The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One by Evan Currie Read Free Book Online

come aboard, almost nine months earlier. Her crew had been the scattered sprinkling of individually great people, with none of the sense of family that existed in a truly great crew.
    Egos and conflicting habits had made true integration difficult, but they’d lucked out with Captain Weston, she believed, and when the chips came down, they’d pulled together and sailed through real history in the making. Something to be proud of on every level, she supposed. A lot of captains would have called it quits after the first contact with the Drasin, and possibly with excellent justification.
    Certainly, they wouldn’t have stuck it out to the end while on the wrong side of the six-to-one odds for a people they didn’t know and had no responsibility toward.
    And they probably would have been right to leave.
    However, it wouldn’t have felt right.
    Captain Weston had made a moral decision to override what was perhaps his legal responsibility. There were damn few men who would have made that stick, and even fewer who could come out of it with their career intact after making such a stand.
    The chief petty officer felt pretty smug about it all.
    A good captain was one thing, and important, to be sure, but a
lucky
captain, well, that was something every crew could get behind.

    “Hey, Jackson!”
    Lt. Jackson Crowley paused in his work and glanced back around toward the voice. “Yes, Sergeant, what can I do for you?”
    Sergeant Greene and three others were approaching in the distinctive walk of people wearing magnetic boots.
    “Yeah, LT,” another man wearing corporal’s insignia spoke up, “we were hoping you’d show us your new toy.”
    Crowley eyed the group warily, trying to gauge their attitudes. He certainly didn’t mind explaining how the EXO-12 armor would work as part of a combined arms team, but he didn’t have the desire to put up with the kind of crap that Greene had laid on him earlier.
    Finally, though, he sighed and nodded. “Sure. Come on over.”
    If there were any ground action on this trip, after all, they’d have to work together as a unit. And while the briefing he’d placed in the computer was available to all of them, it was better to get a jump on such things. It was bad enough that they’d not been able to properly train with the EXO-12 on board ship.
    He stepped down from his perch on the deactivated armor and pulled the cables from his programmer. He’d had to physically jack into the armor in order to review its core programming and make a few adjustments, a security measure in a world of wireless connectivity, and was almost happy with the adjustments he’d made to the armor’s sensor codes.
    “The EXO-Twelve,” he said, waving a hand at the imposing machine. “It’s mostly the same package as your power suits, so don’t get too intimidated by its size.”
    “It’s almost twice the fucking size,” someone said, looking up at the “head” on top of the armor. “It’s a walking tank!”
    “No, it’s armor,” Crowley corrected, “We don’t have the control systems to make walking tanks feasible—yet.”
    “Yet?”
    “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    Jackson focused on the last question. “The difference is that you pilot a tank. You wear the EXO-Twelve. That way, the operator can use his own sense of balance to supplement the onboard gyros, and it also makes operation more intuitive.”
    “What kind of tactical response are we talking about?”
    Jackson looked surprised and looked around to find the speaker. It was another lieutenant whom he didn’t recognize. “Good question…?”
    “Bermont,” Sean Bermont replied, pronouncing his name with the French habit of dropping the
t
at the end. “Sean Bermont.”
    “Well, Lieutenant Bermont”—Crowley nodded—“the EXO-Twelve has a state-of-the-art interface that’s based on the fifth-gen power suit systems. I’m not sure if you’ve been issued those yet?”
    They shook their