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

by Glynn Stewart

  “So, two choices now, I suppose,” he murmured aloud. “Do we let them scout around so the Taljzi think they can hide from us later, or do we kick their asses now and leave the rest of the Return wondering?”

  “I can’t guarantee we’ve got them all, sir,” Ling Yu pointed out. “Plus, we can only hit them with hyper missiles at this range, and if we miss even one…”

  “Then our sucker punch gets undermined,” he agreed with a sigh. “Hold the task force in position in Isaac orbit. Move ships as needed to make sure the bastards do not get a clean line of sight on the D-HSM swarm.

  “Let them see what they expect to see: a desperately rushed and thrown-together defence force.” Rolfson grinned coldly. “And then when they bring their friends, well, we’ll show them how effective their invisibility cloak really is.”

  The Taljzi were clearly more confident in their stealth screens than Harold’s experience with the aliens suggested they should be. The battleships hung back, well away from his fleet, but the cruisers swept their way around the system with an almost-complete disregard for the defenders.

  If they hadn’t already evacuated all of the space stations, there were several points where Harold would have ordered the cruisers destroyed regardless. As it was, they just “accidentally” kept destroyers between the Taljzi ships and the floating swarm of over four hundred dual-portal hyperspace missiles.

  The tactical teams of the three battleships had each assembled firing plans, and they were now running them against each other, taking into account the new boxes of missiles that Commander Casimir had managed to identify and get opened up.

  No plan would survive contact with the enemy, and the presence of the stealth ships swanning around the Asimov System was a potential roadblock. Once their sucker punch connected, the follow-up was going to be critical, and Harold wasn’t even sure what that was going to be just yet.

  “Well, I suppose the good news is that they’ve used up two hours dancing around the system waiting to see what we do,” Ling Yu said philosophically. “We’re now three hours into their window, so I’m guessing the big boys are hanging out in hyperspace either on a specific timetable or waiting for their scouts to report back in.”

  “I’d have a timetable, personally,” Harold admitted. “Gives the scouts more time to pick up data and, well, doesn’t leave me waiting for them to come back if something goes wrong. Depending on how much I trust my scanners and stealth systems…at least two, more likely four or five hours.”

  “And it’s going to wear down our crews,” Ling Yu warned him.

  “Agreed.” He studied the holographic plot, wishing he knew what his enemy was thinking. Right now, he didn’t even know who his counterpart was—presumably someone was in command on the other side.

  But was that someone who’d earned their rank through battle or through seniority? Or, even stranger to Harold’s mind, through being cloned from the stock some scientist had labeled “fleet commander” and stuffed full of someone else’s knowledge?

  The possibility existed that every fleet commander they’d meet among the Taljzi could be, in some ways, the exact same person. He didn’t know if they’d faced enemies out in the dark stars beyond civilized space.

  His counterpart could be a clone, running with theoretical training and downloaded memories of a three-century-old war. Or they could be a hardened veteran who’d fought their way up the ranks against enemies unknown to the A!Tol Imperium.

  Or possibly both.

  “We really don’t know enough about these people,” he said aloud. “I can’t guess which way they’re going to jump.”

  “Well, they are Kanzi. If we were facing a Kanzi Fleet Master, what would you expect?” Ling Yu asked.

  Harold snorted.

  “I’d ask to see their file,” he admitted. “In the main, though…I’d expect them to try and wear us down, and I’d be looking for at least one more feint to try and make us overreact.”

  He sighed.

  “Orders to the fleet: two-thirds of all ships will drop to status two while the remaining vessels remain at battle stations. We will rotate every two hours until every Alpha Team has had a break, then we’ll reconsider.”

  “Or the Taljzi will reconsider for us,” Ling Yu pointed out as she began to open the communications link.

  “Or maybe the horse will learn to sing and they saw Tanaka coming and ran scared,” Harold countered. “But most likely, yes. I don’t expect to complete that cycle of stand-downs.”

  But at least some of his crews would be better rested. It was all he could do for now.

  Harold didn’t leave the bridge for the following hours. Even when Bellerophon stood down to status two, letting most of her crew take at least a quick break, the Admiral remained on the bridge. A steward brought him coffee and a sandwich, and he ate and drank quickly, barely registering the food.

  Every hour that the Taljzi decided to scout the system was an hour less he had to wait for Tanaka to arrive. The earliest she was due was forty hours after the stealthed ships arrived. The latest was over a hundred hours. A three-day window for how long he had to hold.

  He wasn’t going to complain if the enemy spent four hours dancing around the system. Or ten. Hell, if they wanted to spend a week wandering around, poking at the shadows to find his secrets, he’d cheer.

  He knew he wasn’t going to get that, so he’d count every minute, every hour, they were prepared to give him as precious.

  But in the end, they had to have a decent idea of the time constraint he was under.

  “We’re about to cycle over,” Ling Yu told him quietly. “That’ll bring Perseus back to battle stations and take Herakles back to status two.” She shook her head. “You said six hours if they were Kanzi, huh?”

  “If they were Kanzi, I’d have expected at least one more play at psychological warfare,” he admitted. “Even if it was just opening up hyper portals without sending anyone through, just to see what we—”

  “Hyper portal!”

  He and Ling Yu turned to look at the holographic plot in sync, looking for the icon they both knew would be there.

  There was only one portal, but it was huge. The Taljzi had ripped a hole in space a thousand kilometers across, and their super-battleships led the way in pentagonal “walls” of five apiece.

  He’d been expecting fifteen of the massive warships, so the first three formations didn’t surprise him. The fourth did. The fifth sent a chill down his spine.

  The sixth set of capital ships terrified him. That was thirty super-battleships. If the rest of their fleet had been equally augmented, his stand went from “suicide to achieve the objective” to merely suicide.

  Then the destroyers started coming through, in a widely dispersed cylindrical formation he could guess the purpose of.

  “Get me sensor resolution on the inside of that cylinder,” he ordered. “I’m going to guess that’s where they’re hiding the battleships and cruisers.”

  The smaller ships kept coming, circles of ten at a time emerging every few seconds from the portal. Easily two hundred destroyers, double the number that had been at Alstroda, emerged.

  Lastly, a wall of ten battleships that weren’t in stealth emerged. Clearly, they were the ones who’d been holding the portal open, as the gap into hyperspace collapsed behind them.

  “We think we’ve nailed down the stealth ships,” Ling Yu said from behind him, her voice small.

  “How bad?”

  “Thirty super-battleships. Sixty battleships and sixty cruisers, including our ghosts. Two hundred destroyers. Three hundred and fifty warships, all basically Core Power ships.”

  “So are the Bellerophons now,” he said grimly. “We have the super-battleships dialed in?”

  “The plan called for fifteen, sir,” Ling Yu reminded him. “We think we can kill fifteen. I don’t know about…”

  “We can’t kill thirty,” Harold told her. “Target the leading fifteen. Let’s bloody their noses.” />
  He studied the red icons speckling his plot. They didn’t know he could see them in real time. They didn’t know he could hit them at this range. They were sorting out their formations, flying in nice, predictable patterns.

  “The order is hakkaa päälle!”

  Cut them down.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  “The order is hakkaa päälle!”

  Morgan had spent the entire time since they’d arrived in Asimov preparing for this moment. Since she was the only one who’d fired hyperspace missiles before, controlling their entire salvo of dual-portal missiles had fallen to her.

  She was also controlling Bellerophon’s missiles and had helped write the fire-pattern plan for everyone else. More than any other individual in the task force, the sucker punch they were trying to land was her responsibility.

  And the moment she hit the button in response to Vice Admiral Rolfson’s command, there was no longer anything she could do. Hundreds of hyperspace portals opened across Isaac’s orbit and missiles disappeared.

  Bellerophon, however, screamed. Two of her four S-HSM batteries responded to Morgan’s commands, generating their portals as expecting and flinging their missiles through them. The other two…did not.

  “Hotel One, report,” she snapped. “Hotel Four, report. What’s your status?”

  “This is Hotel One. The portal destabilized; we were forced to shut it down. Two of our emitters just disintegrated. Sir…we can’t fire. We don’t have a portal.”

  That was six launchers rendered useless—bad-enough news. Worse news, however, was the automated report from Hotel Four.

  Hotel Four was gone. The hyper portal hadn’t been shut down by a vigilant gun crew. It had been shut down by emergency failsafes…too late.

  “Sir, Hotel One is disabled and Hotel Four is destroyed,” Morgan reported grimly. “We lost Four’s portal, launchers, and crew.”

  That was at least fifty people dead, torn apart by the suddenly untamed vortex into hyperspace that had been the core of their weapon system.

  She hated herself for what she had to do, but she focused her gaze on her systems as she pulled the data.

  “Hotel One’s magazines are intact; I’ll get the crew on transferring the weapons,” she continued. “Hotel Four’s magazines are wrecked. I’m going to have to eject them to protect us from the warheads.”

  Unlike most of the other weapons aboard Bellerophon, the hyper missiles carried warheads. Big, nasty antimatter warheads. The ninety missiles in Hotel Four’s magazines represented almost two teratons of explosive power.

  “Do it!” Vong ordered.

  Morgan already had…and only then turned her attention to the enemy.

  The salvo might have been twelve missiles short, but the rest of the Bellerophons and the Thunderstorm-Ds had done them proud. Four hundred-plus dual-portal missiles had launched independently from Isaac orbit, and the antimatter explosions were only fading now as she looked.

  They’d targeted fifteen super-battleships. The Taljzi ships were bigger than any Kanzi or A!Tol warship ever built, clad in the heavy shields and compressed-matter armor the A!Tol vessels commanded and the Kanzi couldn’t yet match.

  They were both unimaginably immense and unimaginably tough.

  Two of them survived, reeling wrecks spewing atmosphere from gaping wounds in their sides.

  “Orders from the flag, all S-HSM batteries are to continue firing,” Antonova relayed. “They’re not dodging hard enough yet, and every ship we kill in this pass is one we don’t have to fight later!”

  “Continue fire with Hotel Two and Three, if you please, Commander Casimir,” Captain Vong ordered calmly. “I’d like to add some super-battleship kills to our list that no one is going to argue with.”

  “Yes, sir.” Her attention focused on the task ahead, retargeting her launchers on the remaining super-battleships.

  Her people were wounded and dying. Many had died instantly when Hotel Four’s hyper portal had lost control. But if she focused on that, the civilians behind her would pay the price.

  Morgan Casimir was Annette Bond’s daughter in every way that mattered. That would not happen.

  It took almost a full minute for the Taljzi force to even begin to react—a minute in which a second salvo of hyperspace missiles from the internal launchers claimed another five super-battleships.

  Then the aliens started maneuvering, initiating what had to be their standard evasive patterns to reduce missile and beam hits at range. They hadn’t known they were in the defenders’ range, but now that they did, they reacted to it.

  Ten super-battleships survived at that point, two-thirds of their heavy capital ship strength smashed before the battle had even begun. The third salvo of hyper missiles was less effective even than the second. The evasive maneuvers meant that none of the missiles emerged inside Taljzi shields.

  Even the S-HSM missiles were slow in real space, only having seconds of endurance left on their interface drives at that point. The need to make an easy emergence from hyperspace kept their velocity down, and they closed with the Taljzi ships at a mere fifteen percent of lightspeed.

  Heavy antimatter warheads erupted throughout the enemy formation, but they’d spread their fire too much, hoping for the shield-penetrating kills of the first two salvos.

  Shields flickered across the Taljzi fleet, but only one super-battleship’s shields fell. Data streaming into Morgan’s display told her they’d breached the ship’s compressed-matter armor, but she remained in the fight.

  “Focus fire on single targets,” Captain Ling Yu’s voice murmured in her headset. “Flagging SB-22, we already tagged him, let’s drown him in fire.”

  They were firing at a relatively slow pace for the launchers they had available, waiting to see the results of each batch of missiles before opening fire again. That let them recalibrate, and their fourth salvo went entirely at the super-battleship whose armor they’d cracked.

  She writhed in the fire as hundreds of missiles emerged from hyperspace around her, twenty-gigaton warheads igniting new suns as the super-battleship tried desperately to survive.

  She failed. The Taljzi warship’s shields collapsed once more, and at least a dozen missiles hammered into her armor. Mighty as she was, that was more than she could take.

  “Target SB-25,” Ling Yu ordered. “Take her.”

  Morgan was already flagging the remaining ships in sequence. A single tap directed Bellerophon’s remaining S-HSM batteries towards the designated target.

  A few seconds later, SB-25 shared her sisters’ fate. Twenty-two of the Taljzi super-battleships were destroyed or crippled.

  The Militia ships had spent half of the cruisers’ missiles, though, and Bellerophon’s damage was undermining the salvos. They had five more solid hits, and then they were going to have to see what the Taljzi did when the long-range bombardment stopped.

  “Hostiles are moving towards us, point six cee,” Masters reported. Morgan’s boss was handling the sensors while she managed the hyperspace missiles. “If their missiles line up with previous encounters, range in five minutes.”

  “Minimum-sequence fire,” Ling Yu ordered. “SB-26 and work your way up to 30. Hack them down, people.”

  Morgan smirked at the Iranian-Chinese officer’s translated repetition of the Scandinavian Admiral’s order, but the sequence was already in play in her computers. Five more salvos until the cruisers ran dry.

  Those salvos would take them just over three minutes to fire. Then they’d get to see what the Taljzi were going to bring to bear on Asimov.

  A super-battleship died. Then another. And another. The lead elements of the Taljzi Return were melting away as Morgan and her fellows hammered their hyperspace missiles into the charging fleet.

  The Taljzi couldn’t know that the Militia were going to run out of ammunition, and Morgan couldn’t help but wonder just what they were thinking. Even with their losses, over three hundred ships were still charging toward the planet.
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  “That’s the last salvo from the cruisers,” she reported as the tenth salvo of S-HSMs shot out. “I don’t think the battleships can put enough fire on target for guaranteed kills.

  When the last full salvo cleared, only five super-battleships remained from thirty. An entire battle fleet’s worth of warships was wreckage and cripples in the wake of the charging Taljzi, and they were still coming.

  “No, we’ll need the rest of the weapons,” Vong agreed. “Hume, prepare to take us forward. Combat maneuvers online now.”

  The icons on Morgan’s screen began to shift as the warships began their own evasive maneuvers.

  “All right, people,” Ling Yu’s voice sounded over her earbud. “We’re down to sixty launchers now and no idea if Bellerophon is getting her surviving damaged battery back online. Target is SB-18. Hammer her to pieces. Continue minimum-sequence fire.”

  Sixty missiles against a maneuvering target wasn’t enough for a guaranteed kill, but a salvo every thirty seconds was enough to leave the Taljzi super-battleship desperately maneuvering to try and avoid the explosions and keep intact shields between her and the incoming fire.

  She dodged into a cruiser, the smaller ship’s shields flickering under the impact—and then vanishing as two hyperspace missiles hit the wrong ship. The cruiser imploded, the gravitational singularity that fed her power system breaking containment…in contact with the super-battleship.

  Half of SB-18 was sucked into the temporary black hole. The other half took most of a salvo of twenty-gigaton hyper missiles and disappeared.

  “Enemy range in twenty seconds,” Masters reported. “All Bucklers deployed.”

  “For what we are about to receive, may the divine make us truly thankful,” Vong snarked from the center chair. “That’s it for hyper missiles, folks. It’s time for the old-fashioned part of this brawl.”