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

bioform in the video feed was…just tentacles. Enough so that even Morgan, who’d grown up around A!Tol, had a moment of atavistic horror at the sight.

“It’s a Category One bioform that appears to be acting as a symbiotic life form to the bigger units,” Shotilik told her. “We’ve now seen half a dozen of them go into Category Fours and just kind of get swallowed.

“But those tentacles are small enough and flexible enough to get into the Laians’ storage depots. Not so sure about the computers, but I’m going to guess they worked out an answer for that quickly.”

“Good catch, Commander,” Morgan replied, suppressing a shiver as she watched the bioform detach itself from a Laian storage depot, dozens of missiles held in its tentacles. “That’s disturbing.”

“Yes. But those C-Ones are probably key to the Infinite’s technological adaptation,” Shotilik noted. “They’re probably doing a lot of the work around building and installing the hardware they’ve adapted from the Laian systems.

“But on the other hand, if that’s as small as they get, we don’t need to worry about Marine-equivalent bioforms boarding our ships and taking over.”

“Small mercies,” Morgan muttered. “I’ll tell the Fleet Lord. Anything else we need to be concerned about?”

“No. They look about what we expected,” Shotilik said. “They’ve pulled the last of these manipulator bioforms back into themselves and are all but sorted out. I’d guess we’ll see them accelerate toward the fleets in a minute or two.”

“Understood. Thank you.”

Morgan relayed that to Tan!Shallegh, who gave her an acknowledging tentacle gesture while his attention was focused on a conversation with the other two fleet commanders.

Finally, Tan!Shallegh returned his attention to the flag deck—just as the tachyon sensors showed that Swarm Bravo was finally moving out at its ridiculous acceleration.

“The combined fleets will advance to two light-minutes and initiate an engagement with hyperspace missiles and starfighters,” he told the flag deck. “We will use the HSMs to target the largest bioforms while the starfighters sweep up the smaller units.

“Once we have expended fifty percent of the Grand Fleet’s HSMs, we will advance to regular-missile range,” he continued. “The expectation is that the enemy will attempt to force a plasma-range engagement.

“We believe that our hyperfold cannons have a longer range than the Infinite’s plasma bursts…so we will permit them to close the range until we can unleash those cannons.”

His beak snapped in determination.

“There are still fifty million Laians in this system. We will save them.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Infinite might not have interface drives, but their unknown reactionless propulsion was still disturbingly fast. With accelerations of a percent and a half of lightspeed per second, they didn’t seem to max out at all below the impenetrable barrier of lightspeed.

The combined fleets, on the other hand, advanced at sixty percent of lightspeed with only a few seconds of acceleration. It was a matter of minutes for the two forces to close to the targeted two-light-minute range, and then the allies reversed course.

The Infinite would continue to close, but for the moment they were out of range—and two of the three fleets facing them had weapons that could cross the distance.

Each of the two hundred and fifty star hives brought by the Wendira Battle Hives carried over a thousand starfighters. Another two hundred star intruders each fielded just over two hundred and fifty apiece. Within moments of reaching the designated range, over three hundred thousand star fighters, each piloted by a sentient being determined to earn immortality, blazed into space.

And by the time the last starfighter was in space, the first salvo of hyperspace missiles was on its way. Designated “single-portal” missiles to distinguish them from the still-more-advanced weapons commanded by the Mesharom, the Imperium’s hyperspace missiles were launched through self-contained portals concealed at the armored hearts of their warships.

They crossed two regular-space light-minutes in seconds and then activated the hyper emitters they carried, diving back into normal space with suicidal ferocity and detonating ten-gigaton antimatter warheads as they found their targets.

When Morgan had fought the Infinite the first time, she’d refused to fire first. That decision haunted her now, but it also meant that the Infinite had no idea weapons like these even existed. They were confident that no weapon their enemies possessed could reach them at that range.

They were maneuvering enough to throw off long ballistic fire. They were not maneuvering enough to throw off missiles that arrived in seconds, guided by real-time tachyon targeting.

There were four Category Fives at the heart of the fleet, the largest units in the Infinite armada and the ones that they were sure carried singularity guns. Eight hundred–plus kilometers across, they dwarfed any warship the Imperium had ever seen.

So, Tan!Shallegh had sent the entire massed firepower of his fleet at one bioform. There was no point in counting the explosions. At least several hundred HSMs emerged inside their target, ten-gigaton warheads detonating in the flesh of their enemy.

Immense as the Category Five bioform was, it couldn’t take that kind of damage. It never even had a chance to die. It was simply gone.

“Fleet targeting move to C-Five-Two,” Tan!Shallegh said calmly. “Maintain fire concentration.”

It might be overkill—but it was definitely enough kill, and when it came to a bioform eight hundred kilometers long, the last thing they could afford was to leave it intact after hurting it.

The Infinite were evading now, desperate maneuvers that threw off the Grand Fleet’s targeting data. Their entire formation dissolved into chaos—but there was a beauty to the chaos, a pattern Morgan couldn’t quite pick out but which told her that it wasn’t chaos.

It was a planned evasive maneuver, just as well-thought and logical as the evasive maneuvers Va!Tola was engaged in. Like their maneuvers, it would look random to the outside but was coded to keep ships from colliding with each other.

The sheer volume of fire the Grand Fleet was throwing at a single target was enough to render the maneuvers pointless. A second Category Five died in an antimatter sun tens of thousands of kilometers wide.

And then the allied