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

  “Captain Amandine sends his regards,” the Councilor said warmly. “Your shuttle is landing on the roof of the Wuxing Tower as we speak, and I understand that the tram is waiting for us in the basement.”

  Annette lived on the top floor of a condominium building two blocks away from the Hong Kong skyscraper that had been acquired to house the Duchy’s government. One of the reasons for choosing that particular penthouse had been the underground tram line that ran to Wuxing Tower.

  “You are not my personal assistant,” Annette pointed out with a chuckle.

  “Yes, well.” Zhao shrugged. “But since Jess and Maria are on maternity leave, poor Rianne is run off her feet. She’s on her way up, but my staff have been helping her out so I knew the plan.”

  Maria Robin-Antionette was Annette’s personal assistant and Jess Robin-Antionette was her press secretary. They’d met in Annette’s service, married, and decided to have babies in one shot. Both of them were roughly eight months pregnant, which the Duchess of Terra regarded as the bravest thing she’d ever heard of a couple doing.

  It also meant she’d lost two of her key staff members, and their replacement, Rianne Zhao Ha—a relative of both her Councilor for the Treasury and the Municipal Governor of Hong Kong—was still learning her job.

  As Zhao finished speaking, in fact, Ha emerged from the elevator outside Annette’s apartment, a tall dark-haired Asian woman who moved with surprising grace despite her clear rush.

  “Your Grace!” she exclaimed at the sight of Annette. “Your shuttle—”

  “The Councilor filled me in,” Annette told Ha gently. “You’re doing fine, Rianne. Please slow down and breathe.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. Thank you, Your Grace.”

  The Duchess of Terra looked around at the cavalcade she seemed to acquire wherever she went.

  “All right, people. Let’s not keep Admiral Villeneuve waiting. He’s getting grumpier in his old age.”

  #

  Four years, give or take, was more than enough time for the Duchy of Terra to develop its own traditions, separate from both the A!Tol Imperium to which it owed its allegiance and the governments that had come before it.

  One of those traditions, which Annette Bond would admit in her quieter moments was almost certainly her fault, was that the Duchess of Terra almost always traveled aboard the cruiser Tornado, now Militia hull number CA-001.

  Three people had now commanded the ship after her, with Amandine taking over from Rolfson six months before when the Thunderstorms had commissioned, but Tornado remained unquestionably Annette’s ship.

  Of course, regardless of what Annette thought, the men and women who made up her Militia were never going to allow their Duchess to travel in Terra’s oldest and least powerful heavy cruiser, even if Tornado remained more powerful than her Kanzi counterparts. Two Duchess-class super-battleships, each sixteen million tons of the best defensive and offensive systems the Imperium possessed, flanked the heavy cruiser as Annette’s shuttle approach.

  President Washington and President de Gaulle were the third and fourth super-battleships to have entered the Duchy service…which also meant they were the oldest still in service, with Queen of England and the original Emperor of China having been destroyed driving back the Kanzi.

  The upgraded Majesty class represented the current state of the art in Imperial military technology. The Majesty-class super-battleships they’d started as had been top-line warships—and then the Terrans had added compressed-matter armor and the Sword and Buckler systems.

  Very few forces—outside, Annette supposed, the far more advanced Core Powers—could get past those ships without massively overwhelming firepower.

  And that firepower would run into the defensive constellations around Earth, and the Duchy of Terra Militia’s other five super-battleships, and the four Thunderstorm heavy cruisers, and…

  And, well, the ships they were heading out to see today. Annette’s shuttle tucked neatly into Tornado’s hangar bay, and she smiled as she saw the two men waiting for her. They were a study in contrasts, and each, in his own way, was utterly precious to her.

  Short, dark-haired and noticeably chubby, Morgan Casimir’s father Elon stood to one side of the deck with a wide grin on his face. The father of the twins currently making Annette glow was the mastermind behind today’s events.

  Next to him was the tall, white-haired and almost frail form of Admiral Jean Villeneuve. Once the commander of the United Earth Space Force, Villeneuve now led Annette’s Militia and was her strong right hand, her shoulder to lean on, her trusted sword.

  The years had been kind to him, but his job had not. With Imperial medical technology, the eighty-five-year-old Admiral should have another century in him, but Annette couldn’t see it, looking at his worn face. She resolved herself to talk to him about Vice Admiral Pat Kurzman, the commander of the Solar Squadron, and succession planning.

  When she exited the shuttle, however, Villeneuve beat her husband to her with the familiar spring in his step. He swept her into a brief but fierce embrace, and then stepped back to allow her and Elon to reach each other.

  “How are you doing, Your Grace?” Elon asked her after she’d stolen a brief kiss from her much younger husband.

  “Apparently, my body is a fan of pregnancy,” she told him bitterly. “I am unimpressed and continue to regard this as your fault.”

  “I wasn’t even part of the Charter Convention!” he replied with a laugh. “Blame Nash and Rutherford.”

  “Nash is on A!To,” Annette replied. She’d sent Teddy Nash, once one of America’s most famous actors, to the Imperial homeworld to sit in the House of Duchies as the speaker for Terra. The speakers in the House of Worlds and House of Species had been elected, but she had held on to the right to appoint the man who spoke for her on the capital planet.

  “Rutherford, however…” She smiled grimly. Graham Rutherford was her Councilor for North American Affairs and had been a major organizer of the Charter Convention. “Would execution be too much for that ‘heir of the body’ clause? Should I just have him publicly flogged?”

  “I believe you delegated your corporal-punishment authority to the First Ducal Court,” Elon reminded her. “You’d have to convince them of his crimes, and you picked a stubborn collection of Judges.”

  “For a reason,” she agreed with a sigh. She’d selected the nine Justices of the First Ducal Court from the former members of the various national supreme courts. Her criteria had been harsh, but she’d had quite a list of very qualified people. “For a reason,” she repeated.

  “Shall we get this show on the road? I believe we have an Imperial Echelon Lord to show off to!”

  #

  Chapter 8

  Annette and her collection of senior officials took over Tornado’s flag deck, currently unused as all of the cruisers in the system were simply attached to the Solar Squadron, commanded by Tornado’s former Captain.

  “Greetings, Your Grace,” Captain Cole Amandine told her over a video channel once she’d settled in. “We’ve been under way for a few minutes; we’re just clearing the Terra drive-safety zone now and will be bringing the gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine up to full power shortly.”

  She shook her head at him.

  “Does anyone still use that entire mouthful, Captain?” she asked.

  “The formal records, at least. You’re looking fantastically well, if you don’t mind the impertinence.” Amandine was an unusually tall and skinny man—one of a still-small number of humans born and raised in the off-world asteroid colonies—though Imperial medicine had allowed him to give up the powered braces he’d once required to stand in regular gravity.

  “It is somewhat impertinent,” she noted, dropping into her frosty “the Captain’s personal life is not your business” tones for a moment. Amandine recoiled for a moment, and then she smiled at him.

  “But everyone seems to insist on it, so I won’t be asking for your head this wee
k, Captain,” she continued. “To my displeasure, the twins and I are getting along stunningly well. This was not how I expected pregnancy to go for me!”

  Amandine chuckled dutifully.

  “We’ll be in position over the Raging Waters of Friendship Yards in just over twenty minutes,” he replied. “A Dawning of Swords and her escorts have already arrived with Echelon Lord Kas!Val. She sends her regards and looks forward to meeting you on Yard Station Bravo One.”

  The Duchy of Terra was a one-third partner in the Yards. Nova Industries, the company Elon Casimir still owned but no longer managed, owned another third. The last third was owned by a syndicate of Indiri shipbuilding houses, who had underwritten most of the cost of its construction.

  And named it.

  The journey to the Earth-Sol Lagrange Point Three didn’t take particularly long at fifty-three percent of lightspeed, and Annette watched on the holodisplay they’d added to Tornado’s flag deck as they closed with the Raging Waters Yards.

  There were two clear sections to the Yards.

  Orbiting at the outside relative to the Sun were the main structures of the yards, dozens of refit slips arrayed around processing plants that busily consumed entire asteroids to produce the massive slabs of compressed-matter armor that were Terra’s primary export.

  Hundreds of small ships guided the slabs of compressed matter and the massive chunks of prebuilt support matrix through space, locking them onto the calmly helpless echelons of Imperial warships. Other ships cut into the older hulls, finding places to install prebuilt Sword anti-missile laser turrets or the docking nodes for Buckler anti-missile drones.

  No non-Terran Ducal warship had been upgraded yet. After three years, they’d still only upgraded half of the Imperial Navy’s super-battleships, and the refit yards currently held forty battleships and twenty cruisers.

  Closer to the Sun and set away from the refit facility were the actual construction yards. Built after the first, larger part of the yard, there were still only ten slips in place here. Six held Thunderstorm-class heavy cruisers, the second tranche of the warships to be built in Sol.

  Those were only a third built, still over a year away from completion.

  The remaining four construction slips were why Annette was there. Four immense double-ended-spindle hulls, each sixteen hundred meters long and seven hundred meters across at their widest point and massing just under eleven million tons.

  They were more heavily set than A Dawning of Swords, the delicately elegant A!Tol battleship that hung beside them, and wrapped in the sheets of compressed armor Dawning hadn’t been upgraded with yet.

  Two of the Manticore-class battleships were still a year from completion. Manticore herself, however, and her sister Griffon, were now complete and about to launch on their space trials.

  They would be the first battleships in the Duchy of Terra Militia and the first hyper-capable battleships humanity had ever built.

  What everyone knew, of course, was the price of membership in the A!Tol Imperium and the reason Echelon Lord Kas!Val was present. Manticore and Griffon would serve the Duchy—but their two sisters would be presented to the Imperium.

  Kas!Val was there to assess whether or not the Imperial Navy was actually going to want them.

  #

  Yard Station Bravo One sat “above” the construction yards, serving as the central hub and docking facility for the roughly three hundred and fifty spacecraft and fifty thousand workers assigned to the construction facility.

  Bravo Two and Bravo Three flanked the construction slips but were barely half of Bravo One’s size combined. Bravo Four was almost hidden in the hubbub of the construction but, as one of Sol’s two production plants for modern point seven five interface-drive missiles, was at least as important as Bravo One.

  Annette and her entourage were escorted through to the main observation deck, a four-story edifice of heavily reinforced transparent ceramic—rated to survive a nuclear explosion—that looked out over the yards.

  Directly in front of the observation deck lay Manticore, her running lights still dark and several tugs still standing by. All of the physical connections would have already been dismantled, and her trial crew was aboard, but the battleship would be silent until formally released to her trials by the ceremony to come.

  Captain Patience Van der Merwe stood stiffly by the window, flanked by potted trees that shadowed the black South African officer into near-invisibility. Two bodyguards stood with her, helping her maintain a very clear personal space bubble that was not normal for a Militia Captain.

  Standing at almost the exact opposite end of the observation deck were the immense, multi-tentacled forms of the A!Tol contingent. The largest of them wore the insignia of an Echelon Lord, a massive older female Annette knew to be Echelon Lord Kas!Val.

  She wasn’t sure who the junior officers, one female and one male to her now-practiced eye, were—but both of them were flashing the mixed purple, orange, and yellow of what a human would call mortification.

  Kas!Val was mixing orange and yellow. She was angry—and either lying or feeling dirty.

  A!Tol literally wore their emotions on their skin. It didn’t leave much doubt as to what they were thinking, but it also meant that they couldn’t always be diplomatic even if they were trying.

  Two massive four-legged, two-armed bodyguards flanked the senior officers. They wore the insignia of Imperial Marines, but it was unusual, to Annette’s knowledge, for an A!Tol officer to have an escort that wasn’t either of their own race or one of the other Imperial Races, the oldest members of the Imperium.

  The Anbrai were extraordinarily intimidating, being built like meter-and-a-half-wide barrels with legs, arms and heads, but they were not an Imperial Race. For an A!Tol Echelon Lord to have them for her escorts was a not-so-subtle insult from her Marine commander.

  “Ah, Duchess Bond,” a familiar clicking voice interjected into her thoughts, and she turned to find the iridescent carapace of Orentel, one of the Laians who’d settled on Earth and once Dockmaster for the Laian Exiles at Tortuga.

  Now Orentel’s mate Tidikat was a Commodore in the Duchy of Terra Militia, and Orentel herself was a civilian contractor with Nova Industries. Most definitely not a member of the military or an employee of the Duchy of Terra or the A!Tol Imperium.

  The gloriously multicolored alien remained one of the few Laian females Annette had met—her monogamous relationship with Tidikat was moderately perverted by Laian standards, as the Duchess understood it—but she was also one of the smartest people she’d ever met.

  Orentel had forgotten more about shipbuilding and weapons technology than most engineers would hope to ever learn—and she had a photographic memory.

  “Orentel. It’s good to see you,” Annette told her, trading slight bows with the scarab-beetle-like alien. “Any concerns with the launch?”

  “Nothing,” the Laian said quickly. “Your tentacled friend managed to infuriate Captain Van der Merwe in under a hundredth-cycle, though.” Orentel paused thoughtfully. “I did not think that was possible.”

  Annette winced. That was not good.

  “If everything is ready, let Fernandez know we’re here,” she told Orentel. “I’ll go meet with the Echelon Lord.”

  “What is it you humans say?” The Laian clicked her mandibles. “‘Better you than me’?”

  #

  “Elon, Li, if you can go check in on Captain Van der Merwe,” Annette asked softly. “Jean, I think you and I should go talk to the Echelon Lord.”

  “She won’t find my rank particularly intimidating,” the Admiral pointed out. “So far as she’s concerned, I’m sure, she outranks any Militia officer.”

  “That’s her problem,” the Duchess of Terra replied. “I have some frustration at the universe to work out, and it appears Kas!Val may have volunteered to help me do so.”

  She saw Elon wince out of the corner of her eye, but he took Morgan by the hand and led the little girl away toward Manti
core’s new Captain, Annette’s treasurer trailing in his wake.

  “Come on, Jean,” Annette told her old mentor. “Let’s go talk to our overlord’s representative.”

  The old Admiral sighed and fell in at her shoulder as she crossed the dock to the Imperial Navy contingent. One of the Anbrai stepped in front of her and grunted.

  “Echelon Lord is busy,” the big alien told her, and Annette met the much taller creature’s eyes and smiled.

  “This is my star system, Initiate,” she told the very junior officer calmly. “You and your mistress have two choices: she speaks with me now, or all of you get back on A Dawning of Swords and get the hell out of my star system while I officially complain to the Empress about your attitude and actions.

  “Do you really want to make that decision for the Echelon Lord, Initiate?” she asked very, very quietly.

  Anbrai were huge and so were their throats. She could watch the big alien swallow hard before he backed away.

  “No, Your Grace.”

  “Good boy,” she said, quite certain the not-quite-friendly intent would carry through the translator, then approached Kas!Val.

  “Echelon Lord Kas!Val,” Annette greeted the A!Tol. “Welcome to Sol. Are you looking forward to watching the space trials for Manticore?”

  The flag officer’s skin darkened dramatically.

  “No,” she said, the translator carrying the condescension in her voice quite clearly. “I’m not even certain why I was sent. The likelihood that your homebuilt trash will suffice to meet your obligations to the Imperial Navy is quite low, Duchess Bond. This is waste of several five-cycles of my time, time that the Navy could get much better value from.”

  “Echelon Lord, has A Dawning of Swords been updated to the newest specifications?” Annette asked.

  “Not yet,” the A!Tol replied.

  “That upgrade will be done here,” the Duchess told her. “Every ship in the Imperial Navy is planned to pass through these yards over the next ten long-cycles. Every. Ship.