Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Vrai,” Rin replied slowly, taking a moment to realize he was unconsciously slipping into French in response to the other man’s scattering the language into his speech. “I need to check on the compound and the dig site if possible, Battalion Commander.” He gestured to !Lat. “Administrator !Lat is in a bad way and requires medical attention, but this site is critical to what we’re looking for here.”

  “There’s a reason I’m in this room alone, Dr. Dunst,” Vichy murmured. “I’m cleared for Lost Dragon, at least.”

  “Ah.” That was helpful. “Then you understand that I need to check on the dig site. It is critical to the Imperium.”

  “I’ll have Marines take care of your people. I will escort you to the dig site myself. C’est acceptable?”

  “Oui,” Rin replied. “Sorry,” he continued. “My French is terrible and I don’t have a translator set on me right now. They took them away.”

  “At least you try, Dr. Dunst,” the Marine told him. “We’ll have some sent down from Defiance once she’s back in orbit.”

  “Back in orbit? What happened?”

  “Our cloaked friends had a surprise we weren’t expecting,” Vichy told him. “I’d explain it, Dr. Dunst, but I don’t understand it well enough myself to know if we’re going to classify it or not.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Pierre watched the chubby archeologist out of the corner of his eye as they crossed the compound. The dark-skinned man at least made the attempt to speak French, which had endeared him to Pierre even if it was pointless on a battlefield.

  And, unprepossessing as the scientist looked, he’d captured one of the strange raiders who’d seized the site, and killed several more with that man’s weapon. Pierre was an Imperial Marine, a soldier born of generations of soldiers. Rising to that kind of challenge impressed him.

  “These ruins, they don’t seem like much,” Pierre observed as they reached the edge of the dig site. His Marines were still clearing away bodies. Once again, few of the raiders had surrendered. Getting answers was looking harder by the minute.

  “That’s because they’re fifty thousand years old, Battalion Commander,” Dr. Dunst said in a vaguely distracted tone. “Our best guess is that the Alava had about a billion people in this system.” He gestured to the overgrown ruins. “According to the documents that led us here, this was the administration center of the region, a city of sixty million or so.”

  Pierre studied the ruins again. Presumably, “Alava” was the actual name for what everyone else called the Precursors.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” he said.

  “Not to me, either,” Dunst admitted. “We think the faction of Alava out here may have been at least partially rogue. Our files on them are vague, and we’ve already run into areas where they appear to be wrong.”

  “We have files on the Precursors?” Pierre asked. That was news to him.

  Dunst paused and sighed.

  “Fuck,” he said genially. “I am tired and very stressed, Battalion Commander, and I am talking to ignore what has just happened. Please, do me the favor of forgetting you heard that.”

  “I was read in on Lost Dragon,” Pierre told the other man. “We’re a long way out on a random spike of exploration that appeared to be directed at finding this system. I presumed we knew something.”

  “What I just let slip is not covered under the Lost Dragon Protocol,” Dunst told him. “I can’t say more, Commander, I’ve already said too much.”

  “C’est bon. Aucun problème.”

  Dunst seemed to at least understand that as he nodded and stopped in place, shading his eyes against the sunlight as he examined the scattered array of tents.

  “I think most of this was them, but your Marines didn’t help,” he noted. “Needs must when the devil drives, I suppose. I need to find something, Commander Vichy. Will you help me?”

  “I’m just here to watch your back, Doctor,” Pierre pointed out. The surprisingly sparse file they had on Rin Dunst was clear: so far as the Imperium was concerned, the man next to him was worth more than, say, one of Pierre’s Marine companies. Probably not more than Defiance, but protecting the man was now Defiance’s primary mission in this star system.

  Interestingly to Pierre, it was very clear that Dr. Dunst did not realize that.

  “I can pull Marines in for a search detail, if that would help,” Pierre offered.

  “Can your Marines recognize an Alava regional star projection?” Dunst asked. “I know some of the soldiers on the Taljzi Campaigns have seen them before.”

  The Marine officer considered that for several seconds.

  “I, Dr. Dunst, am only vaguely certain I know what you mean,” he admitted. “I suspect the only member of Defiance’s crew who could recognize that on sight would be Captain Casimir, and she’s busy.”

  Defiance still hadn’t returned to orbit, though the updates on his tactical network suggested that most of the cruiser’s small craft contingent was on its way over.

  “That is fair. Then I will search and you will watch my back,” Dunst told him. “What happens to us now, Battalion Commander?”

  The scientist’s switch in thoughts left Pierre blinking for a moment before he chuckled softly.

  “We evac, Doctor,” he told the archeologist. “We pull you out and fall back to Kosha. There, we go over everything we’ve learned and get your people the medical help they need.”

  “This is the most important Alava site we have ever found,” Dunst told him. “We have so much work to do here.”

  “And you will be back to do it, I suspect,” Pierre said. “But today you have wounded and terrified people who need to go home. We extracted some of your people from a slaver ship; they’re in even worse shape in many ways.”

  Dunst paused again.

  “You hadn’t mentioned that before,” he noted.

  “It has been a busy day,” Pierre observed. “That’s what brought us here, Doctor. We encountered them attempting to make a transfer of artifacts and prisoners to another ship during our survey. The prisoners told us they’d captured this site, so we moved in.”

  “And thank God you did,” Dunst replied. “The people they took are safe, then?”

  “Thirty-seven people are safe,” Pierre said carefully and specifically. “We haven’t yet confirmed if that’s everyone.”

  “I think it is,” the archeologist said after a moment’s thought. “A few were killed, but if you rescued thirty-seven from their other ship, I think we have everyone who is still alive.”

  He gestured toward a larger set of tents with his head. “This way.”

  Pierre followed. The whole situation was still confusing to him. The ground defense had been determined but underequipped to stand off a Marine landing. The anti-stun cloaks would have been effective against law enforcement but were almost nothing against a military force.

  The reports were still coming in, but it sounded like they had less than a dozen prisoners, and most of them were wounded. Whoever these people were, they’d fought like tigers.

  Ducking under the tent flap to join Dunst, Pierre involuntarily inhaled in shock. He’d thought he’d been entering a collection of tents roughly shoved together. Instead, it turned out that the tents had been intentionally attached to create a large covered space where the archeologists had seriously opened up a Precursor structure.

  “Our analysis of the city suggested that this was the headquarters building of a military base on the perimeter,” Dunst told him calmly. “The base itself is gone, mostly prefabs that appear to either have been moved or have completely decayed.

  “This was the structure that would have been home to the Alava portion of the military contingent, in any case. We thought we’d find a star projection here and we were right, but…”

  Dunst was down in the half-buried structure, moving chunks of debris with surprising strength.

  “It’s gone,” he said with a loud sigh. “We’d only begun extracting it when they land
ed, Battalion Commander. They knew exactly where the ruins and the key locations were. They didn’t know where we were initially, but the sensor data I was seeing showed them landing at our site and four others, two of which we’d flagged as high-value locations.”

  “They knew as much about the place as you did?” Pierre asked. That was bad news.

  “More.” Dunst shook his head in the dim light as he clambered out of the structure, far more slowly than he’d entered it. “They knew two sites we didn’t. And…well, it’s hard to tell the difference between fifty thousand years of decay and the unintentional damage of someone being careful, Battalion Commander, but we think someone was here before us and had just as clear an idea of what they were looking for as we did.”

  “Someone else already scavenged the place?”

  “Surveyed it, at least. They didn’t take much, I don’t think. Little enough at this site, at least, that we thought we were being paranoid. Now…now I think these people, whoever they are, were here before us.”

  “And specifically came back to deal with you,” Pierre said grimly. “That suggests security breaches to me, Dr. Dunst.”

  “Me too, and I’m not great at security, as we’ve established,” the scientist replied.

  Pierre chuckled.

  “Doctor, your government file is sparse in a way that tells me you know far more than you’ve even suggested exists to me,” he told Dunst. “Someone sent these people out here? When?”

  “If it’s from us, no more than twelve years ago,” Dunst said. “And even that is more than I should say, Commander Vichy. I think further conversation on this topic should include Captain Casimir, at least. I believe she is cleared for more of this.”

  “Probablement,” Pierre conceded. Casimir wasn’t an acknowledged expert on the Precursors, but she’d been on the Taljzi campaign and dealt with a pile of Precursor crap more directly than anyone else on the ship.

  “What is she even doing out here?” the scientist asked. “I would have expected her to be posted near the Duchy.”

  “I am not the Captain’s confidant and it is not my place to speculate,” Pierre told the other man. He had his own guesses, but regardless of his occasional displeasure with his Captain, she was his Captain.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “We’re moving in on the target. This is weird.”

  Lesser Speaker Alex Braddock’s voice hung softly in Defiance’s bridge. The shuttle pilot was in control of one of Defiance’s multipurpose utility craft. Designed primarily for search and rescue, the utility birds were also used for minor repairs on the exterior of the ship.

  The repairs the cruiser needed today were beyond the utility shuttles’ abilities, but Morgan had another use for them.

  Braddock’s shuttle was less than a thousand kilometers from what they thought was the most intact of the ghost ships. Even locating one of them had been hard, the strange ships defying Defiance’s sensors even in death.

  “I’ve got it dialed in on visual and I think we’re good,” Braddock’s voice continued, her tone perfectly calm. “Target has a star-relative velocity of just over eleven thousand kilometers a second. Rotation is one hundred and seven degrees per second. Range is eight hundred kilometers, closing at ten kilometers per second.”

  Lesser Commander Nguyen was running the flight operation, but there was no way that Morgan wasn’t going to be listening in. The situation on Beta was under control, with the prisoners and rescuees being loaded into shuttles to return to Defiance.

  There were answers she’d get there too, but right now her focus was on Braddock’s shuttle and its target.

  “Range is three hundred kilometers, maintaining velocity and preparing grapples,” the pilot reported. “Visual is…getting more detailed. Are you getting this, Defiance?”

  “Show me,” Morgan ordered softly. “Main tank.”

  “We are receiving your telemetry, Speaker Braddock,” Nguyen confirmed. “We’re showing the Captain now. Maintain your approach unless you register a threat.”

  “Understood, sir. Expect grapple deployment in one minute.”

  The ship that filled the holotank looked like nothing she’d ever seen, yet something about it rang familiar bells at the back of her mind. It had been a smooth shape, a rounded teardrop that reminded her of nothing so much as the sperm model from high school sex-ed videos.

  “Do we have a spectro on the hull material?” she asked.

  “Carbon, calcium, some silicon,” Nguyen replied. “It’s nothing like any starship I’ve ever seen.”

  “With the spin, we should be able to get a full three-sixty-squared. Show me.”

  A few seconds of processing passed and the rotating image froze. Morgan studied it, tapping commands to rotate it to the angle she wanted, zooming in on what she thought she’d seen.

  “We blew a fifty-meter-wide hole in this thing with the hyperfold cannons,” she said quietly as she looked at the wound. “What do you see, Commander Nguyen?”

  The entire bridge was silent as they stared at the hole. Wound was the right word. They could see inside their enemy now, and there were no decks, no crew, no technology.

  The wound exposed muscle and bone and vacuum-dried flesh on an unimaginable scale.

  “How big is that thing?” Morgan asked.

  “Based off their thrust energy during the battle, it masses about four hundred thousand tons. Two hundred and forty meters long, a hundred and eighty meters wide at the widest point.” Nguyen stared at the wound. “Is it alive?”

  “Not anymore, but it looks like it might have been,” Morgan said drily. “That spectrography. How does it line up with natural-formed shells?”

  “I’ll have to have my people run an analysis,” Nguyen admitted. “They’re creatures?”

  “Well, I’m seeing what looks like muscle and bone instead of crew decks and conduits, so…potentially, yes,” Morgan agreed. “Warn Braddock that she’s looking at a dissection, not a salvage op.

  “I suspect this is going to be messier than she was counting on.”

  The “shell” was made up of thousands—millions, really—of overlapping scales, ranging from a few dozen centimeters across to a couple of ten-meter monsters on the edge of being shed. That made sense, Morgan supposed, compared to a single solid shell that would need to be shed before it killed the creature.

  “So, it could get bigger?” Rogers asked as Braddock used her shuttle’s manipulator arms to rip a section of the creature’s hide off.

  “The shell definitely wouldn’t be a limitation,” Nguyen replied. “More armadillo than lobster, though I don’t think Earth life has an exact equivalent to this.”

  “Most Earth life can’t survive thousands of gravities of acceleration, let alone create it,” Morgan said. “You’d think if combative deep-space wildlife existed, we’d have encountered it by now.”

  “There are over two hundred life forms in the Imperial catalogs that live in asteroid belts and the rings of gas giants,” Nguyen told her. “Not so many that really do the deep-space thing, and nothing we know of that does interstellar, but…”

  “If this was native to the system, there’d be more of them,” Rogers snapped. “The raiders brought them. Tame space wildlife?”

  “I’ve heard stranger things,” Morgan said.

  “We’re through the hull…hide, I guess,” Braddock reported, her voice sounding slightly ill. “Not much in terms of bleeding, though there’s definitely some vein-esque things here. It’s very dead.”

  “I’d hope so. I prefer things I blow fifty-meter-wide holes in to die,” Nguyen said. “We’re getting good scan data, Braddock, but I want you to dig deeper. We know it has some kind of plasma-generation system. Let’s find that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The metal claws dug deeper into the dead ship, excavating hundreds of kilos of flesh to float off into space as Morgan struggled with the sense of familiarity.

  “Braddock, grab a flesh sample for the analyze
r,” she ordered. “This is starting to look familiar, and that seems weird to me.”

  There was a pregnant pause on the bridge.

  “Yes, sir, that is weird,” the pilot confirmed. “Grabbing samples and running them through. I’ll keep digging for the plasma guts as the scanner analyzes. It’s still warm inside the thing, but I’m digging toward the only active heat source I see.”

  The data running over Morgan’s screen from the analyzer wasn’t entirely readable to her—the university degree she’d been required to get to be a Militia officer was starship engineering, not biology.

  She could read the high levels, though. The flesh was tough as all hell, tougher than anything that had evolved in an atmosphere. Humans had a reinforcing skeletal structure. This entire creature had been made of living tissue that was sturdier than human bone.

  Now that she was looking at the cell structure, the sense of familiarity was even stronger, and she plugged an authorization code in as she told the ship’s computers to search for comparisons. It wouldn’t access Dragon Protocol–sealed data, but it would get the data from…

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “Sir?” Rogers asked.

  “It’s Precursor,” Morgan told them. “It’s artificial. The cell structure is based on the same manufactured architecture as the cloning thing on Arjtal.”

  That living device had taken biomass and living creatures and spat out duplicates of the creatures by the hundreds. It had allowed the Taljzi go from a convoy of sixty thousand refugees to an empire of billions that would have destroyed the Kanzi if they hadn’t accidentally picked a fight with Earth as well—and through Earth, the A!Tol Imperium.

  These ships were built on the same core architecture. Artificial life forms, custom-built to do things no natural organic being could do. And, because they were alive, they’d survived the apocalypse the Precursors had unleashed on themselves and their technology.