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

“Whatever their next move is, they will meet the massed forces of these fleets. The battle to come will not be easy,” Tidirok warned. “The enemy does possess more longer-ranged firepower than we like, and estimates of their close-range weapons remain terrifying.

  “But we will engage them, and we will be victorious. And then we will do the same to the expedition and the expedition after that. We will restore containment until such time as we have gathered sufficient allies to move against and neutralize the Infinite…for good.”

  Rin carefully followed Morgan out of the conference and back to her office. He paused at her door, willing to give her her privacy if she needed it, but she gestured for him to enter. The door slid shut behind him and he heard a ping as the security system engaged.

  “I’m guessing that wasn’t what you expected,” he said quietly.

  “The analysis we sent in basically concluded that Trey-Four-Five-Nine and the rest of the Dead Zone systems were basically a lost cause,” Morgan told him. “We couldn’t detect or maneuver in such a way as to reliably prevent the Infinite from securing raw resources, so we needed to assess our vulnerabilities.

  “That’s factored into this plan in that they’re positioned the fleet on the Laian border, but it still leaves us five cycles, at least, away from several of the systems where the Republic is most vulnerable.”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m assuming both Tidirok and Ronoxosh have their own analysis teams assessing the Infinite threat and objectives,” she told him. “I don’t know what those teams are saying, but I think they’re focusing on the raw-resource side of things.”

  “I don’t follow?” Rin admitted.

  “We keep thinking that the Infinite need more resources, because they’re trapped in the Astoroko Nebula,” Morgan said after a moment. “Except that the nebula itself is basically a gold mine of what they need. It’s not dense or easily accessible, but there’s more raw resources in the nebula than there are in any star system.

  “But for us, or a force operating with a tech base familiar to us, those raw resources are all but useless, so we started with the assumption that they’d want to go after a system for raw resources. Except…if they’re going to do that, Rin, they’ve already done it.”

  “So, what do you think they’re going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “If they don’t need resources…they’re either going for threat elimination or data. That means there’s a decent chance they’re going to come right at the combined fleet with every Category Six and Seven they can squeeze through a hyper portal.”

  “So, if we move closer, we make the combined fleet a target?” Rin asked. That seemed…unwise.

  “We have to move closer,” she admitted. “And I don’t know what the right answer is, Rin, but I do know that we can’t waste our time guarding dead rocks that might be useful for raw materials. There’s too many of them out there.

  “So, if we’re going to sit the fleet somewhere, we should sit it somewhere that needs defending. If Tohrohsail was closer to the Nebula, for example, I’d say we were actually well positioned here.

  “The Laian and Wendira analysis teams are thinking about how to hurt the Infinite…not about how the Infinite can hurt us,” Morgan guessed. “Rin…I’m half-convinced they’re just watching for us to bring a fleet in so that they know where the threat is.

  “So they can squish it.”

  “What do we do?” Rin asked.

  She sighed.

  “Nothing. I follow orders,” she told him. “I’ll make my arguments to Tan!Shallegh again, but I’d guess I’ve already convinced him. We just needed to convince Ronoxosh and Tidirok, and we failed.”

  “So, we move forward, we get closer to the enemy and we see what happens,” Rin told her. “They’ll see the same things you do in time, right?”

  “I don’t think the combined fleet can stop them,” she whispered. “I think all we’re doing is buying time, and if we screw it up, we buy less time—and the time we don’t buy gets bought with inhabited star systems.”

  A chill ran down Rin’s spine.

  “We thought the sun eater was going to eat Kosha, colony and all,” he murmured. “Are we looking at something like that?”

  “We don’t know how the Infinite will react to a civilian population, but they have fired on every single ship they have seen since leaving the Nebula,” Morgan said quietly. “I am afraid, Rin. I’m afraid that if we get this wrong, we’re going to lose an entire star system of innocents.

  “The smallest bioform we’ve seen is eighty meters long,” she reminded him. “That was one of the Servants. We haven’t actually seen a Category One bioform from the Infinite yet. Do they even conceive of us as individuals or sentiences?

  “Or will the population of whatever planet they capture simply qualify as available raw resources?”

  “They might just…eat a civilian population?” he whispered.

  “It’s… It’s more likely than not, but not certain,” she told him. “We don’t know enough about them. We don’t know enough about how they dealt with the Alava.”

  “The Alava were terrified of them,” Rin admitted. “They didn’t even tell their subject races that the Infinite—the ‘Enemy,’ as they called them—existed. Something happened between the Alava and the Infinite that made their war to the death.

  “If the Infinite were eating Alavan worlds, population and all…that could have been it.”

  “Because I needed more nightmares,” Morgan whispered. “I don’t think they’re going to eat a civilian population…but I don’t know.”

  She turned to look at the screen on her wall, which showed a map of the area around Tohrohsail and the Astoroko Nebula.

  “I have to wonder if I think they’ll leave civilians alone because I think a civilized people would,” she murmured. “But then I look at that map—at a region where hundreds of stars and trillions of sentients were killed.

  “It’s hard to maintain hope for a civilized conflict when you’re stationed on the edge of the Dead Zone.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Tohrohsail’s fortresses and defensive frigates faded behind Va!Tola while Morgan watched in the operations center’s holotank. The midsized defensive starships were the only mobile guardians remaining behind, looking small and fragile against the massive walls of metal moving outward toward agreed hyper-portal points.

  It was hard to look at the fleet at a level where individual ships even registered. The FOC’s hologram showed the fleets by squadron, and even that was overwhelming. Twenty ten-ship squadrons of Laian war-dreadnoughts. Fifty five-ship squadrons of Wendira star hives—and two hundred squadrons of the ten-megaton star shields. Twenty sixteen-ship squadrons of Imperial capital ships.

  Almost two thousand capital ships and over four thousand escorts maneuvered away from the gas-giant fleet base. There was no way to assemble a coherent formation, so each fleet was moving in their own formation in a designated “lane” at least a million kilometers across.

  “All right, team,” Morgan said clearly, pulling the eyes of her team away from the holotank and back to her. “We now know what we have, for at least the next few five-cycles.

  “We know where we’re going and we know what we’re watching for,” she continued. “All of that falls on the regular Fleet Operations staff. Our job remains what it always was: analyze what we’ve seen of the Infinite’s movements and project their next steps.

  “They’ve been disturbingly silent for a while now. I want your ideas as to why.”

  Shotilik leaned her snout thoughtfully on top of her console.

  “Because they’re waiting to see what we do next?” she suggested. “They don’t know how we’re going to jump or how much firepower we have.”

  “And what if they have the full databases available aboard Builder of Tomorrows?” Morgan countered. “So, they know roughly what the strength of the Laian and Wendira Dead Zone fleets is. They know where the
Laian bases are, potentially even know where the Wendira bases are. They know the Imperium is here, and they know about the alliances and security agreements.”

  “Would they understand them?” Ito asked softly. Morgan turned her attention to the Pibo woman. “We have to assume they have the databases, yes, but they have no context whatsoever,” Ito pointed out. “They don’t know who the players are, they don’t know the races, the tech, the territory.

  “Even the astrography has changed over fifty thousand years—the Dead Zone didn’t exist then. They’ve worked out hyperdrives, but have they worked out how to read Laian hyper-density maps?”

  “That would slow down their movement out of the nebula,” Morgan conceded. “For worst-case planning, we need to operate on the assumption that they do know everything, but we also need to make a realistic estimate of what they’re doing.”

  “My concern is: what happened to Swarm Bravo?” Shotilik asked. “We know a major force left the nebula but we haven’t seen it since. Presumably, they were scouting and taking in realspace scans to validate the maps they had, but that doesn’t explain where they went after that.”

  “They could have made it back in before we had a scouting fleet in position to see them, but it seems unlikely,” Morgan agreed. “Where could they be?”

  “Anywhere,” Ito said instantly. “Anywhere in the Dead Zone, anyway, and well into Laian or Wendira space. If they have the hyper-density maps, they could be dozens to hundreds of light-years from the nebula by now.

  “I just have no idea why they’d go that far without an objective.”

  “We don’t know what objectives they have,” Morgan said quietly. “What if they’re looking for another cluster of the Infinite? If they have some idea of where the other Infinite were when their drives stopped…they could be trying to find reinforcements.

  “If there were other Infinite out there, wouldn’t we have seen them?” Took asked, the Yin turning to study the holotank with dark eyes. “The cluster in the Astoroko Nebula was uniquely concealed.”

  “If we had encountered them, we would know,” Ito agreed. “But if they were in systems that were useless to us, that we only did long-range surveys of, we likely would write off sleeping Infinite as asteroids.

  “We did that at quite close range in the Eye,” Morgan warned. “When they aren’t active, they don’t look alive unless you know what you’re looking for. Once they’re awake, it’s hard to miss because they’re almost as warm as our spaceships, but they hibernate cold.”

  “So, there could be another entire fleet like the one in the Eye out there?” Shotilik said quietly. “I don’t like those plains, Captain Casimir.”

  “I don’t think we’re looking at one of that scale, but there might be some more out there,” Morgan said. “We don’t know. We don’t even know what we don’t know. We do know that Swarm Bravo is out there somewhere and it hasn’t pinged any sensors anywhere.

  “It’s not a standard hyperspace anomaly, so they could potentially have accidentally snuck past a lot of sensor outposts before the signatures were properly distributed, but we don’t know.”

  She shook her head. She was starting to hate those three words.

  A shiver ran through the floor and the team before anyone said anything more, the transition to hyperspace indescribable though thankfully short.

  “We have analysis based on our vulnerabilities,” Morgan said after the moment passed. “I think that’s a good pattern to keep following. We have to focus on the main swarm in the Astoroko Nebula for now, though.

  “What they have, what they can do. Right now, I’d guess part of their inactivity is a limitation on the number of hyper-portal ships they’ve created and how many missiles they have.

  “That, to me, means that when they next move, it’s going to be in overwhelming force,” she warned her team. “If we’re lucky, it will be somewhere the triple fleet can intercept. If we’re not, they’re going to take a force that makes Swarm Bravo look like a baby into Ren or Wendira space, and the political consequences will probably outlive us.”

  That got her some pained sounds of amusement.

  “So, let’s keep digging,” she told them. “I know it feels like we’re going over the same ground again and again, but that’s what analysis means. Let me know if any of you need a damn towel.”

  Two of the junior noncoms, the group that was solely listening in on this conversation, were human.

  Nobody else got the joke.

  Chapter Thirty

  Morgan was on the flag deck when the answer to the question her team kept asking was finally answered.

  Most flag decks were designed with a direct link to the flagship bridge, a video-screen wall that could make it look like the bridge was attached to the flag deck. It was rarely used for that—the level of distraction both ways often overwhelmed any value, so smaller, direct screens were used—but aboard Va!Tola, it had been commandeered for a different purpose.

  The wallscreen on Va!Tola was linked to the same screen on Storm Sentinel’s flag deck, linking the two superbattleships’ flag decks together into a single massive command center that almost sufficed for the task at hand.

  From either of those flag decks, running the Grand Fleet alone was overwhelming. Trying to coordinate it with two other fleets, in hyperspace where most signals only traveled a single light-second, was an entire new nightmare.

  They were managing it by a mix of relays and tricks like merging the flag decks of two capital ships into one virtual space.

  “Someone pass an order to Sentinel’s bridge,” !Pana said aloud, the A!Tol chief of staff surveying her dual domains from the Admiral’s seat. “We need to pull them about five thousand kilometers closer in. The delay on the link is causing trouble.”

  In regular space, they’d link by hyperfold com. In hyperspace, that wasn’t an option, and even twenty thousand kilometers was adding a measurable problem in the data transfers back and forth.

  Morgan was working with Division Lord Etri, the neuter Pibo who ran Tan!Shallegh’s operations team, on putting together a scenario throwing a simulated triple fleet—commanded by nine officers from the operations team and Storm Sentinel’s tactical department—against Morgan’s team assessment of a Category Seven-X bioform.

  Eighty-five thousand kilometers long, with shields, compressed-matter armor, missiles, and singularity cannons, Morgan figured the single Infinite behemoth had a decent chance against the entire massed allied force.

  “Storm Sentinel Navigation confirms,” someone from the other superbattleship reported. “We are adjusting course to bring them to fifteen thousand kilometers. We’re swapping Liara into her old place in the formation.”

  Liara, if Morgan remembered correctly, was another Galileo-class superbattleship named for a Yin scientist.

  Everything about the linked flag decks was going roughly as Morgan expected. It was calm and quiet—there was nothing on the long-range anomaly scanners, and they were only halfway through their nine-cycle voyage to the Trey-459 System. It was as quiet and calm as a wartime watch could be.

  And then she saw the human communications officer—Staff Captain Guo Yin—leap back from her console as if struck, staring at the screen in front of her for several seconds of shocked silence.

  Only a portion of the aliens on the two bridges could read human body language, but every human was looking at Captain Guo within moments—as were most of the aliens who followed her surprise.

  “Division Lord,” she finally addressed !Pana in a shaky voice. “We have an incoming Code Tsunami starcom transmission.”

  Code Tsunami meant one thing only: Invasion imminent.

  “Summarize,” !Pana ordered.

  “Multiple Infinite bioforms have been confirmed entering the Tohrohsail System,” Guo read out. “Estimate is over five hundred units and portals were still open when…”

  She swallowed.

  “Portals were still open when contact was lost with the Tohrohsai
l starcom,” she reported. “It is unclear from the data what destroyed the starcom station, but the Infinite had been in-system for less than five minutes.”

  Both flag decks were deathly silent.

  “I understand,” !Pana finally said. “I will awaken the Fleet Lord. Share the message with the senior staff, but otherwise keep it to the flag deck until Lord Tan!Shallegh has made his decision.”

  There wasn’t much point to that, Morgan knew. Every capital ship in all three fleets would have received the message. The Infinite had finally moved.

  From the timing, Morgan guessed they hadn’t figured out the Laian hyper-density maps—but they’d definitely worked out how to find the biggest fleet base near them and moved to neutralize the threat.

  Only luck had prevented the Infinite from ambushing the triple fleet in their home anchorages!

  “Your assessment, Staff Captain Casimir?” Tan!Shallegh asked moments after he’d taken his seat at the center of the bridge.

  “Highest-likelihood scenario is that the force at Tohrohsail is Swarm Bravo, sir,” she reported crisply. “If they were unable to read the Laian maps for hyperspace details and took a direct course to Tohrohsail from engaging Korodaun, the attack would line up with the end of their expected arrival window.”

  Or they could have stopped, taken a massive quantity of sensor readings to send back to the Queen and then carried on and arrived closer to the middle of their window.

  Either way, it was most likely Bravo, and Morgan now knew what had happened to that fleet.

  “The good news is that Bravo is almost certainly short on missiles,” she continued. “They were expecting, I would assume, to ambush the First Defense Fleet and engage at close range.”

  She shook her head.

  “The need to defend the fleet base would limit our maneuvers, and they’d be able to pin the First Defense Fleet against the fleet base and wipe it out. It’s a counter-force mission, sir, one that only failed because we decided to redeploy forward.”