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

into play. Parts of the “in-flight refueling” system had been modified to create a weapon, but most of those had been convincing the control computer to accept an interface drive as a ship.

It detected a ship. It judged that it had not fueled that ship. It provided fuel. Icons flashed on the screens, reporting on the teleporter as it activated—and then the hyperfold com from the second ship cut off.

“Target identified and destroyed in…eleven seconds,” Rin reported. “I am still receiving a feed from Extana. She is not showing as a contact on the scanners.”

The room exploded in cheers. Both halves of the mission were complete: they’d built a superweapon and they’d found a way to protect their own ships from it.

As the cheers carried on, Rin met Lawrence’s gaze. She looked grim and returned his regard calmly.

“What next?” she asked.

“We leave everything online and bring Extana in to the swarm,” he told her. “That will take two hours. If the mask works for the entire flight in, we’re good. Either way, we shut everything down when Extana is either here or gone.

“Then we wait.”

Chapter Fifty-Six

“Anomaly scanners put the nearest contact at over a light-day,” Ort reported on Odysseus’s flag bridge. “We should be clear for a rapid-transition hyper portal.”

“Isn’t that going to be fun,” Rogers murmured.

Morgan had to agree. It was possible to create a hyper portal, pass through and close the portal behind you in under a second. But the portal didn’t have enough time to stabilize the way it normally did, which made the transition noticeably more uncomfortable.

“Needs must when the devil drives,” Morgan murmured back to her XO. “Are all ships ready?” she asked more loudly.

“Checking in now,” Ort confirmed. “Seventy-Three-Twenty-Two ships report ready.” Pause. “Wendira ships report ready. Laian ships report ready.”

The Ivida turned in his chair to look at Morgan.

“All special task group report ready for rapid hyperspace transition on your order,” he reported.

Morgan considered the vague map for a few seconds. They could pick up the mass effect of the rosette clearly from there, rippling waves of anomalous readings on the scanners. They should be emerging between thirty-six and forty light-hours from their target star.

And they should be clear to do so. Nothing was on the anomaly scanners except those stars and the one element of Swarm Delta at over a hyperspace light-day.

But something made the back of her neck itch, and she was all too aware that she wouldn’t see any vessels lying doggo in hyperspace. There was only so much delay she could take, though.

“STG will transit in sixty seconds from…now,” she ordered crisply.

There was no grand “leap into action.” Her team had been planning for and expecting the order for days. Everything on her bridge was smoothly planned, and she hoped it was the same on the other ships of the special task group.

A timer was now on her main hologram, ticking down toward zero, and Morgan forced herself to keep breathing normally. She hated rapid transitions.

They weren’t that bad, not really, but they were supposed to be avoidable, and she’d made too many of them in her career.

“Transition in ten seconds,” Odysseus’s navigator announced. “Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

“Transition.”

The world tried to tear Morgan apart, and she grimaced as that one second seemed to take an hour to pass. Her muscles clenched and seized in rippling waves across her body, and she gasped in pain.

She was hardly the only one. Even as rapid transitions went, this was bad. She’d been through one worse, ever, and that had been inside the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula with damaged hyperspace emitters!

“Transition complete,” Rogers reported, sounding short of breath. “All ships confirmed present. We are scanning… Range to target is one-point-six light-cycles.”

Thirty-seven light-hours.

“Well in the zone,” Morgan accepted aloud. “Full scans; I want to know what’s out there, people.”

Her team set to work, interfacing with the individual ships as they moved toward the star at half the speed of light.

“Stealth fields are holding across the task group; we remain invisible,” Ort reported. “Hyperfold coms are…distorted but functional.”

“Get a team on analyzing that,” Morgan snapped. “If it will impact long-range hyperfold transmissions, we need to know that.”

“Yes, sir,” Ort confirmed. He paused. “We’ll run the analysis, but it doesn’t look good, sir.”

“Then we’ll deal with that,” Morgan said calmly. “All ships will maintain course toward Target Astoroko One for now. We were always going all the way in for this one.”

She checked. One of the Laian starkillers was designated for this deployment. In another universe, the blue giant they were approaching would have gone on to tear a chunk of the Astoroko Nebula away with it as it fell out of the rosette, eventually giving birth to a new star system.

In this universe, Morgan Casimir was going to kill it before it got to do that. That star system would die unborn to destroy the Imperium’s enemies.

She was one of the few living sentient beings in the galaxy to have fired a starkiller, and she hated them more than anything else. But the nest of Infinite at the heart of the nebula was unfightable.

“No contacts, scanners are clean,” Rogers reported. “There is nothing within several light-hours of us that our passives can pick up. Do we risk going active?”

Morgan had to stop and think for that one. Even pulsing their tachyon scanners would expose them to anyone out there, but at the same time…passives missed things. Just distance and moderate emissions control could hide a starship from the STG’s passive sensors.

And that was for a starship, let alone a bioform that could have entirely different emissions profiles from what they were used to.

“Coordinate it,” she said quietly. “Spread out ships for maximum heterodyning, and go active on everything for a one-second pulse. Radar, lidar, tachyons—the full array.

“I want to know the names of the local dust, clear?”

“Yes, sir!” Rogers replied crisply. “On it.”

Morgan watched and waited. Without the limits of the hyperspace visibility bubble, her ships spread out