Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  #

  Shields flickered under the pounding. Four Kanzi cruisers disappeared, barely noticed in the armageddon being unleashed, and another salvo swept in on the A!Tol fleet.

  Ix!iIt might not seem to like Harriet, but once she’d decided to listen, she’d followed through. The next salvo ran into the beams of seventeen cruisers, and part of the A!Tol fleet was lit up with the glitter of proton beams.

  “Clear waters,” Vaza announced. “The squadron didn’t take a single hit.”

  “That’s incredible,” Harriet breathed.

  “Most of the missiles are aimed at the battleships,” the Indiri replied. “If we were facing more, we wouldn’t be able to take it.”

  Harriet nodded, her focus on the Kanzi fleet as another Imperial salvo struck home. Hunter’s Horn’s sensors were reporting localized shield failures across both fleets, but so far none of the capital ships had actually taken a hit.

  The A!Tol had started shooting first—so it was no surprise when the Kanzi took the first hit. A battleship’s icon flashed with a massive energy release as at least one missile impacted, the collapsing interface field releasing an unimaginable amount of kinetic energy.

  The flash faded, and the battleship in question belched out another swarm of missiles. The Kanzi vessel was almost entirely unarmored by any reasonable comparison to the hit she’d just taken, but the sheer size of a capital ship allowed one to take hits and keep fighting even after the shields went down.

  Internal baffling and tough hulls went only so far in the absence of armor that could actually stand up to those kinds of hits. The next Kanzi salvo tore into the A!Tol fleet…and one of the battleship captains’ luck ran out.

  Harriet wasn’t sure how many missiles slipped through the sudden collapse of Shield of Honor’s shields beyond “too many”. One moment, she was eight million tons of fire and death incarnate.

  The next, the battleship and six thousand sentients were expanding vapor…and the battle took on a new, harsher tempo as the range continued to drop.

  The damaged Kanzi battleship and one of her sisters blew apart on the next A!Tol salvo, and the next Kanzi salvo ran into a scattered mix of proton beams being used for missile defense.

  The defense wasn’t coordinated. It helped, but not enough, and Harriet gripped the arms of her command chair so tightly, her knuckles went white as half of the other cruiser squadron disappeared in balls of fire, lit up by the death of a second battleship.

  Her ship felt tiny and frail on the edge of this storm—and she wasn’t sure that her titans were winning in the clash she was observing.

  “Orders from the fleet flag,” Piditel reported. “All ships are to download and use your missile defense program.”

  “Maybe it will help,” she half-whispered, staring as more and more missiles filled the screen. Horn alone had fired off a quarter of her magazines, well over a thousand missiles, and she was only one of over a hundred and fifty ships in the fight—and one of the smaller ones.

  Kanzi ships were dying but still mostly cruisers. Their escorts seemed to be intentionally hurling themselves forward, absorbing missiles that would overwhelm their bigger siblings’ defenses, even as the Imperial fleet began to lash out to defend itself with beam weapons.

  Shield failures flickered across the fleet. A battleship took a hit but stayed in the fight. Then another. A third. Over half of the battleships left in the Imperial fleet were flashing red damage markers now, but at least as many Kanzi ships were showing the same markers.

  Horn shivered as a swarm of missiles picked her out of the mess, hammering her shields with cee-fractional blows that sent alerts flashing across her screen.

  “Vaza?” she snapped.

  “Nothing more I can do,” he said grimly. “They’re working their way through the cruisers and we’re up.”

  “Ides, keep us alive,” she ordered.

  “Trying,” he told her. “Beam range in two thousandth-cycles.”

  Unless someone broke off, that was going to hurt. The battleships on both sides carried massive beam armaments as well as their missiles, weapons that would cut through even capital shields with contemptuous ease.

  Fire rang in the deeps of space and two more damaged Kanzi battleships vanished, bringing the two battle lines down to the same number of capital ships.

  “They’re changing their vector!” Vaza declared loudly. “They’re running for hyperspace.”

  Harriet started to sigh in relief, but then she saw the exact vector the Kanzi fleet was following. They were running, all right—but they were going to spend at least a full thousandth-cycle in proton beam range of the A!Tol fleet.

  Horn trembled again, and she felt the difference even before the warning crossed her screens. This wasn’t the tremor of impacts on the shields. This was the shields failing.

  “Evasive now!”

  Ides was already trying…but it wasn’t enough.

  Hunter’s Horn lurched as the missile struck home, ripping through the cruiser’s starboard nacelles. Elegantly lined weapon mounts and extended drives and sensors ripped apart, tearing away as the weapon tore along the cruiser’s side and sent her careening, temporarily out of control.

  “Shields back up,” Sier announced.

  Harriet almost didn’t hear him, as in that moment, the battle lines finally clashed.

  Of the thirty-six capital ships that had started the fight, only twenty-one remained, eleven of them A!Tol. They passed into energy range of each other, and suddenly the cruisers and destroyers on both sides were almost irrelevant. Their beams could hurt each other, but it was the battleship beams that would decide this fight.

  Even Hunter’s Horn’s sensors had difficulty assessing the power unleashed in those seventy seconds. Battleaxes of directed energy smashed through shields with brutal force, and ships large and small alike came apart under the pounding.

  Two Kanzi battleships emerged from the titanic clash, running for hyperspace and streaming atmosphere, their remaining handful of escorts falling in behind them to protect them from any last missiles with their own shields.

  Even to Harriet, though, it was obvious no one was going to be sending those missiles. Six A!Tol battleships had somehow survived the collision, but the damage codes she was receiving suggested that none of them were even capable of launching missiles.

  There were more Imperial escorts left, but damaged or not, no one was going to go after battleships with cruisers.

  The Battle of Arcturus was over.

  #

  Chapter 50

  Harriet Tanaka could almost feel her ship’s pain. They’d been lucky—a more direct hit would have shattered the entire cruiser and killed everyone—but the damage they had taken was bad enough.

  Half of the weapons and scanners mounted externally to Hunter’s Horn’s hull were gone. Two of her fusion cores were destroyed and three more were in emergency shutdown, reducing the amount of her remaining systems she could even power.

  The cruiser was no longer combat-capable, but she managed to limp into orbit of Arcturus Four with the rest of the fleet.

  That orbit was empty now, the Kanzi logistics ships having fled while their battle squadrons had taken the fight to the Imperial formation. The Imperial ships settled into their place, licking their wounds as they tried to absorb the impact of what had just happened.

  “Transmission from the flag, Captain,” Piditel reported, the Rekiki sounding shaky even though the translator. “All captains are to report aboard Shield of Innocents with a full report of their ship’s status in one twentieth-cycle.”

  “Thank you, Speaker,” Harriet told her. “Sier?”

  “Captain?”

  “What’s the report from damage control?”

  “Not good,” he summarized. “We’ve lost sixty percent of our weapons and fifty percent of our power generation. We can still manage full maneuverability…if you find not being able to fire any of our weapons acceptable.”

  Harrie
t winced. Horn still had guns, but with so many of her fusion cores gone into critical shutdown or just gone, she didn’t have the power to run them.

  “Any chance on getting the shutdown cores back?” she asked.

  “Teams are investigating now,” her executive officer replied. “I am not hopeful.”

  “Keep me informed,” she told him. “I need to know just how bad of a shape we’re in when I meet the Fleet Lord.”

  “I don’t think we’ll even register on his problems, Captain,” Sier told her. “You’ve seen the status alerts on the battleships, right?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, conceding his point. Hunter’s Horn could at least make her full speed. None of the battleships could, though at least they all had some weapons left.

  “I wish we could have brought more ships,” she told her XO. “But…we couldn’t have waited. They might have moved on Sol before we got here.”

  “We won,” the Yin said flatly. “Your world is safe, the Imperium’s borders are secure, and the Kanzi will scrabble to find diplomatic excuses to avoid a war. The price was high, but we won.”

  “I know,” she agreed. But something still didn’t feel right.

  “I’d feel a lot better, though, if we could find Ki!Tana,” she admitted.

  They’d left the Ki!Tol and her scout ship to keep an eye on the Kanzi fleet. That she appeared to be missing did not set Harriet’s mind at ease.

  #

  Harriet had worked with Sier for a year and had worked with various Yin before that in her training. She had never, in all of that time, seen a Yin who looked quite as shattered as Captain Lira did.

  Unless she was mistaken, the Yin Captain was molting, shedding tiny feathers in a hazy but distinct trail down the back of her black uniform as she greeted the arriving captains.

  “Welcome aboard, Captain Tanaka,” she greeted Harriet, her eyes already glancing past to the next captain behind her. “We’re meeting in the main conference room; one of the specialists will guide you.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Harriet replied, receiving a short and exhausted nod before Lira moved on to the next officer, leaving Harriet to the mercies of the collection of noncommissioned officers behind her.

  “With me, Captain,” the next Yin NCO up told her. “We’re trying to get everyone settled as soon as possible.”

  With a nod, Harriet fell into step behind the junior noncom. The battle was over, but the situation was still chaotic enough that a lot of niceties were falling by the wayside.

  #

  The conference room was surprisingly simple, just a single massive table surrounded by seats designed for the twenty-three different species represented in the Twenty-Fifth Battle Squadron and its escorts.

  A lot of those seats were empty. Ten of the sixteen battleships were gone. Fourteen of the thirty-two cruisers. Ten of the destroyers. Almost half of the sentients who should have been at the table were missing, and the litany of damaged and battered ships was depressing.

  “It would have been worse,” Echelon Lord Ix!iIt stated calmly, “if Captain Tanaka had not been refining that missile defense program she provided. I had not seen similar use for our weapons before. The effectiveness surprised me.”

  “Review the footage from the Annexation of Sol when you have time, Echelon Lord,” Tan!Shallegh told her in a tired voice. “Suffice to say I was not surprised to see our first human Captain suggest such a tactic.

  “I, too, was surprised by its effectiveness even with our primary weapons. Captain Tanaka likely saved many lives today.”

  Harriet was thankful that few, if any, of the aliens around her knew humans well enough to recognize her blush.

  “The squadron is in poor shape,” Tan!Shallegh continued, “but we appear to have accomplished our objective. We will carry out what repairs we can from our resources, then return to Kimar, where I will inform the Empress of our victory.

  “By now, she should have already informed the First Priest that we are aware of this violation of our borders and demanded an explanation. We shall see where this leads, but we must be prepared for this fight to continue.”

  No one in the room looked at all enthused about that, and the Fleet Lord fluttered his tentacles in a shrug.

  “We will complete our repairs and receive reinforcements before we face the Kanzi in battle again, I believe,” he promised them. “You have done well. The Empress will recognize your valor.”

  #

  As the meeting wrapped up, Harriet’s communicator started buzzing. The device was set to ignore all but the highest-priority transmissions, so she hadn’t been expecting anything from the device. It was inbound from Hunter’s Horn—at the very highest priority.

  The briefing had slowed enough she was able to step outside the room and take the call without drawing too much attention.

  “What is it?” she hissed quietly.

  “Captain, it’s Vaza,” her tactical officer replied. “I’ve finished my post-processing run. Ki!Tana’s stealth ship is definitely not here and I know why.”

  “This better be…”

  “She left, Captain,” Vaza cut her off. “She left two cycles ago, following the entire Kanzi fleet.”

  Harriet’s heart stopped.

  “We just destroyed the Kanzi fleet,” she objected.

  “I got into the fleet ’nets and ran an analysis before I called you, Captain,” he told her. “Between us and Ki!Tana, we had hard IDs on two thirds of the ships that were here before. After the close pass, we have hard IDs on almost everything that was here today.

  “There’s no overlap. We just engaged an entirely different force than we originally found.

  “That first fleet is on its way to Sol.”

  They could catch them. They had Ki!Tana’s charts and could cut three cycles off the Kanzi squadrons’ time, arriving over twenty hours before the Kanzi…but the Twenty-Fifth Battle Squadron had been hammered into uselessness.

  “I need to talk to the Fleet Lord.”

  #

  Chapter 51

  Harriet walked back into the meeting room as if a dirge was playing in her ear.

  Something in her step, or in the fact that she’d left to take an urgent call and returned, was picked up by the officers. Conversations and discussions died down as she made the long walk across the room to face Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh at the head of the table.

  “Captain Tanaka,” he greeted her, his skin darkening with fear hues. “You walk like the condemned. What have you learned?”

  “This was a different fleet, my lord,” she told him, the words falling like tombstones into the silent room. “We ran the IDs versus the ships Hunter’s Horn encountered before. None of them were the same.”

  For a long moment, no one spoke.

  “I presume we know where they went,” Tan!Shallegh finally said, his skin now purplish-black.

  “Our analysis suggests they left for Sol two cycles ago,” she replied. “Using the charts Ki!Tana gave us, we could beat them there, but…”

  “But this squadron is not combat-capable,” the Fleet Lord said heavily.

  “That is not my call to make,” Harriet replied. “But I know my ship is not.”

  Every eye in the room was on Tan!Shallegh, the noble-blooded flag officer who’d annexed Sol and personally sworn to its safety.

  He rose. Even though he was small for an A!Tol, he still towered over Harriet and many of the other officers in the room.

  “This squadron cannot protect Sol,” he admitted aloud. “The Twenty-Fifth is not capable of going into action. Our escorts cannot defend the humans alone—but the charts Ki!Tana gave us do not only show a current toward Sol.”

  His skin was still dark, but green was overwhelming the purple now. Determination overcoming grief.

  “We will retain some ships here to protect the battleships, but the majority of the escorts will be deployed as couriers,” Tan!Shallegh declared. “Every fleet concentration in a hundred light-years will receive word.
The Duchy of Terra is part of the Imperium. They will not be abandoned.”

  His words echoed in the silent room, the clicks and buzzes of his own speech reverberating off the walls even as two dozen translations ran in everyone’s ears.

  “Captain Tanaka, remain with me. The rest of you, return to your ships,” he ordered. “You will have your destinations shortly.

  “May the currents of history remember us, my Captains. It is these cycles and these voyages that shall decide whether the war we have feared for a generation begins today.”

  #

  The briefing room emptied, until Harriet stood alone with the Fleet Lord. Tan!Shallegh shifted on his couch, as if trying to find a more comfortable position, then gestured her to the nearest remotely suitable chair.

  “Sit, Captain,” he ordered. “You are on the verge of shock. You will do no one favors like this.”

  “I am fine, sir,” she insisted—but she sat, and inhaled deeply to calm her shattered nerves.

  “We have a hundred possible places to send couriers, Captain,” he said gently, “and only forty ships. Damaged as Hunter’s Horn is, you say she can fly?”

  “We can fly and energize a hyper portal, sir,” Harriet confirmed. She knew what she wanted to do, but even if her crew would follow her, stealing her ship and flying back to Terra wouldn’t change anything.

  And she’d sworn an oath. Her ancestors would understand how she’d ended up where she stood today, she was certain, but they would never forgive her breaking an oath.

  “Hunter’s Horn stands ready to go wherever you send us, Fleet Lord.”

  “But your heart of hearts cries out for you to go home,” Tan!Shallegh said. “Few sentients of honor would feel anything else, Captain Tanaka, and I do not believe you are nearly so lost.”

  She sat up straighter, trying not to glare at her superior officer.

  “I know my duty, my lord.”

  “You do,” he confirmed. “But I am no fool, despite the evidence of today. I must send a courier to the Duchy of Terra, and I have an officer whose heart would break to go anywhere else.