“Eloquent, Burke. Worthy of the bards,” Savoy said as he blew out a long breath, letting his armor’s air-conditioning catch the moist air and whisk it away from the faceplate HUD.

“What the hell are you two blathering about?” Mehn asked as he stepped up, coming to a dead stop between the two of them and looking down—a long way down.

The hole in the deck was about five meters in diameter and seemed to bore right through the hull of the landing craft and into the hard ground beneath them.

“I’m getting a depth reading…Jesus…thirty meters…How’d they manage to dig that this fast?”

“Don’t know, boss…But it can’t be a good thing.”

“Yeah…” Savoy shook his head. “All right, Burke, head back out and get one of the chutes in here.”

“How come?” Burke objected. “The sensors on those things aren’t gonna be worth much in that tight an area.”

“I know that…” Savoy responded. “But my suit sensors will be. I’m going down there.”

Weston was sipping a steaming mug of coffee when the alert came in.

He dropped the mug unceremoniously into a recycling hatch and turned to the even younger ensign who was taking Waters’s position. “What is it, Ensign?”

“Tachyon wakes, sir,” she replied tensely, her eyes darting across her board. “I…I think its several ships decelerating from FTL.”

“Put your readings up on the screen,” he ordered.

The screen flickered, showing a computer enhancement of nicely animated blue particles being pushed ahead of something and breaking out and around, like the bow wave of a boat pushing itself through a calm lake.

Only there were five of them.

“Oh my God,” someone whispered.

Weston ignored them.

At least now he knew what the last ship was waiting for.

And he’d been right, too.

He didn’t like it.

CHAPTER 25

LIEUTENANT SAVOY FLOATED in a nonexistent breeze as he dropped down the five-meter-wide hole, the CM chute lowering him slowly into the pit.

“Heat dissipation is roughly even,” he reported, looking down through the thermal overlay that decorated his suit’s HUD. “The walls are almost smooth, very regularly cut…but not glassy like a laser drill…”

His running commentary was relayed up to his tech squad and from them to the major and the Odyssey, so he kept speaking for the record as the walls continued to loom farther and farther above him.

“I’m approaching the bottom now…slowing chute deployment,” he said, bringing himself to a stop just above the turn in the tunnel.

Savoy inverted himself, hooking one leg up and around the cable that held him suspended in the air, and commanded the chute to descend again. His head dipped below the curve of the tunnel a few seconds later and he stopped it again, watching through the thermal overlay down the tunnel, looking for any heat sources that might be the enemy drones.