Into the Black: Odyssey One (50 page)

Not that long at all.

“Lamont, have Engineering begin recharging the coils.”

“Sir… but…, Aye Sir,” Lamont caught herself, and tapped in the order.

Down in the bowels of the ship, cold reactors hummed back to life in response, while on the Bridge, the senior staff watched the range tick down, while the lock slowly firmed up.

“One hundred fifty light seconds, Captain. Lock is now seventy-five percent.”

Weston nodded, but said nothing.

The tension slowly began to climb as the numbers fell, until Waters spoke up almost a minute later.

“One hundred, twenty light seconds.”

“Prepare for firing sequence,” Weston ordered.

“Aye Captain. Firing sequence entered.”

“Lock it into the computer.”

“Locked.”

“Engage the sequence.”

Waters nodded, “Sequence engaged.”

With that command the Ensign sat back, watching as the computer took over.

His program was in control now, and all he could do was watch the data it was throwing back and step in, if something changed drastically. The actual firing would be up to the computer because at the ranges they were dealing with, any minute variance in timing or arc would result in a miss of spectacular proportions.

The Odyssey had to close another eighteen light seconds, before the program would open fire, which translated into another seventy seconds of waiting. Give or take.

*****

An audible hum distracted Jennifer, as she tossed two cards back across the thirty feet of open space to the dealer, forcing Paladin to dislodge himself, to catch the cards. He scowled at her, as he pulled himself back into place.

“Be careful, would ya? I don’t feel like swimming all over this hold looking for the cards,” he growled, thumbing another pair from the deck and sending them back to her.

She caught them, still looking around.

“Relax,” Michaels said looking up from a PDA he was working on. “That’s just the secondary generators coming online. We’re getting ready to fire.”

She nodded, taking a breath. “I knew that Sir. Just…”

“First time you heard them from the nose of an Archangel,” Paladin smirked. “Everything sounds just a bit more dangerous, don’t it?”

“Well, I know that your voice keeps sending chills down my spine,” she said sarcastically as she settled back down. “That count?”

Racer laughed, “nah. Trust me girl, his voice scares all of us anyway.”

A few of the pilots chuckled along with them; even Paladin himself and the card game went on, as the feeling of life started returning to the big ship.

*****

“Firing in ten seconds, Captain,” Waters said, unnecessarily.

“Understood, Ensign,” Weston replied. “Lieutenant Daniels?”

“Yes Sir?” The Navigator glanced over at him.

“Prepare for evasive maneuvering, Lieutenant. Thrusters only.”

“Thrusters only, Aye Sir.”

“Lamont?”

“Yes Sir?” Susan Lamont stiffened.

Eric Weston looked at the clock, then nodded, “sound battle stations, Ensign.”

“Aye-Aye Cap… Captain,” Susan stumbled over her words slightly, as the deck transmitted the high frequency pulse of the tubes, firing through her feet. “Sounding battle stations.”

*****

From the outside of the NAC Odyssey, no sound is heard when the brilliant flashes of light mark the launch of the six bursts of charged energy.

The Pulse Torpedoes just flash into existence in front of the proud ship and then flashed off through the black just as quickly, until they were nothing but another star in the wasteland to the unaided human eye. Though they were not light speed weapons, they were very close, as the total mass of each of the weapons actually approached zero, give or take a few nano-grams.

They left the Odyssey at just over .9c and would take about ten seconds more to cross the gulf, than the light they cast.

Which would give their targets ten seconds to see what was coming, and marginally less time to react.

*****

“Thrusters!” Weston called. “Take us below the system ecliptic, relative to the enemy!”

“Aye Sir,” Daniels said, entering the pre-coded maneuver with a single tap of his fingers. “Engaging thrusters now.”

The Odyssey shivered as her maneuvering thrusters, usually intended for low velocity maneuvers while under port speed restrictions, kicked into action and flared hotly as they strained to shove the big ship, out of the line of any likely fire.

“Keep an eye on passive sensors,” Eric ordered tensely. “I want to know if we get pinged.”

“Aye Captain.” Waters responded.

*****

Jennifer tightened her grip on the fighter’s nose with her legs, as the deck seemed to pitch slightly and a wail of steel and groan of metal echoed through the deck.

This time she was ready for it and didn’t miss her throw, when she sent her card back to the dealer. The Cee Emm field was marginally less effective at muffling sharp maneuvers below decks, due to the absence of any sort of gravity, so the stress on the ship and the littler inertia her body and everything else had, relative to the real universe, was pushed a little bit more in null gravity.

“Captain’s got Daniels standing on the stick,” Racer said with a half-smile.

“That’s what you get, when you put a fighter pilot in command of a ship,” Paladin returned the grin continuing flipping three cards to another pilot. “One seriously neurotic ship.”

Low chuckles passed around the deck, the pilots willing to take any chance to burn away unneeded stress.

“Say,” Jenny spoke up. “Where did you guys pick up the poker thing? I mean, I get the game and all but…”

“How’d we get the idea to try it in null?” Paladin asked with a smirk.

“Well… Yeah,” she admitted, “I mean, this is your first tour in space, right? I mean…”

“We know what you mean,” Racer replied, with a small smile. “The poker game is traditional. Goes back a lot of years. The Null deal, well we figured out how to manage that during our null grav training.”

Another pilot laughed, “Yeah. We almost went bonkers that first week. Took us forever to decide that there just was no-good way to float the pot, between us.”

“Yeah,” Paladin grinned, “Remember the zip-lock incident?”

Several more laughed, but Racer looked more than a little chagrined.

“Hey, my wristwatch got caught in the bag, all right!?”

“Says you,” Paladin returned, not missing a beat in his dealing. “I still think you were trying to palm the pot.”

Racer rolled her eyes disgustedly, “Oh yes, like I really needed twenty-two bucks in loose change.”

Commander Michaels watched the banter with a half-smile, remembering the game himself. As he recalled Gabrielle had won that hand anyway, on a straight flush, so any accusations of ‘stealing’ the pot were more than slightly due to sour grapes.

*****

“Time?”

“Weapons will be TOT in thirty-two seconds, Captain.”

“Keep us moving, Lieutenant,” Weston ordered, rapidly making in calculations in his head.

If the torpedoes were going to strike in just over thirty seconds, the enemy forces would be picking up the first light speed evidence of their strike, in just over twenty. Given that the Odyssey was now altering its course to a slightly more divergent tack, they were still over ninety light seconds from the target ships, and about two minutes from being able to read any solid reactions in the enemy fleet.

Unless he ordered the active sensors back online.

The back of Eric’s knuckles itched, as he contemplated the satisfying influx of data that would follow that order.

Targeting solutions, enemy positions, full course vectors and even weapon energy signatures would be at his fingertips, if he could only give that order.

However, it would also give the enemy a positive lock on his position and even though they might have it already, they may well not have it, yet.

So he kept his peace and watched as the Odyssey’s course continued to drop under the system ecliptic, as her thrusters sought valiantly to shove the big warship along a new path.

*****

Across the reaches of space that lay between them and the alien task force under an alien Commander was thinking many of the same thoughts, as Captain Eric Weston.

They didn’t know their enemy, their weapons and tactics didn’t match the target, they had been sent to eliminate.

The ship profile was unknown.

Its power signature absurdly weak.

And yet it was ripping through warships with an ease that was…, disturbing.

The Masters would not be concerned with the loss of a few ships, or even all of them, if the task was accomplished. However, because of this one ship, five warrior ships had to be diverted from other priority targets, in order to take this system according to plan.

That wasn’t an acceptable situation, even if it was a necessary one.

The Alien Command of the ship was grimly considering the impact the diversion would have on the extermination, when the first warning sensor went off. It was just a minor alert, but the response was quick, just the same. In three seconds, it had been determined that the alert wasn’t tripped by any natural satellite of this system, as this alert was wont to do.

Two seconds more were required to confirm that it didn’t match any known configuration in the target species inventory.

Another four, identified the source of the alert positively as weapon fire from the unknown ship.

Three more seconds would have been required to mount an attempt at defence.

However, two seconds shy of that limit; all hell broke loose across the small armada.

*****

The Odyssey’s pulse torpedoes carried a very small electrical charge, designed to prevent the weapons from accidently intersecting the position of another torpedo or, obviously, the walls of the launching tubes.

This tended to cause the weapons to spread slightly as they flew, which made the targeting calculations that much more important, especially at long ranges. So by the time this spread of torpedoes reached their target location, they had spread enough that three of the weapons were outside positive lock range of any of the enemy ships and kept on flying past as their three identical siblings went into terminal guidance, their very nature causing them to be attracted, to any matter in their path. They corkscrewed suddenly as they came into range, and slammed into a ship apiece, sending plumes of plasma into space as they annihilated huge chunks of matter, with their explosions.

The three damaged ships faltered in their course, shifting slightly under the impact, then slowly returned to their place in formation, as their power came back.

By that time, they had calculated the direction the attack had come from and had turned their sensors outward, pouring more and more power in the search for their unseen foe, as they altered their course to intercept.

*****

“They’re coming around, Captain!” Waters snapped as the changes in the enemy task force finally were shown on the plot.

“All of them?”

“Aye Sir, all of them,” The young man’s tone was a little grimmer now.

Weston frowned, the thermal bloom on the sensors a few seconds earlier had confirmed at least three separate strikes, which seemed to tally with their track of the pulse torpedoes they had launched. A fifty/fifty hit-miss ratio wasn’t great, but if his luck held through, Eric would take it and be glad.

“Course?” He asked tensely.

“Looks like…,” Daniels frowned, tapping out a confirmation. Finally, he let out a long breath and half smiled, not in amusement, but in relief. “Heading for our previous position.”

“They haven’t seen us yet…,” someone whispered, but Weston ignored them.

If that was true, they still had the advantage. They knew, more or less, where the enemy was, and the enemy didn’t have a clue where the Odyssey was lurking.

“Kill thrusters!”

“Killing thrusters, Aye Sir,” Daniels responded, instantly killing the thrusters with a tap of his fingers.

“Mr. Daniels, adjust our stance…, one percent thrust only…,” Weston ordered. “Put our nose in line with the enemy’s projected position in…, one minute.”

“Adjusting stance. Aye Captain.”

And outside, in the cold silence of space, a tiny series of puffs silently and slowly pushed the nose of the Odyssey around until they were pointing almost back in the direction they had come.

“Waters, calculate targeting coordinates for odd-numbered tubes, one through eleven.”

“Aye Captain. Calculating for tubes one through eleven.”

“Lamont,” Eric half turned. “Charge status on tubes two through twelve?”

“Two and four are now charging, Captain. We’ll be ready to fire in five minutes. Six through twelve will take another ten minutes.”

Eric nodded turning back to his displays. Having all the capacitors charged and ready, and not drained by a recent transition, meant that he’d get a second round of shots from all tubes in this battle.

It might be enough.

Probably not, but it might.

*****

Once again the unknown enemy was proving to be an unforeseen obstacle to the Plan. The ship was not along the projected path that its weapons had followed and the fleet had wasted time, in the search.

The vessel had to be of unprecedented technology in order to deploy as much power as it held and yet register so low on the threat rating system.

This was disturbing on many levels of course, but mostly because the weapons and warriors the fleet had been deployed with were intended for use against the target. This new enemy was not in its database, and there were no appropriate counter actions it could take.

Reluctantly, it ordered the fleet sensors to full spread.

*****

“We’re getting heavy spikes all through the EM range, Captain!”

“Have they spotted us?” Weston asked tensely, watching the countdown to firing. It was too soon, they needed another few seconds to fire, then almost a full minute and a half for the shots to land.