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

hyperspace for a twentieth-cycle. Long enough to phone home, though not long enough to get replies.

“We do need to keep moving.”

Morgan considered her audience carefully for several seconds as she stared at the recorder, then shrugged.

“Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh, you will be receiving attached sensor data from all of my ships,” she told the First Fleet Lord. “We have confirmed the presence of a screen of sensor sentinels in hyperspace through the edge of the Astoroko Nebula.

“Based off the dispersion and presence of those ships, I would judge that only stealth ships have any chance of penetrating the nebula undetected.”

She had taken a risk by bringing her fleet out of hyperspace, but the allies needed to know Swarm Charlie was in motion.

“More immediately important is that we have detected a new swarm moving out into Wendira space, estimated at a mass of one trillion tons,” she warned him. “It’s hard to estimate even hull numbers, let alone types or classes, at the ranges we’re scanning, so I can’t say much more than that.

“Even so, that force represents an existential threat to our ally. I feel it was worth taking the risk of dropping out of hyperspace to send this message.”

She drummed her fingers on the desk for a moment.

“We also now have a better idea of what the Queen has mustered to defend herself,” she continued. “Swarm Delta represents a nodal defense force of some five trillion tons. I suspect there is more than one such force securing the core of the nebula, but so far, our stealth fields appear to be holding up to Infinite scans.

“I intend to proceed with my mission as previously instructed. I do not expect to be able to make long-distance hyperfold transmissions once we have entered the immediate area of the rosette.

“Calculations suggest a minimum thirty-six-hour realspace approach to be able to fire each starkiller, but the rosette prevents anything else.” She shook her head. “Currently, the plan is to deploy the starkillers under automatic control at eighteen light-hours, but that may or may not survive contact with reality.

“We will not be able to complete our mission before Swarm Charlie engages the Wendira,” she admitted. “It is…uncertain whether Swarm Delta and any other defense nodes will be materially impacted by the destruction of the rosette, so we may still be facing an utterly overwhelming threat if our mission succeeds.

“This will be my last transmission until we have exited the rosette,” Morgan told her superior. “I will do all within my power to complete this mission and bring my people out alive. If we succeed, it should be relatively clearly visible to anomaly scanners at some distance.

“If we don’t…” She sighed. “If we fail, you won’t hear from us again, Fleet Lord. I hope to speak again in a few cycles.

“Gods speed you, Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh.”

Chapter Fifty

Going through seven thousand space stations’ worth of photos, three-dimensional models and energy profiles took Rin and his people over a day. Even dividing it into smaller and smaller chunks as more of their people came into the lab, it was still a slow, painstaking process.

In theory, identifying a solar-collector station was easy, and they didn’t care about the solar-collector stations. In practice, even the Alava didn’t manage exact duplication of their Dyson swarm units and every station was slightly different.

Add in that at least some of the “space stations” in the Dyson swarm were actually ships—both defensive and utility craft that had settled into stable orbits when their crews and engines had died—plus a dizzying array of additional support stations that existed in similar numbers to the control and teleporter stations, every station had to be examined in detail.

“All right,” he finally said when the last reports cycled into his computer. “Everybody, we did it.”

His team looked blearily back at him. He’d told people to take the rest they needed, which seemed to have resulted in no one actually taking enough rest—including him, if he was being honest.

“We’ve now gone through seven thousand, one hundred and thirty-four individual contacts,” he told them all. “The Wendira did a fantastic job of cataloging all of this.”

Castellash and several of his senior people had spent several hours reviewing the identification criteria Lawrence had put together, and then joined in. They looked even more wiped than the rest of his people, but the station director’s wings fluttered in appreciation as Rin recognized their efforts.

“The good news is that we found an intact teleporter station,” Rin noted. “Two of them, in fact, and three more damaged ones where we might be able to rig up the teleporters to work, at least.

“Bad news is that we haven’t found a single plasma collector,” he told them. “So, we’re going to rig up those teleporters on the damaged stations if we can.

“Commander Lawrence, do you want to explain the problem?”

Lawrence stepped up to join Rin, then turned and faced the team sitting at their consoles.

“We don’t even begin to understand the science—or even the hardware—of an Alavan teleporter system,” she told them. “What we do understand is, roughly, how an Alavan teleporter with half its functions obliterated by the Fall operates.

“And the key point to that is that one end of the transfer is always going to physically be at the teleporter. The system the Taljzi rigged up pulled plasma from a collector station in low orbit of the star.

“What exactly that station was originally intended to do is unknown, but what it did for the purposes of this system was limit how much plasma was being pulled into the teleporter station. The Taljzi reinforced the receiver chamber and added their own containment fields, making it capable of handling the amount of plasma they were pulling from the collector station.

“A second teleporter unit then transferred that plasma to a destination fed to it by the control center,” she noted. “That destination was being tracked in real time by a wonky gravity-hyperspace interface scanner, making the interface drive the easy target.”

“From the review of the