The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (50 page)

▸
SO IT CAME down to this
, Johan thought.

“Collision imminent!”

The yell was calm, at least as calm as one could expect, and Johan was proud of his crew in that moment.

They had done all he had asked of them, all he could have asked, and he only wished that he had done as well for them as they had for him. It was easy to see the mistakes made in retrospect, perhaps especially since this one had been so glaring and so short a time past. He should have engaged the fighters farther out, but had expected them to engage like his own small craft might, and didn’t believe them to be a credible threat to his ship.

He’d been wrong.

And now he was going to die for it.

The pity was that he wouldn’t die alone.

Johan watched as the fighters wheeled in on terminal approach, and issued one last order.

“Launch the life pods!”

His ship shuddered under him, the smaller explosions the forerunners of what was to come, and he knew that some of his people were getting away.

Not all, that would have been impossible in the time they had, but some.

He only wished that he could have held off on the order just a few seconds more.

And then it was too late for regrets.

ARCHANGEL SQUADRON

▸“TAKE EVASIVE ACTION!” Stephanos ordered over the network as the last two Drasin fighters passed through the last-ditch fire from both the Angels and the Priminae ship. He rolled his own fighter as he spoke, throwing full power to the CM field as he did, and activated the fighter’s blast shields.

The armor plates slid out over the sensor pods that normally had to be exposed to space to one degree or another, cutting them off and effectively blinding Stephanos inside, but he already knew what was going to happen, anyway.

His mind filled in what the sensors could no longer see, graphically illustrating the cataclysm that was passing just outside his cockpit.

The two fighters would be crashing into the Priminae’s shields about now
, he thought, wincing slightly at the thought.

He imagined the shields flaring under the force of impact, either holding or failing, he couldn’t say, but turning brilliant white under the impact even as the fighters’ mass was converted into energy by the impact.

On a planet’s surface, there would be a mushroom cloud, but in space, it would be spherical.

No, no, Stephanos corrected himself, the ship had its own gravity field.

How would that affect the explosion? Stephanos didn’t know, couldn’t even guess. For a moment, he was tempted to lower his blast armor, just to find out, but then his mind filled in the next thing that would happen.

The shock wave would reach out like the angry fist of God, swatting his Angels from the skies.

The universe then shook and rolled and tried to turn Stephanos inside out as his imagined scenario came entirely too true.

PRIMINAE VESSEL HERALC

▸“BREAKER BELOW.”

Someone hissed at the curse that escaped Kierna’s lips, but the captain of the
Heralc
couldn’t care less. On the screen was the same thing that had been there when they overloaded, the last image of the
Vulk
before it vanished into an inferno of heat and light, and over fifteen thousand people died in the endless night.

“Weapons status!” he called out, trying to shake the feeling of stunned shock that threatened to swallow him whole.

There was a pause before anyone responded, but he let it pass.

“W…Weapons active, Captain. Ready to deploy.”

He nodded. “Increase all forward scans.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Captain!” A too-young woman at the engineering station called sharply, turning to look at him.

“Yes, Ithan?” Kierna asked, though he knew what she was going to say.

“We do not have reactor mass to engage the Drasin in a prolonged battle, Captain. We’re down to under 60 percent of gravity, Captain.”

“Understood, Ithan,” he said in a too-calm voice, not looking at the young woman. “Weapons are to be charged.”

There was a silence on the bridge, and for a moment, no one wanted to meet the Captain’s eye, which was fine with Kierna. If he miscalculated, if he simply chose to ignore the threat, then the
Heralc
would become a derelict, forever falling away from the world it was supposed to defend.

There was nothing they could do that would repower the reactors once their mass dropped below critical levels.

Not a thing in the universe.

ARCHANGEL SQUADRON

▸STEPH STRUGGLED WITH his fighter as he bucked around, relying on nothing but inertial guidance and his own inner ear as he tried to bring it back under control. Finally, the system smoothed out, rocking a bit as he overcompensated for the last correction, and an awful sense of calm passed over him.

It was strange; it shouldn’t be. He was physically unconnected from the explosion and the ship by anything—vacuum isolated him more effectively than anything else could—but Stephanos felt what he was going to find before he secured the fighter from its highly armored mode.

Lights came back as the sensors were free to look out again, and instantly, new data began pouring in. The Angel transponders were all there, the first thing he queried, and Steph gave a brief prayer of thanks for that before he looked to the ship.

Or what used to be a ship.

The hulk of the once great ship was twisting slowly in space, well astern of Steph or any of the other Angels, and he flipped his fighter in response, firing his reactors to kill his momentum.

“Jesus…” Burner’s voice came back over the network, whispering in shock.

Stephanos didn’t blame him.

As the sensors got a better look, the computer filled in the image with as close to real-time data as he was going to get, and Stephanos watched the dying ship as pieces of its hull twisted and collapsed inward. First one section, and then another, until finally the rest of the ship itself twisted horribly of its own accord and sank into itself.

And then finally, there was nothing left.

No hull.

No debris.

Nothing at all.

“Holy shit.”

“Sir, this is Cardsharp…Recommend we avoid that area.”

“What?” Steph blinked, not that he was planning on flying through it. “Why?”

“Don’t know for sure, but judging from what we just saw…I don’t think it’s all gone yet, sir. Something’s still under power in there. And it eats ships.”

Stephanos blinked, trying to shake away her words with little success, the very concept boggled his mind. Finally, he managed to say, “Agreed.”

He marked the area as a hundred thousand–kilometer no-fly zone, choosing the number mostly at random except that all of his fighters were at least that far away and seemed OK, then shot the waypoint orders to the flight.

“Sir,” Burner came on a moment later, “I think I’m picking up survivors’ beacons.”

Steph checked the data, then cursed. “Archangel One to
Odyssey
, request immediate search and rescue units. I
say again, we request immediate search and rescue at the following coordinates…”

Everything slowed down then for a while, took on normal dimensions. The Archangels lazily orbited the escape pods from the downed Priminae warship, unable to do anything more, but unwilling to entirely abandon the stricken people to their fates, either. Stephen eyed the screens carefully as the second big Priminae warship approached, growing with every passing moment.

“They’ll be here in a few more minutes,” he announced over the squadron link, finally. “When they start search and rescue operations, we’ll peel out and meet up with the
Odyssey
.”

Most of the team acknowledged, but there was a silence from Cardsharp’s fighter. He waited a moment, then quickly checked the status of her fighter. When everything showed green from where she was currently flying “overwatch” position, he flipped over to her channel.

“You all right, Jen?”

There was another pause, and he was just on the brink of heading his fighter over in her direction. Her voice over the network put a halt to that a moment later, however.

“Yes, sir. Fine. I’m just tracking something odd here.”

“Odd how? We have more bandits inbound?”

“Negative. I think the
Odyssey
has launched shuttles.”