Out of the Black (Odyssey One, Book 4) (68 page)

He found the bridge with a minute and a half to spare, not bad given that he’d had to get quarters assigned, wash up, talk to an entity he barely recognized let alone understood, and then get dressed and find his way back to a room he’d only been to once before.

He could do better next time, he was sure.

“Captain on the bridge!”

Eric paused, noting the stiff forms and salutes that greeted his arrival, and calmly returned the latter while acknowledging the former with a curt nod and a few words.

“As you were. Admiral,” he said, “reporting as ordered.”

“Good to see you cleaned up, Captain,” she told him, getting out of the seat. “I have a strategy meeting with the President and Premier. I’ll leave the
Odysseus
in your hands. She’ll serve you well, I think.”

Eric blinked. “Ma’am?”

“The con is yours, Captain Weston,” Gracen said, tone brooking no argument nor fake confusion. “I’ll be in my office.”

He swallowed. “Y . . . yes ma’am.”

“Don’t look so shocked,” she said softly, walking past him. “I told you, I need every able hand.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” Eric said. “I won’t let you down.”

“Just try not to crash this one into a planet, would you? The paint is new, Captain.”

Eric twisted his lips into a grimace, but Gracen didn’t notice. She was already past him and headed off the bridge. He was forced to sigh to himself and gingerly move around to the command console and take a seat. He squirmed a bit, getting used to it, and then began to hesitantly call up information on the command displays.

Eric didn’t notice, or didn’t let on if he did, the surreptitious glances of the other officers on the deck as they looked between him and each other, some just interested, but most smiling to themselves. He had work to do, and the formation of inbound enemy warships held his interest most deeply.

“This ship is different than what my humans build . . .” Gaia pondered as she examined the vessel that had previously been little more than a minor blip on her consciousness
.

It felt significantly different than anything she’d encountered previously, not surprising, she supposed, since it was clearly not of Earth human manufacture. However, there was something more to it, something almost . . . familiar. She walked the decks, drawn to what she quickly learned was the power core of the big ship
.

Humans used reactors to power their ships. That is . . . Earth humans did. Those were warm sources of magnetic energy. She could feel them from beyond her normal influence, actually. These ships used something far different, however. They used massive gravity wells of their own. Singularity cores that contained as much mass as small planets and conversion units to turn that mass directly into power as it was needed
.

Deep in that mass, however, was something she had never experienced before
.

It was like looking into a mirror, she found. Deep inside the massive singularity of the
Odysseus,
Gaia found an abyss . . . Within the abyss she was staring into, there was a reflection there, staring back. A human would have drawn back, would have cringed or even cowered, but Gaia had never known fear until the Drasin arrived. And now she was dying anyway
.

That brought a strange sense of resignation and an urge to satisfy whatever curiosity she had left
.

Gaia pushed deeper into the singularity, looking closer at the reflection. It winked at her
.

Then she was sucked in so fast that she didn’t even have a chance to fight back
.

Eric had just barely sat down when the power flickered and dimmed, all the instrumentation going dead for a moment before it all came back.

“What the hell was that?”

“Power variance, Captain,” a Priminae engineer said from a station to the back right of Eric’s position.

“That happen often?” he asked.

“Never, sir. It’s not possible.” The engineer didn’t look happy at all, not that Eric blamed him.

Impossible things happening with high-energy power sources rarely resulted in good times being had by all.

“Figure it out,” he ordered, knowing that the last thing they needed was for anything to go wrong now.

“Yes sir.”

Great, I sit down in the hot seat and the damned ship starts acting up. What next? The Moon planning on dropping on our heads too?

He forced himself back to the task at hand, analyzing the enemy’s actions, which, unfortunately, was all too easy. They were being cautious and smart, coming in spread out to avoid any nastiness like the maneuver he and Sun had pulled on them before. That meant that the squadron would be able to break out, yes, but it also meant that the odds of defeating a force this size were effectively zero. The admiral was right about that, to be sure. They had enough munitions split among the squadron to take out a couple hundred of the drone ships, but no more. He figured, power for power, what he was looking at on the
Odysseus
would be able to account for another few in close-range fighting. But once the enemy fighter screens got involved, it would be almost impossible to hit and fade long enough to make a real difference.

Unfortunately, the
Enterprise
fighter complement is too small to keep all of these bastards tied up while we take out the ships
.

Ship-to-ship combat on this level was really more a matter of who guessed the other’s actions first. With adaptive lasers
and Priminae power sources, he was confident that he could take on the enemy and savage them, but in the end it would be a pack of wolves wearing down a bear. The
Odysseus
would fall, they’d all die, and the Earth would be gone shortly thereafter.

There
has
to be a way. There has to be
.

If there was, however, he wasn’t seeing it.

Eric sighed, shaking his head.

Sometimes, the good guys lost.

Gaia blinked, scowling as much as she could given her lack of corporeal form
.

Something had happened, but she didn’t know what in the hell it was. She blinked and glared at the
Odysseus,
where it was floating above her, trying to piece together what had occurred. It wouldn’t come together, however, and she wasn’t about to try again
.

She finally turned her back on the serene vessel, and turned back to the visceral violence tearing her apart on-world
.

“More to do. I’ll worry about the
Odysseus
later.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX