Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2) Read online

  “Only if they’re suicidal,” Sier told him as the first destroyer’s shields failed. There was no way to tell how many of the forty missiles in Horn’s second salvo had actually impacted, but it was more than enough. The horseshoe-shaped three-hundred-meter-long warship came apart in several balls of flame as the missiles impacted, their drive fields collapsing and releasing all of the pent-up kinetic energy of their unimaginable velocity.

  “That cruiser could fight us at beam range,” the Yin continued, “but that destroyer can’t. And he isn’t going to live long enough to try.”

  “Revising follow-up salvos,” Vaza confirmed as warning icons flashed on Harriet’s screens, Kanzi missiles slamming home on her ship’s shields.

  She checked the status. The beams were being less effective on the follow-up salvos, but they were still killing over a dozen missiles before impact. Hunter’s Horn’s shields were taking a beating, but they were holding.

  The second destroyer was only slightly luckier than the first. Her captain had dropped her back, pulling the smaller ship behind Strikes with God, forcing much of Horn’s fourth salvo to slam into the cruiser.

  It wasn’t enough to save her. Vaza’s fifth salvo, the third targeted on the second destroyer, whipped around the cruiser in a preprogrammed maneuver and hammered into the fleeing destroyer.

  Another set of explosions rippled through the barren system.

  Horn’s shields flickered under the latest salvo. They snapped back into place before the second group of missiles hammered home, but the moment of weakness concerned Harriet.

  “Get us spinning,” she ordered Ides. “Keep the damaged sectors clear of their fire, buy Vaza time to take down their missiles with the beams.”

  Earth’s last space force had developed some armor worth deploying against interface-drive missiles. Harriet didn’t know the details, but apparently, it was a trick the A!Tol hadn’t mastered yet. Beneath her shields, Hunter’s Horn was basically unarmored. A single hit probably wouldn’t kill her—but three or four would.

  “They’ve begun rotating as well,” Sier reported. “They’re holding the range.”

  “It seems Kanwal is figuring our shield damage is enough to make up the difference,” Harriet observed aloud. “Let’s prove him wrong, shall we?

  “Vaza, focus your fire as tightly as you can. Sier, take over the defensive fire. Ides, this ship doesn’t need to run. Put me all over the damned sky—every missile you make miss makes it more likely we get to go home.”

  Killing the destroyers had evened the odds, but Horn’s shields were flickering close to overload in several sectors. Now it was a numbers game—Harriet’s ship had more launchers and the proton beams were working better than she’d expect, but Horn had already been battered and Strikes with God hadn’t been.

  The battle quickly settled into a deadly metronome, both ships’ shields flickering with impacts every ten seconds as they danced across the star system at half the speed of light.

  The moment of shield failure was sudden and shocking when it came, a single sector of Hunter’s Horn’s defenses crashing down for a few fractions of a second, enough for a single Kanzi missile to slip through and hammer the elegantly built cruiser.

  “Take the hit,” Harriet snapped. “Cease weapons fire, spin with the damage!”

  The order was almost redundant. Horn rang with the impact for several seconds, the million-ton cruiser spinning end over end.

  “Shields are back up and intact,” Vaza announced, his voice unstable even through the translator. “We’ve lost a quarter of the proton beams and ten missile launchers.”

  “Interface drive is at forty percent of capacity,” Ides reported grimly.

  “We can fix the drive but not the weapons,” Sier told her. “What do we do?”

  “We spin like our drive is crippled and play dead,” Harriet ordered. “He’s a Kanzi. Given the chance to take prisoners, he’s going to come right to us.”

  Unspoken was the fact that a Theocracy officer was only going to take that risk when presented with an unusual prize—an unusual prize like a human female. Humanoid slaves were prized in the Theocracy and exotic ones even more so.

  It was a risk but one that Harriet knew could pay off.

  “If he doesn’t take the bait, we can still take him,” she pointed out to her suddenly quiet bridge crew. “We can’t evade him, so let’s take advantage of our weakness.”

  “He’s ceased missile fire and is closing with us,” Sier reported. “Optimal proton-beam range in two thousandth-cycles.”

  “Patience, people,” she said softly, watching the range drop rapidly. With Horn spinning “helplessly” in space, her drive down, the Kanzi ship was closing at her full velocity.

  If Kanwal wanted to get close enough to disable the ship for boarding, he’d need to bring Strikes with God within a light-second—an insane distance against a functioning opponent.

  “He’s being cautious,” the XO noted. “Showing full charge on his proton beams and active targeting sensors. Strikes with God is ready to resume fire at a moment’s notice.”

  “Let’s not give him that notice. Ides: when Vaza gives you the word, I want our proton beams aligned on Strikes for exactly one half-second, then I want maximum delta-v perpendicular to the ecliptic plane. Take us up—I don’t want to be anywhere Kanwal’s expecting when we shoot him.”

  “Understood,” the navigator confirmed.

  Seconds ticked away. Markers appeared on the hologram, preprogrammed responses at certain distances. There would be fractions of a second to respond, and no sentient had reflexes that fast. Whether Harriet’s plan saved them or doomed them was down to the computers now.

  Time.

  At exactly six hundred thousand kilometers, Hunter’s Horn stopped spinning. She aligned all of her remaining proton beams on Strikes with God and fired.

  The beams tore through the Kanzi ship’s shields, gouging massive holes in the cruiser’s hull as Horn leapt into motion.

  She was slow and crippled compared to her normal grace, but it was enough that Strikes’ counter-fire tore through empty space, and her second salvo of beams completed the crippling of the cruiser’s shields—moments before Vaza’s missile salvo struck home.

  Then Hunter’s Horn was alone in the brown dwarf system and Harriet Tanaka sighed in relief.

  “Not slavers,” she said quietly.

  “No, Captain,” Sier replied.

  “I need those drives back, people,” she told them. “Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh needs to know the Theocracy Navy is scouting around Sol.”

  #

  Chapter 2

  Even after several months, Annette Bond couldn’t get used to not being in uniform.

  It didn’t help that when the A!Tol had refitted Tornado and added VIP quarters, they’d just copied the Captain’s quarters. Her new employers hadn’t found much to upgrade when they’d gone through Tornado in general, and she knew perfectly well the “refit” had been an excuse to go over the Terran cruiser’s mix of home-built technology and everything she’d stolen or bought during her privateer campaign.

  Since her new quarters were identical to the rooms she’d used when she commanded the cruiser, it felt strange to be in them and not be in uniform. The plain black suit she now wore was more appropriate for her role, but the athletic blonde woman still wasn’t comfortable in it.

  It was, she had to admit, entirely possible the tailor on A!To, the capital of the Imperium she now served, had got something in the design critically wrong. But it was unlikely. She just wasn’t comfortable with what the change in clothing represented.

  She was no longer an officer of the United Earth Space Force. The UESF didn’t even exist anymore—and it could be argued that it had not truly died until the moment Annette Bond had betrayed it.

  Now she was Duchess Annette Bond, having made a trip all the way to A!To to swear her fealty to the Empress herself, and returning to her homeworld to take up rulership of Earth as
a member Duchy of the A!Tol Imperium.

  There were words for people who entered the service of their people’s conquerors. She expected to hear all of them directed at her in the near future.

  A buzz at the door pulled her attention to the moment—and notably not to the file she’d been reviewing: a case study of how the Duchy of Yin had taken form.

  “Enter,” she ordered.

  The door slid open to reveal a tall man with dark hair and sharply defined features. He wore the black uniform that had once served the United Earth Space Forces Special Space Service and was likely to become that of her new Ducal Guard.

  “Captain Kurzman’s compliments, Your Grace,” he greeted her cheerfully, “and we are thirty minutes from opening the portal into Sol. He believed you’d want to join him on the bridge.”

  Pat Kurzman had been Annette’s executive officer until the fateful day she’d surrendered to the A!Tol. Now he commanded her old ship, flagship of the spaceborne component of the Duchy of Terra Militia.

  “Your husband,” Annette told the man in the door slowly, “has an entire cruiser’s worth of personnel to deliver a message for him, Major Wellesley.”

  James Arthur Valerian Wellesley, the commander of Annette’s personal guard, grinned like the aristocratic British schoolboy he’d once been.

  “And that entire crew is busy making sure Tornado doesn’t embarrass you when we bring you home,” he pointed out. “Whereas my Guards and I are entirely superfluous until we reach Earth. He could spare my pretty face better than any of his crew.”

  “Fair,” Annette allowed. “I’ll be happy to join him. It’s not like I’m actually reading these case studies.”

  “Your Grace, you’ve known what you need to do once you got back to Earth from the moment you knelt,” Wellesley said quietly. “Your instincts are good, and we’ll back you the whole way. I don’t know exactly what support you get from the A!Tol for being a Duchess, but I figure they’re not planning on hanging you out to dry, either.”

  She smiled thinly and shook her head.

  “Am I that transparent, James?”

  “Only to your crew, ma’am,” he said crisply.

  “Did we do the right thing?” she asked quietly. James was the youngest son of the current Duke of Wellington. She was planning on leaning on him for the current “best standards” on aristocratic etiquette on Earth. “Yielding instead of fighting?”

  “You told me once that all we could achieve at that point was to get more people killed,” he said. “I didn’t disbelieve you then and I don’t think you should disbelieve yourself now. Earth is home, but it’s going to be a fight to keep together, and you need to be ready for it.

  “Don’t undermine yourself,” he advised. “There will be plenty of people willing to do it for you.”

  She chuckled.

  “That is true enough,” she agreed. “All right, Major Wellesley. Let’s go join your husband. We’ve been waiting a long time to come home.”

  #

  Tornado’s bridge was the closest thing Annette had to a stable center. From this two-tiered horseshoe-shaped room she had waged war against her new masters. On the command chair on the raised central dais, she’d made the decision to spare a world and kneel to Earth’s conquerors.

  It was on the big main viewscreen that covered the wall at the end of the bridge that she’d last seen Earth. There was nowhere else she’d planned on being when they returned, though she’d never expected to return with someone else in command of Tornado.

  “Do we have a tactical link with the squadron?” Captain Pat Kurzman was asking as Annette entered his bridge. The dark-haired man was even shorter than his Duchess, sturdily built and near unflappable now after serving Annette in one capacity or another for almost two years.

  “We do, Captain,” Yahui Chan replied. The tiny Chinese woman remained Tornado’s communications officer.

  At some point, they’d even establish just what ranks and authority everyone held in the new military they served—or at least what name Annette was going to hang on her Duchy’s militia space fleet.

  “The ‘squadron’ has an average of eighteen crew apiece,” she murmured in Kurzman’s ear as she stepped onto the command dais. “They’re not exactly combat-ready.”

  Her “duchy starter package” from the Imperium had included a full squadron of sixteen relatively modern A!Tol destroyers. They were accompanying Tornado with passage crews lent by the Imperial Navy, but those crews were hardly enough to take the destroyers into combat.

  “No,” Kurzman agreed. “But they have modern weapons and shields, which puts them ahead of anything that the Weber Network can throw at us.”

  “Expecting trouble?” she asked.

  “If I were running the resistance, you’d be target number one,” he replied. “Everyone on Earth has known you’d been declared Duchess for months, and known when you were supposed to arrive for weeks.

  “If they don’t hit us before you get to Hong Kong, I’ll be surprised.”

  “Maybe they’ve decided to give us a chance,” Annette pointed out. The Weber Network was the remnants of the former United Earth Space Force, gone underground with most of the UESF’s resources during the invasion per the pre-established Weber Protocols.

  “Would you, if it were, say…Commodore Anderson in your place?” her subordinate asked.

  Annette chuckled at the memory of the logistics officer who’d tried to short-stop Tornado’s original deployment.

  “No,” she admitted. “But I can hope that they’ll see reason.”

  She glanced around the bridge. A good tenth of the support crew were nonhumans, aliens of half a dozen species she’d picked up along the way who’d decided to stay with them as they returned to Earth.

  “If they don’t, you need to drive them off with minimum force and casualties,” she told Kurzman, then glanced back at Wellesley. “That goes for you, too, James.”

  Between them, the couple were responsible for her safety in space and on the ground. They exchanged the meaningful glance of longstanding couples and looked rebellious at her words.

  “We need the information and resources the Protocols cached for the Network,” Annette continued before either could object aloud. “That means doing everything in our power to show them that we are not the enemy.”

  “Can we arrange interviews with Kanzi slavers?” Wellesley said dryly. “I have to admit, the blue bastards were pretty effective at changing my mind on the A!Tol.”

  “Believe me, Captain, Major, I have plans for changing their minds. But we need to not kill them first, understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Captain, Your Grace,” Cole Amandine interrupted. Tornado’s navigator walked over to them with a spring in his step. Oddly tall and gaunt to human eyes, he’d been born in zero gravity and spent his entire life wearing a powered exoskeleton—until the Imperial Navy’s doctors had completed their physical on him and told him they could fix his legs with a single-shot nanotech injection.

  Like the eye patch that had covered Annette’s now-regrown eye, Amandine’s exoskeleton was now a thing of the past.

  “Emergence is in ninety seconds,” Amandine told them. “I thought you’d want to make sure you were paying attention.”

  “Indeed. Thank you, Cole,” Annette told him. She laid her hand on the back of Kurzman’s command chair, no longer hers, and exhaled gently as she turned her attention back to the front screen and the gray void of hyperspace.

  A shivering thrum spread through the ship as power was fed to the exotic-matter arrays in preparation for opening the portal.

  It had been a year to the day since Tornado had left Sol. The timing had been chosen carefully, with the convoy even delaying intentionally after an unexpected hyperspace current had cut a day off of their trip.

  “Portal forming,” Amandine announced. A moment later, the void in front of them tore open, a gap of “real” space suddenly visible through a burst of blue Che
renkov radiation. The Terran-built cruiser’s overpowered emitters tore the gap wider and wider, clearing space for the entire convoy of sixteen destroyers and half a dozen transports to follow them through.

  In a moment of indescribable discomfort, Tornado flashed through the portal and Annette Bond was home.

  #

  Despite all of the changes, upgrades and refits that Tornado had undergone over the last year, her shuttles remained the same slow Terran-built craft she’d started with. The ones that were left, anyway.

  The power-armored forms of Wellesley’s Ducal Guard troops waited for Annette as she crossed the cruiser’s shuttlebay. Despite having ordered there to be no send-off, no big ceremony, she wasn’t alone.

  The cruiser had settled safely into orbit, and a massive chunk of her crew had decided this gave them an excuse to come see their Duchess off. She was relatively sure that almost the entirety of the original human crew was here, their alien companions taking over to let them be there.

  “Company, ATTENTION!”

  Annette wasn’t even sure who had barked the command, but the salutes in response could have been rehearsed, rippling along the deck in perfect order.

  She’d left Kurzman behind on the bridge and she’d thought she’d taken the fastest route, but the Captain was somehow waiting for her beside the shuttle. An old XO’s trick, she supposed, but he was the last to salute, and she returned it with a somewhat embarrassed smile.

  “Bastard,” she told him quietly. “I told you no ceremony.”

  “It’s not for you,” he replied. “We don’t know when we’ll have you back aboard, but we wanted you to know that we’re behind you all the way. Everyone aboard has already volunteered for the new militia. Tornado will stand guard over Earth while you smack heads together.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly, then repeated it louder. “Thank you all. Your faith in me has brought us this far, and it sets my mind at ease to know that the crew of this ship is watching my back.