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

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.
Published: 2018-10-14T06:00:00+00:00

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.

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