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

  Rin figured that actually was a good compromise—though he also suspected any remotely honest accounting would result in something close to a wash. The provocateurs had been targeting both sides relatively evenly.

  “The presence of a Laian mobile shipyard amongst the provocateurs suggests to us that the royal’s share of the blame lies with the Republic,” Oxtashah snapped. “We are not responsible for what happened along this border.”

  “Enough,” Tan!Shallegh told them, his skin flashing dark in despair. “There is no purpose in swimming the waters again and again every single day. We must look to the reefs ahead before we all fall.”

  Somehow, that was enough to bring both of them to a momentary quiet, and Rin sighed into it.

  “You’ve already both committed not to attack each other until this is resolved,” he pointed out. “That means the fleet available to Oxtashah is not necessarily needed sitting at the border, glaring at us all.

  “I know I’m not one of the diplomats or military officers here, but may I make a suggestion?”

  “An academic’s perspective might be useful,” Tidirok said. “Princess?”

  “You are here to speak of the Alava and the Infinite, not of our politics,” Oxtashah said coldly, but her wings flickered in agreement. “But as the Fleet Lord suggests, we circle the same pile for suns on end. Speak, Professor.”

  Rin concealed a mental cringe as he realized what kind of pile the Wendira metaphor referred to, but he faced the three senior aliens levelly.

  “You are not yet prepared to work together,” he told them. This wasn’t news to anyone. “But you aren’t going to stab each other in the back yet, either. The Eleventh Voice has already relied on this to send ships to support Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla.

  “But the Laians and the Imperials can only blockade the portion of the Astoroko Nebula in the Dead Zone or in Republic space,” he noted. “They don’t even have the hulls to do that effectively—as I understand it, they are only blockading the route the provocateurs used to enter the Nebula and hoping they can intercept if the Infinite leave along an unexpected vector.

  “But there is a section of the Nebula that is in Wendira territory, where the Laians would hesitate to send ships even if they did detect the hyperspace anomaly of the Infinite.”

  He shrugged.

  “The Laians have already drawn down their forces here. I suggest that Princess Oxtashah does the same and sends the ships in question to block the other exits from the Nebula.

  “You do not need to ally with the Republic to secure your own borders against the threat we have found. We are all best served if the Infinite remain trapped in the Astoroko.”

  And if the Infinite left the nebula into Wendira space, Princess Oxtashah would quickly be the one begging for Laian help. Unless, of course, the Infinite were far less of a threat than anyone anticipated.

  “That…is a reasonable suggestion,” Oxtashah said slowly. “I will consult with the Commandants. I make no promises. I am a diplomat. I do not command the Dead Zone Fleet. But I believe we can spare a few carriers to secure our own borders.”

  “We will all benefit, I think,” Tan!Shallegh replied. “If you are prepared to share their patrol patterns with my people, I will commit to making certain we have all vectors covered without informing the Republic of their location.”

  Rin suspected that Tidirok wanted to object to that plan—but it wasn’t really that the Imperium didn’t trust their allies. It was that they all knew the Wendira and the Laians had spent the last several hundred years killing each other in numbers that made any sense of scale impossible.

  And all of it mostly because a Laian looked like a Wendira Worker caste with no wings.

  Chapter Ten

  Watches in the endless void were a quiet thing. Jean Villeneuve and her companions were dozens of light-years from anything other than the Astoroko Nebula. Their reinforcements weren’t due for cycles yet, and their enemy hadn’t demonstrated any ability to threaten them through the hyper barrier.

  The flag deck didn’t have formal watches the way a ship’s bridge did, but there was still a schedule to make sure at least one senior officer of the flag staff was on the deck if the Squadron Lord wasn’t.

  Tonight, that officer was Morgan Casimir. She was trying to keep an eye on everything going on on the flag deck, which was overwhelming for any soul. Practice was teaching her what she needed to watch, which made the whole endeavor good training.

  She could follow the sensor data more easily than some of the other reports feeding to the fleet’s command center, which meant she was giving the tactical plot the smallest portion of her attention—and she almost missed it when things changed.

  “Wait,” she murmured. “Speaker Atraxis, can you double-check the anomaly scanner for me? I’m seeing something odd.”

  Atraxis, an Ivida officer in Ashmore’s Operations department, leapt to obey. He pulled the anomaly scanners up on his own screen as Morgan brought them up on the main holographic tank at the center of the flag deck.

  “They’re leaving,” Atraxis said quietly, confirming what was now obvious on the larger display.

  Anomaly tracks for a moving ship were strangely stretched, an artifact of a faster-than-light travel signature that arrived at lightspeed, but the pattern was clear. The entire Infinite force that had been lurking “next” to them in hyperspace was moving away.

  “I make their course for the Astoroko,” Morgan said. “You see the same?”

  “I do, sir,” Atraxis confirmed. “Should I confirm with Villeneuve Tactical?”

  “Please, Speaker,” she told him. “Let’s make certain what we’re looking at—then I’ll brief the Squadron Lord. If the Infinite are going away, that’s a relief for everyone.”

  She still watched the tracks stretch across her display. It was hard to judge the speed—or anything, really—of the anomaly from regular space, but they could get an estimate. The Infinite swarm was up to about a third of the speed of light in hyperspace—and hundreds of times it in regular-space pseudovelocity.

  “What changed?” Morgan murmured. “I was expecting you to stick around until the Laians kicked you off. We didn’t do anything, and the bugs are still five days out.”

  She shivered. It looked like good news…which meant that she didn’t trust it at all.

  The mist units in Tan!Stalla’s office were running at full power as Morgan reported to her former Captain. Humidity was always high in the A!Tol portions of Imperial ships, but this much water was new to Morgan.

  “Sir,” she greeted the Squadron Lord with a crisp salute…that squelched slightly as her hand touched her damp chest.

  “Take a seat, Staff Captain,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “I saw the report from the sensor teams. It looks like good news.

  “So, what do you think is actually going on?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” Morgan admitted truthfully. “We can’t guarantee that the Infinite are operating on any set of principles we understand, sir. If it were one of our forces, though…”

  She trailed off but Tan!Stalla gestured for her to continue.

  “Finish your thought, Casimir,” the Squadron Lord ordered. “No one knows anything. Your guesses are as valuable as anyone else’s.”

  “They either had a strict timeline they were supposed to return on all along, or they got a recall message,” Morgan guessed with a shrug. “Either seems…iffy, given that they have no ability to open a hyper portal.

  “On the other hand, they could have kept a set of portal emitters at the Eye, in which case they might be able to get everything except the Category Five back into regular space there.”

  Tan!Stalla snapped her beak in thought.

  “I would have held on to at least one set of spare emitters,” she admitted. “That wouldn’t help them send out new fleets, not without the ability to create portals at the target, but it could let them bring their bioforms ‘home’ in this kind of situation.”

  “
We’re assuming the Infinite attaches value to the individual bioforms,” Morgan warned. “We don’t know that. The Great Mother certainly didn’t seem to—but that doesn’t prove anything. She was…not Infinite. Not culturally, so to speak.”

  “That’s an important distinction,” Tan!Stalla agreed. “The Tosumi, Ivida and Pibo are not A!Tol physically, but…culturally, most of their culture is A!Tol-derived. That is why they are the Imperial Races.”

  Those three were the species the A!Tol had annexed and uplifted before they learned how to do so without wrecking the preexisting cultures. Morgan’s understanding was that Imperial integration was still considered a work in progress, with humanity—the current ‘latest acquisition’—being held up a sign of their progress and success.

  “Where the Taljzi were biologically Kanzi but not culturally Kanzi anymore,” Morgan suggested. “Their separation from the main body of their species and their reliance on the Alavan cloner made them something very different.”

  “And the Great Mother had no exposure to the Infinite, as I understand it,” Tan!Stalla said. “So, we are better judging the Infinite by their actions than by her. Their actions so far do not provide a definitive answer, but they suggest that they place a value on at least the larger bioforms.”

  “Ease of replacement may also be a factor,” Morgan said. “So long as they are trapped in Astoroko, we don’t know if they can create new bioforms at all—and I suspect the larger bioforms take hundreds of long-cycles to reach that scale.”

  “Or thousands,” Tan!Stalla murmured, tapping a command that adjusted a sprayer to point more directly at her. “A hundred thousand long-cycles in the dark, Staff Captain. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that most of the larger bioforms saw the war against the Alava.”

  That thought sent a chill down Morgan’s neck.

  “God, Rin would love to talk to them,” she murmured. “So far, our only conversation was them demanding our hyperdrive and then shooting at us.”

  “We may find a way to communicate yet,” Tan!Stalla said hopefully. “We have crossed language and culture barriers before. Not always well, but we have done it.” She snapped her beak. “The Laians and Wendira would be better off, in some ways, if they hadn’t managed to get their video formats to talk to each other.”

  “I’m not certain everything between them can be blamed on visuals, sir,” Morgan said. “But…it’s hard to make peace with someone you can’t talk to.”

  “This is true.” Tan!Stalla shifted…and there was a cracking noise Morgan had never heard from an A!Tol before.

  “Sir, are you okay?” she asked.

  The A!Tol was flickering black streaks of pain.

  “No,” she admitted slowly. “Give me a moment, please.”

  Tan!Stalla reached inside her desk and produced a strange, gun-like device. It took Morgan a moment to recognize it as a modified liquid-bandage applicator. She didn’t see where Tan!Stalla used it, but the A!Tol was still flickering black in pain as she laid the applicator down.

  “Not all A!Tol age gracefully,” Tan!Stalla finally told her drily. “My girlfriend convinced me to get the sprayers”—she gestured at the misting units around the room—“but my body has decided to remind me that A!Tol are barely meant to be amphibious, let alone land-dwellers.”

  The black darkened for a moment, then began to fade toward a dark purple of bitter amusement.

  “All A!Tol must rest in water to avoid skin issues,” Tan!Stalla noted. “And we keep the areas we live in as humid as possible. For some of us, however, our ability to survive in drier air fades over time. Va!Sara Syndrome, it’s called.”

  She shivered her tentacles.

  “I was already showing signs when I commanded Jean Villeneuve with you as my XO,” Tan!Stalla admitted. “But I am a stubborn fool at times. When I returned home to spend time with my love, she saw the difference—she is a doctor, a far wiser soul than I.”

  “And she insisted on this?” Morgan gestured at the mist-sprayers.

  “They help,” Tan!Stalla agreed. “And it helps that my girlfriend is a doctor and can issue a medical order the Fleet will recognize. All waves know the Fleet treats Va!Sara Syndrome as best as we can, though. !Lot could have just insisted I see a Fleet doctor…but she wanted to be certain.”

  “It sounds like she cares deeply for you,” Morgan noted. Girlfriend, she knew, was the translator picking a close-enough word, since English didn’t really have the language for the gradations of A!Tol romantic relationships.

  Given that A!Tol reproduction was invariably fatal to the mother, an issue corrected by vast amounts of technology these days, it was hardly a surprise that same-sex relationships were actually more common than reproductive partnerships among the squid-like aliens.

  “She does. And she is eternally patient with one who is rarely home,” Tan!Stalla said with a flush of red pleasure that broke some of the pain. “And she would insist that if I am having skin cracking issues, I should see the ship’s doctor.”

  Morgan smiled.

  “And she would be correct, I believe,” she told her superior. “The Infinite, for whatever reason, have left us be for now. We are safe for the moment—which makes this the best time to make sure our Squadron Lord is in top form when the enemy returns!”

  Chapter Eleven

  Hyperspace had been quiet for several days when the portal appeared. By the time the anomaly of the ships’ travel through hyperspace caught up with their exit portal, Morgan had already identified the war-dreadnoughts from the sensor data she was reviewing.

  “Multiple war-dreadnought signatures,” Ashmore reported. That was his job, after all. Morgan’s was to keep Tan!Stalla advised of what they figured the Infinite were doing.

  So far, she didn’t think she’d stepped on Ashmore’s toes too badly.

  “Villeneuve Tactical makes it ten dreadnoughts, plus cruisers,” the operations officer continued, glancing toward where Tan!Stalla waited at the center of the flag deck. “Fifty-plus contacts.”

  “That should be Fifty-Sixth Pincer Korodaun,” the Squadron Lord observed. “Commander Nitik, channel to the Pincer’s flag, please.”

  The war-dreadnoughts were barely a light-minute away. It was a matter of maybe thirty seconds to get a hyperfold com link established between the two flagships, filling the holographic tank at the center of Jean Villeneuve’s flag deck with the image of the inverted step pyramid of her Laian equivalent.

  Centered in the hologram was a Laian officer who practically gleamed in the lights of her flagship, iridescent greens and oranges glittering under the lights as the bejeweled carapace of a female Laian shifted to allow Korodaun to see her counterpart.

  “Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla,” Korodaun greeted them, using a mandible snap to emulate the beak snap. Most Laians left that to the translator, which Morgan took as a positive sign. “I appreciate your continual updates on the status of the Infinite’s forward deployment.

  “My approach would have needed to be very different if they had still lurked in the shallows here.”

  “It will serve no one if we follow different currents against this enemy, Pincer,” Tan!Stalla replied. “Your arrival is appreciated. We were starting to feel a bit lonely out here.”

  “It is a lonely chunk of nowhere,” Korodaun agreed. “I have left several of my cruisers in hyperspace to maintain a long-distance watch, but I think we will need to consider our strategy now that we have augmented our forces here.

  “May I invite you aboard Scion’s Sword for further discussions?”

  “Of course,” Tan!Stalla said instantly. “This is a Republic chunk of void, after all, and I am delighted to turn operational command of the blockade over to you.”

  Korodaun’s command also outmassed the Imperial task force by over three to one—and not that long before, a single war-dreadnought would have been capable of destroying an entire Imperial Fleet.

  Times changed, though, and the Imperium had cheated.

&nbs
p; “Of course, Squadron Lord,” Korodaun said. “I estimate we will make rendezvous in fifteen minutes. I look forward to seeing you and any officers you feel necessary for our conversation then.”

  “Prott, Casimir,” Tan!Stalla snapped the moment the channel closed. “With me. We’ll need Marines. Honor guard only.”

  “I’ll arrange it,” Ashmore promised. “They’ll meet you in the shuttle bay.”

  Fifteen minutes was more than enough time. Probably.

  Morgan and the Ivida chief of staff fell in around Tan!Stalla as the Squadron Lord exited the flag deck.

  “Is surrendering command a good idea, sir?” Prott asked. “I know we decided it in advance, but I worry. We have not seen a recognition of the depth of the waters yet from the Laians.”

  “Korodaun appears to understand,” Tan!Stalla replied. “But even if she didn’t, we have no choice. As I told her, this is Laian space—or, at least, the portion of the Dead Zone they still claim.

  “We have no real authority here, and she has more firepower than we do. By any reasonable logic, this is her command, and we are now the supporting allies we were always supposed to be.”

  “Besides, aren’t there more Laian ships on the way?” Morgan said. “Another twenty war-dreadnoughts at least.”

  “Over the next ten cycles, yes. Our Grand Fleet is remaining with the main Laian Dead Zone defense force, the First Defense Fleet, until the storms stop thundering at each other.”

  “I had higher hopes for the Wendira, but I guess I don’t know them well,” Morgan admitted.

  Prott clicked his tongue in a soft chuckle. His people’s faces didn’t move, but she still felt his bitter amusement.

  “None of us do and we hesitate to take the Laians’ opinion at surface value,” he said. “But it seems that this kind of game is normal for them. The Queens do not comprehend that anything can threaten them.”

  “Even Oxtashah has done her duty as a Royal caste,” Tan!Stalla reminded them. “She is mother to ten thousand children. No Royal caste who has not done the same would be permitted to leave the Queens’ reach.