Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  It was now truly his dream flag deck, and he sat in his command chair and watched the timers tick down toward the Kanzi arrival with trepidation in his heart.

  Bond had taken one of the consoles, the Duchess even now not-so-gently defusing an argument between two Australian mayors over water rights by threatening to install a Ducal facility and charge them both premium rates.

  Only when the battle finally started could the Duchess take her attention away from the affairs of her world. Passing command of Duchess of Terra to the Imperial Navy, much as Jean would miss the ship, had been a brilliant idea.

  “Ten minutes,” Colonel Wellesley noted softly from next to him. “How accurate is this timer, Admiral?”

  “Within half an hour either way, we guess,” Jean replied. “Ki!Tana had to leave them behind and take a different route to get here, after all. No has seen them in twelve cycles, over ten days. They could even have gone somewhere completely different.”

  “What are the odds of that?”

  “The Kovius Treaty means the A!Tol have only a handful of outposts within forty light-years of Sol,” Jean replied. “There’s nowhere else for them to go, not with twenty battleships.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Wellesley sighed. “I’ll get out of your hair, Admiral,” he continued with a crisp salute. “This one’s your fight.”

  Jean returned the salute and went back to watching the holodisplay.

  Three super-battleships. One cruiser. One destroyer. Three weapons platforms roughly as capable as Hunter’s Horn before that cruiser’s damage.

  It was a frail shield to hang in the path of the armada that was coming, but it was all Jean Villeneuve had.

  This was the second time he’d faced an alien invasion of his homeworld, and he swore to himself that this time, he would not fail.

  #

  Emperor of China loped through space, carving a long oval course that would take the super-battleship through the most likely emergency points for the Kanzi fleet. Taking it at fifteen percent of lightspeed, the loop would take the warship fifteen minutes to complete.

  Queen of England was five minutes behind Andrew’s ship, and Duchess of Terra five minutes behind her. At no point would any of the capital ships be out of range of the other two—but if one of them was on top of the Kanzi when they emerged, the hammerblow they could deliver before they had to flee could help turn the odds in the defenders’ favor.

  It would also, Andrew knew, be damned hard on his ship or Sade’s if they were the “lucky” one. Their shields should hold long enough to run, but it wasn’t a sure thing. Between the missile defenses, the shields, and the armor, Duchess would definitely be able to run.

  But they only had one Duchess, so his ship made its loop, launchers and beams at the ready.

  “They are overdue,” Maksimov said sharply. “One would expect better punctuality from religious slavers than this.”

  “It’s always possible they decided to go pick a fight with the squadron at Kimar instead,” Andrew replied. “I certainly wouldn’t complain if they decided to go tangle with someone their own weight.”

  He glanced over the space surrounding them in the holotank.

  “More likely, however, they’re simply a little bit slower in hyperspace than Ki!Tana estimated,” he continued grimly. “Keep your eyes peeled, Vitya. We know they’re coming.”

  “Do we?” the Russian challenged. “We’re operating on the word of an alien, one who’s an exile, so far as I can tell. Why are we trusting her?”

  “The Duchess trusts her because Ki!Tana helped us when were we out being privateers,” Andrew said sharply. “I trust her. Everyone who was on Operation Privateer would gladly fight at Ki!Tana’s side, Commander.

  “No. If that particular alien exile tells me the Kanzi are coming, the Kanzi are coming,” he concluded. “So keep your damned eyes peeled.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Arendse?”

  “Captain?” his navigator replied.

  “You have the course dialed in for us to run back to Earth orbit as soon as the bastards appear?” he asked.

  They could get a solid punch in while the Kanzi appeared, but once the real battle was joined, Andrew wanted Tornado and Geneva’s point defenses between his ship and an entire battle fleet.

  “Of course, sir. Direct line at point five cee. Even at our furthest point, we’re two minutes from orbit.”

  “Thank you,” Andrew told her. He leaned back in his chair studying the hologram again.

  War was ninety-nine percent waiting, one percent deadly terror. Some waiting, however, was worse than others.

  #

  There was a strangely still feeling to the entire affair. Every station and colony off of Earth had gone silent, leaving only the three starships carving their massive, light-minute-diameter loops through the system. The flag bridge aboard Duchess of Terra was silent as the crew watched those ships, and Annette Bond had to fight the urge to hold her breath.

  She wasn’t even able to pretend to work anymore and stood next to the console she’d claimed, watching the hologram of the star system shift above her head. Every minute, every second, that passed increased the almost-nonexistent odds that the Kanzi had gone somewhere else.

  More importantly, however, every moment the Kanzi were late was a moment closer to the Imperial Navy arriving. A single echelon of battleships would be enough to change the tide of the battle. Depending on the timing, a single division of super-battleships.

  But she could do the math. The nearest concentration that would actually be able to risk deploying against a Kanzi battle fleet was the squadron at Kimar. No one at Kimar would even know Sol was under attack for two more days, and it would be a week for the capital ships there to reach Earth.

  Nine days. There might be a few singletons that could arrive before that, but other than the morale impact to both her people and the Kanzi, those ships would have a minimal impact.

  “I don’t suppose you have a miracle tucked away in your back pocket, Your Grace,” Jean murmured as he stepped up to join her.

  “No, I’m afraid,” she replied. “Just the hope that we can sucker-punch them as they emerge, then make them afraid of the defense constellation.”

  A frail hope. The scattering of missile launcher satellites they had could almost certainly kill a battleship for her. One battleship. That left nineteen for the Militia and Duchess of Terra.

  “Then we are down to the last and most important of resources, I’m afraid,” he replied.

  “And what is that, Admiral?”

  “Your countrymen’s stock in trade,” Villeneuve said with a smile. “Sheer bloody Yankee stubbornness.”

  She couldn’t help herself. She laughed, letting the sound ripple out around the room.

  The flag deck crew glanced over at her and the Admiral, and small smiles flashed on their faces as their shoulders relaxed. If the Duchess could laugh, perhaps they could carry this after all.

  “Thank you, Jean,” she told him. “For everything. I don’t think I’d have made this Duchy business work without you.”

  “It was a group effort, Your Grace,” he replied. “I’d hope your Council lived up to your expectations.”

  “I hope we all live up to Earth’s expectations,” Annette said. “And keep living up to them, Admiral. This doesn’t end today. I refuse for it to end today.”

  “Keep that in mind,” Villeneuve advised her. “We’re all going to need some of that before this is done.”

  “Ma’am, sir!” One of the techs interrupted them. “Hyper portal!”

  #

  Chapter 57

  “Dō shiyō,” Harriet whispered. “They’re coming out on top of Queen of England.”

  The hyper portal was forming less than half a million kilometers from Captain Sade’s super-battleship. Harriet watched on the tank, half-expecting the Militia Captain to turn her ship away, to open the range to allow for a missile engagement.

  But Sade kne
w the same thing Harriet did: Queen of England wasn’t much more likely to survive a close-range missile engagement, and she would be able to do far more damage in a point-blank beam clash.

  The Imperial Captain watched in silent respect as Queen of England turned into the hyper portal and accelerated, crossing the gap as the Kanzi ships began to emerge.

  Duchess of Terra was almost ten million kilometers away. Everything she was seeing was thirty or more seconds out of date, and the massive hyper portal’s burst of radiation made it impossible for Duchess’s sensors to resolve any details of the emerging ships.

  Sade’s ship was close enough that her scanners would cut through that chaotic mess, and the holotank reported the signatures of missile launches and proton beams as the super-battleship launched herself into the heart of the attacking fleet.

  “Orders from the Admiral,” Piditel reported. “We and Emperor of China are to close to extreme range and engage with missiles to try and cover Queen of England.”

  “Take us in, Ides,” Harriet snapped. It wasn’t going to change the fate of Captain Sade and her crew, but they could use it as a wedge to try and shatter the Kanzi morale. “Hold the range at twenty light-seconds.

  “Vaza, open fire at maximum range and pour it on. We have the magazines to burn; let’s use them.”

  The Terrans might not be able to refill her magazines, but the super-battleships carried thousands of missiles. She’d gladly spend some to give Queen of England even a miniscule chance of escape.

  “I have major explosions in the hyper portal interference.” Vaza reported. “At least two, maybe, three capital ships. Dark tides… There goes another one.”

  As the Kanzi fleet completed their transition to normal space, they began to be more easily visible to the sensors of the ships closing with them—and more easily targeted. Emperor and Duchess opened fire, pouring missiles into the conflagration Queen of England was creating.

  Even as the sensors resolved, two Kanzi cruisers made a suicide run on the super-battleship with proton beams blazing. They stopped in space, slammed to a halt by the energy transfer of super-capital proton beams that smashed through their shields and hulls to stop them in place and gut them both in a perfectly paired set of explosions.

  The Terran super-battleship’s shields were already flickering, failing in sections as dozens of proton beams and literally uncountable missiles slammed home. The Kanzi might not have been expecting to be ambushed on emergence, but there was nothing wrong with the Theocracy Navy’s training or professionalism.

  Another battleship came apart as a stream of missiles tore through a shield weakened by beam fire, then a trio of destroyers interposed themselves in front of another capital ship and died as they took the proton beams meant for it.

  The first salvos from Emperor and Duchess were a surprise, hammering into the melee from behind and overwhelming the strained shields of another battleship, its explosive death lighting up one side of the Kanzi formation as the two ships tried to save their sister.

  But it was too much. An entire fleet poured fire into Queen of England at point-blank range, and she didn’t have compressed-matter armor. Didn’t have anti-missile turrets to reduce the missiles.

  One moment, Queen of England was a leviathan of fury surrounded by petty sharks…and the next she was gone, multi-gigaton kinetic strikes wiping her from existence as a dozen or more missiles struck home at once.

  “Withdraw to the defense constellation,” Villeneuve ordered in Harriet’s earset. “We need to preserve our ammunition.”

  “They’re shattered, broken,” she objected. “We should push our advantage.”

  “We don’t have enough missiles to kill them all, Captain Tanaka. More than anything, we have to buy time…and as you say, they are shattered. Let them spend the hours to rebuild their formation while we guard Earth.

  “The Navy is coming, after all.”

  Technically, Villeneuve couldn’t give her orders, only make suggestions. Her heart rebelled. She wanted to close with the Kanzi, hammer them until she ran out of missiles, take advantage of their broken formations to shatter the blue-furred bastards who threatened her race.

  But as the data continued to resolve, she knew that would be suicide. Fourteen battleships remained. Twenty-five cruisers. Twelve destroyers. Disorganized and shattered or not, Sol’s defenders would lose that fight.

  “Ides, set a course for Earth orbit,” she ordered heavily. “Vaza, keep pounding them as we withdraw. If they fire back, let the shields take it unless we risk losing them. We don’t want to show our hand just yet.”

  #

  Disorganized the Kanzi might have been, but they weren’t going to let Andrew just zip past them unmolested. Arendse’s course curved away from the Theocracy fleet, holding them at maximum range as Emperor of China ran for Earth orbit, but the battleships were blasting missiles at them less than a minute after Queen of England died.

  Their squadron fire control was gone and the salvos weren’t focused, but fourteen battleships’ worth of missiles was more than Andrew wanted to tangle with.

  “Pull us directly away,” he ordered Arendse. “Bring us around the far side of Earth if that’s what it takes, but I want to get out of their range.”

  Whoever was in command over there had recognized the weaknesses of his broken command structure and just ordered his capital ships to dump missiles at one of the two ships on the board. At this range, Emperor could take those salvos. Probably.

  “Hold our fire,” he told Maksimov. “We aren’t maintaining this engagement long enough to kill one, so the missiles would be wasted.”

  “That feels…wrong,” the Russian tactical officer complained.

  “Shields regenerate, Commander. Missiles don’t.”

  “Missiles at twenty seconds to impact; initiating evasive maneuvers,” Arendse announced.

  There was nothing to feel as the massive ship began to spiral in space, the interface drive shifting her course a dozen times without any noticeable acceleration aboard the ship.

  When the missiles started hitting the shields, however, Andrew felt it. A tremor in the chair, in the deck plates under his feet, as hundreds of cee-fractional missiles slammed into the energy screen.

  There was no coordination to the salvos. No streams of missiles focused on a single target. No exquisitely timed mass strike to attempt to overwhelm the entire shield. Arendse’s maneuvers stretched out the impact time, spreading the hundreds of impacts over ten, then fifteen, then twenty seconds.

  Emperor’s shields held.

  “Clear of their range,” Maksimov reported. “One more set of salvos incoming.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “No better coordinated than the last ones. The shields will hold.”

  “What’s our time back to Earth?”

  “Five minutes,” Arendse replied. “Everyone else will be there first.”

  “Everyone else was closer,” Andrew reminded them. The Kanzi weren’t pursuing Emperor or Duchess, a reprieve he was relieved to see.

  The Kanzi fleet had lost over a quarter of their firepower in the moments after they’d arrived. Even assuming Queen hadn’t been lucky enough to knock out the flagship, that was a body blow that few formations could recover from quickly.

  “The Kanzi will recover,” Andrew continued grimly. “They get to choose the tune of the next dance, and I doubt it’ll be one we like.”

  #

  Annette stood next to the holotank, watching Emperor of China run from the Kanzi missiles, and kept her eyes level, her face still. In the cold logic of war, they’d been lucky. The Kanzi emerging that close to Queen of England had allowed the super-battleship to inflict unexpectedly disproportionate losses on the assault force.

  But with Sade gone, she was down another group of friends—and some from the very select list of people who’d followed her into war against the A!Tol when Earth fell.

  How long, she wondered, until all of those brave souls were dead and only she was left t
o soldier on with the decision she’d made?

  “What now, Jean?” she asked, hoping for her study of the plot to produce an answer.

  “We organize our formations within the constellation and prepare for them to come to us,” Villeneuve replied. “It’s a waiting game, Your Grace.”

  “And the longer they take putting themselves together, the better off we are,” she acknowledged with a sigh. “I can’t say I’m a fan of having them in my star system, Admiral, but I understand.”

  The collection of red icons on the holotank looked like a disease, a rash on deep space fifteen million kilometers from Earth.

  Emperor completed her arc, the super-battleship slotting into place alongside Duchess. Geneva and Tornado drifted up from beneath the ring of satellites, the destroyer and cruiser moving into place to cover Emperor of China and her lack of active defenses.

  The two escorts looked tiny and frail next to the leviathans Annette had managed to acquire to defend her world, but Tornado, especially, was actually harder to kill than Emperor was. As Annette watched, tiny green icons flickered out from every ship except Emperor, rainshower defender and Buckler drones deploying to shield their motherships.

  “What happens if we miss a missile?” she asked suddenly, realizing that the backstop to this battle was Earth.

  “I asked Elon the same question,” Villeneuve told her. “The drive fields only fail catastrophically when they hit a solid object. Atmosphere triggers a safety mechanism that shuts them down completely.”

  He shrugged, more fatalistic than she suspected he actually was.

  “Without the drive field, the missiles will slowly fall and burn up. I can only hope the Kanzi have the same safety mechanism—and the fact that they haven’t accidentally wrecked any worlds I know of suggests so.”