Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) by Glynn Stewart (best e book reader TXT) 📕

The room was silent.

“None of this was…preventable, I do not believe,” Ronoxosh said after a few moments. “But it leaves us in a strategic situation that is far more complicated than I had hoped. Short of advancing into the nebula and engaging the Infinite’s primary nest—a task we lack the forces for—I’m not certain I see a most-optimal set of next steps.

“That, Royal Commandant, is the current we are here to discuss,” Tan!Shallegh noted softly. “Thank you, Staff Captain Casimir. I think we should carry on the rest of this conversation in private.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Shotilik was the senior member of Morgan’s original team that she’d brought over to Va!Tola. She’d also grabbed Took and Ito, leaving Rogers to assemble a new team around herself and Kadark.

Morgan had meant to leave Ito, but Rogers had insisted that the team responsible for the entire Grand Fleet was more important than the one for a single task force. The Grand Fleet had ten forces like Tan!Stalla’s, after all.

The Rekiki was standing next to the holotank, her arms moving icons around as she tested an operational contingency plan, when her superior came in. Shotilik turned and saluted crisply, fist to chest, at Morgan’s arrival.

“Captain Casimir,” Shotilik greeted her. “Just testing scenarios.”

“Which ones?” Morgan asked, pulling a seat up.

“Where I’d go for resources if I were the Infinite,” her subordinate noted. “I have more data than they do, but I’d be sending my resource-extraction units to one of these three systems.”

Three unnamed systems near the Astoroko Nebula blinked red.

“They’re all binary star systems with significant asteroid belts and minable planets,” Shotilik said. “Depending on how many hyper emitters they have and if they can split up their bioform production, they might want to move in on all three.”

“Makes sense,” Morgan agreed, studying the map. She poked at the system for a moment, then brought up a green veil through the area around the Astoroko Nebula, marking where the Laian scout fleet covered.

“Except that we would have seen them move on any of those three systems,” she told Shotilik, taking Ronoxosh’s assessment into account. “They wouldn’t have waited this long to start acquiring new resources, so if we haven’t seen them, they went somewhere we wouldn’t have seen them.”

“But we haven’t seen anything from them to suggest that they can detect Laian stealth fields in hyperspace,” Shotilik replied.

“I’m not sure they can,” she said. “But they know where we were, so even if all they did was swing thirty degrees to starboard and up…”

“We’d never see them leave,” the Rekiki analyst said grimly. “Preyshit. I didn’t even consider that they might try to evade our scouts—they came right at us before.”

“When they want to fight, they want to fight,” Morgan replied. “But when they want to hunt and extract resources, they want to avoid us. Even factoring in the Wendira side, we’re not even covering ten percent of the Nebula’s potential exits with scanners.

“They wouldn’t even need to try very hard to evade us.”

“If I factor that in, it changes where they would go for resources.” Shotilik shook her long head. “I’m not sure we can get any useful information with that wide a net.”

“I know.” Morgan buried a sigh. “We’ll go over it again and again.” She snorted. “And again, until we have something useful to provide the joint command.”

Morgan adjusted the display to show the entire Astoroko Nebula, all twelve light-years of it. More lights dropped onto the hologram to show the inhabited systems around the Nebula. Only one side of it faced onto the Dead Zone, after all.

“I think we need to consider our vulnerabilities,” she said quietly. “Where can they do the most damage if they launch an assault directly from the nebula?”

She waved her hand into the hologram and tapped a star that she vaguely remembered.

“Solost,” Shotilik said before the data even appeared.

“A Laian sector capital,” Morgan agreed. “Population, fourteen billion. Seventh largest shipyard in the Republic.”

More data flowed out onto the screen, confirming her memories.

“Rated for parallel production of war-dreadnoughts,” she concluded. “As many as fifteen, if my memory serves. They’ve never actually built them like that there, but in the hands of the Infinite…”

“I seem to recall that the Republic targeted, what, a two-hundred-dreadnought wartime production capacity?” Shotilik asked.

“Around that, though I suspect that the true number would come up short if they actually tried to activate those yards,” Morgan agreed.

The shipyards were heavily subsidized to keep “war-dreadnought scale” yards operational, but the vast majority of those yards had never been used to build war-dreadnoughts. Even if only half of the yards actually ended up working, though, that would give the Republic a hundred-war-dreadnought shot in the arm eighteen months into any war.

It was a hell of a backup plan—one that Morgan didn’t know if the Republic had activated for the current crisis yet, but one that would take a while to have an effect regardless. Two-hundred-million-ton warships did not get built quickly, even with Core Power tech.

“But Solost would be a military, economic and political disaster for the Republic if it was attacked,” Morgan continued. “It’s well fortified, but I think even Swarm Bravo could overrun it. And it’s on the other end of a hyperspace current that cuts the travel time in half.”

Solost was twenty-eight light-years from the nebula, hardly close by most standards, but hyperspace was a fickle terrain. It would only take seven cycles for a force traveling the current to reach the sector capital.

“That’s the kind of target we need to identify,” she told Shotilik. “There will be more than just Solost—there’s almost certainly equivalents in Wendira space and Ren space.”

The Ren were the third Core Power that bordered on the Astoroko Nebula, sitting between the Laians and Wendira on most of their other approach points. They were neutral between the two powers, determinedly so.

“We’ve been focusing on the path they have taken and not considered the paths they could take,” Morgan finished. “Pull the rest of the team in,