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

evade that first overwhelming salvo—or, Morgan estimated, the two after it. They were damned.

Except…

“Wait, what are they doing?” she asked aloud as she saw the maneuvers of the Laian war-dreadnoughts.

The Laian escort cruisers were breaking off with the Imperial fleet, fleeing the battlespace at point-seven c alongside the Thunderstorms and leaving the battle line behind. The war-dreadnoughts were doing no such thing.

They’d closed up their phalanx and changed their velocity, all right—to head directly toward the Infinite and into the teeth of that missile hurricane at sixty percent of the speed of light.

Unlike the Imperial ships, they had no sprint mode. That was as fast as they could go, and Morgan’s heart ached as she realized Korodaun’s plan.

“Incoming transmission,” Nitik reported, throwing it into the main holotank without even asking.

“We have failed,” Korodaun said, her voice flat in the way only a translator with emotional overtones disabled could manage. “Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla, I leave the withdrawal to your command.

“Get my escort cruisers out. They have the speed. My dreadnoughts do not. I will attempt to maintain a communication chain via sensor probes until…the end,” Korodaun noted. “We will buy what time we can for you and our people.

“Containment has failed. The Republic endures!”

The blockading fleet was scattering along at least nine different vectors, but Morgan left that part of everything to the rest of the flag staff. Her job wasn’t to make sure the fleet had a rendezvous point and made it out safely. She had to trust that Tan!Stalla and the rest of the staff could manage that.

Morgan’s job was to learn as much as she could from the final charge of the Fifty-Sixth Pincer of the Laian Republic. A daisy chain of sensor drones linked the two flagships, both of them spilling out the robotic spacecraft as they moved to create a chain of relays a quarter-million kilometers apart.

She had full telemetry data from the ten war-dreadnoughts as they charged, every launcher spitting fire as they entered the teeth of the overwhelming force. They drew the missiles in on themselves and deployed hundreds—maybe even thousands—of automated defense drones.

They’d also kept everybody else’s defense drones, Morgan realized, and the Infinite missiles collided with a solid wall of laser and plasma. There were enough missiles and drones on the relayed scanner data to walk from dreadnought to dreadnought.

Even so, the Imperial ships wouldn’t have survived at the heart of that maelstrom. Two of the war-dreadnoughts died, even their immense shields and armor unable to withstand the incoming fire.

Eight survived the first salvo. Their unexpected course change allowed them to interpenetrate the second salvo, leaving most of another million missiles to blaze off into the featureless gray void of hyperspace.

The time also gave Morgan a chance to look at the sensor data on the missiles themselves. They were what she’d hoped, in as much as she had hopes around this many missiles. They were still Laian missiles, built, presumably, by Builder of Tomorrows.

If the yard had built this many missiles, it hadn’t been doing much else. That gave the fleeing allies a small chance. On the other hand, she had no idea where the Infinite had found the materials for this many missiles.

The third salvo was more accurately targeted, and half of Korodaun’s remaining dreadnoughts died, along with all of their defense drones. And yet…somehow, four war-dreadnoughts reached ten light-seconds.

Those ships were already broken, Morgan knew. She could see that on their telemetry. They’d been firing missiles as they came, but they had no idea if they’d hit anything. At ten light-seconds, though, they could finally resolve individual targets in the anomalies facing them.

That was data Morgan and her people would go over with a fine-toothed comb later, but what was important at that moment was that the Laian capital ships had targets for their beams.

Battered and broken as they were, the war-dreadnoughts still commanded over four thousand proton beams more powerful than Jean Villeneuve’s own equivalent weapons. At ten light-seconds, they couldn’t guarantee hits with an individual shot.

But quantity has an accuracy all its own.

Contacts began to vanish. Morgan couldn’t tell if the bioforms being hit were Category One or Category Eight, but they died under beams of c-fractional protons. For a second, maybe even two, the duel went entirely the Laians’ way.

And then the Infinite returned fire. Plasma washed over the Laian ships at a focus and quantity Morgan had only seen once before—and her data feed died with Korodaun’s flagship.

Jean Villeneuve’s flag deck and bridge were silent when she looked up at the others around her, turning her gaze to Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla specifically.

“They’re gone, sir,” she told the A!Tol. “They hurt the Infinite… I don’t know how bad, but they hurt them… But they’re gone.”

“She did it,” Tan!Stalla replied, her voice just as soft as Morgan’s. “All ships are clear of Infinite missile range on vectors that will get them to safety. Korodaun saved the blockading force, but…”

“The blockade is down,” Morgan concluded.

“We have a rendezvous point and will make our course there ASAP,” the Squadron Lord declared. “We must inform the Grand Fleet and our allies of this as quickly as we can.

“We underestimated the Infinite. We cannot afford to do so again.”

Chapter Seventeen

The conference room at the heart of Va!Tola was as silent as a tomb. Quieter, for that matter—Rin had been in tombs that had more noise from wildlife than the conference room had from anything.

A frozen hologram hung above the table, stuck at the end of the recording of Pincer Korodaun’s doomed—and all-too-necessary—charge.

“Further reports from Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla and Three Hundred and Eighty-Four—I mean, Three Hundred and Eighty-Third Pincer of the Republic Sokotal confirm that Pincer Korodaun did some level of damage to the Infinite force,” Tan!Shallegh said quietly. “However, they continued on their vector without apparent interruption.”

“And what was their mission?” Oxtashah demanded.

“We can’t be certain, as it was necessary for the remnants of the blockade fleet to withdraw as quickly as possible,” Tidirok said smoothly, before Tan!Shallegh could