The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (17 page)

“I masked them from you.”

“Why?”

This time, there was a long silence.

“Central?” Eric asked finally, looking around. “Are you still there?”

“I am, Captain,” the voice said again. “The answer to your question is…complex. For one, I wished to speak with you…to…thank you.”

“Thank me? For what?”

“For saving me,” the voice said simply. “Your interception and destruction of the Plague Ships, and their Virii here on the surface, saved me as much as the other people here.”

Eric considered that, wondering if a computer were able to be grateful.

“I told you before, Captain, I am not a computer,” the voice replied.

“What are you, then?” Eric asked, still deeply frustrated.

“I am the heart,” the voice replied. “But then, so are you.”

“That’s not answering the question.”

“Not in the way you wish, no,” the voice conceded. “However, I do not have a better way to respond to it at this time. I haven’t been asked that question in more then twenty thousand cycles of this system’s primary.”

Twenty thousand years. Eric’s mind spun from the implications, and he finally had to move over to the side of the room and lean against the wall.

“That long?” he asked unsteadily.

“Yes, Captain. I suppose that I am what you might call ‘immortal.’”

Push it aside, man!
Eric told himself, trying to get a grip.
Come on, think straight, dammit!

“It’s my experience that humans rarely, if ever, ‘think straight,’” the voice replied dryly.

“Stay out of my head!” Eric snarled, glaring around him.

“I’m afraid that I’m quite unable to help it,” the voice said, actually sounding vaguely apologetic. “You see, your neural impulses fire in a coded sequence as unmistakable to me as someone yelling in your ear would be to you. Energy fields are something of a natural order of things to me.”

“How come you can read my ‘neural impulses’?” Eric demanded. “Shouldn’t I think differently than the locals?”

“Not perceptibly so,” the voice said with a thoughtful tone. “I’ve read minds from several worlds and three separate species, in fact. Mental thought is a universal standard, as near as I can tell from such a limited sampling, of course.”

“The Drasin?” Eric asked, his mind racing as he tried to put things together while still keeping track of the conversation.

The voice paused for a moment, then spoke quietly. “No. The Drasin don’t read as intelligent beings.”

Eric pursed his lips. “They have to. You don’t build ships—or fly them, for that matter—without being intelligent.”

“Perhaps you are right, Captain. I don’t know,” the voice replied. “However, for the moment, they are not the subject I have in mind.”

Eric nodded slowly. “All right. What is it you have in mind?”

“I want to know you, Captain. And your people,” the voice said. “I want to know what you intend here…”

“Intend?” Eric frowned. “We don’t intend anything except contact.”

“Contact is precisely what I am afraid of.”

NACS ODYSSEY
Ranquil Planetary Orbit

▸BERMONT DRIFTED IDLY by a far wall as he watched the show from a safe distance, arms hooked loosely into handholds so he could float withough moving too far.

“Turn out!” Master Sergeant Greene snarled, his foot clomping in a steady staccato as he crossed the open deck in front of the flailing soldiers.

They’d suited up in powered armor for parade drill, but most of the people who made up the
Odyssey
’s newly filled troop complement were less than familiar with zero-gravity drills, and the added complexity of the power suits resulted in some interesting definitions of the word
formation
.

Bermont winced as he watched Greene lay into a soldier who was floating upside down and flailing in an attempt to right himself.

“Sweet Jesus,” Bermont whispered as he shook his head, “when did we become a day care facility?”

Beside him, Sgt. Jaime Curtis glanced sideways at him and smirked under her helm, keying a local burst transmission in a private channel. “About the same time as the word got to the brass that aliens were coming and they probably needed
to start recruiting again. Anyway, they can’t all be old men like you, LT.”

Bermont scowled at her, though the effect was pretty much wasted since she could neither see his face directly nor did he open a vidcom to her heads-up display. “Don’t start that old man bullshit with me, Sarge. I’m only twenty-five, and it ain’t my fault that these guys came straight out of boot.”

Jaime returned a chuckle, but shook her head slightly. “It’s not that bad, and you know it.”

Bermont reluctantly nodded in agreement.

She was right, of course. The soldiers they’d been given weren’t out of boot by a long shot; most of them were graduates from some of the toughest schools of military Special Forces in the Confederation. The problem was that they were graduates, and only barely that. The
Odyssey
had originally enjoyed the pick of the crop, literally the best of the best the Confederation had to offer. Why not? After all, she was unique, and there had been very little competition for the services of people like Sean Bermont, or even legends like Eric Weston.

Since they had returned home and dropped the bomb on Congress, however, things had changed. The
Enterprise
had to be staffed, and she was slated to be one monster of a ship by all accounts. With the
Valley Forge
and the
Ticonderoga
on the list to be constructed within two years and eight more unnamed keels being floated in Lagrange points from Earth to Mars, the demand for people was reaching critical mass.

Soon, he supposed, the Confederacy was going to have to open up wholesale recruiting again, and wasn’t that going to be a fine mess?

Along with the military boom, the commercial construction had more than tripled. The exact nature of the events of the
Odyssey
’s first mission was still more than a little clouded in
the mind of the general public, but the conglomerates knew a new market when they smelled it, and they were banking on finding some way to exploit it.

How exactly they expected to do that, Bermont didn’t have a clue, since the transition drive system had suddenly become the most highly classified thing in history. Not that it hadn’t been secret before, of course, but the security around it had reached insane levels, even on board the
Odyssey
herself.

“Sweet mother of mercy, son!”

The scream brought Bermont crashing back to reality just in time to see one of the floating troops kick Greene across the helmet. The master sergeant snapped his leg up with one hand and unceremoniously whipped the unfortunate trooper across the length of the deck to where he crashed into the far wall with a bang.

“That is what you call basic physics, you sorry sons of bitches!” Greene snarled. “Action, reaction! His action was to kick me in the face because he was too stupid to plant his feet! My reaction was to plant the rest of his body for him! You got me, soldiers?”

The line of troops snapped out in agreement. “We got you, Master Sergeant!”

Greene gave them one last glare, doubling it up by using a clear helm and piping them a close-up of his snarling face through the HUDs. Then he turned and stalked off toward the soldier who was trying to crawl along the far wall by his fingertips, his crash having bounced him just far enough out that he couldn’t get any real purchase.

“Lieutenant!” Greene called. “You mind taking over for a minute?”

“Not at all, Master Sergeant,” Bermont replied with a smile. “You go do what you have to do.”

Bermont kicked off the ground, killing the electromagnets in his suit, and glided away from where he had been standing. Halfway through his flight, he calmly flipped end for end and reactivated his magnetic clamps in midair.

He touched down on the “ceiling” and looked “up” from his position to the troops lined up beneath him without saying a word. After almost a full minute of nothing but his stare, some of the figures below started to get visibly antsy.

“Well?” he growled. “Form up!”

They were quick enough, he supposed, as almost half of them got the idea in a hurry. First, they kicked off the ground and flipped with varying degrees of grace and its lack, then the rest, and in a few moments, most of the line was clomping awkwardly into position in front of him.

“Better,” Bermont told them evenly.

He might have said something else if they were raw recruits, but they weren’t. Many of them had even seen action toward the end of the war, though none of them had seen it from their last units. He walked the line slowly, feet clomping with authority as the magnets sounded against the metal deck. Each time he passed within a few feet of one of the soldiers, his suit automatically RFIDed their ID tags and gave him their service records.

Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. Bermont smiled thinly. The yet-unnamed space service didn’t discriminate when it came to the sources of their men.

“Better,” he said again, nodding in the manner of someone used to suit work. The gesture was exaggerated, enough so that it was visible to an outside observer. “But not great. I know that zero grav is hard to get used to, but this is all we have to do suit work in until we get permission to go ground-side, so you’d better get used to it.”

They shuffled slightly, but he ignored it and went on. “In fact, get used to it anyway! You’re not in whatever unit spat you out and gave you to us. This is space, and believe me when I tell you that gravity up here, it is a privilege. It ain’t a right. Formation drills, roof to floor, move it!”

They moved.

RANQUIL

▸ERIC WESTON LOOKED around, still seeking the source of the voice that seemed to reverberate directly inside his skull. “What are you talking about? Why are you afraid of us?”

Something like a dry, deep chuckle echoed for a long time. “Afraid of you, Captain? I’m not afraid of fleas or ants, am I? I never said I was
afraid
of you, Captain,” the deep voice replied. “However, I do not believe that contact with you is in the best interest of the Priminae.”

Eric could feel his hackles rise over the casual confidence in that comment. “Aren’t you the one who just thanked me for saving them?”