Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  As Captain Vong walked onto the bridge, exactly five minutes before the scheduled emergence, and the battle stations announcement rang through the ship, Masters carefully put his bookmark in the book, closed it and walked over to the main station.

  “Lieutenant Commander Casimir,” he greeted her. “I relieve you. Report to your battle station.”

  “I stand relieved, sir,” Morgan said brightly, rising and taking exactly six steps to the assistant tactical officer station. There was, as she understood it, a continuing discussion over whether or not the new warships should have a secondary bridge.

  Human design philosophy called for redundancy—but A!Tol design philosophy was based around a combat environment where a ship was either fully functional or mission-killed. There wasn’t much in between, even with compressed-matter armor. A!Tol designs buried the bridge at the absolute center of the ship, and modern designs had a second shell of compressed-matter armor around it.

  But still no secondary bridge, which put the assistant tactical officer just to the tactical officer’s right.

  “Readiness report?” Masters asked her.

  “All batteries live and green,” she confirmed with a quick glance at her console. Enough of the crews had already been at their stations that the batteries had all checked in within thirty seconds.

  Bellerophon was ready for war.

  Her boss nodded to her, then turned to Captain Vong.

  “Captain, all weapons systems and batteries are live and green,” he reported. “We are ready for battle.”

  “Let’s hope we won’t be fighting one,” Vong told the bridge. “Bring shields and sensors to maximum power. Time to emergence?”

  “Seventy seconds and counting,” navigation reported.

  Morgan ran over the detailed assessments for the ship’s guns. There were no warning signs hidden behind an overall green status indicator. The ship’s missiles, hyperfold cannons, proton beams and plasma lance were all ready for battle.

  A notification popped up on the corner of her console and she concealed a smile. Interpreter-Lieutenant Coraniss might be one of the few among their people who could talk to non-Mesharom, but the young alien still vastly preferred text communication to speaking in person.

  Watch safety margins, the note told her. Interface-drive interactions with gravity singularities are different than initial calculations suggest. Margin for ship of this mass potentially twice your expectation.

  Use this calculation set:

  The email devolved into math. Morgan could follow it, and some of her smile slipped through as she did.

  “Navigation, I’m forwarding you some information from our passenger,” she announced. “New calculations for interface-drive interactions with singularities.”

  The bridge was quiet for a moment as the navigator processed the data.

  “Damn, if these calcs are right, we could have accidentally trapped ourselves, easily.”

  “I’m not betting against Mesharom calculations,” Morgan said.

  “Lieutenant Commander, please forward those calculations to my station as well,” Captain Vong said evenly. “And perhaps archive them for our R&D teams?”

  “Forwarding now. Already archived, sir,” Morgan replied, while sending a quick thank you back to Coraniss.

  The Mesharom Interpreter wasn’t a scientist or an engineer—Coraniss was a navigation officer, if Morgan had understood their conversations correctly—which meant they wouldn’t necessarily realize they’d just handed over the key to one of the Imperium’s recurring engineering problems.

  The Imperium knew that the Mesharom, like the Precursors before them, used a gravitational singularity to power their ships, an even more efficient prospect than the matter-conversion plants concealed deep inside Bellerophon’s hull.

  All of the Imperium’s attempts to duplicate a singularity plant had, however, failed as soon as any kind of interface drive became involved. In the interests of keeping their ride safe, Coraniss had just handed Casimir a key calculation needed for the next generation of power plants.

  “Emergence in five seconds,” the navigator reported. “Opening portal…now.”

  The portal took them into deep space for only the second time in Morgan’s experience, and to a black hole for the first time in the experience of any officer aboard. The Duchy of Terra Militia had kept most of its operations close to home, and the A!Tol Imperial Navy gave black holes a massive safety margin.

  Morgan’s scanners had software written by the A!Tol, and they were not happy to be surveying a black hole from this close in. She had to mute four critical-danger alerts just to get a clean sweep of the accretion disk.

  Once she’d done so, however, answers started to fall into place with surprising speed.

  “I’ve got definite radiation trails from large-mass interface drives,” she reported. “With the background rads from the black hole and the accretion disk itself, I can’t give you definite numbers, but I’d say a group of at least six heavy warships came through here.”

  That would line up with the number of survivors from the clash with the Mesharom Frontier Fleet. Working out where their targets had gone from here, however, was going to be harder.

  “They definitely dove into the accretion disk,” Morgan concluded aloud as she continued to review the data. “They were hiding their trail.”

  Like diving through a river on a planet, the accretion disk would hide the signs she was using to track them. They could circle the disk, looking for the point where the alien fleet had left, but that could take days. Weeks.

  Possibly months. The accretion disk was just over a light-day thick and two light-days across, a collection of debris being slowly consumed by the black hole at its center. That was a lot of volume to scan for an exit point.

  “I hate clever enemies,” Vong said aloud. “Anything you can find for me, Casimir?”

  “Our drones might have more luck covering space than we will,” she admitted. “I’m not sure what else to suggest.” She glanced over at Masters. “Commander?”

  “We’ll deploy drones and sweep the exterior of the accretion disk,” Masters confirmed. “The drones’ scanners, however, don’t have enough power to punch into the disk itself. Only Bellerophon can do that—and we may find some more clues in there if we look.”

  “Agreed,” Vong said. “They didn’t just stop here to hide their trail, people. I want to know what they came here for—every piece of data we learn about them gives us another piece of the puzzle.”

  He smiled thinly.

  “And the sooner we solve this puzzle, the sooner we go back to dealing with the people who blew up two of our colony worlds.”

  They were close enough to the relay network to get updates whenever they came out of hyperspace, and Morgan agreed with the Captain. Bellerophon wasn’t going to be missed in the search for Powell’s murderers—but that didn’t mean her crew didn’t want to be there.

  Politics and promises would keep them here for now, however. Humanity owed the Mesharom too much to leave the destruction of a Frontier Fleet squadron as an unanswered question—and they couldn’t take the chance that the two attacks were unrelated, either.

  Morgan had spent a year of her life on DragonWorks, surrounded by scientists and engineers by the hundreds. During that year, she’d learned the oft-repeated phrase that no great discovery was ever announced by “Eureka.” They were announced by studying the data and saying “huh, that looks funny.”

  That phrase was definitely on her mind as she studied the data from the sensors. The Imperium had enough scans of black holes that she knew roughly what she was looking at and how difficult it was going to be to identify the trail of an interface drive through the accretion disk.

  The oddity she was looking at didn’t belong. It wasn’t an interface drive, but it was some kind of trail cut through the disk. It looked funny.

  “PO Maki,” she called one of her noncoms over. “Take a look at eight four point six by t
hirteen point three three, out just over a hundred million klicks. What do you see?”

  The Japanese Petty Officer fed her coordinates into his console and looked over the area.

  “Huh. That looks funny.”

  Morgan chuckled.

  “I know,” she allowed. “It’s not an interface-drive trail, but something is cutting a hole through the accretion disk. Guesses?”

  Keane Maki swallowed and glanced over at Commander Masters, who was paying attention to the drone sweeps. Morgan wasn’t putting him on the spot, but she was curious what the NCO thought.

  “It could be a ship,” he suggested hesitantly, then shook his head. “No, sir. It’s not a ship. Too big. That’s… I think that might be a planet.”

  “That far out in the middle of nowhere?” Morgan asked, but she was already feeding that assumption into the scanners and adjusting her sweep toward the end point of the trail.

  “Yep,” she answered her own question a moment later as they localized the ship. “Well, calling it a planet is being extraordinarily gracious, PO Maki, but it’s definitely a big honking rock of some kind. I make it twenty-five hundred kilometers across and clearing itself a path through the dust and debris. Can you confirm?”

  “I get the same,” Maki replied a moment later. “Small planet, big asteroid, either way it’s probably the single biggest piece of real estate in the accretion disk.”

  “Which makes it the most likely landmark for if you had a rendezvous point, doesn’t it?”

  Morgan didn’t wait for Maki to reply before pinging Masters.

  “Sir, PO Maki found something,” she told her boss. “We think it’s a planetoid…which makes it the most likely place for our friends to have rendezvoused with somebody else.”

  “Nice catch, both of you,” Masters said as he began to go over their data. “Let’s get one of the probes lined up for a dive into the disk and then I’ll get the Captain involved. This might be the breadcrumb we’re looking for.”

  The current generation of sensor drones carried by the Duchy of Terra Militia were equipped with a widely varied suite of systems, including light shields and a hyperfold communicator.

  The combination was enough to allow Morgan to watch her probe take a hit from a piece of debris that overwhelmed both the shields and the inherent anti-debris properties of an interface drive in real-time. She had enough warning to see the rock coming and not enough warning to save the ten-million-mark probe.

  “I don’t think probes are going to cut it in the accretion disk,” Captain Vong noted drily as he saw the results. “Commander Masters, will we have any problems if we head in?”

  “No,” Morgan’s boss said instantly. “Our shields are more than powerful enough to withstand random debris. The probes are really only shielded against normal space debris, not an accretion disk.”

  “Commander Hume,” the Captain continued. “Do you have Commander Casimir’s planet in your charts yet?”

  “We do,” Kumari Hume, the Indian-born navigator, told them. “ETA is just over eleven minutes at full speed, but…”

  “Let’s take it a bit slower than that, Hume,” Vong agreed. “Twenty-five percent of lightspeed, if you please. Commander Masters, Lieutenant Commander Casimir—keep your eyes peeled. Feel free to use the proton beams or the Sword suite to keep our space clear.”

  Morgan began running a basic defensive program into the computers as the battleship dove toward the accretion disk. The Sword antimissile suite should suffice to protect the ship from most debris, and she brought that online in automatic tracking mode.

  The proton beams were a secondary weapon, but they’d still suffice to take out any natural debris heading their way. The Swords’ drone sisters, the Bucklers…weren’t going to be safe to deploy.

  “I recommend against deploying the Buckler drones,” Masters told Vong, echoing Morgan’s thoughts. “We’d lose them far too quickly even if we aren’t engaged. That leaves us vulnerable if we do find an enemy in here, Captain.”

  “I ran the same numbers, Commander,” the Captain replied. “Interface missiles are going to have a hell of a time in this mess. If we are attacked, you are cleared for Green Dragon engagement protocols.”

  That meant everything the Imperium officially admitted to having—the newest generation of Sword and Buckler, the heavy plasma lance, and the point eight cee interface-drive missiles—was clear for use, as well as the new-generation shields and the hyperfold cannons.

  “And if those aren’t enough?” Masters asked quietly.

  “We have a Mesharom aboard, Commander,” Vong replied. “I’d rather not flaunt this vessel’s true power in front of the people we stole pieces of it from.” Morgan spotted his familiar thin smile reflected in her console as he spoke.

  “That said, I will authorize escalation to Black and even Gold Dragon protocols if needed to defend this ship. Is that sufficient for you, Commander Masters?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Commander Hume? ETA to the disk?”

  “Twenty seconds to entry,” the navigator confirmed. “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”

  Bumpy was overstating things a bit, but terrifying was bang on.

  From the moment Bellerophon entered the debris field, Sword was alive. Lasers flickered out at larger chunks of rock and ice as they approached, reducing them to vapor and gravel that pelted the battleship’s shields.

  Then there was the vapor and gravel that had already been present. Here, in the accretion disk of a significant black hole, Morgan finally saw conditions that rivaled what entertainment liked to present asteroid belts as.

  Their speed was the main issue. Point two five cee was slow for an interface-drive ship…but that was the only standard you could say that in.

  At a quarter of the speed of light, Bellerophon smashed through the accretion disk like a belly-flopping swimmer. There was no subtlety or stealth to their approach. Even a stealth field couldn’t have hidden someone moving through the debris field, let alone someone moving at their speed.

  Morgan watched the patterns around them like a hawk. Half of her attention was looking for larger debris, chunks of rock too large for the Sword turrets’ lasers. Those she tagged for the proton beams.

  The rest was watching for a trail like theirs. The most likely situation was that their prey had moved on, and their best-case scenario was finding an abandoned fueling station or some such.

  If the warships that had attacked the Mesharom were still there, however, then Bellerophon was screaming her presence for all to see. They weren’t going to turn that down.

  She checked the status signals on her standard missile launchers—her Alpha and Bravo series batteries—and her hyperfold cannons—her Charlie and Delta series batteries. The proton beams—the Epsilon batteries—were live, firing at her targets as she flagged the debris.

  Currently, those were the only batteries her console was showing. Her Foxtrot, Golf and Hotel batteries wouldn’t even show up on her systems unless the Captain authorized higher-tier engagement protocols.

  All of the weapons systems Green Dragon protocols gave her were green and live, and she returned her attention to the space around her ship.

  “Any sign of company, Commander Masters?” Vong asked.

  “Nothing so far,” the tactical officer replied. “Should we bring up a marching band as well?”

  “We’re all on the same page, I see,” the Captain noted with a chuckle. “I don’t think the band would make much difference, but give me a maximum-power radar pulse at that planetoid, please.”

  Morgan was already on it. Emitters across the battleship’s hull adjusted and then pulsed.

  They were getting a lot of garbage returns. There was a lot of debris out there, but…

  “I have movement!” she barked. “Unknown contacts, in the lee of the planetoid. Interface drives coming online and heading in our direction.”

  “I see we have their attention,” Vong said calmly. “Commande
r Antonova, send the standard challenge, if you please. This is Imperial space.

  “Commander Masters, Lieutenant Commander Casimir…stand by to engage the enemy.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  One moment, Morgan’s console had at least basic access to all of Bellerophon’s weaponry. The next, that entire screen shut down, and she barely stopped herself from whipping around to glare at Masters as he yanked offensive control from her station without a word.

  “You’re on scanners,” he ordered dismissively. The tone was very different from all of their interactions since the very first few. “Find me targets.”

  Swallowing her personal reactions, she realized that the split made some sense. It was just a surprising shift from how things had been operating even a few moments before. She pulled in the sensor feeds, cross-referencing to make sure she had the unknown ships locked in.

  “I have one super-battleship that matches the Mesharom sensor data, three ships in the battleship-mass range that energy signatures suggest are logistics ships, and four destroyers,” Morgan reeled off as her team crunched through the analysis.

  Then something flashed on her screen, a small note as a program she’d forgot to turn off came back with a result, and she stared at the icon for a long moment.

  “Commander Masters, Captain—we have a warbook entry for those destroyers,” she reported. She was distracted as she dove into the data and found its source: a series of scans from the Thunderstorm-class cruiser Liberty.

  “What do you mean?” Masters demanded. “They don’t match anything I’ve ever seen.”

  The difference in tone between the cooperative relationship they’d been building and his suddenly harsh attitude as they neared combat grated on her nerves, but it could easily just be combat…combat and the nerves of a twenty-four-year-old.

  She swallowed and transferred the data on her screen to her boss.