“Coming about,” Steph said as he leaned into the controls and the stars rushed past them on the screens.

The Odysseus swung about hard, putting her weapons on target in just under a second as she began to warp space-time in the opposite direction as hard as she could. Bleeding velocity at incredible rates, the swarm of Drasin ships jumped at them from the black of space as Eric watched the screens light up with augmented data about their foes.

“Milla,” he spoke. “Fire as she bears.”

“Aye Capitaine,” Milla Chans said, eyes gleaming as she looked out at the things that had killed her previous ship, her previous comrades. “All lasers . . . firing.”

The lasers of the Heroics weren’t quite as sophisticated as the ones on his Odyssey, Eric noted wryly, but they made up in power for what they lacked in sophistication. The beams lanced into the lead ships with the force of a hundred focused suns, and four Drasin drone ships vanished into oddly spherical bursts of plasma.

“Evade.”

“Aye Captain,” Steph said, twisting the controls and leaning into his NICS needles. The sharp twinge in his neck was an old friend and he couldn’t help but smile as he shifted the warp field, slamming the ship hard to port.

The Odysseus responded impossibly, not even groaning under the sudden strain, and Eric noted in the back of his mind that it somehow felt wrong not to have some sort of acceleration effect. The Priminae gravity systems took care of that, however, leaving everything—even his filled-to-the-brim coffee—unfazed by the universe-bending actions they were taking.

“Laser bloom, Captain!” Winger announced. “I have the signature. Should I adapt?”

“No. Maintain best reflective settings,” Eric ordered. “There’s too many of them out here.”

“Yes sir.”

“Milla, fire at will,” Eric said, leaning forward. “Steph . . . take us into the swarm.”

“Aye aye, sir!” Both of them responded, and the Odysseus surged forward into the roiling storm that was threatening to sweep them all away.

With the augmented systems fully online, Stephen Michaels had always felt a little like he was in a simulator more than the real thing, but on the Odysseus it was exacerbated by the artificial gravity systems. He missed the feeling of motion, the sensations that accompanied wrestling his fighting around a tight turn.

On the Odysseus, he may as well be sitting in front of a computer screen playing a game. Alright, it was a pretty friggin’ awesome computer screen, he’d give that to the wraparound system, but it was still just a screen. The augmented views supplied by the computer made that feeling even worse, of course.

As he guided the Odysseus into the swarm of enemy fighters, Steph watched the beams as they swept space, curling the big ship around, over, and under them as the enemy continued to try and get a bead on him.