Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (74 page)

COLONEL MARION GRUMBLED as he made his way through the largely makeshift comm center constructed to facilitate the movements of the special unit and its operations. He knew it had become necessary to use every asset available, but honestly there was no reason to build them their own operations control. That could have been run out of SOCOM, surely.

“What is it, Miss Myriano?” he asked tiredly.

“I called for the general.” Lyssa scowled.

“The general is busy in another part of the facility. You’ll have to make do with me.”

Lyssa scowled at him, then grunted. “Fine. I need authorization to retask.”

Marion blinked, mind reeling incredulously.

Did she just actually ask me for authorization to retask nuclear strikes? Is she insane, or just stupid?

“Miss Myriano, the approved strikes were determined at the highest levels,” he growled. “This is not some game where you can start shooting whatever you feel like because you got a new
gun
.”

She gave him a dry, almost pitying look, then hit one key on her board. The screen in front of him lit up, and he noted that it was standard imagery from a recon package. He leaned in a bit and shrugged. “You have one Drasin drone soldier out in the middle of nowhere. I fail to see . . .”

Lyssa hit another key and it flashed to infrared, causing him to reel back.

The entire area was crawling with them, so much that at first it looked like one single heat source if not for the scrambling movements he could pick out. Marion paled. “Where is that?”

“That’s an abandoned mine in Kentucky,” she said. “It’s noted for having high concentrations of various rare earth minerals as well as other useful materials.”

“Why is it abandoned?” Marion asked absently as he stared in fascination at the imagery.

“After the war ended, the Block flooded the market with most of what it produces,” she shrugged. “They still have much lower wages than we do, so for things like this the mine’s owners couldn’t compete. Better to cap the mine and save the materials for when they’re more profitable to get out. Unfortunately, it looks like the Drasin beat us to it.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this, not in any city . . .”

“The cities are decoys,” Lyssa cut him off. “They replicate there, yes, but they don’t even bother going to ground. They just swarm around, catching our attention. I’ve located a dozen other mines just like this one through our recon packages worldwide. Colonel, we
need
to retask.”

“It’ll have to go right to the President,” Marion shook his head. “This is . . .”

“This is
vital,
” she stressed. “If you have to go to the CinC, then do so.
Now
. Before it’s too late.”

He nodded slowly, reaching for her system and keying open a channel. “This is Colonel Marion. I need to speak directly with the Chiefs.”

“Yes sir,” the woman on the other side said, sounding disinterested.

The screen flickered, and in a moment the logo of the Joint Chiefs appeared and another woman’s voice spoke. “Joint Command and Control, how may I direct you?”

“The Chiefs,” Marion said simply.

“I’m sorry, I require authorization . . .”

“Marion, Colonel, Confederate Air Force. ID Number Zero Niner Five Niner Alpha Zeta Bravo One Two. Omega Protocol.”

There was a pause, then the screen instantly changed to show a man in a suit staring off at something else. It took a second before he glanced down and was apparently surprised to see someone looking back at him.

“Holy hell, son, you scared a year off my life.” The man snorted. “What is it?”

“I’m about to scare more than a year off, sir,” Marion told him, nodding to Lyssa. “Send the file.”

She nodded, hitting a few commands.

The man on the other side frowned, eyes flicking to the left. He stared for a moment, then paled. “Is this what I think it is?”

“It’s worse. We need to retask all Shiva groups.”

Far from Earth, the front line of the Drasin force pursuing the fleeing
Odysseus
exploded into clouds of expanding plasma. The ship minds noted the destruction, were again
frustrated in their attempts to locate a source, but otherwise did not flinch from their mission.

The furor of destruction lasted only seconds, peaking as over a dozen ships vanished into plasma at once, then dwindled off before finally ending with just over three hundred ships destroyed. The ship minds noted that again, and the lack of follow-up as time continued to trudge on, and decided that the enemy was either in the process of reloading their unknown weapon or had spent their final shots.

The swarm absently hoped that was the case. It was becoming more and more tedious to replace drone ships that had been blown from space-time by a method that couldn’t be determined, tracked, or countered.

What had to be done
would
be done, but it would be so much easier for everyone involved if this annoying example of the red band would simply accept their fate. There was work to be done elsewhere, other worlds to cleanse of the filth that had infected them.

Other stars to bring back to the whole.

“Enemy ships’ course is unchanged, Captain.”

Eric nodded. “Good. I want best speed for the heliopause, Commander.”

“Aye Captain,” Steph said. “Course is engaged. We’re warping space for the heliopause.”

Eric murmured his response, surprised by the different feel of this ship over his
Odyssey
. The slight jolt of acceleration that the centrifugal gravity and CM systems had never quite been able to mask on his previous ship was entirely missing here. All he felt was a slight flutter in his guts as though he
were falling, and nothing else. Luckily everything seemed to fall right along with him, so no harm, he supposed.

The
Odysseus
was a marvel of a ship, that much he could admit, but Eric missed his old chair.

“Enemy ships are matching speed,” Michelle said. “Correction . . . they’re . . . Captain, they’ve increased speed to overtake.”

Eric twisted, his face a mask hiding the concern he felt rush through him. “How long to overtake?”

“We won’t make the orbit of Neptune, Captain.”

“Damn, that’s fast,” Eric hissed. “Do we have any more speed?”

That set off a flurry of debate behind him, and he had to run his seat to look at the Priminae engineers who were arguing. Eric let them go for a moment, the translator barely keeping up with half of what they were tossing back and forth, before finally breaking in.

“I asked a question.”

The chief winced and looked over at him, shaking his head. “Not safely, and likely not even if we remove the breakers, Captain. The Drasin have never shown this level of speed before. We did not even believe it was possible within the realm of practical physics.”

That honestly didn’t surprise him much. The Drasin had ways of confounding physics, to his mind at least.

“What keeps that speed from being practical?”

“Primarily the fact that the heat generation increases exponentially,” the chief answered. “Within the space-warp, eventually you reach levels of heat that only existed briefly in the history of the universe, right after the first instant of expansion.”

“Lovely,” Eric turned back.

He remembered that bit about the theory of the Alcubierre drive mechanism, and knew that Priminae ships devoted massive parts of their infrastructure to heat pumps and reclamation tools. It didn’t surprise him in the slightest, however, that Drasin would be able to use more speed.

The Drasin were far more tolerant of heat than any human.

Eric took a breath. “Alright. It’ll be a fight then.”

Steph half turned from the helm, puzzled. “Wait . . . why is the heat buildup so bad now? Both of us can go FTL using this drive. Shouldn’t we be able to withstand more?”

Eric raised an eyebrow, glancing back at the chief, who simply shook his head.

“I am afraid not, Commander. To pass light we must be outside the solar gravity field, or very nearly so. Right now we’re fighting both the common law of physics and the pull of the star itself.”

“As I said,” Eric repeated himself, “it’ll be a fight.”

“Sir, I don’t understand . . .”

Eric glanced over to where Milla was manning the tactical station, noting that she looked nervous, but not as bad as he might expect. “What don’t you understand?”

“Why are they overtaking us now? If you’re right, they need us. The need us to lead them to . . . well, wherever,” she said, brow scrunched up as she puzzled out her thoughts.

The whole point behind the captain’s plan was that the Drasin didn’t realize that they had
already
located the homeworld they sought. The whole point of running as a decoy was that the Drasin would
have
to follow, to seek their source of reinforcements.

So why would they suddenly force a battle now? It made no sense.

Eric just shrugged and smiled, sadly. “The transition drive, Miss Chans. They can’t let us reach the heliopause, and they know it. I gambled and lost. I hoped they’d let us get out of the system and lead them on a merry little chase, but they didn’t take the bait.”

“Oh. But then . . .”

“They’ll try to take us in one piece,” Eric said confidently, “probably hoping that they’ll be able to get intel from our computers, so we’re going to use that against them. There’s nothing harder than taking an opponent alive if he’s trying his damndest to kill you first.”