From the outside of the NACS Odyssey, no sound was heard when the brilliant flashes of light marked the launch of the six bursts of charged energy.

The pulse torpedoes flashed into existence in front of the proud ship and then off through the black just as quickly, until they were nothing but another star in the wasteland to the unaided human eye. Though they were not light-speed weapons, they were very close, as the total mass of each of the weapons actually approached zero, give or take a few nanograms. They left the Odyssey at just over 0.9c and would take about ten seconds more to cross the gulf than the light they cast.

Which would give their targets ten seconds to see what was coming, and marginally less time to react.

“Thrusters!” Weston called. “Take us below the system ecliptic, relative to the enemy!”

“Aye, sir,” Daniels said, entering the precoded maneuver with a single tap of his fingers. “Engaging thrusters now.”

The Odyssey shivered as its maneuvering thrusters, usually intended for low-velocity maneuvers while under port speed restrictions, kicked into action and flared hotly, straining to shove the big ship out of the line of any likely fire.

“Keep an eye on passive sensors,” Weston ordered. “I want to know if we get pinged.”

“Aye, Captain,” Waters responded.

Samuels tightened her grip on the fighter’s nose with her legs as the deck seemed to pitch and a wail of steel and groan of metal echoed through the deck.

This time she was ready for it and didn’t miss her throw as she sent her card back to the dealer. The CM field was less effective at muffling sharp maneuvers below decks due to the absence of gravity, so the stress on the ship and the littler inertia of her body, and everything else relative to the real universe, was pushed a bit more in null gravity.

“Captain’s got Daniels standing on the stick,” Racer said, with a half smile.

“That’s what you get when you put a fighter pilot in command of a ship,” Paladin said, continuing flipping three cards to another pilot. “One seriously neurotic ship.”

Low chuckles passed around the deck, the pilots willing to take any chance to burn away unneeded stress.

“Say,” Samuels spoke up, “where did you guys pick up the poker thing? I mean, I get the game and all but…”

“How’d we get the idea to try it in null?” Paladin asked.

“Well…yeah,” she admitted. “I mean, this is your first tour in space, right? I mean—”

“We know what you mean,” Racer replied. “The poker game is traditional. Goes back a lot of years. The null deal…Well, we figured out how to manage that during our null-grav training.”

Another pilot laughed. “Yeah. We almost went bonkers that first week. Took us forever to decide that there just was no good way to float the pot between us.”