This was a sentient who shared his knowledge. Al-Ka had clearly been briefed on much of the Imperium’s knowledge of the Alava—like Rin himself, they never referred to them as Precursors.
Al-Ka had known that what they’d encountered was a glorified machine, one built of flesh instead of steel, but still a machine. But they had touched it and all of their training in science and analysis had failed.
They had become a worshipper of a creation of the Alava. Rin had seen images of the Alava’s creations, and he could understand awe, but to worship this Womb as a god?
There was something Rin was missing. Something he didn’t understand—and if he didn’t understand it, he feared that he and the rest of Defiance’s crew were just as vulnerable to the fate that had overtaken Dr. Al-Ka and their companions.
Then he found the drawings. Al-Ka had organized their files in such a way that Rin had missed them until he’d read through the entire journal, but once he found them, he realized that Al-Ka had truly missed their calling.
The sketches were also only from the last hundred cycles, but they were spectacular. The first one Rin found was of the Alava base in D-L-T-Three. Six peaks, broken fragments of ancient meteor craters, rose above a valley filled with the distinctive shapes of Imperial prefabricated structures.
The artificial tones and structures on those peaks had been picked out in digital pencil, giving Rin a perfectly detailed view of a place that no longer existed. The peaks and central valley that Al-Ka had drawn over the course of several cycles were gone now, vanished in the nuclear fire of the Children’s security policy.
The level of detail and attention was awe-inspiring. Rin didn’t know how long it had taken Al-Ka to put together the drawing, but they’d obviously taken at least several cycles to sit outside their base in an environment suit and sketch.
The next sketch was a clearly quicker piece, of a female Yin whose pose and clothing left Rin wondering whether sterile actually meant no sex life for a Catatch.
The next few sketches were more to Rin’s interest. They were detailed work-ups of particular artifacts that Al-Ka had found.
And then Rin found it. The image in the drawing was an Alava artwork, the three-dimensional frescos the four-legged Precursor race liked to use for public imagery. Most likely, the original artwork had been vaporized with the base in D-L-T-Three, and the galaxy was worse off for it.
Al-Ka had titled the piece The Birth of a God. Rin didn’t know what the Alava had called it, but it showed a creature that looked like a human heart hanging in space while ships orbited around it. The original artist had managed to catch the multiple different streams being fed into the open valves of the heart-like creature.
One was clearly physical fuel of some kind, probably something equivalent to Universal Protein or a similar source of biomatter. Another was a gas or a liquid, probably hydrogen.
The third was clearly live plasma, being created and delivered by a large ship that looked like nothing so much as a fusion reactor with thrusters attached, even to Rin.
At the bottom of the image was the edge of a star, but most important was behind the focus of the artwork. The stars were picked out in detail in the back of the fresco, and Rin knew the Alava.
No Alava artist would have put those stars in unless they were exactly correct. If they were in the background of the creation of the Womb, then those stars had been the constellations seen from that place at that time.
And that meant that Al-Ka’s sketchbook had just undermined the security efforts of the entire cult of the Children of the Stars.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“We’ve got it,” Nguyen said in an exhausted tone. She was one of the two other people physically present in the room with Morgan—the other was Commander Rogers. Dunst and Murtas were linked by hologram from Child of the Great Mother, where Vichy had been pulled out of a training exercise down in Marine country and was only linked in by voice.
Presumably, he looked slightly less than perfect, and that would have been unacceptable.
“Define it, s’il vous plaît,” Vichy asked.
“We know where the Womb is,” Defiance’s tactical officer told them. “We got the star chart mapped about half a cycle ago, shortly after Dr. Dunst delivered a sketch of what appears to be the initial activation of the Womb.”
“The Alava had an obsession with stars, always,” the archeologist said. “No Alava would have put incorrect stars in the background of an image of that much importance.”
“And the constellations mapped to one of our target stars,” Nguyen agreed. “I don’t know what the Alava named it; we’re flagging it as Target One.”
“We’ll have to discuss this with Echelon Lord Davor once we arrive,” Morgan told her staff. “While our reinforcements should only be ten cycles away, we may want to move on this sooner rather than later to minimize the cult threat.”
“Target One’s current position is thirty-six light-years from Kosha,” Nguyen noted. “We don’t know as much about the hyperspace in that area as we’d like, but we’re looking at a minimum of fifteen cycles’ travel time by my calculation.”
Hyperspace was always variable. If someone worked out how to predict a flight time perfectly, they’d be rich beyond belief anywhere in the galaxy.
Even the flight from Earth to Alpha Centauri, a relatively short flight through low-density hyperspace, could vary by as much as twelve hours. That was before a navigator took into account the currents that could be found, some of which could run ten times as deep as even the densest regular regions of hyperspace.
The Imperium was experimenting with technology to increase the local density of hyperspace. Stolen from the Mesharom, it was only mounted on the most critical of couriers so far. Even with that, though, travel time was unpredictable.
“What’s Target One’s name in our records?” Rogers asked.
“That’s our current biggest headache,” Nguyen told them. “Target One doesn’t exist in our records. Part of what took so long to reconcile the Precursor map to our charts is that there are multiple stars that aren’t in our records.”
“Stars don’t go missing as a rule,” Murtas noted. “They called it a sun-eater. It can’t have literally been eating entire suns, can it?”
“It seems unlikely,” Morgan agreed. “But if it’s grown large enough to eclipse large chunks of its star, it might not be as visible as we would expect from any given distance.”
A terrifying thought all on its own. How big was this Womb?
“Our only real option is to scout where the stellar orbit calculations say Target One should be,” she continued. “Echelon Lord Davor will likely want someone to confirm the Womb is there before we start sending out entire squadrons of cruisers to deal with it.”
“If it’s big enough to eclipse a star at that kind of range, are cruisers going to be enough?” Dunst asked.
The conference was silent.
“We expended over half our munitions against the bioships in D-L-T-Three,” Morgan said quietly, “and I am still in possession of over a hundred twenty-gigaton antimatter warheads, Dr. Dunst.
“I am confident in the ability of a squadron of Imperial cruisers with modern hyperspace missiles to deliver sufficient firepower to obliterate anything short of a star itself.”
The question was whether that squadron could manage to reach its target to do so. Everything they’d seen suggested that there were large numbers of the Servants around the Womb, plus whatever warships or armed freighters the Children themselves still possessed.
The Children had always been willing to run so far. They’d have ships on hand, even if they’d probably fight at Target One. That was the home of their god, after all.
“We might get sent on a scouting jaunt before the main strike, but believe me, everyone, we will be going after Target One with a real strike force. The Children will be given a chance to negotiate—what they’ve learned could be of great value to the Imperium—but if they are d
etermined to be a threat, they will be destroyed.”
If nothing else, Murtas was right that the evidence pointed to Child of the Great Mother being sent out there under her original name as home to an Imperial survey project. That project had gone very wrong, but hopefully not so wrong that Morgan was going to have to blow away all of what appeared to be a crazy Imperial science team.
“We’re back in Kosha in a cycle. We’ll see what our next mission is then—we may not need repairs this time, but we definitely need more missiles!”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The A!Tol Imperium might be run by amphibious squids taller than any human and contain nearly thirty different species, but some rules were apparently universal. One of them was that militaries ran on “hurry up and wait,” which resulted in Morgan cooling her heels in the reception area near Echelon Lord Davor’s office.
She’d arrived in system to orders to report in person as soon as physically possible. Now she was waiting for the flag officer to be available after she had hurried to be there.
The young Rekiki officer behind the desk twitched in response to a chime that Morgan couldn’t hear. Her response was also behind the privacy screen, but she gestured Morgan over to her a moment later.
“The Echelon Lord sends her apologies for the delay,” the Speaker told her, “but she wants to show you First Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh’s message.”
Morgan swallowed hard, hoping she’d at least managed to conceal her surprise and concern from the junior officer. Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh was as A!Tol as the A!Tol came, a nephew or some equivalent—A!Tol family relationships were odd—of Empress A!Shall herself.
He was also a male A!Tol who had overcome his species’ long-standing sexism to rise to the pinnacle of his career, his position as First Fleet Lord marking him as the senior officer of the Imperial Navy.
He was also the fleet commander who’d first conquered Sol and then saved it from the Kanzi.
Morgan’s stepmother regarded Tan!Shallegh as a personal friend. Morgan most emphatically did not know him well enough to do the same.
“Thank you, Speaker. I presume the Echelon Lord hasn’t moved offices?”
“Double door at the end of the hall, Captain Casimir,” the Rekiki told her.
With a firm nod, Morgan set off down the corridor. She wasn’t even sure why the First Fleet Lord was speaking to Echelon Lord Davor, let alone why he wanted to speak to Morgan.
Dreading it would only make it worse, so she tapped the admittance button as soon as she reached the doors. They swung open automatically and she stepped into the office.
Nothing had changed in Davor’s space. The Ivida flag officer was seated behind her desk, looking at a holographic image of the tentacled A!Tol that had clearly been scaled to put Tan!Shallegh at eye level with Davor.
“Come in, Captain Casimir,” Davor ordered. “Take a seat.”
Morgan obeyed, watching as the hologram shifted so Tan!Shallegh was now more clearly visible to her than to Davor.
It wasn’t a live hologram—the Kosha System didn’t have a starcom transmitter. They could receive a live transmission from Tan!Shallegh, but their inability to reply would limit its use. The nearest starcom was sixty-five light-years away, which meant any answer they sent back would be sixty-five hours old by the time Tan!Shallegh saw it.
“I’ve reviewed the summary of your new information,” Davor told her. “Unfortunately, the circumstances have changed since you left D-L-T-Three.” She gestured at the hologram and started it again.
“A Laian war-dreadnought was jumped by powers unknown near the Wendira border,” Tan!Shallegh’s voice began, Morgan’s earbud translators automatically linking in to the holoprojector.
“The dreadnought and its escorts were destroyed, but not before they got a message out. Not enough to identify their attackers, but enough to warn the Republic that they were under attack.”
The A!Tol’s skin was a determined and concerned dark green.
“The Republic is assuming the attackers were Wendira and has summoned the Grand Swarm’s representatives to explain themselves. In the meantime, their entire fleet has gone on alert and they have activated our mutual defense treaty.”
The world was doing its best to fall out from underneath Morgan. It was the general assessment of the Imperial Navy that its most heavily upgraded ships—Defiance’s Armored Dream class and that generation of designs could go up against Core Power ships on an even basis.
But they only had a limited number of ships upgraded to that level. The previous generation had better weapons than most Core Powers—the A!Tol Imperium remained one of a very small group of powers in possession of a working hyperspace missile—but their shields and electronic warfare systems fell well short of those deployed by the Wendira Grand Swarm.
And the one advantage the Core Powers still unquestionably had over the A!Tol was production. They often had more ships and they also usually had bigger ships. If the Imperium was dragged into a war between Core Powers…
“Given the new alert levels along the Coreward frontier, we’ve drawn on a number of nodal deployments I’d rather not have drawn down. Most relevant to you, I’m afraid, is that I have halted the tide of your reinforcements.
“Division Lords Ibo and Assendorp have already received their updated orders. The majority of their ships are returning to the Wendira border. Captain Kelik’s destroyer echelon will continue to the Kosha System.”
Tan!Shallegh fluttered his tentacles.
“I know this news darkens the water,” he conceded. “I have seen the reports on what these Children of the Stars may have found, and they make me nervous. I cannot spare modern cruisers from the potential war, but not everything in the Navy has been upgraded sufficiently to be worthy of this fight.
“A division of battleships under Division Lord Bo-Ta will be on their way from the Lirip System within the next two cycles. Their ETA will be between fifteen and twenty-one cycles, I’m afraid, and they are older ships retrofitted with minimal hyperspace missile and hyperfold cannon armaments, but they are battleships with compressed-matter armor. We are trying to break free escorts from the Lirip System as well, but I wouldn’t expect more than an echelon of older cruisers and destroyers.”
The First Fleet Lord’s dark skin tones warned of the depth of the situation. Even disregarding the three-cycle transmission time, it was clear to Morgan there would be no argument.
“The situation you have uncovered represents a grave potential threat, but this ‘Womb’ has existed for fifty thousand years. It is unlikely to become an immediate threat tomorrow, and a potential war with the Wendira will be an existential threat to the Imperium.
“You will continue to receive standard briefings from the usual channels, Echelon Lord Davor,” Tan!Shallegh concluded. “But I wanted to advise you that I was stealing your reinforcements myself. I will be leaving A!To within the next cycle, taking two squadrons of superbattleships to a nodal base near the Wendira border.
“If we are lucky, the Wendira and the Laians will sort this out. Her Majesty has ambassadors in place to mediate the discussions, so I have some hope that we will avoid outright war. But that potential must be my focus.
“Smooth waters to you, Echelon Lord Davor.”
The holographic recording ended and Morgan slowly shook her head.
“Relying on the Wendira and the Laians to even talk to each other, let alone come to an agreement, is always a risky game,” she said quietly.
“As I understand the waters, the Laians bear some resemblance to the Wendira Worker caste,” Davor replied. “And the Wendira Royals are unimpressed by their lack of deference. They are, however, impressed by the swathe of dead stars between their territories.
“Fear of mutual annihilation should provide some incentive to their talks.”
“We can hope,” Morgan agreed. “Where does that leave us, Echelon Lord?”
“My plan, Captain Casimir, was to wait until our reinforcements
arrived and use them to scout the sixteen closest systems of these rogue Precursors,” Davor told her. “In the absence of those reinforcements, I greet the identification of a target system like the spring fish schools.”
“Defiance needs a few hours to restock and rearm, but we should be able to deploy within the cycle,” Morgan replied. “Sir, the scale of what we might be facing…it may be eclipsing the star it is feeding on.
“It isn’t small and it won’t be undefended.”
“I do not, Captain, expect you to assault the Womb,” Davor clarified. “I want you to confirm its presence. We will wait for Division Lord Bo-Ta to arrive with their battleships and move against it with real force.
“While Defiance alone carries as many hyperspace portals as Bo-Ta’s ships do combined, there is much to be said for the weight of a real capital ship. Those bioships will have a harder time penetrating the battleships’ shields, and we will retain the range and speed advantage.”
Not as much of one as Defiance had, since the battleships would have to close to interface-drive-missile range to do real damage. But still, Davor had a point. Morgan was definitely more willing to go in against the Womb with twenty million tons of capital ships than with three million tons of cruiser.
“The situation on arrival may prove to be more dangerous than we anticipate,” she noted. Despite the rudeness, she pulled up her communicator and checked something.
“Captain?” Davor said, her tone questioning.
“My apologies, sir,” Morgan told her boss. “I had to confirm that you were cleared for information sealed under the Final Dragon Protocol. You are, thankfully, and I am obliged to remind you that Defiance does carry Final Dragon–class strategic weapons.”
The office was deathly silent for at least ten seconds, to the point where Morgan registered that Ivida breathed e quietly compared to most species.
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 22
