Dunst was silent for a few moments too long, and Pierre finally worked out what was going on. Not all of it, he was sure, but there was definitely an extra layer of personal tension between Dunst and the Captain.
“I see no reason to impose on the Captain,” Dunst finally said. “She’s given or promised us all we need to do our work. We’re here as civilian advisors, Commander, to help where we can.
“We’re just bored, and I hoped to impose on you for conversation.”
Pierre laughed.
“Mais oui,” he replied. “You feed me, I bring wine, we talk into the night. It is very French.”
“Oui, le vin. D’où cela vient-il?” Lawrence asked in perfectly fluent French. She had a distinctly British accent to the language, but it was faint and almost adorable.
The woman now had Pierre’s undivided attention as he answered her question about the wine.
Chapter Forty-Two
“Portal open. Emergence in five. Four. Three. Two. One. Emergence.”
Defiance flashed through the portal she’d torn in reality at a quarter of the speed of light, every weapon system active and every scanner sweeping the space around them.
“Report,” Morgan ordered grimly after a moment.
“Nothing to report,” Nguyen replied, her voice sounding almost twisted. “There’s nothing here, Captain. Nothing.”
Morgan was about to counter that there was never truly nothing in a star system—and then the sensor sweeps updated the main hologram.
They weren’t in a star system.
“I’m guessing that we’re not looking at an eclipsed star at this point,” she finally said.
“No. There is no star here,” Morgan’s tactical officer replied. “No planets…every calculation says the star the Womb was built at should be here, but we’re in empty space.”
“Were the stars on that image wrong?” Morgan asked. She was irritated with Dunst still, but she doubted that he’d have been that far off. “Did they send us to the wrong place?”
“Even if the stars were incorrect, we still used them to identify a star in the Precursor charts,” Nguyen replied. “El-Amin? I’m assuming we’re in the right place?”
“I’m validating as best as I can,” the navigator replied. “It threw off our final arrival calculations when there wasn’t a mass here, but we’re certainly within a light-day or so of our intended destination.”
A sick silence fell over the bridge as everyone considered that.
“Did the sun nova?” Morgan asked.
“Even if the star novaed, there’d be a stellar remnant,” Nguyen replied. “Permission to deploy maximum VLA? We’re looking for everything at this point, and we need better resolution.”
“Granted. There’s nothing out here to stop us getting our drones back,” Morgan said.
A Very Large Array used hyperfold communicator–equipped drones to create a virtual telescope hundreds of thousands of kilometers across. The drones lacked some sensors their mothership had—they weren’t big enough for the widely dispersed receivers of a tachyon scanner—but the different receivers could dramatically expand Defiance’s eyes.
Dozens of robotic spacecraft spilled out from their launch bays and zipped away at seventy percent of lightspeed. It only took a few minutes for the VLA to take form.
Minutes Morgan spent trying to guess what had made a star disappear.
“Commander Rogers, while Nguyen gets the VLA online, I want you to look at the gravimetrics of the area,” she ordered. “We’re looking for sequential shock patterns.”
“You think someone fired a starkiller?” her First Sword asked. “We’re a long way out for that to have happened.”
“Or something equivalent,” Morgan replied. Even the Precursor experts she’d stuffed in a lab in the belly of her ship weren’t cleared to know about the source of the starkillers. An attempt to duplicate or activate a Precursor engine could have had messy results.
“Gravimetrics are clean,” Rogers reported after a couple of minutes. “I guessed. Even a starkiller leaves a stellar remnant. I’ve never heard of a star just vanishing.”
“What do the gravimetrics show?” Morgan asked. “Deep space? Or…”
“No. This was a star system,” Rogers confirmed. “Gravitational echoes remain. They’re the weirdest I’ve ever seen, but then I haven’t spent much time looking at the ghost of a star system before.”
A shiver ran down Morgan’s spine.
“I’ve seen dead stars,” she said quietly. “But this is something else. Nguyen?”
“There’s…scraps here,” the tactical officer said slowly. “Like someone blew the planets into pieces to better use them as raw materials.”
“That would fit Precursor methods,” Morgan noted. “They did like to carve up entire worlds for their cores.”
“This was rougher and left a lot more debris behind,” Nguyen concluded. “It looks like anything of real value was used up, but that left a lot of dust. None of it registered on our first scanner pass, but we’re picking it out now.
“Most of it’s just a heterogenous cloud, maybe half an Earth mass spread across a star system’s worth of space. But…”
The young Vietnamese woman trailed off.
“Lesser Commander?” Morgan demanded.
“It gives us something to hold a trace,” Nguyen answered. “And there’s a distortion pattern here—radiation, waste hydrogen, an eddy in the dust—that suggests something moved through the dust cloud after it had taken form.”
“Define ‘something,’ Commander; this mystery is making me nervous,” Morgan ordered.
“I don’t know, sir,” the tactical officer replied. “Just the fact that I can still pick it out after what looks like tens of thousands of years? It was big, sir. Made war-spheres look like toys.”
“Can we trace where it went?” Rogers asked.
“I can’t,” Nguyen admitted. “That’s not…that’s not something I’m trained to do. This trail probably predates some Core Powers. We need…”
“We need an archeologist,” Morgan concluded, sensing several meals of crow in her future. “Conveniently, we have three. Send everything you have down to Dr. Dunst’s lab and link his people in to the sensors.
“Full access, Commander Nguyen.” She swallowed a sigh. “Trust me, Dr. Dunst has the clearance for it.”
She rose from her seat and gestured Rogers over.
“Commander Rogers, you have the bridge,” she told her First Sword.
“Where are you going, sir?” her XO asked.
“To go brief Dr. Dunst on just what we’ve found and what we need from him,” Morgan replied.
The apology that was required wasn’t anybody else’s business.
“So, that’s what we have,” Morgan told the three archeologists in the temporary lab. Defiance had very few unused spaces—that was part of why evacuating the expedition from K77DLK-6 had been such a pain—but she did have redundant spaces. The “lab” was a secondary sensor control room.
It wasn’t an overly spacious room for its intended purpose, but it was intended for an operating crew of ten. Removing the seats had allowed several tables of additional equipment to be added, which had resulted in an even more cramped space.
“You already know the answer,” On Rai said bluntly. “We have assumed in our currents that the Womb was closer to a space station than anything else. This new evidence is that it is self-mobile.”
“That explains the path in the dust,” Morgan replied. “It doesn’t explain what happened to the star.”
“It does,” Dunst said. His voice was very small and tired-sounding. “The Womb took the star with it. Or had already completely consumed the star by that point. What you’re seeing isn’t dust as we think of it.
“That cloud, Captain Casimir, is a coprolite on a massive scale. Your target ate a star system. Presumably with Alava assistance at this stage, but the evidence is clear.”
“That is impossible,” she argued. The
sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach made all the counterargument she needed, though.
“The facts do not support it being impossible,” he reminded her. “We stand amidst the remains of an entire star system. No worlds. No star. Only debris.
“I agree with Lesser Commander Nguyen’s assessment that the Alava destroyed the worlds first,” he continued. “We have evidence that they occasionally used a system similar in some ways to our hyperspace missiles for demolition on a planetary scale.”
“I’ve seen planetary-scale plasma cutters,” Morgan said. “I haven’t seen that one, though I vaguely remember something?”
“Teleporting a multi-teraton antimatter charge into a planetary core was wasteful by Alava standards,” Dunst told her. “They did it when they were in a hurry. My guess would be that they didn’t care much what form of raw material the Womb was fed, only that it was fed.”
“So, they blew up entire planets and fed the wreckage into it?”
“Basically,” he agreed. “Then, at some point after the Alava died, the Womb ran out of food in this system. So, it left.”
“That implies both more intelligence and more flexibility than I was expecting of the Womb,” Morgan admitted. “That I might be facing an intelligent megastructure wasn’t something I’d expected.”
“It would explain quite a bit about the Children themselves, though,” the other woman in the room told her. Kelly Lawrence had been digging into the sensor data since Morgan had arrived, mostly ignoring the conversation.
“If they spoke with it, saw it, touched it…if this thing is half the size and power I’m starting to suspect, the argument that it is a god would be very compelling in those circumstances.”
“It is not a god, and it is potentially a serious threat,” Morgan said. Not, perhaps, as serious as a war between the Wendira and the Laians, but serious enough for this far into the middle of nowhere.
Even her worst-case scenarios couldn’t see any way more than Defiance, at worst, could be threatened. But she was considering the possibility of needing to reassess those scenarios.
“Have we learned anything we can work with?” Morgan continued.
“We can revise further if we keep working, but I’ve got an initial probability cone of where it might have gone,” Lawrence told them. She waved it up above a holoprojector on one of the tables.
The star chart was readily recognizable to Morgan, and the pale orange cone covered far too much of it. Including, to add to her nightmares, the Kosha System.
“Do we have anything to narrow it down?” she asked. “Do we even know how fast it’s going?”
“There’s nothing in this data to give us that,” Dunst said slowly. “But we e have a lot of information from the Children. I think we might even have copies or digital scans of most of the artifacts they used to find the Womb in the first place.”
“Keep at it,” Morgan instructed. “Whatever it takes. That cone”—she gestured at the hologram—“includes Kosha System. I’m not leaving this system until I either have a destination or know for sure that all of this was a waste of time.”
“We’ll find an answer, Captain,” Dunst assured her. “The Children found it and I’m certain we have more information than they did at this point.”
“I hope so,” she told him. “I really hope so.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Rin was actually surprised at the degree to which Casimir had changed her mind on the spot the moment she realized she was wrong. Suddenly, his team was no longer restricted to quarters and had access to anything they might need.
Most tellingly about the professionalism of Defiance’s crew and Captain, he supposed, was that the only real difference between restricted to quarters and access to anything you need was that he didn’t have an MP escorting him around the ship.
They’d already been providing him with everything he needed for his work equipment and data. If he’d needed the ability to pace while he thought, well, even he understood that was hard to provide while keeping his mobility restricted.
Now he was pacing the corridor outside their lab, trying and failing to divine just how the Children had managed to find a creature that had left its last known location forty-five thousand years earlier.
Between the bits of information they’d picked up in their whirlwind return to Kosha Station, he now knew a bit more about how Child of the Great Mother and her crew, the original Children, had ended up out there.
Both the ship—commissioned as Child of the Rising Storm—and the identified scientists and crew-beings had been Imperial, all right. All of the scientists had been either Archeology Institute members or Navy researchers. The ship had been built fifteen years before and served in the A!Tol’s survey corps.
Then, four years later, the files for every single identified individual and the ship itself simply vanished, lost beneath a security block that Rin’s authorizations and clearances hadn’t sufficed to open.
Presumably, people with that access were now going through the data under those seals to work out what had happened. Assuming they weren’t distracted by a potential war, anyway.
Rin knew enough to put together the pieces now. Freshly in possession of a bunch of information on the Alava, a covert Imperial project had been launched to investigate a region the A!Tol suspected the Mesharom hadn’t cleaned up yet.
A ship capable of long-range independent operation and a select team of scientists. They’d come out there, dug through K77DLK-6, and then gone on to Target One. Most likely, there’d been something at K77DLK-6 similar to the fresco he’d found at K77DLT-3.
So, the expedition that would become the Children had ended up right there, orbiting a dust cloud that had been a star system and wracking their brains to work out where the Alava creation they were hunting had gone.
He reached the end of the corridor and turned on his heel. The sight of someone coming up the corridor stopped him in his tracks, and he shook his head to clear his thoughts as he recognized the ship’s First Sword.
“Commander Rogers, how may I help you?” he asked. “If you’re hoping for answers, I don’t have any yet.”
“I suspect that if you had answers, I’d already know them,” she admitted. “I did want to talk with you, Doctor. Is this a bad time?”
“I’m just wearing holes in the flooring and my brain alike,” Rin told her. “What do you need?”
“The flooring is the same ceramic composite as the interior bulkheads,” the Commander said. “It takes more than a few hours of pacing to cause noticeable wear.”
“Give me a couple of days,” the archeologist replied. “Because I suspect I’ll wear through it before I do have any answers.”
“I probably don’t have any useful contributions,” Rogers said, leaning against the wall and crossing her arms. “I’m here for a completely different problem, one where you probably do have the answers and can help my ship get back to proper efficiency.”
That was sufficiently outside Rin’s expectations that he caught himself nearly staring at the Navy officer.
“All right, Commander, you’ve managed to get my attention,” he admitted with a chuckle. “Care to explain?”
“You. My Captain. This bullshit,” the XO replied with a gesture around them. “One of you is going to have to apologize. You’re both in the wrong and neither of you is really going to be working properly until you get it sorted out.”
“I’ll admit, Commander, I was regarding that as a ‘future-Rin’ problem,” he confessed. “Captain Casimir made it very clear that anything personal between us ceased the moment the two of us were aboard her ship—and I have no illusions about the amount of damage I did by going over her head, either.
“And the advantage of polyamory, as I understand it, is that dumping my ass doesn’t leave her without a support network,” Rin said. “Everyone involved is an adult, Commander Rogers.”
“And you’re fine and she’s fine and I bloody well know that chorus, Dr
. Dunst,” she said. “And I’m back to ‘You. My Captain. This bullshit.’”
“I’m lost.”
“It’s in what you expect to see, Doctor,” Rogers told him. “Each of you is determined to present a certain face to the world. She’s a starship captain. You’re a team leader, an expedition vice-director. You’re both familiar with authority and consequences of losing face.
“And you’re playing the same game of masks and expectations with each other. It’s in what you expect to see.”
“So, I expect to see Morgan being the stern mistress of her command and angry at me, so that’s what I see?” Rin asked.
“Exactly. And all of that is true and honest and all of it is a lie,” the XO said bluntly. “I’m her First Sword, her executive officer. It’s my job to know what she thinks, Dr. Dunst, and right now, she thinks she’s an idiot.
“She’s not, and she had reasons to bar you from the ship. She was wrong in the end, but that doesn’t negate those reasons, does it, Doctor?”
“No,” he admitted. “I’m still not seeing your point.”
“Talk to her, Doctor. Outside the meetings and the data transfers and the mission. She’s still allowed to be human; she’s just not allowed to show that to the crew.”
“Because it’s not what they expect to see?” Dunst asked.
“Exactly. My job means I need to see what’s there, not what I expect to be there. In this case, I can tell you that right now, my ship is going to run at ninety-eight percent when we finally find this thing.
“And that if you and my captain sort out this bullshit, that goes right back up to a hundred percent, where it belongs. Because while my captain is very good, she’s also still human.”
“And she’s also seeing what she expects to see?” Rin asked.
“Exactly. And she thinks you’re mad at her.”
He chuckled.
“I’m not,” he admitted. “I needed to be here, Commander. But I knew what that was going to do to any personal matters. She took it better than I expected.”
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 25
