Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9), Glynn Stewart [reading well .TXT] 📗

Chapter Six

Being in command of a special analysis team left Morgan’s position on the flag bridge in a certain degree of question. She wasn’t part of the Operations department, so she didn’t have a station there. She wasn’t part of Communications or Logistics or…

Fortunately, the Imperium designed their flag bridges with some flexibility. Morgan’s job was to provide advice and context to their encounters with the Infinite, which meant she needed to be available to the Squadron Lord when things went down.

“It’s confirmed,” Commander Nitik, the Ivida woman who headed up Tan!Stalla’s communications team, announced. “A task group of war-dreadnoughts is being detached from the First Defense Fleet.”

“The Wendira finally saw sense, did they?” the A!Tol task force commander said with a flush of purple relief.

“Reading between the lines, they’re still swimming around the point, but they’ve given the Laians enough assurances that the Voices are ordering ships our way,” Nitik replied. “Ten war-dreadnoughts and fifty cruisers are due to arrive in ten cycles.”

Morgan concealed a sigh of relief. Their task force was half made up of Galileo-class superbattleships, which punched well above their weight even by Core Power standards, but a war-dreadnought was ten times bigger than the Imperium’s best capital ships.

Well, active capital ships. Morgan’s father ran the Duchy of Terra’s military shipyards, the home of much of the A!Tol Imperium’s experimentation. She was well aware of the new leviathan-type warships—but none of those fifty-plus-megaton behemoths were scheduled to enter service in the next long-cycle.

And the Laians already had hundreds of two-hundred-megaton behemoths. Jean Villeneuve and her sisters might outrange the Laian warships, but nothing the Imperium had could take a hit like a war-dreadnought.

“More ships from their core fleets are due five cycles after that,” Commander Ashmore pointed out. “Fifteen cycles and we’ll have thirty war-dreadnoughts here.”

“At that point, I might start to relax,” Morgan said dryly. “Maybe. Thirty war spheres would make me happier.”

“Assuming they were on our side.”

Morgan wasn’t sure exactly which one of Ashmore’s subordinates had muttered that, but she couldn’t disagree. The Taljzi—a xenocidal offshoot of the Imperium’s long-running enemies, the Kanzi Theocracy—had represented the threat they had because of Alavan technology.

That had brought the galaxy’s Elders, the Mesharom, out to investigate. Forty of their war spheres—each the size and mass of a hundred war-dreadnoughts, at least—had arrived to “help.”

Of course, the Mesharom had then realized the Imperium was experimenting with a slew of technologies based on scans of Mesharom and Alavan ships. The argument that had followed had stayed nonviolent. Barely.

The Mesharom had then swept off on their own and into a trap that had wiped out a fleet that could have single-handedly conquered any Core Power Morgan cared to name. Their involuntary sacrifice had spared the Imperium from walking into the same trap, but the Mesharom had basically disappeared from the galactic scene afterward.

Condescending and reclusive as the big caterpillars were, Morgan would have given anything to see them back right now.

“No one has seen the Mesharom in a while,” Tan!Stalla reminded her people calmly. “We can and we will deal with this situation ourselves. So long as we can keep the Infinite in the Astoroko Nebula, their threat is limited.

“The more hulls we have, the better for that—and I’m not going to swim away from handing responsibility for these dark waters over to a Laian officer!”

“Hyperspace anomaly detected.”

Three words. Just three words that sent Morgan’s heart dropping into her stomach. A video link kept the flag deck and the bridge permanently linked together. At that particular moment, Jean Villeneuve’s Captain was on duty—but Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla wasn’t.

Morgan was, in fact, currently the senior officer on the flag deck. The flag deck didn’t really have a watch-officer structure in the same way as a regular bridge, so that hadn’t occurred to her until those three words echoed over the link.

“Any details?” Captain Germain Arnaud asked calmly. Not only had the Imperium picked a human officer to command the ship named for Morgan’s honorary French uncle, they’d picked a French man.

“Negative,” the superbattleship’s sensor officer reported. “I’m looking at the relay from the destroyer, and it’s a vague contact at best. Not an interface drive…but something moving.”

Even the destroyers in hyperspace were too far out to pick out a hyper portal opening in the eye of the nebula. Everyone had assumed, Morgan realized, that the Infinite would be just as detectable as their own ships.

“Do we have a vector?” Arnaud asked, his tone still calm and precise.

“Reverse of Builder of Tomorrows’s, it looks like,” someone reported. “No clarity on numbers or…anything.”

“Understood.”

Morgan glanced around the flag bridge and realized the other officers were doing the same. Tan!Stalla was out of communication for the next few minutes—even alien admirals showered, or some equivalent thereof, after all.

“Ashmore, who are the destroyers on standby?” she asked the operations officer. She had enough seniority to give orders to the flag deck staff, at least.

“Winding Road, Jambalaya, Kitorath,” Ashmore replied crisply. “Plus, Starsong just portaled back in with that report.”

“All right.” Morgan inhaled. She might be exceeding her authority, but someone had to act—both she and Arnaud could justify it, but she was the one on the flag deck who knew the Squadron Lord was out of contact.

“Nitik, orders to all four of those destroyers,” she told the com officer. “They are to enter hyperspace and approach to closer contact with the anomaly. We need more detailed vector analysis and, if we can manage it, numbers.

“They are not to approach within the visibility bubble.”

Hyperspace made a giant mess of sensors of every type. A hyperspatial anomaly scanner could pick up another ship passing through the chaos, but that was all. To see with any regular scanners required two ships to be within a light-second of each other.

A range at which Morgan was grimly certain the Infinite’s plasma cannons would obliterate the destroyers she was sending out.

“Sending the orders now,” Nitik confirmed. She wasn’t questioning Morgan’s authority to take action.

“And let’s