It was to her shame, perhaps, that the rational side wasn’t the reason she didn’t look away. Lyssa tried to force herself to turn, to move, to do something, but instead she just froze there as the first of the alien bugs was joined by a second, and then a third.

The thinking brain wanted her to learn, the primal part wanted her to run, but Lyssa found herself caught by the sheer terror that gripped an even deeper part of her psyche. She froze in place and desperately hoped that they wouldn’t notice her if she stayed very, very still.

Getting the doors open without power while at a thirty-degree slant to the stern was a hassle that Eric doubted the designers had ever thought of. If they had, it was clear that they’d discarded the thought as too unlikely to bother with. He managed it, however, and pulled himself into the munitions storage of the Odyssey, then took a moment to rest and survey the area.

It was a mess, was the first thing that he obviously concluded.

Cargo pallets had been tossed around, broken open against each other and the deck and walls. The crash had spread their food stores and other general provisions across the decks, leaving most of it entirely unrecoverable.

Thankfully he hadn’t come for any of that.

Eric half crawled up the incline, making his way to the first level armory. There he continued past, ignoring the weapons left locked in their ready-release cases. Those had all survived, but would take more time to get to than they were worth.

Inside the next section, however, was the treasure.

The Museum was intact.

Eric was somewhat surprised, even though he’d counted on it. It was one thing to know how tightly secured the objects in the Museum were, but it was another to see it.

Suits of powered armor lined the walls. Rifles filled fast-deployment cases bolted to the floor. The SOCOM armory was designed to be deployed in a hurry, just not from underwater. So while he was gratified that the equipment was intact, he still had some work to do.

The Odyssey had been equipped with a War Level SOCOM deployment capability, on par with any aircraft carrier of her day.

Now, let’s see if we still have . . . Eric half thought to himself and half mumbled as he pulled open an electrical panel and threw a breaker. Ah, power.

The lights snapped on, running on battery and capacitors. Without the main reactor he only had a few hours of power, and only where the circuits weren’t shredded. The Odyssey had been designed with a decentralized power grid. Batteries and capacitors dotted the hull by the literal thousands, but Eric had no way of knowing just how many he had access to at the moment, or what kind of grounded shorts may be sucking power. So he got to work.