The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (25 page)

▸“POD THREE IS gone!”

Commander Breem didn’t bother to acknowledge the report; she just ordered her two remaining pods to target another Drasin as it approached. The beams from the powerful satellite pods slashed out through space, hitting the Drasin ship almost instantly at the close range they were now fighting at, and gutted the enemy ship in a ten-second-long rage of fire that proved to be their last.

As the Drasin flared and burned, two more of the cruisers turned on the offending pods and blasted them out of existence.

Lora threw back her control system, letting it scatter as the hard projection that sustained it lost positive contact with her, and slumped back in her seat.

“That’s it, Captain,” she said over the open communications link to the captain of the
Heralc
. “We’re out.”

The projection of her subordinate didn’t look much better than she felt, she supposed. He was in a marginally better situation, of course, being that his ship was still intact, and so he still had weapons with which to fight, but the projection
also clearly showed that his bridge was in a frenzied state as people struggled to keep it that way.

Still, he spared her a glance over the open channel and nodded. “Understood, Commander. Your orders?”

Breem stared at him for a moment, almost unable to understand what he was asking from her. She was out of the fight. There was nothing he could do to help or save her any more than either of them could help or save those still on the planet.

She closed her eyes, then slowly shook her head. “Withdraw, Captain.”

“What?” He paled, staring at her in shock. “Commander, I—”

“That is an order. Withdraw. Your duty is now to the evacuees. Defend them until they reach sanctuary, Captain. Then report to the fleet,” she said, opening her eyes and glaring at him. “Withdraw. Now.”

She could feel the eyes of those in her control room as they matched the captain’s stare, but ignored them all as she glared at the subject of her thoughts.

He nodded reluctantly. “Yes, Commander…Walk the Path, Commander. You and yours.”

“Walk the Path, Captain,” she said in return, then shut off the commlink.

PLANET RANQUIL

▸“WE’RE PINNED DOWN, Major!” Lieutenant Bermont snarled from where he’d thrown himself behind a large boulder. “They’ve got a good cross fire set up here.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Lieutenant,” Brinks said through a smile that was as much a sneer as anything else. “Give me a—”

“Major,” Jackson interrupted. “Pardon me, sir, but I might have something that can help.”

“What is it, Crowley?”

“The EXO-Twelve is equipped with heavy ECM capabilities, sir. I might be able to get a couple clean shots—”

“What kind of ECM, soldier?”

“The works, Major,” Jackson replied. “Everything from squealers to chaff.”

Brinks eyed the big suit for a moment, then half laughed. “I guess they had to cram something into all that extra space.”

“Uh…yes, sir.”

“All right, hit it,” Brinks ordered. “Hit everything. We’ll move together. A three-layer pincer, with Crowley at the center, everyone got it?”

“Sir,” the men responded, shouting the word as an affirmation, not a question.

“Good. Let’s move!”

Crowley nodded automatically as he pumped the legs of the big machine to bring it to the front, keying open the ECM menu with the eight-way “coolie hat” under his left thumb and flipping them all to active.

From the observation room, Weston could tell it wasn’t going as planned when Wilson suddenly winced, shouted
shit
, and yanked his earphones off. They could all hear a sudden squealing sound coming from them.

“What the hell is going on, Chief?” Reed asked as Weston hung back, watching.

“Someone down there is cheating, sir,” Wilson said with a grimace that was at least partially amused. “Heavy electronic jammers. Real heavy.”

Reed frowned. “Who? Those are just Power Suits. They don’t have enough power or mass to mount those kinds of systems.”

“Don’t know, sir, but I’m cut off,” Wilson said, tossing the earphones to the control panel. “The defenses are under full computer control now.”

Reed half laughed, shaking his head. “Well, good for them.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rael and Nero exchanged glances, somewhat confused as they looked to Milla, who seemed just as lost as they were, but Weston just smiled.

“That’s battle for you, Admiral,” he said with a shrug. “Even mock battle. Surprises are the one thing you can’t hope to plan for.”

Reed chuckled in agreement. “That’s why they call them surprises, Captain.”

“Indeed,” Nero said stiffly, pointing to the projection in front of him. “However, we appear to have lost our view of the exercise.”

Reed looked at the projection and nodded with a sigh, an acknowledgment that the jamming had indeed skewed the computer-generated images badly, probably causing it to report entirely wrong positions and actions.

“’Fraid so, Commander,” he said with a shrug. “Nothing to do about it except turn it back to plain optics.”

He did so, and they soon had a view of the battle that was clearer, but now muddied by smoke and debris.

“How is this going to affect scoring, Colonel?” Weston asked Reed.

Reed shrugged. “Not too bad, sir. It’ll just take longer because we’ll have to compile the data from the suits after the exercise. We just lost our real-time numbers, is all.”

Weston nodded, then turned his attention back to the scene.

Eight of the automated defensive stations covered the area on the other side of their rocky cover, so Brinks had split the team into three groups, with Jackson Crowley at the center so that his jammers would be given the maximum coverage. The lieutenant took the position eagerly enough and was at the front of the line as the soldiers made their move from cover.

They led with indirect fire from the grenade launchers saddled under their assault weapons, dropping thermobaric munitions and a mix of smoke and HE rounds into a
short-range arc that landed less than fifty meters away. The
hiss-bang
of the TB rounds going off was at first overpowered by the loud cracks of the high-explosive rounds, but the thunderous rumble and lightning crack of the noxious vapors detonating shook the ground itself as the ten-psi overpressure wave rocked them, even in their suits, and provided the team with the signal to move.

Jackson pumped the legs of his oversized tactical armor, bounding over the cover in two small jumps, and extended his weapons arms out forty-five degrees from his center, allowing him to cover the widest area. The HUD of the tactical armor began reporting back with likely targets with the first second of the rush, leaving Jackson with the simple yet critical task of simply giving the machine permission to engage.

He thumbed the coolie hat controls on each handgrip, selecting weapons and prioritizing targets, then squeezed his index trigger down on the firing selectors for both arms.

Despite being at the cutting edge of technology, the EXO-12 and its onboard computers suffered from the same issues all computerized weapons systems had. For all their intelligence and capability, they weren’t equipped to make moral choices. That was Jackson Crowley’s job.

He was the moral conscience, the emotive factor, of the machine. He had to make the choices that it couldn’t, like any rifleman did for his weapon.

Is this a viable target?

Should it be destroyed?

Fire or hold?

Crowley fired.

Around him, men in power suits were bounding over the cover, their own weapons rattling his ears as the sound was
echoed to him by the suit’s sensors. His own weapons fire, however, was nothing but a mild vibration that rung through the armor, the suit itself filtering out the sound of its own making in order to leave him open to sounds that others might be making in his direction.

From the outside, however, the air was filled with the rattling sound of the EXO-12’s three-barrel gun whining up to speed as it began to pump over five thousand rounds per minute down range, firing the same 15mm scramjet rounds that the M-112 fired, only about four times faster.

Anti-armor lasers whined as well, their capacitors dumping power in a series of fast pulses that tore up targets in a fury of hellish radiation, vaporizing the defenses as he moved. Step by step, Crowley began to feel a growing confidence. After this, they wouldn’t be making jokes about his armor anymore. The EXO-12 was proving itself, once and for all.

Of course, that was the time that Mr. Murphy tapped him on the shoulder.

Actually, it was on the foot, though the difference was of little import to Jackson. He had shifted his attention away from the action of walking, coming to relax into the natural feel of it, and then had the misfortune of stepping on a loose stone about the size of a bowling ball.

One second he was eliminating a series of hostile targets, and the next the EXO-12 pitched sideways as its center of balance was disrupted and he went down in a three-ton tangle of limbs.

Crowley cursed, throwing the armor’s limbs out in all directions to flatten his tumble quickly, and began to flip himself over and climb back to his feet. He was about halfway up when the closest active defense station tagged him and shut his armor down.

Everything went black, and the armor shook as he hit the ground again, and Lt. Jackson Crowley pursed his lips in disgust as he lay there in the dark.

“Well,
fuck
.”

PRIMINAE COLONY, THEORA DEICE
Orbital Station