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

  “Between us, we are covering less than ten percent of their potential exits. Are these creatures clever enough to realize that and go around our screens and scouts?”

  “Yes,” Morgan said bluntly. “That is one of my largest concerns at this point. Unfortunately, full coverage would require thousands to tens of thousands of scout ships, all hopefully stealthed to evade detection and elimination by the Infinite.

  “So far, we have successfully intercepted them by blockading the route that the conspirators used to enter the nebula. We cannot assume that they will continue to use the same route to exit the Astoroko Nebula once they have confirmed the validity of the maps they will have acquired from the conspirators.”

  “It seems likely, then, that the Infinite have already evaded our attempts at surveillance and are carrying out operations we may have missed?” the Wendira officer asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Morgan agreed. “I have no real way of projecting what they are doing that we cannot see, beyond attempting to extrapolate their likely objectives, as I have done.”

  “I am not objecting to your work, Captain,” Ronoxosh said. “I am attempting to make certain that I and my fellow fleet commanders understand the limits of the information we have. You are projecting that their next action will be the acquisition of resources on a mass scale. However, you’ve also noted that you do not know where they acquired the resources necessary for the manufacture of five million missiles.”

  “There is potentially sufficient raw material in the Eye to support munitions manufacture on that scale for a period,” Morgan countered. “But, yes, we do not have information on how much of those asteroids, et cetera, have already been converted into Infinite biomass versus were available to be used in production of Laian-style technology.

  “We also cannot speak to the degree to which they are able to reconfigure their existing biomass,” she warned. “We currently believe that the portal emitters they are using are newly bred Category One bioforms, potentially existing in symbiosis with larger forms as a kind of ‘add-on system.’

  “Until we have regular-space visuals of a hyper-capable Infinite force, it’s hard to judge. In our last engagement, we did not even get drones into the visibility bubble of the swarm.”

  “Have we deployed hyperfold-com-equipped drones in the most likely systems for their resource extraction?” Ronoxosh asked.

  “We have,” Tidirok said before Morgan could answer this time. “And more drones and scout ships are on the way to expand our surveillance. As of the last round of reports from those drones, the Infinite have not been spotted in any of the systems.”

  “So, it is possible that the enemy has eluded us entirely with multiple forces,” Ronoxosh replied. “And even if they have not, we still have no idea where Swarm Bravo went after destroying Pincer Korodaun’s forces?

  “Does that summarize our problem sufficiently?”

  “Yes,” Tidirok snapped. “Do you have a solution, Royal Commandant?”

  “No,” Ronoxosh admitted. “As I said, I am attempting to make certain we are all on the same tablet of the problem.” He stabbed a pincer at the nebula on Morgan’s presentation map.

  “As Captain Casimir has laid out, there is a force in this nebula that can destroy everything we have gathered,” he said bluntly. “They could have sent out multiple secondary forces we have not yet detected, and have sent out at least one force, Swarm Bravo, that we have lost track of.”

  The room was silent.

  “None of this was…preventable, I do not believe,” Ronoxosh said after a few moments. “But it leaves us in a strategic situation that is far more complicated than I had hoped. Short of advancing into the nebula and engaging the Infinite’s primary nest—a task we lack the forces for—I’m not certain I see a most-optimal set of next steps.

  “That, Royal Commandant, is the current we are here to discuss,” Tan!Shallegh noted softly. “Thank you, Staff Captain Casimir. I think we should carry on the rest of this conversation in private.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Shotilik was the senior member of Morgan’s original team that she’d brought over to Va!Tola. She’d also grabbed Took and Ito, leaving Rogers to assemble a new team around herself and Kadark.

  Morgan had meant to leave Ito, but Rogers had insisted that the team responsible for the entire Grand Fleet was more important than the one for a single task force. The Grand Fleet had ten forces like Tan!Stalla’s, after all.

  The Rekiki was standing next to the holotank, her arms moving icons around as she tested an operational contingency plan, when her superior came in. Shotilik turned and saluted crisply, fist to chest, at Morgan’s arrival.

  “Captain Casimir,” Shotilik greeted her. “Just testing scenarios.”

  “Which ones?” Morgan asked, pulling a seat up.

  “Where I’d go for resources if I were the Infinite,” her subordinate noted. “I have more data than they do, but I’d be sending my resource-extraction units to one of these three systems.”

  Three unnamed systems near the Astoroko Nebula blinked red.

  “They’re all binary star systems with significant asteroid belts and minable planets,” Shotilik said. “Depending on how many hyper emitters they have and if they can split up their bioform production, they might want to move in on all three.”

  “Makes sense,” Morgan agreed, studying the map. She poked at the system for a moment, then brought up a green veil through the area around the Astoroko Nebula, marking where the Laian scout fleet covered.

  “Except that we would have seen them move on any of those three systems,” she told Shotilik, taking Ronoxosh’s assessment into account. “They wouldn’t have waited this long to start acquiring new resources, so if we haven’t seen them, they went somewhere we wouldn’t have seen them.”

  “But we haven’t seen anything from them to suggest that they can detect Laian stealth fields in hyperspace,” Shotilik replied.

  “I’m not sure they can,” she said. “But they know where we were, so even if all they did was swing thirty degrees to starboard and up…”

  “We’d never see them leave,” the Rekiki analyst said grimly. “Preyshit. I didn’t even consider that they might try to evade our scouts—they came right at us before.”

  “When they want to fight, they want to fight,” Morgan replied. “But when they want to hunt and extract resources, they want to avoid us. Even factoring in the Wendira side, we’re not even covering ten percent of the Nebula’s potential exits with scanners.

  “They wouldn’t even need to try very hard to evade us.”

  “If I factor that in, it changes where they would go for resources.” Shotilik shook her long head. “I’m not sure we can get any useful information with that wide a net.”

  “I know.” Morgan buried a sigh. “We’ll go over it again and again.” She snorted. “And again, until we have something useful to provide the joint command.”

  Morgan adjusted the display to show the entire Astoroko Nebula, all twelve light-years of it. More lights dropped onto the hologram to show the inhabited systems around the Nebula. Only one side of it faced onto the Dead Zone, after all.

  “I think we need to consider our vulnerabilities,” she said quietly. “Where can they do the most damage if they launch an assault directly from the nebula?”

  She waved her hand into the hologram and tapped a star that she vaguely remembered.

  “Solost,” Shotilik said before the data even appeared.

  “A Laian sector capital,” Morgan agreed. “Population, fourteen billion. Seventh largest shipyard in the Republic.”

  More data flowed out onto the screen, confirming her memories.

  “Rated for parallel production of war-dreadnoughts,” she concluded. “As many as fifteen, if my memory serves. They’ve never actually built them like that there, but in the hands of the Infinite…”

  “I seem to recall that the Republic targeted, what, a two-hundred-dreadnought wartime pr
oduction capacity?” Shotilik asked.

  “Around that, though I suspect that the true number would come up short if they actually tried to activate those yards,” Morgan agreed.

  The shipyards were heavily subsidized to keep “war-dreadnought scale” yards operational, but the vast majority of those yards had never been used to build war-dreadnoughts. Even if only half of the yards actually ended up working, though, that would give the Republic a hundred-war-dreadnought shot in the arm eighteen months into any war.

  It was a hell of a backup plan—one that Morgan didn’t know if the Republic had activated for the current crisis yet, but one that would take a while to have an effect regardless. Two-hundred-million-ton warships did not get built quickly, even with Core Power tech.

  “But Solost would be a military, economic and political disaster for the Republic if it was attacked,” Morgan continued. “It’s well fortified, but I think even Swarm Bravo could overrun it. And it’s on the other end of a hyperspace current that cuts the travel time in half.”

  Solost was twenty-eight light-years from the nebula, hardly close by most standards, but hyperspace was a fickle terrain. It would only take seven cycles for a force traveling the current to reach the sector capital.

  “That’s the kind of target we need to identify,” she told Shotilik. “There will be more than just Solost—there’s almost certainly equivalents in Wendira space and Ren space.”

  The Ren were the third Core Power that bordered on the Astoroko Nebula, sitting between the Laians and Wendira on most of their other approach points. They were neutral between the two powers, determinedly so.

  “We’ve been focusing on the path they have taken and not considered the paths they could take,” Morgan finished. “Pull the rest of the team in, Commander.

  “We’ve got work to do.”

  By the time Morgan exhaustedly dragged herself back to her quarters, her team had assembled a list of twenty-two high-value/high-vulnerability targets near to the Astoroko Nebula—targets that could be reached by the Infinite without being detected by the scouting fleets.

  The definition of “high-vulnerability” made her head hurt, since it included systems with massive sublight fortifications and, in several cases, defensive flotillas of Core Power capital ships.

  She ended up sitting on the foot of her bed, staring blankly into space with one boot off.

  “How do you think?” she asked the air. “If I knew that, I could make a call, but I don’t even know what you want.”

  The air wasn’t able to provide answers for the distant Infinite Queen—and neither, unfortunately, was Morgan.

  The Infinite had spent fifty thousand years sealed away from even the ability to see the rest of the galaxy. What did they want now that they were free? Conquest? Food? To convert everything into themselves?

  Morgan didn’t know. She could project what the Infinite would do for any one of half a dozen sets of objectives, but even if they guessed right, the projections would be wrong.

  She was starting to think she hated her new job.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The summons to a massive meeting probably shouldn’t have been a surprise to Rin. He’d been involved in a lot of the private meetings between Tan!Shallegh and his Core Power counterparts, and helped Tan!Shallegh and Morgan as well, but he still hadn’t quite regarded himself as part of the command structure of the joint fleet.

  But as he stepped into the massive conference room aboard Va!Tola, he realized he was the only civilian in the room. Everyone else in the room was an officer of one of the three fleets—and a senior one, at that.

  The room was filled with Pincers and Fleet Commandants and Fleet Lords, flag officers of three different galactic powers. Rin didn’t have the baseline to judge if every flag officer of the fleets was in the room—virtually or physically—but he suspected they were.

  He was there as a member of Tan!Shallegh’s staff—and he hoped that his rush down to where he had spotted Morgan wasn’t too obvious or embarrassing.

  There were at least fifty sentients physically present from the Imperial fleet, joined by at least four hundred people present by virtual holograms. While the conference room used screens and software to make it appear even larger than it was, it still felt cramped.

  “Do you know what this is about?” he whispered to Morgan as he took the seat next to her.

  “Not in detail,” she admitted. “But the Wendira have been here for four cycles, and the combined fleet hasn’t moved. I’ve been feeding analysis into a meeting with the three fleet commanders for that whole time, so I’m hoping they’ve decided on a course of action.”

  She gestured around them.

  “Every flag officer is here, and every ship captain is watching,” she told him. “People who aren’t visibly in the conference can’t ask questions, but they’re listening and they’ll see everything. I don’t see why they would have pulled everyone in like this unless they had a plan to announce.”

  “But you don’t know what that plan is?” Rin asked. He was surprised by that. As she said, she’d been providing analysis of the Infinite to the fleet commanders for days.

  “Not that I can say,” she murmured. “But even if I could, not enough to give a meaningful hint.”

  Rin nodded his acknowledgement. There were things they couldn’t share with each other. That was the limitations of their jobs.

  “Have you heard from Ki!Tana?” he asked quietly. “Or…anyone else?”

  He wasn’t entirely sure who their unnamed associates scattered across the galaxy were. He and Morgan had been recruited into the society for a specific task, and no one had given them contact tools. No decoder rings for them!

  “Not a peep,” Morgan admitted in a whisper. “I think she’s probably the one who got anyone other than the Ren to sign on to this mess, but no one has ships heading our way yet.”

  He nodded, but further discussion was cut short by the arrival of three figures on the dais at the front of the conference room. It was just barely possible to tell that Tan!Shallegh was the only one of the three officers physically present aboard Va!Tola, with Ronoxosh and Tidirok virtually linked in from their own flagships.

  “Thank you, everyone, for helping our staffs arrange this,” Tan!Shallegh said by way of greeting. “I know that fleet commanders have a certain weight in such things, but everyone’s cooperation is appreciated.

  “For the non-Imperial portion of the audience, I am First Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh, the commanding officer of the Grand Fleet of the A!Tol Imperium.”

  He gestured to Tidirok.

  “I am Eleventh Voice of the Republic Tidirok,” the Laian officer introduced himself, though he was probably the only one of the three known to everyone in the audience. “I command the Republic’s First Defense Fleet.”

  “And I am Royal Commandant Ronoxosh,” the Wendira finished. “I command the Eighth, Ninth, and Fifteenth Battle Hives of the Wendira Grand Hive.”

  He gestured at the other two officers.

  “Together, we represent the joint command of our allied fleet, and it falls to us—and to all of you—to protect the Republic, the Hive and the rest of the galaxy from the Infinite.”

  The three sentients on the dais had the undivided attention of thousands of officers, Rin suspected, even if he was somewhat more interested in the cultural details of the three beings’ uniforms.

  Tan!Shallegh wore a black leather harness that exposed most of his skin but provided a place to mount insignia and an emergency vac-suit deployment system.

  Ronoxosh and Tidirok, on the other hand, both wore what were effectively black tunics cut for their number of arms. While Ronoxosh was slightly smaller than the Laian officer, Rin suspected that the two could have traded uniforms and the Wendira’s vestigial wings would have been the only problem.

  “Our staffs have run hundreds of simulations about the Infinite’s next moves, but we currently suffer from a lack of information and an extended deploy
ment cycle,” Tidirok announced. “It would take far too long to move the combined fleet to intercept any movement by the Infinite.

  “We have established a list of most likely targets that will be distributed as part of a smaller briefing package for you to provide your officers,” the Voice continued. “The critical point is that we will be moving the combined fleet forward to the edge of the Astoroko Nebula, the Trey-Four-Five-Nine System.

  “Trey-Four-Five-Nine is on the Laian side of the Dead Zone, and we judge it is a central location among the potential target sites for the Infinite movements. It does not currently have any infrastructure, so we will be dependent for some time on the Republic fleet train, but the position will allow us to maneuver to intercept as quickly as possible.”

  Rin wasn’t familiar with the Trey-459 System, but he heard Morgan inhale sharply at the name. He didn’t really have a chance to ask her more as the briefing continued.

  “Once in position at Trey-Four-Five-Nine, we will deploy roughly one-quarter of our escorts to expand the sensor screen across the Astoroko Nebula. We will also be coordinating with Ren and Wendira defensive forces to expand sensor networks on other sections of the nebula and maintain a linked network for rapid detection of Infinite movement.”

  Rin knew Morgan well enough to guess that her sudden stillness wasn’t a good sign.

  “However, we will be maintaining a full concentration of the capital ships of all three fleets in preparation for a major attack by the Infinite. As you will see in your briefing packets, we expect to face this enemy with a significant tonnage disadvantage but an overall firepower equivalency.

  “We have grounds to believe that their larger bioforms will be lacking in long-range arsenals and we will be able to control the range of any major engagement to our favor. Based on those projections, the plan is to use the combined fleet as a central force that will move against and crush the next Infinite excursion from the Astoroko Nebula.