The planet meant there was a colony there. The space station meant there was a resupply base there. And there was only one colony and one resupply base within thirty light-years.
“It’s headed for the Kosha System, and it’s up to an average velocity of seven percent of light,” Nguyen said grimly. “Assuming a constant acceleration, it would have a current velocity of almost point-one-five c.
“That’s still sixty years from reaching Kosha Station, but…”
“The course change represents a clear and direct threat,” Morgan confirmed. “Commander El-Amin! Assuming it’s followed that course and acceleration, our ETA to intercept? I don’t want to get closer than a light-day at initial emergence.”
“Local hyperspace is pretty stable, and there are no currents or unexpected dead zones,” the navigator replied, clearly thinking out loud. “Eleven hours, roughly half a cycle.”
The degree to which human Imperials intermingled Imperial time and date standards with Terran measurements could still amuse Morgan, even at the most dangerous times.
“All right. El-Amin, get us back into hyperspace heading after that thing,” Morgan ordered. “Rogers, stand the ship down. Minimum watches, cycle for the next nine hours so everybody gets at least six hours’ rest and sleep.”
“And in nine hours, sir?” Rogers asked. She knew the answer, Morgan was sure, but it needed to go in the record.
“In nine hours, we go to battle stations. I don’t trust the Children not to have some kind of watch in hyperspace, and I am so very done with Precursor surprises.”
Morgan knew she wasn’t going to sleep, but she had to set an example. She retreated to her quarters, dimmed the lights, and started soft music playing.
There were a thousand things she could do. She could record a message for Victoria. She could talk to Rin or even drag him to bed with her, though that felt a little too much like taking advantage of her position.
None of them really appealed. She stared at the dim ceiling while the music played, but she kept running through mental scenarios again and again and again.
Finally, she got back up with a sigh and pulled up a tactical-simulator program on her computer. They had a pretty good idea of the bioship’s capabilities. The real question was how many bioships the Womb would have to defend itself and whether the Children would have more modern vessels to assist.
No one had confirmed the existence of a covert scout expedition based around a long-range freighter, but she didn’t need that confirmation. She’d seen the data Murtas had acquired around the known members of the Children and Child of the Great Mother.
A long-range military freighter with a Navy science team and a handful of Imperial Archeology Institute specialists to provide extra backup on the knowledge side. The problem she was facing was that the Imperium wouldn’t have sent one ship.
Child of the Rising Storm would have been sent out with escorts. That could have ranged from a single destroyer up to multiple heavy cruisers, depending on how dangerous the A!Tol had judged this region of space at the time.
Morgan would have sent heavy cruisers, at least, along with any expedition that expected to meet Precursor technology. Given the time line, that probably meant some iteration of the Thunderstorm class, the first cruisers equipped with HSMs.
Defiance could handle any of her predecessors one-on-one, but even a two-ship division of cruisers could wreck Morgan’s command in a straight-up fight. That was ignoring the bioships, and the computer was happily telling her there was no basis on which to calculate an upper limit on the number of those.
The Womb had the mass of three entire star systems to play with. The first one had been specifically blown into pieces by the Precursors to feed to it more easily, but the bioships, according to the simulation Morgan ran as she was thinking about it, could do a decent job of carving up a planet.
That carving would take longer than using the Precursors’ teleported munitions. That potentially explained why the Womb was “only” twenty-five light-years away after fifty thousand years if it could get up to fifteen percent of lightspeed.
Most likely, moving the entire star at that kind of velocity was draining on both its energy and fuel reserves. Without a reason, the Womb wouldn’t accelerate that fast.
That meant, of course, that the Womb was specifically targeting Kosha. It wanted the naval base and the colony, but for what?
Unless Morgan missed her guess and her math, the Womb would need to eat when it reached Kosha. To sustain itself, it needed to eat the planets and sun of each star system it arrived at. It was going to burn through most of the mass left to it in its captive sun just to reach Kosha.
But…sixty years. That wasn’t quite the worst-case scenario, but it put the Womb’s limits in perspective. To push an entire star’s worth of mass, even ignoring whatever the Womb itself weighed, to that kind of velocity with a reaction engine…
It couldn’t go that much faster; not with a glorified fusion rocket pushing a star. So, sixty years. Maybe fifty.
In a hundred long-cycles, the Imperium could move mountains. Build entire new fleets specifically intended to fight the Womb.
That it was headed for Kosha made it a direct threat to Imperial territory and Imperial citizens, but for all of its scale, power, and horrific diet…the Womb was far from an immediate threat.
Morgan would scout it out, and the Imperium would send a fleet. It would be handled and handled without any real danger to anyone.
So why did fear coil around her spine and keep her awake?
Chapter Forty-Six
Defiance’s bridge hummed with activity. Morgan sat at the center of that hum, a trained pattern of shifting attention keeping her aware of everything going on. Repeater screens on her chair arms let her pull up what any station on the bridge was looking at, and the main holoprojector showed the standard tactical display as well.
Everything was green. Defiance’s weapons, engines, defenses and sensors were clear, and the minutes were ticking down toward the moment of truth. Even from six light-months away, there was only so much detail they’d been able to discern of a creature next to a star.
From the planned light-day, they’d be able to count its hairs. Assuming the Womb had hairs, that was.
“Emergence in five minutes,” El-Amin reported. “Mass shadow is where we were expecting it.” He paused. “It’s bigger than I was expecting. I’m going to have to adjust our emergence.”
“Understood,” Morgan replied. “Tactical, be prepared for the unexpected.”
“If anything out here twitches, it better flag an Imperial IFF fast or it’s going to get shot,” Nguyen said grimly. “Anomaly scanners are clear; I have no hyperspace contacts.”
Morgan nodded silently as the seconds ticked down.
“I’m going to have to bring us out early, and I can’t be certain of the range,” the navigator told them all. “Mass shadow is significantly larger than expected. I’m not sure where the thing actually is.”
“Understood,” Morgan repeated. “Emergence, Commander?”
“Sixty seconds,” El-Amin snapped. He tapped a command and opened a shipwide channel.
“All hands, this is Lesser Commander El-Amin. We are emerging early; stand by for portal translation.”
Seconds ticked by and new icons popped up on Morgan’s screens as power ran to her ship’s exotic-matter emitters. They charged up, flashed on her screens, and then the main display showed them activating.
Outside of a combat situation, a portal was usually opened five to ten light-seconds ahead of a ship. It could be cut tighter if necessary, but the extra range gave a navigator time and a safety margin.
Safety margin if, for example, an unexpectedly variable mass shadow caused the portal to open three light-seconds closer than expected.
“Portal close, portal close!” El-Amin snapped. “Emergence!”
Despite the problems, Defiance slashed into normal space with most of her usual grace, the por
tal collapsing behind her as El-Amin twisted her through a ninety-degree turn to keep her from heading directly at their target.
The main holodisplay filled almost instantly, Nguyen’s team standing by to pick up their prey, and Morgan felt the shock ripple across their bridge as they finally got a solid look at the Womb, the Great Mother—the alien artifact that an Imperial survey team had decided was a god.
Even in her worst nightmares, Morgan had envisaged the Womb as a parasite on the stars it consumed, a gas giant–sized tick or mosquito “drinking” the stars’ plasma to consume it.
She was not prepared for the size of her prey. Scale wasn’t a term she could apply—she had nothing to really give the Womb scale—but it was immense. It resembled its teardrop-like progeny in rough form, with a bulbous “head” that wrapped around the star, and a long tail, easily ten times as long as the star it was feeding on was wide, that extended out into space and presumably acted as a magnetic accelerator to turn starstuff into reaction mass.
“How…how big is that thing?” Morgan asked softly.
“It has the mass of an entire star system,” Nguyen told her. “That’s what screwed up El-Amin’s calculations. We were expecting a subdwarf, maybe an orange dwarf. A tenth to a quarter of a solar mass.
“I’m reading just over two solar masses.”
“It ate three star systems and metabolized them,” Rogers said from secondary control. “Much of the stellar mass was expended as fuel, but that’s still three star systems.”
“How close are we? I can’t tell from the display,” Morgan snapped.
“Its size is confusing our systems… Maybe two light-hours. We came in far closer than we were planning,” El-Amin admitted. “I am maintaining the range.”
“It’s two-point-three million kilometers from the top of the ‘head’ to the tip of the ‘tail,’” Nguyen reported. “I’m not sure even our antimatter bombs are going to make a dent in that thing.”
“They will if we bring enough of them,” Morgan replied. “I need a confirm on the velocity vector.”
Silence answered her as her bridge crew bent to their work. That wasn’t a question that should have taken this long, but their scanners weren’t designed for a creature with twice the mass and three times the size of Earth’s sun.
“Vector remains on a direct line for the Kosha System,” Nguyen finally confirmed. “Current velocity, eighteen-point-five percent of lightspeed. It is not currently accelerating or decelerating.” She swallowed audibly.
“It is likely reserving what remains of the last sun it captured to sustain itself until it reaches Kosha and to provide deceleration at the other end,” she concluded. “My god.”
“People, that is a sun-eater,” Morgan said as levelly as she could manage. “Its lack of speed contains it, but that is a clear and present threat to any and all civilizations near it.
“Our job is not to destroy it today,” she continued. “As Lesser Commander Nguyen pointed out, our entire arsenal of HSMs would probably fail to kill it without far more precise targeting than we are capable of.”
She smiled thinly.
“Which means, people, that our job is to get in close enough and get enough scan data that when we bring a real fleet to kill this thing, they are capable of that precision targeting.”
Morgan gestured to El-Amin.
“Lesser Commander El-Amin, set our course for the sun-eater,” she ordered. “In the absence of hostile activity, we will approach to one light-minute for detailed tachyon and lightspeed scans.”
“You think it’s going to let us that close?” Rogers asked.
“I think we’re going to see how many bioships it has to defend itself in about two hours,” Morgan replied. “We have the advantage in that they’re not expecting us and they probably don’t have hyperfold-equipped sensor probes watching us.
“We will close in realspace at point-six c. At some point in the next three hours, we’re going to encounter their defenders, and we’ll see just what the Children and their ‘Great Mother’ are bringing to the party.
“I have no intention of risking this ship, people, but we need as much data as possible,” she reminded them all. “The closer we can get, the better off we are. I am prepared to play cat and mouse with the Servants if that’s what it takes, but if that thing has a weak point, I want to know.”
Because she’d be far happier if they could take it out with two battleships in a few weeks than if they had to wait years to assemble a fleet.
Just because it was currently only traveling at eighteen and a half percent of lightspeed didn’t mean that was as fast as it could go. Nine and a half light-years gave the Imperium space and time, but Morgan wasn’t sure just how many risks she was willing to take with this kind of monster.
Defiance’s journey toward the Womb was blisteringly fast by any objective standard, the cruiser’s cruising speed of sixty percent of lightspeed crossing vast distances in moments.
The distance they were crossing was even more vast. Now that they understood what they were facing, Morgan knew that they could use a hyperspace jump to close the range—but speed wasn’t the point anymore.
She wanted to see how the Womb—and the Children—reacted.
In two hours, they closed over half the distance to the Precursor monstrosity, but then the light of their arrival finally reached it. Their tachyon scanners didn’t reach it yet, but the probes they’d sent ahead of them were twelve light-minutes closer.
Still not in tachyon-scanner range, but close enough that Morgan saw her enemy’s reaction after thirty minutes instead of forty.
“Drones have contacts,” Nguyen reported. “As expected, I’m seeing deployment of bioship Servants…”
Nguyen didn’t need to continue her report. The red icons on the screen were visibly beyond counting, bubbling out of the Womb like an over-shaken soda. Not dozens. Not hundreds.
Thousands of bioships. Probably more. All of them accelerating toward Defiance at the same thousands of gravities as the Servants they’d encountered before.
“We can still evade them,” El-Amin reported calmly. “I’m not sure we can get past them to get a decent scan of the creature itself, though.”
“We are far more maneuverable than they are,” Morgan replied. “Nguyen. If there’s a standard prefabricated base on that thing, how close would we need to get to detect it?”
“Like the one at D-L-T-Three?” her tactical officer asked. She paused for several seconds, everyone on the bridge watching as more Servants spilled out from the Womb.
“Within five light-minutes,” she admitted. “And I couldn’t be certain it didn’t exist until about two light-minutes.”
Thirty-six million kilometers. Morgan didn’t bother to ask if tachyon sensors would help—the five-light-minute number told her that was using the tachyon scanners.
“At a thousand KPS squared, can they get into range of us before then?” Morgan asked.
“Easily,” Nguyen admitted. “It will take us another fifty minutes to get that close. I’m not sure what their speed cap is, but they’ll match our velocity in three minutes. Relative velocity gets weird at that point, but they’ll intercept us about halfway.”
“I don’t suppose they’re all being so helpful as to charge right at us like that?”
“Negative,” the tactical officer replied. “Looks like ‘only’ about five hundred of them are headed straight for us. We’ve got about three thousand units spreading out in a cone around that, creating an interception zone we’d almost certainly have to pass through to reach the Womb itself.”
“And how many are staying behind?” Morgan asked.
“About another four thousand,” Nguyen said. “I’ve got about eight thousand Servants on the screens, and some of them are big. It looks like there’s a core of battleship-sized units in the force hanging back to defend the Womb.”
Morgan was silent, studying the situation. She could reverse Defiance’s velocity in six
seconds, turn her headlong charge into a headlong flight. The cruiser could dance circles around the Servants in her sleep, but…
She shook her head.
“El-Amin, ninety-degree vector change, port and up,” she ordered. “Let’s circle for the moment and see what they do.”
“They have the interior position, sir,” Rogers warned over their private channel. “And enough acceleration to make sure we can’t get through.”
“I know,” Morgan agreed behind her privacy screen. “But they can’t force us into a fight, not with reaction drives.”
“No. But we’re twenty light-minutes out, and I’m not sure how much closer we can get, sir,” her First Sword told her. “I’m not sure we’re going to get into five light-minutes. The Servants are already starting to shoot down sensor probes.”
Morgan checked the status of their forward probes and grimaced. Nguyen had set up several patterns at fixed distances from Defiance, moving her real-time sensor range forward, but the farthest pattern had now collided with the Servants and was getting picked off by precision plasma blasts from the living ships.
“We need to get closer,” she said aloud. “If we cut around to the other side in hyperspace, that will at least leave this bunch heading in the wrong direction at a good chunk of lightspeed.”
“We’re only going to get one group of the things headed the wrong way, sir,” Rogers warned. “They’re too fast—and they’re only going to fall for that once. We’ve scouted the target, Captain. It might be time to fall back and bring in bigger guns.”
Morgan nodded, dropping the privacy screen and studying the screen again. There were a lot of bioships out there, and they seemed determined to chase her.
“Sir?” Nystrom’s voice sounded concerned. No one had been expecting the communications officer to have much role in today’s work, but her battle station was on the bridge.
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 27
