It wasn’t going to change anything, but it would buy her fleet time.
And maybe, eventually, Morgan would think of something to do with that time.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The computer center on the ancient Alavan control station was starting to take on the look of a proper command-and-control facility. More holographic displays had been brought in and linked up to the molycirc core running everything—after Lawrence’s teams had purged the Wendira hardware, of course.
There were Wendira scattered around in support positions, but it was Rin and his collection of scientists who were handling the various workstations. They had direct control of what the archaeologist suspected was the most powerful weapon in the known universe.
A quarter of his people were civilians who had been accompanying the Grand Fleet because of the unusual opportunity to interface with the Laians and survey their space. The rest were at least officers and navy technicians as well as scientists.
Still, it was an unusual assembly to be in control of a weapon, a crew that told the tale of how the Skiefail swarm had been converted into one.
“We are now in the time frame estimated for the arrival of the Battle Hives,” Castellash told him. “Without contact, we cannot anticipate their exact arrival.”
“I know,” Rin agreed. While the messages they’d sent by hyperfold would have been relayed to Fleet Commandant Icenar by starcom, the Wendira officer was unable to respond. They had to hope that the Battle Hives had received the message with its instructions.
Rin looked over the room, his dozens of scientists, the chandelier-esque Imperial computer core and the massive towers of black Alavan molecular circuitry that surrounded him.
“Commence system activation,” he ordered, projecting his voice so everyone could hear him. He didn’t spend nearly as much time teaching as the Imperial Institute of Archaeology might prefer, but he’d done enough to be able to make himself heard to a classroom.
Green lights flashed up on the holograms as the hyperfold links established and hybrid systems interrogated ancient hardware for readiness reports.
“Teleporter one is online.”
“Teleporter two is online.”
“Teleporter three is online.” Lawrence reported the last activation herself, satisfaction in her voice. Teleporters one and two, after all, had been structurally intact and required only reprogramming and minor repairs.
Teleporter three had been struck by a meteorite at some point in the last fifty thousand years, and they hadn’t even been sure they’d be able to bring it online. Lawrence had worked miracles there.
“All systems online,” Rin reported aloud, for the recorders more than anything else. “Sensor board is clear. We have hyperfold links and active masking for all warships in the system.”
“My vessel is prepared to sortie in defense of the swarm, if needed,” Sub-Commandant Likox observed from one of the holograms. “Oxtashah has relocated to the expedition station.”
Hopefully out of the line of fire of whatever came next, Rin reflected. Unfortunately, the expedition station was attached to the control station, and if the Infinite worked out what was going on, that was going to be their priority target.
“Scanners are clear except for masked signatures,” he said aloud. “We are standing by for hyperfold links to create new signature masks.”
Even if Icenar sent the links the moment his ships emerged from hyperspace, there wouldn’t be time to mask them before the swarm fired. They needed the incoming Wendira ships to cut their drives the moment they entered the system and only bring them up after they were masked.
Not only would the teleporter destroy any Wendira ship that didn’t cut its interface drive, that would expend one of their strictly limited number of shots. Rin would mourn the dead if there was a mistake—but they could easily end up mourning that wasted shot more.
“Now we wait,” he told his team. “Please tell me someone brought coffee.”
Seventeen of Rin’s fifty people were human, which meant there were actually two coffee machines that had made the migration to the control center. In total, there were seven devices that turned water into hot stimulants for various species.
He was on his fourth cup when the alarms finally blazed to life. Checking the time, he nodded silently to himself.
Hyperspace travel times were always a guess. There were currents and density changes and all sorts of things that affected how fast a ship traveled. Most were constant enough to be mapped and included in the projection, but none were always the same.
Generally, hyperspace was denser and ships moved faster as you drew closer to the core of the galaxy. There were always currents of denser space and patches of lighter space, no matter where you were, and all of these things had some random variation.
There was still an average “most expected” time, though, and Fleet Commandant Icenar’s survivors had arrived exactly in the middle of it.
“I have a lot of hyper portals,” the Pibo tech watching the interface scanner told them. “Multiple ships passing through and cutting interface drives. Estimate…four hundred twenty contacts. Thirty are definitely star hives.”
There was no range at which the hundred-megaton Wendira supercarriers wouldn’t be clearly distinguishable from their escorts. Rin was no military expert, but that had always struck him as a bad idea.
“That’s Icenar,” he said aloud. “Stand by for incoming hyperfold links and prep the masks.”
He wasn’t sure he could mask four hundred–odd ships—but even the escorts would be detected and vaporized by the Skiefail Swarm.
“No additional contacts,” the sensor tech reported. “Wendira fleet is drifting in-system at four hundred KPS. That won’t get them to safety.”
“No. They need to be invisible,” Rin murmured. They weren’t, and that meant they were going to lose more of Icenar’s ships. There was nothing Rin could do to change that.
“We have a link with Icenar,” Likox’s hologram reported. “He’s asking how many ships we can protect from the weapon.”
“I don’t know,” Rin admitted. “In theory, all of them. In practice…I don’t know.”
There was a long pause.
“Even the escorts have three hundred souls aboard,” Likox pointed out.
“I’d really prefer it if he didn’t bring up his interface drives,” Rin replied. “But I know what he’s looking at. I need a live link to every ship so we can run the masking code. Do we have an ETA on the Infinite?”
“Three hundred forty seconds,” the Wendira officer said grimly. “If Icenar’s ships are still in easy range of where they hypered in…”
New links finally began to appear on Rin’s dashboard, and his fingers flew across the console, linking the telemetry data he was receiving to the software that was scrubbing their existence from the Alavan sensor data.
“The hives are clear,” Rin snapped. “I’m working my way down by order of mass—each ship should get a pingback when we’ve confirmed they’re covered from the interface scanner.
“They need to watch that link. We will have enough warning to tell them if the mask fails, but only barely.”
“Understood. Passing on the updates,” Likox replied. “What happens now, Doctor Dunst?”
“We find out in five minutes if this was all for nothing,” Rin told him. The star hives were now moving, blazing in-system at seventy percent of the speed of light. Unlike Imperial ships, Core Powers didn’t really build an overload speed into their ships.
To push that far over their usual max of point-six c was dangerous, but Rin understood. The Infinite were likely to come out of hyperspace exactly where the Wendira had—and by now, everyone understood how bad an idea being within ten light-seconds of an Infinite Swarm was.
“Last of the star shields are now masked,” his assistant told him. “Working on the escorts, but I think we’re at the point where we’re risking corruption of the overall sensor scan.”
“They can’t get far enough to clear our targeting, can they?”
“No.”
He turned to Likox.
“I’m sorry, Sub-Commandant,” he told the Wendira. “We can’t mask the escorts without risking our targeting of the Infinite. They’re on their own.”
“There are still fifty thousand people out there,” Likox whispered, his wings snapping wide in an unconscious stress reaction.
“And if we’re only a little lucky, we’ll kill the bastards coming for them while they’re still alive,” Rin countered. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Sub-Commandant. Quite possibly less. But we have to destroy Swarm Charlie—or two full Battle Hives died for nothing.”
“Estimated emergence in sixty seconds,” Lawrence barked. “Everything is online; containment is at full power. We’re ready, Rin.”
“We’d better be,” Rin snapped, turning away from the link to the Wendira officer. “Because there are fifty thousand people out there who are going to die if we get this wrong.”
That was just on the hundred and fifty–odd escorts still drifting near their emergence points, too. The other fifty-plus escorts, two hundred star shields and thirty star hives had over two million souls on board.
“Hyper portal! Massive hyper portal.”
Everyone in the room turned to look at the main hologram as it spat out information on what they were looking at. The Infinite, it seemed, still weren’t creating individual portals for their ships.
Instead, they had created a portal almost a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, and the first ships through were a phalanx of twelve six-thousand-kilometer-long Category Six behemoths.
Rin’s attention turned back to his own console as more bioforms flashed through the hyper portal, looking for a report that had to be there. It had to be…
There.
“Their drive has an interface signature,” he snapped. They’d projected and analyzed and calculated and estimated—but the only copy of the strange Alavan scanner they had was the one he was using right now. They’d had no way to know for sure that their estimate of how the bioforms would look to the Alavan systems was right until that moment.
They were close enough, and Rin held his breath. Five seconds. Six. Seven. Ten. There was plasma in the containment chamber now and…
“Firing! All teleporters firing!” Lawrence’s half-shouted report echoed through the command center. “Resequencing and firing again. Cycle time is three-point-four seconds.
“Station team, watch those containment fields!”
That was why there were Wendira Drones aboard the teleporter stations. They could watch the scanners tracking the plasma content coming in and adjust the shields in real time, far faster than even someone with a hyperfold command link.
“Did we get them?” Rin asked. “I need a report!”
“Escorts are reporting that the lead formation is gone,” Likox’s hologram proclaimed, his wings flickering in excitement. “Even the Category Sixes just…vaporized.”
And more bioforms were pouring through the hyper portal. At least three hundred bioforms had entered the system, including another dozen Category Sixes—and every three and a half seconds, three more of them died.
“My god,” Lawrence murmured. “What have we built?”
“What we set out to,” Rin told her. “The ultimate trap. A mirror to the one that destroyed an entire Mesharom battle fleet.”
The Infinite formation was chaos. They didn’t even seem to know what was hitting them, and several units tried to dive back through the hyper portal, only to discover what the allies had known for a long time: given the energy levels involved, even a sustained portal was only one-way.
Then the portal vanished.
“Wait, are they all through?” Rin asked.
“Negative, anomaly scanners are still showing significant masses on the other side of the barrier,” Likox told him. “They realized what was happening…but how? They can’t have a starcom; they couldn’t have transmitted back, could they?”
“At least one of the ships that made it through has emitters,” Rin’s aide barked. “Exit portal opening.”
“And collapsing,” Lawrence said grimly. “Not sure if that spiked their interface signature or what, but the teleporters just nailed the ship opening the portal.”
“Of course it spikes their signature,” Rin murmured. “My god. They can’t run.”
The Wendira escorts were still far too close to the Infinite, but with their drives down and death stalking the bioforms’ ranks, the Infinite were ignoring them as they tried to run.
“According to the escorts’ scanners, several dozen of the Infinite just flipped to an interface drive,” Lawrence noted. “They’re running…but they’re just making themselves easier targets.”
Rin forced himself to watch. If the Infinite had another drive system beyond their reactionless propulsion or their stolen interface drives, they didn’t try it in time. Five and a half minutes after the wall of massive bioforms had entered the system, not a single bioform was left.
“Lawrence, status on the teleporters?” he asked softly.
“I’m…glad they ran,” she said after a moment. “Three is done. Containment field nearly failed, and the on-board crew shut her down. No casualties, but the gun is out of commission. Probably permanently.
“One and Two are in better shape, but I’m not liking the instability data I’m being forwarded.” She shook her head. “It looks like we overestimated how many shots we were going to get, Rin. We fired a hundred and ten from each platform, and one is already gone and the other two are looking shaky.
“I don’t think we’d have been able to handle another hundred bioforms,” she concluded. “So, yeah. I am very glad they decided to run.”
“What happens now?” Rin asked, glancing over at Likox.
“That’s up to fleet command, I think,” the Sub-Commandant suggested. “But if it were up to me…we’d go after what’s left of Swarm Charlie with everything we have, Laians and Imperials included.”
Rin exhaled a long sigh and tapped a series of commands, shutting down the interface scanner and, with it, the entire weapon.
“Your ships can all bring their drives back up,” he told Likox. “I suspect the Skiefail swarm has done as much as it’s going to for you. The Infinite aren’t coming back to this system.”
And neither, if Rin had any say in it, was he or any other Imperial!
Chapter Fifty-Nine
“That makes three,” Ort reported, his voice soft as another swarm emerged from a hyper portal. “I’m not sure this tactic is working.”
“It’s not and I never expected it to,” Morgan admitted.
The special task group was running along the edge of the rosette at half the speed of light. The battle with the ambushing swarm had left them wounded and battered, missing half the Wendira escorts and one of the battleships along with the starkillers, but they were still there.
Unfortunately, the Infinite knew that. Three new forces—detachments from Swarm Delta, Morgan presumed—had now entered normal space at the edge of the impermeable zone around the rosette.
They were carrying out long, sweeping patrols that cut off any exit for Morgan’s fleet, but something still didn’t feel quite right.
“Why aren’t they coming after us?” she asked aloud. She looked around at her staff, all present on the flag deck and all looking exhausted after thirty hours of running. “Any of the three detachments we’ve seen since Swarm Echo could have taken us out, but they’re hovering at the edge of the impermeable zone, just…waiting.”
“We did kick the shit out of Swarm Echo,” Rogers suggested. “Maybe we’re making them nervous?”
“We used up seventy percent of our HSMs and thirty percent of our sublight missiles doing that,” Morgan pointed out. “Not to mention losing every one of our starfighters, five of the Wendira escorts, all eight sta
rkillers and Tan!Loka. They have to know they hurt us.”
“Or do they?” Ort asked suddenly, the operations officer suddenly sitting up straighter. “They know we’re here. No question about that. They knew our original course, obviously. They can clearly pin down roughly what direction we’re going…but what if they can’t actually see us through the stealth fields?”
Morgan looked at the operations officer and blinked.
“Walk me through it,” she ordered.
New shaded zones appeared on the map in front of the operations officer, then duplicated themselves on the main display at Morgan’s order.
“Let’s say they’ve got a one-light-thousandth-cycle error radius on detecting us through the stealth field,” Ort suggested. “Eighty-four light-seconds. So, a fifty-million-kilometer-diameter zone we could be in.”
A shaded zone appeared around their course, marking that error radius.
“So, they don’t know where we are, but they can tell what course we’re following,” the ops officer continued. “If they can detect us at that eighty-four light-seconds, those patrols will make sure we can’t escape without being detected and engaged—but if they come in after us, they can’t guarantee the same.”
“Okay, I see it,” Morgan told the Ivida. “Except that an eighty-four light-second variance on their detection of us would not have let them put Swarm Echo directly in our path the way they did.
“They had our target and our emergence point estimated to within ten light-seconds, maybe less,” she continued. “There’s no way they’d have a different scan error now unless…”
She trailed off as it struck her. She turned to look at the red-highlighted shapes on a different screen, one that listed their losses, and swallowed a curse.
“A starkiller is an Alavan star drive,” she announced.
Everyone on the flag deck looked at her in confused surprise.
“Sir?” Rogers asked.
“The first starkillers were created when the Mesharom attempted to duplicate their masters’ jump drive,” Morgan told them. “Not something we really publicize, because we’re not supposed to know that much about the starkillers’ origins.
Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Page 30