David Weber - Empire from the Ashes

"Emergence in five minutes," Janet Santino said politely, and Tamman shook his head. Woolgathering, by the Maker!

"Come to Red One," he said, and his command staff settled into even more intimate communion with their consoles. His own eyes focused dreamily on the red circle delineating their target's locus of emergence, barely twenty light-seconds from their present position, while his brain concentrated on his neural feed, "seeing" directly through Birhat 's superb scanners.

That courier had done a bang-up job of timing its jump, given the crudity of its computers, to hit this close to an exact rendezvous with the vanguard.

"Emergence in one minute," Santini said.

"Alpha Battery," Tamman said gently, "you are authorized to fire the moment you have a firm track."

"Emergence in thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five. Now! "

The red circle suddenly held a tiny red dot. There was a brief, eternal heartbeat of tension, and then the missiles fired.

They were sublight in order to home, but only barely so. They flashed across the display, and the dot vanished without fuss or bother, twenty kilometers of starship ripped apart by gravitonic warheads it had probably never even seen coming.

"Target," Birhat's velvety contralto purred, "destroyed."

"Thank you, Darling," someone murmured. "I hope it was good for you, too."

"Well, that's the first hurdle," Colin said as he digested Tamman's brief hypercom transmission.

"As thou sayst," Jiltanith agreed.

Colin nodded and looked around, admiring Dahak Two 's spacious command deck and awesome instrumentation, and knew he would trade it all in a heartbeat for Dahak 's outmoded bridge. Not that Two wasn't a fantastic fighting machine; she just wasn't Dahak . But Dahak couldn't fly this mission, and Colin refused to send his people to fight without him. Assuming anyone survived the next few months, that might be something he'd have to get used to. For now, it wasn't.

At the moment, Two was tearing through space at better than eight hundred times light-speed. Herdan was closest to the vanguard's projected emergence, and the ships which had spread out to cover the courier's probable emergence points hurried toward her. They could have made the trip in a fraction of the time in hyper, but then the vanguard might have seen them coming.

It was all right, he told himself again. Those Achuultani clunkers were so slow all twelve of the ships he'd committed to the operation would be in position long before they emerged.

"Approaching supralight shutdown, Captain," a female voice said.

"My thanks, Two," Jiltanith replied, and that was another strange thing. Colin might be an emperor and a warlord; he was also a passenger. Two could not be in better hands, but it felt odd to be riding someone else's command after all this time, even 'Tanni's.

He turned his attention to the display, and the bright green dots of his other ships blinked as Two went sublight and the stars suddenly slowed. There came Tor , the last of them, closing up nicely. Good.

"All units in position, Sire," Jiltanith said formally. "Stealth fields active."

"Thank you, Captain," Colin said with equal formality. "Now we wait."

Great Lord of Order Sorkar hated rendezvous stops, especially in the Demon Sector. Battle Comp assured him there was no real danger, and Nest Lord knew Battle Comp was always right, but there were too many horror stories about this sector. Sorkar was not supposed to know them—great lords were above the gossip of lower nestlings—but unlike most of his fellows, Sorkar had won his lordship the hard way, and he had not forgotten his origins as thoroughly as, perhaps, he ought to have.

Still, this visit had been almost boring, despite those odd reports of long-abandoned sensor arrays. Sorkar had longed for a little action more than once, for the urge to hunt was strong within any great lord, but Protectors were a commodity to be preserved for the service of the Nest, and he was too shrewd a commander to regret the tedium. Mostly.

He split his attention between his panel and the chronometers as they clicked over the last segment, and a corner of his brain double-checked the override between Battle Comp and his own panel. Battle Comp seldom took a hand directly, but it was comforting to know it could.

There! Emergence.

He watched his instruments approvingly. It was impossible to coordinate the translation between hyper space and n-space perfectly for so many units, but the time spread looked more than merely satisfactory, and the spacing was exemplary. His Protectors had learned their duties well over the—

"Alarm! Alarm! Incoming fire! Incoming fire!" a voice yelped, and Great Lord Sorkar jerked half-upright. They were light-years from the nearest star— who could be firing on them here?

But someone was , and he watched in horror as missiles of the greater thunder and something else, something beyond belief, shredded his proud starships like blazing tinder.

Nest-killers! The Demon Nest-Killers of the Demon Sector! But how ? He'd studied all the previous great visits to this sector. Never— never! —had nest-killers struck until one or more of their worlds had been cleansed! Had those mysterious sensor arrays alerted them after all? But even if they had, how could they have known to find the rendezvous? It was impossible!

Yet the missiles continued to bore in, sublight and hyper alike, and his scanners could not even see the attackers! What wizardry—?

A raucous buzzer cut through his thoughts, and his eyes flashed to Battle Comp's panel. Data codes danced as the mighty computers took over his fleet, and Great Lord Sorkar was a passenger as his ships deployed. They spread apart, thinning the nest-killers' target even as they groped blindly to find their enemy. It was a good plan, he thought, but it was costing them. Tarhish, how it was costing them! But if there truly was a nest-killer force out there, if this was not, indeed, the night-demons of frightened legend, then they would find them. Terrible as his losses were, they were as nothing against his entire force, and when Battle Comp found a tar—

A target source appeared on his panel. Another blinked into sight, and another, as his nestlings spent their lives merely to find them, and Nest Lord, they were close! Some sort of cloaking technology. The thought was an icicle in his brain, for it was far better than anything the Nest had, but he had targets at last. He moved to order his nestlings to open fire, but Battle Comp had acted first. He heard his own voice, calm and dispassionate, already passing the command.

"Burn, baby! Burn! " someone whooped.

"Silence! Clear the net!" Adrienne Robbins cracked, and the exultant voice vanished. Not that she could blame whoever it had been, for their opening salvos had been twice as effective as projected. Unfortunately, that was because they were three times as close as planned. The hyper drives aboard these larger ships were slightly different from those the scouts had mounted, and their calculations had been off. By only a tiny amount, perhaps, but minute computational errors had major consequences on this scale.

They were going to burn through the stealth field a hell of a lot quicker than anyone had expected. She knew she had more experience against the Achuultani than anyone else, and perhaps her earlier losses had affected her nerve, but, damn it, those buggers were inside their own sublight and hyper missile range! Herdan 's defenses were incomparably better than Nergal 's, and her shield covered twenty times the hyper bands, but her sheer size meant it extended even further from the hull than Nergal 's had, and there were going to be a lot of missiles headed her way very soon.