Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  Mandela spread his hands wide, facing the camera even as he theoretically spoke to Annette.

  “We chose to give you time,” he admitted. “To see how much of what you promised was truth versus ideals or lies—to keep our options open to bring you to heel if you failed to keep your promises.”

  He sighed theatrically.

  “And then rogue elements within our ranks decided that the scorched-earth campaign was the only legitimate option. They murdered men and women trying to serve Earth as they always had. Murdered innocent bystanders—and took hostage the family members of those who wouldn’t stand with them.

  “Faced with betrayal, we turned to the only force that could save the families we swore to protect. You.”

  The crowd was silent now and Annette hoped that was a hopeful sign.

  “You treated with us with honor,” Mandela said loudly. “You stood with us against our own failures and you fulfilled our oaths for us.

  “To fight you now would be to dishonor ourselves and the sacred trust we were given. Humanity must go forward united, as one people.”

  Annette faced him squarely and bowed her head to the Admiral, both of them blinking against the noon sun.

  “Duchess Annette Bond, we offer the surrender of the Weber Network. Its personnel, resources, and data files are yours to do with as you choose.”

  “Your surrender is accepted,” she told him. “Your resources and data files will be absorbed into the Duchy to help support the defense of humanity—exactly as they were put aside to do. Your people will be recognized as UESF crew and officers and hence qualify for the same Imperial Pension extended to all of Earth’s military personnel.”

  Mercy was the word today. Anyone who still fought would be crushed, but most of the Weber Network would now quietly disappear, just as the literally unimaginable numbers of soldiers, airmen and seamen pensioned off after the invasion had.

  A reliable ability to take care of one’s family was a powerful shield against extremism.

  She faced the cameras herself, drawing strength from both Zhao and Villeneuve’s solid presences.

  “We are all human,” she told her people. “In victory, magnanimous. In peace, vigilant. In defeat, unified.

  “I promise you truth, honor, and justice. I don’t promise you’ll like any of these things,” Annette said with a chuckle, “but they are what you will get from me.

  “Today we stand united. We may stand under the shade of a taller tree, but we stand nonetheless. Do not forget this.

  “Thank you, Admiral Mandela.”

  He nodded to her, knowing as well as she did that her speech was no more addressed to him than his had been to her.

  Hopefully, their words had been heard—Earth needed peace at home if they were to survive what she’d been warned was coming.

  #

  Chapter 23

  Sier was waiting for Harriet as she strode back onto Hunter’s Horn’s bridge. Her XO looked at her quizzically, tilting his head and angling his beak in a gesture she hadn’t seen from the Yin before as he studied her.

  She knew perfectly well that she was glowing and any human in Sier’s position would have been able to guess her previous night’s activities without much effort. From his unusual reaction to her, the alien might not be having an easy a time of it…but he suspected something.

  “You are looking…well, Captain,” he finally said, rising from the command chair and gesturing her to it. “Your visit home agreed with you?”

  “It did,” she confirmed. “Not least, Commander, in the assurance that it remains home despite my fears.”

  “I had the privilege as a child to hear Fleet Lord Aris speak,” her executive officer said slowly. “He was very old for a Yin then—it was one of the last speeches he gave before his death, in fact— but he was the first of my species to ever enter the Imperial Navy.

  “He told us he thought he’d flown too wide a ravine to return home when he joined. That putting on the uniform of the new masters of our wings would bar him forever from our skies. Aris regarded the fact that he’d been able to come home—that he was invited to speak to flocks of younglings—as the greatest reward for his service.”

  “Your people saw the advantages of Imperial membership immediately, as I recall,” Harriet replied. “There wasn’t even a battle above Yin.”

  “Indeed,” Sier confirmed, his alien eyes lost in the hologram of the Sol system that filled the bridge. “And it was still ten long-cycles after he retired before Aris was invited home. You are luckier than you think, Captain.”

  Harriet hadn’t known that. She’d looked up Aris’s career, among others who’d been the first of their species in the Imperial Navy, and he’d been phenomenally successful. He’d commanded a super-battleship squadron during the last war against the Kanzi and was credited with turning the tide in several critical battles.

  He was a hero to the Imperium. She hadn’t realized just how long it had taken for him to go home after that.

  “What’s our status?” she finally asked, pushing aside those worries.

  “We’ve replaced the sensors and other externalities that were damaged on the hull, and rewired the damaged shield generators,” the Yin reported. “We are at seventy-six percent of our full missile load, but the Duchy has refilled our fuel tanks.

  “Sol StarCom had some further messages that arrived after our scheduled arrival time,” he continued. “I’ve relayed them to your office; I believe they may contain our new orders.”

  “Thank you, Sier,” she told him. “If you can hold down the fort here, I’ll go see what our lords and masters require.”

  He gave her a different quizzical look now, but then got the essence of the idiom.

  “I hold the command,” he said formally.

  #

  Harriet’s steward, a smaller Tosumi named Onda Sel Mir, had clearly spotted her Captain headed for the office attached to the bridge. No sooner had Harriet sat down at her desk, sighing in relief as the chair automatically contoured to her, than the green- and red-feathered steward entered behind her with a steaming pot of tea.

  “Thank you, Onda,” Harriet told her. Taking a sip of the tea as the steward left, she brought up the starcom messages that had been sent.

  While both starcom transmitters and receivers were a nightmare to build, starcom transmitters were locked to the location they were calibrated to. Receivers could be moved without losing function.

  Of course, they remained massive pieces of equipment, so only Navy capital ships mounted truly mobile receivers. The Imperium built a small but steady stream of prefabricated receivers that could be delivered by freighter and set up, however, and one of those had been delivered to Sol before the defending battleships withdrew.

  The messages waiting for Harriet included a number of the usual standard updates sent out to every ship on a regular basis, a few reports forwarded by Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh’s staff, and a video message from the Fleet Lord himself.

  She played the message.

  “Captain Tanaka,” Tan!Shallegh greeted her. His skin was a deep black-green, a shade she’d rarely seen on A!Tol. Her training suggested he was afraid but determined. Some news had clearly seriously shaken the Fleet Lord.

  “Since you left Kimar, we have confirmed two more ships as overdue and presumed lost,” he told her. “That brings the total to four, making the last few five-cycles one of the deadliest ‘peacetime’ periods in the last hundred long-cycles.

  “I’m sending out follow-up ships to make sure this is not simply a coincidental series of maintenance failures. At Sol, you are closest to where Shadowed Currents went missing. Captain Alles’s course and patrol pattern will be forwarded in a follow-up message by my staff.

  “You will need to follow Shadowed Currents’ patrol path and locate any evidence of her fate. You are not to engage any Kanzi forces. If at all possible, Captain, you are to avoid detection.

  “Above all else, you are not to risk the destruct
ion of your ship. We need to know what’s happening, Captain Tanaka, and more dead ships won’t answer that question.”

  Harriet shook her head at those instructions. Apparently, after her last patrol, the Fleet Lord thought she was going to go looking for fights.

  “Leave your report with the starcom receiver crew. We have a destroyer flying escort for an Indiri shipbuilder delegation that will arrive in Sol ten to fifteen cycles from today. They will deliver any communication needed back to Kimar.”

  “Good luck, Captain. Report back as soon as possible.”

  The recording ended and Harriet studied the directory for a long moment, then sighed.

  The Fleet Lord needed to know what had happened in Sol, and since her orders didn’t really give her any leeway, that meant she needed to borrow one of the Duchy’s ships.

  #

  Admiral Villeneuve took her call with gratifying alacrity, the old Admiral still in his dress uniform from the ceremony earlier in the day.

  “Captain Tanaka,” he greeted her cheerfully. “How may I assist you? I expected to see you heading out shortly to report to Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh.”

  “That was my intent, but I’ve been ordered out on a search-and-rescue sweep for a missing Imperial cruiser,” she told him. “While I don’t disagree with that mission, I agree that the Imperial Navy has to be informed of what happened here.

  “I need to borrow one of your ships to act as a courier, Admiral.”

  Villeneuve was silent for a moment, clearly considering.

  “The Duchy of Terra only has three warships at the moment, Captain,” he pointed out delicately. “We have no courier ships, though several are on order. I would need to send a destroyer to deliver your message.”

  “I know, Admiral, but I don’t believe any other ships will be visiting Sol in the near future that will allow the Fleet Lord to be informed in a timely fashion—and he needs to know about the attack on Sol.”

  She smiled humorlessly.

  “You could say it was in your own best interests to accommodate me, Admiral.”

  “I could,” he agreed. “I even would, Captain. Though I’m also very much looking forward to having those courier ships, I don’t see any alternative. I’ll talk to Captain Lougheed aboard Washington. Give me about half an hour to bring him up to speed, then forward your reports and any other information you need sent to Kimar to him.”

  “Thank you, Admiral,” Harriet told him. Technically, as an Imperial starship commander, she had the authority to order the Militia to comply, but she doubted that was ever a good idea—and especially not for her when dealing with Earth’s Militia.

  “We’re all on the same side, n’est-ce pas, Captain? The Duchess refuses to let me forget that.

  “If you need any assistance before heading out on your sweep, we’d be glad to provide it.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then shrugged.

  “We could use a missile restock if you have them to spare,” she admitted.

  “Captain Tanaka, we are a mere Militia,” Villeneuve told her. “Our missiles pale in comparison to those provided by the Imperium to its Navy.”

  “Admiral, I saw Tornado in action,” she replied. “Those were modern missiles.”

  “Tornado’s missiles are a limited stockpile,” he admitted. “Our production line isn’t scheduled to come online for a few more weeks. I can provide you with point seven cee missiles from the stocks we were given for the destroyers, but our supply of truly modern weapons is currently very limited.”

  “Those are better than nothing,” Harriet accepted after a moment. She hadn’t missed the implication that the Duchy of Terra had every intent of building modern missiles, something she didn’t think they’d been officially given the schematics for. The source of the schematics they clearly had, and the consequences of Sol having that capability, however, were above her pay grade.

  Thankfully.

  “I’ll speak to the crew on Defense One,” Villeneuve promised. “We’ll have a full reload ready for you in a few hours.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  #

  Chapter 24

  “A bit different from the last time we came out of hyperspace, isn’t it?” Warner asked Andrew as the hyper portal began to take shape in front of them.

  “Still expecting A!Tol battleships on the other side,” Washington’s Captain pointed out, but he knew exactly what his XO meant. Andrew was relaxed in the command chair, studying the holographic image of the portal, not on the edge of his seat watching a dozen automated freighters pass through ahead of them.

  “This time, we know they won’t shoot at us,” the other man replied. Warner had made that tense transition back into Sol, escorting thousands of rescued slaves, aboard Oaths of Secrecy instead of Of Course We’re Coming Back, but he’d been there nonetheless.

  “And we know we can take more than, oh, five hits,” Andrew noted. The two Terran-built scout ships had been armed by the time they’d come home, but they hadn’t acquired more than rudimentary shields or defenses.

  Washington was a destroyer, not a scout ship, and her shields could probably take a full salvo from even a battleship. She couldn’t take a second salvo, or survive even one pass with one of the Imperium’s super-battleships, but she was far more survivable than Andrew’s last command.

  “Portal active,” Arendse reported. “Normal space in…five seconds.”

  The three-hundred-meter-long, half-million-ton destroyer hit the portal at a gentle forty percent of lightspeed, passing her entire bulk through the tear in reality in a fraction of a second that barely registered to human senses beyond a momentary sense of discomfort.

  “Welcome to the Kimar system,” Andrew’s navigator reported.

  “We’re only the second Terran ship to ever visit this system,” Andrew told his bridge crew. “And Duchess Bond’s visit was…less congenial. Feast your eyes, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Kimar was a busy system with seven planets, one of them a gas giant. The fleet base was split between the fueling depots and logistics infrastructure built over the gas giant and the command station orbiting over the third planet, the only populated world in the system.

  “We’re here to speak with the Fleet Lord,” Andrew told his crew. “Any guesses?”

  “Fifty-fifty he’s either on the command station above Kimar Three or aboard his flagship with the fleet,” Warner replied. He studied the hologram plot and swallowed. “That is one hell of a fleet.”

  Andrew nodded in agreement as the numbers started filling in.

  Eight super-battleships, two kilometers long, a kilometer wide and fifteen million tons.

  Eight fast battleships, what Bond had designated battlecruisers after her duel with one during one of their pirate raids. Eight hundred meters long, three hundred meters wide, four million tons without compressed-matter armor.

  A full squadron, sixteen strong, of regular battleships. Ten-million-ton ships fifteen hundred meters long and eight hundred wide, the workhorses of the Imperial Navy’s capital fleet.

  The battleships caught his eye and he studied them more carefully for a moment.

  “Is it just me, or are the battleships reorganizing?” he asked quietly.

  Warner joined him in his study.

  “Looks like the battleship squadron, a squadron of logistic ships and about fifty of the lighter warships are pulled off to the side here, yeah,” the XO agreed. “Preparing to move out?”

  “That would my guess as well,” Andrew said. “Arendse, set your course to intercept that squadron and forward our IFF to the command station and the orbital fleet base.

  “I’m guessing that if half of Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh’s fleet is moving out, that’s where the squid is.”

  #

  Power-armored Imperial Marines were always intimidating, but there was an extra layer of terrifying, at least to Andrew Lougheed, to A!Tol Marines. The tentacled aliens touched something atavistic in the human brain, and wrappin
g every inch of their form in articulated plating didn’t help.

  Neither did the fact that A!Tol Marines were inevitably female and therefore a minimum of two and a half meters tall before you wrapped them in power armor.

  Three of the armored behemoths guided Andrew through the brightly lit, starkly clean corridors of the battleship toward Tan!Shallegh’s office. They spent the time politely asking him about Earth and, by the time they reached the Fleet Lord’s office, comparing Andrew’s home Rocky Mountains to several mountain ranges on A!To.

  “The Fleet Lord has split the currents for you,” the leader told him as they reached the office. “These are strong tides right now, but he will speak with you.”

  Complex and powerful as the translator technology Earth had inherited from the Imperium was, it still had issues with idiom. Andrew caught their meaning, however—Tan!Shallegh was very busy right now but had made time for the Terran Captain.

  “Thank you, Initiate,” he told the Marine as the door slid open to admit him.

  “Come in, Captain Lougheed,” Tan!Shallegh ordered. The A!Tol was smaller than the Marines, barely two meters tall and clad in a black leather harness bearing the insignia of his rank. “Welcome aboard Shield of Innocents.”

  The alien stood at the far end of the office, studying a massive holographic display of the local section of the Imperium.

  “Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh,” Andrew greeted, coming crisply to attention and saluting. “Captain Tanaka asked us to deliver her report as a matter of highest urgency.”

  Tan!Shallegh didn’t respond for a moment, still studying the map, then turned around, his black eyes unsettling as they met Andrew’s gaze. His skin was a faded green, but sparks of both blue and black flickered through as the flag officer approached him.

  Andrew wished he’d paid more attention to the briefings on what the skin colors meant.

  “What happened?” he asked simply. “Captain Tanaka was supposed to provide a briefing to Dan!Annette, a task that does not require a report.”