“What do we know about this ship, Speaker?” Rin asked. “I was hoping to get at the files, but my plan is to go through the stash of Alava artifacts I figured they had aboard.”
“I know her name: Child of the Great Mother,” Murtas told him. “I know her schematics and I have a message in the queue to dig through the builder’s files and see if we can track who bought her.
“I’m guessing the news there is going to suggest things I don’t want to know.”
“I’m…not sure I follow,” Rin admitted.
“This is a military ship, Doctor,” the Speaker told him. “Not a warship, but it’s got nearly warship-grade interface drives and warship-grade hyperspace emitters. She’s not a military courier with classified hyperspace tech, but she’s still packed with tech that’s not supposed to be sold to anyone other than the Imperial military.
“So, my five marks says the builder’s records are going to say she was built under order for the Navy or another government branch, everything entirely aboveboard. And somewhere between her being taken into the Imperium’s service and her showing up out here, she went astray—and that, Dr. Dunst, makes me wonder what the source of our little cult problem actually is.”
Rin wasn’t even sure how to respond to that.
“That makes no sense, Speaker,” he told the intelligence officer.
“My job is to be paranoid, Doctor,” Murtas replied. “I’m still assembling my data, and I’m starting to spot the holes. Some of those holes are just things I’m not cleared for. Like, I’m pretty damn certain both you and the Captain knew we’d be finding Precursor structures out here and that’s why the surveys have stretched so far in this direction.
“There are other bits like that, where I’m pretty sure everything’s legit, but I’m not cleared.” The man shrugged. “And then there’s holes that don’t make sense. A military-grade freighter in the hands of a religious cult that clearly knows more about Precursor bullshit out here than we do—but didn’t necessarily need to to get started.”
“You think someone in the Imperium sent them out here?” Rin asked.
“It’s a possibility. A ship like this would make the perfect base for a long-range covert survey expedition. If it went silent because of something, well…then we’d need real force, and that’s most easily deployed by pointing a major survey effort in this direction.”
“I wish I could believe that was as paranoid as it sounds,” the archeologist replied. “I like that option better than what I thought you were saying.”
Murtas snorted.
“Even I, Dr. Dunst, hesitate to consider the possibility that the Children are being actively managed by a conspiracy within our own government. I mean, our overlords can’t even lie worth shit.”
“That’s not actually true,” Rin admitted quietly. “They just have to focus on a different emotion when doing it. Determination to keep a secret works pretty well. They can’t sustain a long-term deception, but keeping a secret in the face of random questioning? The A!Tol can manage that.
“It’s nearly impossible to have corrupt A!Tol politicians, but it’s merely difficult for them to conceal a conspiracy.”
“And the difficult we do immediately,” Murtas replied, almost automatically. “That’s not helping my paranoia, Doctor.”
“Your paranoia is a professional benefit,” Rin said. “For the moment, though, I want your guess on that schematic we were talking about. If there was a stockpile of artifacts of historical and religious importance on this ship, where would you put it?”
“The big cargo bays wouldn’t be the right ones,” the analyst replied instantly. “Those are probably hauling the bioships. The ship has a few smaller, more heavily secured storage compartments. They’re where we’d put things like spare molycirc cores and similar high-value, low-cubage cargo.”
“Sounds about right. Can you flag them on my map? I’ll take my escort and check them out. We might find something useful there.”
“More than I’m finding here,” Murtas agreed. “I’m about to move on myself. We’ve got enough prisoners that we need to start processing them, and for my sins, that falls on Intelligence and the Marines.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“The good news is that our hyperfold coms are back up and our guns are working properly again,” Rogers reported to the gathering of the senior staff.
Defiance was now less than ten thousand kilometers from Child of the Great Mother, with shuttles flying back and forth every few minutes. Most of Vichy’s Marines were still aboard the captured freighter, but a number of Morgan’s Navy crew were over there now as well.
“We’ve sent in a full report to Kosha Station and requested information on Child,” Rogers continued. “She’s a military ship, so we’re hoping we can ID when she went missing.”
“Our best guess at this point is that she was taken by pirates some years ago,” Morgan noted. “There is a possibility that she was sent out here intentionally ten to twelve years ago on a covert pre-survey of the region.
“If so, we can assume that survey went very, very wrong,” she concluded drily. “As for Child herself, I dragged Commander Vichy back aboard to brief us. His efforts appear to be the only reason we retrieved her intact.”
She wasn’t going to admit just yet that the report had included a recommendation that the Battalion Commander be awarded one of the Imperium’s higher awards for valor. The French officer still annoyed her, and it hadn’t really been his job to make the crazed charge that had prevented Child from self-destructing, but he’d done it.
They’d lost eleven Marines KIA and another thirty wounded taking Child, but the antimatter core would have killed all of the hundred and eighty Imperial personnel on the ship. Along with the hundred and fifteen Children aboard as well, though Morgan cared somewhat less about them.
“Child of the Great Mother is currently lobotomized and powerless,” Vichy told Defiance’s officers. “We killed her power, but they wiped her computers. My understanding from Lesser Commander Liepins”—the Marine gestured to Defiance’s Chief Engineer—“is that both life support and the power systems run on local operating systems that appear to still be intact.
“Certainly, we have control of Child’s life support and have restored her atmosphere via the use of portable generators. Commander Liepins has a team aboard that is studying whether we can overwrite their software and security and bring at least the secondary power cores back online.”
“It’s looking promising,” the Latvian engineer interjected. “But from Speaker Murtas’s analysis, we have very little functional aboard the ship to feed power to.”
“We could restore her operating systems and take full control, but we’d risk losing everything in her files if we do so,” the Speaker, the most junior person in the room, told them all. “If at all possible, I’d like to bring her computer cores and servers to Kosha Station untouched. With the resources at the station, we should be able to do a full dump of the data without damaging it.
“Defiance’s computers simply don’t have the capacity to take a full copy of an entire starship’s computing network,” Murtas admitted. “We need the Station and the Navy base’s computers to do that.”
“Understood,” Morgan allowed. She didn’t like drawing on her stepmother’s experience, but thanks to Annette Bond, she knew the answer to this problem.
“In one memorable moment of my stepmother’s career, she used a hyper-capable survey ship as a substitute control center for a crippled freighter,” she reminded them all. “In that case, the entire bridge and power supply were gone. Of Course We’re Coming Back was providing power to the ship’s existing exotic matter emitters.
“If Child can provide her own power, we can load the hyperspace navigation software into one of our shuttles and wire it into the ship’s control systems. Then we should be able to use the shuttle to control and fly Child without risking the data we want to use.
“Liepins? Is it doable?”
The engineer was silent with a thoughtful look on his face.
“The biggest problem will be trying to insert the shuttle into the drive and hyperspace emitter control links,” he admitted. “We’ll need a team at Engineering managing the power core no matter what, but I think it should be doable.
“We are probably far safer having Defiance escort the freighter for the trip, though.”
“I was planning on it,” Morgan agreed. “Is there anything else in this system even worth us taking the time to study?”
“Dr. Dunst is still nose-deep in the pile of artifacts he found aboard Child,” Vichy reported. “But from the time he and I took to look at the surface installation, we don’t think there’s anything left even worth looking at. They nuked it very thoroughly.”
“Someone is very determined to keep their secrets,” Morgan noted. “Did our interrogation get us anything of value?”
Vichy and Murtas shared a look, and the Marine CO made a conceding gesture to the much more junior intelligence officer.
Murtas glanced around the table at the people he shared a room with. Five department heads, the First Sword, the Captain, and the Marine CO. Seven other officers, most of the people on the ship senior to him.
The ship’s surgeon didn’t sit on these meetings, and the Marine company commanders were busy aboard Child of the Great Mother.
Murtas had answered questions before but he seemed less ready for this particular bomb to get dropped on him. Morgan made sure to keep her face calm and inviting as she gestured for him to proceed.
An intelligence officer wasn’t likely to become a starship commander, but Speaker Murtas was the juvenile form of the kind of sentient whose intelligence would dictate the deployment of entire fleets. He’d need to be ready to share his conclusions with his seniors.
If building that readiness required Morgan to be more patient than she’d like, that was part of the job she’d taken when Empress A!Shall gave her a ship.
“Most of Child of the Great Mother’s senior crew is dead,” Murtas finally began. “They were the ones with the weapons and ready access to air masks and anti-stun armor. They fought with the same fanaticism we’ve seen out of what I now suspect might have been specially selected units on D-L-K-Six and Kosha Station.
“The handful of senior cult members we have in custody have been as hard to interrogate as anyone we’ve taken previously,” he continued. “The usual vague phrasings around the Mother and the Womb. A couple of threats around the Mother consuming light that isn’t hers, that kind of thing.”
He laid his hands on the table, levering himself to a straight-backed sitting position.
“It was in the interrogations of the more junior members of the crew that we finally began to find context for what those statements mean. I’ve been putting together pieces, but there are some key points I think we all need to know.
“First, the Womb is a place and a creature. Every one of our cultists has seen it and touched it. One used the phrase ‘I have walked on the skin of my God,’ which to me suggests a living Precursor structure of some size.
“Secondly, the Womb is a stellarvore.”
Unused to briefings he might be, Murtas knew to wait for his audience to process just what that word meant.
Sun-eater.
“You cannot be serious,” Rogers exclaimed.
“I am,” Murtas said levelly. Morgan made a mental checkmark. It might have taken the young Speaker—the man was still a few years shy of thirty—a few extra seconds to get going, but he’d found his footing.
“I am not certain of exactly what scale this entails,” he continued. “There are a number of different ways our prisoners described it, but it was quite clear in the aggregate that we are talking about a biological creature in close orbit of a star, drawing on both the heat energy of the star as well as its physical mass to sustain itself and to create the bioships we’ve encountered.
“The Children call the bioships Servants. Holy Servants, Grand Servants, Her Servants…” Murtas shrugged. “A lot of different descriptors but always the same core name. The Womb eats bits of stars and births the Servants. The bioships are not, so far as the cultists know, self-reproducing.”
“They’re also not much of a threat at this point,” Nguyen pointed out. “We can outmaneuver and outshoot them, even if they’re still hard to target. If one cruiser can take out a swarm of fifty or so, they’re no threat to a real fleet.”
“That’s when we control the battlefield,” Morgan countered. “We couldn’t do what we did here if a swarm of fifty of them was heading toward Kosha Station. To defend something, we’d have to stand and fight. And those things can demonstrably make a goddamn mess of our shields and armor.
“They’re slow and short-ranged, which means they make solid defensive assets and could make for a terrifying juggernaut if pointed at something we have to defend,” the Captain said grimly. “Murtas, do we have any idea what kind of numbers we’re looking at?”
“Large,” he said simply. “It’s clear that the limit on how many Servants they could deploy was a question of transport and feeding rather than supply. Similarly, it sounds like there are definitely larger Servants guarding the Womb itself.”
“Do we know where the Children are based?” Rogers asked. “Even if these Servants are dangerous, they are limited by their need to be transported through hyperspace by modern ships.”
“At the Womb itself,” Murtas said. “And no, I have not managed to identify the location of the Womb. None of the individuals who are providing us with useful information even know. If we have any prisoners that do know, they’re not telling us.”
“So, we now understand the scope of the threat,” Morgan said calmly. “The Womb and its Servants are a severe but contained danger on their own. It is the Children that make them a threat. If they’re based at the Womb, then we must locate it.
“The only answer I see lies in Child of the Great Mother’s files. It will take some time to refit Child to interface with one of our shuttles and enter hyperspace, so we will wait for that process to be complete and to receive new orders from Kosha Station.
“At last report, our reinforcements are at least twenty-one cycles away. Hopefully, by the time those squadrons arrive, we will have located the Womb and potentially have a better idea of what we’re looking at there.
“Defiance has handled swarms of dozens of these Servants,” Morgan concluded. “I have full faith in the ability of an entire squadron of modern warships to handle whatever this Womb has created to defend itself.”
And if it was a sun-eater, well, Defiance at least possessed a final answer to the problem.
“Commander Liepins, let’s get started on that refit. We should hear back from Kosha Station in the next few hours, and I want to be on our way as soon as possible.”
She smiled thinly.
“I think we’ve all seen more than enough of this particular star system.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The Children of the Stars had done everything in their power to protect the storage bay against intruders. The storage area had been designed as a secure vault even in the original schematics, a thirty-thousand-cubic-meter area with its own layer of armor and only two entrances.
The Children had added a triple lock to each of those entrances, requiring not only a physical key but a genetic sample and an authentication code.
Unfortunately for the Children, Child of the Great Mother was a military ship. Its systems had built-in overrides available to certain clearances and certain ranks. Vichy had had a long list of those codes.
The degree to which they’d almost all failed had been disconcerting. From the French Marine’s expression when he activated the override that did work, he wasn’t necessarily supposed to have it.
The vault had been a Cave of Wonders for Rin Dunst, though, and he knew he’d barely surfaced from it to sleep and eat, let alone shower or collate reports. The Children’s members had
clearly included people trained by the Imperial Archeology Institute, but their organization was intentionally obfuscated.
It had taken Rin an entire day just to work out the substitution key they were using on the IAIS categorization system. The sheer scale of their effort and research had begun to sink in after that.
This vault was clearly not the primary storage place for the Children. Many of the items Rin encountered had a flag that said they were duplicates, a second item where multiples had been found.
Many he recognized as having distinct stylings that marked them as from D-L-K-Six. Not only had the Children visited his dig site before him, but this ship had. Many of the secrets he’d been investigating had been discovered, labeled, and stuck on these shelves.
What he didn’t have was the research that could link things together. Still, there was an answer in the room. He knew it.
When he found the code telling him there was a star projection in the vault somewhere, he cheered aloud.
“Sir?” one of the Marines asked from the door. “Are you okay?”
“There’s a star projection here, Marine,” Rin told them. “We might just have some answers.”
“Uh. Yes, sir.”
He knew the Marines understood more than they were letting on, but they were also probably trying to avoid getting drafted as research assistants. Their job was to protect him as he tried to sort through multiple museums’ worth of Alava artifacts for his answers.
Going from the single reference to try and locate the star projection took him over thirty minutes. Part of the problem was that he was expecting, well, the suspended metallic orbs of an intact Alava star projection.
Instead, he found a box. He stared at it for at least a minute before he opened it and swore.
Every one of the orbs and their hanging threads and everything to set up the projection was in the box. Without the three-dimensional map that they were supposed to mimic, they were useless to him—and if he had that map, he wouldn’t have needed the projection.
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 20
