Odysseus Ascendant

by Evan Currie

  “Target and vector data queued for pulse transmission, sir,” the comm officer responded. “Pulse out!”

  Morgan nodded, settling back as he waited along with the rest of the crew for the ultimate expression of their mission to play out in front of them. They’d been tasked with locating stellar and special anomalies since their first fated mission, and it was all coming down to this one moment in time.

  Let’s see how you bastards like a taste of fire from the gods.

  Prometheus Facility

  “Forward targeting data logged and locked, Commander!”

  Commander Janek nodded, standing in the middle of the alien control facility that had been retrofitted with computers and cables to power reactors in order to allow humans some level of control over all the technology that existed around him. He turned to a man standing in the corner, headphones over his ears, who was ignoring the proceedings almost entirely.

  Janek pressed a button that cut off the audio to the headset, startling his colleague.

  “Doctor Palin, if you would join us, please?”

  Doctor Edward Palin sighed, pulling the headphones down as he turned back to look at the commander. “Yes? What is it?”

  “We are preparing to engage the gravity lensing,” Janek said patiently, mentally reminding himself that the eccentric and often-distracted individual was also one of the smartest people in the service. “Could you confirm that our commands are correct before we send the initiation codes?”

  The language expert nodded, looking irritated at having been pulled away from his focus. Janek didn’t know what he was working on at the moment, and he’d learned some time ago not to bother asking.

  “Yes, yes,” Palin said as he switched up his screens and looked over the current data, making minor alterations on the fly as he noted anything wrong. “You should be good now, Commander.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Janek said, nodding to the fire control officer. “Engage.”

  “Yes sir,” Lieutenant Commander Waters said firmly. “Engaging gravity lensing now.”

  The Prometheus facility was, ostensibly, the most powerful telescope in the galaxy as far as anyone had been able to determine. Using massive but incredibly controlled gravity manipulation systems, the structure was capable of gathering all light from a huge expanse of space, literally sucking it in right up almost to the event horizon of an artificial singularity before focusing the energy and sending it back on its way.

  Normally, the light would be sent to a high-resolution imaging system, and the resulting data would be recorded in the facility’s archive.

  In this specific case, however, the light wasn’t being sent on to the imager.

  All the accumulated light had been gathered from the local stellar primary, concentrated, and focused to a point of burning energy best compared to a supernova in intensity. Of course, being light-speed limited, all that destructive power was worthless, as it was literally hundreds of years from its target.

  “Transition waveguides are online, Commander.”

  Or maybe not.

  “Fire for effect.”

  “Aye aye, Commander,” the gunner officer said as he flipped a bank of switches before announcing, “beam out!”

  A roiling inferno of energy lanced out from the Prometheus facility directly into the waiting transition waveguides and then vanished into the black as though it had never existed.

  AEV Autolycus

  “Tachyon surge, Captain.”

  “Thank you, Commander,” Morgan said, wishing that he’d dared get closer. Despite the stealth capabilities of the Rogue Class ships, there were limits, so they’d have to wait for the light-speed data to reach them.

  Tensions mounted as the seconds ticked away. What they were about to do was entirely untested, and everyone on board the small ship knew just what was a stake. With the enemy at the gates, this was their Hail Mary.

  Suddenly, all the screens lit up, casting shadows around the bridge, and the crew lifted their hands to cover their eyes.

  “Holy shit.”

  Morgan didn’t know who said it, but as the screens adapted to filter some of the light out, he honestly had to agree.

  Holy shit indeed.

  AEV Odysseus

  Miram twisted. “What in the hell is Prometheus? I thought it was just the Rogues’ operation under Passer’s command.”

  “It is,” Eric said as the Odysseus screamed around him, the ship flying right through the heart of the enemy formation. He ignored the distress, focusing on his link to Prometheus Actual via the Cheyenne Mountain facility. “What you don’t know is just what they managed to accomplish during the run of the operation, from their very first mission.”

  Heath grimaced as an Imperial destroyer attempted to ram them, only for Odysseus and the young pilot at the helm to twist their forward warp around and use the drives to crush the smaller ship like a freighter running over a kayak at sea.

  Getting too close to a ship the size of the Odysseus had consequences, more so when there was a fight going on.

  “What did they accomplish?” she asked, apparently having brought her attention back from the fight.

  “An ace in the hole,” he answered as he checked a signal being retransmitted to his station from the Cheyenne Mountain facility. Eric’s lips drew back in something far too feral to be a smile as he got the confirmation he had been waiting for. “Yes!”

  “What is it?”

  “A moment,” Eric said, keying open the ship’s communication system to a multicast on all frequencies. “We just received a download from the Auto.”

  Miram shot him a stunned look. “The Auto? They’re on assignment light-years away, sir. Rogues don’t have FTL comms that can do more than basic pulse code.”

  “Prometheus is an exception,” Eric said, signalling her for silence as he opened his command channel to the broadcast and started to speak. “Imperial Commander, this is Commodore Weston of the Allied Earth Vessel Odysseus. You don’t normally talk to us, but I think you want to change your mind.”

  When there was no response—not that he expected one—Eric went doggedly on as though the fighting all around him weren’t happening.

  “You might recognize the imagery I’m broadcasting,” he said. “This is an Imperial System, ten of our minutes ago. Please observe the military construction facilities.”

  “What are you doing?” Miram asked, looking at Eric in confusion, as was about half the crew on the bridge who weren’t busy actually fighting the ship at the moment.

  “I’m conducting a lesson on the proper utilization of strategic weapons,” Eric said as he hit “Play.” “Something these bastards are desperately in need of.”

  The video, mirrored on a small screen overhead, began its playback. At first nothing much seemed to happen. Ships came and went, mostly smaller construction-class vessels, and all seemed in order. The first thing that happened out of the ordinary was easy to miss, but Miram noticed the distinctive look of a transition event.

  Then a pillar of flame roared up from the shipyards, igniting metal and ships and everything in its path as if the finger of God were being dragged across the facility. Wherever it touched, everything burned.

  The whole video took only about twenty seconds to play, but at its end there was nothing but glowing wreckage congealing in space where once a massive military shipyard had floated.

  Eric wasted no time upon the video’s completion.

  “If you won’t answer, we’ll just move on to other targets in the Empire then, shall we?” he said through his command channel.

  He was bluffing—he knew he was—but he didn’t know what else to do. In time, Morgan and the others would locate other targets of value, that was certain, but they wouldn’t in time for this battle. He needed to get the enemy commander’s attention.

  Now.

  For a long moment he felt his guts sink, thinking that the bluff had been called, and then the screen cleared and a voice in clear, accente
d Priminae snarled three simple words.

  “You are lying!”

  Eric smiled, relaxing visibly. “No, I am not. Who am I speaking to?”

  The man on the other side glowered at him for a long moment before responding. “I am Lord Jesan Mich.”

  “Well, My Lord,” Eric said sardonically, “I have no need to lie. We eliminated one of your shipyard facilities. Shall we move on to ground-based military targets?”

  “What you claim is not possible!”

  Eric glanced to one side, noting one of the enemy ships that was more or less holding steady a few light-seconds away. He tapped out a few commands, sent them via pulse back to the Cheyenne Mountain facility with orders to relay to Prometheus, and then he waited. “Is it, now?”

  A few seconds passed, then a pillar of flame lanced down from nowhere and entirely encapsulated the enemy ship in fire. Hull steel began to glow and slagged off as the heat became too much and finally erupted in flames.

  The ship became a drifting pyre as the pillar of flame vanished as quickly as it came. Suddenly, the vast majority of fighting in the void came to a mutually consensual cease-fire as both sides seemed to freeze in shock and awe at what had just happened.

  “Unless you want us to move on to other Imperial worlds, Lord Mich,” Eric growled, “I believe you need to withdraw from this system.”

  The Imperial lord hesitated, eyes darting down in disbelief to the displays in front of him.

  “We could overrun this world, eliminate your weapon . . . ,” he said, uncertainty clouding his tone.

  “You could, and if the weapon were here, that might even work,” Eric said. “Maybe. But maybe we smoke a few of your worlds before you manage? Of course, since the weapon isn’t here, it’s really an academic question, isn’t it?”

  Eric looked right into the display that was showing the enemy commander, eyes setting into cold flint flecks as he dared the man to try him.

  “This game ends now, My Lord,” he said, sardonically mocking the man’s supposed rank. “Or we will turn your worlds into a charnel house. You might send us to hell, Mich, but we’ll turn your territory into our funeral pyres if you try.”

  He settled back, gesturing expansively. “So make up your mind. I’m fine with it either way. If we have to die here, as a species, I’ll settle for burning a genocidal Empire a hundred times our size out of the universe as our legacy. Hell, after what you bastards pulled with the Drasin . . . it would be an honor.”

  Eric smiled easily, eyes fixed on the screen as he waited for the response.

  The screen went abruptly black, and Eric’s hand tensed slightly over the communications terminal that was linked to the Prometheus facility.

  Then the Imperial ships began to reverse away from his own, weapons dead as they moved, and he relaxed slowly until he collapsed fully in his seat and struggled to keep from turning a sickly green in front of his crew.

  “Oh Jesus, I’m so fucking happy he bought that bullshit,” Eric groaned as he leaned over and closed his eyes, taking deep breaths.

  Every member of his bridge crew stared at him with wide eyes, seeming uncertain whether or not to cheer, laugh, applaud . . . or throw up. He completely understood where they were all coming from.

  “Commodore,” Miram said dryly, “do remind me not to ever play poker with you, if you would? You just laid the fate of the entire human race on a bluff, and I honestly thought you meant it when you said you were fine with however it turned out.”

  “I was,” Eric said seriously as he slowly got up from the command station. “Every species dies eventually, and if we have to go out here and now? Well, there are worse ways to go. ‘They died that others might live free’—that would be one hell of a eulogy line for our species, Commander.”

  EPILOGUE

  Lord’s Own Dreadnought, Empress Liann

  Jesan Mich stood alone in his command center when Misrem entered, standing by the door as she waited for acknowledgment from the fleet commander.

  “Enter,” he said, not turning to look at her.

  Misrem nodded politely, though he couldn’t see her, and walked slowly into the room as she examined the man for a brief moment. The proud lord of the Empire was visibly enraged, only barely in control of himself if she were to hazard a guess. She understood the feeling. She’d been on the receiving end of the locals’ little surprises in the past, though the level of shock they’d rolled out this time dwarfed anything she’d ever imagined.

  “My Lord,” she greeted him, bowing respectfully.

  “For how much longer, I wonder.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Jesan shook his head. “Not your concern, Navarch. These anomalies we’ve discovered are proving to be rather . . . irritating.”

  Misrem shuddered slightly.

  “That would be a slight understatement, My Lord. They’ve devised a means to project force . . . in a way I had not believed possible.”

  “Or a way to appear to do so.”

  “You think it’s a trick, My Lord?”

  The sector lord of the Empire gestured uncaringly, waving off the question. “For the moment it matters not. If it’s real, then we will have to deal with it. If it is not . . . well then, we will have to deal with it, won’t we? It’s just a matter of what method of dealing is left to us at this point. The best people in the Empire will examine every scanner record we have, as well as everything from the shipyard attack. We will work out what they did eventually.”

  He looked over the display to his left showing those same records.

  “I expect that they are using stealthed vessels,” he said after a moment’s thought. “That would be the simplest answer. In that case, the Empire will be forced to hunt them down, one by one if necessary, and clear them from our space.”

  “And if there is some sort of superweapon?” Misrem asked, trembling slightly. Like the Drasin?

  “Then we will be forced to locate it, and destroy it.”

  “Yes, My Lord.”

  “To that end, Navarch,” Jesan said, “I’ve issued orders to the fleet. As soon as we leave Oather space, we will split our group and begin searching for any evidence of which it might be. You will command one of the groups.”

  Misrem saluted. “Of course, My Lord.”

  “Go,” he said softly. “Leave me for a time. I have . . . work to do.”

  Allied Earth Command, Cheyenne Mountain Facility

  There were fewer celebrations going on than the admiral would have expected if she were inclined to think about it much. The relief was too strong for her to do that, though, and so Gracen found herself slumped at her desk in the war room as she looked over the data that was still pouring in from multiple sections.

  Prometheus had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. The mission she had originally tasked to the first Rogue Class vessel, the Autolycus, had just paid for itself beyond all calculations, but she was realizing that it wasn’t over like most of the people around her seemed to think.

  They’ll be looking for Prometheus, whether they know what it is or not.

  Earth had too much now relying on a single deterrent and still no real information on the Empire. It was an untenable situation in the long term, but for the moment . . . they’d succeeded. This battle was over, and she supposed she should be happy while peace lasted.

  “Every victory has a price.”

  Gracen felt a chill but managed to keep from jumping at the familiar voice behind her.

  “Would you stop that?” she hissed, turning to see Gaia dressed in that perfectly fitted commander’s uniform. “You can’t just appear from nowhere like that. Someone will notice.”

  “No one ever has if I didn’t want them to.” Gaia smiled, gesturing idly. “But I didn’t mask my presence. You were simply too caught up in your thoughts to notice me standing here.”

  Gracen frowned but didn’t comment on that. She knew it was probably true.

  “Yes, every victory has a cost,” she said finally,
trying not to clench her teeth too tightly as she glared at the “commander.” “Some are too high, but this time I’m quite certain that the cost of losing was far worse.”

  Gaia tipped her head, acknowledging that. “Likely, yes. Time will tell, I suppose. This Empire fascinates me.”

  “They piss me off.”

  Gaia smiled. “That hardly surprises me, Admiral. I rarely get truly angry any longer, not like when I was younger. The Drasin made me enraged, but the Empire I find more fascinating than anything else. Something in their actions bothers me, but I cannot quite place it.”

  “A lot of their actions bother me, to say the least,” Gracen retorted, “but they do seem unduly virulent in their obsession with the Priminae.”

  “And now, humanity,” Gaia added thoughtfully. “Yes. There’s more there than we’ve seen. Why would they open the war with genocide, Admiral? The Priminae records, as reported, show no contact in . . . millennia. No matter how contentious the relationship before that, humans don’t have the . . . consistency . . . to hold a grudge across that many generations.”

  “One question among thousands,” Gracen said in a light voice. “Maybe we’ll learn the answer, someday.”

  “Yes . . . someday.”

  AEV Odysseus

  Eric Stanton Weston silently secured his station and stepped away, largely ignoring the celebrations that had broken out. The crews had earned their moment, and he hoped the pleasantness lasted, but he also knew that while they had landed a telling blow, it hadn’t been truly decisive.

  The Empire would likely be quiet, for a time, but they would look for any way they could to defend against, destroy, or circumvent Prometheus.

  For the moment, Earth was on borrowed time, protected only by security through obscurity, because the Prometheus facility was ultimately vulnerable if it were to be discovered. How long that security would hold was anyone’s guess, but against an intense effort by the Empire, it would inevitably fail.