Ma’am.”

  “I require this deck cleared. Move all material against the walls,” she ordered. “Place everything in groups. Call in the full shift. We will require all engineering ratings . . . No, make that two shifts. Engineering ratings with qualifications in small-craft maintenance, transition technology, and . . .”

  Milla shuddered. “And antimatter production.”

  Chief Garrick and Lieutenant Chin exchanged startled, extremely concerned glances.

  “Ma’am?” the chief croaked.

  “Commodore’s orders, Chief,” Milla said. “I assure you, I am no happier with this than you are.”

  “Small comfort, ma’am.”

  “Chief, be about your business,” Milla said sourly. “Lieutenant, oversee the inventory and organization of this material, if you please? We will require exact numbers of all parts.”

  “I’ll see to it.”

  “Good. I have a design to work on.” Milla paused as she started to turn around, an object off in the far corner catching her eye.

  She smiled as she recognized it.

  I may have an idea for an improvement to the commodore’s design request.

  Steph tossed a glance over his shoulder toward the back of the bridge as the commodore reappeared, sans Milla. It wasn’t that he was worried exactly, at least not for Milla’s safety or anything like that.

  Her sanity? That was a possible concern.

  He was, however, burning with curiosity as he watched Eric step back into the command station and return to work as though nothing had just occurred. Eric’s acumen for calmly working under almost any pressure was legendary, but there were times when it drove Steph absolutely batty. Steph could just barely remember the suggestion he’d made, something about mounting a t-cannon on a drone to fire pulse torpedoes?

  Insane, but then they seemed to be living in insane times.

  His musings were cut short as a new contact appeared on the threat board. Steph tagged it automatically to his station as the scanner station chimed behind him, bringing the contact to the general attention of the bridge.

  “Priminae cruiser approaching, Commodore,” the lieutenant standing watch announced.

  “They’re expected,” Weston said without looking up from his work. “We’re going to be putting together a joint task force. Clear them to a twenty-kilometer approach, watch their vectors closely.”

  “Aye sir.”

  A twenty-kilometer approach was effectively welcoming the other ship inside the Odysseus’ point-defense envelope, simultaneously saying that they were trusted as well as protected. Anything less than ten thousand kilometers was ludicrously close, given the nature of their weapons, and under a full light-second was knife range.

  If you were going to be shuttling anybody back and forth, though, closer was still better. Even with counter-mass technology and the more effective Priminae versions, it wasn’t considered safe to go popping around at high speed that close to the steep gravity sheers of an active core.

  Steph updated his tag to list the ship as an ally and then largely ignored it, though he did spare a thread of his attention on the approach vectors. He trusted the Priminae—they were generally decent, if unimaginative, pilots—but he’d seen what happened to ships that got too close to a cruiser’s core. Keeping that from happening to him would always be a priority.

  That done, he returned his focus to wondering just what Raze really thought he was going to be able to pull off with the drone concept.

  Certainly, it would alleviate some of the concerns about using antimatter charges, but Steph didn’t think there was remotely enough time to really put something effective together before the weapons would be
needed. The numbers approaching them were too stark to be handled with simple tricks.

  We need a new Double A initiative, Steph thought grimly, because this Block ain’t going to be turned back by anything less than a clear show of superiority, and we just don’t have anything like that.

  Eric barely spared any attention for the approaching ship that he knew would be but the first of many. Rael had informed him that the Priminae forces were recalling all patrols, and the ships that had been on the lookout for any remnants of the Drasin would be retasked to the more pressing concern. He knew that Admiral Gracen would, in turn, break loose every ship she could from Earth.

  There were also a few force multipliers left that he could leverage, especially if he could construct one or two more of his own that no one had seen yet. Steph’s offhand comment about drones might be enough to give them a temporary edge, but he had few illusions about its overall effectiveness in the coming battle.

  That didn’t mean he was going to give up any slight edge he could gain himself just then, cost be damned. With everything on the line, he could authorize experiments that would never get through the cost/benefit calculations back home, so while he could, he would draw on everything he possibly had. If any of it turned out to be useful in what was coming, Eric would count that as a win.

  And if not?

  Well, he wouldn’t be around for the bean counter to bitch at.

  Win, win.

  I wish we hadn’t been forced to send the others on ahead, Eric thought as his mind turned back to the issue that had kept the Odysseus from deploying with the task group.

  Odysseus.

  The boy king. Perhaps that was a better moniker than the warrior king, Eric now supposed. The alien intelligence was problematic to the proper running of a starship, and yet they had no choice but to fight the ship whether they liked it or not.

  In peacetime, Eric had no doubt that the Odysseus would have been pulled off the line instantly. Sent to some research and development area, the vessel would be maintained only to keep the entity active until the military could figure out what the hell had happened to create it and whether it was worth creating again or enacting countermeasures.

  He didn’t know which decision made the most sense himself.

  A self-aware warship was not exactly a comforting thought, particularly one as powerful as the Odysseus. They’d had to do some scrambling to make sure that the weapons on the ship weren’t accessible without physical human intervention.

  Most required a physical circuit to be bridged, a throwback to wet Navy doctrine and something that wasn’t shared by the Priminae. Eric had ordered every system to be scrubbed through again just to ensure that no one had missed anything when the hardware breaks had been first installed.

  A deep-seated paranoia concerning artificial intelligence in Earth culture seemed to ultimately apply here, though Odysseus wasn’t precisely what he would call artificial, of course.

  “Are you sure?”

  Eric looked up to see the young man in armor and glittering pink makeup staring at him, intense curiosity alight in his expression.

  “That you aren’t artificial?” Eric asked, receiving a nod in return. “As near as I can be. You’re no more artificial than I am, though given what we’ve learned about human DNA since we encountered the Priminae, that isn’t as certain a fact as I once believed.”

  The boy hummed thoughtfully, then abruptly shifted topics.

  “Lieutenant Chans has some interesting ideas to complement your and Lieutenant Commander Michaels’ concepts,” he said, startling Eric briefly.

  “Oh?” Eric said.

  “Yes. She has already improved your conceptual design in several ways and discovered one of the key flaws.”

  “Flaws?”

  “Communications lag will be an issue on platforms that small,” Odysseus said simply, making Eric curse softly.

  He really should have remembered that.

  FTL transmissions were . . . difficult. There were differing levels of communication possible, primarily through the modulation of FTL tachyons. However, due to the nature of the tachyon pulses, you needed extremely significant power sources and a very concise transmission code. Analog voice and video were possible, but burst code was by far preferred.

  A drone platform, particularly one that needed every ounce of power for its weapon system, was not going to have a mounted FTL transceiver. That would mean they’d have to keep the drones close to the ship if they wanted to maintain a real-time weapons control system, but that would undo several of the key advantages of using a drone platform in the first place.

  Drones were soft targets, so the last thing you wanted was for them to be loitering around close to laser magnets like a Heroic Class cruiser. They’d be fried by even a grazing strike from an Imperial laser, and if the Odysseus accidentally dodged an Imperial laser and sucked an antimatter-armed drone into its gravity well . . .

  Okay, that’s not going to happen.

  “And did Lieutenant Chans have a solution?” he asked mildly.

  Odysseus smiled. “Think ‘Loyal Wingman,’ Commodore.”

  “Huh,” Eric said, blinking. “I haven’t thought about that program in a long time, not since I was active duty with the US Marines. They killed it when the anti-drone treaty was signed, but it had some promise. Still, where is she going to get . . . Oooh . . .”

  He made a quick notation on his station before looking back to Odysseus, noticing that pretty much everyone on the bridge was now paying close attention to his discussion with the boy intelligence.

  “If you have any more concepts to bring to my attention, please do so,” Eric said, his voice clear and carrying.

  “Of course, Commodore,” Odysseus responded, his tone shifting to a more professional one.

  Insomuch as a teenage boy could manage to put on a professional front.

  Eric smiled at the eager salute, posture so stiff the boy was practically vibrating, and a matching expression on his made-up face.

  “Head out,” he said, nodding to the door. And don’t vanish until you’re alone, damn it.

  Odysseus nodded, dropping the salute and doing an almost textbook heel turn as he marched out to the rear hatch. He was soon out of sight, clearly having read Eric’s mental order.

  “He’s an interesting . . . boy?” Miram Heath said as she quietly approached. “That makeup is hardly in keeping with military policy, mind you.”

  “Mentally he seems to be a confused teenager,” Eric said, sighing.

  “Confused? I don’t understand.”

  “Gender issues,” Eric said as quietly as he could. “Odysseus is obviously a male name, and we even call the ship the Warrior King, but what gender do we assign vessels?”

  Miram’s eyes widened. “A ship is always female.”

  “Exactly. I think he’s trying to figure out his gender, and is having some rather serious issues with the concept,” Eric said. “I’ve been trying to ignore it, just because it’s not really an issue of discipline in this case, and any attention I bring to it will just make the problem worse.”

  “Ugh.” Miram rubbed her temples. “I think I just sprained my brain trying to wrap it around the concepts alone.”

  “Tell me about it. Honestly, I’m far from an expert in dealing with the experiences of transgender servicemen and women. Just don’t have the know-how needed to put it all in context, so I try and do what I think is fair and hope I’m right. This is worse again, because I have no frame of reference by which I can understand the issues Odysseus is dealing with.”

  “More or less with you there.” Miram sighed. “What can we do?”

  “Just normalize him,” Eric said. “Treat him normally, as if nothing is out of the ordinary. Let people see you do that. We need the Odysseus, which means we need Odysseus now, as he is the ship in a very real way. We can’t afford any hint of fracture in command or hint of issues with the status of the ship, otherwise people will take that cue from us.
”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Eric hoped that she did, and that everyone took the appropriate cues from his actions. One thing he was certain of was that they could not afford for the crew to start thinking the ship was cursed or haunted. There was too much riding on every single ship Earth and the Priminae forces had available for them to sacrifice even one Heroic over something as stupid as superstition.

  Even when that superstition was clearly true.

  CHAPTER 13

  Station Unity One, Earth Orbit

  Admiral Gracen sighed deeply, knowing that she couldn’t put this off any further but hating it all the same as she walked up the ramp into the large delta-wing shuttle. The hydraulics whined softly behind her as the ramp rose up to the bottom of the lifting body craft. A pressure seal hissed as the ramp closed.

  She’d managed to avoid returning to Earth since her discussion with Commodore Weston, only getting as close as her office in the high orbital facility that was Unity One. That had worked so far, but no farther. She’d been recalled in no uncertain terms to brief various governmental leaders in person. That meant returning to the Earth’s magnetic field and, more specifically, bringing her brain into said field.

  From what Weston and Tanner had told her, whether this Gaia entity chose to reveal itself or not, the moment Gracen was deep enough inside the field everything she contemplated would become part and parcel of Gaia’s memories.

  The very thought gave her chills. And hives. Lots of hives.

  Gracen absently scratched at the back of her hand as the shuttle finished its checklist and received clearance to depart.

  The rumble of the twin turbine reactors powering up sent shivers through the shuttle. Normally it was a sound, a feeling of power, that she had some appreciation for. This time, however, she would have preferred to remain behind on the nearly silent decks of the space station.

  Duty, however, called.

  There was no window for her to admire the view as the shuttle powered out into space from the station, but she’d spent enough hours staring at the unparalleled vista available from her office to have the image permanently etched in her mind. The shuttle spiraled around the station, locked in a flight control pattern as they waited for their window to make reentry.