“We’re going to war, Rowley. Got a problem with that?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good,” the chief said, nodding once in her helmet. “Get your crew back to work.”

“You got it, Chief!”

Rowley switched over to his crew’s frequency. “All right, you bums, we’ve got a deadline. Franks! Get me a couple canisters of that insulating foam from storage. We’re gonna patch this bitch the dirty way!”

“Sir,” Commander Roberts hesitated, “I’m not sure this plan of yours is going to work.”

“Join the club, Commander,” Weston said as he took a seat behind his desk.

“Sir, it relies on too many unknowns.”

Weston nodded. “Agreed. But you and I both know that we can’t hope to win in a stand-up fight, Jason.”

Commander Roberts paused, blinking back a bit of surprise as Weston used his first name for the first time. After a moment, he shook his head. “Even so, you’re risking a lot on our stealth systems. We don’t know what kind of sensors the enemy has.”

“True. But I think that we can pretty much imitate a hole in space for anything short of an active tachyon scan.”

“For anything using conventional frequency scans, you mean,” Roberts corrected, though he had to concede the point.

The Odyssey had been built with the cam-plates for two reasons. The first—or rather, the first that became important to them—was the fact that, with appropriate modifications, the cam-plate system could reflect over 98 percent of laser energy away from the ship. It was, against energy weapons, the ultimate form of armor.

However, the original design wasn’t built with armor specifically in mind. The cam-plate technology was based on the development of carbon nano-tubes designed to shift reflective frequencies as an active camouflage for main battle tanks. An appropriate program shunted through the armor coating so as to allow a tank to blend into practically any environment with a nearly perfect camouflage.

At the far end of its ability was the black hole setting, a phase-shifted armor that would absorb everything in the EM range sent its way, including radar, laser, and all other conventional detection systems. The net effect was to reduce the electronic and sensor profile of any unit coated in it to less than 2 percent of its normal signal.

Of course, Roberts knew that particular use had one rather nasty side effect. “You do know what will happen if one of their lasers nails us while we’re using the black hole settings?”

“We’ll probably be vaporized before we know we’re hit,” Weston told him flatly.

Since the net effect of the black hole setting was to absorb over 98 percent of all energy directed against it, it would actually behave like an inverse of the normal armor and offer absolute minimal resistance to enemy lasers.

And given how powerful those lasers were, one shot would be all it would take.

“It’s reckless, sir,” Roberts said calmly, finally taking a seat across from Weston.