“For Christ’s sakes, Alex!” Racer snapped, her face flaring.

“Hey, I’m just saying…” the cocky pilot shrugged defensively. “You know it’s true.”

“Yeah, and I also know that’s the captain’s plane, Paladin.” Racer glared at him. “It’s fuckin’ ready to fly, so don’t spook her.”

Paladin just shrugged again, still chewing the gum that had replaced the cigar that would normally be clenched in his teeth, while looking back at Samuels. “So? You in?”

Samuels looked at him for another minute and shrugged as she pulled herself up and out of the cockpit. She settled down on the nose of the fighter, straddling it in the zero gravity to hold her place. “Sure. What’s the game?”

“Five-Card Stud.” Paladin smirked, flipping a card. “We’ll keep it simple for ya. Deuces wild. Five buck ante and the table limit is a fifty-dollar bet, fair ’nuff?”

The card spun through the air in the zero-gravity compartment, and Samuels snatched it as it twisted past.

“Sure,” she smirked. “We gonna float the pot in the middle of us all?”

“Nah.” Paladin flashed a toothy smile. “That’s the fun part. You gotta keep tally in yer head. Up to it?”

“Keep dealing the cards.”

“We’re entering the engagement envelope now, Commander.”

“Thank you, Ensign,” Roberts said, not looking up.

He knew that the captain wasn’t going to engage at extreme range, so there was no rush. “What’s the disposition of enemy forces?”

“Still continuing on course to the planet, Commander. They don’t appear to have changed their formation.”

Running fat and slow, Roberts hoped. He’d been looking over the reports from the ground fighting as well as comparing the after-action reports filed from each station concerning the alien ships. They weren’t too bright when it came to combat maneuvers, but they seemed to learn fast.

That bothered him, perhaps more than anything else, because there was something about that itching at the back of his skull.

Something he was missing.

Something important.

A warning buzzer sounded, interrupting his train of thought, and he looked up sharply. “Ensign?”

“The captain’s set all stations to action alert,” the ensign said.

Roberts looked over the board, noting that the scale of the battle zone was rapidly dwindling as the range closed. “The captain will open the engagement shortly. Stand to for battle stations.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“What’s our lock status?”

“Soft lock, sir, but we’re approaching sixty-five percent,” Waters responded.

“Charge even tubes two through twelve.”

“Aye, Captain. Charging tubes.”

In one of the old submarines, or any navy ship, that order would have sent people on the weapons decks scrambling to load torpedoes into the tubes, or even double-checking all the systems involved, but on the Odyssey, the military had been forced to bow even more to the gods of automation.

The pulse tubes charged from the capacitor banks that circled the habitats of the Odyssey, draining the charge in mere seconds to bring themselves up to full battle-ready status. They could only hold that charge for a mere eight minutes before they would lose the power needed to generate and fire one of the lethal bursts, but Captain Weston didn’t plan to hold them that long.