The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (68 page)

“Commander,” he said as he stepped up beside Roberts, “those do not look like Drasin.”

On the plot lay a small squadron of ships that were larger and sleeker than anything the Drasin had shown to date, clearly gleaming with a metallic sheen that the silicate-based Drasin vessels lacked. Eric didn’t know what more the universe could throw at them, and honestly, he wished that he
wasn’t about to find out, but it was clear that whatever they were looking at wasn’t anything they’d seen before.

“No, sir, they do not,” the former Army Ranger said seriously.

“Did I screw up?” Eric asked seriously, more than a little concerned by the situation. “I thought this was a Drasin construction. Was I wrong?”

“I don’t think so, Captain. Michelle, tell him what else we found.”

“Uh…yes, sir,” the sensor specialist said tersely. “Ensign Lamont and I located these earlier.”

She changed the plot for the moment, showing clouds of familiar vessels moving in and out through the plates that made up the swarm. Those Eric clearly recognized as the familiar Drasin ships they’d been fighting.

“More to the point, hyperspectral analysis of the swarm itself shows that it is clearly of Drasin fabrication,” Winger went on, “identical chemical signatures as their ships and soldier drones.”

That brought a near-invisible wince from Eric. Though he’d been counting on it, it wasn’t what he would term good news. Of course, it just might be better news than if the Drasin were only one of two species that were clearly capable of dismantling a solar system, but he could have wished for a nice peaceful superpower, he supposed.

Fat chance. Superpowers don’t get where they are by being peaceful. Peaceful people don’t have the drive to expand.

No, if there were another species out here that wasn’t getting attacked by the Drasin, Eric was thinking that he had a good candidate for his “trigger men.”

Maybe they’re actually allies, or some variation of such, but genocidal sorts don’t usually have particularly good allies anyway, so either way, these ships need watching.

“Record everything,” he said quietly, but firmly. “I want every piece of data we can scan or extrapolate on those ships. Either they’re allies to the Drasin, or maybe something much worse. Either way, if we ever run into those ships on our own, I want to know who they are before they get a chance to pull anything.”

“Aye, sir.” Michelle nodded. “We’ll get everything we can.”

Eric nodded curtly, then walked over and took his place at the command station, calling up the plot on his personal screens. The high-resolution scans were eerily perfect, in the way that computer-generated data often was, but Eric found himself feeling something when he looked at the new types of ships.

Familiarity.

They weren’t Priminae, that was certain. The material signatures were all wrong, that was clear from the hyperspectral analysis, but the design…The designs looked very similar to the Priminae Combat Class ships they’d seen in the past. The Priminae didn’t build with metal, however; they preferred ceramic composites that were stronger and lighter than any alloy possible in nature.

These people use metals. Advanced alloys, from what these scans are detailing, but metals just the same.
Eric skimmed over the hull on his screen, eyeing the bulges with a critical air and generally trying to get a feel for the builders.

Who are you?

PRIMINAE VESSEL CEREKUS, RANQUIL SYSTEM

▸THE DECK ROCKED under the feet of Coranth Cirrus and his team as they finished sweeping another deck.

“Are you absolutely certain we’ve tuned the impellers as low as is practical?” he demanded of the engineer who had delivered the weapons to him.

“Yes, for the twelfth time, I’m certain.”

“Damn,” Cirrus swore, “it feels like we are inflicting more damage than the Drasin.”

They paused to look at the jagged hole they’d blown through the inner bulkhead, even now cooling from the impact and the spattering of a Drasin’s molten innards, and few had a response to that. The impeller weapons were most assuredly not intended for use on board ship, and Cirrus was reasonably sure that he and everyone with him had damage to their hearing from the continuous explosive discharges they’d been unleashing.

Still, with their standard-issue milosec lasers being effectively worthless against the drones they were encountering, there were few options.

“How many left?” Cirrus asked wearily.

They’d eliminated three of the drones so far, leaving behind smashed bulkheads and rapidly cooling pools of molten silicon and other materials in their wake for the maintenance crews to manage. It didn’t seem like much, but each one required a different approach depending on what the Drasin was attempting to do. The last two times they were positioned at vital circuitry that, while perhaps not completely irreplaceable, they certainly would prefer to avoid inflicting undue damage on.

“We recorded two more breaches in the hull.”

At least two, then.
Cirrus hoped that was it. They were tearing themselves and the ship itself apart to remove the intruders, and it was taking a toll on his team and himself. Every bone in his body ached, and he felt like he wanted to throw up with every step, something he was told was due to the continuous exposure to concussive force from their own weapons.

The Drasin hadn’t even laid a finger on them during the entire engagement; they were more focused on sabotaging the ship to give a damn about the crew at the moment. No, every bit of injury he and his had suffered had been at their own hands!

It was galling almost as much as it relieved him, to be brutally honest. The enemy apparently didn’t consider his teams enough of a threat to bother fighting, despite the fact that they’d been picking them off one by one since the monstrous beasts set their first pincer on board the
Cerekus
. While he certainly didn’t want them to wake up and take serious notice, Cirrus had to admit that the complete lack of any sort of respect from the enemy was both irritating and worrisome.

“Come on, we’ve got to drag this gear over to Deck Four, Section Eighteen, next.” He grunted as he slung the impeller and picked up the munitions pack.

Either way, they had a lot of work left to do before the
Cerekus
was clear of enemy intruders, and even when that was done, he shuddered to think of the cleanup.

The repair teams are never going to look at me the same again.

On the command deck of the
Cerekus
, Syrenne Tianne gritted her teeth as she actually felt the last reverberations of the explosion several decks away fade.

Ordering men to use demolitions material on my own bedamned ship! What’s next?
She tried to keep her expression from scaring any of the younger crewmen and women around her, but was frankly failing miserably.
Likely, I’ll shortly receive a summons from the admiral to fire on Ranquil itself!

As soon as that thought had crossed her mind, she winced involuntarily. That particular order was far from unlikely, and she realized it almost the moment it crossed her mind.

“Captain, we’ve redirected the comet sufficiently for it to completely bypass all Ranquil facilities.”

Tianne turned to the crewman and nodded. “Thank you. Kill the beams and let it fall freely then. I want all imagers scanning constantly. See if there are any more of those things around us!”

“Yes, Captain.”

Could she relax now? No, she couldn’t.

RANQUIL, OVER DRASIN IMPACT CRATER

▸LT. ALEXANDRA PAULSON had seen impact craters in the past, but there was an ugliness to them that never failed to send a shiver down her spine. This one she was orbiting her shuttle around was no exception; in fact, it was possibly even uglier than most, given what she knew was waiting down in its black depths. The smoke and dust of the impact was fouling visibility, and she’d actually elected to switch over from air-breathing jets to the shuttle’s self-contained systems in order to prevent any of the trash in the air from equally fouling the intakes.

“Well, that’s certainly one big-ass hole,” she said as she directed her shuttle in a smooth orbit over the impact strike.

“Deep penetration, same as the last couple,” Maj. Wilhelm Brinks replied absently. “They’re consistent, if nothing else.”

“They are that,” the pilot replied as she flipped over the protective cover that shielded the weapons payload switches from accidental activation. “We’re armed and ready to pop, sir.”

“Target area is clear of friendlies,” Brinks said calmly. “Fire when ready.”

“Roger that,” Alexandra said, composed as she overshot the target once and put the nose of her bird almost vertical.

The big orbital shuttle was a flex-wing lifting-body design despite the use of the CM systems, partly because CM was such new technology that no one had gotten around to designing completely efficient hulls for it yet and partly because no pilots wanted to trust their lives to a craft they couldn’t glide in on a bet if the fancy counter-mass systems failed.

They barely felt the climb inside due to the CM systems, but the big shuttle was clawing for altitude as Alexandra let out the reactors a little. Part of it was just show—she could have dropped from a much lower altitude, to be sure—and some of it was just because she enjoyed pushing her bird to its limits, but there were real tactical reasons to drop to a higher level than they’d chosen to perform their final observations from.

For one, they didn’t want to get nailed by a piece of shrapnel thrown up from the blast that was coming. She still shuddered whenever she remembered one of her academy training exercises when she was called upon to do a low-altitude strike run with live munitions. A slight error in her instrumentation caused her to be a mere ten feet under the planned drop altitude, something that shouldn’t have made the slightest difference in any sane world. In the real one, however, it was the difference between getting her arse end wet and having it torn clean off by the waterspout she created.

It was only a miracle and the reflexes of her training supervisor that kept her from planting the training bird nose first into the lake they’d been using for target practice. A Mach 1, forty-foot impact was pretty much not a survivable incident in
anyone’s book, and since that day, she felt like puking whenever she had to do a low-altitude drop.