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

into a rough disk half a million kilometers across in a few seconds, linked together by their FTL coms.

“Initiating synchronized active pulse…now.”

The main hologram flashed gently as the tachyon pulse went out. Seconds passed as the FTL particles flashed across the dark void, leaving traces in the dark whenever they hit anything. Rocks. Dust. There shouldn’t have been much out there.

And then the new icons started to appear on the screen. First just a handful as the tachyon pulse washed over what could have been a slowly forming asteroid belt…then dozens of icons as the pulse continued on.

“Contacts, multiple contacts!” Rogers snapped. “Contacts in full em-con at one hundred twenty light-seconds!”

For a moment, everyone on the bridge froze in stunned shock. There was no way there was an ambush fleet waiting for them there. They’d been stealthed all along and none of the forces and sentinels they’d passed had reacted to them.

The only way the enemy could already be there was…

“They’ve been watching us all along,” Morgan said flatly. “They detected us as soon as we came into the nebula and projected our course. We’ve never been hidden.”

“What do we do, sir?” Rogers asked.

“Can we resolve numbers and types from the pulse we already got?” she asked.

“Estimates only,” Ort told her. “I make it sixty-six contacts, led by at least one Category Six…potentially a Six-A.”

“Understood.” Morgan looked at the hologram. “Assume Swarm Delta knew exactly where we were and re-vectored as soon as we transitioned. Can they position to cut off our retreat?”

There was a longer pause as the operations team ran their analysis.

“Yes, sir,” Ort said quietly.

“Then we complete the mission,” Morgan told her staff. “Bring up the tachyon sensors for long-range targeting. All Seventy-Three-Twenty-Two units will engage the Six with hyperspace missiles.

“Task group will commence a realspace run for Target Astoroko One,” she continued. “Even one starkiller threatens the Queen. They may be prepared to negotiate—and if not, the deeper we are in the gravity well, the more damage we can do to Swarm Delta when they come after us.”

Even as she laid one plan aloud, though, Morgan was assembling her real plan in the back of her mind.

There was a decent chance they could punch through the force in front of them and make a run into the rosette’s gravity well. They’d be a nightmare for the Infinite to dig out of that—which had a chance of bringing all of Swarm Delta in to deal with them.

Swarm Delta’s three components were fifteen trillion tons of warships, with hyperspace drives and probably missiles and potentially even hyperfold singularity guns. If she could lure them inside the hyperspace dead zone around Target Astoroko One and then detonate the star, well…

The special task group was already dead. If she could take fifteen trillion tons of Infinite bioforms with her and have a decent chance of hurting the Queen and the central nest, she was going to take it.

“Tachyon scans now running continuously,” Ort reported. “Confirming numbers and identities now. Swarm Echo is sixty-five combat units, mostly Category Threes but led by a Six-A. Range is one-twenty-six light-seconds, but they are now accelerating toward us at the standard one-point-five percent of lightspeed per second.”

“Initiate evasive maneuvers to hold the range. Do we have a solid target lock on the Six-A?” Morgan asked, surprised at how calm her tone was.

No, not even that. Surprised at how calm she was. She was dead. All of her people were dead. They didn’t know it yet, but that was already written. If the Infinite had always known where her ships were, they were dead.

The only real question was why they hadn’t already finished her people off.

“All Bellerophons are locked on,” Rogers confirmed.

“Synchronize firing systems,” Morgan ordered. “Full time-on-target salvos. Fire when ready.”

The main hologram was shifting now as they closed into battle mode. The map plot had shrunk in around the two forces, with new icons appearing across the bottom of the big projection as her ships began to feed live updates on all of their weapon systems.

The HSM launcher icons flickered as they fired, dozens of tiny portals opening inside Morgan’s ships and the missiles charging through.

“That’s confirmation that we can still fire HSMs in this mess,” Rogers observed. “We didn’t from Defiance, so I was wondering.”

Morgan chuckled.

“Those portal generators are small enough and powerful to cut through almost any interference,” she reminded her chief of staff. “We used them to send shuttles into a planet’s atmosphere once.”

Of course, none of those pilots had survived, but that had been because she’d sent them into the teeth of the Taljzi cloner’s defenses. They’d achieved the mission—but none of those brave Marines had expected to come back.

Now it seemed that Morgan had the same kind of duty.

“Tachyon scans suggest multiple hits on the Six-A,” Ort confirmed. “Target is still mobile.”

“Target has Alavan armor,” Morgan said drily. “I don’t think even the HSM’s warheads are going to do much without a direct hit or an internal emergence.”

“Well, there are always fish in the water,” Ort replied. “Second salvo away.”

There’s always a chance. At two light-minutes, the chance wasn’t great, but it was there.

“Can we evade around them and maintain range?” Morgan asked as more hit icons appeared over the big bioform.

“Most likely,” Rogers said. “I don’t know if we’ll keep it this open, but we should stay out of plasma ran…”

“What is that?” someone asked.

“Interface drives,” Ort replied. “All units in Swarm Echo just brought up full-power interface drives at point-six-five c.” He paused. “They’re not scanning quite right, so I’m guessing they’ve done something odd, but those are definitely interface drives.”

“Understood,” Morgan confirmed. “There goes evading them. Can we keep the range open while staying inside the zone where Swarm Delta can’t arrive on top of us?”

The closest Swarm Delta force was theoretically at least a day and a half away, but Morgan wasn’t taking bets that there’d only been the swarms they could see out there.

“No,” Rogers said grimly. “They have the interior