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

by Glynn Stewart

  But they’d caught up to the echelon of Thunderstorm-D–class cruisers Rear Admiral Sun had sent on ahead, which tripled the number of S-HSM batteries at their disposal. Twelve launch portals and seventy-two hyperspace missile launchers weren’t much, but Morgan suspected they’d be enough to give the Kanzi a bad day.

  “Forming hyper portal. Shadow and Fallout are leading the way.”

  The eight cruisers accompanying Bellerophon were the most modern ships in the Militia’s arsenal and a quarter of the vessels of their class in existence. They had sacrificed the earlier Thunderstorms’ proton beams entirely and given up a third of their conventional missile armament to squeeze in sixteen hyperfold cannons, an upgraded plasma lance, and the S-HSM battery.

  Unlike Bellerophon, they’d done it with conventional fusion and antimatter power cores, too.

  “Emergence.”

  The single word hung in the bridge like a suspended anvil as Morgan set to work. Tachyon emitters came to life, pulsing their impossible progeny across the star system. Receptors for a thousand mundane and exotic particles across her ship’s hull drank deeply of the detritus of a star.

  They found only silence, and Morgan felt a heavy weight settle in her chest.

  “We’re alone,” she reported aloud. “No Kanzi ships. No…civilian shipping. No station.” She swallowed. “No power signatures from the planet. Xīn Táiwān is dark.”

  The silence seemed to consume the entire bridge, reaching around to eat people’s voices and thoughts as awareness of Morgan’s report rippled outwards.

  “Did we…” Vong coughed, swallowing to clear his throat then continuing in a more level voice. “Did we beat the Kanzi here? Or…”

  “All calculations suggest they shouldn’t have made it yet, and I’m not picking up anything to suggest a major presence of un-stealthed ships,” Morgan said slowly. “I think…I think this was our strangers again. Attack from stealth, blow up…everything.”

  No defenders. Nothing had been stationed there yet, and both the Imperial Navy and Morgan’s own Militia had decided the system was safe.

  They’d been wrong.

  “Get drones into space,” Vong finally ordered. “Sweep every square centimeter of this star system. If there is anyone out there—survivors, stealthed enemies, anyone—we need to know.”

  He shook his head.

  “Then get us into orbit. The Kanzi are still coming, and I have every intention of asking just what the hell they think they’re doing when they get here.”

  Morgan drew the short straw of the watch-qualified officers and remained on the bridge as Bellerophon’s crew slowly stood down from battle stations and settled into orbit of Xīn Táiwān. The cruisers were sweeping the rest of the system, but it wasn’t like there’d been that much industry to start.

  If there was any positive to the whole mess, it was that the colony had been small enough that the kinetic bombardment didn’t look to have set off a nuclear winter. It was a small blessing, given that the single settlement and its surrounding farms had been blasted into a giant crater.

  Morgan hadn’t visited the planet before this, but she knew Seventy-Seventh Fleet had. She wasn’t looking forward to the Fleet returning—the survivor’s guilt this was going to engender would be brutal.

  “Bellerophon, this is Shuttle Six.”

  Eight of the battleship’s shuttles were flying a survey over the wrecked colony. Their search was probably futile, but none of Bellerophon’s crew could leave without at least searching.

  “Six, this is Bellerophon,” Morgan confirmed. “What do you need?”

  “I got a blip on my scanners, but then it went dark,” the pilot replied. “Might be nothing. Might be a stealthed power source.”

  “What kind of power source, Six?” she asked.

  “Not a damn clue, sir.” The pilot paused, then continued in a firmer tone. “Requesting aerospace drone deployment for a low-altitude survey. This is a messy set of mountains; I don’t really want to take a shuttle in.”

  “But if there’s a power source, there may be people,” Morgan agreed, bringing up the sensor panel and checking her stock of the class VI autonomous multi-environment sensor drones. “I’ve got three AMESDs dropping now; switching them to your control for a close survey.”

  The robotic craft fell away from Bellerophon, letting gravity do most of the work of delivering them into the atmosphere before bringing up their drives and diving toward Shuttle Six.

  “I’ve got them; I’ll let you know what I find,” the pilot promised.

  “You’re the only one who’s found anything, Six,” Morgan told her. “Good luck.”

  She watched the drone sweep for a minute or so, but it would easily take hours to search the mountain range above the Xīn Táiwān colony for people.

  The battleship was the center point around which they were rotating their entire operation in the system. The cruisers were spiraling outward from the planet, with hyperfold com–equipped drones leading the way.

  Morgan wasn’t sure what Captain Vong had hoped to find, but she was the officer of the watch and the one responsible for those drones. At this point, she could basically program a sweep pattern in her sleep, but that would be somewhat irresponsible.

  If anything strange happened, after all, she’d have to account for it and adjust the sweep pattern. Right now, she was just going over the data and ordering occasional post-processing checks for stealth ships.

  They couldn’t pierce a stealth field in anything resembling real time. What they could do was dedicate a significant portion of Bellerophon’s computing power to go over a five-minute section of sensor data looking for the oddities that would confirm a stealth field’s presence.

  It took about thirty minutes, and the area she could do it over was relatively small. She could run a full ninety-minute post-process on all of her sensor data—and she’d started doing just that sixty minutes before—but that data would be so out of date by the time it was done, it was almost useless.

  “Huh. That’s funny,” she murmured to herself. There was something in the asteroid belt. It was almost too much to be a stealth-fielded ship, though it wasn’t like they knew the full details of the stranger’s stealth systems.

  “PO Maki, can you redirect drones E-17 and K-9 towards two-thirty-two by one-sixty-five, thirty-two million klicks out?”

  “On it,” the noncom replied, his focus on his console as he got to work. “Huh. That’s funny.”

  “That’s what I said,” Morgan said with a chuckle. “Now let’s get past ‘funny’ and see just who our joker is, shall we?”

  Their “joker” reacted to the drones before the drones were close enough to give Morgan any clear data on them. Interface-drive missiles erupted from the blip that Morgan was tracking, flashing toward the drones at point eight five cee.

  “Tachyon scanners live,” Kami reported. “We’ve got a clean look at the bugger. Looks like three to four megatons, Kanzi attack cruiser or A!Tol battlecruiser size.”

  Twice the size of the Thunderstorm-Ds but less than half the size of Bellerophon herself. A big escort, much bigger than the destroyers they’d seen the strangers using so far.

  “Is she Kanzi?” Morgan asked.

  “Not sure,” Kami admitted. “Her interface drive is up; she is maneuvering for clear space. She’s running, sir.”

  Morgan ran the numbers. The cruiser was already at point six cee and was at most two light-minutes from space where she could open a hyper portal. None of the Militia ships could range on her with interface drive missiles or even hyperfold cannons.

  Bellerophon and four of the Thunderstorms could range on her with the S-HSMs, but Morgan wasn’t supposed to deploy those on her own authority. Captain Vong was asleep. She might be able to get approval before the enemy fled, but she couldn’t rely on that.

  She was the officer of the watch.

  “Stealth field suggests the strangers,” she said aloud. “Which means that this is one of th
e sons of bitches who’ve killed four worlds we know of. She is not getting away. Kami, vector in more drones, get her in tachyon range and give me live targeting data.

  “On it!” the PO snapped.

  Morgan sent an alert to the Captain’s cabin, but it was almost an afterthought as she plugged into the codes to bring the Hotel batteries online. Twenty-four missile launchers and four contained hyperspace portals came online while Kami got her the targeting solution.

  “Sixty seconds to hyper portal range,” Kami reported. “We have live data.”

  “And we have launch,” Morgan replied as she hit a command. The batteries pulsed, flinging their missiles into hyperspace, and she issued a shutdown command.

  She wouldn’t get a second salvo. The Thunderstorms might get a round of their own in, depending on who was on their bridges, but she wouldn’t. Even with the hyperspace missiles, it was a twenty-second flight time.

  The stranger “knew” she was outside range of anything the Terrans possessed. She was running fast and straight toward open space…until she seemed to run into a wall in space.

  Half of Morgan’s missiles missed, their twenty-gigaton warheads lighting up tiny suns around the enemy ship. At this kind of range, even live targeting data at launch couldn’t guarantee a hit.

  Eight bracketed the enemy ship, dumping massive quantities of energy into her shields and shattering her forward momentum. Those eight might have been enough, the ship writhing in the antimatter explosions.

  It didn’t matter if they were. The last four missiles emerged inside the stranger’s shields, one of them literally inside the ship itself. When those explosions faded, there was nothing left of the running cruiser.

  “Compressed-matter armor doesn’t help against that, I suppose,” Morgan said quietly. “We won’t be able to do that very often before the enemy learns better.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Five minutes later, Captain Vong entered the bridge, and Morgan rose to salute her superior. Vong was in full uniform and walking at a leisurely pace. He’d clearly seen the situation resolved before he’d been able to react and had chosen to take his time getting to the bridge.

  “Lieutenant Commander Casimir,” he greeted her. “Report.”

  “We detected an anomaly in the asteroid belt, sir,” she reported. “We vectored drones for confirmation, which were destroyed by missile fire revealing what appeared to be a stealthed heavy cruiser. Missile speeds and stealth field suggested one of the strangers, so I concluded we didn’t want to allow them to escape.

  “They were well beyond conventional weapon range, so I authorized the deployment of a salvo of single-portal hyperspace missiles. The target was destroyed.”

  Vong nodded and stepped up to the command seat.

  “I have the con, Commander,” he told her.

  “You have the con.” She rose, stepping away nervously as she waited to hear what Vong had to say.

  “You are aware of the level of secrecy around the Gold Dragon systems,” he said calmly. “While the fact that the Mesharom are now aware of our possession of those systems has increased our discretion, that discretion is explicitly given to Captains, not to assistant tactical officers, correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So, you took it upon yourself to deploy weapons systems you were not authorized to fire. Why?”

  “The enemy scout could have reported on our presence, the presence of the inbound Kanzi fleet, or the presence of Seventy-Seventh Fleet once they arrive,” Morgan replied. “We also may have found survivors on the surface, and the cruiser may have been able to launch a long-range bombardment to threaten those survivors once revealed.

  “The decision was mine and I take full responsibility for it,” she concluded.

  Vong chuckled.

  “That it was, that you do, and so I will make sure is reflected in your record,” he confirmed. “Probably under sections labeled things like ‘takes appropriate initiative’ and ‘damn fine shot.’ You made the right call, Casimir. I’d have done the same, but I wasn’t here, so let the record show that I fully endorse your decision.”

  She exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

  “Now, from the sound of it, we need to get in touch with our shuttles again. Survivors?”

  “Shuttle Six, this is Bellerophon, what is your sweep status?” Morgan asked.

  “We’ve got something, Bellerophon,” the pilot replied. “AMESDs have located what looks like a concealed low-yield pebble-bed reactor buried deep in a cave. We never would have found it if they hadn’t had to vent just as we were flying over.

  “The drones have triangulated the actual reactor, but we’ve basically landed the damn things. If the goal was to be invisible from orbit, someone gets an A.”

  “Can you make contact, Lieutenant Pearson?” Vong asked, cutting into the channel. “If there’s survivors down there, we need to know.”

  “Trying to localize an entrance now, but it looks like the mountains are a bit of a warren,” the pilot admitted. “AMESDs are mapping with ground-penetrating radar. I think we’re looking at a natural complex, but at least some prep work was done.”

  “How much prep work?” Morgan asked. “Are we talking Farmer Joe and his family or…”

  “Sir, I’d hate to give false impressions…but I think that’s the colony’s backup power plant in there. We may be looking at an impromptu survival bunker for the whole settlement.”

  Morgan was silent and Vong shook his head at her.

  “I think you understand me, Lieutenant, when I say we need to find that entrance ASAP,” he told the pilot. “We’ll get off your shoulder. Happy hunting.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to hunt for a needle in a haystack, sir!”

  “Your people gave us one hell of a heart attack when they parked that shuttle in the main entryway,” Hymie MacChruim told the bridge crew of Bellerophon two hours later. “Oy vey, we thought the damn bastards had found us.”

  “Came out to meet us with a dozen hunting rifles,” Lieutenant Jeff Pearson confirmed, standing next to the Governor. “Never seen a happier bunch of guys pointing guns at me.”

  “We’d buried the reserve plant back here since folk were nervous about a fission pile,” MacChruim told them. “After everything we heard about Powell and then Lelldorin, well, I figured ‘God helps those as help themselves’ and started moving food and other supplies in.

  “We had an evacuation plan, horses, cars, other things that couldn’t be scanned from orbit. Soon as there was even a blip on the scanners, we got folk moving.”

  He shook his head.

  “Not everyone listened,” he said sadly. “But…some, Captain Vong. Some listened. We don’t have food for long, maybe another couple of weeks…but I’ve got fifteen thousand souls in these caves.”

  “And they owe you their lives,” the battleship Captain confirmed. “We’re going to drop a chunk of our reserves of Universal Protein and medical supplies, as well as at least a couple of doctors. We’ll make sure you’re dug in for the long haul, but…for now, we’re going to need to leave you in there.”

  MacChruim looked surprised but fatalistic.

  “It’s not over yet, is it?” he asked.

  “No. There’s a Kanzi fleet heading this way,” Vong told him. “We beat them here by a day at most. I want you to take the supplies we’re going to drop to you and pull your heads back into your hole.

  “If the worst comes to worst, Fleet Lord Tanaka is only a day behind the Kanzi. She’ll dig you out then.”

  Vong smiled grimly.

  “You already saved yourselves, Governor. I’m going to make sure you stay saved.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The arrival of the Kanzi fleet was a spectacle like Morgan had never seen. She hadn’t been present for the Grand Fleet arriving in Alpha Centauri after the Incident there or for Tanaka bringing her fleet out of Jupiter. She hadn’t been old enough to really pay attent
ion or understand when the Imperial fleet arrived to annex Earth or later to relieve them from the Kanzi.

  When the Alstroda Fleet arrived in Xīn Táiwān, however, not only was she present and paying attention, but she was one of those responsible for developing a countermeasure. She wasn’t sure she saw one.

  Twenty attack cruisers led the way, the three-megaton ships sweeping the system with their scanners as they looked for the enemy. A solid phalanx of ten super-battleships, a full Kanzi squadron, followed on their heels.

  Twenty six-hundred-thousand-ton destroyers came next, spreading out at sixty percent of lightspeed to open up the fleet’s sensor horizon as the rest of the capital ships began to come through.

  The portal was wide enough that even the battleships and super-battleships were coming through five across. Another twenty super-battleships and then twenty battleships emerged, followed by twenty more attack cruisers and thirty standard cruisers.

  Fifty capital ships was more than Tanaka had warned them to expect. The escorts alone would probably have been enough to take down Bellerophon and her single eight-ship echelon of cruisers.

  There wouldn’t have been much left of the Kanzi fleet, given the advantages of the Gold Dragon ships, but they’d have overwhelmed the Militia. The battleships and super-battleships wouldn’t bleed as hard to take down the Militia ships, but it wouldn’t go all their way, either.

  “Kanzi fleet will enter hyper-missile range roughly a minute after they head our way,” Morgan reported. “Thunderstorms are returning to orbit at sprint velocities; we should have consolidated our forces inside five minutes.”

  “Thank you, Casimir,” Vong replied. “What’s our munition status on the S-HSMs?”

  She checked the numbers.

  “We have sixty-six missiles in each battery magazine, eleven per launcher. Just under sixteen hundred total,” she reported. “The Thunderstorms haven’t fired off any of their HSMs, but they only had ten each to begin with. Forty-eight launchers, four hundred and eighty missiles there.”