Imperium Defiant Read online

  “I think you overestimate how much territory you can hold with forty war spheres,” Bond replied. “And how much damage you would do to your cause in the long run. You have no authority to demand what you are asking for. There are no treaties that give you that claim, no reason for us to accede but naked force.

  “Do you understand what you will sacrifice if you use that force? That you will destroy ten thousand years of carefully built reputation? That you will throw aside the work not merely of Interpreter-Shepherd Adamase but of every Shepherd to ever hold the title?

  “Your people’s power out this far is based on respect and honor, not coercion. You don’t have the ships to compel even the Arm Powers to bow to your will by force—and there are enough Arm Powers with cozy relationships with the Core to require more.

  “Are you prepared to set your people against all the galaxy because we managed to build technology you have determined is your own?”

  The room was silent again and Harriet coughed to clear her own frozen fear.

  “And you may overestimate the firepower of your fleet,” she said quietly. “Your weapons are not that much more powerful to allow you take forty ships against a thousand.

  “You and I are military officers, Grand Commander. If I lost even half my fleet on a side project, unrelated to my actual mission, I would be court-martialed. Your superiors sent you to deal with the Taljzi, not start a new war.”

  “And if you turn on us, Grand Commander, you have my word that you will fight that war against the Taljzi alone,” Bond said quietly.

  “So, I repeat myself: your dictate is refused. We will not accede to your request. This meeting is over, and we will return to our shuttle now.”

  Bond turned and walked toward the wall where the door had been with perfect confidence. Still more than a little in awe, Harriet Tanaka followed.

  Fortunately for their egos, the wall slid open to allow them passage.

  Chapter Four

  By the time Harriet and Bond made it back to Emperor of China, the rumor mill was in full overdrive. The Fleet Lord could tell from the way the deck crew were looking at them as they came out of the shuttle, and she wondered just what news had reached the fleet.

  Patrick Kurzman-Wellesley entered the shuttle bay before they reached the exit, the Admiral moving with the solid pace of an angry glacier. His bulk, still more muscle than fat even with his desk job, did as good a job of scattering people out of the way as his stars.

  Normally, Harriet knew Kurzman to be more careful about abusing those factors than this, and a chill ran down her spine.

  “Admiral,” she greeted the Militia’s commander, half a second ahead of Annette Bond. “Something happened. What?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” the Admiral admitted. “We got cut out of the Mesharom hyperfold communications network when you were halfway back. Not just the multi-system net but the coms with the local fleet as well.”

  The chill was turning into a sheet of ice across her lower back. Hyperfold communicators relays only had a ten-light-year range and suffered from a two-hour delay at that distance, but they were vastly cheaper and easier to build than the instantaneous starcom stations.

  As part of their recent alliance with the Mesharom, they’d been given access to the Mesharom’s interstellar communications. That wasn’t needed for their own territory, but it had let them negotiate the deal that saw Laian war-dreadnoughts ready to go to war against the Taljzi.

  Its loss wasn’t a big deal in itself, but it was a disturbingly good sign of just where Grand Commander Tilsan’s mind and mood were.

  “We appear to have lost the alliance with the Mesharom,” Annette Bond said calmly.

  Kurzman was stunned to silence, barely managing not to stare at his Duchess. Harriet had been there and known what happened, but the frank phrasing still sent a shiver down her spine.

  “Grand Commander Tilsan demanded the surrender of all Gold Dragon technology and ships built with it,” Bond continued. The Gold Dragon systems had been the most classified array of technology to come out of DragonWorks, most notable the single-portal hyperspace missiles.

  “Starting with Jean Villeneuve. That wasn’t fucking happening.”

  “No, no it wouldn’t be,” Kurzman confirmed after several more seconds of silence. “What do we do, Your Grace?”

  “Ki!Tana is aboard, yes?” Bond asked.

  Ki!Tana was an odd creature, a member of an ancient and special breed of A!Tol that had served as Bond’s friend and advisor since Bond had fled the A!Tol conquest of Earth. From privateer to Duchess to chosen representative of the Empress A!Shall, Bond had risen with Ki!Tana at her side.

  “She is,” Kurzman-Wellesley confirmed. “We hid her quarters down behind the Guard to make sure no one bothered her.”

  “Get me a guide, Patrick. Ki!Tana knows these people better than anyone else in the star system. She can tell me how deep a hole Tilsan may have invited us into.”

  “I’ll show you myself,” Kurzman replied. “I get the feeling this might be important.”

  Bond sighed. “True. Harriet, you’re with me as well.”

  Harriet nodded silently and followed the Terran Admiral. The ice at the base of her spine wasn’t going anywhere. Ki!Tana was part of the reason they’d had any support from the Mesharom, but she’d known Interpreter-Shepherd Adamase and their predecessors.

  Grand Commander Tilsan seemed like a very different caterpillar.

  Harriet Tanaka had spent twenty years in the service of the A!Tol Imperium, since the day she’d discovered that Imperial medicine could cure her then-ten-year-old son’s aggressive cancer—and that while that medicine was coming to Earth, it would be made immediately available for volunteers for the Imperium’s military and their families.

  She’d been the first of the United Earth Space Force’s officers to make the leap. She remained the most senior human in Imperial service, having risen to the highest rank the Imperial Navy had.

  Along the way, she’d grown familiar with the A!Tol and their oddities. The worst of these, from the perspective of a human woman who’d now had three children, was that A!Tol females didn’t have wombs.

  Their birth cycle was parasitical—and fatal. They’d developed egg extraction and artificial gestation before they’d developed computers. A!Tol females were bigger and stronger than their males and grew until they died.

  But their biology assumed they’d die breeding…and their hormones conspired against them to make sure they did. Every A!Tol female eventually reached the point where the demands of their body grew too much, at which point they usually quietly suicided.

  A small but significant portion of the population had at least some of their eggs fertilized and reimplanted, dying in “childbirth” as their ancestors did.

  Some tried to make it through the birthing madness and come out the other side. Most who tried failed, but a tiny number made it through. On the far side of insanity, they found a new balance of lost memories, self-control…and near-immortality.

  The Ki!Tol were the trickster demons and wise advisors of A!Tol mythology, a reputation that Ki!Tana had never disabused anyone around her of. Bond’s advisor was one of only two Ki!Tol Harriet Tanaka had ever met, and she was the older of them as well.

  When the three humans entered the sitting area of Ki!Tana’s quarters, the A!Tol was waiting for them. Even by the standards of A!Tol females, she was immense, a three-meter-tall squid capable of cracking unpowered armor with her bare tentacles.

  Today, however, that height and strength were undermined by the color of her skin. Flickers of red pleasure at seeing them were visible but mostly lost in the deep purple sadness that covered her entire ever-shifting flesh.

  “Ki!Tana,” Bond greeted the old alien, giving the Ki!Tol an awkward hug. “You look like you already know some of what I need to ask you about.”

  “In two hundred long-cycles of working intermittently with the Mesharom, I have had a dozen different l
evels of communication with them,” Ki!Tana replied. Two hundred long-cycles was roughly a hundred and five years. All of the humans in the room were distinctly familiar with A!Tol time units by now.

  “But in all that time, I have never been entirely cut off from communicating with them,” the Ki!Tol concluded. “I am guessing that the Imperial Fleet and Militia were cut off as well?”

  “They were,” Kurzman-Wellesley confirmed. “Less than five minutes after the Fleet Lord and the Duchess left their meeting with Tilsan.”

  “I take it that meeting didn’t go well,” Ki!Tana said dryly.

  “Tilsan demanded the surrender of all Gold Dragon technology,” Bond said flatly. “So, basically, to hand over every active warships currently in the Sol System and then let his people gut every ship the Imperial Navy has spent the last three months refitting.”

  The purple on Ki!Tana’s skin grew darker and shades of fear-black were starting to be clearly visible.

  “They presumed the technology was stolen,” Ki!Tana guessed aloud. “They would be wrong, and the evidence would have been easily accessed by someone with their cyberwarfare systems.”

  Harriet twitched at how casually Ki!Tana assumed the Mesharom could access the most secured computers in the star system.

  “Tilsan couldn’t accept that,” Bond replied. “They doubled down. I called their bluff and pointed out that forcing us over false pretenses would destroy any moral authority the Mesharom claimed to have.”

  “I do not know Tilsan, but Adamase knew them by reputation,” Ki!Tana admitted. “The Mesharom Conclave does not pick Expeditionary Fleet Grand Commanders at random, Annette. They will have chosen a Mesharom of extraordinary will and stubbornness.

  “They would not have expected Tilsan to ignore their primary mission in favor of this kind of distraction, I imagine, but the control of Precursor technology has been their primary objective for a hundred thousand long-cycles.”

  There was something more to that…something Harriet didn’t know but was clearly bothering Annette.

  “So, they got sent out to deal with a problem and got distracted by their usual objectives,” Harriet concluded. “That doesn’t help us much.”

  “No,” Ki!Tana confirmed. “Though it does give us one piece of reassurance: Tilsan won’t start a war without checking in with the Conclave. That’ll take a day, at least, and…well, the Conclave is mostly likely going to tell them to get back on mission.”

  “Which raises another unpleasant question,” Kurzman said. “If their main mission is to deal with the Taljzi, why would they demand that their own allies gut the forces we’re going to support them with?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” the A!Tol said with a sad chuckle. “Tilsan doesn’t think they need you.”

  Chapter Five

  Even from her flagship, the Bellerophon-B-class battleship Ajax, Harriet Tanaka didn’t feel any better about the situation. It didn’t help that the Bellerophon-class battleships had been the testbed for what had become the Galileo-class superbattleships…and the B type was every bit as “guilty” of having been built with Gold Dragon technology as their larger siblings.

  “Any status change?” she asked her operations officer as she stepped onto the flag deck. Koanest was a Yin, a tall blue-skinned alien who might have passed for a human woman in body paint if not for the fact that her head more closely resembled a featherless blue raven.

  Koanest had been recommended by her previous right-hand officer, Sier. Squadron Lord Sier now commanded the sixteen Bellerophon-Bs that were most of Tenth Fleet’s current firepower.

  Forty squadrons of capital ships might be the plan, but right now, she had one. There were a dozen squadrons in various locations near Sol, guarding the approaches and ready to be called back if Sol was attacked, but they were only loosely assigned to Fleet Lord Harriet Tanaka’s fleet.

  None of them had been refitted. Once Harriet had her squadrons of Gold Dragon–refitted capital ships, those vessels would return to the yards for their own overhauls.

  Koanest was responsible for tracking all of that, keeping an eye on the status reports of the ships destined for Tenth Fleet and making sure Harriet’s flagship had a stockpile of real Japan-grown green tea for the Fleet Lord.

  The last thirty-six hours, though, she’d been watching the Mesharom.

  “They’re just…sitting there, Fleet Lord,” the Yin told Harriet. “They pulled all the battlecruisers in from around the system two hours after Tilsan met with you. No activity since. They’re out of the allied tactical network; they’re not responding to hyperfold or radio coms.

  “They’re ignoring us, Fleet Lord.”

  “Tilsan’s an asshole,” Harriet replied conversationally. “Any update on the Galileos?”

  “Jean Villeneuve has completed her trials. There’s some paperwork for you to go over and then we’ll need to arrange a formal ceremony to buy her into Imperial service,” Koanest told her. “The other three are about four weeks from their own trials. Barring unexpected problems, we’ll have a full division of Galileos by the time Tenth Fleet is ready.”

  “We’ll attach them to Sier’s squadron,” Harriet decided. “They’re going to be our most powerful single ships by a significant margin. I want them close to hand.”

  “Will you be taking command from one?” Koanest asked.

  “No, we’ll stay aboard Ajax, I think,” she replied. “Better to get everyone used to where to find the Fleet Lord, after all.”

  Plus, the Bellerophon-Bs punched above their weight and were extremely well defended while still not being superbattleships. The superbattleships were going to attract a lot of fire once the battle closed, and the Galileos were almost four megatons bigger than the Vindication-class ships that were now the Imperium’s second-biggest superbattleships.

  Ajax would attract a lot less attention than the bigger warships and could survive what attention did get thrown her way. Hopefully.

  Harriet hummed softly to herself as she reached the main holographic display and surveyed it.

  “What are our Laian friends up to?” she asked.

  “They moved the war-dreadnoughts away from the Mesharom shortly after coms got cut,” Koanest reported. “They’re keeping well to themselves otherwise, but they’re at least linked into our hyperfold coms and talking to us.”

  Ten war-dreadnoughts and a hundred escort cruisers. Once, that fleet would have terrified her—it was two and a half billion tons of Core Power warships, after all.

  Now she’d seen a fleet of a thousand capital ships swarm Sol. Seen a threat from beyond any known territory field over twenty billion tons of warships against her home. The new Gold Dragon technologies had changed the balance between the A!Tol Imperium and the Laian Republic.

  That change was part of why Eleventh Pincer of the Republic Kanmorad was there. The Republic had agreed to a pact of mutual nonaggression with the Imperium as they engaged in a conflict with the Wendira, their neighbor amongst the Core Powers.

  That agreement had been made with an inferior they’d pissed off. Now, though, that inferior was closing the gap far faster than they’d expected, and the Republic was still exhausted from the latest round of war with the Wendira Hive. Helping the Imperium now came with the unspoken proviso that the Republic would call for the Imperium to return the favor.

  Ton for ton, Ajax was actually more powerful than the war-dreadnoughts now. They just outmassed the battleship twenty to one, and the Republic could build a war-dreadnought in the time it took the Imperium to build two superbattleships.

  “All right.” Two Core Power fleets hanging out in her star system, and one of them wasn’t talking to her—and she didn’t have the power to fight either of them. Not right now. Maybe once she had everything she’d been promised, she’d feel comfortable taking on one of them.

  For now, all she could do was hope that Tilsan was merely an asshole and not utterly mad.

  “We have movement in the Mesharom formation!”
br />   The barked report had the attention of everyone on Ajax’s flag deck. Its equivalent probably had everyone’s attention across the combined fleets gathered in the Sol System.

  It wasn’t just movement. The Mesharom Conclave’s Expeditionary Fleet had gone from motionless to sixty percent of lightspeed in under three seconds. That was five percent of lightspeed faster than the new cruise speed the A!Tol Imperium was standardizing, reached in slightly less than half the time.

  Harriet breathed a sigh of relief as she saw the Mesharom fleet was heading away from Earth. Despite all of the assurances she and Annette Bond had given everyone, the fear that Tilsan would turn his weapons on the Imperium had never quite faded.

  “They’re leaving the system,” Koanest reported. “They’ll reach hyper portal distance…now.”

  Space tore in front of the Mesharom war spheres, massive portals sized for ships of a scale no one else could build. There was a flicker on the hologram as the ships entered the portal, and then emptiness.

  “All the Mesharom units moved together,” Koanest reported. “There’s nobody left. Not even a scout ship.”

  “We know damn well they have stealthed sensor platforms hidden in the Kuiper Belt,” Harriet pointed out. “They’ve been watching us for a while. Still, to leave like this…”

  Ki!Tana had said that Tilsan didn’t think he needed the A!Tol and their subject races. Harriet, on the other hand, had seen the Taljzi invade Sol with three thousand warships. She suspected Tilsan might be underestimating their enemy.

  “Fleet Lord, we have an incoming communication request from the Eleventh Pincer of the Republic,” her Frole reported. The ambulatory fungus was more dependent on machine translators than most of the crew, since they didn’t naturally communicate by sound.