Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Read online

  #

  Permafrost and rock were generally safe for one landing, but reactionless, relativity-less, and mostly inertialess as the interface drive was, it still put out a lot of heat when bringing a multi-hundred-ton spacecraft in for a soft landing.

  By the time Harold arrived, on the first wave of Liberty’s five-thousand-ton heavy lift shuttles, the Development Corp’s people had already addressed the problem. In two of Hope’s thirty-two-hour days, they’d sprung into action at a site just outside the blast zone from the self-destructing Kanzi shuttles and assembled an entire work camp.

  Central to it was a two-hundred-meter-diameter nano-concrete landing pad, created by loosing specially designed nanotech converters into the soil along with some feedstock. The dirt, stone, ice and chemical stock were rapidly transformed into a hardy black surface that could easily withstand the heat from any shuttlecraft ever built.

  And since the nanites only had a power supply for ten minutes, there was no danger of turning anything you didn’t want into concrete. Like many of the more mundane technologies the Imperium had brought to humanity, it was simple, elegant, and effective.

  Off to the side of the landing pad were several massive tent hangars, each big enough to handle three of Liberty’s big military shuttles. A prefabricated control tower rose out of the hangars, festooned with sensors and scanning arrays as a small crew handled the chaos of shuttles, planes and survey drones sweeping over the plateau.

  “We’re down in thirty seconds,” his pilot reported crisply. “And we then have two minutes to get off the pad and into one of the hangars; there’s a bird inbound from New Hope City with a temporary medical clinic.”

  “Carry on,” Harold ordered, leaning back in his chair. The Centauri Development Corporation were efficient; he had to give them that. They had had access to the best of Terra’s people, though, plus the ability to hire expertise from twenty-eight species and over a hundred star systems.

  Both the Duchy of Terra and the A!Tol Imperium had been determined to make sure the first human colony was a massive success, and they’d put their money, their people, and the resources behind making that a reality.

  His shuttle landed with a gentle thud as the interface drive shut down and wheels extended, the spacecraft already moving toward the hangar.

  Given the cycle of operations already in place at the Corellian Plateau, it appeared they needed to get off the landing pad before they could exit the shuttle.

  #

  A harried-looking logistics team took over offloading Liberty’s shuttle’s cargo moments after they came to a stop, with an even more exhausted-looking manager waving Harold over to her.

  “Linda McWilliams,” the graying and stocky woman introduced herself briskly. “We’re in barely-controlled-chaos mode here, Captain Rolfson, though from what I hear, that’s not something you’re unfamiliar with.”

  “Hardly,” Harold agreed with a small smile. “This looks positively calm compared to most of my time aboard Tornado.”

  McWilliams shook her head at him.

  “I’ve got a note that you and an escort need quarters?” she queried.

  “Help setting them up, more likely,” the Captain replied. “We brought down military prefabs that will handle about a hundred souls. They’re military, so they have officers’ quarters, and I’m laying claim on those right now,” he continued with a larger smile, “but my understanding is that I’m only bringing down about forty of my people, including my Guard security detail. The other three prefab units are at your disposal.”

  “Oh, thank Goddess,” she said. “We’re good at rapid setup at CDC, it’s been our job for eighteen months, but we didn’t have an entire additional major regional survey on our schedule. Our people and our gear are already allocated, so we’re robbing Peter, James, Philip and Thomas to pay Paul.”

  Harold winced. He was intimately familiar with that kind of arrangement from the aftermath of the desperate defense of Earth against the Kanzi.

  “How can my people help?” he asked.

  “Hands and gear, Captain, hands and gear—and you’ve just promised both,” she said with a grin. “What you can do, however, is get over to the survey command center and, well, take command.”

  “This is a civilian op,” Harold pointed out carefully. “I’m just the Militia and Duchy rep.”

  “Which means you aren’t part and parcel of eighteen months of Centauri Dev Corp politics,” McWilliams told him. “Not my place to judge who’s right or who’s in charge, but Ramona and Jonah are going to kill each other if someone doesn’t take charge and tell them to work together.”

  That, too, Harold was familiar with.

  “Who are they?” he asked. Walking into a minefield was a lot safer with a map.

  “Jonah Trudeau is the head of CDC Survey. He’s a geologist with thirty years of experience finding useful junk on asteroids,” McWilliams replied. “I’ve worked with him for ten of those years; he’s smart as a whip.”

  “But?”

  “But. Ramona Wolastoq is humanity’s first Goddess-blessed xenoarchaeologist, trained by the A!Tol themselves,” the logistics manager said flatly. “And when she says there’s a way we should be looking, I’m not going to disbelieve her!”

  #

  The command center was a prefabricated building like the rest of the encampment, though unlike most of the rest, it was two stories tall and had a hefty communications array attached to the top.

  A pair of Ducal Guards stood watch outside the entrance, one of them holding a flimsy—a datapad built into a sheet of paper, old Terran tech—and subtly checking faces against it, while the other not-so-subtly leaned next to the door with a plasma carbine slung over his shoulder.

  “Captain Rolfson,” the man checking faces greeted him. “The Director is upstairs. He…” The soldier glanced around and shrugged. “He’s in a meeting, but I doubt he’ll mind being interrupted.”

  If even the security guards knew there was a problem, things had progressed downhill far faster than Harold’s worst fears.

  “Thank you, Corporal,” he told the Guard non-com as he entered the building, his own trio of Guards trailing in his wake.

  The ground floor of the center was a mixed array of cubicles and computer screens, some analysts going over data brought back by the early survey teams, while other analysts prodded at maps and radios, trying to coordinate efforts across the entire plateau.

  They were also, to a man, woman, and alien, studiously hard at work. Very obviously at work. The kind of “obviously at work” that meant they were pretending not to notice something.

  Harold walked through the studiously oblivious crowd to the stairs, then stopped and glanced back at his escort.

  “Wait here, people,” he ordered softly. “I’m not expecting assassins to jump out of nowhere.”

  This wasn’t, after all, Earth. While the organized Resistance born from the UESF’s emergency Weber Protocols had surrendered, there remained individuals horrified by Earth’s annexation who would happily take potshots at the collaborators.

  Anyone who made it to Centauri would have passed psych screening to make sure they were at least reconciled to the current state of affairs, if not necessarily happy about it.

  Harold still wasn’t sure he was happy about it, but his oaths and his loyalty to Annette Bond had dragged him from the UESF’s uniform into the Duchy of Terra Militia’s uniform.

  And here. To an unusually empty upper floor with a closed conference door. A door that probably should have been guarded, except the guards had decided that securing the entire building instead was the better part of valor.

  “I know my damn job, Wolastoq,” a male voice snapped through the door as Harold approached. “I will not sit here and be lectured just because the Governor has an overinflated idea of your ego!”

  “My ego, Director, is not the one refusing to listen to sensible advice,” a melodious female voice replied. She was speaking significantly more sof
tly than Director Trudeau, but she sounded no less aggravated. “Governor Harper asked me to join this expedition for a reason, but if you continue to waste my time, I’m not even sure why I’m on this warmth-forsaken planet!”

  Harold sighed and pushed the door open, stepping in before Trudeau could respond to Wolastoq’s words.

  “Director, Miss Wolastoq, please…take a moment.”

  “Doctor,” the woman replied harshly, eyeing him levelly. He returned her frank gaze, studying the calm-voiced woman. She was tall, with wide shoulders and broad, tanned features under thick black hair drawn back into a heavy braid.

  Her eyes were flashing and her lips were pressed together enough to turn them white.

  “It’s Dr. Wolastoq,” she repeated. “I did not earn a PhD on Earth and recognized academic credentials on A!To to be referred to as ‘Miss’, whoever you are!”

  “Doctor,” Harold conceded. “I am Captain Harold Rolfson, and I have been sent here as the representative of the Duchy of Terra.” He turned his best “Captain’s gaze” on the two CDC officials.

  “Which means, in case you aren’t up to speed, is that I speak for the majority shareholder of the company that employs you both, as well as being the man in the command of the heavy cruiser in orbit.”

  He let that sink in and then smiled at them.

  “You now have about thirty seconds to convince me I shouldn’t have the Board of Directors haul you both back to New Hope City and declare this entire expedition under military command,” he said sweetly. “Go.”

  “We know our damned jobs, Captain,” Trudeau repeated. He was a slim man of average height with night-black hair, and he hadn’t moved from glaring at Wolastoq since Harold had arrived. “We’ve been surveying this planet grid by grid for eighteen months. We may be surveying here instead of around New Hope as planned, but we know the drill.

  “High-level air searches, followed by ground surveys on areas of interest.” He shrugged. “There’s nothing complicated to this, Captain.”

  Harold nodded and looked over at Wolastoq. She was ignoring Trudeau and glaring at the Militia Captain, with a fire in her eyes that intrigued him.

  “And, Doctor?” he asked simply.

  “Trudeau knows his job,” she allowed.

  “Thank you!”

  “But he’s doing the wrong job,” she said, holding up a hand to silence the director. “His people are geographic and resource surveyors. Sure, by the time they’re done, they’ll know the location of every source of minerals or hydrocarbon over a thousand tons in the area…but I doubt the Kanzi risked war with the Imperium again for raw materials.”

  “We’d find anything else of interest, too,” Trudeau objected. “We’re not going to miss anything.”

  “Yes, you will,” Wolastoq snapped. “Your high-level air survey will miss any sign under ten meters wide. Your scanner resolutions aren’t set up to detect small manufactured objects.

  “We’re not going to find a settlement or a facility or whatever they were looking for on the surface,” she continued. “All we’re going to find on the surface is minor debris, small amounts of discarded or damaged manufactured objects. Hell, Director, your scanners wouldn’t even pick up concealed power sources.”

  “There’s not going to be—”

  “There might,” Harold cut Trudeau off. “We don’t know what the Kanzi were looking for, but they seemed to have a damn good idea of what it was—and Doctor Wolastoq is quite correct. We’re looking for a facility or a settlement, not a mineral outcropping.

  “They came here looking for something of enough value to knowingly lose thousands of people just for the chance. That’s not raw materials, as the lady says. That’s tech. Tech they expected to be intact and retrievable.”

  “That’s nuts,” Trudeau replied. “What kind of tech could they want? Hell, as I heard it, the buggers had stealth fields.”

  “Weird ones,” Harold said. His analysts were still puzzling out the fields the Kanzi had used. “Too small for starships, and they required atmosphere to function properly. If we hadn’t followed them down, we never would have found them. They’d have had weeks to find what they were looking for.

  “Dr. Wolastoq.” He turned to the woman, whose glare had become somewhat less hostile and somewhat more curious. “Can the sensors Director Trudeau’s people have be used for that kind of search?”

  “Yes, but not from altitude,” she told him. “Fifty meters at most.”

  “We won’t cover much area at all with the scanners at that height,” he protested.

  “But you won’t miss anything, either,” Wolastoq replied. “Better to take the time, Director, and do it right.”

  “I have to agree,” Harold said. “People died because of whatever the Kanzi were looking for. We are going to find it, and if that means we need to take longer than you’d like, Director Trudeau, that means we take longer.

  “Do you understand me?”

  Unspoken was that if he didn’t, Ramona Wolastoq was going to end up in command of this expedition.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  #

  Chapter 7

  In Annette Bond’s opinion, her current status represented an utter betrayal by her husband, the people who’d put together the Charter for the new Duchy of Terra and her own body.

  She’d thought the requirement for “an heir of the body” was a cute bit of poetry, until her newly elected Ducal Assembly started asking her when she planned on getting pregnant. Blonde and curvaceously attractive or no, Annette Bond was closer to fifty than forty and had built her career on being a hardass.

  Unfortunately, the same sense of duty that had resulted in the United Earth Space Force’s last Captain ending up as the Duchess of Terra had eventually led to her conceding the point—mostly because it would help with the politics around the A!Tol Imperium’s newest member species and Duchy.

  Ducal Consort Elon Casimir, however, had neglected to mention that his family tended towards twins and his own only-child status had been an anomaly until after they’d conceived.

  The worst betrayal of all, however, in the mind of the woman who’d led a cruiser into exile, stopped an interstellar war, and dragged Earth’s resistance kicking and screaming back into the fold, was that of her body.

  At four months pregnant—with twins!—the doctors told her she was healthier than she had any right to be, and, beyond feeling slightly more tired than usual, she felt better than she had in years.

  Plus, she glowed.

  Her tailor was putting in a manful effort to help her suits conceal her pregnancy, and that state was the only reason she now employed a full-time tailor. She was making a very specific point to minimize the perks and benefits she claimed for her position.

  Her stepdaughter, Morgan Casimir, was happily helping her dress. At a touch over eight years old, the blonde cherub wasn’t very helpful yet, but she was at least better than Annette trying to dress herself.

  “Are you ready?” a machine-generated but still-familiar voice asked, as a bullet-shaped body with a black beak navigated into her room on thick tentacles. The A!Tol Ki!Tana was an unusual specimen even among her own race, towering three meters tall when in motion and old enough not to remember how old she was.

  She’d also survived the A!Tol version of menopause, which was almost universally fatal for assorted reasons, so she was basically immortal.

  “As ready as I’m going to be until I’m no longer acting as a living incubator,” Annette groused.

  “Your young do not eat you alive,” Ki!Tana pointed out. “Consider yourself lucky.”

  There was that. The A!Tol led the galaxy in artificial gestation technology for a reason.

  That, of course, was why that “heir of the body” phrase was pissing her off.

  “Are you coming with us?” she asked Ki!Tana.

  “There is, unfortunately, a male A!Tol amongst the Imperial delegation,” the Ki!Tol noted. Part of the price of her continued survival was
avoiding the males of her species. A!Tol hormonal problems were…unimaginable to most species.

  “I will need to avoid the meeting, but you and Elon and Orentel will be there,” she continued. “I feel our world and family are well-represented.”

  “You had as much to do with Manticore as anyone,” Annette said. “You deserve to be there.”

  “I had as much to do with this Duchy existing as anyone,” Ki!Tana replied. “That doesn’t mean I want to be visibly credited. That is not…how Ki!Tol work.”

  The survivors of the Birthing Madness were regarded as wise advisors by their race, but their history and legend had its similarities to old Norse kings and Odin. They were wise and they were helpful, but they were not often safe.

  “Let’s be on our way, Morgan,” Annette told the child hovering at her elbow. “Villeneuve will never forgive us if we make the ship late.”

  “Unc’ Jean will forgive me anything,” the youngest Casimir said brightly. “He gonna be there?”

  “Is he going to be there?” the Duchess of Terra corrected the child with a smile. “And yes, Admiral Villeneuve will be there.

  “We are commissioning his new battleships, after all.”

  #

  The massive form of Annette’s Councilor for the Treasury, Li Chin Zhao, waited outside the room for them. Zhao was a shaven-headed man dressed in a light pink suit that was carefully tailored to minimize as much of his obesity as possible.

  He was also the former Chairman of the Republic of China and still the leader of the China Party. The Party was more of a social and philanthropic organization now, but it retained a degree of political power and influence—power and influence that Li Chin Zhao, as a member of Annette’s Council, had made certain was thrown behind keeping the fledgling ducal government afloat.

  Two of his ever-present white-suited young male bodyguards slash nurses hovered at his shoulders, trading professionally wary and amused glances with the Ducal Guards waiting for Annette.