Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1) Read online

  “My god,” someone said behind them. “That was the city.”

  “Sensors aren’t clear,” the pilot reported to her quietly. “At least four kinetic strikes. Maybe more. Arbor is gone.”

  They were flying close to the surface now, barely skimming the trees and unable to see any other aircraft. Behind them, another pillar of fire plummeted from the sky.

  Amanda didn’t need the pilot to tell her there wasn’t a city where that one had hit. The aliens had just used orbital bombardment to wipe out a farm.

  Which meant…

  “Do we have coms with the rest of the evacuation?” she snapped.

  “Most of ’em; why?” the pilot asked. “Everyone is running as hard as they can.”

  “Because they need to stop,” Amanda told him. “We need to land now—they’re targeting power signatures, and every aircraft on the planet is going to stick out like a sore thumb.”

  They left the shuttle behind at a run, enough of the people aboard the police aircraft listening to Amanda and chivvying the rest along to keep them safe.

  The irony wasn’t lost on her that most of the people she was using to keep order were probably the criminals who’d been in the station’s cells, but with the police aircraft landing, she suddenly found herself responsible for four or five hundred people…with ten pilots for support.

  They managed to get everyone about a kilometer away from the aircraft before their cooling power plants attracted the attention Amanda expected. It was, thankfully, a small kinetic strike as things went.

  She was flung to the ground by the shockwave, the breath knocked from her lungs, and then silence took over the night as she waited. Ten seconds. Fifteen.

  Whatever power sources they had with them weren’t enough to attract fire from on high. They were okay…for now.

  “Check in on everyone,” she ordered. “Get a tally of the injured and of what supplies we have, then see if we can get everyone under whatever’s left of the trees for shelter.”

  She looked around grimly.

  The police aircraft had been stuffed with people, not food. They’d assumed—as she would have, if she’d thought about it—that they’d be able to rely on the farms for food and shelter.

  Except those farms were now craters along with Arbor City.

  “What do we do in the morning?” the pilot from her aircraft, a young man whose name she still hadn’t picked up, asked.

  “We survive,” she told him grimly. “And we wait for the Imperium. Those destroyers had hyperfold communicators. Someone will be coming.”

  She hoped.

  Chapter Two

  Even aboard Orbit One, the primary orbital station for the Duchy of Terra Militia space fleet, there were parties celebrating Annexation Day. Most of the partiers were in uniform, however, which meant that they could only get so out of hand.

  MPs who had drawn the short straw kept watch on everything, and a pair of the white-helmeted troopers escorted Lieutenant Commander Morgan Casimir through the throng. Both were older than the blonde Militia officer, but they treated her with a degree of deference that left her swallowing her irritation.

  Morgan knew lecturing the Corporal and Private would be both inappropriate and a waste of everyone’s time—and they’d probably fall back on the logic of “respect is due an officer.” She just knew perfectly well that the deference she was getting was less to do with her lofty new O-4 rank, still so fresh it squeaked, and more to do with the fact that her stepmother was Annette Bond, the Duchess of Terra.

  “Bellerophon is this way,” the Corporal told the young officer, leading the way off the main thoroughfare into a somewhat quieter section of the station. The battleship Morgan had been assigned to was being kept away from any area where civilians might wander into—and a guarded checkpoint stopped them before they entered the docking arm.

  “Identification, please,” the Ducal Guard Sergeant told them. The woman clearly recognized Morgan but still insisted.

  Morgan passed her digital ID over with an approving nod.

  “Lieutenant Commander Morgan Casimir, reporting aboard Bellerophon as an emergency replacement for Lieutenant Commander Alex Yu,” she said crisply.

  Alex Yu had been in a shuttle accident two days earlier, forcing the Militia’s newest battleship to delay her departure while they found an officer qualified to serve as her assistant tactical officer and cleared to know everything about Bellerophon.

  Given that Morgan’s father, Ducal Consort Elon Casimir, had been instrumental in the design of the ship and her stepmother ran the planet, she had the clearance. They’d decided she could be spared from her utterly critical logistics role.

  “You’re on the list,” the Sergeant replied with a salute. “Congratulations on the promotion, Lieutenant Commander.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. Am I clear from here without escorts?”

  “Only people past here are Bellerophon crew,” the MP told her. “Last I heard, Captain Vong was holding the ship until morning to allow them the celebration, since they were held up anyway.”

  Morgan nodded. She’d moved as fast as she could, but the Militia had decided to bump her promotion up and move her aboard only ten hours before.

  “Then we can let Corporal Winton get back to keeping an eye on the party,” she said with a chuckle. “My thanks, Corporal. I think I can find my way to the only starship on the dock from here.”

  “Of course, sir.” The MP saluted. “Our pleasure.”

  With a nod to both her escort and the checkpoint guards, Morgan stepped forward into the secured dock. Her second-ever starship assignment awaited.

  There was a gallery about fifty meters short of where the directory said the main accessway to Bellerophon was, and Morgan couldn’t help herself. She stopped there, stepping up to the abandoned window—she could hear the party going on in the main open area of the dock, but it hadn’t spread out here—and looked out over the warship that would be her home for at least the next year.

  Her last shipboard assignment had been aboard the destroyer Ottawa, one of the Capital-class ships that had been the Duchy’s first refits for their own service. She’d spent two years as the most junior person in their tactical department, learning the ins and outs of the Ducal fleet.

  The distinction between Ottawa and Bellerophon was huge, and it wasn’t just size. Ottawa had been half a million tons and just over one hundred fifty meters long. A!Tol-designed, she was built around a central hull with sweeping nacelle arches that held her antimissile turrets and heavy proton beams. Once the arches were taken into account, she was almost as wide as she was long.

  Bellerophon was not so evenly proportioned. Massing ten point five million tons, she was just over eighteen hundred meters long and only six hundred across at her widest point. Her core hull was a double-ended spindle showing her Terran ancestry, but heavyset “wings” at her rear spread her main weapons systems away from her hull, while arched nacelles in the A!Tol style stretched her defensive armaments out.

  It was an awe-inspiring mix of Terran and A!Tol design paradigms, and Morgan Casimir thought the ship was gorgeous, and not just because it was as much a child of her father and stepmother as her twin sisters were.

  Turning to resume her journey toward the battleship’s boarding tube, she realized she was no longer alone. A tall and well-muscled man with dark hair and brilliant blue eyes was looking down his nose at her.

  Her noting of the man’s features and attractiveness came to a sharp halt as she recognized the gold circle and triple bars of the man’s insignia and the shoulder patch of Bellerophon on his Militia uniform.

  “Sir,” she greeted the Commander with a crisp salute.

  “Do you enjoy having the most powerful vessel in the Militia held up on your arrival, Lieutenant Commander Casimir?” the officer asked her in an acid English accent.

  “No, sir,” Morgan replied crisply, resisting the urge to dissolve into her shoes.

  “Then why, Lieutenant
Commander, did you decide that ‘with all urgency’ did not apply to you?” he snapped.

  That had been the exact phrasing in her orders, yes. A phrasing she’d heeded in leaving even the limited possessions of a Naval officer behind and reporting aboard Orbit One with literally the clothes on her back.

  “Wanted to see the ship, sir,” she confessed. “No excuse, sir. My apologies.”

  He grunted.

  “Commander Chin Masters,” he introduced himself. She’d missed the Asiatic cast to his features, but the first name brought it to her attention. “Bellerophon’s tactical officer and your new boss. Your effects?”

  “Going into storage on Earth,” Morgan responded instantly. She tapped the small bag she was carrying. “This is all I’m reporting aboard with.”

  He eyed the bag with suspicious eyes, then shrugged.

  “There may be some hope for you yet. Let’s get aboard, Lieutenant Commander. We’re already two days overdue, so you have very little time to learn before we head for Rimward Station.”

  Masters led the way aboard the battleship with a practiced gait. He clearly knew the ship and the dock like the back of his hand, in a way Morgan had only begun to master aboard Ottawa at the end. Apparently, practice made that easier.

  She was able to keep track of where they were going and what deck they were on, however, and realized they were heading to the tactical officer’s office before they got there. Masters, it seemed, was planning on starting her off immediately.

  The trip to his office, however, was silent and he gestured her to a seat wordlessly as he poured two glasses of water without asking what she wanted.

  “Lieutenant Commander Casimir,” he stated. “Promoted less than twelve hours ago and assigned to what many would regard as the premier O-4 slot in the Militia. Lieutenant Commander Yu earned his rank and his place in this slot, Casimir. Why do you think you got it?”

  “I got this slot because someone at HerCom decided that it was easier to accelerate my promotion than to read someone else in on Gold Dragon clearance and bring them up to speed on Bellerophon,” Morgan told him.

  HerCom was the Human Resources Command. HerCom, along with her last group, LogCom—Logistics Command—ShipCom—Shipbuilding Command—and RadCom—Research and Development Command—made up the ground-support contingent of the Duchy of Terra Militia.

  “You already had Gold Dragon clearance?” he demanded.

  “I spent the last year of my pre-Academy education living on DragonWorks Station because of a security threat,” Morgan said quietly. “I spent my weekends doing grunt admin for the team working on Bellerophon’s power systems to earn spending money.”

  She didn’t like to think of the reason she’d ended up living on the secret research station hidden inside Jupiter’s atmosphere, not least because the threat had only been declared credible after her girlfriend at the time had taken a bullet meant for her.

  Josephine had survived. Their relationship, understandably, hadn’t.

  The shooter had confessed to being part of an anti-Imperial organization targeting the Duchess’s family. Since the Duchess couldn’t disappear, the kids had. The twins, being the actual Heirs, had to occasionally appear, but no one had questioned Morgan vanishing for a year.

  “Since I had that clearance already, I was working on Bellerophon’s logistics needs,” she continued. “I assumed that my familiarity with both the class and the ship herself were the reason for my assignment.”

  Masters grunted. Morgan suspected his interpretation of her getting the position involved more nepotism.

  “Lieutenant Commander Yu and I had been working together to get this team up and running for six months,” he told her. “We’ve had the tactical department complete and doing exercises for a month.”

  She nodded. She wasn’t quite stepping into a dead man’s shoes, but it was pretty near. Lieutenant Commander Yu had nearly died, and reconstruction was going to take months. Months Bellerophon didn’t have to wait, not for one relatively junior officer.

  “You’re going to be the odd one out for a while and you need to keep my department together,” he continued. “Think you can manage not to screw this up?”

  “Believe me, sir, if I screw this up, my stepmother will never let me live it down,” Morgan told him with a moment of fervent humor that extracted a grin from her new boss.

  It wasn’t a bad start. She was going to have a long time to work on him, after all.

  Chapter Three

  Vice Admiral Harold Rolfson looked at the somewhat disastrous aftermath of the party with a huge grin.

  “I think that went well, don’t you, love?” he asked his wife. It was rare for Ramona Wolastoq to have much time to spend on his ship. He commanded Rimward Station for the Ducal Militia, and his wife was humanity’s preeminent xenoarcheologist.

  She was down to spending only a third of her time buried inside Jupiter these days, but a good chunk of what was left was going through ancient ruins. The colony in the Lelldorin System had found the wreckage of an industrial civilization that appeared to have actually committed humanity’s old nightmare: nuking themselves into the Stone Age.

  They’d done it long enough ago that the nuclear winter had passed, leaving the planet Arend perfectly habitable for humanity but with some fascinating ruins. Ramona had stopped by on her way through and found herself commandeered to help host the Admiral’s party.

  “You put me in a dress and made me make nice to people,” she complained, only partially joking. “It went all right for that. I didn’t punch or stab anyone.”

  Harold chuckled. His wife was from the Algonquin First Nation in North America, and she was often abrasive to those who didn’t respect her achievements or her. She was a tall woman, with broad shoulders and tanned skin, more than able to intimidate anyone who got on her bad side.

  When they’d first met, she’d intimidated him, and Harold had at least fifteen centimeters on his wife and the bulk to go with it. Reputation and tradition had stuck him with the massive red beard he’d had when Annette Bond’s ship had fled the A!Tol conquest of Earth.

  He’d grown the beard when there’d been no real rules enforced on Tornado’s crew. That leeway had survived the end of their mission, and the beard had become part of his reputation.

  The remaining members of Tornado’s crew were given a certain amount of leeway…leeway that Harold had found was its own kind of trap, eventually.

  Fortunately, he liked having a beard and the Majesty-class super-battleship President Washington had plenty of space for the larger-than-life personality expected from him. Even as he was joking with his wife and helping the stewards start to clean up, he kept one eye on the wallscreen showing his fleet.

  Rimward Station of the Duchy of Terra Militia orbited the planet Isaac in the Asimov System. Two super-battleships, President Washington and Indira Gandhi, hung at the core of the picket, with six Manticore-class battleships orbiting them.

  Two squadrons of Thunderstorm-class cruisers and a matching number of destroyers brought the picket to seventy-two ships total. It was the single largest Militia presence outside Sol. It was also, so far as Harold could tell, the single largest deployment of a Ducal Militia outside their home system in the Imperium.

  The Imperial Navy regarded the Ducal Militias with a degree of condescending benevolence in the main, but the Navy also knew that the Terran Militia was being used as a testing ground for an entire generation of new technology.

  As the stewards ushered Harold away from the mess, his wife stepped up next to him and leaned over to kiss his cheek.

  “You put me in this dress,” she purred throatily, clearly not caring if the stewards heard her. “I hope you have plans for getting me out of it.”

  He wrapped an arm around her and grinned brilliantly.

  “As it happens, my love, I—”

  His communicator was between them, which meant they both felt the harsh buzzing of the high-alert communication. With an ap
ologetic look at Ramona, Harold pulled the device out.

  “Admiral Rolfson,” he answered it shortly. “What is it?”

  “Sir, we have an incoming hyperfold distress signal,” his staff communications officer told him. “We’re still decrypting, but it came in under an Imperial Navy code. I think you need to see this.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he promised, then looked at Ramona. “Sorry, my love.”

  “You’re as married to your ships as I am to my ruins,” she told him. “We both knew what we were getting into.”

  President Washington’s flag bridge was an efficiently laid-out space, designed to allow an Admiral with a staff of about a dozen to command an entire fleet. Most of that efficiency was built into an impressive suite of communications tools that allowed each member of the flag staff to easily coordinate a up to a hundred more crew.

  The Rimward Station fleet wasn’t large enough to require that, but the design was still useful, as it meant that Harold could gather his people and have access to the primary holographic tank that filled the central section of the room.

  “There’s few details in the message,” Commander Yong Xun Huang told Harold grimly. Like many of the first generation of the Militia’s officers, he was Chinese—originally a member of the secret fleet the China Party had prepared in case the old United Earth Space Force had turned on them.

  When the newborn Duchy had needed crews to field a fleet against the Kanzi, the China Party’s people had volunteered. In an inevitable, if unplanned, exchange, Chinese officers made up a notable plurality of the senior personnel of the Militia.

  “No details?” Harold asked. “But it’s a fully encrypted distress signal, correct?”

  Harold could remember a day when a system like Powell would have had no way to communicate with his fleet. The massive starcom installations that still formed the backbone of the communications infrastructure of the Imperium were expensive and took forever to build.