Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Glynn Stewart (100 books to read .txt) 📖

transition to regular space in half a thousandth-cycle,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “This collection is trapped in hyperspace. I am not risking this fleet to deal with them now!”

Chapter Eight

The countdown timer on the screen was down to its last half-minute when the portals flared to life in front of the Imperial warships. The destroyers, almost irrelevant in the missile exchange that had just occurred and definitely irrelevant in a plasma exchange, went first.

Then the heavy cruisers. Then the battleships. Morgan suspected half of the flag bridge was holding their breath as a group when Jean Villeneuve finally flashed through her own portal and plummeted back into the void of deep space.

“Watch for portals,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “If we estimated wrong, this could get messy fast.”

Morgan went right back to holding her breath. The team that might have got things wrong was hers—if they’d missed even a single portal ship, the entire Infinite strike force might come out of hyperspace on their head.

On the other hand, in normal space with hyperspace missiles and hyperfold guns, they’d potentially be able to wipe out any remaining portal ships and flee back into hyperspace again. They just wouldn’t do so without paying for it.

“No portals on the screens,” Ashmore reported. “Anomaly scanners suggest that the enemy may be slowing into position around us. Hard to tell just yet.”

The irony of anomaly scanners was that they could still track FTL ships from normal space—but they tracked that data with a regular lightspeed delay. That had been useful for Earth, prior to joining the Imperium, when an array of scanner satellites had allowed them to locate Imperial worlds before they ever knew what they were looking at.

Right now, they’d be able to detect the Infinite fleet coming back toward them…but they wouldn’t know until the enemy was right on top of them, separated only by an impenetrable barrier of reality.

“Keep an eye on them; hold the fleet at battle stations,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “Nitik, get a hyperfold pulse to the main fleet ready. Dump everything we’ve got. The Laians need to know there’s a fleet wandering loose in hyperspace in the region as their reinforcements approach.

“Even if the Infinite are blind now, our allies will need to be careful.”

Morgan was already going over the data of the last thousandth-cycle or so they’d been in hyperspace, and she shook her head as the Squadron Lord spoke.

“They’re not blinded, sadly,” she reported. “We definitely got the portal ships, but they were still tracking us after the portal units went down. I’d guess several of the larger units also had anomaly scanners.”

“It was worth a hope,” Tan!Stalla replied with a flush of purple disappointment. “But those are the waters I anticipated. If they truly had been blind, we could have stuck in hyperspace and bled them until we ran out of missiles.

“Maybe even risked a plasma engagement. But…”

She fluttered her tentacles.

“Prott?” Tan!Stalla turned to her chief of staff. “Once we stand down from battle stations, I’ll need a coordinated meeting with all of the Captains. We got out of this bloodlessly, but we’re also trapped in normal space for the moment.

“Let’s learn what we can from the experience. Getting out of here is going to be an entirely different storm.”

A twentieth-cycle—a bit over an hour—later, it was clear that the Infinite didn’t have any portal ships left. It was also clear that they knew exactly where the Imperial fleet had gone back into normal space, their anomalies leaving measurable wakes as they flickered around Tan!Stalla’s fleet.

The virtual meeting had a grim tone, one that Morgan shared. They’d achieved their mission and kept the Infinite contained, but now they, too, were trapped.

“Captain Arnaud, I know we’ve all mathed the swim out,” Tan!Stalla said after the last officer linked into the massive conference. “Lay out the waters as your team has calculated.”

“Comme vous voudrez,” Arnaud replied.

His blip of French brought a momentary smile to Morgan’s face. Everyone else’s translators would have rendered “as you wish,” but hers was programmed with her understanding of French—and the phrase reminded her of Defiance’s Marine CO, an intentionally prissy but overwhelmingly competent officer who’d insisted on scattering French through his English when dealing with his human subordinates.

“My navigators have run up a full course,” Jean Villeneuve’s Captain continued. “The problem is inevitable, of course. They are in hyperspace. We are not. Assuming a minimum safe margin of distance between us and the Infinite of one light-cycle in hyperspace…”

He shook his head.

“We estimate a minimum of one month—thirty cycles—underway at full cruising velocity,” he concluded. “Hyperspace densities are always in flux, so even that may not be enough.”

“And farther is better,” Tan!Stalla noted, turning her attention to the hundred–plus faces in the conference. “Staff Captain Casimir, your assessment of our ability to engage the Infinite at close range.”

Morgan wanted to grimace as everyone’s gazes turned to her.

“In hyperspace, we are limited to plasma lances, proton beams, and interface-drive missiles,” she reminded them all. “We’ve already fired off thirty-two percent of our sublight missile magazines.

“Based off our sensor data and our encounters in Kosha, it is a safe assumption that Infinite plasma weaponry is more powerful than our own,” she said. “Without shields or high metal concentrations for the plasma lances’ magnetic tubes to latch on to, we do not believe we have a range advantage over them. Lightspeed is lightspeed, after all.”

The conference was almost perfectly silent, and she shrugged.

“Most likely, the Category Five bioform is capable of generating plasma pulses that can vaporize a Galileo-class superbattleship in a single hit,” she told them. “The Category Fours can likely vaporize a cruiser—if they hit. Hyperspace is an awful targeting environment for any system.

“Unless they have something else we haven’t predicted, their tachyon scanners won’t work in hyperspace any better than ours do. We won’t have instantaneous targeting—but neither will they.

“On the other hand, their firepower is utterly overwhelming at close range. I do not believe that this fleet would survive to clear the Infinite swarm’s plasma