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

  “Even if we learned that you’d lost your ship from Tan!Shallegh,” Elon Casimir added drily.

  “Be nice, Elon,” the gracefully aging Duchess told her younger husband with a smile. “You’ve never commanded a starship or been involved in fleet command. I have. Morgan is busy, believe me.”

  “Officially, we know nothing about what’s going on out there,” the Ducal Consort told his daughter. “If the Imperium isn’t briefing the Dukes, that tells me a lot all on its own.”

  “They’ve told us that they don’t expect the Wendira and Laians to start shooting,” Bond corrected. “But the full details of what you found are still classified at the highest levels.”

  Morgan chuckled and took another drink of wine. That was as close as her stepmother was going to come to admitting that the pair of them knew everything. They might not have been briefed as Dukes—the rulers of the Imperium’s various semi-autonomous racial homeworlds—but they were also the primary shareholders of the Imperium’s fifth-largest shipyard.

  And Annette Bond was A!Shall’s friend, one the Empress found useful as a sounding board, Morgan suspected.

  “I’ve told Victoria what I can,” Bond continued. “I imagine you have as well. She…gets it. I’m sure you knew that, but it can’t hurt to be reiterated. She does command one of my orbital forts, after all.”

  Morgan’s parents were almost embarrassingly supportive of her…somewhat complex relationships and love life. The only time they’d drawn a line was when they’d found out she’d slept with one of the Ducal apartment security guards.

  That had gone down like a lead balloon. Morgan, at eighteen, had suddenly received an extremely detailed further explanation of the concept of conflict of interest.

  “I do wish we’d heard that you’d lost your ship from you,” Elon Casimir said quietly. “That’s not meant to guilt-trip you, Morgan. As Annette said, I don’t fully get how busy you are. But…I do know that’s a hard path to walk, and it’s one that’s always walked alone.

  “We love you and we want to have your back, in anything and everything.”

  Morgan found herself blinking away tears…and not just in gratitude at her parents’ love.

  “Duty is a harsh mistress, Morgan,” her mother reminded her. “But you’re not alone in facing it. Never. Not while you have us, not while you have your sisters—not while you have Victoria and Rin, either.

  “Or Tan!Shallegh, for that matter. The old squid will have your back, you know that, right?”

  “I do,” Morgan muttered, wondering where all of the tears were coming from.

  Over a hundred of her crew had died aboard Defiance. Seven times that many had come back with her and been scattered through Tan!Stalla’s fleet, but she’d lost a hundred souls—and killed some of them herself when she’d ordered a power core ejected to save the ship.

  She had to pause the message for a moment, letting the tears flow freely as she finished her wine. There was no one there to see, and she had, for the first time since firing the scuttling charges, a moment to herself without tasks to complete.

  Peace wouldn’t last. The creatures they’d found at the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula weren’t going to leave her peace, any more than they’d spared her crew. But right now, she had a quiet moment along with the holographic images of her parents.

  Morgan Casimir knew how to handle nightmares and how to handle grief. And sometimes, the best way to remember your dead was to simply let yourself cry.

  Her parents would understand if it took her a while to finish their message.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “So, the exercise for the fleets,” Shotilik rumbled as Morgan and her team gathered in their conference room again. “Do we assume the worst, the best or somewhere in between?”

  Morgan snorted and tapped a command, dropping a smaller Category Seven bioform into the hologram above the table they surrounded.

  “I was trying to forget those existed,” Rogers said drily. “Fifteen thousand kilometers. Multiple singularity cannons. Probably multiple plasma cannons. Anything else I need to mention?”

  “Missiles, hyperdrives, anomaly scanners,” Morgan reeled off. “We know they have tachyon scanners and the full gamut of everything we use for realspace scanning, so we assume the next wave has everything we use for hyperspace scanning.”

  “Everything the Laians had on Builder of Tomorrows,” Ito said, the Pibo woman dropping a list of key components next to the giant bioform’s hologram. “Whether the Laian systems grafted onto bioforms or their own biotech equivalent, we can assume they have point-eight-five missiles, hyperfold cannons, hyperfold coms, tachyon scanners…”

  Took shivered, the blue-feathered Yin woman considering the list.

  “They couldn’t have adopted all those winds in a few dozen cycles, could they?” she asked.

  “We have to assume they could,” Morgan replied. “Hence Ito’s point. We know they have copies of the Laian versions of all of these—and we also have to assume, at this point, that they have full access to Builder’s computer systems.

  “Maps. Tech databases. The works. The maps are Pincer Korodaun’s problem,” she said with relief. “But the tech databases are our problem. So, for those exercises we’re giving them tomorrow, I want us to mock up a dash-X category modifier, for ships fully modernized with the Laian weapon systems.”

  “So, missiles, IDMs… Shields?”

  “Shields and interface drives,” Morgan agreed. “Using whichever of their reactionless or our interface drive seems more efficient at a given moment. A Category Four-X will have everything, people.”

  “Any other category modifiers we should be thinking of?” Shotilik asked thoughtfully.

  “Dash-H, for units like the ones we saw in the last attack,” Took suggested. “Standard bioforms with hyper emitters.”

  “We’ll use dash-H for hyper-equipped units and dash-M for IDM-equipped units,” Morgan told them. “But for the simulations, the only thing we throw at people is dash-X. Worst-possible-case scenario.”

  “Makes sense,” Rogers agreed. “If we train to fight the worst possible scenario, the reality can’t help but be better, right?”

  “I’m not taking that bet,” Took said flatly. “If I did, I’d pull out all my feathers from stress. I’m going to have to pull launcher and magazine estimates by mass. They’ve got to be lower than Laian numbers, right? If they’re basically bolting the Laian system, one way or another, onto existing forms?”

  “Run me two sets of numbers, Took,” Morgan ordered. “First, the one that we’ll probably use for training purposes, is where they’ve updated themselves with an equivalent launcher-to-mass ratio as Laian war-dreadnoughts.

  “Second, your best guess of what they’ll look like if they’re adding a Laian launcher-and-magazine assembly to an existing bioform, but trying to get up to a number of launchers that can seriously challenge us at range.

  “That’ll be the one we use for intelligence and operational assessments,” Morgan concluded. “Run it conservative but realistic. We don’t want to terrify people outside of training scenarios, but we don’t want to underestimate these creatures, either.”

  “I’m on it,” Took confirmed.

  Morgan pivoted to Kadark.

  “Kadark, you were Engineering, right?” she asked the big Anbrai.

  “Yes, sir,” he confirmed.

  “I want you to tear into whatever we have on the Laian mobile shipyards,” she told him. “I need to know just what Builder probably carried—but more importantly, what she can do. If she can update and modify war-dreadnoughts, she can probably at least do implants and modifications on Category One, Two and Three bioforms. I want an idea of how much she might have done to them in terms of implants and grafts.”

  “On it,” he confirmed.

  Morgan turned to Ito, Rogers and Shotilik and considered them.

  “Ito, Rogers, I want you two to start putting together our scenarios for the training,” she to
ld the Pibo and her former XO. “Use the numbers from Took once she has them, but you’ll need to come up with guesses for shields as well. We’re almost certainly going to be staying out of ranges where plasma and hyperfold cannons matter for now, but if they start having shields to eat our missiles, it’s going to change the math.”

  “And their use of plasma for missile defense is going to get better as well,” Rogers suggested. “It wasn’t that long ago that even the Imperium relied on shields alone to handle missiles, but we’ve already seen them shoot ours down.”

  “Agreed,” Morgan said.

  Finally, she turned her assessing gaze on Shotilik, the second-senior member of her team after Rogers.

  “Tactical, right?” she asked the Rekiki.

  “Yes, sir,” Shotilik agreed.

  “You and I get the most fun job,” Morgan told her. “We’re going to go through the Infinite’s resources and the numbers everybody else puts together, and we play OPFOR. We’re going to assess their resources and try to extrapolate their goals and objectives.

  “Everyone else’s job is to assess what the Infinite have. We get to try to guess just what the Queen will do with those resources.”

  The simulated Category Five-X blazed across the hologram at eighty percent of the speed of light. Eight hundred kilometers across, it seemed to spray missiles like a sprinter spraying sweat. The tiny icons scattering in front of the behemoth represented Laian war-dreadnoughts, the largest warships available to the defenders.

  The dreadnoughts’ missile fire was almost invisible against the tsunami the Infinite bioform unleashed, but their defenses rallied in trained synchronicity. Plasma-cannon-armed equivalents to the Imperium’s Buckler drones opened fire at two light-seconds against the portion of the missiles that reached their target in hyperspace, and they dodged away, taking advantage of every bit of maneuverability their interface drives gave them.

  It was…not enough.

  Morgan watched grimly as their simulation ground to its inevitable conclusion. Shotilik hadn’t even used the bioform’s interface drive to match the Laians’ maneuverability. The Rekiki had simply taken the Infinite forward and smashed the dreadnoughts to pieces with overwhelming missile fire.

  “So, I’m hoping that is not our conservative estimate of the Infinite’s missile armaments,” she observed as the last war-dreadnought—controlled by Rogers this time—blew apart.

  “It isn’t,” Ito confirmed, the Pibo looking tired. “That’s Laian war-dreadnought ratios—six launchers per megaton. But on an eight-hundred-kilometer bioform…that’s millions of missile launchers, sir.”

  “Millions,” Morgan echoed, looking back at the simulation. “And the more conservative estimate?”

  “Their ratio appears to be ten to one for length versus average height and width,” Ito said. “So, an eight-hundred-kilometer-long unit is two hundred kilometers wide and high at its largest point, average of eighty kilometers. Volume of over twenty million cubic kilometers.”

  “They’re limited by surface area, but…” Morgan wasn’t even sure how she’d meant to finish that sentence.

  “My conservative estimate is that a Category Five-X bioform that has been fully updated with Laian tech will have a hundred thousand missile launchers at the minimum end,” Ito told them all. “That’s a unit that is a mere hundred and twenty, say, kilometers long. At the high end, the eight-hundred-kilometer bioform we used here… A minimum of a million.”

  “I’m not sure I can even wrap my brain around those numbers,” Morgan admitted, understanding why Ito sounded tired. “That’s entire fleets’ worth of firepower in a single bioform.”

  “The Category Three-X ships look more like regular warships,” the Pibo said. “But a top-end Category Three bioform is already larger than a Laian war-dreadnought. So, my conservative estimate is that a C-Four-X unit is going to carry a minimum of two thousand missile launchers.”

  Morgan nodded, throwing the three smallest categories up in the hologram to replace the Category Five. The One-Xs were…well, from her team’s analysis, they’d made for decent destroyers, but they were still almost irrelevant in the clash of titans she was facing. The Two-Xs were bigger, but still smaller than even the cruisers the blockade would bring to the fight.

  The Three-Xs were real warships, ranging in size from as small as the Laian attack cruisers and Thunderstorms of the blockade fleet to as large as the Laian war-dreadnoughts. Ton for ton, they were projecting that the X versions of the bioforms would be more lightly armed and defended than their technological equivalents, but they were just plain bigger.

  They’d detected two thousand Category Fours, each more powerful than any ship present in the blocking fleet. The breakout force had brought at least a dozen Category Fours to go with their single Category Five.

  “Do we have a winnable exercise to present the fleet?” Morgan asked. “I want them to recognize how dangerous an X-Category bioform is going to be. We need the worst-case-scenario models in the exercises—but we also need to present a scenario the blockading fleet can win. At least at first, anyway.”

  “We’ve got something,” Rogers promised. “I’m not sure how winnable it will be, and I’m not sure it’s realistic at all, but we’ve got a scenario based around them bringing a fleet of Category Twos and Threes, refitted to the X standard with shields, missiles and hyperdrives.

  “I suspect we’re underestimating how large a force they’ll bring,” the young redheaded officer admitted, “but it will give everyone a starting point.”

  “That’s all we can do without more data,” Morgan admitted. “We need people to realize how bad this can be, but we also need to set the scenarios to allow us to find ways we can win.”

  She looked at the hologram that had been showing the simulated Category Five-X and shook her head.

  “Assuming we can win,” she half-whispered.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Squadron Lord’s staff was silent when Morgan completed her briefing. She wasn’t sure if the silence was good or bad—though the only bad silence would be them disbelieving her.

  “What level of upgrades do you expect them to deploy in short order?” Tan!Stalla finally asked.

  “That’s probably our only good news,” Morgan said. “Using Builder of Tomorrows, they can update any of the Category Three or smaller bioforms with grafted Laian technology, but a single mobile yard can only do so much work so quickly.

  “They are also limited by the resources available to them. I would guess that we are probably looking at between two and four Category Three bioforms equipped with shields and missile launchers every five cycles,” she told them.

  “We do not have the data to estimate around when they will have a biotech version of any of these systems or how quickly they will be able to integrate biotech systems into their existing units,” she continued. “If it turns out that they can only integrate shields and missiles into newly born bioforms, then we will continue to have a large advantage, as only the smallest units should be able to match our range.”

  “And if they can remap the flesh of their existing bioforms?” Prott asked.

  “It depends on what the process looks like, but in that case, we are probably fucked,” Morgan said bluntly. “Potentially, we could see a full revamp of all of the Infinite bioforms to an equivalent of our Class X categorization within a long-cycle.

  “At that point, containment may well be impossible.”

  The room was silent again.

  “We have time,” Tan!Stalla reminded everyone. “We will distribute this analysis as widely as we can,” she noted. “And request reinforcements from all possible allies. The Kanzi, for example, should be able to spare a fleet or two from their civil war now.”

  “Their civil war has been over for five long-cycles,” Ashmore muttered, the operations officer sounding disgruntled. “They’ve just been dragging it out for politics.”

  “And if we disagreed with the reforms the High Prieste
ss was implementing, the Imperium might draw more offense at that,” Tan!Stalla agreed. “But I will take anyone who can lend me a twenty-megaton superbattleship with hyperfold cannons right now.”

  The Kanzi Theocracy hadn’t cheated nearly as well as the Imperium over the last thirty years of tech development. Most of their focus recently, Morgan knew, had been on using their civil war as an excuse to dissolve their age-old institution of enslaving every non-Kanzi biped they encountered.

  Morgan didn’t know where that reform was going to end, but she was a lot more willing to talk to the Kanzi fighting for that reform than the people fighting against it.

  And as Tan!Stalla had noted, the Imperium had traded hyperfold cannons to the Kanzi as part of the deal that had seen them fight the Taljzi together. The Kanzi fleet would be worth committing to this fight.

  “The Wendira and Laians both have friends among the Core Powers they can call on as well, I hope,” Prott said. “I was always surprised we were the only people involved in this fight.”

  “That’s because any Core Power signing a deal with one of the pair explicitly excludes fighting the other half of the pair,” Ashmore told the chief of staff. “Nobody else was dumb enough to get involved in the galaxy’s oldest grudge match.”

  “Which meant no one else was in a place to talk them down from it,” Tan!Stalla countered. “We have them talking to each other, and that is worth a lot. Hopefully, Staff Captain Casimir’s analysis will help bring a fina—”

  Every communicator in the room chimed at once, cutting the Squadron Lord off as she stared down at the device. A deadly new silence filled the room, and then Tan!Stalla stabbed a manipulator tentacle at her com.

  “Tan!Stalla.”

  “Sir, one of the Laian cruisers just exited hyperspace,” Captain Arnaud said quickly and grimly. “They are reporting a major hyperspace anomaly exiting the nebula—and headed directly for the last position we encountered the Infinite.”