The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (55 page)

With his orders delivered, Tanner stepped back and took a seat at his personal station. He accessed the outer line stations and began looking over the raw data.

What are they up to?
He couldn’t believe that the Drasin thought that a purely kinetic assault would ever possibly work. The Priminae colonies had been capable of shifting immense mass in defense of their planets for thousands of cycles. There was simply no conceivable mass that could be tossed their way that they couldn’t deflect.

His first thought was, of course, that they intended to somehow escort it in. They could possibly pull that off; however, with the level of warning the outer picket lines permitted, the defense forces had other options than a direct intervention. Continuous laser fire from extreme range could
easily be enough to deflect even huge masses, the tiny amount needed to create huge differences at their destination.

However, there was no indication of anything but some scattered ice and mineral, completely as expected in a cometary tail.

What are they up to?

It almost had to be a trick. He knew it, and the Drasin likely knew that he knew it, but in the end, Tanner had to send his ships out, anyway. He couldn’t just ignore a mass that size aimed at a populated world, to say nothing of it being
the
populated world of the entire sector.

The problem was, he was all too aware that they also knew that, and that meant he was being forced to make moves that his enemy could easily predict.

Even he, as inadequate to the job as he sometimes felt, was fully aware of how bad a position that was, strategically speaking.

NACS ODYSSEY
Deep Space

▸COMING OUT OF transition was never pleasant, but after the experiences of the recent high-speed transitions, Eric was surprised to find that he barely felt any discomfort at all when they transitioned close to the location of their “missing” star. The short break of a little more than a day had been enough to let people get their footing back, so to speak, and the reports of transition-related illnesses was markedly lower than even their normal rates.

Of course, several of our most illness-prone crew members are in medically induced comas at the moment, which is probably skewing the results,
Eric thought darkly. Those crew members were weighing heavily on his mind ever since the end of the rapid succession of transitions left them permanently in the medical labs.

The doctor assured him that they would be fine, but the fact that they were confined to medical beds and kept from waking for their own good was something that troubled his sleep. He didn’t know how long they’d be like that, simply because he didn’t know how long the
Odyssey
would be committed to its current mission.

They’d come out of transition several light-days from the recorded location of the “missing” star; he’d ordered that range to keep any chance of detection from being a possibility. They were now approaching the area where they’d lost the enemy’s signal, falling in on a pure ballistic descent.

“We’re starting to pick up some strange low band readers, sir.”

Eric looked over to where Michelle Winger was frowning as she stared into her instruments. “Define strange.”

“Heat. Lots of it,” she replied curtly, still glaring at her displays.

“Heat? But no light?”

“Nothing much. Occasionally, there’s a ghost echo, like something is out there…But it’s nothing I can pin down. Even our best scopes just show flashes and shadows, and then only for a split second. The only constant is the heat.”

“Is it a threat to the ship, Lieutenant?”

“Negative, sir. Not that hot, just well above the average. Heat doesn’t propagate well in space, so we’re close to the source, but I’m not seeing anything on any of our passives besides the infrared,” she answered. “If we could just go to actives…”

“Not a chance, Lieutenant. This is a scout recon. We sneak in, sneak out, and hopefully never get seen. Blasting the entire sector with tacyons and high-energy radiation would be counterproductive,” he told her dryly.

“Aye, Captain.”

Eric was almost amused by the slight pout he could hear in her tone and easily imagined her face with an expression to match. He suspected that it offended her professional sensibilities to be limited to such a degree, but that was the way things worked sometimes. You used what you could, what the
mission permitted, and you made yourself satisfied with it, even if you couldn’t be happy.

Michelle went back to work without complaint, however, as he expected of her. Sensibilities aside, he knew she was both competent and professional.

“There’s something else, Captain,” she said after a moment.

“What is it?”

Michelle grimaced, shaking her head. “I’m not sure…Here, sir.”

She flicked her hand, sending what she was looking at to the main viewer. Eric’s eyes focused on the screen, but all it showed was a dark-red mass.

“What am I looking at?”

“The heat source, sir.”

Eric frowned. “What magnification?”

“Sir, this is the widest-angle lens our scopes have. There is no magnification.”

Eric leaned forward, then stood up as he circled around the bridge to where Michelle sat. He leaned over her shoulder to read the raw data himself.

“How big is this?” he asked, perplexed.

“I can’t tell, sir,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s nothing to use to compare it against. I have no frame of reference. It’s big, but without some sort of parallax or ranging beams, I can’t tell how far away it is. We can’t range using parallax because it’s too big from our frame of reference, and the
Odyssey
’s scopes aren’t set far enough apart. Without the actives, I can’t say how big it is.”

“Best guess, then, Lieutenant,” Eric growled.

Michelle was quiet for a moment, then shrugged helplessly. “Maybe as little as a few light-minutes across to as much as light-years. It depends on how close we are to it.”

“On the low end, how long until we make contact with the target?”

“At current speeds? Sometime in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

“Any idea what it might be?”

“No, sir. There’s nothing in any of the listed natural phenomena that match this,” she told him. “But honestly, I don’t think we’d be able to detect it from Earth, anyway, so we could be looking at some very common physical event in the galaxy.”

Eric shook his head. “Nice thought, but I don’t buy it. The enemy flew in here; they didn’t come out. This isn’t natural.”

“Then it’s not my department, sir.” She shrugged helplessly.

Eric sighed, straightening up. “Then whose department would it be?”

“Engineering?” Michelle offered, uncertain.

Eric considered it for a moment. “All right. I’ll try that.”

“Sir? I was just guessing…”

“It’s better than what I had, Lieutenant. Keep monitoring the scopes.”

“Yes, sir.” She nodded.

“Commander, the bridge is yours.”

Roberts nodded, stepping over to the command station. “Aye, Captain. I have the bridge.”

Eric nodded, stepping away from the sensor station and heading off the bridge. He caught the first lift from the command habitat, heading back toward the engines and life-support systems in the aft of the ship. He didn’t know if anyone in Engineering would have an answer, but it was better than any of the ideas he’d come up with.

The majority of the
Odyssey
’s Engineering Department was in microgravity, back in the aft of the ship where the engines
were located. Eric pulled himself along the handrails, sliding into the main rooms where he located the ship’s chief.

“Sam, I have a question I want to spitball past you,” he said as he hooked the corner of a wall to bring himself to a stop.

“Shoot, Cap. I’m listening,” Sam Wilson said, looking over from where he was monitoring the output temperature of the
Odyssey
’s reactor.

“You paying attention to what’s going on outside?”

“The missing star, you mean? Heard about it. Not my section.” Sam shrugged.

“No, well, maybe not,” Eric said. “We’re picking up a lot of heat coming from up ahead.”

“You think we’re heading into an invisible star?” Sam blinked, his mind suddenly racing as he began calculating the
Odyssey
’s heat tolerances and whether the ship could pull away from a stellar mass if it got too close.

“Not that much heat. This is a lot lower in temperature, but it’s everywhere.”

Sam frowned. “It can’t be everywhere.”

“It’s so big, Sam, that our forward scopes can’t see the edges. But here’s the thing”—Eric frowned, thinking about what he was saying—“the enemy ship we’ve been tailing, it went in to this sector and didn’t come out. I don’t think it’s a star. Detection and sciences say it’s no natural phenomena they’re familiar with, so I’m thinking it isn’t natural at all.”

“You think it’s something the enemy built? How big are you talking, Captain?”

“On the low end? Numbers say that, if we’re right on top of it, at least forty, fifty light-seconds across.”

Sam whistled. “That’s the low end?”

“Extreme low end of the scale, based on the angle of our scopes.” Eric nodded. “More likely to be several light-minutes across or more.”

Sam shook his head. “Can’t even begin to imagine, Captain. Sorry.”

“Uh…sir.”

The two men turned to see a crewman first class with his hands in the air, as if he were seeking permission to speak in class.

“What is it, Sanders?” Wilson asked.

“You say this thing is giving off heat, sir?”

Eric nodded. “That’s right.”

“And it’s probably several light-minutes across?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see the raw data?” The crewman looked eager.

Eric half twisted and tapped in a set of commands at a nearby terminal. The engineering screen changed over to the raw feed coming from Winger’s scopes.

“This is all we’ve got, besides occasional flashes of light.”

“Flashes?”

“Yes,” Eric said. “Indistinct, fuzzy, but certainly broad-spectrum light.”

“It’s a mega construct,” Crewman Sanders said a few seconds later. “Has to be.”

“I need more than that, son,” Eric said tightly.

“Well, it’s only theoretical on Earth, sir,” Sanders said, “but what we’re looking at here fits the expected readings you’d see if you were on approach to a Dyson construct. First glance, you’d think probably a Dyson sphere, but that’s unlikely. Those are almost impossible to build, even in theory, and the light flashes are probably sunlight from the star within.”

“So it’s not a sphere,” Eric said, confused. “What is it?”

“Best guess, Captain? We’re looking at a Dyson Cloud,” Sanders said softly, almost reverently as he looked over the raw data.

“Which is?”

“Sorry, sir. OK, the sphere is the easiest to describe.” Sanders shook himself, turning to the Captain. “Imagine a shell around a sun, about eight light-minutes in diameter. Along the inside of the shell, you build your civilization, right? The sun gives you massive amounts of energy, all of it captured and used, and because the shell is so huge, you can have a society of trillions of people or more living there.”

Eric stiffened, his mind racing.

“The Dyson Cloud is a little different, not quite as elegantly perfect, but a lot more realistic to build. Instead of a shell, you surround the sun with orbiting platforms in a cloud formation. They don’t have to be perfectly balanced like the shell, and you gain some redundancy protection, but you give up a little space and a few other things.”

“You’re telling me that the
Odyssey
is currently diving toward possibly
trillions
of Drasin?” Eric’s eyes were wide, his jaw slack. The implications alone were staggering, but for the moment, he was more concerned with the immediate repercussions. “But this had to have been built in only a few decades. How could they have done that?”

“Decades? No, sir. This is Class Two megastructure. You can’t build that in a few decades.” Sanders shook his head.

“In twenty twenty-eight the James Webb scope mapped this star,” Eric growled. “Even accounting for light-speed lag, this thing can’t be more than…two hundred years old, tops.”