Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (55 page)

Admiral Gracen had to admit, the sentiment fit.

“Alright.” She shook off the surprise of the Drasin ships just vanishing into clouds of plasma. “The
Enterprise
has cleared the road. Time to do
our
jobs. Come about and clear the guns!”

“Aye ma’am,” Steph said softly, thinking about the sheer rain of destruction the Vorpals had just brought down on the enemy.

He truly hated to admit it, but it was a fair sight more than the Double A squadron would have been able to pull off even at their height.

Those new birds are some scary pieces of kit, I’ll give them props for that
.

Of course, for the moment at least, he wasn’t Double A anymore. He was Heroic, and that meant that he could top that little show and leave plenty to spare for an encore.

“Ithan Chans”—Gracen looked over to where Milla was working—“prepare targeting solutions for the ships within our range.”

“Yes Admiral. Solutions being prepared.”

“We’re out of the fire, but this fight is a long way from over. Michelle, watch our flanks. They ambushed us once. We may not get so lucky a second time,” Gracen ordered.

“Aye ma’am. Should I go full active?”

Gracen considered it, then nodded. “Yes. They know we’re here anyway. Do it.”

“Going full active, all screens, all bands,” Michelle said. “The other Heroics are following suit.”

The Heroic Class ships were capable of operating with full FTL scans of a system, effectively for an unlimited duration. It poured high-energy, low-life tachyons out into the system and used the nearly invisible bounce-back signals to track everything moving within a range of several AU.

The words “energy intensive” didn’t begin to cover the costs of such high-level scanning, but one thing that the Heroics had aplenty was energy.

“Four hundred thirty-three enemy ships approaching on track from Earth orbit,” Michelle announced a moment later.

Gracen nodded. That was just within their engagement limit if her count was correct.

“Firing formation Delta,” she ordered. “Spread us out, clear the guns, and fire as they bear.”

“Aye ma’am,” Steph said. “Formation Delta.”

He casually adjusted the course of the big ship, splitting away from the
Heracles
as the other ships did the same. It was a move intended to clear their gun sights, removing any chance of interfering with one another’s shots, as they brought the tachyon waveguide cannons to bear.

The six ships of the Heroics task force went to full automatic fire as the line of sight first cleared, their waveguide cannons humming almost constantly as they discharged. The shells, one-meter nuclear fused munitions, had been improved by the Priminae, as had most of the systems provided by Admiral Gracen and the refugees from Earth. Each now packed multi-gigaton fusion weapons in the place of the smaller Terran warheads.

The tachyon transition, instantaneous as it was, threw the weapons across the intervening space in the blink of an eye. At their targets the effect wore off naturally, plunging the weapons back into real space and, hopefully, right into the heart of the targeted ship.

Some missed. The equations for determining the effect of gravity on tachyon formations were far from perfect, and occasionally the powerful local fields caused by multiple warp interactions caused some shells to reappear outside their intended target. Or, in more extreme cases, other shells reappeared as fragments of their original form due to the tachyon formation being totally disrupted by opposing fields.

Others struck true, but returned to normal space inside the solid matter—such as the hull of the ship—they were aimed at. This was destructive, annihilating both the shells and the section of hull quite effectively, but generally not fatal to the target or even particularly inconveniencing.

Most, however, appeared within the interior of their target as intended—in the cargo rooms, the drone bays, the ducts that piped vital gasses about. These shells fell to the decks with
loud clanging noises, attracting attention from all in the area, but by that time it was far too late.

In the first volley, over twenty Drasin ships simply
vanished
into nuclear fire.

The six ships of the Heroics squadron continued on full automatic fire for nearly five minutes until the last of the charging Drasin ships were destroyed in what was, for Admiral Gracen, the single most one-sided battle she’d ever witnessed or heard of.

There was a quiet moment after the report of the last destroyed Drasin ship made its way around the bridge, a period in which no one seemed to know what to say. Gracen finally broke the silence herself.

“Alright. Set course for Earth orbit,” she said. “They likely need some help.”

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

“Get me the
Enterprise
in the meantime.”

“Yes ma’am. Captain Carrow . . . online,” Susan told her a moment later.

“Captain, I see you have some fighters headed your way. Do you require assistance?”

“No ma’am, we can handle them. Suggest you get ground units to Earth,” Carrow answered. “We’ll follow as soon as we’ve cleaned up.”

“Very well. Tell your pilots they have my compliments and thanks for the save,” she said. “Gracen out.”

The admiral considered something for a moment, then stood up. “Ithan Chans . . .”

“Yes Admiral?” the Priminae woman asked.

“How are our munition stocks looking?”

“We are low, Admiral. Transition shells are at twenty percent or less across all ships,” Milla said. “If they had many more ships, it would have been very close.”

Gracen nodded. “Understood. Thank you.”

Mentally she was tallying what she knew was in the system when she was forced to flee and comparing it to the kill rate. They didn’t have an exact count, but she knew that between Captain Sun and Weston, and with the help of Carrow, the initial force of thousands had been devastated, leaving
only
a few hundred to take control of what they’d won.

They had now accounted for nearly five hundred more of the enemy ships, so while there could be some stragglers about in the system . . .
Almost certainly are, actually
. . . they should have eliminated the bulk of the enemy force.

Her task force was a little beat up. They’d lost some people and had a few holes poked in their armor, but they were intact. The Priminae systems, combined with the Terran systems, were an incredible combination of power and sophistication.

The lab boys are going to be working overtime trying to find a way to block the waveguide cannons
.
Those things are just
monstrous
.

“Course charted and coded, ma’am. We’re en route for Earth orbit.”

“Alright,” Gracen said firmly. “Good. We’re not done here yet. Alert Colonel Reed and have his boys suit up. I have a bad feeling about what’s going on back home.”

“Aye ma’am,” Susan said. “Reed reports that his teams are ready to deploy just as soon as we get there.”

“Then by all means. Commander Michaels?”

“Yes ma’am?”

“Don’t spare the engines.”

“Aye aye, Admiral. Maximum acceleration engaged,” Steph said. “We’ll have to do some fancy braking moves when we get there though.”

“Is that a problem for you flyboys?”

The former fighter pilot just laughed. “Not even a bit of one.”

“Good.”

The Heroics, led by the
Odysseus,
warped space hard as they plummeted toward Earth.

Commander William Briggs grinned as he poured on the thrust, leading Alpha Flight as they plunged toward the array of red icons spattered across their HUDs. The enemy fighter drones were closing on Bravo Flight, and would be able to engage them before they made it back into the security zone of the
Enterprise
. It was his and Alpha Flight’s job to ensure that the Drasin didn’t get a chance to do much damage when that happened.

“Spread out. Watch for energy leaking off their beams,” he ordered. “The fighters aren’t as powerful as the big ships, but their lasers are still bloody obscene.”

The green IFF signals coming off of Bravo Flight were getting closer, but so far the other squadron of Vorpals hadn’t closed within visual range. He doubled checked the vectors of every fighter in his squad against those among the other, just to ensure that no one was being careless enough to Fox Five themselves into an ally.

Everything was clear, however, and that was no more than expected. Even if anyone on his squad was that stupid, and he liked to think that they weren’t, space was a big-ass place. One would almost have to plan something like that.

Which, honestly, was what frightened him. The competition between Alpha and Bravo was heated at the best of times, and occasionally someone would
show off
. He was willing to put up with that in training, but if anyone had tried to buzz an ally in this situation, Bill Briggs would have had to think about splashing them himself.

“Hey boss man,” Bill’s wingman called out, “do you have a count on those things? I’m getting fuzzy readings here.”

“They’re in close formation, probably leftover orders from when they were shielding their mother ships,” Bill answered. “The initial count we got was north of sixty enemy fighters.”

A whistle went up across the board. “That’s a lot, boss.”

“They use lasers, which means they have to get inside knife range to score a reliable kill,” Bill reminded them. “We hit them hard from outside knife range, then pull back to let the
Big E
move into place to cover us before we wrassle them around up close.”

“Sounds good, boss, but let’s remember that these guys are kamikaze fighters.”

“Fair point,” Bill conceded. “Everyone watch for suicides. We don’t want to lose the
E,
got that?”

They had it.

“Everyone hold your fire until we clear Bravo Flight’s location,” he said seriously. “I know you guys don’t always get along, but you wouldn’t believe the paperwork involved if one of us accidentally splashes our own guys.”

“What if we just wing one?” Alpha Nine asked, laughing.

“With high-velocity missiles? Yeah, that’s likely. Just wait,” he answered, rolling his eyes.

A glance at the numbers told him that they didn’t have long left to wait.

“Interpenetration of the Bravo line in . . . twenty seconds. Stand by to go weapons hot.”

Captain Carrow watched the numbers fall on his screens. There was little else he could do. The fighters were too small and too far
out to track visually, and even if they could the signals would be almost three seconds out of date before the
Enterprise
got them.