Into the Black: Odyssey One (51 page)

“I don’t think so, Captain,” Waters answered first. “I think…, it looks like an omnidirectional burst and we’re far enough out that the pulse density is under our detection threshold.”

“But is it under theirs?” Eric muttered under his breath.

“What was that, Sir?”

“Nothing, Lieutenant. Hold our course.”

“Aye-Aye Captain.”

The tension continued to mount as the timer counted down, then the odd-numbered pulse tubes opened fire.

“Thrusters! Half power, Lieutenant,” Weston ordered. “Take us up above the enemy this time, but maintain our current horizontal heading.”

“Aye Aye Captain. Firing thrusters.”

The Odyssey groaned again, though quieter this time, as she tipped her nose up and began to climb back toward the ecliptic. This time the big ship only fired thrusters that were pointed more or less away from the enemy, as she sought once more to evade detection.

*****

In a conventional battlefield, one minute was a lifetime, ninety seconds a lifetime and a half. But in space, such time felt like eternity, especially when waiting on information that has to travel that distance just to get to you before you can make any choices based on it.

The Torpedoes were the first legs, of that ‘data transfer’, though the only message they carried was death. They crossed the expanse, blazing a trail across the black with the impunity that belonged to single-minded things and came flashing right in on their targets, just as calculated.

The Alien Command noted their arrival, nine seconds before impact and began standard countermeasures against projectile attacks less than one second after that. The ships maneuvered away from each other, spreading out as they targeted the incoming weapons with lasers and opened fire.

Each of them scored direct hits within four seconds of firing, and yet not one of them had the slightest effect on the incoming energy pulses.

The reported failure came as a shock, but no more so than the slamming impact as five of the six slammed into the fleet and more plumes of destruction rose up.

Then the second leg of the ‘data transfer’ began as the energy from the attack was transmitted back to the Odyssey.

*****

“Hit!” Waters fist clenched a tight grin on his face. “They spread their formation at the last second, Captain.”

Eric Weston grimaced automatically, though it was good news. Against a pulse torpedo attack your best defence was to tighten your formation, presenting a smaller target for the charged weapons to lock onto. You would probably still suffer a strike or two, but the spread of the weapons was likely to push at least some of the shots out of range.

“Captain…, I think we got one of them.” Waters said a moment later, looking at his boards. “In fact, I’m almost certain that I’m looking at a catastrophic failure of a reactor here.”

Weston called up the information and found he had to agree. It looked that the odds were down to five to one.

“All right, lock in firing coordinates for…”

“Captain!” Waters interrupted him, “They’re up to something! Fleet formation is breaking up…”

“He’s right, Captain.” Daniels added. “It looks like they’re spreading out… It might be a search patter…”

“Shit!”

“Waters!” Eric Weston snapped.

“Sorry Sir,” The young man blinked. “But Captain… I think they just engaged whatever stealth systems they’ve got… We’re losing them, Sir.”

Weston glared at the young man, but finally flipped his display up again, looking at the information as the hostile red icons faded, then finally vanished one by one from the plotter screen.

Shit.

“Hide and seek,” Eric Weston said out loud.

“Excuse me, Sir?”

“Hide and seek,” he repeated. “And they’re ‘it’.”

Chapter 34

“Where are they, Ithan?”

The young woman started as Tanner stepped up behind her, glancing back in surprise, then quickly caught herself and turned to the board she was watching.

“We’re not certain, Admiral,” she said tensely. “We think that there are Drasin ships, at these points…”

Rael saw three fuzzy and indistinct symbols appear on the projection, separating quickly at the scale, the system map was set at. “The others?”

“We don’t know,” she said reluctantly. “They must have some sort of cloaking systems, Admiral. They’ve vanished from our sight. We only catch intermittent signals from them now, and it’s not reliable.”

Tanner grimaced, but nodded as he gently patted the woman’s shoulder. “And the Odyssey?”

“Gone from our scanners,” she said simply. “We lost them after they fired the second time.”

Rael Tanner, Admiral of a non-existent fleet, nodded grimly as he took a step back. The Odyssey had eliminated one ship that they could tell, its reactor explosion illuminating its death for all the system to see. That on its own was a feat unmatched by any ship, in the Colonies ‘fleet’ to this point.

Two others were possible kills, though they had not been able to confirm those. And that left three of the Drasin still out there, looking to kill the men and women of the Odyssey.

And the entire people of the planet on which he stood.

Tanner hissed in frustration, fists clenched and nails biting into his palm. “Very well, Ithan. Thank you.”

*****

“Find them for me, Mr. Waters.”

“Aye-Aye Sir,” the young man said, eyes staring at his displays, as he tried to ignore the feeling of dread that had begun to mount.

It had been over a half hour since the enemy had gone to stealth, their last vectors indicating that they had broken up their formation, in a possible search pattern. In that time, Captain Weston had brought the Odyssey above the system elliptic and slowed her to a relative stop with an asteroid belt that floated under her keel, only a few thousand kilometers away.

With luck, even if they were spotted, they’d appear to be a rogue rock that had been knocked from the Trojan point, by a comet or other stellar event.

“Pulse transmission!” Lamont yelled as the event was communicated to her from the Electronic Warfare people.

“Locate it!” Weston ordered, even though they were already doing so.

“They’re working on it, Sir,” she told him tightly, waiting.

Always the waiting.

Finally Lamont shook her head, “couldn’t do it, Sir. We’ve got a tangent, but it’s fuzzy.”

“Damn,” Eric muttered, then nodded. “All right… Helm, I want our nose pointed down that tangent…, softly.”

“Aye-Aye Sir. Softly, Sir,” Daniels responded, taking the controls lightly and tapping out a few puffs of the propellant.

The big ship came around on its axis slowly pointing its nose along the direction they’d been given.

“Anything on the main passives?”

“Negative, Captain,” Waters shook his head. “It’s all quiet.”

“Ahead, dead slow, Lieutenant.”

“Dead slow. Aye Captain,” Daniels repeated, easing the thrusters on.

A low rumble shook the ship, as it fought against its own inertia to start moving, then slowly died out as they came underway.

“Keep your eyes on those sensors.”

“Aye Sir.”

“Yes Sir.”

Eric sighed softly, leaning back in his chair and wished that he was back in a fighter, where things were simpler.

*****

“Damn it, I wish we were out there, doing something.”

“Shut up, Paladin,” Racer said curtly, checking her cards before tucking them into the oxygen hose of her flight suit. “We go out when we go out, you know that.”

“I know, I know,” the sharp-faced man said with a wry smile. “It’s just the waiting, it gets to me.”

“Gets to everyone, Alex,” Stephen Michaels said, looking up. “Don’t worry, we’ll get our shot, soon enough.”

Alexander ‘Paladin’ Kerry nodded in agreement glancing over at Jennifer Samuels. “You betting or folding?”

Jennifer glanced down at her cards frowning as she tried to remember the pot total.
Let’s see…, Paladin opened with a two-dollar raise, everyone went in, and Racer saw him and bumped him up another three. Crys and Ice folded, Paladin stayed in… So that brings the total up to. . , . Hmmm, carry the three… forty-one bucks.

“I’m in,” she said. “I’ll see the three and raise you five.”

“Ooo, big spender,” Paladin grinned.

“I’m out,” Racer shrugged, slipping her cards from the hose and setting them spinning in front of her.

“It’s you and me, coal baby,” Paladin smirked. “You got the assets to back up your play?”

“You wanna see ’em, you gotta pay the toll,” Samuels smirked.

The deck rumbled around them again and they all looked around for a moment.

“Those were the secondary thrusters,” Racer said, looking back. “We’re moving, again.”

They all nodded, taking a few moments to wonder what toward, Paladin looking back toward Jennifer and tried to gauge her face.

“Screw it,” he muttered. “I fold.”

“I’d say come to ‘mamma’ while chortling and grabbing the chips, but…,” Jennifer smirked and shrugged as she flipped her cards back.

Paladin caught them, glancing briefly at them as he tucked them back in the deck. His eyes widened and he looked up, “you were fucking bluffing!”

“Hey! You don’t pay, you don’t peek, boyo!” She growled, stabbing a finger at him.

“Yeah… but!”

“No buts, ‘Paladin’. Try that again, you’ll eat the deck,” she told him in no uncertain words.

“Yikes…” Racer grinned, “Don’t wanna mess with this one, Pal. She’s a cardsharp.”

Paladin pursed his lips and grinned, “Yeah. I think she is. Howzabout it, ‘Cardsharp’? Another hand?”

Jennifer Samuels stared for a moment, and then smiled as she realized that she’d just been pegged with a call sign. “Deal ’em, Pally.”

*****

“There’s something on the passives, Captain,” Waters said, his voice uncertain.

“What have you got?”

“An intermittent signal, twenty degrees left declination from our course. It’s almost directly on the elliptic, but I can’t… quite… see it.”

“Visual spectrum?”

“A shadow, Sir,” Waters replied. “I keep losing it in the background.”

That could be anything
, Weston thought grimly.
Only there was a signal in this direction.

“Adjust our heading to intercept,” he said, making his choice.

“Aye-Aye Captain,” Daniels responded instantly, making the changes in his board.

*****

On the Auxiliary Bridge, Commander Roberts watched the same displays that were available to his Captain, dark eyes narrowed as he tried to fathom the immense game of the hide and seek game, they were currently engaged in.

Out there, somewhere in the immensity of space, there were five ships, trying to kill them. In here, five hundred people turned everything they had to destroying those ships, in turn. It was an old game, the Commander knew, just being played on a brand new playground.

“Anything on that bogey, yet?”

“Nothing, Sir,” the woman at the tactical slot shook her head. “It’s just a shadow.”

The Commander nodded eyes boring into the screen as the tension around him became palpable.

It must be what the submariners felt, he decided, when hunting a surface fleet, or even more so, when they hunted one of their own. This feeling of vulnerability that wouldn’t go away, like the only defence they had, was a fragile silence that could be pierced, at any moment. That, somewhere, there was someone who was watching them, even now.

The skin between Jason’s shoulder blades itched as he tried to shake the feeling.

*****

“This is impossible!”

“Nothing is impossible, lad,” Palin retorted mildly to the young technician’s outburst, not bothered in the slightest by it. “Just improbable.”

“Easy for you to say,” the young man muttered. “I can’t make heads or tails out of this.”

“Nor can I.” Palin shrugged. “But that’s not the point. Sometimes all it takes is one block falling into place, everything else will just…, come together.”

The tech just shook his head and tapped a command into his computer.

Palin stiffened when a new sound played over the speakers.

“That’s not the same signal,” he said firmly.

“What? Of course it is…,” Evan, the tech, replied. “I’ve been playing it for an hour now…”

“The pitch is different, and the pattern…,” Palin turned and pierced the young man with a glare. “Where did you get that?”

“I’m telling you, doctor, it’s the same signal…,” Evan replied, exasperated, calling up the folder. He pointed to the screen, “There? See it’s…”

Palin waited for a moment, and then prompted him. “What? What is it?”

“It’s a new file,” Evan muttered, staring at it. “Where did this come from, now I wonder…, Oh!”

“Oh?”

“It was just received. A pulse signal came in over the forward spires…”

“Play it.”

“Doctor it’s probably just…”

“Play it,” Palin repeated, voice hard.

“Uh… as you wish, Doctor,” the technician replied, hitting the play key again.

*****

“It’s one of them, Captain,” Waters said softly. “Lying quiet down there, but it is one of them.”

Eric nodded, leaning forward, “how many tubes do we have?”

“All but two are charged, Captain.”

“Prime tubes one through four for sequential fire.”

“Aye-Aye Captain.”

“Range to target?” Weston asked softly.

“Eighty-three light-seconds,” came the reply.

“Hold our course. Fire on my command.”

The tension mounted as the light-seconds slowly counted down, each tick of light as the display changed, sent an imperceptible shiver down the spines of each man and woman present.

As the range dropped to under seventy-five light-seconds, Eric nodded his head to Waters and gave the command, “fire.”

This time, the computer had less time to plot a course prediction for the enemy, but the ship was also flying more slowly than before and the range was closer than either of the previous shots. The tubes fired sequentially, according to the Captain’s orders, each Pulse of energy being blasted clear of the ship and given a full half second gap, before the next shot followed.