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

by Glynn Stewart

  “My capital ships can match yours, but only my escorts could sustain that speed,” he admitted. “And, well…” He shrugged. “Our drones aren’t as good as yours, and it has been easier to update the missile defenses on our destroyers than our battleships. My missile-defense doctrine relies more on my escorts than yours. I can’t really afford to send them ahead.”

  “Then we move together, Fleet Master, and we bring the largest hammer we can when we catch the bastards.”

  “We do what we can,” he agreed, a shadow crossing his eyes. “I wish I could send more ahead, Fleet Lord. I know what we’re asking of Admiral Rolfson.”

  “So does he,” Harriet said quietly. “So does he.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Task Force Seventy-Seven–One, arriving!”

  Morgan snapped to attention amidst the honor guard. Normally, greeting the Admiral and his staff would be a job for a more-senior officer, but every member of Bellerophon’s crew was straining to the limit to get the battleship ready for a multi-day sprint at maximum flank speed—and to receive a new flag officer.

  Vice Admiral Rolfson and his staff clearly weren’t expecting even this much ceremony. The drop-dead gorgeous Persian woman leading the way off the ship almost stumbled at the sight of the Guard lined up to greet them.

  She recovered herself quickly, however, and promptly saluted Morgan.

  “Lieutenant Commander Casimir,” she said swiftly, demonstrating that Morgan’s attempts at anonymity had, as usual, failed. “The whole task force is in a hurry. Can you let us know where the flag bridge and our quarters are?”

  “That’s why I’m here, Captain,” Morgan replied. “We have a team going through the flag deck like a hurricane right now, but Bellerophon’s flag control systems haven’t been brought online since initial testing. Captain Vong doesn’t expect any problems, but my orders are to show you to your quarters and let you drop off your things first.”

  The giant that emerged behind the Captain chuckled loudly.

  “Far be it for me to argue with my new flag captain,” Harold Rolfson told Morgan.

  The last time she’d seen Rolfson, Morgan had been fifteen and he’d towered over her. She wasn’t that much taller at twenty-five, but somehow, she’d expected the red-bearded Admiral to tower less now.

  She’d been wrong.

  “This is Captain Nahid Ling Yu,” he continued, introducing Morgan to the woman who’d led the way. “My operations officer and chief of staff. All of my senior officers are with me, but I’ve two more shuttles of support staff on their way.”

  Morgan checked the communicator she had nestled in her left arm.

  “They’re in a holding pattern while we clear the boat bay,” she reported. “If everyone you have can grab their things, I can show you to your quarters and leave the next wave to Chief Eliza.”

  Chief Andrea Eliza was the boat bay NCO of the deck, and she was only barely managing to not actively shoo the Admiral out of her boat bay.

  “Of course,” Rolfson agreed genially. “We’re all under time pressure here. We have seven minutes left to leave this system, per the orders I gave, so I have no problems getting out of the way!”

  Morgan led the collection of officers to the section of the ship reserved for the flag officer and their staff. It was on the “flag officer’s deck”, but not actually part of the flag deck itself—a block of quarters of various scales wrapped around the working flag deck.

  Like the flag deck, the quarters hadn’t been used before. Unlike the flag deck, the rooms didn’t have electronics and complex systems to review. Sweeping the spaces to make sure they were usable had taken a team of stewards and techs under ten minutes.

  That team was now helping others work through the flag deck systems. Morgan didn’t expect those to be fully online until the Task Force was well on their way to Asimov.

  “Nahid,” Rolfson addressed his chief of staff as Morgan pointed out the flag officer’s own quarters. “Can you download the map and room assignments from the ship’s computers? I need to borrow Commander Casimir for a few minutes.”

  “Of course,” Ling Yu confirmed, slicing off the rest of the staff and leading them away with practiced skill before Morgan could say a word.

  “Now, unless we built Bellerophon to completely different standards than every other capital ship we ever designed, there’s an office in here,” Rolfson told Morgan with a grin. “I’ll need to impose on a few minutes of your time.”

  “You’re the Admiral, sir,” Morgan allowed. Her codes opened the door and assigned the room to Rolfson.

  The suite was far larger than hers and, as Rolfson had predicted, had a good-sized office right next to the main entrance. The big Admiral led the way in and slotted his communicator into the desk computer systems.

  “That’ll take a few minutes to update and get everything loaded from my backups,” he said. “You’re live on the ship’s systems, Commander. How long until we get moving?”

  Morgan checked her communicator.

  “The last of your people have boarded and we’ve finished shaking the new task force out of the main fleet,” she reported. They were leaving with most of the Imperial escorts, though she was already missing the fifty super-battleships they were leaving behind.

  “Without being on the bridge or having the squadron systems fully online, I’d say we’ll be underway for your deadline. Our coms officer will relay any questions or concerns to you directly. She’s good at her job.”

  “I’ve heard generally good things about this ship,” Rolfson told her. “You were the first to meet these Taljzi in battle and win. You’re still the only people in the Imperium who have—and the only ship in the universe, so far as we know, to fire S-HSMs in combat.”

  Ah. Now Morgan understood why she’d been pulled in.

  The Admiral gestured her to a seat and searched for the coffee machine. It turned up relatively quickly and he got it whirring away.

  “Coffee, Commander?”

  “I don’t know if we’ll have time, sir.”

  “Take the damn coffee, Morgan,” he ordered, somehow managing to disturbingly mix Vice Admiral Rolfson, her boss, with Uncle Harold, her family friend—and both of them in full command mode.

  She took the coffee.

  “What’s your assessment of the HSMs?” He paused thoughtfully. “Both versions.”

  “The D-HSM is simply too big to be useful,” Morgan said instantly. “It’s relatively reliable for taking down targets with minimal shields or armor—we took out Taljzi transports and destroyers with two apiece—but the ammunition limit is unsustainable.

  “They help with the alpha strike, but if I had any say, the future Bellerophons will trade their Golf battery D-HSMs for another set of S-HSM launchers. There isn’t enough space to add another four full batteries, but we could probably bring the new ships up to six batteries and double the munition allotment.”

  “You have notes on this somewhere?” Rolfson presumed aloud.

  “Commander Masters and I have a file with a list of suggestions,” Morgan told him. “I would assume every other department on all three ships has done the same.”

  “We’ll need to make sure those make it home. Your mother has ordered that every slip that can hold a Bellerophon or a Thunderstorm-D is being reprioritized to build those ships. All evidence we’ve seen is that the S-HSMs outweigh anything else in our line of battle.”

  Morgan considered.

  “Yes and no,” she concluded. “As far as single-weapon mounts go, they’re our most powerful system, yeah. But even with the upgrades we’re discussing, we’re talking battleships with thirty-six S-HSM launchers. Right now, while we’re facing enemies that aren’t expecting that? That’s a one- or two-shot kill, even on Taljzi super-battleships.

  “They’re going to learn, however, and the S-HSMs have the same core weakness as the Mesharom system: you can’t reprogram the emergence point.

  “With tachyon scanners and hy
perfold-equipped drones, you know where they are when you fire. But at maximum range, there’s as much as a ten-second gap between firing and emergence. The S-HSMs have slightly better maneuverability after terminal emergence than the Mesharom version, but they’re still range-limited and slow at that point in the envelope.”

  “So, we want more of them, but we don’t want to dedicate entire platforms to them,” Rolfson concluded. “That’s what I was planning towards, so it’s good to hear my ideas validated.”

  “I can understand why the Mesharom carry conventional missiles and hyperfold cannons as well,” she confirmed. “I’m not sold on giving up my plasma lance yet, but we already know proton beams are almost useless against the Taljzi.”

  “I suspect that we’ll be seeing a B variant of the Bellerophon design out of DragonWorks quickly,” Rolfson told her. “I’ll put Ling Yu on making sure we have everyone’s notes to them as soon as we arrive in Asimov.”

  They could transmit the data before they went into battle. Morgan shivered at the likely result of that battle.

  “Are the odds as bad as I think, sir?” she asked quietly.

  “You’re the only person who’s ever fired single-portal hyperspace missiles, Commander,” Rolfson noted. “The only one. They’re our ace in the hole, so you tell me, Lieutenant Commander Casimir.

  “Are the odds as bad as I think?”

  Morgan was spared from answering by the tremor of the interface drive coming online. A quick glance at her communicator confirmed what she expected: every ship in TF 77–1 had lit off their drives within a few seconds of each other, exactly on Admiral Rolfson’s deadline.

  “That’s it, then,” he said softly. “Hyperspace in thirteen minutes. A bit over six days to Asimov where, if we’re very lucky, we’ll arrive at the same time as the Taljzi.”

  She didn’t know the Admiral well, but he had been a friend of her parents, and she realized he was letting his guard down around her more than he should. Rolfson was worried.

  “The good news for the odds,” she finally said, “is that our HSMs of both varieties outrange the Taljzi by two light-minutes. Their birds have a range of about one point seven LM, but our HSMs can hit almost as far as four.

  “Our accuracy sucks at that range, but our first salvo is going to be a sucker punch that they’re not expecting. After that, it’ll get harder, but with this many launchers and the D-HSMs, we should be able to hammer their super-battleships to debris before they can engage us.”

  She shook her head.

  “After that, though, it’s down to that we have active missile defenses and they don’t. Their shields are a bit tougher and I think their compressed-matter armor is a bit tougher as well, but we have to stop fewer missiles.”

  “And their hyperspace disrupters have a far more limited range than anything in our arsenal,” he agreed, then sighed. “The hyperfold cannons will hopefully be a surprise as well. The Kanzi didn’t have those, either; all they had were proton beams.”

  “I don’t think we can stop them on our own, sir,” Morgan admitted quietly. “But I think we can damn well bloody their noses hard enough to make them back off and reconsider. And the rest of the fleet are only, what, three days behind us?”

  “If we’re lucky, less, with hyperspace being what it is,” he agreed. “And it’s not just Fleet Lord Tanaka, either.”

  “Sir?” He couldn’t possibly mean what she thought he did.

  “I received confirmation from her just before I came aboard. The Kanzi are coming with her. I’d give a lot to be a fly on the wall of the Taljzi flag deck when, after having their asses kicked for days by three battleships, Cawl and Tanaka come through a hyper portal with eighty super-battleships.”

  Chapter Forty

  “The Alstroda System has been leveled.”

  Admiral Patrick Kurzman’s words were flat, calm, a stark counterpoint to the content of his short report to the Ducal Council.

  His husband, General Arthur Wellesley, sat at Annette’s right hand as Kurzman’s bombshell dropped.

  “Fleet Master Oska met the Taljzi Return with ten super-battleships, thirty battleships, and assorted escorts drawn from both the Theocracy Navy and the local Clan forces,” he continued. “The Return used stealth fields to conceal the majority of their forces, including their entire battleship strength.

  “They ambushed the Kanzi fleet at near-point-blank range and wiped them out. The last reports we have from the system show them bombarding the planet at long range with specially designed munitions. Most recent estimates of the Alstroda System’s population were between eighty-four and eighty-six million people.”

  “Kanzi,” Takuya Miyamoto said in sharply accented English. The old Japanese electronics tycoon’s English was perfect most of the time, his accent only slipping in when he was stressed. “Do we weep now for those who would enslave us?”

  “Only thirty-two million of those sentients were Kanzi,” Kurzman said quietly. “The remaining fifty-plus million people were slaves of various degrees of status. And even the Kanzi, I will remind the Councilor, have their dissidents. It is only a tiny portion of even the Kanzi population that can be argued to seek to enslave us.”

  “And right now, their entire population realizes their back is against the wall,” Wellesley added. “I’ll admit that leaves me with enough satisfaction to allow me to sympathize with their losses. The deaths of millions of innocents are not something I’m prepared to celebrate.”

  “These Taljzi are a nightmare made flesh,” Annette concluded aloud. “While their main efforts are pointed at the Kanzi Theocracy, let’s not forget that they lost their war with the Kanzi because the Imperium blew up their main star system. They may be coming for the Kanzi first, but they’ll come for the A!Tol…and if they come for the A!Tol, Sol is directly on their course.”

  “The kind of mass cloning our intelligence suggests is terrifying,” An Sirkit noted.

  “There have to be some limits to it,” Miyamoto argued. “Nothing is magic.”

  “I would have placed the limits to it well below what we know they have achieved,” the doctor replied. “Once they have passed the difficulties in parallel cloning, rapid growth acceleration and high-speed education that they must have passed for our autopsies to find six-year-old starship technicians…”

  She let that hang over them all.

  “Once they have passed those difficulties, it is only a question of scaling up. Our only true hope, Councilor, is that they cannot duplicate whatever Precursor technology is allowing them to clone themselves.

  “Even so, however, if they have sustained mass cloning of new individuals for three centuries…” An Sirkit shivered. “The greatest limitation of any galactic-level civilization is birth rates. Our own has slowed dramatically over the last twenty years, but we remain the most rapidly growing member race of the Imperium.

  “If they don’t have that limitation, thirty thousand could have easily become thirty billion.”

  “Or thirty trillion,” Annette added. “If they can duplicate the Precursor tech they are using, they could have built an empire beyond our known universe to rival the Kanzi and A!Tol combined. Or larger.”

  The Duchess of Terra rose to her feet and surveyed her people.

  “We must prepare for war like we have never seen before,” she warned them. “Even in the most optimistic scenarios that Admirals Kurzman and Villeneuve and I have worked through, this Return is only the first fleet of several—or many.

  “Fleet Lord Tanaka and Fleet Master Cawl will deliver victory this time, but I suspect this attack is only a test. A calibration, if you will, of the level of force the Taljzi must bring to bear to avenge their long-dead.”

  “So, we have to make peace,” Zhao told them all. “A!Shall has a plan. We’re waiting to hear back from the Kanzi on whether they’re prepared to meet her price.”

  “They’re against the wall and they know it,” Wellesley said with a snort. “What else can they do?”
<
br />   “Die.”

  Jean Villeneuve’s single word hung in the air. “They can choose to die rather than change. The High Priestess knows that alliance with us will destroy the Theocracy as it currently exists. Faced with one death or another, she may well choose to sacrifice her people instead of their culture.”

  Annette grimaced.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” she replied. “For now, regardless of whether we fight alongside the Kanzi, we need to make sure the Imperium can fight the Taljzi. Elon—how goes the switchover to Bellerophon construction?”

  The Council dispersed as their meeting concluded, holograms—including Annette’s husband—winking out of existence all around her and leaving her alone in the big conference room except for Zhao and Wellesley.

  “The Empress and the High Priestess do both have starcoms, correct?” Wellesley asked.

  “They do. The High Priestess isn’t sure if she’s prepared to release every member of an Imperial subject species her people hold as slaves,” Annette replied. “With the raids they’ve done over the years—the centuries—that’s got to be hundreds of thousands of people. Perhaps millions.”

  “Some of whom were born into slavery in the Theocracy,” Zhao agreed. “They’re going to have a rough time of it if the Kanzi do turn them over. Some of the slave groupings are very well treated. They do use them for everything except soldiers, after all.”

  “Like the inverse of the Ottoman Janissaries,” Wellesley said. “Slaves are what, fifty percent of the population? Sixty?”

  “Around there,” Annette confirmed. “I’m not sure anyone outside the Theocracy even knows how many species they’ve enslaved, but they fill a lot of roles in Kanzi society. It literally can’t function the way we envision it, with half-dressed slaves being driven by whip-wielding overseers.”

  “It’s still slavery,” her Guard commander replied. “I don’t have much sympathy for any loss of ‘culture’ they suffer in losing it.”