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

by Glynn Stewart

  Would the Return be prepared to trade another twenty or thirty battleships—they, after all, didn’t know that Rolfson was about to run out of HSMs—just for the chance to wipe out a planet and study the wreckage of three battleships?

  If they lost the majority of this force, how many reinforcements did they have? For that matter, even if they took a Bellerophon mostly intact, how quickly could they reverse-engineer it and get a weapons system into production?

  Harriet didn’t know the answer to those questions. The Taljzi, however, would—and that would decide whether the Return’s commander was going to spend the ships and lives to take Asimov.

  In their place, however, she’d be waiting for reinforcements. Even against three ships.

  After all, the Taljzi had no way of knowing that those were the only three Bellerophons in existence.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  “Fleet Lord! You need to see this!”

  Harriet jerked awake from an unexpected and unplanned nap at the sound of the junior Speaker’s excited chatter. Blinking away sleep she hoped nobody else had seen, she rose from her chair and crossed to the young Tosumi’s station.

  Sier met her halfway there, something in the birdlike alien’s dark eyes suggesting he knew damn well she’d been asleep—and was more than a little frustrated with the other avian alien for waking her.

  The moment she saw the Tosumi’s screen, however, she stopped caring.

  “That’s not near Asimov, is it?” she asked softly.

  “No, sir,” the Tosumi replied, all four arms fluttering across the station. “Heading towards Asimov, though. Point six lightspeed. Vector is…from DLK-5539.”

  That was the black hole where Bellerophon had found a Taljzi refuelling station and destroyed the logistics ships and the super-battleship guarding them. That was not a good sign.

  “Can we resolve numbers?”

  “They’re at our maximum scan distance and there’s a lot of them, sir.” The Speaker fluttered his arms—what had once been the supporting limbs of a remote ancestor’s wings—again in discontent. “Can’t resolve individual anomaly signature, but a signature this large…”

  He trailed off.

  “Speaker?” Sier said sharply. “That kind of estimate is your job.”

  “Yes, Division Lord. Apologies, Division Lord. My waters darken and—”

  “Give me the clouds-shadowed estimate,” Sier snapped, and Harriet shivered.

  It was still weird to hear a species that had been born to fly and had evolved down to jumping between trees use the metaphors of an amphibious race without thinking. The Imperial Races like the Tosumi had seen their original cultures all but destroyed, replaced with A!Tol culture.

  The A!Tol had learned and they had two dozen subject races they hadn’t done that to. The Imperial Races were still weird.

  This particular example was wilting in his seat, a feather dropping loose in stress-molt as Harriet watched.

  “Speaker?” she asked, far more gently than Sier had.

  “At least five hundred ships, Fleet Lord,” the Tosumi said in a very small voice. “Possibly more. Given enemy force proportions to date, at least a hundred capital ships.”

  “If it’s the Taljzi,” Harriet noted.

  “Point six lightspeed, Fleet Lord,” the youth repeated. “Wrong vector for a Core Power; they’re coming from beyond our Rimward borders.”

  “They’re Taljzi,” Sier finished the conclusion. “Blazing suns.”

  The good news, pathetic as it was, was that the geometry was in their favor. The second Taljzi fleet would arrive at Asimov roughly thirty thousandth-cycles—forty-five minutes or so, Harriet automatically translated still—after they did.

  They were faster but her ships were closer.

  “Anomaly scanners are picking up a force in hyperspace around Asimov,” Sier reported. “Two hundred–plus ships, no breakdown yet.”

  “That lines up with what Huber reported,” Harriet said. “So, they haven’t decided to suicide-charge Rolfson yet.”

  “Would you, if a force twice your size was on the way?” her subordinate asked. “They do not seem to care about their people’s lives for any moral concern, but they still understand that ships and spacers take time to replace.”

  “So, we take them by formation,” Harriet concluded. “Do you think the buggers are smart enough to run for their friends when they see us coming?”

  “They can run the geometry just like we can,” he told her. “They’ll know they won’t make it—plus, all they can see in hyperspace is how many hulls we have. Even the first Return outnumbers us.”

  Harriet hadn’t even considered that. Even combined with Cawl’s fleet, she had fewer ships than the force lurking outside Asimov. That force was clustered together, a tight formation they clearly hadn’t even budged to chase Huber’s refugee column.

  What the Taljzi didn’t know was that between her and Cawl, they had over a hundred capital ships. Those ships might not have hyperspace missiles or hyperfold cannons or any of the fancy toys that the Bellerophons had…but they had active missile defenses and the Taljzi didn’t.

  “We probably can’t take them both combined,” she noted. “But either of those fleets…”

  Yin beaks didn’t have the flexibility of human mouths. Sier couldn’t grin. His species’ equivalent gesture was a wide opening of the beak that showed its sharp, serrated edge.

  “Are you ready to become a legend, Fleet Lord?” he asked. “Two hundred against eight hundred?”

  “That Asimov still stands tell me that Harold Rolfson has already become a damn legend,” she told him. “Again. I can’t let the Norseman get all of the glory. My ancestors would cry with shame.

  “Get me a channel to Cawl. This is going to need to be far better coordinated than I think either of us are truly comfortable with, but I don’t intend to let a single one of these bastards get away. Let the people who sent them wonder what black hole they dropped into.”

  “They may still have hyperfold coms, Fleet Lord,” Sier warned.

  “Yes. But they have to survive leaving hyperspace to phone home with those.”

  “Fleet Lord Tanaka,” Cawl greeted her, the old Kanzi Fleet Master looking more awake and energized than she’d seen him yet. It seemed he had more than one cane like the one he’d snapped, as he was leaning on its exact duplicate as he stood in his flag bridge, facing her image in his main hologram projector.

  “Fleet Master Cawl. I presume you have also seen our enemies,” Harriet told him.

  The white scars around his blue-furred jaw twitched in what might have been either amusement or frustration.

  “Your people have shared their scans of the force at Asimov,” he replied. “The force coming from the Rim we do see ourselves. It seems that your anomaly scans are longer-ranged than ours, though, I will note, less detailed.”

  “Less detailed?” Harriet asked carefully.

  “Yes. The force coming from the rim is five hundred and twenty ships strong. One hundred and twenty are capital ships. We cannot break it down further than that.”

  That was more than her people’s scanners could tell her. Despite herself, she was impressed.

  “That’s a lot of firepower.”

  Cawl shrugged.

  “I doubt they have eighty super-battleships, Fleet Lord,” he pointed out. “Nor are they fighting to defend God and Clan-blood. They may believe God has willed them to destroy, but even fanatic belief in that cause cannot match the will of those with family and friends to protect.”

  “I suppose you would know,” Harriet replied before she could stop herself.

  The old Kanzi winced.

  “I would. For both the reasons you mean and others,” he agreed. “I am sworn to service, Fleet Lord. I do not choose what orders to obey, what doctrines to follow. I may only choose what I believe, not what I do.”

  “It is what we do that defines us.”

  He nodded.

  “And w
hat do we intend to do today, Fleet Lord Tanaka? I have watched too many of my people die to these monsters. I don’t intend to add your people to that tally.”

  “We’re going to kill them all,” Harriet replied. “No runners, no escapes. There’s no way for them to surrender in hyperspace, though I’d let any of them that tried. We hit each fleet in sequence and smash them to pieces.”

  “In hyperspace,” Cawl echoed. “Have you fought a battle in hyperspace before, Fleet Lord?”

  “Only skirmishes,” Harriet admitted. “But I don’t see a choice.”

  He laughed.

  “Even skirmishes, I must admit, are more than I have fought in hyperspace,” he told her. “It seems that even old warlords can be taught new tricks when we must learn.”

  “We will need to coordinate our fire closely,” she stated. The thought of merging tactical networks with a Kanzi fleet made her almost physically ill—but she liked it better than the losses they’d take if they didn’t.

  “Of course,” he agreed. “And of course, neither of us feels entirely content with this. I think our best plan is—”

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  “Well, it seems the Taljzi aren’t lacking in courage.”

  Harriet wouldn’t have minded a cowardly enemy. It wasn’t what she was expecting, of course. The Taljzi’s errors tended to be in the other direction, a callous disregard for losses that made no sense to her.

  Even if you could produce infinite ships and soldiers and attached no moral value to them, you only had so many at the point of contact. Every ship and soldier lost was a ship and soldier that couldn’t press the current campaign.

  Her plan hadn’t really relied on the Taljzi doing anything in specific, but their charge out to meet her definitely worked in her favor. The Taljzi missile-range advantage was still meaningful in hyperspace, but Harriet was counting on her layered defenses to make up the difference.

  She had the data on Rolfson’s defense with hyperfold cannons, but that ran into the same problem as her communicators: they didn’t work in hyperspace. Tachyon scanners did, if not as efficiently as in normal space, but the hyperfold cannons and communicators didn’t.

  This was going to be a more traditional battle, missile against missile. No energy weapon could function at a range above a light-second, so her range advantage over the Taljzi’s guns didn’t matter.

  Her engineers were still arguing over whether they thought the hyperspace disruptors would work inside hyperspace. Harriet didn’t care. She wasn’t courting a visibility-bubble engagement. This was going to end long before anyone got to see each other.

  “They’ll make their range of us in ten thousandth-cycles,” Sier reported. “We’ll range on them roughly two thousandth-cycles after that. The Kanzi should range at the same time.”

  They’d given each other far more information on their weapons systems than Harriet would have dreamed of even a few weeks before. She wasn’t trusting Cawl, not really…but she needed his capital ships.

  “So, what happens if Cawl betrays us?” Sier asked quietly. The Yin was closer to her than he usually came, whispering into her ear. “We’re going on his word for who these people really are, after all. If he’s working with them…”

  “They didn’t fake Alstroda’s fate,” she told him. “I believe the Kanzi are capable of many things, but destroying worlds to bait a deception?” She shook her head. “No. Not without a far larger prize on the table than Seventy-Seventh Fleet.”

  “What about the Bellerophons?” her chief of staff said. “They’d make a pretty damn large prize.”

  “Not large enough for them to have murdered millions of Kanzi,” Harriet replied. “Non-Kanzi? Maybe. But we’d have known if they’d evacuated fifty million of their own from Alstroda. No, someone burned that planet down and killed a lot of Kanzi.

  “Cawl wants their blood, and we’re all pretty sure it was these bastards, so I don’t think he’s going to turn on us.”

  “And if he does?” Sier pressed.

  “Then we die, Sier,” she admitted. “We’re too close and have given him too much information. Call it necessity, call it trust…Fleet Master Cawl is in a position to kill us all. But right now, I think we all know who our real enemy is.”

  “I agree,” the Yin told her. “I just wanted to make sure you realize how vulnerable we are.”

  Harriet snorted.

  “The data network alone is giving me hives,” she admitted. “Fortunately, it’s going to give the Taljzi more cee-fractional missiles than their shields can handle. That’s a trade I have no choice but to make.”

  The Taljzi still had better missiles. There wasn’t anything Harriet could do in preparation for that, and she remained still and silent in her seat as they opened fire. It took a precious handful of seconds for them to reach the range of her tachyon scanners, but those at least gave her useful data.

  Almost six thousand missiles were screaming toward her fleet, and even as she was eyeing them, a second salvo dropped into space.

  “Push the drones further forward,” she ordered. She sighed. It was time. “Then activate the datanet connections.”

  There were a million firewalls, defenses and everything else in play, but this was still the moment of truth. Only one ship on each side, a super-battleship in both cases, was acting as the relay. They could cut that ship out of the network and cut off a cyber-attack—if they realized it was happening.

  There were backup ships positioned to take over if a ship was lost, but there was only so much data flow Harriet could risk with the Kanzi.

  “Network connection is live,” Commander Ilaize reported. “The stream is clean and clear. Data flow is good. We are communicating.”

  “No sign of malware?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Ilaize confirmed. “The Kanzi datafeed is clean.”

  It seemed Cawl was on the level. So far.

  “Sier, time to weapons range?”

  “One thousandth-cycle.” He paused. “Their first salvo will hit ten seconds before that.”

  “Move the super-battleships forward,” Harriet ordered. “They can’t tell the difference until the last second, and the big ships can take a lot more hits before they’re in danger.”

  Bucklers and their Kanzi equivalents swung out in front of the fleet, slightly less than one light-second away. Their relays expanded Harriet’s sight and doubled the engagement time against the missiles.

  Fortunately, this was an environment the antimissile systems’ designers had considered. They wouldn’t be as effective as they were in normal space, but the tachyon scanners gave them a few fractions of a second they wouldn’t otherwise have.

  The storm still smashed down on Harriet’s super-battleships. Eighty of the immense warships took their place at the front line of her fleet. Normally, she’d have used destroyers to screen her capital ships—but the Taljzi missiles knew less about their enemies than hers did. The Taljzi weapons split their fire across all eighty capital ships, and her drones and antimissile turrets gutted the incoming fire.

  Hundreds of missiles still made it through, and Justified vibrated around Harriet as near-cee hammers battered her shields.

  “We have shield failures on several units,” Sier reported. “No hits.” He shook his head. “A good thing, since the shield failures are all Kanzi ships. Those hulls can’t take a real hit.”

  Harriet chuckled. Twenty years before, the same thing had been true of the Imperium. As with the active missile defenses, the Imperium had learned from humanity.

  Humanity had sold the Imperium compressed-matter armor—and the money from that had made the Duchy of Terra wealthy beyond belief.

  Today, the presence of that armor was going to save a hundred million humans.

  An indicator flashed green as Harriet’s fleet entered their range of the enemy.

  “Open fire,” she ordered.

  If the Taljzi had thought they had the advantage, that illusion was dashed when the joint Imperi
al-Kanzi fleet opened fire. They flung over twice as many missiles back at the Taljzi as had been fired at them, and they were targeted with deadly efficiency.

  Even with the Kanzi scanners, Harriet’s people could only truly distinguish “capital ship” versus “non-capital ship,” but that was more than they’d expected to be able to do. There were forty-one capital ships among the two hundred and fifty enemy ships.

  The allied fleet sent twelve thousand missiles at twenty of them.

  “Pull the Kanzi ships that have shield failures back,” Harriet ordered as their own missiles took off. “Cycle in battleships to fill their places until their shields are back up. Keep the line at eighty ships, but do not hold anything in the line whose shields are failing.”

  They only had twenty-six battleships, including the Manticores, and most were Kanzi. Untouched super-battleships, however, could bring their shields back up far faster than ships under fire.

  She had the ships to rotate and the knowledge that the enemy would only barely be able to see what she was doing.

  It took two minutes for their first missiles to arrive, and they had lost six Kanzi battleships by then. Over a dozen of her Imperial and Terran super-battleships had taken hits, but their armor could take hits.

  The Kanzi ships couldn’t.

  When their missiles crashed down on the Taljzi, it was all worth it. They hit twenty ships with thousands of missiles. Sixteen of the anomaly icons blinked out—and the next salvo was only a few seconds behind them.

  Only five of the Talzji capital ships survived that second salvo, and the third salvo had been sent in specifically to clean up any surviving heavy warships.

  The follow-on salvos worked their way through the escorts with brutal precision, hammering individual ships that could have survived perhaps two hundred missiles in a salvo with four hundred at once.

  Ten salvos was all it took. When the eleventh salvo arrived to clean up, there were only a handful of scattered cripples left from the fleet that had leveled Alstroda and Lelldorin and other worlds.