Homeworld (Odyssey One) (67 page)

“
ODYSSEY
’S SENT THEIR fighters back toward the enemy, Sir.”

Carrow looked up, eyes bulging, “They did what?”

“Sent them on what is looking like a full-frontal assault.”

Carrow exchanged glances with Andrea, and even she, who had no liking for Weston whatsoever, looked completely shocked and befuddled.

“Weston’s not going to sacrifice his own team like that.” Carrow shook his head. “No way.”

“Agreed,” Parker admitted, sounding a little sour for coming down in favor of Weston on any issue. “So what is he planning?”

“Not a clue. I’m not ordering my pilots to do anything like that without damned good reasoning, though,” Carrow said defensively.

“A fact, I am certain, that they’ll appreciate,” Andrea responded dryly.

The
Enterprise
carried one hundred and forty of the latest space superiority fighters known as the Vorpal Class. They were designed to be mechanically superior to even the Archangels
in every respect. Faster, better armed and armored, more maneuverable…the works.

The only thing the Archangels had over them was the precision of the NICS interface, but while no one had pitted them one on one in war games as of yet, the Blades were generally expected to edge out the Angels.

For all that,
and
the fact that he had almost
thirty
times the number of fighters as the
Odyssey
, there was no way in
hell
that he was going to order his air wing back into that nightmare behind them.

Not without a damned good reason and a chance to deliver the order face to face at least,
Carrow thought grimly.
They would deserve that much.

“New orders from the
Odyssey
, sir,” Andrea offered.

Carrow glanced down, eyes widening slightly as he noted the new course plot, and nodded.

“I see,” he said seriously, considering the orders before looking up again. “Make for Mars, all ahead flank!”

“All ahead, flank. Aye, sir!”

PRIMINAE WARSHIP
POSDAN

KIAN LOOKED OVER the dispatch orders, or what could be more accurately stated as requests, from the
Odyssey
.

She could see what Weston was aiming for. He clearly wanted the crippled ship brought out of the range of the Drasin. She personally thought that was rather optimistic thinking, given that the enemy had enough ships to split their forces among each target in the star system and still have more than enough at any given point to totally crush any Priminae defense grid of which she was aware.

That said, her orders from Ranquil were clear. Follow any reasonable orders and requests from the Terrans, so long as they didn’t unduly risk her ship for no useful purpose, and look for an opportunity to acquire Terran technology if possible.

She wasn’t sure how she was going to pull that off, but she’d do her best.

With both the
Nept
and the
Posdan
hauling the stricken Terran ship, they could easily handle the load, but with living human beings
inside
the ship they couldn’t move particularly quickly. The space-warp drive in use by the Priminae ships
completely nullified the effects of acceleration within the area of effect of the drive, but the Terrans currently sat well
outside
that effect and they would be plastered across the back of their ship if they tried to move more than a few standard gravities.

That, unfortunately, left the whole group of ships limping through space like wounded birds, a free and inviting target to the Drasin that were closing in on them.

I do not know how it is that you believe you can keep them from annihilating us all, but I hope you know what you are doing, Captain Weston.

“Captain! The Terran’s small fighters, they’ve initiated an assault on the Drasin forces.”

Kian’s head whipped around, eyes bulging as she stared at the display. Five small fighters had launched from the
Odyssey
and were now accelerating directly toward the Drasin armada!

Are they
insane
?

“This is
insane!
” Cardsharp laughed freely as she followed her Wing leader through a twisting barrel roll that looped them around the edge of an enemy laser burst.

The alien lasers were so powerful that they actually
leaked
energy off to the sides, stray photons not perfectly aligned with the rest of the beam. Some were actually knocked out of the beam by a collision with other particles while some were just misaligned from the beginning, but in either case the result was the same.

Properly tuned detection systems could pick up those stray photons and calculate the location and angle of the beam from which they’d originated. The augmented reality of the Archangel HUDS filled in the rest, and to the pilots of
the Four Hundred and Forty Fourth Airwing, such as it had become, the rest was pure adrenaline.

“Keep the chatter down, Cardsharp,” Steph replied, twisting his fighter around towards the other direction in a maneuver that would have turned his plane, and himself, into expanding debris had he tried it without the CM field on full power. “Just do your job.”

“Come on, boss man,” Burner laughed over the comm. “Not like we can’t have a little fun in the pursuit of our duty?”

“Fun is fun, but those fighters ahead may have a bone to pick with us over our choice in entertainment.”

“I guess we’d best show them the error of their ways then, huh?”

Steph chuckled. “I suppose we should. Archangels, weapons free. Engage enemy fighters, guns only. I say again, guns guns guns.”

The channel echoed with acknowledgements and the five fighters of the 444
^th
threw their throttles wide open and charged into the maw of the enemy fleet.

It wasn’t quite as insane as it looked, Steph mused to himself as he flipped his plane to the left and rolled under another laser sweep. The enemy couldn’t get a lock on them short of a miracle at the speeds they were moving, not with the complex and unpredictable flight path the Archangels were flying. So instead the Drasin fighters were sweeping space with their beams, trying to cut the Archangels in half with lasers wielded like swords.

That plan had one fundamental flaw.

Lasers moved at the speed of light. If one was aimed directly at an Archangel, it was game over for the pilot unless his plates were adapted to the beam frequency, which would take a miracle in itself. However, the aiming
system on the enemy ships
weren’t
light-speed devices, so the beams had to traverse space, limited first by the technical limits of the ship, and also by the fact that even a platform as lightly armored as the Archangels wouldn’t be too badly burnt if they only crossed the beam for a few fractions of a second.

No, the Drasin had to lock onto their position and
hold
the beam on them until they were toast. It wouldn’t be long. A second might do it. Certainly two would turn a fighter from a loose amalgamation of parts flying in formation to an expanding cloud of debris that used to contain a living human being.

Unfortunately for the Drasin, the Archangels weren’t interested in holding still for the fireworks.

Steph mentally haloed a series of targets ahead of him, writing them off as soon as he squeezed the firing stud on his stick. The forward gauss guns on the fighters roared, launching three kilo depleted uranium slugs into space, already moving at a significant portion of the speed of light before they were expelled from their guns.

“Open a hole, and you better make it a big one,” Steph called over the vibration of the big gun sticking from the nose of his craft. “Otherwise we’re going to find out what it’s like to thread a needle at point-five light!”

The enemy fighter screen was mostly ignoring them, not that he was surprised. In fact, he’d have been shocked if that hadn’t been the case. With numbers the size of what he was looking at, you just didn’t expect to see a significant number paying attention to a half a handful of gnats, even if they had stingers. It was undignified, for one, and it also went against the nature of a mob mentality to pay attention to a small force that wasn’t already their main focus.

That said, they still had the better part of a hundred or more enemy fighters trying to trap them with crisscrossing laser beams, so things were hairy enough.