Milla looked puzzled as Weston smiled, but he didn’t comment further. Instead, he turned to Dr. Palin. “Doctor, you’re with me. I want you on the bridge for this.”

“Huh?” Palin looked up in surprise. “Oh, yes. Of course, Captain.”

Weston nodded to Milla and led Palin out through the isolation ward airlock.

The planet hung in space, glittering in the reflected and refracted light of its primary like a jewel in black satin. The shattered fragments that passed over the sea-green orb marred the beauty of the scene, a testament to the fact that the world’s defenders had not gone easily.

The low rumble of the Odyssey’s reactors sounded ominous to the crew as they watched the planet approach. There was something about the world on the viewer that felt wrong.

“Launch orbital drones,” Weston ordered as the Odyssey slid to a stop, relative to the planet, already punching up a link to the main sensor array.

“Drones launching,” Roberts replied, the report punctuated by the brief shudders that they felt through the deck. “Moving to take up orbital positions.”

Weston nodded, distracted as he examined the information on the screen. The numbers didn’t look right, but he couldn’t tell what was off. After a moment, he looked up. “Analysis!”

“Sir…” a voice from behind him spoke up.

Weston turned toward the young female ensign. He had to think hard, but he placed her name quickly. “Yes, Ensign Rodriguez?”

“The numbers are all wrong, sir,” Emma Rodriguez replied, frowning. “We’re getting a serious shift in the oxygen content of the atmosphere. That’s why the continents are red-shifted.”

“Tell me why that’s wrong, Ensign.”

“Because we’re getting indications of the same plant life we’d see on Earth. In fact, this world is extremely rich in photosensitive plankton,” she replied, shaking her head. “No, Captain. There is something wrong here.”

Weston turned back to his own display. That pretty much jived with what he felt in his gut but added a substance to his misgivings. “All right. Show me what the drones are seeing.”

Carnivore combat drones were catapult-launched, unmanned, reconnaissance vehicles designed as stealthy platforms to conduct surveillance over combat zones that had been previously cleared of more conventional platforms, like, for example, satellites.

Equipped with the same CM generators that permitted the Odyssey to approach two-thirds light-speed without a prohibitive fuel cost, the carnivores could accelerate to a tenth of light-speed in under eight seconds and crash to a halt in just under ten.

And that was in an atmosphere.

In orbital space the drones literally ricocheted around, altering courses on a dime, until they reached their preprogrammed orbital trajectories and slowed to a ballistic course that gave each of the five drones a stable orbit.

Then the heavily shielded bottoms of the drones slid open, revealing sophisticated optics and intercept sensors, and they got down to the nuts and bolts of their job.