He stepped into the Cat panel, locking the loader into place as best he could as he leaned forward. A blur of motion to his left made him turn at the torso, reaching out automatically with his left arm to snap the lunging Drasin out of the air. He held it in place, hissing and screaming, while he contacted the detonators he’d set earlier and gave them a nudge.

The distant crump was barely audible, but Eric knew that the blasts were small and directed away from his current location. Shaped charges blew down into engineering, sending plasma into the reactor room and penetrating containment.

The Odyssey used a fusion system, a very safe and stable reactor technology that wasn’t prone to the meltdown problems that plagued fission systems. It did, however, run on compressed hydrogen gas.

When the hydrogen was ignited by the plasma and mixed with an influx of oxygen from the breach, things got hot in a hurry. The reactor itself could have handled the heat easily, but it was the containment tanks that took the hit, and they weren’t proofed to the same degree. Engineering vanished into a ball of flame so blue as to be practically invisible until it began melting the plastics littered around the area.

The fires of hell erupted out of engineering, rolling upward through the decks, pushing the air before it. When it reached the flight deck, the pounds per square inch were low, but the square footage was immense.

The entire far wall blew in with enough force to make Eric cringe as he ducked down and sent the launch command to the Cat. The electromagnetic launch exploded forward, driving him and the loader out at five Gs, straight at the port-side hatch. Eric folded the loader’s big steel arms in front of him as he exploded out of his ship even as the fires roared past.

“Holy son of a . . .”

Lyssa hugged the control console of the boat as blasts of fire exploded out of the Odyssey’s keel at even points along the side, moving up from the waterline toward where the bow was hanging fifty meters over the water.

A plume of fire then erupted from the bow and scorched the sky for hundreds of meters above the ship in a display of pyrotechnics that Lyssa expected would be visible for miles around. She was so focused on the blast of flames that she almost missed the smoking projectile that arced over her head, a scorched yellow missile that left a wake in the air as it fell into the water of the sound a few hundred meters away.

For a long moment Lyssa just sat there, eyes moving from the splash point of yet another mysterious object, the fiery wreck of the Odyssey that was now smoking like a giant cannon sticking out of the sound, and finally the bobbing assault craft floating around her.