The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (53 page)

▸“THAT’S WHAT THE
Odyssey
reported, ma’am.” Reed was standing easy as he delivered the information to the ambassador, arms crossed behind his back and legs set about shoulder width apart.

Ambassador Lafontaine examined the information, scowling at the screen of the plaque as if she could intimidate it into reporting something different. While the
Odyssey
wasn’t assigned to Ranquil or her office, she would have preferred some notice before Weston took the ship haring off after some new shiny thing that caught his attention.

That was saying nothing of the soldiers and pilots he’d saddled her with here. Certainly, she was confident that Colonel Reed could find things for them to do, but it hardly seemed professional and could leave her with awkward questions to answer when she dealt with the local parliament.

“Your thoughts, Colonel?”

“On what, ma’am?”

She looked up at him, her eyebrow arching as she pinned him with a stare. “About Captain Weston’s actions.”

The colonel just shrugged. “Judgment call, ma’am. He had to decide then and there if he was going to pursue the target. Everything else just fell from that decision.”

“And you believe it to be the correct decision?”

Clearly, Reed hated it when he was put on the spot like that, but the ambassador didn’t particularly care what Reed hated. She knew he probably resented interference from the civilians in his chain of command, but what choice did he have but to ask for assistance? Unlike Weston, Reed was unlikely, in the ambassador’s opinion, to take wild risks.

Reed sighed, shaking his head. “Situational, ma’am. I can’t say, and that’s not me trying to weasel my way out of anything. I really can’t say. From here, it seems a little over the top, particularly given that he left the Archangels behind, but from the bridge of the
Odyssey
? Hard to say. I wish he’d kept some of his shuttles, but I can see the logic in leaving them behind.”

“You can?” she asked, skeptical. How much was Reed covering for the man? “I certainly cannot. Without his shuttles, he can’t abandon ship in case of an emergency or even investigate anything he may find up close.”

“While that’s true as far as it goes, Madam Ambassador,” Reed conceded, “I believe the point is that if the
Odyssey
encounters a situation they can’t run from, they’re not making it back, shuttles or no. Also, this is a recon mission. There won’t be any planetary exploration or the like. It’s as I said, I wish he’d kept a couple birds on a gut level, but honestly, I can’t imagine what he’d do with them.”

The ambassador sighed, rubbing her face tiredly. This was going to wind up giving her migraines and more gray hair to cover up, she just knew it. The bright, shiny allure of being on a planet new to her had already begun to wear off.

“Very well,” she said finally. “Thank you for the report, Colonel. I’ll see to it that your materials requests are given high-level consideration, just to help move things along. You’re dismissed.”

“Ma’am.” He nodded, heels clicking as he turned and left her office.

She stared at the information on the portable computer plaque for a long moment.

Why did I volunteer for this posting again? Oh, yes, adventure and the history books. I’d feel better if Captain Weston weren’t so intent on making certain those books were such fascinating reading, however.

She checked her schedule, noting that she had a meeting with a senior administrator in less than an hour, and decided not to arrange any special meetings over the matter. She’d let him know what was going on and let it run up the Priminae chain that way. It may not be the fastest way, but she could do with the experience of how their politicking was handled.

She didn’t think that the requests would be anything overly troublesome, either, so there really wasn’t any need to fast-track any of it. Hydrogen and oxygen were easily available, and while they’d have to fabricate adaptors for whatever system the Priminae used for storage, that would be easily handled as well.

More than likely, they already had adapters, now that she thought of it, or at least schematics for them. The Priminae had provided the
Odyssey
with additional oxygen the last time they were in the system, after all.

She supposed that Captain Weston would have been well aware of that when he made his decision. One less headache for her, at the very least.

She checked her timepiece and closed down all the files.

There was work to be done, after all.

BRIDGE, NACS ODYSSEY

▸WESTON TRIED VALIANTLY to keep his stomach from voiding its contents all over the deck, just barely succeeding as he curled over in his chair and listened miserably to the sounds of others failing in the same task.

Have to make a note that multiple transitions in succession are to be avoided under almost any circumstance.
He groaned, forcing himself upright as the first scents of stomach acid reached his nose. His gut tightened up, and he had to fight through the repeating urge to vomit alongside so many of his crew.

There was work to be done first.

“Deploy sails,” he ordered. “Bring us about and locate the enemy cruiser.”

“Aye, Captain,” Winger said miserably, clinging to her controls to keep from sliding to the deck.

“Coming about, Captain.” Daniels groaned, his hands working the controls more by instinct and muscle memory than his will.

As the
Odyssey
rumbled and slowly came about, her large sensor sails unfurling to catch the enemy trace, Eric placed his fingers to his temples and tried to soothe the throbbing he
felt there.
We’re going to have to do a full medical after this. The side effects are going beyond motion sickness. We’re going to need to know if it’s temporary or cumulative.

It was the
Odyssey
’s fifth successive transition, and each time, the jump through transitional space seemed to become exponentially worse. The normal rush of fear and gut-level nerves he experienced had been replaced by a deep sickness that had grabbed him at his core and made him want nothing more than to go to his cabin and curl up in the dark. If it became any worse, he could easily add sob softly until he fell asleep to the list, though Eric figured it would take about two more transitions before he’d admit that aloud.

They already had more than twenty men and women in sickbay, sedated to various levels. The worst were in medically induced comas, though Palin assured him that there were no signs of any permanent damage at this point. He wasn’t sure he could authorize too many more transitions in rapid succession, though. The risk of losing more of his crew to medically ordered sedation would be high, and soon he’d run the chance of losing crew he couldn’t stand to lose.

He’d already crunched the numbers after the last transition and thought he could possibly order three more. Realistically, however, Eric didn’t think he’d chance more than two, and he was really pushing it to say that.

“We have them. They’ve executed another evasive maneuver.”

Eric groaned as quietly as he could. Every damned time they thought the enemy was heading for a star, the little bastard changed course and left them running themselves ragged to catch up. “Calculate and prepare transition drive for new coordinates…”

“Hold on, sir.” Michelle snapped straight up. “Enemy contact is red shifting! They’re slowing down!”

“What? There’s nothing out here.” Eric’s eyes snapped to the screen. “Show me the plot.”

“Aye, sir.”

The star field appeared on the screen, with the computer highlighting the decelerating Drasin cruiser. It was clearly slowing its relative speed, but there was nothing in range that it could be meeting.

“Is there another ship out there?” Eric asked.

“Can’t say yet, sir. We’re working on passives, but unless it just arrived a short time ago, I don’t think so,” Michelle said, equally confused.

Her computer beeped at her, calling her attention to an error in the system.

“Hold on, what’s this?” she mumbled, confused.

“Lieutenant?” Roberts spoke up for the first time since they’d arrived at this point of deep space.

“Computer error, sir. There’s a mismatch between our records and the current scans,” Michelle said, fingers skating along the controls of her panel. “Computer wants to know if it should update the logs.”

“What kind of error?”

She called up the offending record, and her eyes flickered back and forth between the real-time view and the original mapping made decades earlier by the James Webb Space Telescope. The computer helpfully pointed out the error in the original file, as well as suggested that they update their data with the most recent observational and clearly correct version.

She stared at it for a moment and then flicked her hands across the board to send both images up to the main screen.

“The image on the left is from the James Webb Space Telescope, mapped in twenty twenty-eight,” she said in clipped
tones, still uncertain as to what she was seeing. “The one on the right is from our own scans, two minutes ago.”

“They look like stars to me, Lieutenant,” Roberts said, eyes nonetheless flicking between the two.

“They’re identical, except for the area our bogey is decelerating into,” she said, highlighting the offending sections of the images.

On the Earth-based scan, there was clearly a star sitting right there where the
Odyssey
’s instrumentations insisted nothing but empty space was currently sitting. Eric stared at it for a long moment, unable to quite believe what he was seeing.

“Michelle,” he said slowly, “how could we possibly have misplaced an entire
star
sometime in the last few decades?”

“Unknown, sir. We’d have seen a nova, and even a singularity collapse would show us something from here on the higher band sensors,” she answered. “I’m getting nothing on any of those, however.”

“Range to the star from our current position?” Eric asked. “Assuming the Webb scans are accurate.”

“Just under half a light-year, sir.”

He nodded, thumbing open the ship-wide. “All hands, this is the captain. I believe we may have tracked our quarry back to his den. The
Odyssey
will stand down from transition alert for the next twenty-four hours while we observe the area. Medical checkups will be scheduled—they are mandatory. Other than that, we’re on minimal watch starting now. Get some rest. You all deserve it.”

The comm blinked off, and he addressed the people around him. “That goes for you all as well. Nonessential stations can be left unattended; essential stations please be certain to schedule yourselves at least two free shifts out of the
next three. Get the observation running, then get some rest. I have a feeling that we’re going to need it.”

After seeing that everything was settling down, the jobs needed doing being done, Eric handed the bridge over to Commander Roberts with a firm admonition for him to do the same as soon as someone suitable to replace him was freed up. He then headed down toward medical to check in with Dr. Palin over the effects of the last set of rapid transitions.

The
Odyssey
’s CMO took one look at him as he stepped into the medical labs and shoved a pill pack and a small cup of water in his hand.

“Take them.”

Eric might normally have argued a bit, or at least demanded to know what he was taking, but given how he was feeling, he decided it could wait. He swallowed the two pills from the pack and washed them down quickly before returning his attention to the doctor and the actions beyond him.

“How bad is it?”

Palin, who had returned his attention to a computer screen, shrugged without looking up. “In the short term? Reasonably bad. It’s like better than 70 percent of the crew has come down with near-crippling motion sickness. If you hadn’t called a stop when you did, there might not have been anyone to run the ship.”

Eric winced, though he’d been reaching that conclusion himself. “And the long term?”

“Indeterminate at this point.” Palin scowled. “In theory, there shouldn’t be any repercussions. Tacyon radiation is too highly energetic and the particles too small to interfere with human cells. In practice? This is dark territory, Captain. We may not know for years—or decades.”