Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Page 6

  If the portal ships were the only ones with anomaly scanners, they had a chance after taking them. But that was a big if.

  “Multiple hits from the first salvo on the portal ship,” Ashmore reported. “Anomaly is…gone. The bioform might still be with us, but she’s not moving anymore.”

  New icons popped up on Morgan’s display before anyone could ask, and she tapped a command.

  “Sending you the targets for the other portal ships,” Morgan told him. “We think there’s only five left, but we’re flagging ten, as target identification isn’t perfect.”

  “We didn’t need the entire fleet’s missiles to kill the last one,” Tan!Stalla noted. “Split our fire, get them all. Then we can assess the rest of the fleet.”

  Morgan realized a new marker had added itself to the main tactical display. There were no features or geography to hyperspace, so all that was on that display were the maneuver cones of the Imperial task group and the closing Infinite bioforms.

  The new marker was a countdown, tracking the minutes until the Infinite units entered their estimated range of their ships. There were only three and a half minutes left.

  “Fleet navigation will stand by for my orders,” Tan!Stalla noted. “Running doesn’t seem to be working, but I have an alternative plan.

  “But kill me those portal ships, please.”

  Thirty-two capital ships and forty-eight cruisers of the A!Tol Imperial Navy fired a lot of missiles, even limited to the systems that worked in hyperspace. The Infinite lacked the maneuverability of interface-drive ships, making them easier targets in hyperspace.

  “We got four of them,” Ashmore reported as the Imperial missiles struck home. “Still six targets on the board, but next salvo is already inbound.”

  Morgan checked the timer. They had time. In theory…but she wasn’t sure what happened after the portal ships were gone. There was still a fleet of ships sixty to a hundred kilometers across, heading their way.

  “All targets down, all targets down,” Ashmore barked. “Casimir, what’s our chances?”

  “Ninety-five percent we got them all,” Morgan replied. “It’s possible we mis-IDed one, but there’s no way to tell now.”

  “Then we take the chance,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “Villeneuve Navigation, confirm: we have exited the Astoroko Nebula’s hyperspace shadow, correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” one of Arnaud’s officers replied. “We estimate we are least a light-month outside the nebula.”

  “Good. All ships will open portals and transition to regular space in half a thousandth-cycle,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “This collection is trapped in hyperspace. I am not risking this fleet to deal with them now!”

  Chapter Eight

  The countdown timer on the screen was down to its last half-minute when the portals flared to life in front of the Imperial warships. The destroyers, almost irrelevant in the missile exchange that had just occurred and definitely irrelevant in a plasma exchange, went first.

  Then the heavy cruisers. Then the battleships. Morgan suspected half of the flag bridge was holding their breath as a group when Jean Villeneuve finally flashed through her own portal and plummeted back into the void of deep space.

  “Watch for portals,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “If we estimated wrong, this could get messy fast.”

  Morgan went right back to holding her breath. The team that might have got things wrong was hers—if they’d missed even a single portal ship, the entire Infinite strike force might come out of hyperspace on their head.

  On the other hand, in normal space with hyperspace missiles and hyperfold guns, they’d potentially be able to wipe out any remaining portal ships and flee back into hyperspace again. They just wouldn’t do so without paying for it.

  “No portals on the screens,” Ashmore reported. “Anomaly scanners suggest that the enemy may be slowing into position around us. Hard to tell just yet.”

  The irony of anomaly scanners was that they could still track FTL ships from normal space—but they tracked that data with a regular lightspeed delay. That had been useful for Earth, prior to joining the Imperium, when an array of scanner satellites had allowed them to locate Imperial worlds before they ever knew what they were looking at.

  Right now, they’d be able to detect the Infinite fleet coming back toward them…but they wouldn’t know until the enemy was right on top of them, separated only by an impenetrable barrier of reality.

  “Keep an eye on them; hold the fleet at battle stations,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “Nitik, get a hyperfold pulse to the main fleet ready. Dump everything we’ve got. The Laians need to know there’s a fleet wandering loose in hyperspace in the region as their reinforcements approach.

  “Even if the Infinite are blind now, our allies will need to be careful.”

  Morgan was already going over the data of the last thousandth-cycle or so they’d been in hyperspace, and she shook her head as the Squadron Lord spoke.

  “They’re not blinded, sadly,” she reported. “We definitely got the portal ships, but they were still tracking us after the portal units went down. I’d guess several of the larger units also had anomaly scanners.”

  “It was worth a hope,” Tan!Stalla replied with a flush of purple disappointment. “But those are the waters I anticipated. If they truly had been blind, we could have stuck in hyperspace and bled them until we ran out of missiles.

  “Maybe even risked a plasma engagement. But…”

  She fluttered her tentacles.

  “Prott?” Tan!Stalla turned to her chief of staff. “Once we stand down from battle stations, I’ll need a coordinated meeting with all of the Captains. We got out of this bloodlessly, but we’re also trapped in normal space for the moment.

  “Let’s learn what we can from the experience. Getting out of here is going to be an entirely different storm.”

  A twentieth-cycle—a bit over an hour—later, it was clear that the Infinite didn’t have any portal ships left. It was also clear that they knew exactly where the Imperial fleet had gone back into normal space, their anomalies leaving measurable wakes as they flickered around Tan!Stalla’s fleet.

  The virtual meeting had a grim tone, one that Morgan shared. They’d achieved their mission and kept the Infinite contained, but now they, too, were trapped.

  “Captain Arnaud, I know we’ve all mathed the swim out,” Tan!Stalla said after the last officer linked into the massive conference. “Lay out the waters as your team has calculated.”

  “Comme vous voudrez,” Arnaud replied.

  His blip of French brought a momentary smile to Morgan’s face. Everyone else’s translators would have rendered “as you wish,” but hers was programmed with her understanding of French—and the phrase reminded her of Defiance’s Marine CO, an intentionally prissy but overwhelmingly competent officer who’d insisted on scattering French through his English when dealing with his human subordinates.

  “My navigators have run up a full course,” Jean Villeneuve’s Captain continued. “The problem is inevitable, of course. They are in hyperspace. We are not. Assuming a minimum safe margin of distance between us and the Infinite of one light-cycle in hyperspace…”

  He shook his head.

  “We estimate a minimum of one month—thirty cycles—underway at full cruising velocity,” he concluded. “Hyperspace densities are always in flux, so even that may not be enough.”

  “And farther is better,” Tan!Stalla noted, turning her attention to the hundred–plus faces in the conference. “Staff Captain Casimir, your assessment of our ability to engage the Infinite at close range.”

  Morgan wanted to grimace as everyone’s gazes turned to her.

  “In hyperspace, we are limited to plasma lances, proton beams, and interface-drive missiles,” she reminded them all. “We’ve already fired off thirty-two percent of our sublight missile magazines.

  “Based off our sensor data and our encounters in Kosha, it is a safe assumption that Infinite plasma weaponry is more powerful t
han our own,” she said. “Without shields or high metal concentrations for the plasma lances’ magnetic tubes to latch on to, we do not believe we have a range advantage over them. Lightspeed is lightspeed, after all.”

  The conference was almost perfectly silent, and she shrugged.

  “Most likely, the Category Five bioform is capable of generating plasma pulses that can vaporize a Galileo-class superbattleship in a single hit,” she told them. “The Category Fours can likely vaporize a cruiser—if they hit. Hyperspace is an awful targeting environment for any system.

  “Unless they have something else we haven’t predicted, their tachyon scanners won’t work in hyperspace any better than ours do. We won’t have instantaneous targeting—but neither will they.

  “On the other hand, their firepower is utterly overwhelming at close range. I do not believe that this fleet would survive to clear the Infinite swarm’s plasma range if we were to transit into hyperspace in our current relative locations.”

  If she was being entirely honest, she didn’t believe the fleet would survive past the first ten seconds. A close-range engagement with the Infinite was suicide.

  “So, what do we do?” Squadron Lord Exex asked. The Catach sterile was a chitin-armored mammal that resembled a cross between a human, a fox, and an insect. “If we cannot outrun and we cannot engage them, do we simply wait?”

  “Our first wave of Laian reinforcements is due in less than eight cycles,” Tan!Stalla noted. “We have not yet established contact with them via the hyperfold-starcom network, but we will be able to inform them of the situation.

  “I hope to be able to have an actual conversation with Fifty-Sixth Pincer Korodaun, but that is uncertain at the moment,” the Squadron Lord said.

  To have that conversation, Korodaun and her fleet would need to exit hyperspace to allow them to directly connect via hyperfold com. Right now, their messages were being relayed to the nearest starcom and then sent to the Laian fleet.

  “Even without direct planning, ten war-dreadnoughts is a far more equitable matchup with the enemy advance force than ours,” Tan!Stalla continued. “Especially given that we will be aware once the battle is opened.”

  “Would we be wiser waiting for the second wave of reinforcements?” Arnaud asked, the Flag Captain raising Morgan’s own thoughts.

  “Most likely, yes,” Tan!Stalla agreed. “And if I am able to have a conversation with the Fifty-Sixth Pincer, I will make that recommendation. Twenty war-dreadnoughts is better than ten. Thirty is better still.

  “But I remind everyone that our objective was to contain the Infinite inside the Astoroko Nebula. The destruction of their first wave of portal ships achieves that goal. There is now an Infinite swarm trapped in hyperspace blockading us, but that force cannot enter normal space.

  “They will be destroyed or they will starve in hyperspace,” the A!Tol flag officer said grimly. “We have bought time for our Lain reinforcements to arrive. More ships will come in over time and we will secure the nebula.”

  “When do we move against the Infinite?” Division Lord S!Ra asked. The A!Tol commanded one of the escorting squadrons of cruisers.

  “Not soon,” Tan!Stalla replied. “Review the analysis Staff Captain Casimir’s team did, Division Lord,” she instructed. “Even range-limited by their use of ballistic near-c weaponry, the Infinite main cluster represents an astonishing threat level.

  “Once the Laians are on the same page and have implemented a successful blockade of the Astoroko Nebula, plans can begin to be made to neutralize the overall threat.” Tan!Stalla’s tentacles shivered.

  “I do not believe those waters will be cleared without more blood than any of us wish to spend,” the Squadron Lord concluded. “But those decisions will be made at higher levels. Our task was to contain the Infinite until the Laians arrived.

  “Unless something strange happens in the next fifteen cycles, we appear to have succeeded.”

  Morgan shivered. She couldn’t disagree with her superior…but those were dangerous words.

  Chapter Nine

  “We’ve traded containing them for containing us,” Morgan’s image admitted to Rin. “That’s not the official word, but it’s roughly where we are. They can’t get out, but they’ve got a pretty solid plug in hyperspace keeping us right here.

  “My team is busy trying to guess how quickly they’re going to get their own hyper-portal system working,” she continued. “We’ve got a few ugly little facts out of our close scan of the fleet that came at us, though, that I wanted to share with you.

  “They all have some level of exotic matter in them. I’m guessing it’s a critical part of what makes them tick—potentially even part of how they traveled FTL during Alavan times. Unfortunately, if they can produce exotic matter, very little of our tech is truly beyond them.”

  Rin didn’t know about that, but he wasn’t a technical specialist. He was a xenoarchaeologist and, outside the Alava, most xenoarchaeology sites didn’t deal with hyper-advanced technology.

  “Sorry to fill up our personal call with work,” Morgan said after a few moments’ silence. “It’s filling my every waking thought, and Victoria isn’t cleared for this.”

  She sighed.

  “I did get your message,” she noted. “I have to agree that it’s dangerous to apply the Mother’s abilities to the Infinite. We know they have to be more capable than she was in many ways. On the other hand, she was a hell of a lot bigger than even the Queen.

  “Some stuff had to benefit from that.” She snorted. “And work again. Sorry. I’d like to plan for what to do when we get back to Earth, but…I have no idea when this will be over.

  “When it is, you and I are going home and spending time with Victoria and Shelly,” she told him. “Well, maybe not Shelly. That’s up to her.”

  Rin chuckled. He wasn’t entirely sure how, exactly, Shelly—Victoria’s wife—fit into his own relationship with Morgan, but he’d traded a few friendly messages with Victoria. Polycules were almost as hard to keep track of as departmental politics, even if there were fewer people involved.

  Morgan blew him a kiss.

  “I’m going to go get some rest,” she admitted. “But if there’s any fires you can light to get more ships headed our way, I’m pretty sure I can find a way to make it worth your while. Night, Rin.”

  She gave him an exaggerated wink and then her image froze.

  Rin sighed and closed the video. He didn’t know what levers he had. Most of the ones he could think of were better pulled by Ki!Tana or Tan!Shallegh, but he was at least there. His role seemed to basically be “advisor to the Fleet Lord,” which at least put him in the room where things happened.

  The truth, though, was that not much was happening—regardless of whether Rin Dunst said anything.

  Despite questioning his value, Rin joined Tan!Shallegh again. Every day since he’d arrived aboard Va!Tola, he’d joined the A!Tol Fleet Lord in the armored and secured conference chamber deep in the superbattleship’s bowels.

  There, they met with Princess Oxtashah and Eleventh Voice Tidirok. There, they listened to the two insect-like aliens beat their heads against the same points of conflict again. And again. And again.

  Rin had been there for over a month now. Tan!Shallegh had been there longer. The original need for the conference was clearly fulfilled—the two nations weren’t shooting at each other.

  Now the conference was about the Infinite…but the Wendira continued to hold their position that the Laians had to compensate them for their losses to the provocateurs who’d tried to start a war.

  Of course, they weren’t willing to compensate the Laians for the Republic’s losses from the Wendira part of those provocateurs. It was a simple point, one around which the two sides had been circling for weeks, and Rin Dunst was a student of history.

  These kinds of deadlocks didn’t break without an outside force. He just wasn’t sure what that force was going to be.

  “Have you reviewed the repo
rts I forwarded you both about Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla’s encounter with the Infinite?” Tan!Shallegh asked once the formal niceties were done. “We now have a more detailed combat engagement than Defiance’s near-destruction.”

  “We do,” Oxtashah agreed. “I must admit, I find these creatures far from as intimidating as you seem to. They are large, perhaps, but they failed to inflict any damage at all on the A!Tol force. Your ships are not Core Power vessels, and they survived the encounter unscathed.”

  “And are now trapped in an empty stretch of void far from any warmth or shore,” Tan!Shallegh replied. “If they were to reenter hyperspace, they would be obliterated. The limitations of the Infinite’s range were expected, and Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla used them perfectly.

  “It is what the Infinite had that we did not expect that concerns me.”

  “They appear to be very efficient scavengers,” Tidirok observed. “Thirty-four cycles to study, adapt and integrate stolen hyper emitters into their own biology. Plus missiles. I will admit I did not expect either so quickly.”

  “These beings terrified the Alava,” Rin said quietly. “We are reasonably sure this group of Infinite defeated the Alavan sector fleet the conspirators were hunting and sent its survivors fleeing into the Astoroko Nebula to hide.

  “Like Alavan technology, much of their old weaponry is likely nonfunctional. But they have had fifty thousand years to work through that problem.”

  “You are still trying to convince me that this danger is sufficient for us to lay aside our dead,” Oxtashah pointed out. “I am not convinced. My Queens have made their demands clear.”

  “And the Grand Parliament has made their counteroffer,” Tidirok snapped. “We will compensate the Grand Hive for their losses if the Grand Hive compensates the Republic for ours.”