Normally, an interior hit was pure luck—but this enemy didn’t even know it was a possibility. Four HSMs targeted each of the leading Servants and at least one arrived inside each of them.
One moment, twelve battleship-scale biological warships were plunging toward Morgan’s command at a relative five percent of lightspeed.
The next, Nguyen’s six targets were expanding clouds of debris that Morgan didn’t really want to see a close analysis of.
The surviving six were slow to start evasive maneuvering, but they were fast enough that the second salvo only got one interior hit. The other missiles made their close-range attack runs at a quarter of the speed of light, with over half missing or being shot down.
A second Servant died in a cascade of antimatter explosions, but Morgan knew that was their last easy shot. The third salvo didn’t kill any of them, though leaking liquids and vapors were clear on the scanners.
“The shuttles will be prepped in five minutes,” Nguyen said quietly. “If we turn now, we won’t be in deployment range for seven. Your orders, sir?”
A fourth salvo lashed the Servants, and Morgan watched in silence. This was the safest part of the fight, and part of her wanted to draw it out. There were arguments both ways, too, but she wasn’t sure how much of it was just to avoid the ravaging she knew her ship was going to take when she tried to punch through the expanding net of lesser Servants coming her way behind the interface-drive ships.
“I don’t suppose the Womb is going to push through her guardians and leave itself exposed, is it?” she asked aloud.
“The sun-eater appears to have settled at forty-two percent of lightspeed,” Nguyen told her. “The main swarm is holding velocity at half of light. Scans suggest they can go faster.”
“They’re waiting to see how the biggest and baddest do,” Morgan concluded. The answer was poorly. A ninth Servant died under her ship’s missiles, leaving only a quarter of the original squadron to continue their hopefully fruitless pursuit.
“We hold the course until the last of the interface drive units is dead,” she ordered. “Or until they demonstrate they can threaten us at this range.”
The range was still over a hundred million kilometers. They were outside the range of the starkillers, let alone the Servants’ more conventional weapons.
Unfortunately, the need to deliver the weapon into a sun had negated using an HSM chassis to deliver the starkillers. The Mesharom, who used a missile that generated both of its own hyperspace portals, hadn’t bothered. The Imperium, who generated the entry portal aboard the launching starship, couldn’t fit the weapons through their current generation of launchers.
A realspace deployment was required. The weapons had a long range, but today, that range wasn’t enough.
“Battleship Servants are improving their evasive maneuvers but not…enough,” Nguyen reported. Only one remained. “They also appear to have not mastered retreat.”
Twenty-four missiles flashed through hyperspace and bracketed the surviving bioship in an inescapable globe. When the half-teraton of explosions faded, only debris remained.
“Hostile squadron destroyed,” the tactical officer continued. “Main swarm continues on course at fifty percent of lightspeed.”
“Let’s give them a moment to see what they do,” Morgan ordered. “Come on,” she murmured to her distant opponent. “You don’t want me to get away. You want my power core and you’ve got an inner shell of defenders still. Bring it, you ancient bitch.”
Silence reigned on Defiance’s bridge for several seconds.
“Main swarm is splitting,” Nguyen reported. “We’ve thirty-five hundred units chasing us in a great big net, and they are breaking into two formations. Still a net big enough to catch our vectors toward the Womb, but half are maintaining point-five c and half are now accelerating toward us.”
“A thousand KPS squared still?” Morgan asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Let them come,” she ordered. She watched the velocity of her targets scream upwards. A hundred and fifty-five thousand kilometers a second. A hundred and sixty. A hundred and seventy.
A hundred and eighty thousand. Now they matched Defiance’s velocity and continued to accelerate.
“They can’t slow down from this speed, can they?” Morgan asked softly.
“Best guess is they have a little over one-point-one c of delta-v,” El-Amin told her. “Once they’re over sixty percent of lightspeed, somebody’s going to have to catch them.
“Or the Womb is writing them off to try and catch us.”
A hundred and ninety-five thousand kilometers per second. Sixty-five percent of lightspeed, heading directly toward Defiance.
“Do they have a chance in hell of being able to target us as we interpenetrate?” Morgan asked.
“We don’t with any of our sublight weapons,” Nguyen admitted. “I can launch a spread of interface missiles as we close, but the only close-range weapon I can hit them with is the hyperfold cannons. Our plasma weapons are useless at that speed.”
“Well, that does answer the important question, doesn’t it?” the Captain said with a small smile.
“Lesser Commander El-Amin, Lesser Commander Nguyen…execute.”
Six seconds. That was the time period necessary to completely change the vector of an interface drive.
One moment, Defiance was plunging directly away from the Womb at sixty percent of the speed of light, pursued by an immense swarm of bioships. Half of those bioships were slowly starting to gain on her, potentially sacrificing themselves for the chance to catch the Imperial cruiser.
Six seconds later, she was plunging into the teeth of that pursuing swarm at seventy percent of the speed of light.
There were a dozen reasons that no Imperial ship had a standard cruise speed of over sixty percent of light. It was energy-intensive and damaging to the engines. The dampeners used to contain the gravitic warping of an interface drive started to fail at those speeds, making it dangerous for the crew.
And, most relevant right now, at those velocities, even Imperial sensors started getting confused. Even though the interface drive didn’t play fair with either Newton or Einstein most of the time, velocities measured in fractions of the speed of light did not add neatly.
Morgan’s ship charged toward the bioships at seventy percent of light and they charged at her at just over sixty percent—but their true relative velocity was only around ninety-two percent of lightspeed.
That velocity still consumed the light-minutes between them with blistering speed.
“Targeting hyperfold cannon directly ahead,” Nguyen reported. “Launching sublight missiles and allocating HSMs.”
New icons appeared on Defiance’s plots as her standard missile launchers spoke. The missiles were fifteen percent of lightspeed faster than their mothership, and they plunged into the swarm ahead of her.
“Bogies are firing. I am evading,” El-Amin said, his tone utterly flat. “Enemy targeting is badly degraded by relative velocities and their own dilation effects.”
Morgan hadn’t even considered that. Defiance didn’t suffer from time dilation—a reduced degree of distance dilation, yes, but not time dilation—but the Servants were using reaction drives. They were fully subject to regular physics.
“They’re still shooting down the missiles,” Nguyen reported. “They’re going to hit us.”
“I know,” Morgan conceded. “Liepins, keep my shields up. We’ll cross the entire range envelope of the first swarm in under a minute. We have to survive that.”
The first swarm was seventeen hundred Servants, averaging over a million tons apiece. The second swarm was eighteen hundred, averaging a little under a million tons apiece.
“The problem is the third swarm,” Morgan murmured. There were still two thousand Servants directly accompanying the Womb, averaging over two million tons apiece. Some of them easily approached the ten-million-ton monsters they’d already smashed with the HSMs.
<
br /> “We’ll be on the right side of the first two swarms when we launch the starkillers,” she noted more loudly. “The last defensive swarm is the problem.”
“The decoy shuttles will help, but we have to draw their attention,” Nguyen said grimly. “I’m not seeing a lot of ways to do that.”
“I only see one,” Morgan agreed. “El-Amin…we’re not turning back once we launch the starkillers. We’re going right past that thing and we’re cutting through the range of the defensive swarm.”
“We can avoid their range, sir,” he argued.
“But they can almost certainly shoot down the starkillers, Lesser Commander, and nothing else in our magazines is going to take that thing out. We have to draw their attention.”
And while she wasn’t going to say it, Morgan knew that if came down to trading Defiance for the sun-eater, the Imperium came out ahead. She suspected the whole damn galaxy came out ahead.
“Entering estimated range of the first swarm in thirty seconds,” Nguyen reported. “Engaging with hyperfold cannon on our target list.” There was a long pause. “If I have to fight a battle outnumbered five thousand to one, can I at least fight an enemy that doesn’t take my best hits and keep coming?”
“Keep your fire spread,” Morgan ordered. “We’re better off right now with fifty Servants who can’t energize a full beam than with five who are vaporized.”
“Maintaining fire spread,” the tactical officer confirmed. “We’re landing solid hits, sir, but it’s taking at least half a dozen before they’re even acting like we touched them. I miss our own plasma lances.”
Almost in answer to Nguyen’s words—their own long-range plasma weaponry required a metallic or interface-drive target to an extent that made the Servants immune to it—the bioships opened fire. Near-lightspeed blasts of plasma littered the empty void around Defiance, and El-Amin twisted the ship like an angry seagull.
Hits still landed, but Liepins was watching the shields. Sectors flashed red as plasma beams nearly overwhelmed them, only to quickly flash back to orange as Engineering rebalanced power from the surrounding sections.
It was robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it worked. Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Thirty, and Defiance’s shields were still up.
But the range was nothing now. They’d avoided the center of the net the Servants had cast, but they couldn’t move far enough to avoid still having bioships on all sides. They just didn’t have several hundred bioships in any given direction.
Part of Morgan had hoped the Servants were stupid enough to injure each other as Defiance penetrated their formation, but they showed no signs of it. They exerted a level of situational awareness and fire control she wouldn’t have expected from less than an experienced Imperial fleet.
Nguyen had focused her fire from the beginning, continually opening a larger and larger hole of dead or crippled Servants. There were no functioning bioships within half a million kilometers of the point where the cruiser flashed through the Swarm—but half a million kilometers was bad enough.
The shields went down. Not individual sectors. Enough hits came in simultaneously that Defiance’s overpowered shields, based on a design stolen from the Taljzi and updated with select Mesharom technology, just…went down.
“Liepins!”
If Morgan’s engineer replied to her barked challenge, she didn’t hear him as warning chimes rang out around her, matching icons flashing across her display.
“We’ve been hit,” Liepins said grimly. “Multiple breaches on multiple decks, armor integrity is down to under forty percent. Shields…shields are cycling. Why are we still alive, Captain?”
It took Morgan a moment to work out just what Liepins was asking. They weren’t being shot at. They’d punched through the swarm…and now no one was shooting at them.
“Commander Nguyen?” she asked. “What happened?”
“They’re having problems turning around,” the tactical officer reported. “They don’t have shields or interface-drive fields. At those velocities, there’s enough particle density even out here to cause actual friction.”
“They can’t turn,” Morgan repeated, studying the screen. The icons of the enemy units were clear, pointed in the same direction they had for the last few hours. Days? Minutes? Morgan’s sense of time was getting messy.
“They can’t turn quickly; that’s for sure. We’re…we’re going to be out of range, I think, before they’ve flipped.”
“Hold your fire, then,” Morgan ordered. “Focus on the second swarm; stand by. We only have a few minutes until we hit them.”
She turned to Liepins.
“Any way we can keep the shields up next time?” she asked. “I’m not sure we can take that again, Lesser Commander.”
“We can’t,” Lesser Commander Liepins said grimly. “Blow a bigger hole? I’m not sure there’s anything I can do, Captain.”
“Understood.”
Morgan shook her head and looked at the display. Less than two minutes until they entered range of the second swarm. That group was moving slower as well, adding another ten seconds to the time they’d be in range.
At forty percent of light, this swarm was going to be able to turn.
“El-Amin, can you get us farther from the center?” she asked.
“If I do, we move away from the hole Commander Nguyen is blowing with the missiles,” her navigator pointed out.
A dozen or more Servants were already dead or crippled as Nguyen blazed her way through Defiance’s magazines.
“And I can’t punch a new one,” the tactical officer report grimly as a new set of red icons appeared on Morgan’s displays. “We are out of hyperspace missiles. They killed us a few hundred million tons of these things, but we’re down to interface missiles and the hyperfold cannons.”
“Then we go through the hole we’ve made,” Morgan conceded with a sigh. “Any ideas, people?”
Defiance’s bridge was silent as the seconds ticked away. The swarm they were charging toward was still six light-minutes short of the Womb itself. The immense Precursor creature continued to charge toward them at forty-two percent of light itself, seemingly eager to bring Morgan’s ship within its grasp.
She didn’t want to know what defenses the sun-eater could muster itself. At the minimum, she suspected the massive fusion thruster it no longer needed could function as the biggest plasma cannon in existence. It wasn’t currently pointed at Defiance, though, and she doubted a creature that massed as much as two stars could turn quickly enough to aim that engine.
“I have an idea,” El-Amin admitted. “It’s a terrible idea and I don’t know if it will work.”
“Will it keep us alive?” Morgan demanded.
“It’ll buy us about half a second,” the navigator told her. “If that. But…”
“Based off the last punch, half a second might just save us all. Do it,” Morgan ordered.
She didn’t ask what his plan was.
She didn’t really want to know.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The charge toward the second swarm went much the same as the first. Plasma washed over the shields, but Liepins kept them up. It went so much like the first, Morgan knew the Servants were preparing something.
“They’re conserving their fire and adjusting their positions,” Rogers’s voice said in her ear. “I don’t know what you’re planning, sir,” her First Sword continued, “but I suspect that if we get hit with the full fire of five hundred Servants at the same time, it isn’t going to happen.”
Secondary Control’s links to the bridge were now mostly open, a necessity for running the ship in a battle. Only the bridge crew had needed to be briefed on Final Dragon, which bought Morgan’s executive officer a bit of grace.
Even if the bridge was destroyed—difficult to do without destroying the entire ship—the starkillers would launch now. Commander Bethany Rogers could never be held responsible for Morgan’s decision.
The Final Dragon starkillers were, after
all, one of the Imperium’s most deeply held secrets. Morgan suspected she was about to fire a tenth of the Imperium’s entire arsenal of the weapons.
“I’d like to live through my plan,” Morgan conceded to Rogers. “So, I’m crossing my fingers for whatever El-Amin has come up with.”
She had a pretty good sense what it was, and she had to admit she was in full agreement with her navigator.
It was a terrible idea and she didn’t know if it was going to work.
“Penetration in ten seconds,” El-Amin reported. “Portal formation in nine. Eight. Seven.”
A hyperspace portal wasn’t impenetrable, but by its very nature, what went through it went somewhere else.
Better, though worse from any perspective except this one trick, they knew that they couldn’t manage a stable portal. The exotic-matter emitters would be pulsing rapidly, creating and losing multiple portals in a second as they tried to punch through a barrier too warped by the rapid movement of the Womb to allow a solid portal.
That would strain the emitters—but it would also provide Defiance with a shield that moved with her. For a bit.
El-Amin had guessed half a second. Morgan had privately estimated a third of that. They were both wrong.
“Unstable portal pattern in place,” the navigator snapped, the words already taking longer than Morgan had expected to have the shield. “Maintaining in position—pattern lost, we’ve lost the pattern…we’re through.”
They were. The portal pattern had held for two and a half critical seconds.
“Shields are still up,” Liepins reported. “Beaten to shit—we only blocked fire from one side—but the shields are still up.”
“They focused everything on trying to hit us, and El-Amin scattered that across a few dozen light-seconds of hyperspace,” Rogers said with satisfaction. “Can we do that again?”
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 29
