Homeworld (Odyssey One) Read Free Page B

connection and drifted over to the body of his officer.
    He couldn’t ask someone from medical to come up for the corpse, so Sun had no choice but to pull the body over to Kong’s station and strap him down into his bolster.
    “Well, Kong,” he said softly, “one last mission between us, shall we?”
    He patted the dead man on the shoulder and drifted back to his own seat, strapping himself back into place as he quickly examined the displays around him to familiarize himself with the current situation once more.
    He thumbed the ship-wide, signaling everyone again.
    “This is the Captain. All crew are to stand ready for maneuvering,” he said sternly, masking the ice that had sunk to the pit of his stomach. “Helm, go to maximum counter-mass, all flank thrust, on my mark.”
    A glance at the tactical display caused him to glance in another direction. “Status on the missiles?”
    “Impact with targets in twenty seconds.”
    Sun nodded, examining the plot.
Twenty seconds. Not quite ideal, but close. Yes, that will do.
    “Initiate break away in fifteen seconds!” he ordered, eyes on the weapon plot.
    The
Weifang’s
missiles were CM-enhanced sub-nuclear guided weapons, a little old school compared to the toys the NAC played with, but very nearly as effective, just the same. They were slower than the speed captured intelligenceindicated that the NAC’s “pulse torpedoes” were listed as and were unfortunately vulnerable to interception, but the shaped charges within were far safer to handle and packed a punch that was nearly as potent.
    At ten seconds to impact, Sun knew that the weapons would have entered terminal guidance, locking onto the specific target and accelerating in a last boost phase that burned up the remainder of their propellant. They would strike at a little under point-one lights, a speed that literally boggled Sun’s mind, but his current worry was that it would be slow and they’d be picked off by point defense.
    Given the distance between the
Weifang
and its pursuers, however, he would only learn that long after he had already been committed to his maneuver for some time.
    The clock ticked down, the last ten seconds passing in an interminably slow fashion until they were gone.
    “Break away! Break away!” the helmsman called as he initiated the maneuver. “All flank to thrust, maximum countermass engaged!”
    Like a ball that had been spinning on a string and had just been cut free, the
Weifang
erupted outward from the star at high speed. The Chinese ship’s counter-mass generators powered to full actually extended slightly beyond the ship’s hull. So as they exploded out of the corona, they brought some of the plasma with them in a spectacular eruption on par with the most energetic of coronal mass ejections ever recorded by Earth instruments.
    “Arm all forward tubes!” Sun called. “Get me a targeting solution for the squadron ahead of us.”
    “Calculating.”
    Sun nodded, though he knew that his officers were too busy looking to their own instruments to notice, and returnedto the tactical displays focused on the closer pursuit group. “Status on our pursuers?”
    “We lost contact when we exited the corona, Captain,” Shi said. “Interference is keeping us from monitoring the telemetry of our missiles. We did register detonations, however, so they successfully entered terminal guidance.”
    “Understood. Thank you,” Sun said, shifting his display forward to the second squadron that was now accelerating away from the star on a parallel course to their own.
    The
Weifang
had a current time-speed advantage, but they’d lose a lot of that with the enemy now accelerating to keep them in range as long as possible. In open space, there were far fewer tricks they could use to lose or outrun the enemy; either they had the engines to muscle through or they didn’t.
    Unfortunately, from what he knew of the alien capabilities from captured NAC telemetry data, the
Weifang
simply