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

was no range at which the hundred-megaton Wendira supercarriers wouldn’t be clearly distinguishable from their escorts. Rin was no military expert, but that had always struck him as a bad idea.

“That’s Icenar,” he said aloud. “Stand by for incoming hyperfold links and prep the masks.”

He wasn’t sure he could mask four hundred–odd ships—but even the escorts would be detected and vaporized by the Skiefail Swarm.

“No additional contacts,” the sensor tech reported. “Wendira fleet is drifting in-system at four hundred KPS. That won’t get them to safety.”

“No. They need to be invisible,” Rin murmured. They weren’t, and that meant they were going to lose more of Icenar’s ships. There was nothing Rin could do to change that.

“We have a link with Icenar,” Likox’s hologram reported. “He’s asking how many ships we can protect from the weapon.”

“I don’t know,” Rin admitted. “In theory, all of them. In practice…I don’t know.”

There was a long pause.

“Even the escorts have three hundred souls aboard,” Likox pointed out.

“I’d really prefer it if he didn’t bring up his interface drives,” Rin replied. “But I know what he’s looking at. I need a live link to every ship so we can run the masking code. Do we have an ETA on the Infinite?”

“Three hundred forty seconds,” the Wendira officer said grimly. “If Icenar’s ships are still in easy range of where they hypered in…”

New links finally began to appear on Rin’s dashboard, and his fingers flew across the console, linking the telemetry data he was receiving to the software that was scrubbing their existence from the Alavan sensor data.

“The hives are clear,” Rin snapped. “I’m working my way down by order of mass—each ship should get a pingback when we’ve confirmed they’re covered from the interface scanner.

“They need to watch that link. We will have enough warning to tell them if the mask fails, but only barely.”

“Understood. Passing on the updates,” Likox replied. “What happens now, Doctor Dunst?”

“We find out in five minutes if this was all for nothing,” Rin told him. The star hives were now moving, blazing in-system at seventy percent of the speed of light. Unlike Imperial ships, Core Powers didn’t really build an overload speed into their ships.

To push that far over their usual max of point-six c was dangerous, but Rin understood. The Infinite were likely to come out of hyperspace exactly where the Wendira had—and by now, everyone understood how bad an idea being within ten light-seconds of an Infinite Swarm was.

“Last of the star shields are now masked,” his assistant told him. “Working on the escorts, but I think we’re at the point where we’re risking corruption of the overall sensor scan.”

Rin exhaled and checked the clock.

“They can’t get far enough to clear our targeting, can they?”

“No.”

He turned to Likox.

“I’m sorry, Sub-Commandant,” he told the Wendira. “We can’t mask the escorts without risking our targeting of the Infinite. They’re on their own.”

“There are still fifty thousand people out there,” Likox whispered, his wings snapping wide in an unconscious stress reaction.

“And if we’re only a little lucky, we’ll kill the bastards coming for them while they’re still alive,” Rin countered. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Sub-Commandant. Quite possibly less. But we have to destroy Swarm Charlie—or two full Battle Hives died for nothing.”

“Estimated emergence in sixty seconds,” Lawrence barked. “Everything is online; containment is at full power. We’re ready, Rin.”

“We’d better be,” Rin snapped, turning away from the link to the Wendira officer. “Because there are fifty thousand people out there who are going to die if we get this wrong.”

That was just on the hundred and fifty–odd escorts still drifting near their emergence points, too. The other fifty-plus escorts, two hundred star shields and thirty star hives had over two million souls on board.

“Hyper portal! Massive hyper portal.”

Everyone in the room turned to look at the main hologram as it spat out information on what they were looking at. The Infinite, it seemed, still weren’t creating individual portals for their ships.

Instead, they had created a portal almost a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, and the first ships through were a phalanx of twelve six-thousand-kilometer-long Category Six behemoths.

Rin’s attention turned back to his own console as more bioforms flashed through the hyper portal, looking for a report that had to be there. It had to be…

There.

“Their drive has an interface signature,” he snapped. They’d projected and analyzed and calculated and estimated—but the only copy of the strange Alavan scanner they had was the one he was using right now. They’d had no way to know for sure that their estimate of how the bioforms would look to the Alavan systems was right until that moment.

They were close enough, and Rin held his breath. Five seconds. Six. Seven. Ten. There was plasma in the containment chamber now and…

“Firing! All teleporters firing!” Lawrence’s half-shouted report echoed through the command center. “Resequencing and firing again. Cycle time is three-point-four seconds.

“Station team, watch those containment fields!”

That was why there were Wendira Drones aboard the teleporter stations. They could watch the scanners tracking the plasma content coming in and adjust the shields in real time, far faster than even someone with a hyperfold command link.

“Did we get them?” Rin asked. “I need a report!”

“Escorts are reporting that the lead formation is gone,” Likox’s hologram proclaimed, his wings flickering in excitement. “Even the Category Sixes just…vaporized.”

And more bioforms were pouring through the hyper portal. At least three hundred bioforms had entered the system, including another dozen Category Sixes—and every three and a half seconds, three more of them died.

“My god,” Lawrence murmured. “What have we built?”

“What we set out to,” Rin told her. “The ultimate trap. A mirror to the one that destroyed an entire Mesharom battle fleet.”

The Infinite formation was chaos. They didn’t even seem to know what was hitting them, and several units tried to dive back through the hyper portal, only to discover what the allies had known for a long time: given the energy levels involved, even a sustained portal