Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2) Read online

Jess Robin sat off to the side, an old-fashioned keyboard in her lap as she dutifully prepared to take notes. Only some of today’s meeting could be released to the public, but Annette suspected her press secretary would do good work with what was left.

  “All right, everyone,” she greeted them. “You all know each other, at least by reputation. There is no one sitting at this table who isn’t a household name in their home country, a symbol of old and new cultures alike.

  “I’m probably the least-known person here,” she concluded, which earned her a round of chuckles.

  “As you’ve probably gathered from who is sitting at this table, at least part of the purpose of this Council is to demonstrate to the people of Terra that there is some continuity of the old into the new,” she continued. “You wouldn’t be here, however, if I thought you were only going to be a symbol. You’re here because I expect you to be able to contribute to leading this planet.

  “To do so, you need to be aware of our constraints, assets, and requirements. Before I get started on that briefing, are there any questions?”

  “Yeah,” Nash drawled. “One I think we need to get out of the way so everyone’s clear on it. We’re your Council, but that’s a purely advisory role, correct? This isn’t a democracy.”

  “Thank you,” Annette said softly. “You’re right; we do need to get that out of the way. No, right now, the Duchy of Terra is not a democracy and this Council never will be.”

  She let that sink in.

  “My intent is that the Duchy of Terra will, like the Imperium we are now part of, become a constitutional monarchy,” she told them. “We will need to establish a legislature and a judiciary over the next months to years to fulfill that purpose. Imperial law limits how much power I can actually pass over, but I intend to have a functioning worldwide democracy in place inside two years.

  “This Council, however, fills the role of the cabinet in our old governments. I will rely on you for advice, but the decisions are mine. As we move forward, I will likely assign portfolios and will expect you to act within those portfolios, but the buck stops here.” She tapped her chest.

  “I am responsible for Earth’s safety, security, and future. I intend to lean on you all, but when push comes to shove, the vote is mine.

  “If you have a problem with that, I suggest you leave,” she finished. “I’d hate to replace any of you, but I refuse for this Council to become a dogfight.”

  An Sirkit chuckled, a bubbling sound from the Thai princess.

  “I don’t think anyone came here expecting differently,” she pointed out. “I have my own questions, Your Grace, but they are of details, not of generalities. Perhaps you should give us your briefing—unless someone does want to take our Duchess up on her offer to leave?”

  The room was still for a long moment and Annette tried not to hold her breath.

  #

  Annette waited for a few more seconds to see if anyone would actually leave. When no one rose, she tapped a command on her communicator and brought up a hologram in the middle of the table.

  From the sharp inhalations around the table, no one had expected the Imperial-grade hologram—still a rarity on Earth, even for people at this level.

  “Everything we’re about to discuss is classified for the moment,” she told them all. “Under Imperial law, that means that if you leak it, you get locked up for twenty long-cycles minimum. That’s about ten and a half years.

  “The time frames and instructions we receive from the Imperium will be given in A!Tol cycles and long-cycles,” she continued. “Translators can handle the conversion, but it will probably be easier if you all get comfortable with the time frames. A cycle is basically a day. A long-cycle is two hundred cycles, one hundred and ninety-four days.”

  “I thought the A!Tol used base-sixteen math?” Jovanovich asked. The former Russian premier was a gaunt man with hawkish features, a neatly trimmed beard and night-black hair.

  “They do. But, like us, their calendar is driven by their homeworld’s day, year, and lunar cycle,” Annette explained. “A!To orbits a weaker star than Sol and so orbits closer and faster to be habitable. Since their moon orbits A!To every twenty cycles, their calendar got stuck on base twenty.”

  “So, their time units line up with their normal numbers about as well as ours do,” the Russian noted. “Confusing, but somehow it makes me feel better.”

  “Hang on to those warm feelings,” Annette told them. “Because while there’s good news in this briefing, a lot of it, I’m going to start with exactly what I mean when I warn everyone that the A!Tol are not in this for our good.”

  “Other than conquering us, they kind of seem to be,” Nash pointed out. “You said as much yourself—Imperial Navy protection, the Uplift program. They’re doing a lot for us.”

  “For their own reasons,” she warned. “You all saw my interview with Jess?” Nods went around the table. “As I said to her, we are facing an obligation to ‘contribute to the common defense.’

  “That’s going to take a few forms, which will grow more onerous over time as our economy updates and expands. The Imperial Forces are already recruiting on Earth with a low but measurable success rate.”

  “Some quite high-profile,” Miyamoto said softly. “Captain Tanaka did herself no favors back home. I presume it will be in our interests to rehabilitate the good Captain’s image?”

  “It will, though that brings us to the joker in the deck,” Annette responded. “Exactly what forces we’re required to provide directly and how quickly is very much a discretionary part of the process of establishing a Duchy.”

  As she spoke, she manipulated the hologram, highlighting the systems of the last few new member species of the Imperium.

  “I’ll provide you with copies of the case studies of the last few, but the Yin, for example, went through the same process we’re going through sixty years ago. It was fifteen long-cycles before they became a Duchy, however, so much of their economy was fully modernized.

  “They were still given ten long-cycles to provide their first contribution to the Imperial Navy, a manned and equipped squadron of sixteen cruisers.”

  Thoughtful nods went around the table.

  “Five years?” Lebrand said aloud. “We’ll want to bring Nova Industries in on that discussion—even with Casimir and most of their orbital facilities gone, they’re the ones with the plans and infrastructure to build more orbital factories.

  “It’ll be a challenge to get the yards in place fast enough,” the American industrialist admitted, “but we should be able to build them sixteen cruisers in five years.”

  “That’s what the Yin had to provide,” Annette told him quietly.

  “We are being required to provide an echelon—eight ships, half a squadron—of capital ships. In two long-cycles.”

  The room was silent. The hologram now showed the rotating image of an Imperial Starburst-class battleship. To drive the point home, sitting next to it was an image of the Starry Wing–class cruisers the Yin had built—barely a tenth of the size.

  “We’ve never built anything they’d class as a capital ship,” Villeneuve finally said. “It would take us most of the five years they gave the Yin just to build eight capital shipyards, let alone the ships. How can we possibly build eight capital ships in a year?”

  “We can’t,” Annette said flatly. “We are being intentionally fucked to force us to take the actions the A!Tol want us to take.

  “We will have to buy the ships,” she continued. Thanks to her privateering days—and the fact that she’d claimed the entire haul from a mass pirate raid after the rest of the scum had turned on her—she actually could swing more of that than she thought the Empress realized, but still…

  “The budget we are provided by the Imperium as an early support measure will not, of course, stretch to eight battleships,” she said. “To afford the vessels, we would need to raise a significant amount of capital in a very short time period.”

  “Le
ss than five percent of the global economy has converted to Imperial marks so far,” Zhao pointed out, the obese Chinese leader’s voice very quiet. “If we somehow claimed all of that income, I doubt it would suffice.”

  “And, under Imperial law, our citizens are protected against that kind of seizure,” Annette told him. “No, we would need to raise the funds outside Sol. The only thing of value the A!Tol see us as having is the technology behind compressed-matter armor—they analyzed the hell out of Tornado’s hull, but scans of it don’t really tell you how to make it.”

  Her Council was quiet, staring at her.

  “That technology was destroyed with BugWorks Station,” Villeneuve finally said. “Any records of how it worked are in the hands of the Weber Network.”

  “I know. And even if we had it, I’d have no intent of selling it to them,” she replied. “Being the primary source of compressed-matter armor for the Imperial Navy would be exactly the kind of massive economic leveler our system needs.”

  “You have a plan?” Zhao asked.

  “Parts of one,” she confirmed. “Firstly, Lebrand, Villeneuve.”

  “Yes?” both men replied instantly.

  “You and I are going to meet with the Nova Industries board. I want to set up new refit yards to upgrade the destroyers we got from the A!Tol. They have no active missile defense—I want to mix our designs for laser defenses with Imperial technology and build the best damn anti-missile suite we can.

  “Once we’ve got that, I’m going to want the engineering team to go over Tornado’s plasma missile defense drones. We don’t have the tech to duplicate their plasma guns, but if we could build a simpler system around our laser anti-missile suites, we’d have a piece of defensive tech the Navy will give half their tentacles for.”

  “What I’d give to still have Casimir,” Villeneuve sighed. “It’s an engineering problem and the man was brilliant.”

  A moment of personal grief hit Annette, which she suppressed. Elon Casimir had been her employer, her friend, and—for one short period after his wife’s death—her lover. She also did not truly believe the man was dead.

  Not until she’d seen a body and buried it with her own two hands. She’d been party to Casimir’s plans for this eventuality, and she had her suspicions about his fate—and that of BugWorks Station, for that matter.

  “We will do everything in our power to find the money to buy ourselves eight battleships in the next year,” Annette concluded. “We’re also supposed to provide crews from recruitment efforts of our own. We’ll need to crew our new destroyer squadron as well.”

  “What’s the catch on those destroyers? Do we have to pay for those eventually as well?” Mandela asked. The elegantly dressed black woman looked tired. “It seems nothing comes from the A!Tol without reason.”

  “The destroyer squadron is part of the support package that the Imperium is providing us to get on our feet,” the Duchess replied. “They’re also providing us with a generous budget to fund the operations of both the Duchy government and our militia. It doesn’t stretch to battleships, but it will fund building yards while we try and get our economy in a shape that will.

  “The main ‘catch’ is that the passage crews have already left, so right now, they have no crews and no trainers for crews. They’re glorified empty metal currently, but we have Tornado and the other Operation Privateer crews to draw on to train people on modern gear.”

  “I have no concerns on manning or equipping the squadron,” Villeneuve told the rest of the Council. “Captains Lougheed and Sade will command the first two, though I imagine they will get rapidly sick of the degree to which we will have to keep poaching their crews just as they get them trained.”

  With a wave of her hand, Annette brought the hologram back to the general map of the galaxy.

  “We know roughly what we’re doing with those ships now,” she concluded. “It is even more critical that this next piece of information remain secret,” she warned them.

  “The A!Tol Imperium and the Kanzi Theocracy are both signatories to the Kovius Treaty,” Annette noted. “The Kovius system is here”—a light flashed deep toward the center of the galaxy—“in the Core, in the territory of a species called the Mesharom.”

  A tap zoomed in on the section of the galaxy known as “the Core,” lighting up the multiple different zones of the Core Powers.

  “The major powers in the Core are very old,” she said. “I’ve met Laian exiles—they left their empire five hundred years ago, and their technology still outclasses the A!Tol or the Kanzi. The rest of the Core Powers have at least that five-hundred-year tech edge over, basically, every power in the galaxy’s spiral arms.”

  She let that sink in for a moment.

  “A single squadron of modern Core warships could easily take on five or six times its numbers in A!Tol or Kanzi ships. They are as far beyond our new nation as the Imperium was beyond us a year ago.

  “At some point in the past, long enough ago that I believe it predates the A!Tol having spaceflight, the Mesharom talked the rest of the Core Powers into creating the Kovius Treaty to protect the rights of latecomer sentient species to their own local neighborhood.

  “Note that it doesn’t protect our independence,” she said dryly. “What it does mean is that no one else will colonize worlds within forty light-years of Earth. And, under A!Tol law, those systems and worlds actually belong to us.”

  “Wait, what?” Zhao asked.

  “While any colonies wouldn’t be part of the Duchy of Terra, the Duchy of Terra owns all resources, habitable worlds, and anything else we happen to find inside forty light-years of Sol.

  “This cuts into a region of space the Kanzi used to regard as their own,” she continued. “Because of our Kovius Treaty rights, that space now belongs to the A!Tol Imperium. And to us, under their auspices.”

  “Could we, I don’t know, sell a star system to pay for those battleships?” Zhao asked.

  “We are specifically not permitted under A!Tol to sell those rights for one hundred long-cycles,” Annette said with a chuckle. “Probably to stop us being pressured into doing just that before we can really use them.”

  “Well, that explains why they annexed us, doesn’t it?” Princess Sirkit said quietly.

  “That’s a good chunk of it,” Annette agreed. “There is another piece, one we all need to understand because it drives everything the A!Tol have done with their member species and Duchies.

  “You’re a doctor, An,” she continued to the Princess. “You might know this off the top of your head. What’s Sol’s current population?”

  “Ten billion,” Sirkit answered instantly. “Give or take a hundred million souls.”

  “Only about two million of those aren’t on Earth,” Villeneuve pointed out.

  “Indeed. And Doctor Sirkit, what’s our average births less deaths per thousand people per year?”

  The Thai princess looked confused but thought for a moment.

  “It differs across countries and cultures still, but around fifteen,” she answered.

  “Our death rate is going to plummet over the next ten years as we bring Imperial medicine fully online,” Annette reminded them all. “But this year, we’ll still see roughly one and a half percent population growth. One hundred and fifty million new humans.

  “What would you guess the Imperium’s total population of sentients at, people?”

  “We’re the twenty-ninth species involved, so…” Lebrand shrugged. “Two, three trillion?”

  “Seven hundred billion,” Annette replied. “Plus or minus about the population of Earth. One hundred billion of those are A!Tol. The Imperium’s species, as a whole, suffer from the same problem our more advanced societies have been fighting with for centuries: as life gets easier, fewer people have children.

  “The A!Tol are the fastest-breeding species in the Imperium…at just over point three five percent population growth per long-cycle. The entire Imperium, including us, is expected to add
just under one point two billion sentients in the next twelve months.”

  Her Council stared at her, comprehension dawning on their faces as the numbers sank in.

  “We’re ten percent of the Imperium’s population growth,” Mandela said slowly. “They didn’t conquer us for resources—they conquered us for our population.”

  “Ten billion sentients and a ten percent increase in the population growth for the foreseeable future,” Annette agreed. “That’s the only resource in Sol truly worth giving a shit about in their mind. They’ll use us, and they’ll try and manipulate us, but at the end of the day, the A!Tol want humans to be productive, valuable citizens of the Imperium.”

  #

  Chapter 8

  Captain Andrew Lougheed looked around his quarters on the survey ship Of Course We’re Coming Back with a surprising degree of nostalgia. He’d spent months running with Annette Bond, fighting for his life aboard his originally unarmed ship—but then he’d spent months more in bureaucratic limbo aboard her, orbiting Mars after he’d surrendered to the A!Tol.

  With the exact legal status of Duchess Bond finally established, he and his crew were now officially released, and the Captains of the two survey ships had been summoned to a meeting with the new Admiral of the Duchy of Terra Militia.

  Who was, of course, the same Admiral who’d run the United Earth Space Force. Andrew chuckled to himself, the half-Chinese Canadian officer not bothering to hide his amusement here in private.

  It was true: the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

  “All packed up, love?” his former second-in-command, Sarah Laurent, asked from the door. At some point in the months in orbit over Mars, they’d given up pretending and she’d moved into his cabin.

  The potential consequences of that were part of why he was dragging his feet about this meeting.

  “Yeah,” he finally admitted. “I’m guessing our shuttle is here?”

  “Your shuttle is here,” she told him. “The rest of us get to wait in limbo a bit longer, it seems. On the other hand,” she continued with a wicked grin, “we’re going straight to Earth.”