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

  “I have made the Queens’ position clear,” Oxtashah said calmly. “Once the Republic takes responsibility for the actions of its officers along the Dead Zone and provides appropriate recompense, then we will be prepared to consider discussions around a shared containment protocol.

  “As you yourself said, we have time. The A!Tol data suggests one of their long-cycles before the creatures will be able to leave the Nebula in force.”

  “That is extremely optimistic,” Rin interrupted, his thoughts around Morgan’s words having clicked together into a final point. “That estimate is based on the known capabilities of the Great Mother, the sun eater.

  “But you have to understand what the Great Mother was.”

  Oxtashah’s wings flicked wide in irritation, but Tidirok held up a claw.

  “Princess Oxtashah, Professor Dunst is the A!Tol Imperium’s foremost expert on Those Who Came Before,” he noted. “More, he is the only expert on this creature. Please, Professor.”

  He gestured for Rin to continue.

  “The Great Mother was a product of a rogue Alavan faction,” Rin said quietly. “They had samples and potentially even live specimens of the Infinite, and they were attempting to co-opt Infinite biotechnology for their own purposes.

  “We saw two major instances of this: the cloning facility the Taljzi used to turn a few dozen transports of refugees into an expansionist empire that threatened both the original Kanzi nation and the Imperium, and the Great Mother itself.

  “The cloner was an interesting example. It predates the Mother and was based on a brute-force duplication of Infinite biotech. While the cell structure is the same—it’s clearly based on cloned Infinite organs—it was both a sophisticated and a crude adaptation at the same time.

  “It was also, without question, completely non-sentient,” he said. “At its full extent, after several hundred years of the Taljzi feeding it every scrap of organic matter they could acquire, it could be argued it was a Category Five bioform. But because it was based on cloned organs, not cloned entities, it did not think. It simply duplicated whatever was fed into it—and did so far more perfectly than any cloning technology available to our current galactic civilization.

  “In the cloner at Arjtal, we see what that rogue Alavan faction was trying to perfect: Infinite biotech without Infinite minds.”

  Rin now had everyone’s attention, a situation he was used to…but not at quite this level of political power. He concealed a swallow, realizing that his next words could change the course of the next few months…and could decide whether the Infinite were actually contained or not.

  No pressure at all.

  “They created the entity we now call the Great Mother as a local self-sustaining defense node,” he told them. “The creature’s purpose was to draw on the mass and energy of a star to assemble a fleet that would protect a system against low-grade threats.

  “I suspect that the ships it originally could make were more in line with Alavan warships than the ones it made to face us,” Rin noted. “Certainly, the Servants would have been almost useless against an Alavan mothership.

  “But the key thing to realize is that the Great Mother was born with a computer for a brain,” he said. “We can see it in the iconography and images we have from the Alavan structures in the region. They were impressed with themselves for managing it, but the Mother was never intended to be independently intelligent.

  “She had a control center, manned by an Alavan crew, roughly the size of a Wendira star shield,” he told them. His audience would be more familiar with the ten-megaton warships the Wendira used as star hive escorts than they would be with A!Tol battleships.

  “Like all other Alavan technology, that control center died when their systems broke,” Rin concluded. He didn’t know if his audience was aware of exactly how that had happened—he’d heard the Mesharom story of a dangerous experiment to modify the laws of physics to accelerate their ships.

  An experiment gone very wrong, to the point where all Alavan computers stopped working—including the ones they’d installed in their own heads.

  “Without its control center, the Mother had no mind of its own,” he told them quietly. “It still fed on the star, however, and it eventually got bigger. A lot bigger—enough bigger for the intentionally shriveled leftover of its brain to become sentient in its own right.

  “The Great Mother was not raised by Infinite. By their standards, she was basically a lobotomized child,” he noted. “I would guess that she basically recreated the concept of the Servants from fragments of her pre-sentience memories.

  “The Infinite did not come to awareness alone in the dark,” Rin told his audience. “They were never lobotomized or damaged or built to be a tool. They will be smarter and more capable than the Mother was.

  “And, as we pointed out, all evidence was that the Mother created organic hyper-portal emitters within six months,” he concluded. “If you assume it will take the Queen that long, you are risking a lot.

  “You are assuming that the peak specimen of a species will have the same abilities as that species’s lobotomized giants.”

  He shook his head.

  “Whatever time you expect the Infinite will take to be ready, they will be ready faster,” he said quietly. “We cannot judge the Infinite by the bastardization of their cloned flesh the Alava built.”

  The room was silent.

  “I see,” Oxtashah said quietly. “I… My Queens are stubborn. I will speak with them. But I also sense an answer that I think we might have all missed.”

  “Highness?” Rin asked.

  “If that is what the Alava did to the Infinite, no wonder the two were at war.”

  Chapter Six

  Being in command of a special analysis team left Morgan’s position on the flag bridge in a certain degree of question. She wasn’t part of the Operations department, so she didn’t have a station there. She wasn’t part of Communications or Logistics or…

  Fortunately, the Imperium designed their flag bridges with some flexibility. Morgan’s job was to provide advice and context to their encounters with the Infinite, which meant she needed to be available to the Squadron Lord when things went down.

  “It’s confirmed,” Commander Nitik, the Ivida woman who headed up Tan!Stalla’s communications team, announced. “A task group of war-dreadnoughts is being detached from the First Defense Fleet.”

  “The Wendira finally saw sense, did they?” the A!Tol task force commander said with a flush of purple relief.

  “Reading between the lines, they’re still swimming around the point, but they’ve given the Laians enough assurances that the Voices are ordering ships our way,” Nitik replied. “Ten war-dreadnoughts and fifty cruisers are due to arrive in ten cycles.”

  Morgan concealed a sigh of relief. Their task force was half made up of Galileo-class superbattleships, which punched well above their weight even by Core Power standards, but a war-dreadnought was ten times bigger than the Imperium’s best capital ships.

  Well, active capital ships. Morgan’s father ran the Duchy of Terra’s military shipyards, the home of much of the A!Tol Imperium’s experimentation. She was well aware of the new leviathan-type warships—but none of those fifty-plus-megaton behemoths were scheduled to enter service in the next long-cycle.

  And the Laians already had hundreds of two-hundred-megaton behemoths. Jean Villeneuve and her sisters might outrange the Laian warships, but nothing the Imperium had could take a hit like a war-dreadnought.

  “More ships from their core fleets are due five cycles after that,” Commander Ashmore pointed out. “Fifteen cycles and we’ll have thirty war-dreadnoughts here.”

  “At that point, I might start to relax,” Morgan said dryly. “Maybe. Thirty war spheres would make me happier.”

  “Assuming they were on our side.”

  Morgan wasn’t sure exactly which one of Ashmore’s subordinates had muttered that, but she couldn’t disagree. The Taljzi—a xenocida
l offshoot of the Imperium’s long-running enemies, the Kanzi Theocracy—had represented the threat they had because of Alavan technology.

  That had brought the galaxy’s Elders, the Mesharom, out to investigate. Forty of their war spheres—each the size and mass of a hundred war-dreadnoughts, at least—had arrived to “help.”

  Of course, the Mesharom had then realized the Imperium was experimenting with a slew of technologies based on scans of Mesharom and Alavan ships. The argument that had followed had stayed nonviolent. Barely.

  The Mesharom had then swept off on their own and into a trap that had wiped out a fleet that could have single-handedly conquered any Core Power Morgan cared to name. Their involuntary sacrifice had spared the Imperium from walking into the same trap, but the Mesharom had basically disappeared from the galactic scene afterward.

  Condescending and reclusive as the big caterpillars were, Morgan would have given anything to see them back right now.

  “No one has seen the Mesharom in a while,” Tan!Stalla reminded her people calmly. “We can and we will deal with this situation ourselves. So long as we can keep the Infinite in the Astoroko Nebula, their threat is limited.

  “The more hulls we have, the better for that—and I’m not going to swim away from handing responsibility for these dark waters over to a Laian officer!”

  “Hyperspace anomaly detected.”

  Three words. Just three words that sent Morgan’s heart dropping into her stomach. A video link kept the flag deck and the bridge permanently linked together. At that particular moment, Jean Villeneuve’s Captain was on duty—but Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla wasn’t.

  Morgan was, in fact, currently the senior officer on the flag deck. The flag deck didn’t really have a watch-officer structure in the same way as a regular bridge, so that hadn’t occurred to her until those three words echoed over the link.

  “Any details?” Captain Germain Arnaud asked calmly. Not only had the Imperium picked a human officer to command the ship named for Morgan’s honorary French uncle, they’d picked a French man.

  “Negative,” the superbattleship’s sensor officer reported. “I’m looking at the relay from the destroyer, and it’s a vague contact at best. Not an interface drive…but something moving.”

  Even the destroyers in hyperspace were too far out to pick out a hyper portal opening in the eye of the nebula. Everyone had assumed, Morgan realized, that the Infinite would be just as detectable as their own ships.

  “Do we have a vector?” Arnaud asked, his tone still calm and precise.

  “Reverse of Builder of Tomorrows’s, it looks like,” someone reported. “No clarity on numbers or…anything.”

  “Understood.”

  Morgan glanced around the flag bridge and realized the other officers were doing the same. Tan!Stalla was out of communication for the next few minutes—even alien admirals showered, or some equivalent thereof, after all.

  “Ashmore, who are the destroyers on standby?” she asked the operations officer. She had enough seniority to give orders to the flag deck staff, at least.

  “Winding Road, Jambalaya, Kitorath,” Ashmore replied crisply. “Plus, Starsong just portaled back in with that report.”

  “All right.” Morgan inhaled. She might be exceeding her authority, but someone had to act—both she and Arnaud could justify it, but she was the one on the flag deck who knew the Squadron Lord was out of contact.

  “Nitik, orders to all four of those destroyers,” she told the com officer. “They are to enter hyperspace and approach to closer contact with the anomaly. We need more detailed vector analysis and, if we can manage it, numbers.

  “They are not to approach within the visibility bubble.”

  Hyperspace made a giant mess of sensors of every type. A hyperspatial anomaly scanner could pick up another ship passing through the chaos, but that was all. To see with any regular scanners required two ships to be within a light-second of each other.

  A range at which Morgan was grimly certain the Infinite’s plasma cannons would obliterate the destroyers she was sending out.

  “Sending the orders now,” Nitik confirmed. She wasn’t questioning Morgan’s authority to take action.

  “And let’s make sure Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla is advised the moment she’s available,” Morgan said dryly. “I’ll send out scouts myself, but if the Infinite are coming…she needs to know the enemy are here.”

  Tan!Stalla was back on the flag bridge long before the destroyers returned, the A!Tol flag officer flickering tentacles in acknowledgement of her staff as she approached the stool that served as her seat.

  She didn’t seat herself, instead remaining standing in front of the big display as her manipulator tentacles fluttered with a level of concern Morgan had rarely seen on her superior before.

  “They are not going to exit hyperspace near us,” she finally told her staff aloud. “There is no one else along the vector we are seeing, which means it is almost certainly the Infinite.”

  The two thoughts were disconnected, but Morgan saw the Squadron Lord’s point.

  “Your orders, sir?” Ashmore asked. His voice was almost level, but Morgan was the only person who fully heard him. There were no other humans on the bridge but the two of them, and everyone else was getting the operations officer’s question through their translator earbuds. They wouldn’t catch the slight tremor of fear in his voice.

  “We will wait for the scouts to return,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “But while we wait, the task force will clear for hyperspatial engagement.”

  “Understood,” Ashmore confirmed.

  Morgan concealed her grimace and began to pull up her analyses again. None of their reinforcements were there, which meant the Imperial task force was alone—and an Imperial task force gave up their two most powerful weapons in hyperspace.

  Their long-range missiles worked by jumping into hyperspace to travel the distance to their target. The hyperspace missiles were fired through portals fully contained inside the warship, which made them useless outside of normal space.

  Their main energy weapons were the hyperfold cannons, which used the same transmission system as their hyperfold communicators to send massive pulses of energy across several light-seconds. Those, too, couldn’t function in hyperspace.

  “We don’t know if they have an anomaly-scanner equivalent,” she told Tan!Stalla as she pulled out their tactical data on the Infinite. “Their plasma bursts maintain integrity to about ten light-seconds and should do the same in hyperspace, but they’re going to be at least partially blind.”

  “That’s the first positive thought I’ve had all day,” Tan!Stalla said. “How blind is ‘partially blind,’ Staff Captain Casimir?”

  The A!Tol words for “Captain” as a rank and “Captain” as the commander of a ship were different. English didn’t have that distinction, however, so the translator turned the rank of any non-ship-commander Captain aboard a starship to Staff Captain.

  It was awkward, but there were a lot of awkwardnesses tucked away in the Imperium’s astonishingly sophisticated translators.

  “This first wave is almost certainly using Laian hyper emitters,” Morgan told her superior. “They are quite possibly using Laian hyperspatial anomaly scanners as well—likely on the same ships.

  “But they won’t know what the data means as well as we do, which gives us a chance.”

  “Hyper portal,” Ashmore reported. “Jambalaya and Starsong are back, sir.”

  “Let’s get their report,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “And confirm where the other two destroyers are before we take the fleet into hyperspace.”

  Chapter Seven

  “The rising wind is that any movement in hyperspace appears to trigger some level of anomaly,” Commander Voyun reported. The Yin officer was rigid-spined as he faced the pickups. He had to know his report was going to every senior officer of the fleet.

  “The falling wind is that those anomalies are far weaker than those left by an interface drive,” h
e continued. “We believe we have some resolution on the target flock, but the aggregate was only detectable due to the total mass.”

  Morgan had been afraid of that. She wasn’t sure what logic the Infinite would use to pick the ships they cyborged up with hyper emitters and suchlike, but she would have put them on the biggest ships she could find—the Category Six-As, if that was possible.

  “We estimate we are looking at between two hundred and three hundred individual contacts,” Voyun continued—and the bottom dropped out of all of Morgan’s theories.

  “They should only have a dozen hyperdrives,” she muttered. “How?”

  “The largest contacts are, we believe, Category Four bioforms, with the majority being Category Three,” he noted. “They are maintaining a steady velocity of approximately twenty percent of lightspeed along the course Builder of Tomorrows took into the Nebula.

  “Without approaching within the clearer air of the visibility bubble, we could not learn any further details. Winding Road and Kitorath remained in hyperspace to maintain a lock on the enemy course.”

  “Understood. Forward your data to the analysis team,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “Thank you, Commander.”

  The channel closed and Morgan watched new downloads flicker across her screen. She doubted she’d get more at first glance than Voyun had already provided, and she kept her attention on the Squadron Lord.

  “Your estimate, Staff Captain?” Tan!Stalla asked Morgan.

  “I’m not sure, sir,” Morgan admitted grimly. “We expected approximately a dozen units cyborged with hyper-portal emitters moving forward to scout on their own, but…”

  Hyper-portal emitters.

  She sighed.

  “I think we forget that not every ship needs its own hyperdrive,” she told Tan!Stalla. Hyper-portal emitters were sufficiently easy to manufacture that no galactic power would dream of sending ships into hyperspace without them—but you could pass through someone else’s portal.