Imperium Defiant Read online

  Harriet was used to the Imperium’s sixteen-ship squadrons now. She’d been tasked to command a fleet anchored around over six hundred battleships and superbattleships. With every ship refitted with the new weapons, it would be a more powerful force than the one the Imperium had committed to defend Sol three months earlier.

  It was also a force they could not afford to lose. Tanaka could do the math. Even with new construction, losses at the Battle of Terra had reduced the Imperium to around ninety squadrons of capital ships. If she lost the fleet the Empress was entrusting her with, the Imperium would be crippled.

  The good news was that their most likely enemy was the Kanzi Theocracy, and they were committing a similar fraction of their own forces. If they lost this fight, they would at least have also exhausted the resources of anyone likely to pick a new fight with them.

  The test complete, Harriet and Bond joined Admiral Kurzman-Wellesley in his office next to the flag deck. The broad-shouldered Englishman produced beer bottles and glasses for the three of them, which Harriet regarded with scant favor.

  “Could you be a little less stereotypical, Patrick?” she asked. “I’m sure you have green tea somewhere on this ship.”

  “Probably,” he agreed. “But I like beer, and my people find me some good ones. At least give it a try.”

  Harriet leveled her best glare on him and he gave her an unabashedly cheerful grin. Admiral Patrick Kurzman-Wellesley and his husband General James Wellesley-Kurzman ran the Ducal Militia for Annette Bond now.

  Before either of them could say anything more, the door slid open to reveal a second man, a tall man with graying black hair, who stepped in holding a tray with two steaming cups on it.

  “James! I didn’t know you were aboard,” Harriet said as she smelled the tea on the tray Wellesley-Kurzman was carrying.

  Despite his advancing age and the inherent desk-flying nature of his job, the General of the Ducal Guard was still well muscled and fast. He had the tray on the desk before Harriet had finished speaking and carefully selected one of the two teacups for himself.

  “I prefer to keep a careful eye on Her Grace,” he noted in a precise British accent, a stark contrast to his husband’s lower-class British tones. “And it gives me an excuse to see Patrick.”

  He gave his husband a kiss and gestured to the teacup he’d left on the tray.

  “That one is green,” he noted. “Mine is…British.”

  “Black tea, overbrewed to death?” Harriet said sweetly as she scooped up the cup.

  “Exactly. The only way to properly caffeinate.”

  “I’ll stick to beer,” Kurzman-Wellesley told his husband as he reclaimed the beer he’d pulled out—but hadn’t opened, Harriet noted—for her.

  “James came up with me to see the demonstration,” Bond told Harriet. “We both wanted to get a feel for how Villeneuve and her sisters will stack up against the Kanzi and the Taljzi fleets.”

  The Taljzi were a rogue Kanzi offshoot. They’d apparently acquired a Precursor cloning facility that allowed them to produce soldiers and factory workers in vast numbers, but their ships were built on very similar lines to the Kanzi.

  They just had Precursor-derived tech woven through them that the Kanzi couldn’t match. That was why the Mesharom were here, after all. The galaxy’s oldest race had been slaves of the Precursors before their empire fell, and they kept a careful eye on their previous masters’ technology.

  “And your conclusion?” Harriet asked.

  “If we’re upgrading the rest of the fleet to similar standards, I’m confident in Sol’s security,” Bond replied. “I won’t pretend I wouldn’t rather be rebuilding my Militia, but I understand why the Empress ordered every yard to build for the Navy.”

  “And the licensing fees for all of that DragonWorks-researched tech does not hurt our patience,” Kurzman-Wellesley noted. “The Navy is getting a bargain rate, but when you’re refitting fifteen hundred capital ships and planning on building at least half that in new ships, well…it pays for my new fleet, that’s for sure.”

  “That’s for different minds than mine,” Harriet told them. “My job is just to make sure that the fleet they’re building does its job. No more dead worlds.”

  The humor in the room faded. The Taljzi had destroyed more colonies belonging to their estranged siblings, the Kanzi, but multiple human worlds had suffered under the orbital bombardment of the Taljzi Returns.

  An alert pinged Harriet’s communicator and she eyed it cautiously. In this level of meeting, there was a priority lock on it…which meant the message had already gone through her operations officer and been flagged as important enough to reach her.

  She pulled the device out and swallowed hard as she read the message.

  “Fleet Lord Tanaka?” Kurzman-Wellesley asked carefully.

  “Grand Commander Tilsan’s flagship, Blade, has left their formation and is heading directly for Emperor of China,” she told them, as calmly as possible. “The Grand Commander has not yet sent any communications, but…”

  There was no reason for the Mesharom war sphere to be coming there unless the Grand Commander wanted to speak to someone in person—and while Harriet Tanaka was the highest-ranking Imperial officer in the system, Duchess Annette Bond had been designated the Empress’s personal representative.

  If Tilsan wanted to talk to someone, it would be them.

  By the time they made it back to the flag bridge, Tilsan’s intentions were clearer, if still vague. The Mesharom, as a race, didn’t like dealing with other individuals very much. That disinclination was even stronger when dealing with aliens, which was why only a handful of Mesharom, designated Interpreters, did so.

  Tilsan was not an Interpreter, so their orders were sent via a computer that coded them into a text message.

  Fleet Lord Harriet Tanaka and Imperial Representative Annette Bond are to report aboard my ship immediately upon our arrival.

  That was it.

  “You know, the Mesharom are usually terse, but this is bad even for them,” James Wellesley-Kurzman said softly. “No orders against guards, though they rarely say that.”

  “No guards,” Bond said sharply before Harriet could.

  “Neither of us is actually allowed to go anywhere unescorted,” the Fleet Lord pointed out. She agreed with Bond, but one of them had to say it.

  Bond pointed to the screen.

  “That ship is twelve kilometers across,” she said sharply. “I doubt we can assume we know its full arsenal, but we know it carries molecular disruptors, point eight c interface missiles and hyperspace missiles. Alone, it could probably defeat what’s left of the Ducal Militia and level Earth.

  “Hell.” She shook her head. “Adamase once threatened to level Hope, and all they had was battlecruisers. Not these monstrosities.”

  Unspoken was that Adamase, now the Interpreter-Shepherd of this region of space and the senior Mesharom bureaucrat for light-years in any direction, had a long track record of being the Imperium’s friend.

  Tilsan did not.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Harriet conceded. “Even if we called in the standby fleets, they’re days away and…”

  “Still wouldn’t be enough in the face of forty war spheres,” Bond replied. “We have to go meet them, Tanaka. On their terms.”

  The Duchess shook her head.

  “Whether we like it or not.”

  Tanaka nodded and sighed.

  “My shuttle should already be fueled up and ready to go,” she noted. “Shall we?”

  Chapter Three

  Harriet had never been aboard a Mesharom ship before, and the stark white space they found their shuttle in was strange to her for several reasons—not least that it didn’t have any doors. Even the big hatch that their shuttle had entered the ship through was gone.

  There were no features at all on the smooth white walls of the space the shuttle was tucked into, and the Fleet Lord shivered as she fell into step behind Bond.

&nbs
p; “Shouldn’t there be a door or something?” she asked.

  “There will be one,” Bond replied. “Look.”

  The Duchess pointed and Harriet followed her hand to see a part of the wall rippling away. Two serpentine robots, each the height of a large adult man, slithered through the opening and approached them.

  “Fleet Lord Harriet Tanaka and Imperial Representative Annette Bond,” one of the robots greeted them. “We are your escorts to meet the Grand Commander. Come with us.”

  Harriet joined Bond in stepping in between the robots, but she wanted to shake her head at the machines. Not even a “please”—and while Harriet might be a mere military commander slated for a fleet of over a thousand warships, Annette Bond was the designated ruler of an entire planet and the direct personal representative of the Empress A!Shall.

  And A!Shall was the ruler of a lot of planets and twenty-eight species spread across them.

  Harriet had been raised in a relatively formal Japanese household for the late twenty-second century. Now, six years into the twenty-third century, she’d learned to relax much of that etiquette in most company. The Imperial Navy was, in many ways, even less formal than the United Earth Space Force she’d been trained in.

  Both had been informal, to her at least, for the same reason: when combining dozens of cultures, it was impossible to create a set of etiquette rules that were going to work for everyone.

  The complete lack of anything she’d regard as etiquette or even common politeness from the Mesharom, though…that was just irritating.

  The robot behind her made a strange plink noise and both machines stopped in the corridor. Harriet paused, looking around and sharing a look with Bond.

  The robotic servitors made up the vast majority of the “crew” of the war sphere. If they were likely to just…stop, that would be a spectacularly bad idea for the Mesharom.

  “This is a recorded message for Duchess Annette Bond,” the robot behind them said, in a different voice…one that both of the women recognized.

  Harriet had rarely dealt directly with Interpreter-Shepherd Adamase, but they’d commanded the Mesharom fleet that had fought at the Battle of Terra. She and they had spoken extensively then and she recognized the particular tones of their chosen translated voice.

  “I warned you that there would be consequences for your choices, my old friend, and I have done all I could to mitigate them,” Adamase told them. “Tilsan is a Battle Fleet commander. The flexibilities required to operate out here without destroying our soft power are…offensive to them.

  “I have no authority to overrule Tilsan and he has now seen Jean Villeneuve’s tests…a flagrant demonstration that even I would have been forced to act over.

  “Be prepared, Duchess Bond, to lose everything.” There was a sadness to the translated voice, but that was easily faked, Harriet supposed. “You should never have kept the scans of the Precursor ship. That alone is the stone Tilsan will drown you for.”

  The recording ending, the robot plinked again, and both machines started forward like they’d never paused. The humans were quickly shuffled along, unable to do more than share a nervous look unbefitting two women of their power and stature.

  Tilsan looked like a giant fuzzy caterpillar. Lifted to their full height, Tilsan had a good meter and a half of body on the floor and two and a half meters raised up, towering over the humans as the robots escorted them into the room.

  Dozens of long feelers, clearly usable for both movement and tool manipulation, covered the Mehsarom’s underside, and dark blue-and-purple fur covered Tilsan’s body.

  If they hadn’t been clearly trying to be intimidating, Harriet might have almost found the Mesharom pretty. The colors and the fur twisted through fascinating patterns, and it wasn’t like the Mesharom went in for clothes a human would recognize.

  There were no chairs waiting for them. The room wasn’t colored in relaxing tones as Harriet had heard others describe meeting with Mesharom. There was no attempt to make them relax, and Tilsan was alone in the room with them and the two robots.

  The machines slid back to where the door had been, taking up flanking positions behind Harriet and Bond—and Harriet was grimly certain the robots were armed. If Tilsan wanted to commit a war crime, he could easily have them both killed.

  “Fleet Lord Tanaka. Representative Bond.” There was no tone to Tilsan’s translated words. They were using their own systems to make sure they controlled the tone and other secondary communication of their English…and they weren’t conveying any.

  “I arrived in this system three days ago and began the necessary investigations to make up for the shortfalls of the local Mesharom forces,” Tilsan told them. “As I was completing these investigations, your demonstration began.”

  A hologram appeared in the room without Tilsan seeming to do anything, showing Jean Villeneuve flying the test circuit.

  “She is an impressive ship, isn’t she?” Harriet ventured. “I’m looking forward to having her under my command.”

  “That won’t happen,” Tilsan told them. “Jean Villeneuve and her sister ships are to be surrendered to me immediately. All ships with similar systems will be interned until Mesharom inspectors can confirm those systems have been removed.

  “Your Imperium’s theft, lies, and betrayal end now. You will not be permitted to benefit from your deceptions.”

  Harriet caught herself staring at the Mesharom in shock. She wasn’t even sure what to say to that.

  Bond, thankfully, had clearly taken Adamase’s warning to heart and expected this.

  “Are you mad?” she asked bluntly. “You have no such authority, even if you had proof of some kind of theft…which you can’t have, since none of Jean Villeneuve’s systems were stolen.”

  Whatever Tilsan’s initial response to that reply was, it was untranslatable. A hissing series of clicks emerged from the alien, and none of the translators in the room turned it into English as the Mesharom crossed to the hologram.

  It zoomed in, highlighting chunks of Jean Villeneuve as Tilsan gestured.

  “None of the systems were stolen?” they demanded. “Mass-conversion power cores here.”

  Half a dozen sections of the ships highlighted on the hologram, all along the spinal power trunk.

  “Stolen from the Reshmiri,” Tilsan noted flatly. “The local Shepherd had records proving that theft. It was not our responsibility to solve the Reshmiri’s problem, though I wonder now if we should have taken that as a warning of what was to come.”

  The Mesharom gave a whole-body shiver and then highlighted the wingtip plasma lances.

  “Plasma lances, stolen from the Laians,” they continued. “Potentially purchased from the Exiles, obsolete in any case compared to the hyperfold cannon we so foolishly gave you ourselves.”

  Harriet was expecting to hear Bond jump and glanced over at the Duchess. Bond gave her a shush and listen gesture. Clearly, she was going to let Tilsan run the list of “charges” out.

  “Hyperspace missiles, stolen from us,” Tilsan continued. “Tachyon scanners, stolen from us. All of this built on a hull with a mixed microbot-and-nanobot underlying matrix…based on the Precursor tech you should never have had access to.”

  The hologram snapped out of existence, and Tilsan turned back to them.

  “This ship is built on lies and theft,” he concluded. “To protect the Precursor tech and to reclaim our own technology, it must be turned over. All of the duplication of its technology must also be stopped and all examples turned over.”

  “That isn’t happening,” Bond said calmly. “None of that is happening, because everything you’ve said is wrong. Our original experimental matter converters were based on a reverse-engineered Reshmiri design, yes. That was fifteen years ago. There’s only the most tenuous of connections between our current generation of matter-converter power plants and the stolen Reshmiri technology.

  “As for the rest? We stole nothing from you. We saw the hyperspace missiles, t
he tachyon sensors, your own active microbot hulls and interior starship spaces, in action. Hell, Grand Commander, we saw them all in action in Alpha Centauri, a system we have wired with more sensors than you have aboard this ship.

  “My husband is an engineer, and he says that knowing something is possible is half the battle. We knew the system we’d seen you use worked, so we set out to duplicate them. We succeeded.”

  Bond’s words were fierce, and Harriet suddenly had an entirely new level of appreciation for the amount of work and brainpower that had gone into creating the technology behind her fleet.

  “We duplicated your hyperspace missiles exactly, but with our tech, they were immense things. So, we found a different way,” Bond continued. “Our HSMs don’t work on the same logic as yours. Our hull matrices don’t work on the same logic as yours. We had data-compatibility problems trying to interface our tachyon sensor networks with Interpreter-Shepherd Adamase’s force’s tachyon sensors in the Battle of Terra, because our system doesn’t work the same way as yours.

  “So, we have stolen nothing and all you have proven today is that you are so lost to your ego that you cannot conceive of the possibility that the best minds of twenty-eight species could combine to duplicate what we saw.”

  The room was silent.

  “I am not Interpreter-Shepherd Adamase,” Tilsan said into that silence. “I will not be turned by your brilliance or fooled by your lies. The proof is in front of my eyes, in the sensor data of your own ship. My dictate is unchanged.”

  “Then your dictate is refused,” Bond said calmly. “Are you prepared to wage war on the A!Tol Imperium for your ego, Grand Commander?”

  “It would be a very short war. I suggest you consider your choices carefully.”

  Harriet was frozen. She could do the math about the fate of every warship in the Sol System if Tilsan decided to launch that war. Even if the Laians decided to help them against the Core Powers’ first among equals—unlikely at best—it would only add to the death toll.