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

“I recommend deployment of the Buckler platforms,” she told Tan!Stalla. “We know they’ve mounted Laian hyper-portal emitters and apparently Laian hyperspatial anomaly scanners on cyborg units.

“I can’t, now that I stop to think about it, come up with any reason they couldn’t do the same with missile launchers.”

The flag deck was silent, and Tan!Stalla snapped her beak in frustration.

“Darkest waters,” she cursed. “All ships, deploy Bucklers now.”

“New anomalies!” Ashmore barked. “Range is thirty-five light-seconds and we have missile anomalies. Estimate one thousand incoming.”

“Well, at least they underestimate us,” the Squadron Lord said drily. “Buckler deployment time, please?”

“Forty-five seconds to first wave,” Ashmore reported. He swallowed. “Seven seconds after missile arrival.”

“Laian missiles,” Tan!Stalla noted. “No faster than ours, but smarter and with better electronic warfare systems. Correct?”

“Can’t say at this range,” Morgan admitted. “But that’s most likely, yes.”

“Let’s see if the missiles’ brains make up for the Infinite’s lack of knowledge,” the flag officer replied. “All ships, adjust ninety degrees to starboard, increase velocity to point-six c.”

A ship with an interface drive could go from rest to point-six c in under ten seconds. Adjusting velocities once active took a bit longer, but not much. Morgan didn’t pretend to understand the physics—something about multidimensional surfaces being used to create three-dimensional velocity vectors—but she knew what it did.

The Infinite weren’t as informed. If Morgan had fired their salvo, she’d have spread out the angles, shotgunning missiles across space and relying on the weapons’ maneuverability to bring them together in the end.

The swarm had fired them in one large bunch, aimed at the center of where they’d seen the anomaly of Tan!Stalla’s fleet. Like the probes Morgan had sent at the Infinite, the missiles were blind outside the visibility bubble.

Missile hit chances in hyperspace sucked, but an enemy who knew the game would make sure at least some of the missiles made it close enough that their brains could find a target.

The Infinite didn’t know how. Not yet. Their sudden vector change left the missiles to hurtle harmlessly off into deep space.

“Staff Captain Casimir. Do you have targets for me?” Tan!Stalla snapped.

Morgan was checking as the Squadron Lord asked. The first drone had just returned, and she was running through the data from the robotic spacecraft at a hundred to one acceleration. All she saw was gray void…and then there was something more.

“Not sure yet. Feeding full data from the drones to all ships,” Morgan reported. “We need to ID the portal ships.”

The first thing she realized was that they’d made at least one miscalculation. The lead bioform was not a Category Four. Eight hundred and fifty kilometers long and four hundred wide, it was unquestionably a Category Five—which meant that it might have singularity cannons.

They were pretty sure the Category Fours didn’t have the black hole projectors. They were not as certain about the Category Fives. They might be about to find out.

“We have a Category Five,” she reported aloud. “It does not appear to carry hyper emitters; I am not reading material quantities of exotic matter.” She paused. “That might also answer the question of whether the Cat-Fives—or, at least, this Cat-Five—have singularity cannons.”

New contacts were resolving even as she spoke. The probes had passed through the visibility bubble at seventy percent of the speed of light. She only had a bit less than three seconds of scan data until the second wave of probes reported in.

“I need targets, Staff Captain,” Tan!Stalla pointed out. “Before they shoot at us again.”

Morgan’s team was running the data, and she double-checked the analysis herself at the Squadron Lord’s request. It wasn’t nearly what she’d like.

“We know what doesn’t have hyper emitters,” she admitted. “But we haven’t narrowed down our exact targets. We’ll have our second data set in a few moments; that should help.”

“All right.” There was a pause as Tan!Stalla made up her mind, then she gestured for Nitik to get her a channel.

“All ships, target priority is the Category Five bioform until further notice. Fire at will.”

Hundreds of new icons appeared on the screen as the task force launched their own missiles—but Morgan’s attention was riveted on the second salvo the Infinite had launched.

They didn’t have the full hang of it yet, but they were learning a lot faster than she liked. The first salvo had been inside a point-one-degree cone at most. These were spread across a three-degree cone.

The Infinite had likely already learned that radio coms didn’t work in hyperspace either. A lot of those missiles would be lost…but this time, some of them might actually make it into the visibility bubble of the task force.

“I have a vector change on the anomaly,” Ashmore snapped. “They are now accelerating toward us. One-point-five percent of lightspeed per second.”

At some point, the Imperium and their allies were going to get their hands on an Infinite to dissect, Morgan knew. If they could work out just what the ancient aliens were using for acceleration, that might change a lot of things.

It wasn’t as fast to accelerate as the interface drive—but she’d already seen that it didn’t have the same maximums as the interface drive.

“Any idea what our missiles are going to do to the Cat-Five, Casimir?” Tan!Stalla asked.

“They have no shields, but the bioforms we encountered at Kosha were heavily armored,” Morgan told her. “They weren’t up to compressed-matter levels, but it’s entirely possible these guys are.

“They did, after all, fight the Alava—and the Alava were much better at creating compressed-matter plates than anyone we know.”

“So, it’ll hurt, but the big sparkshark is going to keep coming,” Tan!Stalla said grimly.

Morgan wasn’t entirely certain just what a sparkshark was—probably something native to A!To, the A!Tol homeworld, with an English name assigned to evoke the right image. The Squadron Lord’s intent came through regardless.

“Most likely, sir.”

“Please find me those portal ships,” Tan!Stalla told her. “Because we have about forty seconds until they are moving faster than we are and start closing the range.”

Morgan nodded and dove back