The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (4 page)

▸ERIC WESTON KEYED open the door to the conference room where he knew Comdr. Jason Alvarez Roberts had been sitting in on an informal discussion concerning military nomenclature in the modern era. The room itself was huge, its centerpiece a single-piece table that stretched over twenty feet from end to end. At the far end Eric saw, sitting alone, the commander.

“Commander.”

Roberts looked up, nodding curtly. “Captain. Thanks for coming.”

“Something wrong?” Weston tried not to appear too amused, but he had a good idea just what was bothering the commander. He had, of course, been invited to participate, but unlike Roberts, he had enough seniority and other business on his plate to successfully refuse.

The normally stern man shrugged and actually smiled a little ruefully. “Not really, sir. I just needed to talk with someone who wasn’t clinically insane.”

Eric chuckled softly, pulling a chair out and sitting down across from the well-built black man. “What’s the problem?”

“You ever been cooped up in a room with thirty-five representatives of different military branches, all of them arguing that their branch should be the one whose name and traditions form the foundation of the new service branch?” Roberts asked disgustedly.

“Can’t say that I have.” Eric grinned. “And, if I do say so myself, better you than me.”

“Har har,” Roberts said sourly. “You know, it’s insane. It’s not supposed to be this complicated to just pick a damned
name
for a service branch.”

“Can’t be that bad…” Weston suggested, his smirk clearly making a liar of him even as he spoke.

“Captain, the Marines are arguing tradition; they want the shipboard troops to be named ‘marines,’ of course.”

“Of course.” Eric Weston, former Marine, smiled slightly.

“Well, the main army representative is arguing that spaceships have nothing to do with anything ‘marine’ and the tradition is null and void,” Roberts replied. “His committee, however, is currently stymied by a two-way tie between ‘soldiers’ and ‘troopers.’ To be honest, that’s probably the sanest of them, too.”

“Oh?” Eric asked, still smiling as he leaned back.

“Yeah, there was one colonel in their group that wanted shipboard contingents named ‘rangers,’” Roberts replied with a hint of disgust.

Eric raised an eyebrow. He happened to know that Roberts was a former US Ranger, so he found that reaction somewhat curious. “You disagree?”

“Me and whoever doctored that idiot’s food,” Roberts replied testily, then gave Eric a grim smile. “He came down with a mild case of food poisoning on the day he was to present his argument.”

Eric blinked, frowning in confusion. “And you think someone did it on purpose? Why?”

“Why? Because no self-respecting soldier who wears a tan beret wants to be known as a freaking ‘space ranger,’ thank you very much,” Roberts growled.

Eric couldn’t help it. It started with a snicker, but quickly grew into full, powerful laughs.

Commander Roberts waited, more or less patiently, as his commanding officer laughed at his expense, fingers tapping on the hard composite surface of the desk. When Eric had gotten himself back under control, Roberts just gave his captain a cool look. “Are you done yet?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Eric replied, snickering a couple more times. “But I have to say that I see your point.”

“Thanks ever so much,” Roberts told him dryly. “I don’t suppose that the rest of the service is having these problems?”

Eric shrugged. “To some degree or another, of course. The Navy and the Air Force went head-to-head on a lot of things when they were ironing out the command structure of the
Odyssey
. For the most part, though, the Navy took the arguments on the simple fact that their procedures were easier to adapt.”

Roberts nodded, but Eric had the sense that he’d heard some of that before, though probably had missed out on the details.

“So what we got was a bit of a hash, but not so much of what you seem to be dealing with,” Eric admitted.

“Thankfully. Or we’d never have survived our first mission,” Roberts replied dryly.

Eric shrugged. “Maybe. But don’t sweat the details is my advice, Commander. Things that don’t work out, we’ll
hammer into place as we go along. We’ve got time to work out our traditions ourselves.”

Roberts nodded. “I suppose. It’s just rather frustrating that we can’t even seem to get past the name.” Eric hoped for Roberts’s sake that they could get past it for now—there were a lot more important things coming down the pipe.

“That’ll be the worst of it,” Eric said. “Once you get past that, it’ll just be the minor details of who obeys who to deal with.”

Roberts glared at the smirk on his captain’s face, but declined to comment. Instead, he just sighed and nodded. “I hope that’s all I have to deal with, then. Thanks for coming by, Captain.”

Eric smiled, this time a little less in amusement and more in tolerance. “Not a problem, Commander. I’m sure that you’ll get it all figured out sooner or later.”

Roberts nodded, standing up as Eric did likewise. “I know. It’s just going to drive me to drinking in the meanwhile.” Eric believed it already had.

He couldn’t resist. “Buck up, Space Ranger,” he said, “you’ll do fine.”

“Good day, sir,” Roberts replied through gritted teeth.

As Eric was walking out, he received a signal over his induction set and took a moment to check his messages. A note from the admiral was waiting for his attention, requesting that he take a meeting with someone shortly. Without a name of whom he was supposed to meet, Weston was hardly pleased, but he wasn’t going to turn down an admiral, either. He accepted the meeting and left Roberts to his own personal hell. The Lord knew, Eric had resided there more than once in the past, so now it was someone else’s turn.

WASHINGTON, DC

▸“HAVE YOU BEEN out much since you arrived?” Stephen Michaels asked conversationally as he and Milla Chans walked down the crowded street.

“No. Only very rarely,” she replied, her own musical language sounding odd as the English echo sounded through the induction set he wore on his jaw. “At first, there was much security, and then there was even more things to do.”

Stephen nodded, deftly avoiding bumping into a man who was talking on a civilian comm with video capabilities. The man didn’t even notice the two of them as Stephen allowed the man to walk right through.

Milla’s eyes followed him for a moment, but Stephen just shrugged.

“Some boys shouldn’t have some toys,” Stephen said in mild irritation. “If I zoned out like that in my fighter, I’d have been dead years ago.”

He knew Milla didn’t really understand the meaning behind the words, but found it endearing that she imitated his shrug as they continued walking. “This is a very…
busy
city.”

Stephen smiled, noting the hesitance in her words. “It’s pretty small compared to your cities, I know. But we like it—some of us, anyway.”

“It seems to have so many people, but I was told that there are only a few million?”

“Yeah, something like that.” Stephen shrugged, then frowned slightly. “I’m not really certain how many though—course, DC’s not my hometown.”

“Where are you from, then?” Milla asked.

“Small town down in West Virginia,” Stephen replied with a slight smile. “Haven’t been back there in…Well, I think it’s been over a decade now.”

The last time he’d been home, the town was on its last legs, most of the wartime income from the labs that built the Archangels had dried up, and what had been a bit of a boom-town for a few years was reduced to an almost ghostlike atmosphere. People still lived there, of course, a few like his own family who had been there for generations and likely would be there for generations more, but so many buildings and homes had been abandoned and shuttered that it felt empty all the same.

“You do not go home?” Milla’s curiosity turned to puzzlement.

“Me and the folks don’t get along much,” he told her with a shrug. “And I’ve been pretty busy as well, so…”

“Ah,” she replied in a tone that made it clear that she didn’t understand but wasn’t going to push.

Stephen “Stephanos” Michaels just smiled softly for a moment, then pointed out the Washington Monument in the distance and guided his charge through the throng of people toward it.

NACS ODYSSEY
Earth Orbit

▸CHIEF PETTY OFFICER Rachel Corrin snorted as she watched the next shipment of equipment destined for the
Odyssey
’s stores come trundling off the shuttle at the behest of one of the automated loaders. Whoever was signing off on this mission wasn’t taking any chances with the stores. Where the
Odyssey
had left on her maiden voyage with a heavy inclination toward exploration, this time she was definitely packing heat.

She RFIDed the crate with her reader, identifying the package as yet another preloaded high-velocity missile (HVM) magazine, and made certain that the loader had scanned the right information. That done, she just stepped aside as the trundling loader stomped off across the deck toward the ship’s magazines with its current payload.

It could be worse
, she supposed. The fleet could use nukes or something equally insane.

The HVMs were lethal, certainly, but they packed all their killing power in pure kinetic energy, so they were as safe to store as anything else on board and a damn sight safer than some. She was on her way to RFID the rest of the cargo to
make sure that it all matched her manifest when a call from across the zero-gravity deck turned her around.

“Chief!”

Corrin looked over her shoulder, frowning when she recognized one of her petty officers waving her over. “What’s going on, Jeffrey?”

“Loader here don’t know where to store these things.” He pointed to a stack of crates a previous shuttle had offloaded.

Corrin grimaced, shaking her head.
This shit is ridiculous. I like that they’re sending us all this stuff, but I’d like it better if they’d tag it with the right transmitters
.

“What’s in it?” she asked, walking over.

“Looks like more HVMs,” the petty officer replied. “But the staging numbers are all wrong, and I can’t find them on the manifest.”

“Great.” Corrin sighed. “All right, we’ll have to pop the case and eyeball the contents.”