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

  “The Republic has learned not to trust your Queens without confirmed commitments and action,” Tidirok told her. “I am prepared to forego our righteous demands for recognition and satisfaction for our dead if you do the same.

  “As you have said, we are children before the might of Those Who Came Before. If we stand together, perhaps we can protect our people. But if we continue to glare at each other across the Dead Zone, we make ourselves vulnerable to an enemy even gods could not defeat.”

  Oxtashah closed her jewel-like eyes, bowing her head and allowing her antennae to droop.

  “The Queens do not fully believe in this tale of conspiracy you have spun,” she admitted. “They accept the existence and threat of the Infinite, but they—we—believe this conspiracy is an attempt by the Republic to deflect the responsibility for your actions onto an imaginary third party.

  “We”—she didn’t mistake the pronoun this time—“believe this is a crisis entirely of the Republic’s making, and while we recognize the threat on our borders, we are not prepared to ignore the recent actions of the Republic’s fleet.”

  “Are you mad?” Tidirok asked.

  “You must be, if you think we will allow the Republic to brush aside our murdered children and call us to help you deal with the monster you have unleashed.”

  Oxtashah hadn’t yet opened her eyes. She wasn’t being nearly as effectively diplomatic as Rin suspected her Queens would like.

  She was, unless he missed his guess, doing everything she could short of begging Tidirok to agree to her Queens’ price.

  The Eleventh Voice of the Republic was unmoved. He gazed levelly at the larger Wendira Royal and was silent.

  “Are you all lost to reason?” Tan!Shallegh demanded, his skin a burnt-orange color of anger and fear. “There are single bioforms in the scans from Defiance that outmass your entire fleets, and you are arguing over responsibility?”

  “My Queens do not believe we are responsible for protecting the Laians against their own folly,” Oxtashah said. “We did not deliver a mobile shipyard into the hands of these Infinite. While we recognize the threat, we are not yet convinced it is directed at us.”

  Her eyes were still closed.

  “We recognize the threat,” she repeated, “so we are prepared to assist the Republic in this matter if our most recent grievances are laid to rest. This is the will of the Queens and, as such, is beyond my contestation.”

  That was as close as Oxtashah was going to get to admitting that she had no say in this, Rin figured. She’d been overruled.

  “I will speak with the Parliament,” Tidirok finally said. “But I suspect your demands will fall on closed ears, Princess Oxtashah. There were as many Wendira in the conspiracy that brought us here as Laians, after all.”

  Rin wasn’t sure of that—but it wasn’t like he’d stolen the conspirators’ personnel files while he’d been acquiring the data he’d used to find the Infinite.

  It wasn’t lost on him that all of this was his fault, either.

  Chapter Three

  Morgan wasn’t entirely surprised to find Commander Bethany Rogers waiting for her when she found her new “office.” The young redhead had been her executive officer aboard Defiance and was just as at loose ends as Morgan was.

  “Captain Casimir,” Rogers greeted her with a salute. “I’d say I was about to go looking for you…but in all honesty, I just found our new department myself.”

  Morgan grimaced.

  “Not much of a department,” she told her subordinate. “You’re assigned to me? I haven’t had a chance to check the personnel list.”

  “Seems like the Squadron Lord didn’t want to break up the team and only had so many people to spare,” Rogers confirmed. “We’ve got Lesser Commander Nguyen, too, but she’s currently in sickbay. Stress breakdown.”

  Morgan didn’t see any reason to stop frowning over that. Mental health issues were dangerous. She had her own appointments scheduled, but she’d also been kidnapped and used as a hostage at five years old.

  She’d had a long time to learn how to be mentally resilient. Most people didn’t have that…privilege. Lesser Commander Thu Nguyen had been the woman running Defiance’s guns and defenses. It wouldn’t take much for her to blame herself for everything that had happened.

  Morgan certainly blamed herself for it, so she could see how it happened.

  “I’ll check in with the doctors later,” she told Rogers. “I imagine Thu isn’t the only one of Defiance’s crew in need of support.”

  She gestured to the door they stood outside.

  “Any idea what we’ve got?”

  “It’s a conference room and a couple million marks of processing equipment,” Rogers told her. “Four of Tan!Stalla’s operations staff to start with—and you’ve got a blank check to pull in our old people from Defiance.”

  “Not even an office,” Morgan said, but she was smiling as she said it. Jean Villeneuve might be immense—two-point-five kilometers long and over twenty megatons of mass—but every scrap of her was already spoken for, especially with her serving as a flagship.

  “I’m surprised they even found us this much,” she admitted. “All right. Time to go work out how to politely explain to everybody just what we poked with a stick.”

  The conference room was larger than Morgan had expected, but it had clearly never been designed for its current use. The long table intended to hold dozens of officers had been pushed against one wall.

  The table’s holographic projectors were showing a map of the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula, a natural pattern of half a dozen newborn blue stars that made a giant mess of local hyperspace. At the center of them was a stellar object most easily described as a gas giant—though it was likely a not-yet-ignited star.

  That gas giant had been the anchor the Alavan fleet had used for its final jump to evade their Infinite pursuers, and was now home to the Infinite fleet. More displays around the room focused on particular sections of the familiar rogue planet, identifying regions and objects that Morgan’s people had flagged as either Infinite or potential Infinite.

  “Officer present,” one of the four analysts present in the room rumbled. The speaker was a massive Rekiki, one of the largest of the race Morgan had ever met and with an unusual jet-black color. The Rekiki were lizard-like hexapods with their front third turned upright for tool-manipulation—much like the centaurs of Greek myth mixed with a crocodile, with long snouts that added to the crocodile impression.

  None of the other three officers in the room were human either. A blue-feathered Yin, a bipedal race with a human-enough build to draw human eyes but black eyes and a sharp beak, rose and saluted crisply.

  The third officer was smaller, the smooth, gray-skinned form of a Pibo. With few visible features, Pibo strongly resembled Earth myths of the Grays—a resemblance no one had yet explained, so far as Morgan knew.

  The last was actually the largest of the analysts, large enough that they must have struggled to get into the room. Built like nothing so much as a four-legged barrel with arms on the sides, this particular Anbrai was a bright yellow that contrasted sharply with their black Imperial uniform.

  “At ease,” Morgan ordered. “Report. And introduce yourselves, for that matter.” She held out a hand, palm-upward. “It’s been a nasty few cycles and I’m not as caught up as I’d like.”

  “Lesser Commander Shotilik of House Rayana,” the Rekiki introduced herself immediately. Only Noble Rekiki would automatically introduce themselves by their House, which meant that Shotilik was literally a natural herd leader, with hormones that would make other Rekiki inclined to follow her.

  “These are Speakers Took, Ito, and Kadark,” Shotilik continued, gesturing to the Yin, the Pibo and the Anbrai in turn. Each saluted.

  “And where were you each poached from?” Morgan asked dryly.

  “I’m an engineering officer from Jean Villeneuve’s tech detachment,” Kadark rumbled. “I have some experience working with xenoa
rchaeologists and xeno-technology intelligence analysis in a prior posting.”

  “That’s going to be handy,” she told him. “Though tech isn’t quite what we’re looking at.”

  “So we’re seeing,” Ito said. Their voice was very different from any Pibo Morgan had heard before, and she studied the small officer intently for a second. It was hard to tell—Pibo were relatively featureless and all much the same shade, but almost every Pibo Morgan had ever met had been neuter. Ito, however, was female, with a noticeably sharper pitch to her voice.

  “I was in Commander Ashmore’s operations group,” Ito continued. “The Commander is Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla’s operations officer.”

  “Thank you,” Morgan told the Pibo woman. She hadn’t actually known that, which was a damning sign for how not-caught-up she actually was.

  “The Lesser Commander and I are both from Jean Villeneuve’s tactical department,” Took said swiftly, the Yin woman covering her breasts with crossed arms as she studied the two humans. “Commander MacWilliam suggested that this would be good for our careers.”

  “If we live, probably,” Morgan agreed with false cheer. “If we don’t, well. Do planet-sized living starships have careers?”

  That chilled the mood in the conference room.

  “Tell me what you’ve got so far,” she told them. “I can see Defiance’s data all over the screens, but that doesn’t explain anything.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I think we’re still processing it all,” Ito admitted. She tapped a command, zooming in one wall on the planet and on the immense creature that had lifted itself out to capture Defiance. “I mean, what even is this thing?”

  “A sentient bioform well over one hundred thousand kilometers long, capable of engaging hostiles with plasma bursts, kinetic hits, and focused near-c singularity fire,” Morgan told her crisply.

  “And it is the second-largest such bioform we have ever encountered,” she continued. “Do you have the data on the Great Mother?”

  The room was silent and Morgan sighed.

  “Rogers? I don’t suppose you have it to hand? If these officers weren’t cleared for that, they are now. On my authority.”

  She wasn’t sure she had that authority. She did not care.

  Rogers stepped over to one of the computers and started tapping commands.

  “Villeneuve’s computers have it all,” she told Morgan. “Just need to authorize and… Here we go.”

  One of the walls gave way to the image of the Great Mother.

  “That, officers, is what the Alava created when they stole Infinite code and clones and created their own bioform,” Morgan said quietly. “Just over two solar masses. Two-point-three million kilometers from tip to tail.

  “It was a stellarvore, in a way I don’t believe the Infinite are,” she continued. “The Great Mother, the Great Womb, the sun eater… Its servants called it a bunch of things, but it was smart enough to talk a bunch of Imperial scientists into worshipping it.

  “The Alava broke the Mother, I suspect,” she told them. “She would not have thought or acted the same way as the Infinite and had Alavan additions. But biologically, she was fundamentally the same.”

  “Plains of fire and water,” Shotilik whispered. “What do we… How do we…”

  “First, I suspect we need a taxonomy,” Morgan told them all. “Right now, the sheer scale and oddity of what we’re looking at is making it difficult for us to do any analysis.

  “We don’t expect bioships. We don’t expect singularity weapons. We don’t expect to encounter creatures that lived fifty thousand years ago and fought the Alava. We need to get past all of that.

  “I think we start by classifying. At the low end, we have the Servants, the small bioships the Mother provided her Imperial worshippers. At the high end, we have the Mother…and we have that.”

  Morgan gestured back at the creature that had lifted out of the super-Jovian at the heart of the Astoroko Nebula.

  “The Queen,” she murmured. “I don’t think that’s necessarily the mother of them all, but it definitely seemed to be in charge.”

  The five officers in the room with her seemed to shake themselves as one.

  “Size makes the most sense, I think?” Kadark suggested. “An exponential categorization, and then we break down oddities within each category.”

  “That makes sense to me,” Morgan agreed. “Category One being the original Servants we encountered, so…roughly hundred-meter bioforms?”

  “And then each exponent is another category,” Ito agreed. “Category Two is kilometer-long ships. All the way up to…” The Pibo gestured helplessly at the screens. “Up to Category Eight, where we can probably put in everything over a hundred thousand kilometers long.”

  “I think…I hope…we only need to worry about two of those,” Morgan said. “And one of them is dead.”

  There was a long silence in the room as everyone looked at the image of the Great Mother.

  “How?” Took finally asked.

  “We fired a starkiller into the sun it was eating,” Morgan said flatly. “And part of our job, officers, is to find a better solution than that to the Infinite.”

  After two hours of going through the scans, the good news was that there were fewer Category Seven bioforms than Morgan had figured after her initial panicked flight. There were “only” eight bioforms that fell between ten thousand kilometers and a hundred thousand kilometers in length, and only one of those was more than twenty thousand.

  Even the largest bioforms were still fascinatingly similar to the Servants Morgan had encountered in the Kosha sector. They had the same basic sperm-like shape, scaled up by half a dozen orders of magnitude. What limited spectrographic analysis they could do from Defiance’s data suggested they were basically the same material: an organic carbon-silicon amalgam in a crystalline form previously unknown to Imperial materials science.

  Large and small bioforms alike could generate organic bursts of plasma, superheated jets of fusing plasma traveling at near-lightspeed. That was where the similarities ended, though.

  The Servants had used the same organic plasma to propel themselves, and it had been their only weapon systems. A small portion of the Mother’s Category Two and Category Three bioforms, the largest she’d created, had been equipped with the same gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine used by the Imperium—the interface drive.

  The Infinite, on the other hand, used some kind of reactionless engine completely unknown to the Imperium. It seemed to lack the near-instantaneous acceleration and vector changes of the interface drive, but it also appeared to lack its hard maximum velocities.

  And while they also used plasma bursts as weapons, the Category Seven bioforms had access to the weapon that had wrecked Morgan’s command. Each of the C-7s had at least three projectors capable of firing near-c microsingularities, artificially generated black holes that had torn Defiance apart.

  Eight Category Sevens was bad enough.

  “I make it somewhere between two and three hundred,” Shotilik finally concluded. “Anyone got it closer?”

  “I can definitely identify two hundred and twenty-two Category Six bioforms,” Ito said precisely. “Most of those appear to have been in what Defiance’s crew initially assumed to be an asteroid belt.”

  “We don’t generally figure five-thousand-kilometer chunks of ice are going to wake up and start firing black holes at us,” Rogers replied. “And, to be fair, we were distracted by both the Laian cruiser we were fighting and the fact that we’d just found the Alavan fleet.”

  “I suggest we classify the Infinite wearing Alavan shells slightly differently,” Morgan told them. “I suspect the armor on those will change the threat level significantly—and we know that Alavan teleporter-based weaponry can still function.

  “The Taljzi had several forts online with the damn things, even putting aside the system at PG-Two,” she reminded them. That had technically been a very confu
sed refueling system… One that had wiped out an entire battle fleet of the most powerful warships known to exist.

  “We need to expect that we’re going to run into those in the Infinite’s hands,” she said with a sigh. “If we’re lucky, they’ll only show up in the Alavan spheres.”

  “Those are all at least one thousand kilometers in diameter,” Kadark noted. “I’m including them in my Category Six list, though they’re on the small end. Mark them separately as Category Six-A?”

  “Agreed.”

  Morgan looked at the listings taking place and shivered.

  “Once we’re done with this, we’re going to need to go back over every single scrap of footage from Defiance,” she told them. “Because we need to know what each category of bioform threw at us. I know Category Seven and Category Six forms had singularity launchers.

  “If every Category Five form has one too? This whole mess could be even worse than I thought.”

  Chapter Four

  “I am leaving.”

  The translated words weren’t truly a surprise to Rin Dunst, just a disappointment. The A!Tol on the video feed had brought him to Tan!Shallegh’s flagship on her personal stealth ship, but she’d stayed on her ship.

  Ki!Tana was extremely old, even for an A!Tol, and the price she paid for near-immortality was that she couldn’t be around males of her species. Or females. Or, really, her species in general at this point.

  “I wish you could stay,” Rin told the big A!Tol. Ki!Tana had been a reassuring presence throughout this whole mess.

  “Our…associates will require reassurance that all we say is true,” Ki!Tana told him, referencing the shadowy organization that had recruited Rin and Morgan Casimir to find the people starting a war out there.