The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (61 page)

▸THE IMMENSE WARSHIP barely shuddered as the explosion tore through one of its decks, the mass of the big ship absorbing the force. But for those who had set off the explosives—Coranth Cirrus and the rest of his team—it felt as if the whole universe had come crashing down on them. The corridors were filled with smoke and debris, chunks of the deck and walls covering them as they slowly got back to their feet.

“Central!” Cirrus swore, glaring at the crewman who had been sent up with the demolition materials. “Were you trying to end us?”

Crewman Vasque glared back as he cleaned himself off. “That was the charge I was told to use. The Drasin are difficult to kill.”

Cirrus glowered, but there really wasn’t a lot more to say. “I just hope we didn’t blow the hell out of something we needed.”

“No worries, Coranth,” Miran said, spitting ceramic shards from her mouth. “I told you, we have many alternates to use in the place of those controls.”

Cirrus sighed, hefting his milosec laser as he began to move forward. The corner they’d been peeking around was now a jagged cropping of razor-sharp ceramic edges, but he didn’t see the Drasin soldier drone in the hallway, at least.

“It looks clear,” he said as he stepped into the open, finding puddles of slagged mineral splattering the floor and walls. “One drone down.”

“How many more left, do you suppose?” Vasque asked tensely.

“At least three,” Miran responded, attracting their attention. She shrugged. “That is how many holes we’re currently venting atmosphere from.”

“Well, on that so very comforting note…” Cirrus shook his head as he contacted the command deck. “Clear here. One drone eliminated. Orders?”

“We are tracking another three decks down from you, twelve sectors aft,” an ithan responded. “We are redirecting an engineering team to meet you with the newly issued infantry arms.”

Cirrus glanced at his laser, which he had yet to bother discharging, and snorted. “I hope they’re better than standard issue.”

“We don’t know—you’ll be the first to use them in combat.”

Cirrus bit back his first, impulsive curse of a response, which involved Central and a vacuum cleaner, and said, “On our way now.”

There were days that Cirrus wanted to just lie down and cry, and this, it seemed, was rapidly becoming one of them.

On the command deck, Capt. Syrenne Tianne turned a grim eye to the damage reports from Deck 9. The solution to the
problem rooting out the Drasin had a strong possibility of being almost as bad as the Drasin themselves.

High explosives being voluntarily detonated within the corridors of my ship is not a good precedent.

That said, the tactic appeared to be working as far as removing the Drasin. The fact that it also tore out several large sections of her ship was a sad side effect, but one that she would simply have to endure. If they survived this mission, however, Tianne would be insisting on a timelier issuing of weapons to her crews.

Better to have them and not use them, she was learning, than to need them and not have them.

“Captain,” a crewman spoke up, drawing his attention, “I believe that you should see this.”

“What is it, Neval?” Tianne asked as she walked over.

The crewman nodded to his display. “Look.”

She frowned, her eyes focusing on the display. “What am I looking for, crewman?”

“Watch for it, ma’am. You’ll know it when you see it.”

Tianne bit back an annoyed response, watching the screen as she waited for something to happen. She was about out of patience when her eye caught what the crewman was talking about—an object adrift in space that was only showing very dimly on their visual spectrum scanners.

“Is that what I believe it to be?”

“Yes, Captain. I have spotted three like that so far,” the crewman said, nodding to the Drasin drone on the display. “At first, I believed it to be a drone knocked loose during boarding maneuvers; however, they are all on the same trajectory.”

“And that is?”

“Ballistic intersection with Ranquil.”

Tianne paled as she heard that, her mind racking itself to dredge up everything she’d ever learned about the Drasin. There was little information on whether they could withstand uncontrolled entry into a planet’s atmosphere. Certainly, they hadn’t done so during their last assault, but then, they hadn’t needed to, either.

If even one of those reaches the surface intact and unnoticed, it could spawn billions.
She stepped back from the station, gesturing to the crewman to continue with his duties. Tianne quickly stepped back over to her own station, taking a seat as she deftly opened a comm channel.

COMMAND CENTER, MONS SYSTEMA, RANQUIL

▸RAEL TANNER FELT like he’d been struck with a hammer as he sat there, staring at the comet track as it filled the main screen. Just moments earlier, it had been a sign of optimism, a sign that they were beating back yet another attempt by the Drasin to assault Ranquil.

Now, however, thanks to Captain Tianne’s warning, he saw the previous trajectory of the comet as a sign of a completely new threat. A threat he couldn’t see coming, even if he now knew it was there.

They simply did not have enough optical scanners to map even that one section of the sky in the time left available to them, and it had been proven by the
Cerekus
that no other method would work to spot the incoming drones. He was much like Captain Tianne in that he didn’t know if the drones could survive entry into the atmosphere, but even if one in a hundred did, it was too much.

Rael forced the shock aside, slowly issuing orders that would bring the orbital defenses to task. There was no clean way to track them before they entered the atmosphere, but
once they did, then there would be an ignition trail they could see. The orbital forts weren’t intended to fire inward, but they could be retasked for the duty. The only question in his mind was whether they would be able to track and target drones moving that fast through the atmosphere. They were designed to handle ships that, while they were moving considerably faster, were much,
much
farther away.

The lag time between calculating a safe vector to fire and when the Drasin were low enough in the atmosphere that they ceased burning would be close. Possibly too close for even their best fire-control systems to handle, especially if they wanted to avoid vaporizing large chunks of the planet in the process.

He walked over to where Nero was snapping orders, preparing his ground troops presumably.

“Nero, a word, if I may?”

The beleaguered soldier looked up wearily, then joined Rael on the upper section. “Yes, Rael?”

“Can you task anything to eliminate ballistic items entering the atmosphere?”

Nero sighed. “You know the situation, Rael. Orbital defense is your section, not mine. I have been calling up all reserves and preparing them to intercept anything that strikes the ground, but to answer your question, no, I have no forces that can shoot down anything above forty thousand segments. So why are you really here, Rael?”

The admiral sighed. “This also falls under your authority, Nero, but have you considered asking the Terrans to become involved?”

Nero grimaced, though he had half expected as much. “I’ve sent along a warning of possible planetary assault, so they are readying their forces, yes.”

“Please ask them if I might request the aide of their combat craft. I feel we may need the additional support before this is done.”

Nero said nothing, but he nodded reluctantly.

RANQUIL MILITIA TRAINING BASE

▸REED LOOKED OVER the gathered men seriously for a moment, getting a measure of them before he spoke. They were standing around a display table under an open tent that had been set up to one side of the flight field, the Archangels looking between the intel being presented and the full-bird colonel doing the presenting. The situation on the screens was far from comforting, so they all listened closely when Colonel Reed spoke up.

“While we’re scrambling ready response teams to handle anything that hits the ground, the Planetary Defense command has asked that we provide additional air support,” Reed said, nodding to the pilots.

“What’s the game plan, then, sir?” Steph asked.

“Missile defense,” Reed answered easily. “With multiple confirmed ballistic threats inbound, we need to track and eliminate them in the upper atmosphere.”

“We know where they’re coming from, sir,” Cardsharp pointed out. “Why don’t we sortie the squad and pick them off well short of the planet?”

“Because we haven’t been able to confirm that those tracks are the only inbound threats,” Reed responded. “If I’d been planning this mission, I wouldn’t have sent any along with the comet in the first place. That would have been a distraction play, while additional forces were dropped in from other tracks.”

The pilots grimaced at that thought, but nodded in comprehension.

“Glad you weren’t planning this one, then, sir,” Cardsharp said with feeling.

Reed smiled thinly but didn’t respond. “Planetary Defense has gone to full alert, so they’re blanketing the system with every detection net they’ve got, but these are small and relatively unpowered objects. They’re the devil itself to see, and there’s one hell of a lot of space out there for them to hide in.”