Imperium Defiant by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Four

Joint Task Force Twenty-Five’s emergence into normal space was a slower affair than usual. With a trio of the Bellerophon-B battleships holding the portal open, a trio of destroyers led the way.

Their sensor data was being fed back to every ship in the JTF, and Morgan joined Jean Villeneuve’s tactical department in going over it with a fine-toothed comb.

Nothing attacked the destroyers and nothing was showing up on the close-range scans, so she was unsurprised when Squadron Lord Sun sent the order for the next wave to head through the portal.

That wave was a mix of every size of ships available to the fleet, from the Kanzi destroyers like the ones that had led the way through a Bellerophon-B-class battleship and a Kanzi Righteous Sword–class superbattleship.

Sixty seconds after those ships had made it through, the JTF continuing to be unscathed, Jean Villeneuve and Hammerfall passed through the portal. The two largest ships in the task force came through without escorts, and Morgan was holding her breath as they made the transition.

Nothing.

“I think we’re clear,” she said aloud. “Any blips, Ichri? Nidei?”

“Nothing,” the tactical officer replied from the bridge. “We’re clear out to at least a light-hour. There’s nothing here. I expect Lord Sun to declare the rest of the Task Force clear…” The Ivida made a sharp barking noise, probably a chuckle.

“Now,” they concluded their sentence, a moment after the order for the rest of the JTF to transition into normal space had come through.

At a full light-day clear of the star labeled PG-Two, they were still inside what would generally be regarded as the star system. The usual cloud of comets and icy planetoids—called the Oort cloud in Sol—was still several light-days farther out, but the main system mass of star and planets and main asteroid belts was still well within them.

“What are we looking at with the system, officers?” Tan!Stalla demanded. The A!Tol sounded nervous.

That was fair. Morgan was nervous.

“We’re getting general geography data on the system,” she told her boss. “Looks…looks surprisingly light. I’ve got an outer belt at eight light-hours and a pair of gas giants that look like the outer satellites but then…” She shivered. “Nothing. Innermost gas giant is at forty-two light-minutes, and I’m not seeing anything on a planetary scale inside that.”

“There’s something strange going on with the star,” Nidei said. “I’m getting some weird interference patterns. Nothing we can pick up yet; we’re still resolving sensor data.”

From this far out, there was only so much resolving they could do. Spreading the fleet out would let them do more, though.

“Orders from the flag,” Kira Alles cut in. “New coordinates are being sent to every ship for both direct location and drone deployment. ELA formation,” she summarized.

“Extremely Large Array” formation meant that the fleet was going to spread out across a disk roughly a light-minute in diameter. Spreading the ships and their drones across that much distance would vastly improve the amount of data and resolution they could get and, with the speeds available to the fleet, would only take a few minutes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.