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

by Glynn Stewart

  “Range,” Masters said calmly, as if announcing the weather. The salvo that blasted out from the Kanzi-Imperial joint fleet didn’t match the tsunamis the Taljzi were unleashing on them, but the Taljzi had yet to demonstrate anything resembling active missile defense.

  Morgan just didn’t know if that would make the difference against a hundred and twenty super-battleships.

  Another dozen cruisers died as the two fleets continued to close, new salvoes joining the first wave of the defenders’ missiles on their suicide course for the enemy. Morgan’s fingers flew across her console as she loaded up ECM programs, evasion patterns…anything she could think of to try and save more of her comrades.

  The attack wasn’t her responsibility, but she was keeping an eye on it. The ability to distinguish between capital ship and escort was disturbingly valuable in a hyperspace engagement. Like the defenders, the Taljzi had put their escorts out in front.

  Imperial commanders would argue with the knowing sacrifice of the lighter ships but accept the cold calculus of war. From what Morgan had seen, the loss of the lighter ships barely even occurred to the Taljzi’s commanders as a concern.

  Unfortunately for the Taljzi, Seventy-Seventh Fleet and their Kanzi allies could see exactly what they were doing, and the vast majority of their missiles completely bypassed the screen—a screen that had no ability to shoot down those missiles.

  Tanaka’s orders had erred on the side of caution. That entire twelve-thousand-plus missile salvo was targeted on a mere ten ships. Super-battleship or not, their shields couldn’t stand under that fire. Their compressed-matter armor couldn’t stand under that fire.

  Ten icons disappeared from the screen and Morgan saw Masters shake his head.

  “I wish I could say that was overkill, but we fought one of these bastards head-on,” he admitted. “Twelve hundred or so missiles apiece sounds about right.”

  The second salvo repeated the first’s success. Another ten super-battleships disappeared—but the Imperial and Kanzi screening units were getting hammered. Missiles were leaking through and the capital ships were taking hits.

  “Move the capital ships forward,” Morgan heard Tanaka order. “We’ll cycle off, relieve the escorts while keeping the majority of the fleet protected. Keep hammering the—”

  The Fleet Lord stopped in mid-word as a sudden flash lit up their screens. Hyper portals tore through reality, ripping an entire salvo of missiles to pieces—and then the Taljzi were gone.

  They’d dropped back into normal space, rendering the salvos still heading toward them harmless.

  Unfortunately, the same wasn’t true for the Taljzi salvos heading toward Morgan.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  “Oh, you clever kusottare-me,” Harriet murmured as she watched her enemy disappear. She’d hammered a sixth of their capital ships into debris, but now her missiles were useless and she was still facing down over a hundred thousand incoming weapons of her own.

  Except…

  “All ships, adjust course to zero by ninety and go to maximum velocity,” she barked. “If you’ve got a sprint mode, use it. Move!”

  “What about the Bucklers?” Sier asked.

  “Leave them,” she ordered. “Let’s give the missiles something to look at while we get out of the way!”

  The entire combined fleet moved, every single ship pitching “up” ninety degrees and using every scrap of the impossible maneuverability the interface drive gave them to move away from where the missiles were expecting them.

  The missiles didn’t change course to match. About half of the closest salvo tried, but they handed the Buckler drones a perfect extended targeting period and died in their thousands.

  The rest charged past the Bucklers and attacked suddenly empty space, tens of thousands of missiles flinging themselves pointlessly into the void.

  “Sun’s last shadow,” Sier hissed. “How?!”

  “Hyperspace anomaly scanners are huge, Division Lord,” Harriet reminded him. “We don’t even have them mounted on the Bucklers. We’re feeding our missiles targeting data up to the last second or so, making sure they get into the visibility bubble of their targets.”

  She gestured to the now-harmless missiles as their interface drives flickered out and they disappeared from their screens.

  “Theirs are the same. They were counting on there being enough missiles in hyperspace with us that it wouldn’t matter.”

  Harriet shook her head.

  “Detach our destroyers to retrieve the escape pods and search for survivors,” she ordered. “They’re to sweep back and find everyone they can. Hell, if they can find any of the Taljzi alive, I’ll take them.”

  “What are the rest of us going to be doing?” her chief of staff asked carefully.

  “Every ship bigger than a destroyer in Seventy-Seventh Fleet has been refitted with at least ten hyperfold cannons, Sier,” Harriet pointed out. “Calculate me an emergence point that will be within two million kilometers of the bastards—and preferably more than half a million kilometers away from them.

  “Two can play the close-range-ambush game—and they sure as hell aren’t going anywhere without us seeing them.”

  There were days Harriet Tanaka hated hyperspace. It wasn’t the best way to travel faster than light, just the only way anyone knew of.

  It took almost ten minutes for them to calculate the emergence point of the Taljzi fleet and move into position to duplicate it, and her staff was still looking nervously at her.

  “It all depends on what they did after they went through,” Sier reminded her. “We’re dropping in about two million kilometers from where they came out, we think, but they could be as much as six or seven light-minutes away from there.”

  “Then we chase them, whatever it takes,” she told them. “We can skip through hyperspace after them and use Rolfson’s hyperspace missiles on the bastards. For that matter, all of Seventy-Seventh’s capital ships are currently carrying at least two D-HSMs. If we’re at long range, we’ll be able to use them.”

  “And if we get this all right?”

  “Then they’ll be losing super-battleships before they even know we’re there,” Harriet said with satisfaction. “So, I’ll take the risk, Sier. These bastards have killed entire worlds. They don’t get to go home. Not today. Not ever.”

  They were reasonably sure, in truth, that the first fleet they’d destroyed had been responsible for that. No one decided to point that out to Harriet, however, which was probably a good thing.

  “Portal formation in twenty seconds,” Sier told her with a sigh. “Vice Admiral Tidikat’s squadron is leading the way.”

  The second Taljzi fleet probably hadn’t had a chance to communicate with the fleet that had attacked Asimov. If they had, they’d have realized the last thing they wanted to do was fight the Imperial Navy in normal space before they’d had a chance to build countermeasures.

  “Portals open,” Sier reported, and sixteen super-battleships vanished through it in a moment. More ships followed, a steady stream of massive warships as Harriet Tanaka fed her fleet into the fire.

  The telemetry coming back was a chaotic mess, and she barely had time to see it before Justified flung herself through the portal held open by the Kanzi battleships. She had enough time to realize they’d got it almost right before her flagship joined the maelstrom.

  They’d emerged just over one million kilometers from the Taljzi, and the aliens had responded immediately. By the time Harriet’s flagship was in normal space, the Taljzi had already closed most of the gap to bring their disruptors into range.

  It took them precious seconds to do so. Seconds the knife fight Harriet had chosen to court didn’t give them. Super-battleships died by the dozen as massed hyperfold cannon fire bypassed their shields and compressed-matter armor alike. Only a tiny portion of her fleet’s weaponry was striking inside the enemy ships…but only a tiny portion of it needed to.

  “Hit them,” Harriet snapped, watching a
s plasma lances and proton beams added their fire to the fray. Even at this range, missiles were flashing out of both sides as the distance dropped.

  At three hundred thousand kilometers, Vice Admiral Tidikat’s flagship lurched. Vindication reeled out of formation as her entire front quarter disappeared, torn to debris as random pieces of it were flung into hyperspace.

  A second Imperial super-battleship died. Then a third. A fourth.

  But there were no Taljzi capital ships left to face them. The cruisers’ disruptors were bad enough, but they struggled against super-battleship shields—and their antiproton curtains were failing in the face of the massed proton-beam fire of two entire battle fleets.

  One moment, Harriet was holding on to the arms of her seat with white-clenched fingers.

  The next, it was over, the last Taljzi cruiser ripped apart by point-blank fire from a Kanzi battleship before it could ram Tidikat’s crippled flagship.

  Silence hung over her flag bridge like a fog as she rose, studying the display. The butcher’s tally for this was going to take hours, even days, to total. Harriet Tanaka had just led tens of thousands of sentients to their deaths.

  But the Taljzi Return had been stopped.

  “Did any of them get away?” she asked softly.

  “I can’t be sure,” Sier admitted. “We’ll have to go over the data in detail; with the hyperfold cannons overwhelming our anomaly scanners, it’s possible they opened a portal and got a handful of their ships out without us seeing.” He paused. “None of the capital ships. We got all of those.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “It will have to do.”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Annette Bond massaged her temples slowly as the hologram played in front of her. The recording had winged its way through the hyperfold relay network to her from Asimov, where Harriet Tanaka’s flagship now hung in orbit of the no-longer-threatened planet of Isaac.

  “We confirmed it in the end,” Tanaka said in a tired voice. “Four of their destroyers ran during the final clash. We didn’t make it into hyperspace in time to catch them, so they got away. I don’t know where the logistics elements of either fleet were, but they were definitely around, since the bastards never seemed to run out of ammunition.

  “I’ve sent a squadron of super-battleships, with your Manticores and the Thunderstorm-Ds for escort, to check out black hole DLK-5539,” she continued. “I don’t expect them to find much, but I’m guessing that was a rendezvous point for them, since the second fleet seemed to be coming from there.

  “Our alliance with Fleet Master Cawl, tentative as it has to be, is holding for now. He’s pulling most of his ships back to Kanzi space, but I sent a squadron of cruisers with him. They have hyperfold coms, so we can keep in coordination with him.

  “I can’t help but fear that this is only the beginning. We know nothing about these Taljzi except that they fled Kanzi space almost six hundred long-cycles ago. The size of their industrial base, their population, hell, even how they’re cloning their soldiers. We know nothing.”

  The petite Japanese officer sighed and shrugged.

  “I don’t have the ships to spare for scouting expeditions beyond DLK-5539,” she admitted. “Part of my message to the Empress is requesting more reinforcements. Not Ducal ships,” Tanaka added. “We’ve already asked more of your Militia than is appropriate, and lost too many of your ships.

  “They made all the difference, though. Without the Bellerophons, Asimov would have fallen. Without Tidikat and Rolfson, we’d have lost the hyperspace battle.” She snorted. “Notably, without your stepdaughter, I think we would have still lost the battle. She has an eye for the chink in the armor that will serve her well. Today, it was the chink in our armor, and she probably cut our losses in half.

  “Tomorrow, it may be the chink in their armor and turn the tide of a battle we won’t be able to afford to lose.”

  Annette studied the weary face of the other woman. Tanaka had been the first human to put on an Imperial officer’s uniform, and Annette Bond had been the woman who’d given up the last fight humanity had against the Empire. They understood each other better than many did.

  “We’re sending our cripples back to Sol, with our Mesharom rescuee,” the Fleet Lord concluded. “Vindication is going to need to be towed. In different times, I might have ordered her abandoned and scuttled, but I have this sinking feeling we’ll need every ship we can get in the days to come.

  “Seventy-Seventh will hold at Asimov until further orders. Annette…” Tanaka paused, considering her next words. “Annette, I need you to convince the Empress. Everything we can spare. Every ship, every portable surface-to-space battery, every defense platform we can box up: we need it on the Rim.

  “We just smashed half the navy of a decently sized Arm Power and they didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch. The only way that even begins to make sense is if there are far more of them to come.”

  “Tan!Shallegh has left the Sontar System.”

  Annette bowed her head in silence as A!Shall spoke.

  “I have received Fleet Lord Tanaka’s message. You agree with her assessment, I would guess?” the A!Tol Empress asked.

  “I am biased, but yes,” Annette confirmed. “Those are human-colonized worlds at risk. If we can put the Grand Fleet between them and this enemy, we should.”

  “We will,” A!Shall said flatly. “Tan!Shallegh is already on his way. When these Taljzi come again, they will not meet a scratch force of hesitant allies. They will meet the Grand Fleet of the A!Tol Imperium.”

  “We are beginning a refit program on the ships that have already arrived,” Annette told her Empress. “Full Gold Dragon technology, hyperfold cannons, tachyon scanners and S-HSM launchers.”

  “I wish, now, that we had never tried to hide those developments,” the Empress replied. “I need an entire Navy armed with the weapons the Bellerophons took into battle.”

  “I do not think the Mesharom will lightly forgive us for our transgressions,” the human noted. “They have accepted it as done now that these Taljzi are coming, but Adamase is furious.”

  “Let the deep abysses swallow his anger,” A!Shall snapped, her beak clacking together with harsh finality. “If we had done as they willed, millions upon millions of my subjects would be dead. You say they are human worlds, Dan!Annette Bond, but you forget yourself.”

  Annette kept her head bowed. It was rare for the A!Tol monarch to show anger.

  “They are my people. I do not care what world they were born on or how many limbs they have. They are my people. The Imperium stands guard. We always have. We always will. That was the deal, was it not?”

  “It was,” Annette agreed. “It is…easy to fear that one’s own race will be forgotten, when there is an Imperium to watch.”

  “The swords of the Duchy of Terra have stood side by side with the Imperial Navy,” A!Shall said, her tone calming again. “This will not be forgotten. The families of the fallen will receive full Imperial Pensions as well as whatever benefits your Duchy lays upon them. We will pay for the replacement ships.

  “I must, however, ask two things of you I have never asked before, and you must obey.”

  Annette winced. She knew what at least one of those things would be.

  “The full files from DragonWorks and the Bellerophon and Thunderstorm-D designs must be forwarded to the Imperial Navy,” A!Shall ordered. “In the past, I have allowed you to keep a hold on the technologies you have provided the Navy, to help support your Duchy’s economy.

  “Now every shipyard in the Imperium must bend their limbs to the construction of a new war fleet. Licensing and control of the designs and the technology must lie with the Imperium.”

  That was going to hurt Earth. A lot. They didn’t need that extra support, not now that they were roughly the fourth-largest ship-building complex in the Imperium, but it was still going to hurt the Ducal economy.

  “I understand.”

  “Your companies will be
compensated and you can be assured that the Imperium will continue to expand the Sol shipyards,” A!Shall told her. “But we need that new fleet if we are to face the storm to come.”

  “So be it. And the second?”

  The A!Tol’s skin flashed from her usual gray to a flushed bright blue of pleased success.

  “The Kanzi have met my price,” A!Shall told her. “They are collecting a convoy at Arjzi of ships loaded with the slaves they are to release. You will take your Tornado and a squadron of super-battleships under Fleet Lord !Olarski to Arjzi, where !Olarski will send half of her ships back to Sol with the slaves.

  “You, however, will remain in Arjzi. I will send more detailed instructions as you prepare for the trip, but you carry full plenipotentiary authority and my full faith.

  “It will fall to you, Duchess Dan!Annette Bond of Terra, to negotiate the end to a cold war we can no longer afford.

  “The future of over fifty species will rest in our hands, my dear Annette. Tan!Shallegh will see the Taljzi stopped.

  “You must make sure we have the strength to see them ended.”

  About the Author

  Glynn Stewart is the author of Starship’s Mage, a bestselling science fiction and fantasy series where faster-than-light travel is possible–but only because of magic. His other works include science fiction series Duchy of Terra, Castle Federation and Vigilante, as well as the urban fantasy series ONSET and Changeling Blood.

  Writing managed to liberate Glynn from a bleak future as an accountant. With his personality and hope for a high-tech future intact, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario with his wife, their cats, and an unstoppable writing habit.

  Other Books by Glynn Stewart

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