The command deck of the big ship was quiet as they passed the orbit of the former red planet, now a crumbling mass of Drasin soldier drones, most crushed by the sheer weight of their fellows. In a few million years, the Sol System would have a second asteroid belt, but for the foreseeable future, Eric supposed, Earth and its inhabitants would have to make do with a monument to the dangers of the universe and the evils that could come from the deep black.

“Salvo away,” Milla reported as the number-three gun fired.

The tachyon transition cannon was the Odysseus’ main weapon, a nuclear device capable of dispatching high megaton and gigaton explosives to any target within several light-minutes instantaneously. On the screen, just over the uneven curve that still marked the red planet’s horizon, the small explosive detonated.

For a moment, a sunrise shone brightly over a portion of the ragged and fallen world, and then it was gone.

Eric let the silence hold for a moment longer, taking a breath before speaking.

“Helm, make course for the heliopause. Full power to wave drives.”

“Aye Captain,” Steph confirmed as he tapped in the command he’d already prepared. “Wave drives to full power. We are on course for the heliopause. ETA . . . eight hours, sir.”

Eric nodded. “Thank you.”

Eight hours was a fraction of the time the voyage used to take. The wave drive did away with many of the problems that used to plague the reaction drive of the Odyssey, including issues that arose from relativistic effects on its systems. The Odysseus sat securely in the middle of a warped section of space-time and simply surfed the wave while remaining in a stable state of “Earth standard” space-time.

The math made his head ache, and Eric was no slouch in mathematics, but the end result was a much faster propulsion drive that had far fewer maintenance problems than the Odyssey’s reaction drives had ever had. The propulsion system wasn’t even an alien design, or at least it was a design that humans had come up with independently before the Priminae offered to build ships for Earth.

The Chinese scientists from the Eastern Block had built a somewhat cruder version on their own, which was one reason why many of the officers serving in even the Odysseus’ engineering section were Chinese or other nationalities allied with the Block.

That, he hated to admit, was going to take some getting used to.

Eric had spent too many years looking at Block officers over the proverbial, and sometimes literal, rails of his guns.

I may be getting too old for this, Eric thought.

Times changed. That was a rule set in the very foundation of the universe, but men had limitations in their flexibility.

“Commander, you have command,” he said as he got up from his station. “I’ll be . . . on the flight deck.”

“Aye sir, I have the conn,” Miram confirmed, shifting stations.

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