“We’re here, Chief,” the lead man said, glancing back from the sealed door. “We’ve got hard vac on the other side.”

“All right,” Corrin muttered, slapping a sealing switch beside her and dropping the heavy lock door behind them. “Break the seal and let’s get to work.”

The man nodded, turning back to the door as the corridor pitched and rolled around him. “On it, Chief.”

As the men moved quickly about their jobs, the information concerning the battle continued to feed from their suits and from computers all over the ship into the main bridge systems.

Once there, the entire networked computing grid of the NACS Odyssey was sliced into bite-sized pieces, prioritized according to importance through a specialized computer algorithm, and then fed straight to the screens of Ens. Susan Lamont.

“We’re bleeding air from the flight deck!” Lamont snapped over her shoulder, her fingers already cutting off the deck from the rest of the ship as she called up a list of the personnel still on the lower decks.

“Send rescue teams!” Weston barked. “Daniels, did we hit anything?”

The Drasin cruiser pitched upward as it tracked its quarry, trying to keep a solid beam on the human ship as the vessel performed the most…unexpected actions.

As it reconnected the beam to its target, the controller had a moment of satisfaction before warning alarms went off through all its systems.

That moment was its last.

Hyper-velocity missiles could accelerate to nearly 0.8c in the few seconds they took to cross their normal effective range. The ones that launched from the Odyssey were targeted at an enemy ship within half that radius.

Even so, they managed to accelerate to 0.63c before impacting on the Drasin cruiser, delivering their kinetic payload on target less than four seconds after they had launched.

By that time, the ship was already bubbling under the hellish heat of the Odyssey’s primary laser array.

“We got him!” Daniels yelled, throwing his arms up as the cruiser vanished from his screens.

The bridge erupted into cheers, but Captain Weston didn’t join in.

“Lamont…damage control?”

Ensign Lamont swallowed and nodded, turning back to her station as the brief exultation passed, and she began to coordinate the crews moving through the bowels of the ship.

“They did it, Admiral.”

Admiral Tanner nodded dumbly as the central computer painted the death of the Drasin cruiser on the threat board in brilliant detail.

Whomever that ship belonged to, it was a formidable force in and of itself.

However, since it had entered orbit, they had tried contacting the crew on every frequency used by the colonies, to no avail. It either wasn’t answering or it didn’t hear them.

In either case, it wasn’t exactly comforting.

Tanner had no quarrel with the captain of the vessel; certainly, he had nothing but respect for the man’s abilities, as well as those of the people under his command.