Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (80 page)

“Here they come, Captain!”

Carrow nodded, eyes on the incoming track. “Thin their ranks. HVMs fire as we bear!”

“Roger sir, high-velocity missiles firing!”

The big kinetic kill weapons launched, sending shivers even through the bulk of the
Enterprise
. Their CM fields kicked in shortly after, and they lanced away, having more in common with a laser than a missile. The volley struck true, two HVMs slamming into each of the lead ships in a shocking display of force.

It wasn’t the clean kill of the
Odysseus’
lasers, but the debris that survived the impact ceased acceleration and flew on with no hand guiding the tiller.

“More ships are filling the gap, sir.”

“I see them,” Carrow said. “Have Bravo Flight come in from the port, flank them, and take them out.”

“Aye sir.”

The only time Carrow had seen anything like this was in the last dark days of drone warfare before the U.S., China, and other nations got together to outlaw the damned things.

He’d only been a kid at the time, just enlisted and assigned to a destroyer. Stationed off Taiwan, they’d been tasked with defending the island against the aggression of the mainland. The drones had started in the dark, barely showing up on radar, effectively invisible . . . loaded with enough explosives to take out a building.

And there had been hundreds of them.

Carrow shook the memory away, forcing his mind back to the present. These weren’t Chinese drones, they weren’t American, or Indian, or any other weapon of a sane world, or an insane one. They were abominations. They were things that should not exist, should never exist.

He’d never in his life known anything that absolutely had to be destroyed. Gray was where he lived his existence, no purity of good or evil had ever existed in Carrow’s world.

He knew better.

Right until he came face-to-face with the Drasin.

“Go to rapid fire on all HVM banks,” Carrow ordered. “Tear them apart!”

“Captain,” Gracen spoke softly from behind him, “we should call in reinforcements.”

“They’ll never get here in time, Admiral,” Eric whispered in return. “You know that.”

“I know,” she nodded. “But they can finish what we’ve started. These things can’t be left to rebuild. You know what they can do.”

Eric nodded, looking down for a moment.

She was right. He knew it, but calling out the other ships was effectively calling them to their own slaughter. They had to kill every last one of the alien things, or it was for nothing, yet he knew that even all of the remaining ships had no chance of that.

If they stayed on Earth, however, eventually they would face hundreds . . . thousands . . . more.

“Susan,” Eric looked up.

“Yes sir?”

“Signal the other . . . Heroics,” he said, tasting the word for a moment. “Tell them our status, inform them . . .”

He sighed, taking a breath. “Inform them that we are requesting reinforcements.”

To finish what we’ve begun
.

He didn’t say it, but he knew Jason Roberts well enough. The man would understand.

“Aye sir. By FTL?”

“Yes.”

Susan nodded and quickly entered the message. A moment later, however, she frowned and entered another command. She scowled, entered more commands, and then called for a technician.

“What is it, Susan?”

“FTL comm is offline,” she said, shaking her head. “Never seen anything like it, but then again I’d never seen an FTL comm until a few weeks ago.”

“No ideas?” he asked, one eye on the battle. Steph was handling the ship well. He and Milla were a good team.

“It reads like interference, but that’s impossible,” she said. “Not on a tachyon-based system.”

Michelle Winger, across the bridge, scowled in turn and shifted her attention from the fighting for a moment. It only took a few seconds for her to let out a word that would have made Eric blush once, before he became a Marine. He turned in her direction. “Michelle?”

“We’re being
jammed,
” she said, her tone completely disbelieving. “The entire region is flooded with tachyons.”

“That’s not possible,” Milla said, looking over, eyes wide. “I have never heard of something that could flood an area like that!”

“Every FTL scanner I’ve got is whited out,” Michelle said, shaking her head. “We’re not sending anything FTL anytime soon.”

Eric scowled, but it didn’t matter.

“Fine. Send the message via laser comm,” he said, waving it off. He had a fight to conduct.

The
Odysseus
twisted in space, lashing out with lasers in a near-constant flood. The region around her was a wasteland of plasma and debris, interrupted only by the constant influx of Drasin vessels.

As many as she destroyed, however, there were more to fill the empty spaces. And though
Odysseus
fired first and fastest, the enemy got in their blows in return. Atmosphere bled from the kilometer-and-a-half-long hull. Bodies of the dead hurtled alongside the carrier, caught in the space
warp that powered her. Forty enemy ships fell to her lasers, another half dozen to the missiles of the
Enterprise,
and a double handful to the fighter craft that buzzed around the edge of the battle like lethal insects waiting for a target to sting.

The Drasin lasers were just as powerful, if not as sophisticated, and they cut deep into the
Odysseus’
hull with every passing moment. More air bled away, more systems were damaged and hastily patched by the crews within, working feverishly to do what they could.

For every hole they patched, three more would blow open, and for every system they saved, another ten would fail. It was a task worthy of Sisyphus, but the work crews of
Odysseus
threw themselves into it like the gods themselves.

In the end, it wouldn’t be enough, of course . . . but then, it wasn’t always about the end.

Sometimes it was the journey that counted and every one of them had signed on for an odyssey.

“The
Enterprise
is hit! They’ve lost their flight deck. They’re losing air too fast!” Winger said. “The Vorpal fighters are coming about to help . . . they’re going to be too late.”

“Get us over there!”

“We’ve lost too much reactor mass, Captain. We can’t make that kind of acceleration,” the chief engineer said, shaking his head.

“Damn it!” Eric swore, slamming his hands down. “Put the
E
on screen.”

“Captain . . .” Winger hesitated.

“Put her on screen.”

The screen flickered and the crippled image of the
Enterprise
was front and center, everyone looking on as three Drasin ships circled around and came back in on her firing. Eric’s eyes spotted pods launching from the ship, even as the
Enterprise
fired back and crippled one of the three with her main laser.

The beams intersected, slicing the gleaming hull of the Earth-built ship apart cleanly. The big ship separated, her engines floating one way while the habitats went another. The lasers stopped and Eric watched as the ships closed in on the pods and habitat modules.

“Don’t look away,” he said, his voice carrying. “This isn’t something that should be forgotten.”

The alien ships slowed as they got in range of the
Enterprise
habitat modules, their own bays opening as a mini swarm of drones launched across open space . . . and then everything vanished in a massive sphere of white light.