Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  Morgan shivered as her portals slowly powered down. They hadn’t expected to get to a straight missile duel this quickly. The plan had been for the Taljzi to pause after taking this bad of a bloody nose.

  They’d underestimated how much their enemy simply did not care about losses.

  And that was terrifying.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  “They have to break.”

  Ling Yu’s almost-prayerful mutter echoed loudly in Bellerophon’s flag bridge, and Harold wished he could agree with her.

  In his opponent’s place, he’d have withdrawn to hyperspace after the first couple of salvos to reassess the situation. Instead, they’d simply taken the fire and were now closing with his fleet.

  Assuming the Taljzi ran similar crews to the Kanzi, over a hundred thousand sentients had already died in this battle, and they were barely getting started.

  “Are they maneuvering to stay out of our missile range?” he asked.

  “No, they are heading straight towards us at what we believe is their maximum speed,” Ling Yu reported after a moment. “Thirty seconds to our range. Thirty-five to the range of the orbital defenses.”

  His ships were armed with the latest and greatest sublight missiles the Duchy of Terra Militia had access to. Given the role of the Terran Militia as the testing bed for the Imperial Navy, that meant they had the best missiles the A!Tol Imperium had access to.

  The orbital defenses were, at least, equipped with point eight cee missiles. They were the first generation of missiles the Imperium had built with that capability, and they had several critical seconds’ less endurance than his task force’s missiles.

  “Hold fire until they’re in range of the defenses,” he ordered. “I’m not passing up another couple of hundred launchers in the teeth of this.”

  “Enemy is launching.”

  Harold’s calm determination to play the battle by his rules took a hard hit as the enemy fleet disappeared behind the wall of red icons. His enemies carried fewer varieties of weapons than his own ships, and while the Taljzi battleships lost some of the advantage from carrying the stealth systems, they had far more launchers per ton than he did.

  And they had sixty battleships to his three. They might have shattered the Taljzi’s super-battleship strength, but they hadn’t even touched the smaller capital ships.

  “We need to buy time to rearm the hyperspace launchers,” Ling Yu told him. “I don’t suppose you have any clever ideas?”

  “Move the Bucklers forward and pull the escorts back behind them,” Harold ordered, his voice far calmer than he expected. “The new Bucklers have hyperfold coms; we can control them at range. Also, release all hyperfold cannons to the point-defense role and integrate them with the tachyon scanners.”

  He watched the tsunami rushing toward his task force and forced a grin.

  “They may think they have the technology advantage here, but we need to teach them how wrong they are.”

  There was a continuing debate on whether or not the next generation of Buckler drones and Sword turrets should mount light hyperfold cannons instead of lasers. So far, the desire to keep the tachyon scanners secret had helped keep the argument in favor of the existing system.

  Task Force 77–1’s defense against the Taljzi Return was probably going to change that.

  Even at point eight five cee, tachyon scanners gave the Buckler’s lasers time to adjust and assess. Speed was far less of a defense against sensors that picked up the missiles in real time. Hundreds of missiles died to the lasers of the first line of defense.

  Then the Sword turrets on the escorts opened up—and the hyperfold cannons on the later-model Thunderstorms and the Bellerophons lit up as well. The space around Harold’s fleet was glittering with the light of destroyed missiles, and he almost held his breath, waiting for the damage report.

  “Sixty hits across the battleships,” Ling Yu finally told him. “Shields are holding. None of the escorts were hit.”

  “That’s it?” he replied, stunned. “I saw the Mesharom do the hyperfold cannon-tachyon scanner combination at Centauri. I still didn’t expect it to be this effective.”

  “Again, I think, with the enemy not expecting it,” his ops officer told him. “It won’t be as effective in the future…but now it’s our turn.”

  Three battleships and over a hundred and fifty escorts opened fire as one. Two hundred defensive platforms, each holding a single automated missile launcher, joined the salvo.

  It was a tiny response to the tsunami the Taljzi had just unleashed on them, but their enemy didn’t have active missile defenses. The Taljzi could dodge or rely on their shields…but they couldn’t shoot down missiles in their hundreds and thousands.

  “Second enemy salvo incoming, defenses engaging,” Ling Yu reported. “They haven’t had a chance to adapt; I think we’re going to gut this one, too.”

  Harold’s eyes were on his own attack this time, the missiles slashing into the Taljzi fleet. The enemy had been evading since the third salvo of hyperspace missiles, and their ECM came online now. Ghosts and jammers lured and deluded his missiles, and their systems were better than he’d expected.

  A lot better, in fact. Better than his.

  But not good enough. Decoyed missiles slammed into escorts. Unaffected missiles slammed into battleships. Half a dozen cruisers blew apart, their shields overwhelmed. A battleship’s shields flickered, her armor seeming to hold…and then the singularity at her core collapsed.

  As the one battleship disappeared, shields dropped on two more and their own salvo melted away in the teeth of the hyperfold cannons defending the Militia fleet.

  “Hyper portal!” Ling Yu barked. “What the hell? They can’t open one that…”

  It seemed the Taljzi could. Exotic-matter emitters tore a hole through reality far closer than any Imperial ship could manage, and the Return was suddenly gone, their remaining ships fleeing into hyperspace.

  The flag bridge was silent.

  “We took no losses, sir,” Ling Yu finally said. “A few shield failures. Perseus took a hard knock, but nothing that made it through the armor. Our worst damage was the hyper portal failures on Bellerophon.”

  “They had no idea what they were facing,” Harold pointed out grimly. “They’ll know next time.”

  And he still had to hold for at least thirty more hours.

  “So, that went better than we were afraid of, but I’m not liking what it’s telling me for round two,” Harold said grimly to the conference of his flag officers a few minutes later. “How long to rearm the battleships with S-HSMs?”

  “Already underway,” Ling Yu replied. “Casimir drew up a plan for what to do with our extra missiles from her Hotel One magazine and the missiles that would have gone to her two missing batteries.

  “That’s three full loads for a battleship battery’s magazines, which means four and a half for the cruisers—she’s suggesting we give each of the cruisers a half-load for each launcher. That’ll reduce our firepower for the trailing salvos from the battleships, but it’ll give us five solid salvos from everything.”

  “It’s a good suggestion,” Harold allowed. “Make it happen. With a full salvo from all nineteen ships with S-HSM launchers, we have a near-guaranteed kill on anything in their order of battle. The same is not true with only sixty missiles from the battleships.”

  “I’m almost more concerned about the way they ran,” Division Lord Iffa pointed out. The Frole commanded Harold’s sixteen Abrasion-class cruisers from the Imperial Navy. “If they can come out of hyperspace as close to the planet as they went in, they can emerge inside weapons range.”

  “That’s what they did to the Mesharom,” Rear Admiral Sun agreed. “But the Mesharom were in deep space. Can they pull the same trick on us?”

  “I’ve put that question to our engineers,” Harold told them. “I don’t know. We’re going to need to watch for it regardless, as the Taljzi have once again demonstrated that just because we think s
omething is a hard and fast rule doesn’t mean it applies to them.”

  “I wish some of those discoveries were in our favor,” Iffa complained.

  “At least one has been,” the Admiral argued. “We would assume that a ship with compressed-matter armor and heavy shielding would also have active missile defense. The Taljzi don’t have those systems, which is the only reason this task force held our own in the actual missile exchange.

  “The closer they get, however, the less that matters,” he continued grimly. “Demonstrably, we have no defenses that can stop the hyper disruptors they use as energy weapons, and our proton beams are all but useless.

  “Our hyperfold cannons and plasma lances are our only hope when the bastards close.” Harold shook his head, studying the screen listing their strength and the armaments of each vessel.

  “Make no mistake, people, if the Taljzi decide they are prepared to take the losses a direct charge would inflict, they can get enough capital ships to disruptor range to end this battle,” he said. “Against any other opponent, I’d say they wouldn’t be willing to make that trade. They’ve already lost over ten times our total tonnage.

  “But one of the reasons they lost that much was that they pressed the attack long after anyone else would have. They are not completely insensitive to losses, clearly, but they also don’t put the same value on their crews’ lives as we do.”

  “So, what do we do?” Sun asked.

  “We keep smashing them in the nose for at least three more days. Under no circumstances do we withdraw. One way or another, we keep these sons of bitches out of Isaac orbit until Fleet Lord Tanaka arrives.”

  “And what do we do if they get more reinforcements?” someone else asked.

  Harold smiled coldly.

  “What part of ‘under no circumstances’ wasn’t clear?”

  Chapter Fifty

  The general quarters alert jerked Morgan awake from the first sleep she’d had in over a day. She hadn’t even bothered to get out of her combat uniform with its emergency vacuum gear before falling over.

  They’d had twelve hours of silence from their enemies, and Morgan had finally managed to get back to her quarters. Her communicator told her she’d managed four hours of sleep, which meant that it had taken the Taljzi sixteen hours to decide what the hell they were planning on doing.

  The screen on her communicator wasn’t large enough for her to get a good idea of what that plan was, especially given that she was trying to read it while moving. Her quarters were exactly ninety seconds’ brisk walk from her battle station on the bridge.

  She made it in just over a minute, slightly out of breath as she dropped into her seat and brought up her console to see if she could make sense of the enemy.

  Commander Masters gave her a firm nod.

  “What do you make of it, Casimir?” he asked with a gesture toward the plot.

  “Well, firstly, they apparently can’t leave hyperspace as close to the star as they can enter it,” she replied. The new hyper portal was at the same distance as the Taljzi’s original arrival, not at the range where they’d fled into hyperspace.

  That distance, she realized, was actually farther than an Imperial drive or current-generation Kanzi drive. The Taljzi, it seemed, had taken a different route in developing their hyperdrives over the last three hundred years.

  “Also, they still think their stealth fields work on us,” she continued. None of the super-battleships or destroyers were on her screens. Their scanners were still resolving the numbers hidden inside the enemy stealth screens, but the Taljzi’s version of the device was vastly inferior to the Core Powers’.

  “According to the files on Centauri, it’s unusually effective in atmosphere,” Masters replied. “But yes, our tachyon scanners can resolve through it significantly more reliably than we can resolve through the other stealth fields we’ve encountered.”

  Twenty battleships and forty cruisers had emerged from the hyperspace portal, but they’d done so under stealth and were approaching the joint Terran-Imperial task force at barely a quarter of the speed of light.

  “They’re trying to be sneaky,” Morgan concluded. “They’ve learned that we have a massive advantage at long range, so they’re using their stealth fields—which we don’t have and they haven’t realized we can see through—to try and get into at least missile range before engaging.”

  “Agreed. I figure they’ll try and sneak all the way into range of their disruptors.” Bellerophon’s tactical officer smirked. “If they were Mesharom, I’d be worried. As it is, we could start picking them off right now.”

  “Are those our orders?” she asked.

  “No. They’re well out of regular missile range, so we’re waiting on orders from the flag. Someone actually managed to convince the Admiral to go take a nap.”

  Morgan chuckled. Masters had basically ordered her to go sleep, but there wasn’t anyone aboard who could do that to Admiral Rolfson.

  “How’d they manage that?” she asked.

  “No one is saying, but reading between the lines, Ling Yu got his wife involved.”

  “So, we wait for orders,” Morgan confirmed, still chuckling as she studied the screen. “Can we take them if we let them get closer?”

  “It depends on what range we let them get to, I suppose,” Masters admitted. “I kind of want to shoot them to hell right now…but I suspect the Admiral is going to want to hold on to the hyper missiles for a bit longer.”

  Morgan’s fingers flew over her console, drawing in various weapon ranges for the fleet.

  “Ten light-seconds,” she suggested.

  “Commander?” Masters sounded confused.

  “I’m guessing we open fire at ten light-seconds. Far enough out that they might buy we didn’t see them yet and might still be holding their fire and, well…” She gestured at the spheres on her console. “Inside range for our hyperfold cannons and plasma lances.”

  “All right, everyone, this is Vice Admiral Rolfson.”

  The Admiral’s voice was as bright and cheery as always over the shipwide PA, presumably on every ship in the task force.

  “The enemy thought they had enough of an advantage that they could just roll over us. That didn’t work out so well for them, and they’ve already lost more in Asimov than they have in their whole campaign so far.

  “Now they want to be sneaky, and we’re getting the payoff for ignoring their scout ships. They think they have a cloak of invisibility but we…we, my fellow spacers, know that the emperor is naked.”

  Morgan snorted. There were probably a lot of confused nonhumans in the task force now, but they probably got the gist from context.

  “We’re going to let them close. The moment they launch, we launch…but if they’re brave enough and confident enough to get to ten light-seconds, then we give them everything we’ve got.

  “Now, there’s a risk to this, people. The closer they get, the less time our missile defenses have to shoot down their missiles, and if we have the hyperfold cannons tasked for offensive fire, our defenses are weaker than they were before.

  “But if we pull this off, we wipe out a third of their remaining ships and we make the bastards think twice before sticking their noses in this system again.

  “Remember: Fleet Lord Tanaka is on her way. We don’t have to wipe these Taljzi out. We don’t even have to drive them off. We just need to make them hesitate enough that when they finally go all out, they’re doing it into the teeth of over fifty super-battleships.

  “I don’t know you all as well as I’d like, but I know enough of you. And I know the traditions of the Imperial Navy and the Duchy of Terra Militia.

  “And I know there are a hundred million civilians behind us,” the Admiral concluded grimly, as Morgan saw every spine in the room straighten.

  “I will not fail them. I know that you will not fail them. Godspeed and shoot straight, people.”

  Watching an enemy flotilla approach and doing nothing was harder than
Morgan would have expected. Bellerophon’s bridge grew quieter with each passing moment, until it reached absolute silence at around five million kilometers.

  Both sides were so far inside each other’s missile ranges, it was insane. At point eight cee, it would take barely twenty seconds for the defenders’ missiles to arrive. The Taljzi weapons would arrive even faster.

  But eighty warships continued their steady, deliberate advance underneath their stealth fields. Seconds ticked away and Morgan passed a course correction over to Hume at navigation. Their hyperfold cannons could target anything in the enemy force, but the plasma lance had a limited firing arc.

  They needed to make sure the battleships were in it.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Masters’s words echoed in the dead silence of the bridge.

  “I have the lance,” Morgan confirmed, her voice also quiet, as if the enemy could hear them.

  Part of her screen was showing her her superior’s targeting of the hyperfold cannons. Each of the battleships was targeting two battleships, one with their lance and one with their cannons. All of the cruisers had plasma lances, but theirs didn’t match the power a matter-conversion plant could feed into a battleship-sized weapon.

  Only about half the cruisers had hyperfold cannons. All told, however, every single Taljzi battleship was being targeted with enough firepower for what should be an instant kill.

  “Hakkaa päälle!”

  Morgan didn’t bother to establish if the harsh Finnish phrase was from the Admiral or not. The ten-light-second mark was crossed and her plasma lance came eagerly to life at her command.

  Unlike the hyperfold cannon, it was “merely” a lightspeed weapon. A magnetic channel flashed across space to lock on to her target, and then hundreds of kilograms of superheated plasma flashed down that channel at nearly the speed of light.

  The Taljzi battleship’s shields could have taken the lesser bolts unleashed by the cruisers. Its armor could absorb even those mighty blows.