Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Read online

  Eyes of Tomorrow

  Book Nine of the Duchy of Terra

  Glynn Stewart

  Eyes of Tomorrow © 2021 Glynn Stewart

  Illustration © 2021 Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Faolan's Pen Publishing logo is a trademark of Faolan's Pen Publishing Inc.

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Author’s Note

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  Chapter One

  There are no pleasant final duties of a starship’s Captain. The best-case scenario was surrendering command to another. The worst-case scenarios were far more permanent.

  “Scan complete,” a borrowed technician told Captain Morgan Casimir. “There are no life signs aboard Defiance.”

  “What resolution did we run at?” the blonde officer asked. Morgan was in her mid-thirties, her promotions accelerated by a combination of war and her stepmother, the Duchess of Terra.

  She’d spent most of her adult life aboard warships of one kind or another. First as part of the Duchy of Terra Militia, and then, after the first war she’d served in, as an officer of the A!Tol Imperium that ruled humanity.

  The ! was a glottal stop, humanity’s pale attempt at the beak snap of their conquerors-slash-uplifters. The “A-tuck-Tol” were spacegoing squids—large and intimidating creatures like the technician she’d borrowed from Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla.

  “Resolution was set at one-point-three kilograms,” the tentacled technician told Morgan, the translators both of them wore handling the unit conversion. “The ship’s working animals would have been detected.”

  “Good,” Morgan agreed with a nod. She’d been surprised to realize how common having a dozen or so animals—dogs and cats aboard a human-crewed warship like Defiance—was aboard a warship.

  Pests, however, appeared to be a universal factor.

  The A!Tol technician was silent, turning back to her consoles aboard the shuttle orbiting Morgan’s cruiser. The once-elegant starship was a broken wreck. Her flared wings were missing. Her spine was broken.

  Morgan’s command wouldn’t have been reparable even if they were closer to home…and Tan!Stalla’s fleet was positioned next to the Astoroko Nebula, on the far side of the Laian Republic from the A!Tol Imperium.

  The Republic were allies, but Morgan had found something in the heart of Astoroko. Until someone else was in position to secure the Nebula, Tan!Stalla’s thirty-two capital ships were the only shield the galaxy had against that threat.

  And Morgan was wasting time.

  “Fire in the hole,” she whispered, tapping a command on her personal tablet.

  Eight one-gigaton antimatter charges detonated simultaneously. Placed inside Defiance’s compressed-matter armor, the scuttling charges incinerated her interior systems instantly. The almost-unbreakable armor plates, robbed of their supports, scattered into space a few moments later.

  And with that, Morgan’s command was gone. With Defiance’s death, Morgan no longer had a duty station. Given the fleet of insane bioships she’d discovered inside the Astoroko Nebula, though, she doubted she was going to get time to cool her heels.

  “Take us back to Jean Villeneuve,” she ordered. “I have an appointment with the Squadron Lord.”

  Jean Villeneuve was named for Morgan’s honorary uncle, the French Admiral who had commanded Earth’s defense against the A!Tol—and then commanded a mixed Militia-Imperial force to defend the system against two later attacks before his death.

  Given everything Jean Villeneuve had been, Morgan agreed with the decision to make his namesake part of the five percent of the Imperial Fleet that had mixed-race crews. Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla was an A!Tol—the Tan! marked her as a relative of the Empress—but even her command staff had members of three races in it.

  Her chief of staff, for example, was Ivida. Prott was short for his race, with darker red skin than most, but he had the unmoving facial features and double-joint limbs of his people.

  Prott was the one responsible for leading Morgan to meet Tan!Stalla as she returned from scuttling her ship. He seemed to understand roughly where Morgan was mentally and didn’t attempt to engage her in conversation as he led the way through the superbattleship.

  Finally, the Ivida stepped aside, ushering Morgan into Tan!Stalla’s office. She took a regulation four steps into the room and crisply saluted the Squadron Lord.

  Tan!Stalla’s office was odd-looking to human eyes. Even for A!Tol, it seemed unusual to Morgan. There were sprayer systems set up along the walls, constantly misting the space with water. When Morgan had served as Tan!Stalla’s executive officer, her office hadn’t had those.

  The A!Tol’s old office had shared the massive array of screens and controllers that covered one wall, allowing the Squadron Lord to survey every aspect of her fleet as she managed systems with her sixteen manipulator tentacles.

  “Captain Morgan Casimir, reporting, sir,” Morgan said crisply.

  “Have a seat, Morgan,” Tan!Stalla replied. A manipulator quirked and a chair emerged from a wall, trundling over to Morgan on powered wheels. “I’ve reviewed your report and we’ve discussed this, but…”

  The A!Tol shivered, her skin darkening. The species wore their emotions on their skin, the colors shifting with their moods.

  A tentacle flickered at the display.

  “Your opinion
on our ability to maintain containment, Captain,” the Squadron Lord asked calmly. “Sixteen Galileo-class superbattleships and sixteen Bellerophon-C-class battleships against what you saw.”

  Morgan looked at the screens, picking out the warships of Tan!Stalla’s command. A surprisingly large amount of Imperial warship design had taken place in Sol over the last thirty years, with the Imperium using technology they’d begged, borrowed, and stolen from across the galaxy to rapidly upgrade their military.

  Ton for ton, the Galileos could stand against any other fleet in the galaxy, and the Bellerophon-Cs weren’t far behind them…but…

  “Our best guess is that there were at least fifty Alavan mothership shells still present in the nebula,” Morgan noted quietly. “Each of those was at least one thousand kilometers in diameter…and appeared to have been completely subsumed by an Infinite bioform.”

  That was what the creatures had called themselves. The Infinite.

  “Scans suggested the presence of somewhere in excess of ten thousand other bioforms of various sizes,” she continued. “We did not have time to resolve distinctions between bioforms other than the apparent main form in the eye of the nebula, but all of the bioforms demonstrated an unknown reactionless engine and the ability to organically produce plasma weaponry comparable to our plasma lances.”

  She shook her head.

  “The largest had the ability to produce targeted microsingularities at high percentages of lightspeed,” she finished. “The threat parameter of the overall Infinite fleet is difficult to judge, and there is an open question of how many bioforms they will be able to equip with hyperdrives, but…”

  “Our chances are low,” Tan!Stalla concluded.

  “I will need to run more numbers based on our scan data, sir,” Morgan admitted. “But my expectation would be that even one of the bioforms wearing an Alavan compressed-matter-armor shell could take on this entire fleet.”

  “You will need to run those numbers,” the Squadron Lord agreed. “We have data from the Laians on what one of their mobile shipyards should be carrying, but…”

  “Do we know what this one was carrying?” Morgan questioned in the silence Tan!Stalla left.

  Builder of Tomorrows was the Laian mobile shipyard in question, an FTL-capable space station designed to repair the Laian Republic’s two-hundred-megaton war-dreadnoughts on the move. Accompanied by a mixed force of Laian and Wendira capital ships, its owners had been trying to provoke a war between those two Core Powers.

  Their plan had been to use the war as cover to find a semi-mythical fleet of ships belonging to the long-dead Alavan Precursors. They’d succeeded in finding that fleet…and might have just doomed everyone.

  “Not with certainty,” the Squadron Lord admitted. “You will have access to all of the data we possess. I need some idea of what’s coming at me, Captain, and that will be your task.”

  “My task, sir?” Morgan asked.

  “I have a full staff, but they have not encountered these Infinite,” Tan!Stalla told her. “I am adding you to my staff as a special advisor on this threat. I recommend you pull together a team of tactical and engineering specialists.

  “I want you to go over everything you learned and put together a threat assessment. A realistic one, even if I expect that to be utterly terrifying.

  “We know very little about what we have found—but without knowing more, all we can do is stand guard where we know the conspirators entered the nebula and hope the idiots managed to wipe their navigation databases.”

  Tan!Stalla’s skin was a gray-black color that Morgan had seen before—but only during the darkest hours of the first campaign they’d fought together.

  “Give me answers, Captain Casimir,” she ordered. “And let us hope that your friend Rin Dunst is successful in convincing our Laian allies to take the threat seriously.”

  Chapter Two

  Professor Rin Dunst was quite certain that he had almost no business being in the meeting he was in. The stockily built dark-haired academic was a xenoarchaeologist, a student of the fifty-millennia-dead Precursors who had called themselves the Alava.

  His expertise had drawn him into far too many strange situations for him to say anything was unexpected, but he would never have expected to be present as the fate of two Core Powers was decided.

  The Core Powers were the oldest and most technologically advanced species of the galaxy, all resident closer to the galaxy’s center than the Arm Powers like the A!Tol Imperium. The Laian Republic was the Imperium’s closest Core Power neighbor—and the Wendira Grand Hive was their age-old enemy.

  “The presence of these bioforms is concerning,” Princess Oxtashah of the Grand Hive stated. She was a Wendira Royal, a four-winged being almost two and a half meters tall with scales and wings of iridescent gold and purple. “They were a threat to the Alava fifty thousand years ago, and we are mere children against Those Who Came Before.

  “But.” A clawed arm waved at the other sentients in the room. “The Infinite did not kill thousands of my people’s children.”

  “As we have provided more-than-sufficient proof, the deaths and violence here in the Dead Zone were caused by a rogue faction of both of your states,” First Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh said grimly, his skin the dark gray of a determined A!Tol.

  Tan!Shallegh was Rin’s boss today, the supreme commander of the Imperial Grand Fleet. Technically, they were there as allies to the Republic. But since it was the Imperium’s officers—in the form of Rin Dunst and Captain Morgan Casimir—who had dug out the conspiracy and found the Infinite, the Fleet Lord was playing moderator today.

  “Princess Oxtashah, we stand amidst a hundred dead worlds,” the Laian member of the talks said quietly. Tidirok was the Eleventh Voice of the Republic—the eleventh-highest-ranking member of their entire military. The scarab-beetle-esque sentient spoke for the Grand Parliament just as thoroughly as Oxtashah spoke for her Queens.

  “Your people and mine murdered these worlds,” Tidirok continued. “We burnt stars and shattered systems in our anger and our hate. Billions died in the graveyard we stand amidst. Billions.

  “We both came here with claims and righteous anger,” he said. “But all I have left are fear and fatigue. Your people, manipulated by these conspirators, killed thousands of mine. My people, equally manipulated, killed thousands of yours.

  “We have both reviewed Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh’s evidence. We were fooled. Do you doubt this?”

  “Whether I believe it is irrelevant,” Oxtashah replied, her wings folding in to reduce her size. “What is relevant is that the Queens sent me here to demand satisfaction for those deaths. This new threat is concerning but remains quiescent so far.”

  Rin wished he were as certain of that as the Wendira Royal. He’d left Captain Casimir behind, hoping the Imperial officer could find her reinforcements, and fled here to warn these people.

  “We have had minimal contact from Captain Casimir and Lord Tan!Stalla,” he interjected. It probably wasn’t his place to speak, but Tan!Shallegh had brought him there. He doubted the A!Tol had expected him to stay quiet.

  “We cannot assume a lack of news means the Infinite remain contained,” he pointed out. “They now possess a Laian mobile shipyard. We have no idea how long it will take them to adapt our hyperspace technology to their biology.”

  “I hope,” Tidirok noted, “that even my traitors were wise enough to destroy Builder of Tomorrows before she fell into the Infinite’s hands.”

  “We cannot count on that,” Tan!Shallegh replied. “Since Dr. Dunst already revealed the situation in the Kosha region, I feel justified in saying our analysis suggested that the Mother had already reverse-engineered a biotech hyperdrive. She simply didn’t have the power to open a portal to move her own immense body.

  “But the Mother was a sun eater,” he noted. “She was as large as the stars she consumed. The Infinite are not. I imagine it will not take them long to construct hyper-portal emitters—and even less time
for them to mount the Laian technology on cyborg versions of themselves.”

  “They have already consumed and subsumed the hulls of an Alavan war fleet,” Rin pointed out. “Those motherships were larger than anything our current technology could move through hyperspace: thousand-kilometer spheres of hyper-compressed matter. Even if all the Infinite retain from those ships is their armor, those shells make them dangerous to us.”

  “The Republic has accepted the threat,” Tidirok said grimly. “I have communicated with the other Voices of the Republic. We are deploying other ships to reinforce Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla…but so long as a Wendira armada threatens our borders, my fleet must remain facing the Dead Zone.”

  Oxtashah snorted.

  “You blame me for your lack of action?” she demanded. “But it is your own traitors who have delivered the key to escaping their trap into the Infinite’s hands. Why, then, do you expect us to help you?”

  When Rin had first delivered the news of the Infinite, Oxtashah had seemed sufficiently, well, afraid to allow him some hope. Now she’d clearly communicated with her Queens and received updated orders. He couldn’t read Wendira body language, but he had to wonder if she was truly as determined to cause trouble as her translated words suggested.