Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Tachyon scans now running continuously,” Ort reported. “Confirming numbers and identities now. Swarm Echo is sixty-five combat units, mostly Category Threes but led by a Six-A. Range is one-twenty-six light-seconds, but they are now accelerating toward us at the standard one-point-five percent of lightspeed per second.”

  “Initiate evasive maneuvers to hold the range. Do we have a solid target lock on the Six-A?” Morgan asked, surprised at how calm her tone was.

  No, not even that. Surprised at how calm she was. She was dead. All of her people were dead. They didn’t know it yet, but that was already written. If the Infinite had always known where her ships were, they were dead.

  The only real question was why they hadn’t already finished her people off.

  “All Bellerophons are locked on,” Rogers confirmed.

  “Synchronize firing systems,” Morgan ordered. “Full time-on-target salvos. Fire when ready.”

  The main hologram was shifting now as they closed into battle mode. The map plot had shrunk in around the two forces, with new icons appearing across the bottom of the big projection as her ships began to feed live updates on all of their weapon systems.

  The HSM launcher icons flickered as they fired, dozens of tiny portals opening inside Morgan’s ships and the missiles charging through.

  “That’s confirmation that we can still fire HSMs in this mess,” Rogers observed. “We didn’t from Defiance, so I was wondering.”

  Morgan chuckled.

  “Those portal generators are small enough and powerful to cut through almost any interference,” she reminded her chief of staff. “We used them to send shuttles into a planet’s atmosphere once.”

  Of course, none of those pilots had survived, but that had been because she’d sent them into the teeth of the Taljzi cloner’s defenses. They’d achieved the mission—but none of those brave Marines had expected to come back.

  Now it seemed that Morgan had the same kind of duty.

  “Tachyon scans suggest multiple hits on the Six-A,” Ort confirmed. “Target is still mobile.”

  “Target has Alavan armor,” Morgan said drily. “I don’t think even the HSM’s warheads are going to do much without a direct hit or an internal emergence.”

  “Well, there are always fish in the water,” Ort replied. “Second salvo away.”

  There’s always a chance. At two light-minutes, the chance wasn’t great, but it was there.

  “Can we evade around them and maintain range?” Morgan asked as more hit icons appeared over the big bioform.

  “Most likely,” Rogers said. “I don’t know if we’ll keep it this open, but we should stay out of plasma ran…”

  “What is that?” someone asked.

  “Interface drives,” Ort replied. “All units in Swarm Echo just brought up full-power interface drives at point-six-five c.” He paused. “They’re not scanning quite right, so I’m guessing they’ve done something odd, but those are definitely interface drives.”

  “Understood,” Morgan confirmed. “There goes evading them. Can we keep the range open while staying inside the zone where Swarm Delta can’t arrive on top of us?”

  The closest Swarm Delta force was theoretically at least a day and a half away, but Morgan wasn’t taking bets that there’d only been the swarms they could see out there.

  “No,” Rogers said grimly. “They have the interior position, sir, and now match us for velocity. And we have to assume they can match our vector changes now.”

  Morgan was running mental calculations and watching the screen as they spoke. More missiles were hammering their primary target, but the Six-A was huge. Even if they were scoring direct hits, it was a twelve-hundred-kilometer-diameter sphere wrapped in hyper-compressed armor.

  It might take every HSM they had to seriously hurt the beast—and that was what she was planning on throwing at it.

  “Hold the range open as long as we can without leaving the gravity zone,” she ordered firmly. “If we can empty our HSMs into the big bastard before we let anyone into missile range, that would make me very happy, people.”

  New course lines and maneuverability spheres appeared on the hologram as the STG continued maneuvering.

  “Wait…what was that?” Ort demanded as an icon flashed on the screen and disappeared. “Running analysis.”

  Morgan held her tongue. She could guess and she didn’t like the answer.

  “Teleported microsingularity, sir,” the ops officer finally reported. “It’s smaller than the ones they fired from the projector, and dissolved into Hawking radiation in under a second without new mass.

  “But if one of those appears inside one of our ships…”

  “That ship is in serious trouble,” Morgan finished. “Increase evasive maneuvers across the fleet. They missed once. Let’s keep them missing.”

  The range was slowly but surely dropping. The Infinite understood exactly what Morgan’s limitations were—if she passed the invisible line in space where a hyper portal could be created, she was vulnerable to ambush.

  She would also be able to escape—except that she no longer believed she was invisible to the Infinite. That rendered escape impossible. That left only the mission.

  “Drown you,” Ort suddenly hissed. “Three internal emergences. I have detached armor plating and…and…”

  “Blood,” Morgan finished for the Ivida. “Blood on the scale of a creature that size, I’m guessing?”

  “Fluid loss and flesh, yes, sir,” Ort concluded. “Target remains mobile, but I think we just blew off a good chunk of her armor.”

  “Program the remaining missiles to go for the weak spot,” Morgan ordered. “Time to regular IDM range?”

  “Two minutes,” Rogers replied. “Laying in targeting patterns now. Defensive drones deploying across the fleet.” She paused. “Sub-Commandant Irisha is requesting a com channel, sir.”

  “Put him through,” Morgan ordered.

  The Wendira officer appeared in a hologram projected above the arm of her seat, putting him exactly at her eye level.

  “Division Lord,” he greeted her. “I request permission to deploy my fighters. We can reduce the enemy’s smaller platforms before they are able to engage with missile fire. Respectfully, I am your expert on starfighter tactics, and I assess this as our best chance to influence this battle.”

  Morgan paused. Irisha was definitely correct that he knew starfighters far better than she did—she’d barely even considered them in her thoughts as she projected the battle in her head.

  On the other hand, her five star intruders only had twelve hundred and eighty starfighters between them. The odds were that none of those starfighters would survive closing with sixty-four Category Three bioforms.

  Something in Irisha’s gaze told her he knew that. So did his Drones, who had almost certainly volunteered to a one to fly the strike.

  “You are the expert,” she conceded. She glanced at the screens. The range was still over one light-minute, but the need to stay inside the star’s gravity well was limiting the STG’s ability to keep the range open.

  “Deploy your starfighters as you judge fit, Sub-Commandant,” she told him quietly. “There will be later phases to this battle.”

  “Only if we survive this one, sir,” Irisha said calmly. “Fighters will deploy immediately, targeting the Category Threes. I leave the Alavan sphere to you.”

  “Thanks,” Morgan replied before the channel dropped.

  “Rogers, Ort, deploy hyperfold-equipped drones to support the Wendira fighters,” she ordered. “They don’t have tachyon scanners, so we’ll keep them updated as thoroughly as possible as they close.”

  She leaned back in her chair and studied her enemy through narrowed eyes.

  “And, Ort?”

  “Division Lord?”

  “Kill that goddamn sphere.”

  “Working on it, sir.”

  The Six-A was now starting to take the threat seriously. Prior to the internal emergences
, it had simply charged toward her ships at the head of its fleet, flinging microsingularities at her at long range. Its armor had shrugged off near and direct hits with ease, even the ten-gigaton warheads of the HSM missiles barely scratching the hull.

  Now, however, a good chunk of that armor was missing and the beast was hurt. It was trying to dodge now—but it was also the only thing in the Infinite force that could reach Morgan’s ships.

  “Another singularity miss,” Rogers reported. “That’s one too far and one too short. I think we all know what comes next.”

  “I’m hoping for more misses,” Morgan said with a forced chuckle. “Or for Ort to blow the damn thing to hell.”

  “Starfighters are out,” her chief of staff told her. “They’ll reach weapons range twenty seconds before everybody gets in missile range. They might do some good.”

  “They might die for nothing,” Morgan replied. “But we need them.”

  “Shit!” Someone snapped. “Direct hit on Tookoolale. She’s gone.”

  “Confirm that,” Morgan barked. Tookoolale was one of the Laian starkillers. Her crew was small, only twenty-five, but the starkillers were still the point of this entire mission.

  “Confirmed,” Rogers reported a moment later. “Microsingularity emerged inside the starkiller power core and consumed sixty percent of the ship before evaporating. Tookoolale’s command pod was consumed as well.

  “Her crew is gone.”

  “And so is a starkiller,” Morgan replied. “Ort, kill that sphere!”

  The operations officer didn’t even bother to reply. He and four tactical officers were bending their every moment and thought toward that exact mission—and as Morgan snapped at him, he made a strange clicking sound.

  “Hit,” Ort reported. “I think a missile hit the breach. I have more fluid loss…and she is losing speed. More missiles are incoming.”

  “Hit!” Rogers snapped. “Taxula is gone. We’re down another starkiller.”

  Taxula was one of the Wendira weapons, but it couldn’t be coincidence that it was the STG’s starkillers that were being hit. The Infinite knew exactly why Morgan was there.

  And she realized that they were prepared to sacrifice the entirety of Swarm Echo to make sure she didn’t have any starkillers left to fire.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Part of the planning assumptions around Morgan’s mission—and the general strategic structure of the allies’ response to the Infinite—had been that a lot of Swarm Bravo’s intelligence had died with the swarm.

  That theory started to fragment the moment the Wendira starfighters hit missile range of Swarm Echo. Irisha’s fighters were veterans doing their work perfectly. Rapidly rotating formations, dispersed squadrons, seemingly chaotic maneuvers—everything that could make targeting them harder was being done.

  But Echo was clearly expecting it. Missiles lashed out the moment the starfighters were in range, each of the Category Threes flinging at least a thousand missiles at the smaller ships. The patterns were broad wedges, covering as much space as possible until the missiles found a target.

  “They’ve seen data on the starfighters,” Morgan said quietly. “They shouldn’t have. Only Bravo fought starfighters, and we wiped them out that day.”

  “That answers the question of whether Infinite have an FTL com, doesn’t it?” Rogers replied. “Without relays, even hyperfold coms wouldn’t have made it back to the Queen. They’ve some trick of their own.”

  “And today it won’t save them,” Morgan said. “Irisha’s people are too good.”

  They weren’t good enough to save themselves, but they were good enough that over half of the starfighters survived to reach hyperfold-cannon range of the Infinite fleet. Ten seconds after that, the fighter strike was over.

  “All fighters confirmed lost,” Rogers reported. “Estimate…fourteen Category Threes destroyed.”

  Fourteen ships bigger than Laian war-dreadnoughts, wiped out in exchange for thirteen hundred starfighters. It was probably a fair trade—the Drones who flew the starfighters would have called it a fair trade—but Morgan still hated it.

  “Regular-missile range…now.”

  Rogers’s report echoed in a suddenly quiet bridge.

  “Engage as specified,” Morgan ordered softly. Every one of her ships pulsed on the main display as they fired, hundreds of interface-drive missiles flashing onto the screen. She fired barely two thousand missiles.

  The fifty remaining Category Threes and the half-wrecked-by-now Six-A fired seventy thousand back.

  “Full defense screen deployed; all missiles targeted on the Six-A,” Ort reported.

  “I have the defense screen,” Rogers reported. “All drones reported in, and I am interfaced with local control.”

  “Maybe we should have held the fighters for this,” Morgan murmured. Sixty seconds of flight time was enough for her to regret her choices. Those thirteen hundred fighters would have been another twenty-six hundred hyperfold cannons to defend her fleet.

  “We’ve got this, sir,” Rogers replied. “We have shields. They don’t.”

  “So far,” Morgan muttered, but she kept that quiet. If Swarm Echo’s bioforms had shields, she’d have seen them by now.

  “Singularity hit,” Rogers reported a moment later, shaking her head. “Kozovan, one of the Laian starkillers. She’s gone.”

  They were now down three of eight starkillers, and Morgan could already guess the targeting path of the missile swarm.

  “Pull the surviving starkillers back behind the rest of the task group,” she ordered. “They’ve been targeting the starkillers as a priority so far. I doubt they’ve changed now we’re in missile range.”

  The seconds were ticking away as the missiles crossed the void. Morgan’s ships were running at an angle to the swarm, buying themselves time in each range bracket. They knew the Infinite had plasma cannons and hyperfold cannons—both had been thrown at the starfighters.

  “Missiles hitting the perimeter,” Rogers reported.

  No one was giving details, but Morgan watched the cascade of red dots fall onto her fleet like a deadly rain…and disappear. There were multiple layers of defensive drones. Hyperfold-cannon-equipped drones were the farthest out and carried the longest-ranged weapons, lashing into the missiles while they were still millions of kilometers away.

  The laser-equipped drones were next. They had the lowest kill rates of the three weapon systems in play but the second-longest range when backed by tachyon scanners. They took their own cut of the missiles—and then the survivors ran into the rapid-fire plasma cannons of the final internal screen, backed by the lasers, plasma guns and hyperfold cannons of the ships themselves.

  The battered survivors lunged through, but their targeting was clearly confused. Thousands of missiles tried to pass through the fleet to engage the starkillers and were wiped out by guns firing from behind them.

  Others took the targets in front of them, swarming onto the ships of the special task group—primarily the Wendira escorts.

  Less than five hundred missiles hit anything—but over three hundred of them slammed into two Wendira fast escorts, ships that were designed to hide behind ten-megaton battleships.

  “Osofa and Kana are down,” Rogers reported grimly. “The escorts can’t take that kind of firepower.”

  “And they’re close enough in size to the starkillers to confuse the missiles,” Morgan replied. “Fuck. How’s that sphere looking, Ort?”

  “We hit her, and we hit her hard,” Ort replied. “She’s dropped to point-four c and didn’t fire in the latest missile salvo. She’d leaking fluid constantly, but she is still maneuvering after us.”

  “And firing singularities,” Rogers reported grimly. “Astarax is gone. We’re running out of starkillers, Division Lord.”

  “Keep focusing fire on that Six-A,” Morgan told them. “Maintain the defensive screen, keep the starkillers back and clear them to maneuver independently. We can’t shield them from the tel
eporter; we can only stop the missiles.”

  “Next wave is in the perimeter,” Rogers reported.

  The flag deck fell silent, people hoping not to distract the officers and techs buried deep in the dual process of saving them from the enemy’s missiles—and killing the enemy before they launched again.

  This time, none of the missiles were confused. All of them dove “down” and tried to dodge around Morgan’s main body, driving to get at the starkillers she was protecting. She watched as Rogers turned drones and even sent the Laian cruisers diving toward the missiles at sixty percent of lightspeed to expand the defensive perimeter.

  It wasn’t enough. Missiles hammered into the starkillers, which were actually tougher than the escorts…but not tough enough.

  The last singularity hit was as much insult to injury as anything else, and Morgan swallowed grimly as Swarm Echo completed their mission. All eight of the special task group’s starkillers were gone.

  “All starkillers lost,” Rogers reported. “They… They mucked our targeting up pretty good there, sir.”

  “They’ve learned the game far better than I feared, Staff Captain,” Morgan told her chief of staff quietly. “Now it’s our turn.”

  “Freeze in broken ice,” Ort suddenly exclaimed. “We’ve got her. Chunks of armor breaking free; interface drive is offline. The Six-A is dead, I repeat, she is breaking up and dead.”

  Morgan’s attention turned back to her enemies. The big hologram showed exactly what Ort was saying—the last salvo of missiles had clearly managed to slip past the Infinite’s defenses and hit the unarmored inside of the Category Six-A bioform.

  Armor that could stand against a point-eight-five-c impactor coming from outside the hull was far less durable when hit from behind. Massive plates, the size of cities, spun off from the dying bioform as its drive signature cut to zero and massive sprays of fluid, easily visible from drones only a few million kilometers away, filled the void around the creature.

  “Adjust your targeting,” Morgan ordered coldly. “Take down the Threes.”