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

Twenty-five hundred–plus tiny anomalies sparkled across the display as the fighters swept for enemy ships.

“What do we have on their current class?” Morgan murmured into her channel with her own team.

“Scythe of Doom-class,” Took replied after a moment, the Yin woman probably looking up the data as she was answering the question. “Upgraded from the Flying Sword of Fire class we saw at the Centauri Incident. Modular weaponry: they can be fitted with either missiles, a plasma cannon or a hyperfold cannon. Capable of point-eight c under interface drive. Twenty-seven-hour endurance.”

Morgan nodded silently, watching the fighters sweep across. Another anomaly appeared, then two—then six, as the bioform sentinels started maneuvering to engage the tiny scouts.

It turned out that half of this wave of fighters had been equipped with missiles. Six bioforms started moving, and ten thousand missiles appeared out of the darkness to storm in on them.

The other half of the Scythes of Doom were right behind the missiles, plasma cannons flashing. None of the bioforms even managed to initiate a portal before they vanished.

There was a pause on Va!Tola’s flag deck, then Tan!Shallegh snapped his beak.

“Grand Fleet will advance in concert with our allies,” he ordered. “Prepare to transition to normal space.”

Thousands of individual hyper portals cast their own anomalies through the void of hyperspace, blending together in the sensor screens until it looked like one massive portal tens of thousands of kilometers across.

The three fleets didn’t have enough synchronization to create a single portal like that, though Morgan knew it would be more efficient. That kind of planning, using a small number of hyper-capable ships to open a portal for an entire fleet, was essential to their enemy—and normally a sign of an extremely well-trained and -practiced fleet.

The patchier method of individual portals still delivered the combined fleet to their destination, tens of billions of tons of warships taking shape in the outer extremes of a system that should have belonged to them.

Scanners strained to provide a clear picture of the star system, but Morgan only had eyes for two pieces of data.

First, the location of Swarm Bravo. The majority of the bioforms were where she’d expected. At least a thousand of the Infinite creatures were gathered around the Laian fleet base and the gas giant the fleet base fueled from. Presumably, they were still tearing through the wreckage of the command centers and storage depots for anything they could use.

The second piece of data was any evidence that the civilian population was still present—and Morgan exhaled an immense sigh of relief as stations and asteroid colonies began to ping up on the map in yellow—active neutrals. They had power, which meant they probably had air and heat—which meant they had people.

There was no way to hide major space installations, and Tohrohsail didn’t have a habitable planet. Every one of the fifty-plus million people in the system lived aboard something immediately identifiable by even basic scanners.

And the vast majority of those facilities were intact. The updates continued to flow across Morgan’s screen, and she noted that there were bioforms standing watch over the largest clusters of habitations, but those habitations were intact.

“No ships,” Shotilik murmured. “All of the installations and stations outside the fleet base appear to be intact, but I’m not reading any shipping.”

“Only about half of those colonies are self-sustaining, in any wind,” Took argued. “There has to have been shipping for all of them to still be functioning, even after only eleven cycles.”

“Took, keep your eyes on that,” Morgan ordered. “See what you can identify of the intact noncombatant populations and what the Infinite appears to have made of them. Everyone else, focus on Swarm Bravo.

“If they’ve only got Category Twos and bigger, are they even capable of pulling the missiles from the depots?” she asked. “I’d love to be able to tell the Fleet Lord that the big guns don’t have missiles.”

“On it,” Shotilik replied. “Tachyon scanners show they have detected us—on their tachyon scanners, I assume—and are organizing their herd to face the fleets.”

The combined fleets had come out of hyperspace a long way from the gas-giant fleet base. At eight light-minutes, they were well outside the range of any weapons system the fleet had. The point had been to give them a chance to decide whether or not to embrace the engagement.

“Casimir?” Tan!Shallegh asked, his voice cutting through the flag deck with the ease of long practice. “Anything unexpected?”

“They appear to have left the stations and outposts outside the fleet base alone,” Morgan told him. “We won’t really be able to break down what that means until we can interview people afterward, beyond the fact that there are civilians here to rescue.

“The main force is at the fleet base, which supports the logic that they have some ability to extract supplies from the storage base and can be assumed to have full missile loads,” she continued. “If the Laian inventories are right, we can expect them to have roughly twenty million missiles.”

Which was about as many as the Laian First Defense Fleet had in their magazines. The next few hours were going to see incomprehensible numbers of weapons deployed.

“Understood. Let me know if anything sticks out, Staff Captain,” Tan!Shallegh told her. “Assuming we’re looking at your type-M units, we are assessing this as a winnable battle, even one in our favor.”

“Based off what we saw of Swarm Bravo when they fought Korodaun and Tan!Stalla…I would agree with that assessment, sir,” Morgan admitted. “But we have not yet fought the Infinite in regular space on a major scale.

“They will have more surprises.”

“I know,” the Fleet Lord agreed. “Keep your eyes open for them, Staff Captain, and I will hope you see the currents before they drag us under.”

“Yes, sir,” Morgan said, turning her attention back to her console.

What else could she do?

“And there is the answer to that,” Shotilik told her a minute later, relaying a long-distance visual from a probe to Morgan’s console. The