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

Only luck had prevented the Infinite from ambushing the triple fleet in their home anchorages!

“Your assessment, Staff Captain Casimir?” Tan!Shallegh asked moments after he’d taken his seat at the center of the bridge.

“Highest-likelihood scenario is that the force at Tohrohsail is Swarm Bravo, sir,” she reported crisply. “If they were unable to read the Laian maps for hyperspace details and took a direct course to Tohrohsail from engaging Korodaun, the attack would line up with the end of their expected arrival window.”

Or they could have stopped, taken a massive quantity of sensor readings to send back to the Queen and then carried on and arrived closer to the middle of their window.

Either way, it was most likely Bravo, and Morgan now knew what had happened to that fleet.

“The good news is that Bravo is almost certainly short on missiles,” she continued. “They were expecting, I would assume, to ambush the First Defense Fleet and engage at close range.”

She shook her head.

“The need to defend the fleet base would limit our maneuvers, and they’d be able to pin the First Defense Fleet against the fleet base and wipe it out. It’s a counter-force mission, sir, one that only failed because we decided to redeploy forward.”

“And because they underestimated our strength,” Tan!Shallegh said. “If they were expecting just the First Defense Fleet—or perhaps the Grand Fleet as well—they would not be expecting to meet the Wendira Battle Hives.

“We have more ships than they expect and more firepower.” He snapped his beak harshly. “It is not solely my call, but I believe we will need to turn the fleets back. If they want a chance to eliminate the triple fleets, we will give it to them.”

Morgan nodded.

“I think,” she stressed, “that the combined fleets should be able to handle Swarm Bravo, so long as her missiles remain limited.”

“That depends on how intelligent they are, Staff Captain,” Tan!Shallegh reminded her. “Because Tohrohsail is a Laian fleet munitions depot as well as a repair base. Depending on whether they’re smart enough to look for storage depots and to prevent the defenders destroying them, there are more missiles in that system than they fired at Korodaun.”

“They’re smart enough to find that,” Morgan guessed with a grimace. “They’re probably smarter than we are, but they often lack context for what we’re doing. I suspect they can figure out a missile storage station.”

“So do I,” the Fleet Lord agreed. “I will speak with the fleet commanders. Casimir, reconvene with your team and analyze our data on the Tohrohsail System.

“I doubt they held, so I need to know what the Infinite are going to have to throw at us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And remember that you will be asked one question I know you can’t answer,” he said grimly, “but you must have a guess for anyway: will the Infinite harm the civilian population of the system?”

Morgan nodded with a hard swallow.

“Fifty-two-point-six million Laians, Staff Captain,” he continued. “Not all civilians, not by a coastline in a system hosting a fleet base, but still noncombatants. Your team needs to tell me if we’re looking at a complete wipeout.”

“What if we are, sir?” Morgan half-whispered.

“Then we need to consider whether it’s worth it to retake Tohrohsail if we can’t do so in time to save the people.”

Chapter Thirty-One

“I have no idea,” Rin Dunst admitted, looking around at the analysis team Morgan had put together.

His lover was leaning against the holotank itself, silently lost in thought after repeating the Fleet Lord’s question to Rin and her team.

“The Alava feared them,” he told the team. “But we know very little about their interactions. We know they were around for long enough for a rogue faction based around adopting their biotech to take up residence out near Kosha, with a local security force that was using a Dyson swarm to power shipyards that surrounded an entire gas giant.

“Even the Alava didn’t build such things quickly. We’re talking at least decades, and some of the evidence we saw out there suggested they’d been out there for centuries, completely ignoring the central authority.”

The team sat in quiet contemplation of a horrifying question.

“I can’t help but think that if the Infinite had been exterminating every settlement they came across, the Alava would have been more unified in dealing with them,” he admitted. “But the tone of some of what we do know suggests that a lot of the Alava thought the Infinite were just animals until later on.

“Then they were the Enemy, hated and feared in equal measure, the threat that led the Alava to break the universe.”

“What happened in between?” Shotilik asked.

“We don’t know,” Rin said. “My guess? That rogue faction of Alava started experimenting on the Infinite and did something one step too far. I don’t think the Alava meant to start a war—but I think the Infinite decided they needed to finish one.

“I’m scraping and connecting facts that might not be connected,” he warned. “But I think the Infinite started a campaign of annihilation, wiping out planets and systems as they advanced on the main Alavan systems.

“But before that, they existed alongside the Alava for centuries. Measured and controlled as the Infinite campaign seems to have been, they still crossed hundreds of light-years in decades of fire and war,” Rin concluded. “That doesn’t line up with the rogue factions working on stolen Infinite biotech or anything similar.

“Something changed in the relationship between the Alava and the Infinite. There are, now that I’ve looked for them, reference to spacegoing beasts that might well be the Infinite—and they go back for a long damn time.”

The Infinite as a force and a threat were a memory of the final years of the Alava, but there were records of similar creatures going back to some of the earliest records the Mesharom had copied down from their old masters.

“So, the Infinite didn’t destroy every alien they encountered originally,” Shotilik concluded. “And then they started wiping out the Alava