Homeworld (Odyssey One) (45 page)

The delivery system took its cue from the
Odyssey
’s computers, encoding range and gravitational effects according to the known location of the target and the available data on the local warping of space-time caused by stars, planets, and the sometimes estimated impact of drive systems belonging to whatever ships the
Odyssey
was tracking.

Luckily, for the most part, manufactured warps in space-time were extremely local and had minimal impact on trajectory information, unless the ship was very close to the
Odyssey
, the target, or the path of the tachyon particles that made up the payload. That meant that the
Odyssey
computers were able to break a very nearly impossible task down into a series of merely difficult ones, and since the difficult could be accomplished immediately, things continued to get done.

With an appropriate targeting solution entered into the systems, the weapons swiveled out from the hull of the ship like a trio of three gun battleship cannons from the early- to mid-twentieth century. The waveguides adjusted for the angle and elevation, relative to the
Odyssey
, while the computers directed the power to the system to set the range.

One-meter-diameter shells, nuclear-fused munitions were loaded into the breach of the big guns by an automated system in total vacuum. The loader could actually manage up to forty shells per minute, per gun, though the
Odyssey
only had enough power capacitors to fire a tenth of that.

Once the shell was loaded into the breach and everything was sealed, a burst of energy initiated the tachyon phase change. It sublimated the shells directly from solid matter to massless tachyon particles without disrupting the quantum pattern of the shells. Tachyons were strange beasts. They were particles and waves much the way light was, but they were massless and could
only
exist above the speed of light.

It was an expression among Terrans that nature abhors a vacuum. Scientists know that phrase is one of the biggest jokes in the universe because if you looked at the universe statistically you would instantly realize that nature
was
a vacuum. Tachyon researchers, however, knew that what nature really abhorred were tachyons. They didn’t like to exist and, honestly, the universe didn’t seem to want them around either.

Once charged and transitioned, the shell literally leapt across the intervening space…both passing through every point in between and not moving at all, until their charge was drained. Then they reverted back to normal matter, complete with mass and a very familiar pattern.

That pattern spelled trouble for anyone and anything at the arrival point, or at least it did when the pattern was that of a nuclear-fused fusion weapon.

A Drasin “cruiser” wasn’t actually a starship in the traditional sense, with much of the interior being more analogous to that of a living being. Veins and arteries pumped molten metals to where they needed to be, powering the space-warping capabilities of the unit, while passages that resembled emptied lava tubes shifted gasses about for those tasks unsuited to metallic substances.

Large cargo areas holding smaller fighter class drones or ground combat units actually made up most of the overall space inside, however, and it was into one of these areas that the
Odyssey
’s one-hundred-centimeter shells most often appeared.

The sudden appearance of such a device in the middle of a crowded compartment on a human ship would result in general chaos and action, while on a Drasin vessel the only entity that noted the weapon’s arrival was the ship itself. The rest of its denizens were nascent, shut down until needed, and completely unaware of the danger in the midst. The difference was moot, as humans would really only have time to realize they were about to die.

The fission fuse on the device was an implosive type, designed to detonate high explosives inward in order to force atoms of plutonium to smash together. Those atoms would crack apart, neutrons and protons separating as the atom itself was rendered asunder and sent careening outward into other atoms in turn, shattering them. The reaction became briefly
self-sustaining, atoms crashing into one another with enough force to shatter atomic bonds and send more atomic material about on collision courses as the fission trigger detonated.

The fissionable material, however, was just a fuse to detonate the true explosive. The fission reaction was enough to detonate the fusion explosive, a mixture of deuterium and tritium wrapped in a uranium shell casing.

It was a slightly bizarre Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events, but in the end the result was a two-hundred-megaton explosive going off
inside
the hull of the Drasin cruiser.

A far cry from the multi-gigaton weapons of the Drasin and Priminae? Yes, but few species ever thought to armor the
interior
of their ships to the same degree as the exterior, and the Drasin were not among those few.

A few seconds after the weapon transitioned back from tachyon energized space-time, the first Drasin ship was nothing but an expanding cloud of gas, plasma, and various particulate.

And it
was
only the first.

One by one, then in twos, threes, and fours, Drasin ships vanished into miniature supernovas that lived out their short existences in fiery glory.

STATION LIBERTY

“KEEP FIRING,” ADMIRAL Gracen ordered, eyes fixed on the screens that were showing her nothing of any value whatsoever.

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

The Station had four transition cannon turrets, one more than the
Odyssey
, but due to the design peculiarities of the station, they could only bring one onto the target at any given time. That one was currently depleting their stock of one-hundred-centimeter shells at a truly sickening rate, and she could literally see her operating budget vanishing faster than the speed of light.

What was worse, no one could tell if they were hitting anything.

It would be more than an hour before light-speed signals got back to the station from the targets, and they’d be sitting with empty guns in a little under ten minutes at the current rate of fire. She wasn’t going to maintain that rate for that long, of course; they were double- and triple-tapping all their designated targets as a matter of SOP, and that was going to deplete their munitions significantly.

Good thing the Block ambassador signed off on a temporary injunction of the Sol System Nuclear Weapons Ban, or this would have the potential to get a lot uglier on the home front.

For obvious reasons, in a world where the old Russian fifty-megaton “Tsar Bomba” was considered on the small side for fusion weapons, political and military forces had generally agreed that using nuclear weapons on, or near, Earth was a recipe for mutual disaster. Even during the Block War, there had been no use of nuclear weapons by official government agencies.

A few extremist wings of both sides had made some use of older nuclear technologies, but generally nothing more than a few kilotons. Military application of conventional weapons was largely considered more effective, efficient, and far less costly, so nukes weren’t the go-to weapon for anyone with an ounce of sanity.

Not until the
Odyssey
encountered the Drasin, at any rate.

That was why munitions for the transition cannons were in such limited quantities, unfortunately. Manufacturing nuclear materials wasn’t exactly a lost art, but the facilities equipped to handle the work were few and far between.

In North America, at least.

The irony of the situation was that the Block hadn’t mothballed their facilities when the Confederacy did, so they still had the manufacturing capability. Oh, the Confederacy hadn’t abandoned the technology, of course. That would have been insane…or maybe it would have been sane, in an insane world. She didn’t know which. No, the Confederacy only kept enough facilities available now to destroy humanity fifty times or so, instead of the thousand fold or more that the Block facilities could theoretically manage.

Gracen had already heard that some unofficial overtures had been made to Block officials about outsourcing the manufacturing of shells to the Block while the new facilities in the Confederacy were being re-established.

It was a literally unfathomable concept to her, but then she’d made her bones fighting the Block tooth and nail over a series of Pacific islands that neither of them really gave a damn about. The blood she’d spilled, that she’d
ordered
spilled, had long past stained her world view. It was probably a good thing that she wasn’t the one they’d sent to negotiate that particular deal.

For now, however, she had a more important target on her screens.

“Admiral, firing program completed.”

Gracen sighed, but nodded as pleasantly as she could before she spoke.

“Good job. Alright, everyone take a break. We’ve got a little over an hour before we find out if we actually hit anything. If you need anything, now is the time.”

War in space was insane, even by her definitions.