That brought a strange sense of resignation and an urge to satisfy whatever curiosity she had left.

Gaia pushed deeper into the singularity, looking closer at the reflection. It winked at her.

Then she was sucked in so fast that she didn’t even have a chance to fight back.

Eric had just barely sat down when the power flickered and dimmed, all the instrumentation going dead for a moment before it all came back.

“What the hell was that?”

“Power variance, Captain,” a Priminae engineer said from a station to the back right of Eric’s position.

“That happen often?” he asked.

“Never, sir. It’s not possible.” The engineer didn’t look happy at all, not that Eric blamed him.

Impossible things happening with high-energy power sources rarely resulted in good times being had by all.

“Figure it out,” he ordered, knowing that the last thing they needed was for anything to go wrong now.

“Yes sir.”

Great, I sit down in the hot seat and the damned ship starts acting up. What next? The Moon planning on dropping on our heads too?

He forced himself back to the task at hand, analyzing the enemy’s actions, which, unfortunately, was all too easy. They were being cautious and smart, coming in spread out to avoid any nastiness like the maneuver he and Sun had pulled on them before. That meant that the squadron would be able to break out, yes, but it also meant that the odds of defeating a force this size were effectively zero. The admiral was right about that, to be sure. They had enough munitions split among the squadron to take out a couple hundred of the drone ships, but no more. He figured, power for power, what he was looking at on the Odysseus would be able to account for another few in close-range fighting. But once the enemy fighter screens got involved, it would be almost impossible to hit and fade long enough to make a real difference.

Unfortunately, the Enterprise fighter complement is too small to keep all of these bastards tied up while we take out the ships.

Ship-to-ship combat on this level was really more a matter of who guessed the other’s actions first. With adaptive lasers and Priminae power sources, he was confident that he could take on the enemy and savage them, but in the end it would be a pack of wolves wearing down a bear. The Odysseus would fall, they’d all die, and the Earth would be gone shortly thereafter.

There has to be a way. There has to be.

If there was, however, he wasn’t seeing it.

Eric sighed, shaking his head.

Sometimes, the good guys lost.

Gaia blinked, scowling as much as she could given her lack of corporeal form.