“Just SOP, Admiral,” Eric assured him, “and it’s not like we don’t have time.”

“This is true,” Tanner conceded.

Even with the priority repairs being arranged, the Odysseus would have several days—either Terran or Priminae—before she was fully repaired and completely ready for deployment.

►►►

AEV Odysseus

► The Odysseus hurtled through space, warping hard on an interception course with the bandit, lasers slashing out from the emitters even as beams crossed back and raked the flank of the speeding starship.

“Pause playback.”

The imagery stopped, and Steph leaned in to carefully observe the damage as it occurred in the Odysseus’ records.

“Frame by frame,” he ordered.

“What frame rate?” the computer inquired blandly.

Steph sighed, tilting his head to the left, and considered his response. “Make it two hundred frames per second.”

The image started forward again. The computer-enhanced imagery of beams lancing in from the black of space and burning into the hull of the Odysseus was a little cheesy as special effects went, but it still did the job he needed.

Steph made some other adjustments to the playback and set the computer working on pattern analysis. He was working on new attack programs as well as basic evasion and countermeasures for future encounters. The Odysseus wasn’t a fly-by-wire system, not even with NICS allowing him unparalleled access to the ship’s control systems. At the speeds the ship’s systems would be engaging potential targets, no human could possibly keep up, not even interfaced into the computers perfectly—and NICS was far from perfect.

So Steph was coding maneuvering programs with some basic variables he could punch in on the fly, giving him the best possible mix of human intuition and computer precision. A single pass, however, wasn’t a lot of data for him to extrapolate responses from.

He pushed back from the computer and glanced over to where he suspected Milla was doing much the same at the tactical stations.

“Lieutenant Chans,” he called softly.

She turned and looked over. “Yes Commander?”

“These . . . Imperials, they appear to be using systems based on older Priminae designs, correct?” he asked, though he could have simply made the statement. Such an idea was patently obvious, but no one wanted to be too confrontational with the Priminae serving on the Odysseus. Those who knew about the encounter with the Imperials were taking it pretty personally, Milla perhaps more than the rest.

“Yes,” she almost hissed out, her lips twisting slightly.

“Do your database files have tactical maneuvers and the like as well?” he asked hopefully.

Milla blinked. “Well of course, but . . .”

She fell silent for a moment, then turned and accessed the Priminae database. “One moment, Commander. I will locate the war files from the historical database. I believe I see what you hope to learn from those. You may be wrong, however . . .”