Plus the usual files on Alava tech and megastructures. Rin wasn’t quite sure what kind of artifact the Alava had left behind there, but he doubted it was going to be small. The Alava just didn’t do small by the time this region had been settled.
He checked the time. Someone had updated his personal calendar with the exact time of the dinner invitation, and he shook his head as he looked at it.
Dinner with Morgan “and her officers” wasn’t quite what he’d been hoping for in the immediate future, but duty called for them both. He wasn’t entirely sure he was comfortable with the whole situation with the Captain and her girlfriend and said girlfriend’s wife. Polyamory was common enough, but that struck him as a level of complication that was asking for trouble.
It wasn’t his trouble right now. But if he continued to pursue Morgan Casimir, it might become his trouble, and he wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that.
To Rin’s surprise, there was a chime on his door admittance buzzer thirty minutes before dinner. His emotions attempted to imitate a three-ring circus for several seconds, expecting it to be Morgan Casimir.
Instead, he found Pierre Vichy standing on his doorstep in a plain black undress uniform and an openly worn sidearm.
“Bonsoir, Doctor,” Vichy greeted him. “We will not be escorting you around the ship normally, but I presumed upon myself to make certain that you didn’t get lost on your way to the Captain’s mess.”
“My current record suggests I’d stumble into a secret cabal of Children aboard the ship if I did get lost,” Rin said with partially forced humor. “Just how dressed up is this affair?”
The Imperial Marines’ undress uniform—for humans, at least—was the black full-body suit of a standard day uniform with a twenty-first-century-style formal business jacket over it in the same black.
Boards had been added to the shoulder of the jacket to sport decorative insignia, but the marker for Vichy’s rank remained the two gold pips on either side of his bodysuit collar.
Rin suspected the underlayer suit could act as an emergency vacuum suit. Either way, the jacket was far more formal than his own slacks and a shirt.
“Throw a jacket on and ça va,” the Marine told him. “You have one, right?” He studied Rin carefully for a moment. “I don’t have anything that will fit you, but we may find something in the ship’s stores.”
Rin managed not to flush in embarrassment. His bulk didn’t normally bother him, but compared to the spare and athletic form of the Marine CO, it was hard not to feel soft.
“I have a jacket; give me a moment,” he said. He hadn’t unpacked yet, but the jacket was supposed to survive being stored just fine.
Fortunately, it lived up to its advertising and the few wrinkles vanished after a few shakes. Slinging the dark blue jacket over his shoulders, he turned back to Vichy.
“Well, Commander, shall we?” he asked. “I have no idea of the etiquette for this. My only dinners with Imperial officers, well…they weren’t human Imperial officers.”
And he really didn’t want to make a fool of himself in front of Morgan Casimir right now.
“You will be fine,” Vichy assured him. “Come.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Officers and guests, I give you the Empress, the Houses, the Duchies, the Imperium!”
“The Imperium!” Morgan’s guests chorused back.
The toast wasn’t actually part of the Imperial tradition. The first human officers in the Imperial Navy, like Morgan’s honorary aunt Fleet Lord Harriet Tanaka, had made it up to continue an old human tradition.
The opening meal of any voyage was always a sprawling affair that ended up larger than Morgan would ever have wanted. If Serene Guidance hadn’t been overdue and missing, Defiance wouldn’t be leaving yet—and tonight was when she’d penciled in a potential date with Rin Dunst.
The galaxy didn’t wait on the romantic dreams of mid-thirties polyamorous women, however, which left her with a job to do. Civilian and out of the chain of command or not, Morgan had to step very carefully around Rin aboard her ship.
But she had him at the dinner, along with her senior officers. The fierce-souled archeologist was sitting next to Battalion Commander Vichy, speaking to the Marine in slow but functional French.
On the other side of Dr. Dunst was Lesser Commander Nguyen, whose French was obviously worse even from three seats away. She was gamely trying, though, and was very clearly earning points with Vichy for the attempt.
Past her was Commander Rogers, who was leaning back in her chair and sipping her wine with a sharp gaze. Morgan met her First Sword’s gaze and offered a second silent toast. The other woman returned it, so she presumed things were fine.
Engineering, Navigation, and Communication took up the other side of the table. Nystrom and El-Amin were comparing being raised in Scandinavia as a Tibetan-in-exile to being raised on Mars in one of the early Muslim colonies there.
El-Amin was hardly a typical Muslim, with his tightly wrapped woman’s headscarf and soft tones, but Morgan’s understanding was that New Cairo had diverged from its home religion in rapid and fascinating ways.
Past them and sharing Rogers’s silence was Lesser Commander Gary Liepins, the cruiser’s Eastern European engineer. Morgan had never even heard of Latvia before Liepins had been assigned to her command, and she’d thought her knowledge of Earth geography was good.
Morgan let the conversations run over her. She could understand the three-way conversation on her right far better than she was going to admit to Vichy, but since it was currently focused on harmless discussions of French wine, she didn’t need to engage.
There was a lull in both conversations, and she tapped a nail against her glass to draw everyone’s attention.
“All right, everyone, a bit of business before we go fall over to digest that dinner,” she told them. “We portal out in just over a tenth-cycle. Then it’s six cycles to K-Seven-Seven-D-L-T-Three. We’ll be dropping out of hyperspace for a few hours one cycle short of D-L-T-Three to report in and make sure that Echelon Lord Davor knows we’re alive before we stick our heads into the hornet’s nest.
“We don’t know what to expect at D-L-T-Three, but we know the Children fled there from D-L-K-Six. We also know that Serene Guidance never even sent out a communication. We have to assume that Commander Isk was ambushed and destroyed almost immediately on emergence.”
She let that hang in the room, reminding her people that their destination had already eaten a warship without a metaphorical sound.
“Given that information, my intention is to emerge from hyperspace on the far side of D-L-T-Three, avoiding a direct vector and any location that the Children would be expecting us to arrive in. I also intend to emerge roughly one light-hour out to get a scan of the system before we are detected.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t like playing games and sneaking in the back door,” she admitted. “Defiance is the most powerful warship of her mass in the Imperium. But we know one of our ships died here, and we won’t share Serene Guidance’s fate; I swear it.”
“Depending on what we find, we can easily make an in-system hyper transit to close the range after the scan, too,” El-Amin suggested. “That could give us an extra chance of surprise.”
“A light-hour puts us out of tachyon-scanner range,” Nguyen pointed out. “Everything we see is an hour out of date, not real-time.”
“That we’re up to a full five light-minutes of tachyon scanner range is handy but not essential,” Morgan replied. “Data that’s an hour old is better than plasma beams that are brand new. These people killed a destroyer before Commander Isk could even send a message.
“I have to assume we’re facing overwhelming force, which means we run a maximum survivability scouting mission. We act like we’re facing battle squadrons, people. Otherwise, we risk sharing Serene Guidance’s fate, and that will not happen.”
No one was arguing with her. Even Nguyen’s comment was just
that. But she needed to make sure her people knew the stakes.
“We have six cycles,” she told them. “A hundred and forty hours. Let’s be as ready as we can be.
“Our most likely opposition is freighters retrofitted into armed pirates and more Precursor bioships,” Morgan continued. “Given that analysis, I can see why Commander Isk took a riskier approach that was more likely to provide detailed information.
“My fear, people, is that we have drastically underestimated how big and dangerous those bioships can get.” She shook her head. “Commander Nguyen, I want you to work with Dr. Dunst and see if we can get a mock-up for what a superbattleship-sized one of those things will look like in terms of threat level.”
“It’s always going to be mitigated by their engine and their weapons,” Nguyen pointed out. “I wouldn’t want to fight a big one, but so long as we can control the range, all they’ve got is a plasma cannon.”
“All we’ve seen so far is a plasma cannon,” Morgan corrected. “I don’t think we know enough about Precursor biotech to assume we understand its limitations, Lesser Commander. Get me that mock-up.”
“Of course, sir.”
“The rest of you.” Morgan looked around the room. “I want us to disaster-proof this mission as much as we can. If we have the ability, we will do a closer scouting pass. But right now, I want us to plan to get the most information we can with the absolute least risk.
“Everyone on board with that?”
Morgan wasn’t in the slightest surprised to see Dunst lingering as everyone else drifted out. Vichy, who’d escorted him to the party, seemed to be waiting for him.
“Pierre, s’il vous plaît, nous avons besoin d’un peu d’intimité,” she whispered in his ear as she stepped up next to him.
Her use of French completely threw the Marine, probably at least as much as her request for privacy. He glared at her for a moment.
“Vous parlez français?” he demanded.
“Parfaitement,” Morgan confessed. “Now, get going, Battalion Commander. I’m sure Dr. Dunst can make his way to his quarters unescorted.”
That got her a spectacular eyebrow-raise and some muttering in French that she very carefully did not hear.
“Bien,” he finally agreed. “Good night, Captain.”
He saluted and left the room, leaving Morgan and Dunst alone with the now cleared table.
“I believe I just burned any chance of a reputation for subtlety with my Marine commander,” Morgan pointed out to the archeologist. “Do you know I managed to avoid speaking French to him for almost a whole year?”
Dunst was studying her with a gaze that sent a flush of warmth down Morgan’s spine.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because he was being a pompous French ass and it amused me,” she admitted. “I tolerate it because he’s good at his actual job and his Marines adore him. When they aren’t calling him even less polite things.”
The stewards had left the last wine bottle on the table. That had probably been intentional on someone’s part, and the half-full bottle produced two glasses of wine with ease.
“You weren’t hanging around to talk about Pierre Vichy,” Morgan said as she passed one to Dunst. She realized as she did so that she wasn’t sure if the scientist had the alcohol-control treatments any Navy officer got by default.
She shrugged mentally. He was a big boy and could make his own choices.
“No, I wanted to talk to you,” Dunst admitted, then laughed. “Not even about anything in specific, I have to admit. Just wanted a chance to talk.”
That was significantly less problematic than Morgan had expected—even if part of her had been hoping for an attempt at seduction, the smart part of her knew she’d have to shut Dunst down.
“Aboard this ship, I have to be very careful what I say and do,” Morgan warned him. “Even with the hyperfold com, we are out of communication with higher authority a lot of the time. When operating independently, I am the master of this ship. I can’t risk weakening that authority.”
“I figured something of the sort,” he admitted, his tone sad. “And I’m quite capable of being a good boy, Captain Casimir.”
“You can still call me Morgan, Rin,” she told him with a chuckle. “At least when we’re in private like this. And you’re still going to get those dates unless you find a new way to dig yourself into a hole over the next couple of weeks.”
“Good to know,” Dunst said with an answering chuckle. “I have spent at least as long on a dig site excavating and cleaning a single important artifact. My career requires patience.”
“Mine requires both patience and the ability to recognize when to act instantly and with unhesitating commitment,” Morgan said drily. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work well in personal life, especially when duty gets in the way.”
“Career can do much the same,” he agreed. “And that was before I agreed to become one of the Institute’s top experts. I don’t think I really understood just what I was signing on for when I took that role on.”
“Brain implants?” she guessed. Her files hadn’t given much detail on just what kind of cybernetics Dunst had, only that he had some and that any doctor treating him had to know that. There were extra files that would only be unlocked by a combination of Morgan’s and the ship’s doctor’s authorizations.
“Basically,” he admitted. “I know more about the Alava than any other human alive. I imagine there are people in the Core Powers who know more, but I spent three years obsessively studying everything we had before I went back into the field. The implant is additional memory, an augment rather than a replacement for what I already know.”
“I was surprised to learn we did any neural implanting,” Morgan admitted. “I know humanity’s twenty-first-century experiments…didn’t end well.”
At best, they’d proven impossible to control without self-hypnosis. At worse, they’d driven their recipients irretrievably insane.
“And then there’s the fate of the Alava,” Dunst agreed. “For me to access the files requires me to assume a specific physical position and basically self-hypnotize. That allows me to pull more detailed files that basically become part of my memory.”
He shrugged.
“It’s possible—and both easier and safer—for me to access the implant’s databases via my communicator or a portable computer,” he admitted. “That’s my usual method, honestly. But even in those circumstances, I have to engage in some mental frameworks to unlock the data.
“It’s as secure as it can be. It can’t be retrieved if I’m dead, and given how hard it is for me to access the data in the first place, I can’t imagine I can access it under duress.”
“Quite the setup,” Morgan murmured. “And here I just…know most of it.”
“You’re cleared for a lot of things, Morgan, but we’ve spoken about things you’re not on the list for,” Dunst said quietly. “Given that the Children seem to have access to some of the same data, I have to wonder where you learned it.”
That was a fascinating way to phrase the question without accusing Morgan of leaking it, she reflected. He clearly didn’t think she’d told the Children but was worried they had the same source as she did.
“Have you been told how we got the Precursor data we have?” Morgan asked.
“I’m not cleared for that,” Dunst said instantly. “The…shape of the data implies much of it came from the Mesharom, but not all. Officially, the archives I have access to are purely Imperial research, but I can tell that’s bullshit.”
“If you don’t know, I can’t tell you,” she said. That was an easy enough line to draw. “But to answer your question, I’m responsible for how we acquired much of that data. I know where it came from; I know a lot of what it says.
“Add to that that I was in the middle of the Taljzi Campaigns and saw multiple star systems the Precursors had turned into machines. I have a very good understanding of who and what the Precursors were.
> “I know how they died. I know what they did, and I know what level of neural implanting they had to allow for that to kill them. I’m not technically cleared for about half of that, but I’m the source for some of it.” Morgan shrugged.
“Which I guess means I’m cleared? I never asked; I was just told not to tell anyone what I knew unless they were explicitly cleared for it.”
She took a long sip of her wine and shook her head.
“And while this room is secure enough, we really shouldn’t go into more detail than that,” she told Dunst. “So, tell me, Rin, how does one end up one of the Imperium’s speciality subject experts?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Emergence.”
If someone dropped a pin on Defiance’s bridge, Morgan suspected it would have been stopped in midair by the tension before it was heard in the silence. The previous jaunt out of hyperspace to report that they were a cycle out from D-L-T-Three had been calm enough, but data from several light-years away wasn’t going to tell them anything.
“Portal locus confirmed; we are sixty-three light-minutes from K-Seven-Seven-D-L-T-Three,” El-Amin reported, his voice calm. “Holding position for further orders.”
“Nguyen, what do we see?” Morgan said.
They had some limited data on the physical geography from long-range scans from Kosha, but that data was almost two decades old due to the distance. They knew that D-L-T-Three was a large F-sequence star with fourteen planets, six of them gas giants and one in the habitable zone.
D-L-T-Three-Delta had a high chance of being a good candidate for human colonization, depending on its atmosphere and surface water. Before the current mess, it had been scheduled for a survey in around two long-cycles.
“I’m not detecting any obvious artificial structures or energy signatures,” Nguyen reported after a few seconds. “No megastructures, no secret colonies.”
“Would an inactive megastructure be easily discerned at this distance?” Dunst asked.
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 16
