Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (20 page)

“Holy shit!”

Lyssa’s self-imposed silence had been born of terror and was broken by terror when she saw a massive object blast away from the wreckage of the
Odyssey,
arcing over her boat and crashing into the water not fifty meters away. The swell thrown up by the splash caused her to bob heavily up and down as she stared at where the water had swallowed up whatever it was.

“What the hell is that damned fool doing?” she muttered, shaking her head in near disgust.

A bubbling disturbance breaking the surface was her first clue that a method may actually exist within the madness of her erstwhile companion. A few seconds after that a large cargo assault craft breached the surface and was bobbing some distance away.

She was distracted from checking it out closer when another blast made her duck. This time the splash of water was close enough to soak her through before she had time to turn around and see what it was.

Lyssa paled, hands clutching the controls of her commandeered boat as she hit the starter switch and threw power to the engines.

Time to get the hell out of here before that crazy bastard
sinks
me
.

“Three away,” Eric said to himself as the third deployment module launched out the port hatch. He shuffled his way over
to the fourth one and was working on the control panel when a sound caught his attention.

He looked up-deck, in the direction of the sound, and paled beneath his armor. He’d been so focused on his work that he hadn’t noticed the daylight filtering in from above him where the Drasin had chewed through the doors covering the entrance to the flight deck. Against the light of the Sun he could see the monstrous silhouettes skittering across the inclined deck, moving far too quickly in his direction for comfort.

Eric cast his thoughts back to the Priminae weapon he’d left with the loader and slowly began to edge back in that direction.

If they don’t spot me, maybe I can get to
. . .

That idea went up in smoke when three of the alien beasts surged forward, apparently giving up on whatever method they’d been using to keep from sliding down the deck. As they surged toward him, Eric kicked off the deck himself, catapulting across the space and falling forty feet to where the loader was parked.

The magnets in the big machine’s feet were more than strong enough to handle the impact of his form, armor and all, but even cushioned as he was the impact with the machine blew the breath from his lungs. Eric forced himself to move even though his body was practically convulsing, rolling into the steel cage of the pilot’s compartment and slamming his hand down on the controls.

The harness dropped over him, securing him in place as he reached for the controls while his lungs filled with the air they’d been demanding for the last few seconds. He gasped inside his armor even as his hands began working the stick grip instinctively.

The grip felt familiar in his hand as he jammed it forward and brought the big machine’s right arm up to block just as the closest Drasin leapt at him.

Eric felt the loader sway back under that weight, and he began to sweat just a little. His own impact had been negligible to the loader’s magnetic contacts, but the mass of a Drasin? That was something else.

Have to get this thing off me, or we’re both going to experience one hell of a tumble
.

The thirty-degree incline of the deck would give him more than enough time to accelerate to lethal speeds if the magnetic contacts of the loader lost their hold, which was likely for both him and the Drasin or Drasins who caused it. There was only one of him, however, and Eric suspected that the enemy would be more than happy with the trade.

He, on the other hand, didn’t consider it a fair exchange in the least.

Eric grunted as he forced his left hand up to match the right, bringing in the loader’s left manipulating arm to grab the Drasin as it hissed and struck at the right. He got the hydraulic claw around its head and thumbed the control hat over as far as he could, letting the claw slowly hiss shut. It took seconds, not really a weapon he’d choose to make use of. But as the hydraulics began to crush down on the alien carapace, Eric could easily hear crackling sounds erupting from his foe.

The carapace gave under the pressure, a spray of superheated silicon erupting out of it and coating the machine. Eric ignored it, tossing the now motionless Drasin aside as he twisted around and looked for the next.

It found him first.

He saw it coming, but the loader was too slow to react. The Drasin slammed into the machine, causing it to sway back again under the massive impact, and drove its barbed legs in through the open cockpit. Eric twisted as best he could, narrowly avoiding the leg as it stabbed through the padding of the restraints and seat. He twisted his head, looking at the lethal limb just inches away, and then refocused on the enemy with new intensity.

Eric pulled back the other arm of the loader, then slammed it forward into the Drasin with as much power as the hydraulic powered machine could muster. It wasn’t much for striking power, honestly—the machine moved too slow for that—but for pure irresistible strength there wasn’t a lot around that could match it.

Slowly Eric pushed the beast back, the barbed leg grating against the cast steel of the loader as the Drasin was slowly forced out of the cockpit. The creature clawed at the pushing arm, hissing and spitting the whole time. With more leverage, Eric hefted the beast off the loader and then slammed it down with enough force to dent the deck plates.

It clawed and scrambled at the loader’s arm as Eric pulled back and began to pound on the beast with the newly freed right arm of the machine. The first three blows seemed to stun it, the next five cracked the carapace in a dozen places, and the last two stilled its struggles for good. Eric looked up, seeing more of the beasts coming his way, scrambling down the inclined deck like swarming insects.

“Right. Time to ditch,” Eric muttered, leaning forward into the inclined deck as he began to thump
toward
the charging beasts.

He made it to Cat about twenty meters ahead of the swarm, wishing he had guns on the machine he was using but honestly figuring it wouldn’t matter.

“Hey boys,” he said over the open com, knowing that they could probably neither hear nor understand him. “Got a little surprise for ya. Semper fi, you rat bastards. This is
my
goddamn ship! I choose how she goes out, not you!”

He stepped into the Cat panel, locking the loader into place as best he could as he leaned forward. A blur of motion to his left made him turn at the torso, reaching out automatically with his left arm to snap the lunging Drasin out of the air. He held it in place, hissing and screaming, while he contacted the detonators he’d set earlier and gave them a nudge.

The distant crump was barely audible, but Eric knew that the blasts were small and directed away from his current location. Shaped charges blew down into engineering, sending plasma into the reactor room and penetrating containment.

The
Odyssey
used a fusion system, a very safe and stable reactor technology that wasn’t prone to the meltdown problems that plagued fission systems. It did, however, run on compressed hydrogen gas.

When the hydrogen was ignited by the plasma and mixed with an influx of oxygen from the breach, things got hot in a hurry. The reactor itself could have handled the heat easily, but it was the containment tanks that took the hit, and they weren’t proofed to the same degree. Engineering vanished into a ball of flame so blue as to be practically invisible until it began melting the plastics littered around the area.

The fires of hell erupted out of engineering, rolling upward through the decks, pushing the air before it. When it reached the flight deck, the pounds per square inch were low, but the square footage was
immense
.

The entire far wall blew in with enough force to make Eric cringe as he ducked down and sent the launch command to the Cat. The electromagnetic launch exploded forward, driving him and the loader out at five Gs, straight at the port-side hatch. Eric folded the loader’s big steel arms in front of him as he exploded out of his ship even as the fires roared past.

“Holy son of a . . .”

Lyssa hugged the control console of the boat as blasts of fire exploded out of the
Odyssey
’s keel at even points along the side, moving up from the waterline toward where the bow was hanging fifty meters over the water.

A plume of fire then erupted from the bow and scorched the sky for hundreds of meters above the ship in a display of pyrotechnics that Lyssa expected would be visible for miles around. She was so focused on the blast of flames that she almost missed the smoking projectile that arced over her head, a scorched yellow missile that left a wake in the air as it fell into the water of the sound a few hundred meters away.

For a long moment Lyssa just sat there, eyes moving from the splash point of yet another mysterious object, the fiery wreck of the
Odyssey
that was now smoking like a giant cannon sticking out of the sound, and finally the bobbing assault craft floating around her.

This whole situation just went to hell in short order
.