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

destination zone suddenly acquired purple-red contacts. The contacts were moving fast—it was hard to tell what their hyperspace velocity was, but their pseudovelocity was massive multiples of c.

“Portal opening.”

One moment, everything had been quiet.

The next, the largest hyperspace portal Morgan had ever seen tore through the barrier between realspace and hyperspace. A full light-second across, it overwhelmed their anomaly scanners into useless static—and the waves of Cherenkov radiation pulsing out from it rendered half of their other sensors blind.

“Sensors are blinded,” Ort announced. “Passive visuals are down. Infrared is down. Radar is overwhelmed. Tachyon scanners are still live; I have contacts coming through the portal.”

“ID them now!” Morgan ordered.

“I make them Category Seven,” Rogers said, her voice suddenly flat and utterly toneless. “I repeat, multiple Category Seven contacts. Estimate at least five, possibly six.”

“We’ve only seen eight of the bastards in total,” Morgan replied. “What the hell?”

She could see the same reports, the reports that had broken Rogers’ hope for escape. The massive, eighty-thousand-kilometer-long forms of the Category Sevens stood out starkly on the anomaly scanners.

There were other bioforms there too, at least fifty Sixes and Fives, but the Sevens dwarfed everything else into insignificance.

And then the entire portal pulsed again as a new contact came through, the one that had required the portal to be that large and whose presence overwhelmed the Category Sevens as thoroughly as they’d overwhelmed everything else.

“I have a Category Eight contact,” Ort announced uselessly, staring at his screens as the portal closed and the Infinite Queen was suddenly fully visible to every scanner Morgan’s fleet possessed.

Chapter Sixty-Two

This time, there was no gas giant to conceal the full extent of the Queen’s leviathan bulk. She was the same roughly spermatoid shape as her lesser siblings, but she dwarfed even the already-immense Category Sevens.

Forty thousand kilometers across at her widest point and almost two hundred thousand kilometers long, the behemoth exceeded anything mobile Morgan had ever seen except the sun eater. That had been an Alava-modified Infinite that had consumed multiple entire suns over the last fifty years.

The Queen was larger than worlds. Larger than gas giants, though not as large as the immense super-Jovian near-star she’d slumbered in. Nothing that large had any right to move at all, but the Queen moved.

And moved quickly.

“I’m reading interface-drive signatures on all of them,” Ort reported quietly. “The Queen is moving at point-seven c.”

“Bring us about,” Morgan ordered desperately. “Get us away from them. Now.”

She suspected the Infinite were still having problems localizing her fleet. So, they’d brought enough ships that it didn’t matter.

“Sir…”

It took Morgan a moment to place the officer speaking. Her communications officer hadn’t been a critical part of their mission for a while, with the only communications being inside the task force.

“What is it?” she asked the Catach officer.

“We are receiving a transmission from the Queen,” the carapaced mammal said quietly.

“Sanitize and play,” Morgan ordered. “Everybody else, keep us running. Take us to full speed.”

She’d communicated with the Queen before—but that had ended badly. She didn’t see any reason why this would change.

There were twenty light-minutes between them and the Infinite were gaining at twenty percent. Her orders would cut that to ten, but full speed reduced the effectiveness of their stealth.

The Wendira and Laian units could get up to point-six-five c, but the Imperial ships couldn’t do that without going to sprint mode—and sprint mode could only be pushed for about ten hours.

“Playing the message,” Litcha reported.

The voice wasn’t the booming overwhelm of poorly translated and modulated voice transmission that the Queen had used before—or that the sun eater had adopted. It was a calmer voice now, speaking in Laian instead of Alava.

“Your NestBurner escorts are gone. Tell us, TinyLife, are you still slaves?”

Morgan looked at Litcha.

“Commander? Is that it?” she asked.

“Yes, sir,” the Catach confirmed. Much of the young alien’s face was invisible, their armor plating having unconsciously compressed around their snout and eyes in a defensive mode.

“We are not slaves,” Morgan murmured. “What do they think is going on?”

“You said…” Rogers trailed off.

“Rogers?”

“You said the starkillers were Alavan star drives,” her chief of staff said slowly.

“Yeah. Almost exact duplicates for the standard unit,” Morgan agreed.

“The Infinite might have thought they were Alavan ships,” Rogers pointed out. “That would explain why they targeted them first, almost as well as them knowing what the starkillers were.”

Morgan exhaled a breath.

“Well, that’s an interesting disaster, isn’t it?” she murmured. “Do we play along to see what she says…or tell the truth?”

“We can’t outrun them, sir,” Rogers told her. “They’ve got us pinned against the rosette, and I don’t think we can make it far enough for the stealth fields to hide us.”

Morgan considered the message and stared at the massive bioforms hunting her fleet. She could lie…and maybe squeeze her fleet out.

But this was the first time any warship had received communications from the Infinite since she’d fled from them in Defiance. Truth might buy them something more important than one fleet.

Truth might buy them peace.

“Radio transmission, I assume?” she asked Litcha.

“Yes, sir.

“Then we’ll send one back. Translate into Laian for them.”

“Yes, sir,” the Catach confirmed.

“We were never slaves,” Morgan said into the recorder. “The Nest Burners are long, long dead.”

She considered adding more, then shrugged.

“Send it.”

The transmission time was dropping rapidly, but the Infinite were still almost twenty light-minutes away. Every ten minutes that passed took away another light-minute of that safety, but it still took four minutes for Morgan to get a response.

“Message received, sir,” Litcha reported.

“Play it.”

“The NestBurners could not die,” the Queen’s voice insisted. “They were un-destroyable. You serve them as all who came before you did.”

Morgan sighed again, considering what she could do.

“Time to HSM range?” she asked softly.

“Seventy thousandth-cycles,” Ort reported quietly. “They are at one-light-hundredth-cycle.”

Morgan nodded and looked at her staff.

“I figure we talk,” she told them. “We try to convince her of the truth and see if maybe, just maybe, we can talk her down.”

“The odds are not in your favor, sir,” Rogers pointed out.

“Oh, the