Odysseus Awakening

by Evan Currie

  ► Lasers powerful enough to fluoresce the air they passed through crossed the corridors, creating a lethal net of energy that made everyone on both sides of the fight keep their heads as low as they possibly could while still firing at one another.

  Half Centure Leif of her Imperial Majesty’s Void Troopers pressed himself against a ceramic bulkhead and shouted orders while firing his own beam pistol back across air slowly filling with smoke. That would attenuate the beams quickly, he knew, but over the ranges they were locked into, it wasn’t going to be much of a factor besides significantly raising the internal temperature of the ship.

  If they didn’t finish this fight soon, that might actually become a problem. He didn’t know if the ship’s cooling was still online. Beam weapons would quickly heat the ship up to unsustainable levels if cooling was running even slightly below optimum, and he couldn’t imagine that anything on the Oather ship was currently running at optimum.

  We need to acquire the target and get off this deathtrap before we bake to death.

  The initial penetration had gone smoothly. No one was ready for a fight and, once they realized they had one, it had taken the Oathers a stupidly long time to start mounting any sort of resistance. Now that had changed a bit. The resistance was fierce but hardly effective. Few of them seemed to understand their weapons particularly well and fewer had their will in the fight.

  That didn’t make it easy going just the same. Even a halfhearted hand could unleash a laser with the same power as an enthusiastic one, and once those beams started cooking the air, only true fools rushed in.

  Fools, or troops on a mission.

  “Clear this deck. Bring up the auto-tracking systems,” he ordered. “I want to get through to the ship’s computer core before the navarch decides to leave us here to cook!”

  His men scattered without a word. They knew their tasks and were starting them even before he finished speaking.

  Leif was almost disappointed with the nature of the defense they’d encountered, despite the relative ferocity of it. It was a rough defense, easily broken if that were his primary goal, and he would expect shipboard defenders to have weapons more compatible with their particular circumstance.

  Popping off combat-level lasers on board your own ship was generally not considered a sane idea. Even assuming you didn’t put holes in the hull and let the air out, always a consideration on board a starship, the excess heat would put stress on the ship’s radiation systems in remarkably short order.

  Leif couldn’t decide if the Oathers were suicidal or stupid.

  Either way, he supposed it wasn’t his problem.

  A rapid-fire staccato of explosions startled Leif, causing him to risk his head with a look around the corner just in time to see a large section of the corridor up ahead billowing smoke as it slowly fell away from the hull and slammed into the deck with a resounding thud that he could feel through his feet and armor.

  What in the abyss? he wondered, ducking back. “Did we do that?”

  “No sir,” his lieutenant responded. “All our people are accounted for.”

  “Well, I doubt the Oathers blew a big hole in their own ship,” he grumbled. “So what the hell’s happened?”

  ► “Blow it.”

  “Yes ma’am,” the corporal said as he ducked back around the corner and palmed the detonator for the breaching charges they’d just set. “Charges live! Fire in the hole!”

  The damage to the Tetanna was such that all the transport tubes were shut down. Practically every deck had taken some level of destruction, cutting off Conner and her Marines from the most direct routes to engineering and the command deck. Trying to go around the damage would have taken time, more than they had, judging from the communications they had been able to tap into.

  So Conner had elected to make a direct route.

  The breaching charges blew out in a rapid fire of explosions that sliced through the ceramic bulkheads of the Priminae ship, cutting a ten-foot wide swath out of the corridor wall as clean as could be managed with explosives. By the time the chunk of ceramic was falling, her Marines were already moving to and then through the breach.

  Laser fire fluoresced in the air on the other side, petering out as both Priminae and Imperial soldiers looked in their direction.

  “Pop smoke!” Conner ordered the Marines at the front of the charge.

  The armored Marines pulled canisters from their belts, thumbing the catch clear of the arming lever, and tossed them into the corridor beyond the breach. The canisters began hissing before they clattered to the deck, glittering white smoke billowing out to fill the corridor as the Marines continued to charge right into the thick of it.

  Conner held back, two of her Marines guarding her as she monitored the tactical network.

  “First squad, bear right. Enemy at your two o’clock with man-portable lasers. Wax ’em,” she ordered, then shifted her attention. “Third squad, corpsmen, cover the Priminae crewmen and get them clear of the smoke. I don’t see breathers on any of them.”

  The laser-attenuating smoke had suspended metal particles that no one should be breathing without respirators. Lung replacement was possible with modern medicine, but not something she’d wish on anyone.

  Enemy troops were wearing what looked like full environmental suits, so they’d be spared the health effects of the smoke. Lead poisoning, as the old joke went, was another matter entirely.

  Uranium poisoning these days, of course, Conner supposed idly as she continued to monitor the situation.

  ► Billowing clouds of smoke filling the corridor of a starship was universally a bad sign.

  Leif didn’t know what was going on, but it could not be good. What made it even worse was that the smoke appeared to be pouring from thrown objects, so they were apparently intentionally filling the breathable air with smoke.

  And I believed the use of lasers was a bad idea, he thought grimly as he peered into the approaching wall of glittering smoke billowing slowly toward him.

  He could see forms moving around and quickly leveled his laser and fired off a pulse. He was only slightly surprised to see the beam diffract, scattering energy all over the area and diffusing it quickly to nonlethal levels. The temperature in the corridor went up half a degree almost instantly, since the energy had to be turned into something and wasn’t being focused anywhere in particular. But the laser certainly lost its immediate lethality at least.

  Interesting solution to the problem they’re facing, he supposed.

  “Close with the enemy,” he ordered. “The refractive smoke will impede their lasers as much as—”

  Three sharp cracks echoed across the deck. One of his men went down.

  “What the abyss was that?” Leif snarled, ducking for cover.

  “Projectile weapon, sir!”

  That can penetrate our combat armor? That is not in the Oather supply line, according to intelligence!

  Leif had heard rumors of another species involved in the region using ships that defied definition by Imperial standards, but no reports existed for people engaging them in combat to this point. Not close infantry combat, at least. If this were the unknown species, his forces might get some of the information they’d been sent after firsthand.

  “Bring forward the third cohort,” he said. “Did they get the auto-tracking systems up here yet?”

  “Yes Centure.”

  “Good. Set them up here. Hold the enemy forces at this junction while we finish the job,” he said. “Make sure they record and transmit everything that happens.”

  ► Corporal Jack Rivers was running on thermal optics as he walked point for first squad through the glittering smoke that served to dissipate laser energy, but even that was spotty at best through the reflecting metal particles that hung suspended in the white smoke.

  Everything was shot to hell, in fact. Visibility was effectively nil, thermal was almost as bad and getting worse every time someone fired a laser into the mist, and even the battle netwo
rk between his closest squadmates was registering speed rates that sounded like something he’d last heard of in history class.

  What the hell is a megabit in real-world numbers anyway? he thought, annoyed at the slow updates he was being forced to wait for.

  On the other hand, he hadn’t been turned to pink mist by a stupidly overpowered antipersonnel laser, so being frustrated was something he could deal with.

  His assault rifle was locked to his shoulder as he moved forward, though he didn’t bother to use the weapon’s optics. They were useless in the current environment and only marginally more effective than his HUD at their best.

  He held up his fist. “Hold position. I’ve got movement.”

  “Roger,” the scratchy response over the network hissed back at him. “Holding.”

  First squad came to a stop behind him, spreading out to the walls as Rivers took a knee and shifted to his suit’s ultrasonic scanners. Only slightly degraded by the smoke, the ultrasonic system was very close range and returned information that sometimes took an expert to make sense of. He wasn’t an expert, but Rivers wasn’t too worried about specifics either. He just scanned for any Doppler shifts that looked roughly human-sized, trusting that the enemy was in front of him and his allies were behind.

  “Target up,” he said softly as he stroked the rifle’s trigger, sending a burst downrange into the moving target. It dropped in place, like a puppet with strings cut. “Target down.”

  “Good job, Rivers,” the sergeant said. “Do you see any others?”

  “Movement on sonics,” Rivers answered. “Nothing firm. No line of sight.”

  “Roger that. Move forward if you think you can.”

  “Roger, moving forward.”

  The smoke was thinning, giving him better visibility but also a more vulnerable position. So before he got up, Rivers palmed another grenade.

  “Smoke out,” he said, flipping the safety catch off the canister and rolling it down the hall.

  The canister clattered off the deck, bouncing downrange as the glittering smoke began pouring from it. With his ultrasonic now the primary system showing in his HUD, Rivers got back to his feet and started forward again, the rifle leading the way.

  He got about three steps before alarms screamed in his ears. He swore and threw himself to the ground.

  “Shit! What the hell was that?” he demanded, rolling for the wall as his armor scanners told him that the ambient temperature had just gone up another degree. “Christ. What just happened?”

  “Multiple laser pulses, corporal. Hold position if you can; withdraw if not,” the sergeant ordered. “We’re trying to determine enemy locations.”

  “I can chuck a frag over their way, maybe flush him, Sarge,” Rivers offered.

  There was a brief pause before the sergeant came back.

  “Do it.”

  This time Rivers palmed a round ball from his belt, activating the charge with his suit codes and making sure that the IFF readers were showing green just in case something stupid happened. That feature on the new grenades had saved his life half a dozen times over his short career, usually when one of his own—never himself, of course—screwed up their throw. It also kept the enemy from turning the grenade into a weapon against him in the rare worst-case scenario.

  With the explosive detonator primed, Rivers got back to his knees and wound up for the pitch. He flung the grenade on a high and fast arch, aiming to drop it behind his estimation of the enemy position.

  Corporal Rivers didn’t know why the grenade suddenly detonated only a dozen meters away, at the height of its arch. The concussion washed over him with enough force to have killed an unarmored Marine. He blinked as his ultrasonic display was rendered to total noise and the armor defaulted back to normal vision.

  The shockwave had blown the reflective mist back, and for a second, Rivers could see right downrange to where the enemy had set up some sort of automated turret.

  “Oh sh—”

  Rivers never finished the sentence as the laser turret opened fire again, and he was boiled away in his armor in the tiny fraction of a second before the suit failed as well. Nothing remained of the corporal but scorch marks on the deck.

  ► Conner swore under her breath as she received the last few bytes of data from the now-dead corporal, his suit having recorded and transmitted right to the end.

  “Pull back! Pull back!” she yelled. “The enemy has moved point defense systems into the corridor.”

  She could see squad one withdrawing on her HUD overlay, and squad two laying down heavy suppressive fire as they did.

  The Imperial ground forces hadn’t overly impressed her the last time they’d tangled, but she’d had a decisive advantage that time, and clearly they’d known it. This time, they seemed more than willing to pony up and play for keeps, and if anything, they had at least a small edge on her now. They’d come expecting a fight; she was here on a rescue mission. Her Marines were supposed to be pulling people out of the fire, not laying it down.

  “That’s one hell of a defense system,” the chief noted darkly.

  Conner nodded, swapping back to her own HUD view as she stepped forward. “Some sort of auto-tracking turret. The grenade was tracked and killed before it got halfway to the target, right through the smoke. Even with the smoke being thinner up higher, that’s more powerful a system than we’ve seen so far. We could assault that position and take it, but the cost would be high. Not worth it for now. I want this corridor locked down. Bring up proximity mines. They want to deny access, it works both ways. We can secure the primary route to engineering from here.”

  “Yes ma’am,” the chief said, dispatching some of the men to do just that before turning back. “But they have to know that too, Colonel.”

  She nodded. “Which means they’re going for the bridge. Chief, find me a route.”

  ► Drey limped across the command deck, favoring his left side as he leaned heavily on a console and brought up what information he could get.

  “Heavy fighting across the inner decks,” he said, looking over to the engineering station. “Has the enemy reached engineering yet?”

  “No Captain.” The engineer shook her head. “I have reports that soldiers from the Terran forces managed to board somehow as well and have begun securing the path to engineering.”

  Drey wanted to ask how in the abyss the Terrans had gotten on his ship, but he suspected the answer would be “through one of the many holes blown in it by the enemy,” and that assumption was good enough for the moment.

  “Inform as many of our people as you can and be sure they know to work with the Terrans,” he said wearily. “We don’t need mistakes allowing enemy forces into the singularity controls.”

  He had no clue why they would want to access that section. Yes, it was the most vulnerable part of the ship from the interior, but the Tetanna was dead in space. The Imperials didn’t need to get to the controls unless they wanted to take over the vessel entirely.

  That would have made sense if his ship was truly still spaceworthy, but as much as Drey despised admitting it, his Tetanna was not.

  The command deck was near engineering, of course, which made the position he now held another likely possibility. Certainly, if you wanted access to ship controls and the minds of officers in the Colonial Fleet, the command deck was the place to be. He had anticipated that early on and arrayed his primary defenses along that approach, yet the enemy seemed more interested in engineering controls.

  Drey glowered at the reports filtering over the display. What are you looking for?

  ► Conner ran down the corridor, two squads of Marines ahead of her, most of the corpsmen assigned to the mission following behind, and a third squad covering the rear.

  They were moving quickly, trying to get through the maze of corridors that made up the internal structure of a Priminae cruiser/Heroic Class ship.

  The shifting gravity of the local singularities that powered the ship complicated the process
, and the extensive battle damage and occasional ambush points the enemy had chosen to exploit made it impossibly frustrating.

  They’d lost three more Marines to enemy laser fire, almost lost a few more to friendly laser fire, and she was starting to be concerned about the rising temperature levels.

  It was now well over thirty degrees Celsius in the corridors. That wasn’t, on its own, too bad of a problem. She’d fought in hotter places on Earth, as had most of her men, but on a starship, that high temperature was not a good sign.

  The vacuum of space, while quite cold, was not a good conductor of heat. That meant controlling the temperature of a starship was a significant problem at the best of times. And when you had an enemy firing off gigawatt lasers inside your decks, the situation was far from the best of times. It was clear that, whether due to battle damage or overloading, the ship’s internal heat dispersion systems were being taxed to failure by the fighting.

  If they went out entirely, the heat from the cores would quickly turn the cruiser into an oven that even an armored Marine wouldn’t survive in for long.

  A burst of laser fire up ahead sent Conner, and everyone around her, diving to the deck as the rapid-fire response from the lead Marines roared through the deck.

  “Status report!” she called with her sidearm in her grip, pushing forward as she crawled to the wall.

  “Two up, two down,” a Marine replied in clipped tones. “One casualty. Indirect contact. Vicker is still alive. Send a corpsman.”

  “On it!” the closest corpsman said, scrambling to her feet and running forward.

  “Pull him back to the evac point,” Conner ordered, standing and moving forward as well. “If we need to get out of here, there’ll likely be no time to waste later. We’ll push on.”

  “Yes ma’am,” the corpsman responded, sliding on her knees by the injured Marine and checked him as best she could through the smoking armor he wore. “I’ve got vitals, but he’s got to cool down. What happened?”