“So apologize,” Rogers instructed. “And get it sorted out.”
“I’ll…think about it,” he promised. “It sounds like a distraction for us both right now.”
“And again, that’s what—”
“I expect to see,” Rin cut her off as it hit him. He stared blankly at the wall. “I’ll think about it,” he promised again, “but right now, I need to talk to my team.”
“You have an answer?”
“It’s all in what we expect to see.”
“Kelly, I need you to put up a map of the stars in the probability cone as the Alava star projection had them,” Rin ordered as he barged back into the lab. He barely even registered Rogers coming in behind him and leaning against the doorframe as she watched the conversation.
“Doctor?”
“Do it, quickly,” he told her. The holographic star chart flashed into the air, multicolored icons in the orange cone marking the stars.
“Now, flag those locations in white,” Rin continued. “And overlay our current star chart, highlighted in blue.”
“Other than Target One, they should be the sa…”
“We knew they weren’t,” Rin told Lawrence after she trailed off. “It’s why Nguyen had problems with mapping the Alava star projection to current charts, because some stars were wrong and some were missing.”
There was a small green dot marking Defiance’s location, next to the white-highlighted icon for the star that had been Target One. There was no blue icon there. As they had now seen at close range, there was no star at all.
“There,” Lawrence said softly. “Another missing star. Six light-years from here, close to the edge of the probability cone.”
Rin walked around the hologram to study the star. They didn’t have details from the Alava projection as to what type of star any given icon represented.
“Why this one?” he asked aloud. “It’s not the closest, it’s not… Wait. Was it ever the closest?”
Lawrence dug into her computers.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “If the Lesser Commander’s calculations are correct—and I don’t see why they wouldn’t be—K-Seven-Seven-D-I-Four didn’t come closer until forty thousand years ago. If the Womb left before then, that would have been the closest star.”
“So, what would have been the closest stars to here when the Womb finished eating it?” Rin asked grimly.
The lab was deathly silent.
“That one,” Rogers said, stepping over to join him and pointing at a star. “It’s on our charts, at least, but look at it.”
Rin studied the icon. He wasn’t quite sure what Rogers was indicating, though. It was off position, he supposed, but even the best calculations were often off by a bit when talking about stars.
“Miz Lawrence, can you focus on this one?” Commander Rogers asked. “K-Seven-Seven-D-K-J-Nine.”
The entire display shifted.
“It’s just a little thing,” Lawrence said. “Energy levels are barely above white dwarf range.”
“That’s why no one has scouted it,” Rogers said. “It’s at least a light-year out of position, and our closest scan is from five light-years away. No one has paid a lot of attention to it.”
“It’s only ten light-years from Kosha,” Rin said quietly. “That’s closer than I want a sun-eating Alava creation to anything I care about.”
“It’s a white dwarf on scanners, but the spectrography is all wrong,” Rogers said. “Why did we never flag this?”
“Because we have one colony out here that only really exists to help conceal the investigation into the Alava ruins,” Rin admitted. “No one was paying attention to subdwarfs and white dwarfs when they were looking for Alava sites and potential colonies. We had dozens of main-sequence stars to look at; even astronomers didn’t have the time to look at oddities in something this small.”
“Well, this ‘small star’ looks like our answer to me, Dr. Dunst.”
“Because it’s not what we expect to see,” Rin said, echoing Rogers’s words back to her. “We need to brief Captain Casimir. I don’t think we’re going to learn anything from this far away.”
He didn’t know the math well enough to guess the flight time to the system they’d flagged, but he doubted it would be quick. Fifteen cycles to get all the way back to Kosha, and the Womb was two-thirds of the way back to their home base.
It wasn’t, at least, headed to Kosha.
Thank all that was holy for small mercies.
Chapter Forty-Four
“I have to admit, the concept of this thing having eaten two stars is somehow making me even more uncomfortable,” Nguyen said as Rogers and Dunst finished their briefing. “And our best guess for its location is a star that is out of place?”
“Unfortunately, it makes sense,” Rogers told the junior officer. “If it is hopping from star system to star system, it is, well, bringing its food with it.”
“My concern, Commander Rogers, is just how tough is a target that eats suns?” Morgan asked, looking at the star charts they’d been going over. “Is it even going to notice us peppering it with antimatter warheads?”
The twenty-gigaton warheads on her hyperspace missiles were probably the most powerful regular weapons Defiance had. Her point-eight-lightspeed interface-drive weapons had roughly a third of the impact energy of the big antimatter bombs.
“We simply don’t know,” Rogers admitted. “Dr. Dunst?”
“Commander Rogers has the essence of it,” the archeologist agreed. “It’s not an assessment I’ve ever had to do, but I would guess that the Womb is no tougher, structurally, than the Arjtal cloner. It’s just going to be bigger. We’re talking something gas giant–sized at least, attached to and manipulating a small star.”
At least. That was a terrifying phrase in this context.
“How big can it have grown?” Morgan asked softly. “Some idea of what we’re about to investigate would be useful.”
“It depends on the creature’s metabolism,” Dunst said. “No one is qualified to judge that. We’ve never had an intact living Alava biomechanism to examine. So far, we have yet to encounter one that didn’t require nuking for one reason or another.”
She swallowed a chuckle, allowing a smile to reach her face. She’d done a lot of said nuking, including using a hyperspace missile launcher’s hyper portal to deliver orbital bombardment munitions to the cloner.
Unfortunately, the cloner’s final fate had been inflicted by a Marine assault shuttle pilot ramming his craft into it. There’d been a lot of posthumous medals given out that day.
“This one has been alive and mobile for fifty thousand years,” Morgan noted. “It has eaten at least two star systems we know about. A mobile sun-eater, officers, represents a threat to the Imperium we cannot allow to stand.”
“It’s your ship, sir,” Rogers pointed out. “What are your orders?
“We do what every Captain has done since the dawn of time, Commander Rogers,” Morgan told them. “We steer to the sound of the guns. In this case, a dying star pulled onto a new course.
“It might not be our prey—but if it isn’t the Womb, then we have two things out here capable of bodily moving stars. Both hope and Occam’s razor lead me to the same target, people. Target Two.
“It is not Defiance’s role to engage and destroy the Womb,” she reminded everyone. “It is our job to locate the Womb, identify the Children’s base, and call in reinforcements. This is a situation better handled by the battleships Echelon Lord Davor has been promised than by one heavy cruiser.”
“If it’s the size of a gas giant, will even two battleships be enough?” Nguyen asked.
“That’s why we’re scouting it, Lesser Commander,” Morgan replied. “In fifty thousand years, the Womb has only moved thirty light-years. We can, if necessary, wait for more ships to be available.”
If the crisis on the Coreward border resolved peacefully, then the Imperium could easily deploy several squadrons of modern superbattles
hips. The HSMs of two lightly refitted battleships and a modern heavy cruiser might not take down the Womb.
If the HSMs of forty-eight or more modern superbattleships couldn’t, well, the Womb was slow and the Imperium still retained its arsenal of starkillers.
Most of Morgan’s officers had left the briefing room before she realized that Dunst was standing just inside the door, waiting. At that point, El-Amin and Rogers were the last two officers in the room—and the Martian officer took in the waiting professor and glanced back at Morgan.
Any commentary or conclusion on El-Amin’s part was overtaken by Rogers gently taking the man’s shoulder and guiding him out, firmly sealing the briefing room’s door behind them to leave Morgan and Dunst alone in the room.
“My First Sword has an agenda, doesn’t she?” Morgan asked drily as she glanced around the empty room. “Commander El-Amin might well have had something he needed to discuss with me regarding our course.”
“I can’t speak to Commander Rogers’s intent,” Dunst noted, spreading his hands wide in a shrug. “I was only intending to ask if you could make some time for me later.”
“It appears I have some time now, Dr. Dunst,” Morgan replied. She knew she should probably be angry at her XO—setting this up was arguably a minor violation of protocol, though hardly a significant sin by any standard—but she was mostly amused.
And pleased? She interrogated her own emotions as she waited for Rin Dunst to speak, and found herself smiling and raising a hand to forestall his saying anything.
“I am Defiance’s Captain,” she told him. “Inside this hull, I am not supposed to be wrong. All the Captain does is correct by definition in the eyes of her crew, to be judged on return to port by her superiors and peers.
“Based, presumably, on the reports of crew members who were not blind to her flaws, which renders the argument of blind obedience somewhat false, doesn’t it?” she continued. “But the fact remains that a Captain must present a front of infallibility.”
She gestured around the room.
“My crew have intentionally left us alone, and you, Dr. Dunst, are very aware of my fallibility, I think. I apologize for restricting you to quarters. While easily justified, we both know I did it for pettier reasons.”
“Thank you,” he said instantly, then paused. “I apologize for going over your head,” he said quietly. “I felt it was necessary. I still feel it was necessary, but I know it was a dangerous thing to do.”
“Yes,” Morgan told him flatly. “You could very easily have set up a fight between myself and my superiors that would have ended my career. Echelon Lord Davor, it seems, has a more delicate touch than others I’ve served under.”
She shook her head.
“I know far more about the Precursors than you think,” she said quietly. “I wanted to make sure that there was an expert on the scene and a backup expert at Kosha Station in case this scouting mission went wrong.”
“You know about the Alava, but your focus is on your job,” he replied, his voice equally soft. “The Alava are my life. You have access to the data, but you’re not an expert the way I am. You needed me.”
“I did,” she conceded. “We would have muddled through in the end without you, I think, but we were better off for having you. You still shouldn’t have gone over my head.”
“I had to,” he said. “I don’t know how much you know about the Alava, Morgan. From what I can tell, nobody out here does. That leads to some fascinating questions on my part, but it also means that to anyone other than you, you were charging off to investigate an Alava artifact without an Alava expert.
“I think you needed my expertise, yes, but I also think that you needed me along to help keep the secret of what you know about them and how.”
How much Morgan knew about the Precursors wasn’t a secret that would break the Imperium. If the wrong someone started poking at how she knew it, though… The Mesharom had retreated to their own territories, pulling back the fleets that had once watched the galaxy on their behalf. But faced with evidence that she had copied the data core of a Mesharom war sphere…
“I don’t think you even begin to understand the consequences of that secret coming out,” Morgan said quietly. The Imperium was quietly incorporating reverse-engineered Mesharom technology into its warships—that tech underpinned the powerful new shields that protected Defiance, for example—but it was still a slow and careful process.
Their modern ships could fight the outer Core Powers on a reasonably even basis, but even the Laians and Wendira feared the Mesharom.
“I’ll admit that was more Davor’s reasoning than mine,” Dunst admitted. “But I think it’s something you overlooked. I’m sorry I went over your head, but it had to be done.”
“And what, you expect me to forgive you and to carry on the path we’d started before?” Morgan demanded.
“I think both of us need to be focused on the Alava creature that eats suns,” the archeologist told her. “I think that your First Sword, at least, thought us being angry at each other was a distraction you couldn’t afford and wanted us to make up.”
Morgan snorted.
“I suspect the phrase that my faithful executive officer would use is actually kiss and make up,” she told Dunst. She sighed and shook her head, taking a seat in one of the chairs and gesturing for him to join her. Standing and staring at each other was starting to get old.
“You were right…enough…that I’m not really angry at you anymore,” she told him. “But you could have seriously hurt my career if you’d done that with a different flag officer.”
Dunst picked up the chair nearest her, turning it to face her and taking a seat in it. This close, she couldn’t help noticing how warm his eyes were.
“I know. Davor made that point very clear,” he admitted. “I didn’t know that then. I’d have argued harder with you if I had.”
“It wasn’t exactly a circumstance where I was going to listen very well,” she conceded. “You probably could have raised it again once I was back aboard ship, but I can be…stubborn.”
“So can I,” Dunst conceded. “I’m not expecting anything, Morgan. I wanted to make peace between us so that we can get the job done.”
She chuckled. She wasn’t even sure when he’d started using her first name again, but she hadn’t corrected him and she wasn’t going to now.
“I appreciate that,” she told him. “It helps, of course, that my First Sword has apparently gone fully shipper-on-deck. I trust her judgment—I have to, or commanding a starship just doesn’t work.”
“She seemed trustworthy to me,” Dunst admitted. “I doubt she’d hesitate for a second to knife me in the back and throw me out an airlock to protect the ship, though.”
“Interesting definition of trustworthy,” Morgan noted. “That’s usually the Captain’s definition of trustworthy for an XO.”
“She’ll protect her people above all else. Seems trustworthy to me,” he told her.
Morgan glanced up at the sealed briefing room door, then glanced back at the time.
“I have to go,” she finally conceded, a decision clicking into place as she did. “El-Amin will have his course plotted by now, and we need to get moving.”
“Of course,” Dunst agreed instantly. “Thank you for giving me the chance to apologize.”
“I have a price for it,” she told him, smiling slightly.
“Oh?” he said carefully.
“Captain’s mess, eighteenth twentieth-cycle, Dr. Dunst. Your attendance is required,” she told him.
They might not be able to make it work, but in a few days, they were going to be making a high-risk scouting pass at an entity that appeared to eat suns.
There was no time to let things dangle in the realm of possibility.
Chapter Forty-Five
“If you tell me that the star isn’t here, I’m going to get grouchy,” Morgan said. There was an undercurrent of humor to her tone, but it wasn’t pleasant humor.
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“Then get grouchy,” Nguyen told her. “It’s not here. But we didn’t expect it to be here, either, sir. We’re at the last location we have it flagged, which is based on a cursory star scan done as part of a survey five light-years away, two years ago.
“So, our data is seven years old, and we know the star is moving.”
“Well, I guess we know what direction it was going,” Morgan conceded as she looked at the hologram in the middle of the bridge. They were in the middle of nowhere, but logically, the Womb should be a few light-months away at most.
It had only traveled twenty-five light-years in fifty thousand years, after all. Less than a tenth of a percent of lightspeed on average, though it probably had stopped to eat the planets of the stars it had consumed.
Because that wasn’t a terrifying concept.
“Everything suggests that it should have been heading to the nearest star based on the positions maybe ten thousand years ago,” Nguyen noted. “That would put it on this line.”
An astrographic chart appeared on the main hologram, shrinking the standard tactical display. A white line appeared, from where the star should have been according to the Precursor charts and the expected target.
“And?” Morgan asked calmly.
“It’s not on that line,” Nguyen admitted. “We’re doing a broader scan. It can’t be that far away. I’d estimate around a light-month, maybe two. We know it was here seven years ago.”
Morgan knew it wouldn’t take long for them to locate it. Dim and distorted as Target Two appeared now, it was a star. Even if it was six times as far away as Nguyen estimated, they’d be able to locate it in short order.
“We’ve got it,” the tactical officer announced. “My god…Sir, I’m putting the course projection on screen.”
A new icon appeared on the astrographic chart, a red orb that glittered like an evil eye. A line stretched from that red orb, projected from the last known location to calculate both velocity and direction.
The line intersected another icon, nine and a half light-years from the icon’s current location. The icon was a highlighted star, with a stylized planet and a stylized space station next to it.
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 26
