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

fleet discovered that the inverse of the logic that killed the Category Five was equally true. With enough targets in play, it didn’t matter whether your fire could hit a specific target. It had a good chance of hitting a target.

Eight microsingularities punched through the allied formation like javelins thrown by angry gods. Traveling at eleven nines of lightspeed—99.999999999% of c—and absorbing any tachyons that came near them, the black holes were impossible to see coming.

And impossible to stop.

One hit a Laian war-dreadnought, tearing a hole half a kilometer wide through the massive starship. Another clipped an Imperial battleship, delivering the same devastating damage to the bigger ship that a similar strike had inflicted on Morgan’s Defiance.

Two Laian escort cruisers just…disappeared, torn to pieces and the wreckage dragged along with the mass of their killers. Another Wendira cruiser was almost missed, the singularity itself passing by but its gravity well tearing chunks out of the warship.

Even at this range, the combined fleets were simply too big a target. The microsingularities didn’t have time to curve toward anything, but they didn’t need direct hits. And near-hits were far too easy with thousands of ships gathered into a single formation.

Morgan grimaced—but the last Category Five died as she did so, and nothing smaller could host the singularity guns. They hoped.

Plasma and hyperfold cannon fire now filled the space around Swarm Bravo as the Wendira starfighters reached their targets. The range was still dropping, but the two fleets hadn’t yet reached missile range of each other.

And if the Wendira Drones had their way, they never would. Morgan had never seen the deadly small craft in action, only heard stories from her mother and her honorary aunts and uncles.

Now she watched them tear into the Infinite. Formations designed to alternate squadrons to confuse enemy targeting had been adopted to alternate entire Grand Wings. The Infinite unleashed a full million-missile salvo at the small ships as they approached, but Wendira fighters were notoriously difficult targets—and that was for gunners who knew what they were facing.

The missiles took their toll, but it was far from enough to stop the hundreds of thousands of fighters swarming over the Infinite, hyperfold cannons and missiles of their own hammering down on bioform after bioform.

But their power generators could only handle so much sustained fire, and the starfighter strike finally passed beyond range of Swarm Bravo. They were…much reduced, Morgan judged. Three hundred thousand–plus starfighters had gone in.

If she was reading her numbers right, only two hundred thousand had come out.

They’d gutted the smaller bioforms in exchange. If there was a Category Two bioform left in the Swarm, Va!Tola’s scanners couldn’t see it.

That just left the middle of the road. The Category Threes and Fours, ships ranging from two kilometers to a hundred long.

There were a hundred and fifty of them left, and Morgan was already running the math on their missile armament—because the math on their velocity was clear!

“Missile range in thirty seconds,” !Pana announced calmly. “All defensive drones are deployed.” She paused. “Are we clear of incoming singularity fire?”

“We should be,” Morgan replied. “My team has numbers on the missiles on the remaining ships. We’re estimating the Cat-Threes at an average of a thousand launchers and the Cat-Fours at five thousand. Total is four hundred thousand launchers on the Cat-Fours.

“Our scans and opticals suggest these guys carried the biggest chunk of their launchers.”

The four Category Fives had carried almost a quarter-million launchers between them, with the remaining three hundred and fifty thousand launchers spreading over nine hundred Category Threes and Twos.

“Bucklers and shields will hold,” Tan!Shallegh said calmly. “They have neither. This should be…short.”

“We can hope,” Morgan agreed. Her consoles were already running through the range estimates on a Category Four’s plasma bursts, and she didn’t like what she saw.

“Shotilik, confirm these numbers,” she ordered.

The missile launches started. Both Swarm Bravo and the combined fleets fired simultaneously—and Morgan’s team’s analysis appeared to be perfect. Exact numbers were impossible, but roughly four hundred thousand missiles were heading toward them.

And the combined fleet sent a million missiles back. She had never seen firepower deployed on that scale before, and she’d been present for the Battle of Arjtal, where the Imperium had fielded its largest Grand Fleet prior to the one she was aboard now.

“Orders to the fleets,” Tan!Shallegh said suddenly, clearly in coordination with the other two fleet commanders. “We will advance to maximum hyperfold-cannon range while sustaining full-rate missile fire.”

Morgan swallowed and checked her console.

“I have the same numbers, Captain,” her Rekiki subordinate told her. “So does Ito. The Cat-Fours’ plasma bursts will sustain integrity to twenty light-seconds.”

Six million kilometers. A million kilometers longer than the range of the hyperfold cannons carried by the allied fleet—and while the hyperfold cannons’ shots were instantaneous and hence more accurate, the combined fleets were a very large target.

“Fleet Lord, we estimate that many of the larger units can engage us from beyond our hyperfold-cannon range,” she told Tan!Shallegh. “We’ve been revising the numbers based on everything we’ve seen today.”

“Understood,” the Fleet Lord said levelly. “!Pana, Grand Fleet ships will increase evasive maneuvers. Etri, make sure our allies know.”

The incoming missiles were melting away under the fire of the defensive drones, but the range was already dropping. Morgan was about to ask why they didn’t change the plan—but the vectors gave her the answer.

It was already too late to adjust velocities. It would take six seconds to reverse the fleets’ courses…and those six seconds would take them to the edge of six million kilometers, where Swarm Bravo’s velocity advantage would bring them into range within moments anyway.

They’d run the numbers too late.

Morgan watched as the two forces hurtled together and plasma fire began to blink on the screens exactly as her team had predicted. The Category Threes were firing as well, but their plasma bursts lost containment before reaching the fleet.

The bigger bioforms’ weapons didn’t—and the organization of the combined fleet meant that their fire almost inevitably ended up focused on