“Lesser Commander?” Morgan replied.
“We just got pulsed with one hell of a radio wave,” the coms officer told her. “Not a sensor pulse. A com transmission. It looks like a compressed data burst—I have it isolated on a secure server.”
“A data burst? From who?” Morgan asked.
“Unless I’m missing my numbers, from the Womb itself.”
Defiance’s Captain exhaled a long breath.
“Can you translate it without risking it trying to run code on our systems?” she asked.
“Easily. It appears to be an audio-only transmission, but we have security protocols for this,” Nystrom promised her.
“How long to translate it?”
“A minute or two at most,” Nystrom said.
“Do it. I’m guessing that’s from the Children, and I’m fascinated to hear what they have to say.”
The message wasn’t from the Children of the Stars.
“I. See. You.” The clearly artificial voice echoed around the bridge. Morgan had kept the message playback limited to there, but as she watched the impact ripple through her bridge crew, she began to think she should have limited it even more.
“You. Squirm. In. My. Space.” The words fell like tombstones into a shocked silence. It wasn’t translated, which raised disturbing questions to Morgan. Not only was the Womb able to talk to them, but it had known that Defiance had a human crew.
Or was it just that the main people it had dealt with had been human?
“You. Hurt. My. Spawn. You. Tear. My. Space. You. Stink. Of. Energy. You. Stink. Of. Food.”
“My god,” Rogers muttered. “It hasn’t encountered an MC unit before.”
The power plant that drove Defiance’s engines and weapons was a matter-conversion core, converting mass directly to energy in a process that Morgan only loosely understood.
“It’s seen antimatter, but not matter conversion. Fuck. We are a perfect target for it,” Nguyen said, finishing the First Sword’s thought.
“Come. To. Me. Join. Me. Yield. The. Food. You. Flesh. Mind. Not. Food. Yield. The. Food. You. Do. Not. Need. To. Die. Yield. The. Food.”
Nystrom cut off the playback.
“I suspect it continues along the same pattern for a while,” she said drily. “I assume we’re not handing the sun-eating supermonster our matter-conversion power core?”
“Not a chance in hell,” Morgan replied. “It’s already dangerous enough. I don’t want to think about what it could do using an MC core for additional power.”
“What the—?!” Nguyen suddenly snapped. “Sir! The sun-eater!”
“What?” Morgan’s attention snapped back to the main display and a chill ran down her spine. The Womb’s speed hadn’t changed, but its velocity vector had. Suddenly, it was moving at eighteen-point-five percent of lightspeed toward Defiance. It had flipped its vector one hundred and twenty degrees in a moment.
“That’s not possible with what we’ve seen of its maneuvers,” Morgan said grimly.
“I’m running the sensor history and I’ve got a blip of what looked like the mother of all interface drives,” Nguyen told her. “Wait…there it goes again.”
The sun-eater was now moving at twenty percent of lightspeed. No apparent acceleration.
“It has an interface drive?” Rogers demanded. “How? That thing is huge.”
“I’m not sure it is an interface drive as we understand it,” the tactical officer replied. “Liepins, does this scan data make any sense to you?”
“No…” the chief engineer replied on his dedicated channel. “What the hell am I looking at, Lesser Commander? This…this looks like an interface drive flaring and burning out. The entire life cycle of a missile in under a second, but on a scale…”
“On the scale required to create a device that would push a creature that contains a star,” Morgan said softly. Another pulse flashed across their sensors, and the Womb was now moving at twenty-one-point-five percent of lightspeed.
“It couldn’t build an interface-drive field that could encompass it. It could create an expendable push tug that uses a catastrophic field collapse to push itself. It’s basically hitting itself with a giant version of our missiles just to move.”
Twenty-four percent of lightspeed. The pulses were increasing in frequency and power, though not up to the original spike that had completely reversed the Womb’s velocity.
“We need to move and we need to move now,” Morgan ordered. “El-Amin, open a hyper portal. Get us out of here.”
“There is a two-solar-mass object heading toward us at over twenty percent of lightspeed,” her navigator said, his voice disturbingly calm. The calm that lay beyond terror. “I’m not even sure I can run the calculations to create a portal under those circumstances, sir. Certainly, it can’t be done quickly.”
“Then get us moving in realspace until you can,” Morgan snapped. “Commander Nguyen?”
“Sir!”
“Stand by all weapons batteries. If that thing can build a tug to push itself, then…”
“Multiple interface-drive contacts!” one of Nguyen’s senior NCOs suddenly barked. “I’m reading at least twelve battleship-sized interface-drive contacts, current velocity point-six-five c.”
Morgan nodded and bowed her head.
“Like Wendira fighter craft, they aren’t concerned about protecting the crew,” she said softly. “They can outpace with interface drives, and the Womb itself is screwing with our hyperspace portal.
“Estimated time to range?” she asked.
“That depends on whether they have anything we’re not expecting,” Nguyen admitted. “We’ll have HSM range on them in five minutes. If they’ve only got plasma guns upsized along with the rest of them and we turn to keep the range open, they won’t bring us into plasma range for ninety minutes after that.
“But if they’ve got any other surprises to go along with the interface drives, your guess is as good as mine.”
“El-Amin, keep the range as open as you can,” Morgan ordered. “Hold back on our sprint capability for now. I don’t know if the Servants know we have it, so let’s keep it as a surprise.”
She looked at the tactical plot again and swallowed a bitter sigh.
“Any sign of modern vessels or the Children at all?” she asked.
“If they’re there, we can’t see them behind eight thousand bioships,” Nguyen admitted. “Womb is now up to thirty percent of lightspeed, sir. I don’t know how fast it can get.”
Morgan checked a note on the communication systems. Nine-point-five light-years meant nine and a half hours’ hyperfold-transmission time. Any request for reinforcements would take ten hours to reach anyone. Another ten hours for even a message to get back.
At least three cycles for reinforcements, and Kosha Station had no reinforcements to send. They’d send telemetry uploads, but there was no help coming.
“El-Amin, how much distance do you need to jump us out?” she demanded.
“I don’t know, sir,” the navigator admitted. “We’re trying to run the numbers, but our calculations, our nav computers…none of our models are designed to handle mobile objects with multiple stellar masses. We could need as much as a light-day of clearance. And it’s still accelerating.”
It seemed unlikely that the Womb could match her ship’s sixty-percent cruising speed. It was almost certainly counting on its much faster progeny to bring her to heel—the big interface-drive Servants had passed the main swarm now, but the rest of the Servants were still accelerating after Morgan.
A light-day of clearance. Morgan was reasonably sure she could take out the big Servants chasing her. Interface drives made them more maneuverable, more able to avoid her hyperspace missiles, and their sheer size meant they could probably take a hit from the big antimatter warheads.
Maybe. Even a modern battleship could go down to a lucky HSM. While the weapons didn’t count on it, it was certainly a possibility for them to emerge inside their targets
.
“Assume our targets don’t know about HSMs and won’t start maneuvering until we hit them,” Morgan told Nguyen calmly. “Also assume they’re going to maneuver as much as we would facing an HSM-equipped ship as soon as we have hit them.
“Maximize your opening salvo, Commander. If we can punch half of those big bastards off the map in the first round, we’ve got a better chance of getting through this.”
There were answers to the situation. The easiest was to run. Push the sprint mode as long as she could, to the point of making her crew sick and crippling her ship, to get them out. The most straightforward was to fight, to hit the big Servants fast and hard and swing out on a different vector, hoping the Womb couldn’t completely change its velocity vector the same way again.
“Captain, Dr. Dunst is requesting to speak with you,” Nystrom told her quietly. “He says it’s important.”
Now was not the time for her not-quite-boyfriend to be trying to talk to her, Morgan knew— but she also knew that Rin Dunst had a good sense for what was important. And the last time he’d thought something was important and she hadn’t, he’d been right.
“Link him through,” she replied. “Let’s draw this out, people. This isn’t a fight we can win, so let’s make the Womb pay to bring it to us before we get the hell out of here.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
“Mo—Captain Casimir,” Dunst greeted her.
The correction had clearly come the moment the scientist had realized Morgan didn’t have the privacy screen up. She couldn’t really, not with an active fight about to descend on her ship.
“Dr. Dunst. What do you need?” she asked. “It’s not a great time.”
“I’m running over the data you’re getting,” he told her. “I’m the guy who isn’t tied up in the moment or trying to keep the ship alive, so that lets me look at the data in a way you can’t.”
“What did you find?”
“The interface drives on those ships? They’re not an installation,” Dunst said flatly. “The Children didn’t build and install a modern interface drive on them. They grew it themselves.
“The Womb adapts faster and more effectively than our worst nightmares. It’s not using tech built for it by the Children. It’s grown its own interface drives and it’s worked out how to get around the fact that the drive just can’t move its entire mass.”
“It’s a much bigger threat than we think,” Morgan said softly as what he was saying sank in. She’d been expecting decades—a lifetime, really—before the Womb threatened Kosha, but he was right. It was moving at over thirty percent of lightspeed now to chase her. Even if it failed to acquire Defiance’s matter-conversion core, it would reach Kosha in twenty years at most. Still time, but not enough time that it could be dismissed as a threat for later.
“You’re not following it all the way through, Captain,” Dunst said quickly. “The armor scales on the Servants? They’re a form of compressed matter. For us, compressed matter is an inversion of the process for making exotic matter.
“It needs exotic matter for interface drives, so the Womb has obviously made that leap.”
“Yes, I get that,” Morgan agreed. “Doctor, this is not the time to play teacher and see if I can follow along. We’re opening fire on the interface-equipped Servants in the next ninety seconds.”
“If the Womb can build interface drives, it can build a hyperdrive.”
The Captain’s seat beneath Morgan seemed to fall away beneath her. A hyperdrive. Of course. The two technologies were inextricably linked—her father had developed humanity’s interface drive from their hyperspace technology.
If the Womb could give its children interface drives, it could give them hyperdrives.
“That does increase the threat level of its progeny, yes,” she said grimly. “Thank you, Dr. Dunst.”
“Captain Casimir, even we could build a hyper portal big enough for that thing,” the xenoarcheologist reminded her. “It would take more exotic matter than an entire fleet of superbattleships, but we could do it.
“That’s what it’s conserving that sun for, Captain. That’s what it wants Defiance’s power core for. So it can create enough exotic matter to build a hyperdrive for itself. It’s not a question of if it will; it’s a question of when.”
“And then of how many stars it eats before we can gather a fleet big enough to stop it…and how big it gets from eating them,” Morgan finished. She stared at the creature on her screen and felt the weight of the galaxy settle on her shoulders.
“We need to call in heavy firepower,” Dunst told her. “This is more important than we thought it was. More important than the wars we’re watching. My god, Captain…the Alava wouldn’t have designed it to self-reproduce, but given enough mass and enough power, it probably can. Life finds a way, and the Womb is alive.”
“So, we have to kill it,” she said, very softly. “We can’t escape, Dr. Dunst. We’re trapped right now. Our hyperspace portal emitters can’t handle mobile objects of this magnitude in their vicinity. I can call for help, but I’m not sure I can escape.”
The channel was silent.
“Morgan,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper in the probably vain hope that no one else heard him speaking. “You have to destroy Defiance before letting it take her conversion core.”
“It won’t come to that,” Morgan told him, her voice very calm, very level. “Thank you, Dr. Dunst. Your analysis is invaluable and has been critical in the decision I have to make.
“The bridge is now being sealed under protocols you are not cleared for. The situation will be dealt with.”
The channel cut and Morgan felt every eye in the room focus on her.
“Computer,” she ordered, her voice still far calmer than felt remotely reasonable to her. “Seal the bridge under Final Dragon Protocols.”
All that has been created can be recreated, and history turns in cycles.
Over thirty years earlier, Morgan Casimir’s stepmother had earned humanity’s Duchy by destroying a dozen miniaturized starkillers built by a terrorist faction and intended to rekindle the war between the A!Tol and the Kanzi.
The Imperium now knew those weapons had been reverse-engineered from a stolen Mesharom weapon that not even the Core Powers had been brave enough to touch. With access to the Mesharom Archive, the A!Tol hadn’t needed to reverse-engineer the technology.
They’d simply built a small but growing number of exact duplicates of the Mesharom weapon, the Final Dragon–class strategic weapons. Each was approximately a third of the size of one of Morgan’s assault shuttles, and each was just as capable of inducing a near-instantaneous supernova as the regular destroyer-sized weapons.
“Everything you see and hear from now on is classified under the Final Dragon Protocols,” Morgan told her bridge crew. “If you breathe a word of what you are told or what we do now, you will face prosecution under Imperial law for violation of Dragon Protocol classifications.”
Her people knew what that meant. The Imperium didn’t believe in the death penalty, but part of that was that they had worse options. The Dragon Protocols protected secrets they needed to keep from the Core Powers.
The best case someone could hope for would be a lifetime imprisonment. The rarely deployed mind wipe was a distinct possibility.
Looking around, Morgan was certain her people understood.
“Commander Nguyen, I am releasing the performance specifications on our Omega Battery to your console,” she continued. “With Commander Rogers sealed out in Secondary Control, I require your cross-authentication for the deployment of strategic weaponry.”
A new chill ran through the bridge.
“Sir, this is… Sir.”
“This ship is equipped with three Mesharom-designed miniaturized starkiller weapons,” Morgan told her flatly. “I require your cross-authentication for their deployment. We will need to penetrate the Servant formation to a range of three light-minutes to deploy the weapons, but I believe th
at star still has sufficient mass that its nova will kill the Womb.”
The bridge was silent, but Nguyen nodded and tapped commands on her screen.
“I agree with your assessment of the range, sir,” she noted. “I authenticate authorization for the deployment of strategic weaponry.”
“Confirmed. Omega Battery is released to your control,” Morgan said clearly. She would have to defend this to an inquiry, probably one close enough to a court-martial as to make the distinction entirely academic.
But there was a reason that the Captain of a warship equipped with strategic weapons had the codes to fire them without anyone else’s authorization. She entered those codes now, watching as an entirely new section appeared on the tactical display, three icons flicking to green as the deadliest weapons in the galaxy confirmed they were active and ready for deployment.
“Lesser Commander El-Amin, on my command, we will set our course directly for the Womb and engage full sprint mode,” Morgan told her navigator. “Hopefully, the extra speed will confuse our targets sufficiently to get us close enough to deploy the starkillers.
“Lesser Commander Nguyen, you will program the targeting for the Final Dragon weapons yourself. Your staff will assume control of our primary weapons. All batteries are clear for fire at maximum rate until we are out of weapons.
“We need to punch a hole in, and we need to punch a hole out.”
“Sir, I suggest we arrange some kind of decoys to cover the starkillers’ approach,” Nguyen said. “Interface drive missiles can help, but the starkillers will stand out as larger targets.”
“Coordinate with Commander Liepins and Commander Vichy,” Morgan ordered. “They can be cleared for this if necessary, but we need to commandeer Commander Vichy’s shuttles.
“We get one salvo of three shots, people. Only one needs to connect, but we need to survive to fire, and at least one needs to get through.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
The battle joined as originally planned, the twelve massive Servants entering range of Defiance’s tachyon sensors and her hyperspace missiles simultaneously. Nguyen’s team took a few seconds to lock in the current course of targets that didn’t know they needed to be dodging, and then fired.
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 28
