Odysseus Ascendant

by Evan Currie

  “Come on you bastards, blink,” he gritted out. “You know you’re going to. Blink Goddamn it.”

  The hum and click of the laser capacitors charging and discharging continued apace, every erg of power on the ship currently being poured into enough weapons energy to fry a small continent or more, but Eric largely ignored it as he leaned in, waiting for a sign.

  The current tactical map of the system showed that the logistical vessels were clear of the enemy now, there was no chance that they could be overtaken before they got far enough out to transition away. The estimated locations of the Vorpal squadrons as well as Steph’s Loyal Wingman squadron were a little fuzzy, but so far all went according to plan.

  He just needed them to blink.

  “Tachyon pulse!”

  “Finally!” Eric rose from his seat. “Initiate Plan Epsilon! All ships, Plan Epsilon!”

  Lord’s Own Dreadnought, Empress Liann

  Jesan growled in frustration as he looked at the results of the real-time scan, and saw no change.

  “What are they doing? Reduce speed, all ships. Increase scanning for those weapons. They have to be luring us into a trap.”

  The ships of the sector fleet slowed marginally, pulsing ahead of them carefully as they looked for any sign of whatever it was the enemy was up to.

  When nothing turned up, rather than comfort him the clean scans gnawed at Jesan, and he began to swear that someone had to be missing something.

  Several minutes of that had gone by before the light-speed data brought a new, and unwelcome, notification.

  “Enemy vessels are under power, My Lord!”

  “What? When?” he snarled, twisting to examine the screens.

  “It appears . . .” His second looked at the data and winced. “It appears that they went under power the instant after we pulsed them for a real-time fix.”

  Jesan paused, an oath on his lips, before he forced a bit of a grin.

  “The enemy commander was waiting for me to get so paranoid I had to see what was occurring. He knew I would,” he said ruefully, recognizing what had happened. “Current course?”

  “Scattering, currently closing the range with us,” his second said, surprising him. “However, about to reach turnover, at which point they will begin opening range again as they move past us for deep space.”

  Jesan found himself puzzled. “Really? They’re abandoning the system? That doesn’t seem in keeping with their previous actions, does it?”

  “No, My Lord.”

  “Confusing enemies. I prefer stupid and predictable ones. Can we overtake them?”

  “Not all of our ships could. We would be forced to fragment the fleet significantly,” the second said with a shake of his head.

  “We won’t be doing that,” Jesan said. “Let them scatter. Sooner or later we will force them into a battle and end them once and for all.”

  “Yes, My Lord, I will—”

  Whatever his second would do was abruptly cut off as explosions tore through the fleet, including the Lord’s Own Dreadnought.

  Steph had to drop to sub-light for his attack run, which let him establish a laser link with his Tinkertoy squadron just as they began their approach. The flotilla of ships ahead of him was like a thick cloud that slowly gained some definition as he approached at high relativistic velocities.

  Steph ignored the Parasite destroyers, weaving his squadron through them, looking for his true targets.

  The veil of smaller ships parted as he navigated through, finally spotting the cruisers and dreadnought in the snarl of enemy vessels. In only seconds, Steph flipped up the trigger shield, tagging the targets in his HUD and letting the computer figure out which ones were viable.

  “Archangel Lead . . . Fox Hades . . .” He spoke the agreed fire code into the recorder as he pushed his thumb down on the firing stud and his Tinkertoys unleashed all hell.

  The six guns launched their first shots in a puff of impossible particles, feeding the second rounds automatically as Steph led the squadron through a veritable cloud of enemy capital ships. Pure white balls of annihilation inferno erupted from multiple cruisers before the second rounds were even loaded.

  On automatic fire, Steph just let the guns do their work as he threaded through the mass of ships, worrying about not only a traditional collision but also the dangers of gravity sheer if he happened to fly too close to the enemy’s warp drives. Antimatter flew around him while he dodged artificial black holes and tried very hard not to be fried by lasers hotter than the surface of a star.

  I fucking love my job!

  AEV Odysseus

  “T-cannons to bear!” Eric ordered. “Target the Parasites! Fire when ready!”

  Massive electric motors pivoted the transition-cannon turrets into position as the orders went out across the Allied fleet. Every gun picked out their targets among the Parasites, which wouldn’t have the singularity cores that played havoc with the tachyon transition reintegration of the cannons, and then the cannons of the Odysseus engaged the enemy.

  Nuclear fire was visited upon the enemy just as explosions of brilliant annihilation erupted within the fleet, and the battle was joined from all sides.

  “All Vorpals, pick your targets and let them have it.” Commander Jake Hawkins officially let his pilots off the leash as they closed on the enemy from the flank. “This is a hit-and-run, people. Do not loiter around asking to be lit up. That’s an order.”

  “You got it, CAG,” Alexandra Black said firmly as she haloed her target picks and shared them out with the squadron, basically planting a little flag on each of them and saying “mine.” “We know our job.”

  “Stay with your wingmen,” Hawkins ordered, ignoring her, “and let’s show them how much sting a little fighter can really pack.”

  The pilots of the five Vorpal squadrons chuckled and agreed just before the CAG ordered radio discipline. The time for talking was over.

  Threading the needle between exploding Parasite destroyers and flying toward the white light that told them Stephanos had beaten them to the targets, the Vorpals threw everything they had into CM and full military thrust as they dived into the fray with reckless abandon.

  “Excalibur Lead, Missiles Free,” Black announced calmly. “Fox Five.”

  She jammed her thumb down, letting two missiles loose into space as her fighter’s rotary rack brought two more into their place. The missiles were barely visible for an instant as they lanced out. Then only a blue Cerenkov flash was left behind, an instant before plumes of fire burning in space erupted from her targets.

  “Holy crap!” she blurted. “They actually worked!”

  Calls of Fox Five followed her statement as the squadron opened fire.

  Alexandra quickly haloed new targets as she whipped her fighter in and around the suddenly explosive environment, queuing up the next pair of missiles as her wingman called out his strike.

  “Excalibur Two, Fox Five!”

  Hawkins eyed the moves by Excalibur squadron with part of his attention, but the majority remained with his own squadron as he led them into the mass of the enemy fleet.

  “Durandel squadron, I have the lead. Follow me in,” he ordered, haloing targets on his approach and readying the FTL missiles loaded into his Vorpal.

  He picked a cruiser a little deeper in the fleet for his first target, leaving the first targets to others as he wove his Vorpal through the fight that was exploding all around him. He had Tone quickly, though, and in the middle of the biggest furball of his career, Jake Hawkins smiled as he called the play.

  “Durandel Lead . . . Fox Five.”

  A brief flash of Cerenkov blue was the only sign that anything happened when he pressed the firing stud, the kinetic weapon lancing out with an almost impossible force and slamming into the cruiser ahead like the sledgehammer of the gods. The impact was too much for the missile to survive; otherwise it would have just punched right through and out the other side, its entire mass converted to energy by the venerab
le equation e=mc2.

  FTL in the sidereal universe was an impossibility, which meant that as soon as the FTL generators were destroyed, the weapons instantly reverted to just below the speed of light. But since each one was a multiton projectile moving at speeds that would be impossible under natural conditions, the resulting explosion was nearly as disastrous as antimatter delivered via transition cannon.

  Hawkins was grinning ear to ear when he heard his second in command call in next.

  “Durandel Two . . . Fox Five.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Lord’s Own Dreadnought, Empress Liann

  The deck shook with the violence of being struck by some sort of weapon, the likes of which Jesan didn’t know. He held on to his station, eyes wide with shock as he watched dozens of Parasite cruisers simply vanish in flames.

  “What is going on?!” he roared.

  The enemy were too far away for any of this to be possible!

  He checked the scanners, but found nothing that indicated any of the enemy explosives had been deployed ahead of them.

  “My Lord! Check the secondary screen!”

  Jesan looked aside, staring at an image of a cruiser exploding in flames, and for a moment didn’t understand why his second had directed his attention there.

  Then he saw it.

  The black silhouette of a craft, impossibly small, but clearly there as it flew between the Liann’s sensors and the stricken vessel.

  “Are they using . . . ?” He stared, unable to believe the sight for the moment, but it looked like an atmospheric interceptor. “Interceptors? Really?”

  “I would hazard, My Lord”—Navarch Misrem’s voice came over the command channel—“that these might more accurately be called bombers than interceptors. They do seem to be equipped enough to cause serious damage.”

  That much I can see, Jesan thought, though he gave her the point just the same. “Who are these people? They fight like some backwater world that has only just arrived in space.”

  “And yet their style seems effective,” Misrem reminded him. “I’ve been attempting to engage the enemy craft. However, this close they move far too quickly for our weapons to track, and if I were to miss . . .”

  Jesan understood.

  If she missed, then she would likely cause more damage to the fleet than the little insects could have hoped to manage on their own.

  “It still makes little sense,” he snapped. “Given a bit of time we’ll be able to adjust our tactics . . .”

  “And when was the last time these people ever showed us only one new thing at a time, My Lord?” the navarch countered, opening a screen to show the fires and explosions rocking the fleet from all quarters.

  Jesan gritted his teeth, glaring at the woman peering seriously back at him.

  He hated it when one of his subordinates had the nerve to be both smug and right.

  Steph twisted the fighter away from wreckage, noting that his drones were still with him but dry of munitions.

  “Tinkertoy is Winchester,” he said, more for the log than because anyone might be able to hear him through the energy crackling around them.

  Speaking of which, he thought as he checked the dosimeter registering how much rads he and his plane had absorbed running hot on stealth settings through an antimatter firestorm. Steph winced automatically, knowing that the docs were going to be shooting him full of all sorts of nasty crap to ensure that the rads he’d absorbed wouldn’t settle in his system and start unraveling his DNA.

  Weaving the fighter in and out through whatever gaps he could find, he led his squadron out the other side of the enemy formation and into open space, then punched the throttle.

  The blue flash of Cerenkov radiation was added to his dosimeter registry as the squadron went to FTL.

  “What’s this . . . ?” He noted a tone warning, as though someone had locked onto him, but he was sure that wasn’t possible.

  Instinctively he started to react, but stopped himself as he recognized the message.

  He was actually paralleling a laser blast from the enemy fleet, close enough that the corona of the energy beam was setting off his scanner. Steph noted the trajectory and frequency, put them into a simple coded pulse cipher, and hit transmit.

  AEV Odysseus

  Milla blinked as she received a priority message directly to her console . . . with Stephan’s signature?

  What is this? She examined the two numbers that had been sent, recognizing the nomenclature instantly on the first one.

  The second puzzled her momentarily until she connected it to the first. Adaptation code for cam-plate armor was a rather specific number to send, which really limited what the rest of the code should be.

  She linked immediately into the battle network. “Jánošík, Odysseus. Weapons Control Officer Chans, issuing orders and directives for adapting your armor. Please convert to the following frequency immediately.”

  There was a brief delay, and the captain of the Jánošík was on the line.

  “Done, but you’d better have a good . . . what?” The captain stared off screen for a moment before looking back. “How did you know that was coming?”

  “Briefing will be later,” Milla responded, directing the conversation off to a secondary screen as she half turned. “Commodore, I believe we have another use for the drones!”

  He looked over at her. “Lieutenant?”

  “I will explain as soon as we have more time. However, I believe we should retask Commander Michaels to cover our withdrawal,” she said, already issuing the orders. If the commodore decided she was wrong, she’d take the heat.

  “Granted?” Eric was confused but willing to let his people have their heads, at least until he had a better idea of what was going on.

  “Done,” Milla said, ensuring that Stephan knew what the plan was before she turned back to the commodore. “The hyperspectral scanners on the drones are able to calculate laser frequency, Capitaine, and while the communications systems are extremely limited they can send vector and frequency data.”

  The commodore stared for a moment before he connected all the dots.

  “And that means we can track at least some of the lasers and adapt before they hit,” he said in realization. “Shit. We need more drones. We need a lot more drones.”

  Steph deployed his Tinkertoy squads, spreading them out as best he could, though there simply weren’t enough of them to properly cover the intervening space between the enemy and the Allied fleet. Some of the laser strikes would inevitably break through, but they only needed to hold off as much as they could until the fleet broke the FTL barrier and was safe from conventional weapons fire.

  He positioned himself as far out of the line of fire as he could, since it would do no one any good . . . least of all himself . . . were he to catch a blast dead-on. After that his time was occupied with coding and transmitting to the fleet.

  I feel like a secretary.

  He wasn’t about to complain, however, since every pulse he sent out likely saved lives.

  In between moments of transmission he took a quick survey of the Allied ships he could see and had to admit that their prospects were looking a little better than he’d feared.

  They hadn’t gone through the battle unscathed. Most vessels were venting smoke or atmo in some manner, but he didn’t see too many lagging behind. One of the Rogues had apparently been crippled, and the crew was in the process of abandoning ship. There was no time to recover the hull in this furball, which meant that the reactor was likely on overload.

  He didn’t know how many others had been lost, but surely a few. Lives sacrificed for relatively little effect, but Steph was also well aware that a little effect over a long period was sometimes exactly what was needed.

  The tricky part for Excalibur squadron and the rest of the Vorpals was simply to not blunder headlong into the enemy fire by accident.

  Alexandra Black had led her squadron through the enemy fleet with near impunity, but once out the other
side, she realized that accidental fire was far more of a threat than any sort of ship to space-point defense. The section of space between them and the Enterprise was a crisscrossed nightmare of lasers powerful enough to literally smoke them if they stumbled into the beams.

  “Fly perpendicular to the line of fire,” Hawkins ordered. “Get clear of the line before we RTB.”

  Alexandra sent a confirmation message, not speaking as she kept her fighter in close to the enemy ships where the laser fire was thinnest. All those nearby targets made her wish she were still packing, so very much, but there were some significant limits to what even the Vorpals could carry, and they’d all run through their munitions in just moments of combat time.

  She, like most of her team and probably the others, had gone to guns after the missiles were depleted, but they were entirely ineffective, even against the Parasites.

  Few things were quite so frustrating, but now the job was to get clear and make it back to the Big E for rearm and refuel. After that, they’d see how the enemy liked another load of FTL missiles fired right up their tailpipes.

  Lord’s Own Dreadnought, Empress Liann

  Jesan found himself forced to hold back his temper as he watched the last of the small interceptor/bomber craft escape out into the void, almost entirely free of consequence from their arrogant assault on his fleet and even his own dreadnought.

  Repairs were already under way and, extreme though they were, he expected the ship to be fully functional in relatively short order.

  The enemy had inflicted a surprising level of damage, which, in raw numbers, was far more than his fleet had been able to respond in kind with . . . However, in terms of available resources, they’d lost far more than he had. The Parasites were nothing to him, easy enough to replace. But based on all available intelligence, he was quite certain that the Oathers and their allies had felt the loss of each of their ships deeply . . . or they would soon, if it hadn’t sunk in already.