So why was it dead, while the oddly configured ship still lived?

CHAPTER 36

WHAT SHOULD HAVE been a deafening roar was nothing but a brilliant flash of light and a sudden rush of motion as two more fighter craft hurtled themselves off the flight deck and out into the black beyond. Samuels waited her turn, the purr of the fighter charging her as the deck crews moved about, clearing the ground in front of her.

She checked her system status one more time as the last checks cycled, and looked up when a light caught her eye.

The deck crew didn’t talk to her directly; they didn’t have to. The figure ahead of her—his bright white-and-yellow vac suit identifying him as one of the handling officers—waved the okay to her and signaled the all clear.

She gave him a thumbs-up back, keyed in the final release on the twin reactors she was riding on, and waited for the final okay.

The handler dropped to a crouch, waving his hand in a sharp arc, and pointed for the black.

Samuels slid the throttle forward all the way, feeling the sudden lurch that slammed her back into the seat despite the CM field already surrounding her, and the flight deck around her became a blur as she was catapulted out into space.

“Archangels,” Stephanos’s voice came through clearly. “Form up on me…Give me a tight wedge while we gather some intel on the opposition.”

The fighters automatically came together, the bulk of the Odyssey dropping back away from them as they turned on all of their advanced sensor systems and activated the full suite of electronic warfare devices in preparation for the battle to come.

Behind, just as the last of them cleared the spires and moved completely out of range, the Odyssey’s front-control thrusters burned, lifting its nose up and flipping the big ship until it was on a ballistic course, its nose pointed back toward the enemy.

“All planes, engage the interface,” Stephanos ordered.

Samuels’s hand reached forward, hesitating for just a moment in painful memory while she flipped up the safety catch and pushed the switch forward.

The sharp bite of the needles digging into her neck caused her to hiss, then it was gone and she forced herself to relax. With the needles in, she felt herself shifting the plane almost by thought alone as she fine-tuned her place in formation and smiled.

This was what she had trained for.

“Do we have tokamak power yet?” Weston asked, watching the star field change radically as the Odyssey completed its flip.

Computer magnification brought the enemy ships into focus as they hurtled on, their faces lit by the light of the star that was now at the Odyssey’s back. Two of them glinted darkly in the reflected light at forty light-seconds now and closing fast.