“And because they underestimated our strength,” Tan!Shallegh said. “If they were expecting just the First Defense Fleet—or perhaps the Grand Fleet as well—they would not be expecting to meet the Wendira Battle Hives.
“We have more ships than they expect and more firepower.” He snapped his beak harshly. “It is not solely my call, but I believe we will need to turn the fleets back. If they want a chance to eliminate the triple fleets, we will give it to them.”
Morgan nodded.
“I think,” she stressed, “that the combined fleets should be able to handle Swarm Bravo, so long as her missiles remain limited.”
“That depends on how intelligent they are, Staff Captain,” Tan!Shallegh reminded her. “Because Tohrohsail is a Laian fleet munitions depot as well as a repair base. Depending on whether they’re smart enough to look for storage depots and to prevent the defenders destroying them, there are more missiles in that system than they fired at Korodaun.”
“They’re smart enough to find that,” Morgan guessed with a grimace. “They’re probably smarter than we are, but they often lack context for what we’re doing. I suspect they can figure out a missile storage station.”
“So do I,” the Fleet Lord agreed. “I will speak with the fleet commanders. Casimir, reconvene with your team and analyze our data on the Tohrohsail System.
“I doubt they held, so I need to know what the Infinite are going to have to throw at us.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And remember that you will be asked one question I know you can’t answer,” he said grimly, “but you must have a guess for anyway: will the Infinite harm the civilian population of the system?”
Morgan nodded with a hard swallow.
“Fifty-two-point-six million Laians, Staff Captain,” he continued. “Not all civilians, not by a coastline in a system hosting a fleet base, but still noncombatants. Your team needs to tell me if we’re looking at a complete wipeout.”
“What if we are, sir?” Morgan half-whispered.
“Then we need to consider whether it’s worth it to retake Tohrohsail if we can’t do so in time to save the people.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“I have no idea,” Rin Dunst admitted, looking around at the analysis team Morgan had put together.
His lover was leaning against the holotank itself, silently lost in thought after repeating the Fleet Lord’s question to Rin and her team.
“The Alava feared them,” he told the team. “But we know very little about their interactions. We know they were around for long enough for a rogue faction based around adopting their biotech to take up residence out near Kosha, with a local security force that was using a Dyson swarm to power shipyards that surrounded an entire gas giant.
“Even the Alava didn’t build such things quickly. We’re talking at least decades, and some of the evidence we saw out there suggested they’d been out there for centuries, completely ignoring the central authority.”
The team sat in quiet contemplation of a horrifying question.
“I can’t help but think that if the Infinite had been exterminating every settlement they came across, the Alava would have been more unified in dealing with them,” he admitted. “But the tone of some of what we do know suggests that a lot of the Alava thought the Infinite were just animals until later on.
“Then they were the Enemy, hated and feared in equal measure, the threat that led the Alava to break the universe.”
“What happened in between?” Shotilik asked.
“We don’t know,” Rin said. “My guess? That rogue faction of Alava started experimenting on the Infinite and did something one step too far. I don’t think the Alava meant to start a war—but I think the Infinite decided they needed to finish one.
“I’m scraping and connecting facts that might not be connected,” he warned. “But I think the Infinite started a campaign of annihilation, wiping out planets and systems as they advanced on the main Alavan systems.
“But before that, they existed alongside the Alava for centuries. Measured and controlled as the Infinite campaign seems to have been, they still crossed hundreds of light-years in decades of fire and war,” Rin concluded. “That doesn’t line up with the rogue factions working on stolen Infinite biotech or anything similar.
“Something changed in the relationship between the Alava and the Infinite. There are, now that I’ve looked for them, reference to spacegoing beasts that might well be the Infinite—and they go back for a long damn time.”
The Infinite as a force and a threat were a memory of the final years of the Alava, but there were records of similar creatures going back to some of the earliest records the Mesharom had copied down from their old masters.
“So, the Infinite didn’t destroy every alien they encountered originally,” Shotilik concluded. “And then they started wiping out the Alava whenever they came across them. I guess that only leaves one question, but it’s not like we can answer that one, either.”
“Do they regard us as the Alava they wiped out…or the people they basically ignored before that?” Took asked. “We cannot control the winds of their minds. But at least we can conclude that there is a chance they haven’t burnt Tohrohsail to the bare rock.”
“What kind of chance?” Ito asked, her voice strained even through the translator. “One in five? One in three?”
“One in three is what I’m going to tell the Fleet Lord,” Morgan decided aloud, rising from the holotank, and turning around to look at them all.
“Thank you, Rin,” she told him. “We needed that information. We don’t know what they’re doing now—we can only go on what they did before.
“And the fact that Swarm Bravo just hit Tohrohsail with everything they had. There’s no way the forts and frigates held, people. We’re three cycles out—and in three cycles, this ship and every one of her sisters engages the Infinite.”
There was no way for them to send messages home or anything until they left hyperspace and could link into the hyperfold network. Even then, Rin understood that it would take longer than normal if the starcom station in Tohrohsail was gone.
“We don’t know if they see us as successors to the Alava,” he murmured. “But I suspect we’d really prefer it if they didn’t.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Morgan didn’t know what discussions had taken place in the closed virtual conferences between the top levels of the fleet’s command. She did know that less than half a cycle had passed between the combined fleet receiving the news of the attack on Tohrohsail and the entire force turning around.
“No contacts in hyperspace around the system,” Etri announced from Storm Sentinel’s flag bridge.
Every member of Tan!Shallegh’s staff and their support teams were on duty at that moment. Morgan had the operations officer’s console on Va!Tola linked to her analysis team in the FOC. If something happened to Storm Sentinel, her team would become the Fleet Operations team.
Until then, their job was to intake data and make assessments of the enemy.
“Shouldn’t there be something in hyperspace?” !Pana asked, her skin shading darker.
“It’s possible for space around Tohrohsail to be empty,” the Pibo operations officer said slowly. “But statistically unlikely. For the entirety of the time the Grand Fleet was there, there was a near-continuous stream of supply transports flowing back and forth from the Republic.”
“Then there are almost certainly Infinite sentinels in hyperspace,” Tan!Shallegh declared. “I know they are not running interface drives, but we do not want to be surprised at close range by even smaller bioforms.
“Focus the fleet’s sensors, Division Lord Etri,” he ordered. “There has to be a way to detect them.”
“Not unless they move, sir,” Etri admitted. “We’ll watch for them to twitch, but unless they move or activate an interface drive, they’re invisible outside the visibility bubble.”
“Both the Laians and Wendira have ships t
hat can stealth in hyperspace,” Morgan pointed out. “Maybe one of them can send scout ships forward to clear the zone around the system?”
She agreed with Tan!Shallegh’s assessment. For the hyperspace around Tohrohsail to be as quiet as it was, the Infinite had been wiping out any ships coming through. That meant there were bioforms in hyperspace—and even a smaller bioform could cause a lot of havoc if they only discovered it at three hundred thousand kilometers!
“I will ask,” Tan!Shallegh agreed. A privacy shield descended around the Fleet Lord a few moments later, leaving the rest of the flag deck teams to their duties.
Morgan’s duties were mostly preparation at this point. Her team had given their best estimate of what they were facing in Tohrohsail and would actively update as the battle continued.
They were reasonably certain they were facing Swarm Bravo, which gave them some basic information. There were no shielded units but lots of missile-launcher-equipped bioforms. Seizure of the fleet depots in Tohrohsail meant that the Infinite had a lot of ammunition to play with, too. The estimates Morgan had received said there were at least twenty million missiles in the fleet base’s storage facilities.
Swarm Bravo had a lot of long-range firepower to play with. What they didn’t have was hyperspace missiles or starfighters, which gave the combined fleet advantages from its diversity.
“Two squadrons of star intruders are moving forward to sweep the hyperspace-equivalent of the Tohrohsail System,” Tan!Shallegh reported as his privacy shield lifted. “The rest of the fleet will hold position here, at one light-minute, while those carriers advance.”
The star intruders had been humanity’s first encounter with the Wendira—if not necessarily the Imperium’s—when several of them had been used to attack a human colony in the Alpha Centauri Incident.
Stealthed carriers, smaller even than the star shields, let alone their star hive siblings, the star intruders were effectively unarmed other than their starfighters. Each carried a Grand Wing of two hundred and fifty-six of the unique-to-the-Wendira spacecraft, piloted by the short-lived Wendira Drone caste.
With only twenty A!Tol long-cycles to live, Wendira Drones’ only hope for immortality was history. That urge had given the Wendira some of their greatest musicians and artists—and also provided them with a near-infinite supply of pilots willing to strap in for missions with an average fifty-four percent loss rate.
Morgan watched as the massive array of hyperspace anomalies marking the combined fleet came to a halt relative to their destination. It didn’t look like anything kept moving, which meant the ten carriers already had their stealth systems engaged.
“Are we getting anything relayed back from them?” !Pana asked. “I’m not seeing com drones.”
“That would risk the stealth,” Etri suggested. “We’ll see when they deploy their fighters. It’s not like the intruders themselves can deal with the bioforms.”
It only took a few minutes to cross the distance to the system, but it was almost ten before new anomalies appeared on the scanners. The star intruders had positioned themselves evenly across the area of hyperspace that corresponded to the Tohrohsail System and then launched their starfighters simultaneously.
Twenty-five hundred–plus tiny anomalies sparkled across the display as the fighters swept for enemy ships.
“What do we have on their current class?” Morgan murmured into her channel with her own team.
“Scythe of Doom-class,” Took replied after a moment, the Yin woman probably looking up the data as she was answering the question. “Upgraded from the Flying Sword of Fire class we saw at the Centauri Incident. Modular weaponry: they can be fitted with either missiles, a plasma cannon or a hyperfold cannon. Capable of point-eight c under interface drive. Twenty-seven-hour endurance.”
Morgan nodded silently, watching the fighters sweep across. Another anomaly appeared, then two—then six, as the bioform sentinels started maneuvering to engage the tiny scouts.
It turned out that half of this wave of fighters had been equipped with missiles. Six bioforms started moving, and ten thousand missiles appeared out of the darkness to storm in on them.
The other half of the Scythes of Doom were right behind the missiles, plasma cannons flashing. None of the bioforms even managed to initiate a portal before they vanished.
There was a pause on Va!Tola’s flag deck, then Tan!Shallegh snapped his beak.
“Grand Fleet will advance in concert with our allies,” he ordered. “Prepare to transition to normal space.”
Thousands of individual hyper portals cast their own anomalies through the void of hyperspace, blending together in the sensor screens until it looked like one massive portal tens of thousands of kilometers across.
The three fleets didn’t have enough synchronization to create a single portal like that, though Morgan knew it would be more efficient. That kind of planning, using a small number of hyper-capable ships to open a portal for an entire fleet, was essential to their enemy—and normally a sign of an extremely well-trained and -practiced fleet.
The patchier method of individual portals still delivered the combined fleet to their destination, tens of billions of tons of warships taking shape in the outer extremes of a system that should have belonged to them.
Scanners strained to provide a clear picture of the star system, but Morgan only had eyes for two pieces of data.
First, the location of Swarm Bravo. The majority of the bioforms were where she’d expected. At least a thousand of the Infinite creatures were gathered around the Laian fleet base and the gas giant the fleet base fueled from. Presumably, they were still tearing through the wreckage of the command centers and storage depots for anything they could use.
The second piece of data was any evidence that the civilian population was still present—and Morgan exhaled an immense sigh of relief as stations and asteroid colonies began to ping up on the map in yellow—active neutrals. They had power, which meant they probably had air and heat—which meant they had people.
There was no way to hide major space installations, and Tohrohsail didn’t have a habitable planet. Every one of the fifty-plus million people in the system lived aboard something immediately identifiable by even basic scanners.
And the vast majority of those facilities were intact. The updates continued to flow across Morgan’s screen, and she noted that there were bioforms standing watch over the largest clusters of habitations, but those habitations were intact.
“No ships,” Shotilik murmured. “All of the installations and stations outside the fleet base appear to be intact, but I’m not reading any shipping.”
“Only about half of those colonies are self-sustaining, in any wind,” Took argued. “There has to have been shipping for all of them to still be functioning, even after only eleven cycles.”
“Took, keep your eyes on that,” Morgan ordered. “See what you can identify of the intact noncombatant populations and what the Infinite appears to have made of them. Everyone else, focus on Swarm Bravo.
“If they’ve only got Category Twos and bigger, are they even capable of pulling the missiles from the depots?” she asked. “I’d love to be able to tell the Fleet Lord that the big guns don’t have missiles.”
“On it,” Shotilik replied. “Tachyon scanners show they have detected us—on their tachyon scanners, I assume—and are organizing their herd to face the fleets.”
The combined fleets had come out of hyperspace a long way from the gas-giant fleet base. At eight light-minutes, they were well outside the range of any weapons system the fleet had. The point had been to give them a chance to decide whether or not to embrace the engagement.
“Casimir?” Tan!Shallegh asked, his voice cutting through the flag deck with the ease of long practice. “Anything unexpected?”
“They appear to have left the stations and outposts outside the fleet base alone,” Morgan told him. “We won’t really be able to break down what that means until we can interview peop
le afterward, beyond the fact that there are civilians here to rescue.
“The main force is at the fleet base, which supports the logic that they have some ability to extract supplies from the storage base and can be assumed to have full missile loads,” she continued. “If the Laian inventories are right, we can expect them to have roughly twenty million missiles.”
Which was about as many as the Laian First Defense Fleet had in their magazines. The next few hours were going to see incomprehensible numbers of weapons deployed.
“Understood. Let me know if anything sticks out, Staff Captain,” Tan!Shallegh told her. “Assuming we’re looking at your type-M units, we are assessing this as a winnable battle, even one in our favor.”
“Based off what we saw of Swarm Bravo when they fought Korodaun and Tan!Stalla…I would agree with that assessment, sir,” Morgan admitted. “But we have not yet fought the Infinite in regular space on a major scale.
“They will have more surprises.”
“I know,” the Fleet Lord agreed. “Keep your eyes open for them, Staff Captain, and I will hope you see the currents before they drag us under.”
“Yes, sir,” Morgan said, turning her attention back to her console.
What else could she do?
“And there is the answer to that,” Shotilik told her a minute later, relaying a long-distance visual from a probe to Morgan’s console. The bioform in the video feed was…just tentacles. Enough so that even Morgan, who’d grown up around A!Tol, had a moment of atavistic horror at the sight.
“It’s a Category One bioform that appears to be acting as a symbiotic life form to the bigger units,” Shotilik told her. “We’ve now seen half a dozen of them go into Category Fours and just kind of get swallowed.
“But those tentacles are small enough and flexible enough to get into the Laians’ storage depots. Not so sure about the computers, but I’m going to guess they worked out an answer for that quickly.”
Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Page 17
