Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  He wouldn’t want to go into combat against a comparable enemy, not yet, but he’d signed off on Washington’s crew being basically combat-ready, and they were now officially commissioning her.

  “Officers on deck, attention to orders,” he said loudly. His new XO, Thomas Warner, rose from the command chair and stood aside, allowing Andrew to approach and stand next to it. Andrew removed a single plain sheet of actual paper and unfolded it.

  “To Captain Andrew Lougheed, Duchy of Terra Militia.

  “Upon receipt of these orders, you are to report aboard hull DD-001 Washington, now approved for combat deployment, there to take upon yourself the duties of commanding officer of said warship.

  “Signed, Admiral Jean Villeneuve, under the authority of Duchess Annette Bond.”

  He folded the paper, put it back in his uniform jacket, and then put his hand on the arm of the command chair and met Warner’s eyes.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I assume command. Set Alpha Watch throughout the ship.”

  “Yes, sir!” Warner confirmed crisply.

  Alpha Watch would already be at their stations. Commissioning a ship that had been working up with different chunks of its crew for a month was a formality—she’d been fully functional when delivered; the only work they’d done on the ship was tell the computers to use English for communication.

  “Commander Warner,” he turned to his XO. “Are you aware of any issues that will prevent Washington from deploying immediately for search operations?”

  “No, sir,” Warner said crisply. If there’d been any problems, they’d probably have delayed the official commissioning, informal as it had been.

  “Lieutenant Arendse,” Andrew addressed his navigator.

  “Sir!” Farai Arendse responded crisply. She was a black woman with short dreadlocks and a perpetual smile on her face. She’d replaced his old navigator, who’d taken the offer of retirement with a generous pension.

  “Coordinates are downloaded to your console,” he told her. “Set your course as you please; take us up to full interface-drive velocity once we’re clear of the Terra planetary system.

  “Some friends of ours crawled into a hole in space,” he continued. “We need to crawl in with them and let them know it’s safe to come out.”

  #

  Even with Earth on the opposite side of its orbit from the location of BugWorks Station, crossing the roughly twenty-five light-minutes took Washington a little more than an hour. Even now, a year after Of Course had been upgraded with its interface drive, Andrew found the sustained velocity of the strange reactionless engine amazing.

  “There’s nothing at these coordinates, Captain,” his new tactical officer, Lieutenant Commander Vitya Maksimov reported, his English still noticeably accented from his native Russian. He was a clean-shaven, hawk-nosed man with dark eyes and hair. “There’s a few asteroids in nearby orbits, but nothing within about ten thousand klicks of the target coordinates.”

  “Any debris or old energy signatures?” Andrew asked, studying the hologram showing the space surrounding Washington.

  Maksimov studied his scanners for a few more moments.

  “Some,” he finally admitted, flashing highlights around several areas of space on the hologram. “One of the nearby asteroids was definitely flash-melted and refrozen inside the last year or so. I’ve got minor debris over here, but…”

  “But?” the Captain encouraged.

  “Nothing significant,” the Russian concluded. “I’d say someone set off a big bomb, but they didn’t actually blow up anything in particular.”

  Andrew nodded. That was basically what he’d been expecting.

  “All right. Lieutenant Arendse, please open a hyper portal.”

  “Yes, sir,” the junior officer replied, then paused. “What’s our destination, sir?”

  “No destination, Lieutenant,” Andrew told him with a smile. “Just take us into hyperspace.”

  His confusion was clear, but Arendse carried on without question. Twenty seconds later, exotic-matter arrays mounted on Washington’s hull flared to life, tearing a hole in reality that the destroyer slipped through with ease.

  Actual optical visibility in hyperspace was almost nonexistent. The only thing the scanners Washington or any other modern ship carried could pick up at a distance was the presence of a gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine.

  Inside about a light-second or so, however, light worked approximately the way it did in normal space. Things could be “seen” as normal.

  Including the big ring station, roughly a kilometer across, hanging less than fifty kilometers away in the gray void of hyperspace. Andrew’s familiar eye picked out the structures of BugWorks station, the yard slips where Tornado and her sisters—all scuttled to save them from the A!Tol—had been built, the artificial gravity generators, the docking ports.

  “Hail them, please,” he ordered.

  “You’re on.”

  “BugWorks Station, this is Captain Andrew Lougheed aboard the Duchy of Terra destroyer Washington. I’m told to pass on Elon Casimir’s regards and advise you, and I quote, ‘It’s time for the King in the Mountain to wake up.’”

  Andrew was relatively sure Washington’s shields could survive any weapons BugWorks had armed itself with—at least for long enough to get out of hyperspace, anyway—but he still found himself holding his breath after he sent the recognition phrase.

  “Incoming response; they’re opening a channel.”

  “Put them on screen,” Andrew ordered.

  “On screen” was habit. It also sounded better than “in the tank,” which was where the familiar face of Tais Fernandez, BugWorks Station’s senior administrator, appeared.

  “Andrew,” she greeted him. “I’ll admit, this isn’t how I expected to see you again, though I knew someone was going to have to show up sooner or later.”

  “You’ve been kept up to date?” Andrew asked.

  “To a point,” she agreed. “We’ve been following a fixed but irregular schedule for opening a portal and having shuttles drop in.” Fernandez shivered. “We’ve been trying to cycle people off the station, too. Living in hyperspace is…not good for the soul.”

  “My orders are to tow the station through hyperspace to Earth,” Andrew told her. “Are we going to have a problem?”

  “The station was towed out in realspace with rockets,” she pointed out. “She should hold up to being towed under interface drive—and it’ll be a shorter trip in hyperspace.”

  He chuckled.

  “That wasn’t quite my concern.”

  “If Elon gave you that code, it’s time for us to crawl out of our hole,” Fernandez replied. “And I, for one, cannot wait to get out of hyperspace and off this damn station, however short my vacation will have to be.

  “Somehow, I’m sure you have work for us.”

  #

  Knowing what Washington had been sent out to find, Annette had remained aboard Defense One after the commissioning, carrying out an overdue inspection of the new heart of Terra’s defenses.

  She’d read the specifications of the prefabricated defensive platforms the A!Tol had provided before returning to Earth. They were big, powerful stations, designed to form the central core of a constellation of defensive satellites.

  Earth didn’t have those satellites yet. They were on their way, but they took time to manufacture. Even more time to ship.

  The three platforms on their own could stand off a Kanzi battleship without too much difficulty. With the satellite constellation, they could stand off three or four.

  They weren’t likely to destroy those capital ships. The purpose was to stop an attacker from reaching Earth before the A!Tol Imperial Navy could reach Sol.

  In many ways, the still-incomplete starcom transmitter in low Earth orbit was as key a part of the defense as the space stations.

  “I’m impressed, Admiral,” she told Villeneuve, making sure her voice was loud enough to be heard by the s
taff in the command center. “Your people have taken to the new technology more effectively than I’d hoped.”

  “You brought back a solid cadre, Your Grace,” he replied. “Once you get used to taking your lessons from a sentient fungus, well, what’s a new computer operating system?”

  “Nonetheless, well done,” Annette declared. “If the Duchy’s Militia continues to grow in numbers and skill as it has, we have nothing to fear.”

  Right now, they were still mostly recruiting ex-UESF members. Once that pool ran dry, their growth in both numbers and skill would drop dramatically. That was a problem for a later day, however—and one that Karl Lebrand and Teddy Nash were already working on, with plans already in motion for academies, simulators, and recruitment campaigns.

  “Hyper portal!” a sensor tech suddenly announced. “I have a massive hyper portal at the twenty-million-kilometer mark.”

  “Charles, focus the sensors on the portal,” the station commander snapped, swinging away from shepherding the VIPs with admirable haste. She was an older woman, a former UESF battleship commander with harsh lines on her face and short-cropped gray hair.

  “Wen, send an alert to the other platforms and the warships,” she continued. “Everything in Earth orbit goes to full alert, my authority.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  Only after making sure the wheels were in motion to keep the planet safe did she finally glance back at Annette and Villeneuve.

  “Carry on, Captain,” Annette said mildly. “You’re doing fine.”

  “I have initial emergence,” the tech reported. “We’re also picking up a secondary mass and it’s a big one. They appear to be…attached?”

  “We have an IFF code on the lead vessel,” another tech said. “Sent ahead as soon as they emerged; it’s Washington and they have BugWorks Station in tow!”

  Annette let out a sigh of relief.

  “You didn’t trust Elon?” Villeneuve murmured.

  “There’s trusting someone, and then there’s actually seeing the damn thing that’s going to save us about twelve million tons of headache drop out of hyperspace,” she replied as the station completed its transition, collapsing the portal behind it.

  “With the station in tow, Washington is only making about point oh one cee,” the station’s crew reported. “She’ll have BugWorks in orbit in just under two hours, depending on her orbit.”

  “Your Grace, Admiral?” the Captain asked.

  “Tuck her in behind the moon, under the defensive shell, Captain,” Villeneuve ordered. “That station is the single most valuable asset in the Solar System after Earth. Let’s keep her safe.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Annette was about to remind Villeneuve to stand down the defensive fleet from full alert when the sensor tech who’d original picked up Washington’s emergence sat bolt upright, looking at his screens again.

  “We have another hyper portal!” he reported. “Twenty-two-million-kilometer mark, sixty-two degrees around the ecliptic from Washington. Unscheduled arrival!”

  #

  Chapter 19

  “That’s odd.”

  Captain Harriet Tanaka waited a few seconds for her tactical officer to clarify, then turned her command chair to study the red-furred amphibian.

  “What’s odd, Lesser Commander Vaza?” she asked.

  “I was tracking a blip on the edge of our hyperspace sensor range,” the Indiri Lesser Commander reported. “They were moving at the right speed and in the right place to be one of the destroyers we gave the new Duchy, so I wasn’t concerned.”

  “And?”

  “And then I picked up a hyper portal from inside the Sol system—and our stranger went dark. Killed his drive so fast that whoever entered hyper from Sol wouldn’t have picked him up.”

  “That is odd,” she agreed. “Do you have a vector on his last location?”

  “Yes, Captain. I’ve also got an odd signature from that hyper portal from Sol, too.”

  “What’s odd there?” she asked slowly.

  “I’m reading an interface-drive signature, but they’re only moving at about one percent of lightspeed.”

  “Odd,” Harriet echoed. Even the crude interface drive Earth had put together before the conquest could go from a standstill to point four cee in six seconds. She studied the map.

  “Take us after the stranger,” she ordered. Whatever Earth was up to wasn’t her problem, but if someone was buzzing the system…that was the Imperial Navy’s problem.

  “Let me know the instant he moves.”

  Hunter’s Horn had the most modern hyperspatial anomaly sensors the Imperial Navy could build. Unless Earth had somehow upgraded their destroyers’ sensors, the Militia wouldn’t know she was here—and if their ghost was a Kanzi, she’d still have a slight advantage.

  She planned on using it.

  #

  “Someone thinks he is being sneaky,” Sier observed.

  The Yin had joined them on the bridge as Harriet was bringing her cruiser to readiness. Still not full battle stations; she wasn’t sure if she was getting in a fight yet, but she was feeling suspicious.

  The object of the blue-feathered avian’s amusement was the ghost, who clearly had better sensors than the Duchy’s Militia did…if worse than Hunter’s Horn’s.

  The moment the hyper portal back into the system had closed, the stranger’s drive had come back up and they had shot toward Sol at half of lightspeed.

  “What do we do?” Vaza asked.

  “Our most likely case for our strange friend is another Kanzi destroyer, isn’t it?” Harriet asked.

  “Yes, Captain,” Sier confirmed.

  “Then I think we make clear to the kusottare that no matter what their First Priest says, Sol is Imperial territory,” she told her crew. The translator probably wasn’t up to Japanese curses, but she was pretty sure her officers got the meaning from context.

  “Take us to battle stations,” she ordered. “Intercept course, flank speed. Vaza, load the launchers, spin up the proton beams.

  “Let’s go hunting.”

  A klaxon rang through the ship, summoning Horn’s crew to combat stations. Given the mixed nature of her crew, Harriet found her teeth vibrating as the klaxon sounded—there was the sound she could hear but also others both too low and too high for human ears.

  It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

  The cruiser leapt forward with the grace and speed that always made Harriet love her ship just a little bit more, crew and ship alike responding to her hand like a well-forged sword.

  “If she’s Theocracy Navy, when will she see us?” she asked quietly.

  “Less than a thousandth-cycle,” Vaza reported. “If she’s a Clan ship, could be two or three. Either way, she’ll see us before we’re in missile range.”

  Missiles worked just fine in hyperspace. Energy weapons suffered the same limitation as visibility, only working within a light-second or so.

  The same range in hyperspace, of course, translated to real-world distances of light-weeks or light-months, depending on the local currents.

  “She sees us,” Vaza stated. “Good sensors, better than I was expecting. That’s not just a Theocracy ship, Captain—that’s a modern Theocracy ship.”

  “What is she doing?” Harriet demanded.

  “Heading for Sol, I think,” her tactical officer replied. “She’ll make her portal in four thousandth-cycles, give or take. Before our missiles can hit.”

  The Japanese Captain was doing her own math. They’d be seventy seconds, less than a thousandth-cycle, behind the Kanzi ship in emerging.

  “There’s not much he can do to Sol in seventy seconds,” she noted aloud.

  “No, Captain,” Sier agreed. “Unless he has somewhere to hide in that system, he’s ours for the taking.”

  #

  Hunter’s Horn leapt through the portal into Sol, the pursuit of the strange warship bringing them into the system several hours ahead of schedule.

 
Harriet waited patiently as her cruiser’s sensors drank in the light and other radiation bathing her hull, processing and synthesizing the vast amount of data into something the sentients aboard her bridge could understand.

  Even before that process completed, however, she realized she was in trouble. Horn had gone through the portal at battle stations with her shields up. It took less than a second for the sensors to collate the incoming radiation into useful data—and the shields were warning her they were under fire before that second passed.

  “Evasive maneuvers,” she snapped. “Clear the guns—get me a target!”

  “Shields are registering twenty-plus point seven five cee impacts,” Vaza reported as the ship dodged sideways. “Enemy vessel at five light-seconds; they must have fired into the portal on auto-seek mode.

  “That’s why there were so few hits,” the Indiri concluded as the CIC team finally resolved their prey. “That’s no destroyer, Captain.”

  Hunter’s Horn’s computers were immune to fear. They drew in the shape of a Kanzi attack cruiser—roughly fifteen percent larger and ten percent deadlier than Harriet’s command—without hesitation or mercy.

  “Maintain evasive maneuvers and open the distance,” she snapped. “Proton beams to defensive mode, as we’ve practiced. Get my missiles into space; make him blink.”

  Horn’s proton beams flashed out under Sier’s control as Vaza laid down missile fire. The attack cruiser had more launchers than the A!Tol ship, and they laid down a devastating stream of fire now that they had a solid target.

  “That first salvo hammered our shields,” Sier warned. “If we are lucky, we can reduce their salvos down to match ours with the beams, but they have heavier shields in the first place and they got in the first hit.

  “Our best option is to close to beam range and attempt to get the first hit.”