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

Then the portal vanished.

“Wait, are they all through?” Rin asked.

“Negative, anomaly scanners are still showing significant masses on the other side of the barrier,” Likox told him. “They realized what was happening…but how? They can’t have a starcom; they couldn’t have transmitted back, could they?”

“At least one of the ships that made it through has emitters,” Rin’s aide barked. “Exit portal opening.”

“And collapsing,” Lawrence said grimly. “Not sure if that spiked their interface signature or what, but the teleporters just nailed the ship opening the portal.”

“Of course it spikes their signature,” Rin murmured. “My god. They can’t run.”

The Wendira escorts were still far too close to the Infinite, but with their drives down and death stalking the bioforms’ ranks, the Infinite were ignoring them as they tried to run.

“According to the escorts’ scanners, several dozen of the Infinite just flipped to an interface drive,” Lawrence noted. “They’re running…but they’re just making themselves easier targets.”

Rin forced himself to watch. If the Infinite had another drive system beyond their reactionless propulsion or their stolen interface drives, they didn’t try it in time. Five and a half minutes after the wall of massive bioforms had entered the system, not a single bioform was left.

“Lawrence, status on the teleporters?” he asked softly.

“I’m…glad they ran,” she said after a moment. “Three is done. Containment field nearly failed, and the on-board crew shut her down. No casualties, but the gun is out of commission. Probably permanently.

“One and Two are in better shape, but I’m not liking the instability data I’m being forwarded.” She shook her head. “It looks like we overestimated how many shots we were going to get, Rin. We fired a hundred and ten from each platform, and one is already gone and the other two are looking shaky.

“I don’t think we’d have been able to handle another hundred bioforms,” she concluded. “So, yeah. I am very glad they decided to run.”

“What happens now?” Rin asked, glancing over at Likox.

“That’s up to fleet command, I think,” the Sub-Commandant suggested. “But if it were up to me…we’d go after what’s left of Swarm Charlie with everything we have, Laians and Imperials included.”

Rin exhaled a long sigh and tapped a series of commands, shutting down the interface scanner and, with it, the entire weapon.

“Your ships can all bring their drives back up,” he told Likox. “I suspect the Skiefail swarm has done as much as it’s going to for you. The Infinite aren’t coming back to this system.”

And neither, if Rin had any say in it, was he or any other Imperial!

Chapter Fifty-Nine

“That makes three,” Ort reported, his voice soft as another swarm emerged from a hyper portal. “I’m not sure this tactic is working.”

“It’s not and I never expected it to,” Morgan admitted.

The special task group was running along the edge of the rosette at half the speed of light. The battle with the ambushing swarm had left them wounded and battered, missing half the Wendira escorts and one of the battleships along with the starkillers, but they were still there.

Unfortunately, the Infinite knew that. Three new forces—detachments from Swarm Delta, Morgan presumed—had now entered normal space at the edge of the impermeable zone around the rosette.

They were carrying out long, sweeping patrols that cut off any exit for Morgan’s fleet, but something still didn’t feel quite right.

“Why aren’t they coming after us?” she asked aloud. She looked around at her staff, all present on the flag deck and all looking exhausted after thirty hours of running. “Any of the three detachments we’ve seen since Swarm Echo could have taken us out, but they’re hovering at the edge of the impermeable zone, just…waiting.”

“We did kick the shit out of Swarm Echo,” Rogers suggested. “Maybe we’re making them nervous?”

“We used up seventy percent of our HSMs and thirty percent of our sublight missiles doing that,” Morgan pointed out. “Not to mention losing every one of our starfighters, five of the Wendira escorts, all eight starkillers and Tan!Loka. They have to know they hurt us.”

“Or do they?” Ort asked suddenly, the operations officer suddenly sitting up straighter. “They know we’re here. No question about that. They knew our original course, obviously. They can clearly pin down roughly what direction we’re going…but what if they can’t actually see us through the stealth fields?”

Morgan looked at the operations officer and blinked.

“Walk me through it,” she ordered.

New shaded zones appeared on the map in front of the operations officer, then duplicated themselves on the main display at Morgan’s order.

“Let’s say they’ve got a one-light-thousandth-cycle error radius on detecting us through the stealth field,” Ort suggested. “Eighty-four light-seconds. So, a fifty-million-kilometer-diameter zone we could be in.”

A shaded zone appeared around their course, marking that error radius.

“So, they don’t know where we are, but they can tell what course we’re following,” the ops officer continued. “If they can detect us at that eighty-four light-seconds, those patrols will make sure we can’t escape without being detected and engaged—but if they come in after us, they can’t guarantee the same.”

“Okay, I see it,” Morgan told the Ivida. “Except that an eighty-four light-second variance on their detection of us would not have let them put Swarm Echo directly in our path the way they did.

“They had our target and our emergence point estimated to within ten light-seconds, maybe less,” she continued. “There’s no way they’d have a different scan error now unless…”

She trailed off as it struck her. She turned to look at the red-highlighted shapes on a different screen, one that listed their losses, and swallowed a curse.

“A starkiller is an Alavan star drive,” she announced.

Everyone on the flag deck looked at her in confused surprise.

“Sir?” Rogers asked.

“The first starkillers were created when the Mesharom attempted to duplicate their masters’ jump drive,” Morgan told them. “Not something we really publicize, because we’re not supposed to know that much about the starkillers’ origins.

“But they are, mechanically and materially, an Alavan jump drive. Which means if there is one goddamn thing in the