Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  “What shouldn’t, Commander?” Harriet asked. “Some degree of explanation, please?”

  “I’m picking up a radiation cloud ahead of us,” he replied. “Volatile gases, micrometeors, quite the mess…”

  “We can avoid it, I presume?” she asked Ides.

  “Captain, it is definitely a debris field,” the tactical officer concluded before Ides can answer. “A debris field exactly where one of our ships would have flown on a scouting patrol.”

  “Ah.” Harriet sighed. She hadn’t expected to find Shadowed Currents intact, but there was always some hope. “Take us in closer, Commander Ides. Keep us at a safe distance while Commander Vaza’s probes get a good look.

  “We want to know if this is Shadowed Currents—but keep our sensors peeled for other threats,” she added. “Whether this is Currents or not, someone got ambushed and I would prefer not to join them.”

  Despite everything she knew about stealth in space, she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching Hunter’s Horn.

  “Bringing the probes and sweeping the debris,” Vaza reported. The icons representing Horn’s scouting probes zoomed across the display, concentrating on the amorphous green blob the computers were drawing in to represent the debris field.

  The Indiri officer made a strange ribbiting sound, a noise that didn’t dispel the comparison between the damply furred alien and an Earth frog, as the data began pouring in.

  “Spectrography confirms one of ours,” he told Harriet. “Hard to get a mass reading, but from the radiation patterns, she took multiple proton beams at close range. Big proton beams, Captain.”

  “How big are we talking?”

  “Not a cruiser,” Vaza concluded. “Or at least not one of ours or any Kanzi cruiser we know of.”

  “A capital ship,” Harriet guessed, humming thoughtfully. “We have a black-box emergency data storage aboard, correct? A secured, hardened data package that would survive with our records no matter what?”

  “We do,” the Indiri confirmed. “If this was Shadowed Currents, they should have as well.” He paused, studying the debris. “Any beacon is out of power by now,” the Indiri noted. “We’ll have to sweep with the probes, check for larger pieces of debris.

  “It may take some time.”

  “It’s what we’re here for, Lesser Commander. So, let’s be about it.”

  #

  Twenty-seven hours.

  That was how long it took them to find the black box, and by the end, Harriet had to admit that it was basically a miracle they found it.

  Closer spectrographic analysis and examination of what intact debris they did find allowed them to confirm the slowly expanding debris cloud had been Shadowed Currents, destroyed some forty cycles earlier.

  Over five weeks had passed since a ship identical to Hunter’s Horn had been smashed to pieces, almost entirely vaporized by point-blank fire of unimaginable power.

  She’d returned to the bridge for the second time since they’d started the search and was about to call it off when Sier spotted it.

  “There!” the Yin snapped loudly, his beak clacking as he pointed at one of the screens showing the feeds from the probes. “Bring probe six back around and up six degrees.”

  The junior technician manning the station, one of the mushroom-like Frole, rapidly obeyed. The screen focused on the point Sier instructed, and the Yin studied it more closely as Harriet came over to join them.

  “Up another degree, magnify sixteen times,” he ordered. The screen zoomed in and Harriet spotted it too. A cloud of debris, more intact than most of the pieces they’d seen of the cruiser, and in the middle of it, a black sphere.

  “That’s the armored storage,” Sier concluded. “Can the probe scoop it up?”

  “Not a primary function, but it has some collectors,” the tech replied. The screen shifted as the probe closed with the debris cloud, moving at a crawl by the standards of an interface-drive craft as it nudged its way through the debris, opened a vent, and neatly grabbed the sphere.

  “Bring it aboard immediately,” Harriet ordered. “We need to know what happened here.”

  #

  “The hardened storage’s data is materially intact,” Sier reported as Harriet gathered her senior officers in Horn’s main briefing room, the main holographic tank in the room showing the system around them.

  “It reports Shadowed Currents’ exact time of death as forty point six seven cycles ago,” he noted. “I’ve set the sensor logs to start one twentieth-cycle before that and proceed at five times speed.”

  Harriet realized that the tank was showing the system forty days earlier, shortly before Shadowed Currents’ death. The cruiser in the middle of the display wasn’t Hunter’s Horn but her now-dead sister ship.

  The image started moving, Currents following much the same patrol course that Horn had been on. There was no sign of problems, nothing. The system showed just as empty in the sensor logs as it did today.

  “Accelerate the time,” Harriet ordered after a full minute of nothing. “Have the computers watch for anomalies and slow back to real time if it catches something.”

  They’d started a twentieth-cycle before Shadowed Currents’ death, but even at ten times speed, over six minutes passed with the cruiser maintaining a quiet, normal scouting patrol.

  Then the computer slowed the recording down as the cruiser passed an invisible line in space and a hyper portal ripped open directly beside her. Before anyone aboard Currents would even have been able to react, a massive shape flashed into existence and proton beams fired, ending the recording.

  From the beginning of the portal forming to Shadowed Currents’ death had been under ten seconds. There’d been no warning; no one had been summoned to surrender. They had just been murdered.

  “Shadowed Currents was the same class as Hunter’s Horn, correct?” Harriet asked.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Same crew complement?”

  “She was Indiri-crewed instead of mixed-race, but yes,” Sier confirmed. “Five hundred and eight sentients aboard.”

  Dead before most of them had even known they were attacked.

  “Show me the attacker,” she ordered. “No one aboard Currents would have had a chance to look at it, but they got a full sensor sweep of the bastard.”

  Sier manipulated the image, rolling time back and then freezing in the gap between the ship’s emerging and the proton beams’ firing. Shadowed Currents’ sensors had got a perfect view of the warship.

  It was an ugly thing, two kilometers long according to the computer and five hundred meters wide, a multi-ended spike in space forged of black steel.

  “Computer estimates the mass at nine point eight million tons,” Vaza reported, the Indiri’s mouth wide and dry in fear as he stared at the image. “We don’t have enough to be sure of class, Captain, but that is a Kanzi Theocracy Navy battleship.”

  “Well, then,” Harriet said slowly. “I think I need to get back to the bridge and talk to Ides.

  “We’re heading back to Kimar at maximum speed. If the Kanzi are actually bringing capital ships into this game, that changes the threat assessment—and the Fleet Lord needs to know.”

  If they were very lucky, they might even make it out of the system before they found out why she felt like someone was watching them.

  #

  Chapter 28

  Li Chin Zhao had done Annette proud again with the apartment. She’d had her suspicions about how badly he’d overshot her expectations when he’d sent her the bill. Her on-planet personal resources were significant—some of the funds from her privateering days had been quietly making their way to her, and she actually received a stipend from the Imperium entirely separate from the funds paid to the Duchy.

  It was more money than she thought she’d ever known what to do with, and the penthouse apartment that Zhao had picked out for her wiped out over eighty percent of her on-planet funds.

  It met her requirements. The buil
ding was barely a block from Wuxing Tower and apparently had a concealed underground connection to the skyscraper dating back to the construction of the condominium building by the same builder.

  There was an “empty” floor below the penthouse apartment that came with it. Anyone who tried to take the elevator to the penthouse who didn’t have the physical key or wasn’t registered in the building’s computer systems would be sent to that floor, which Wellesley had been making cooing noises over turning into a fortified barracks.

  The roof above was hardened and reinforced, supporting the requested shuttle landing pad with enough space to spare for the Ducal Guard to apparently permanently park a VTOL high-altitude interceptor.

  All of that, she’d asked for.

  What she hadn’t asked for was a one-hundred-and-sixtieth-floor apartment that took up the entire floor with double-height ceilings, vast expanses of reinforced-beyond-bulletproof windows, built-in plots for trees, hardwood floors and stone countertops, an indoor fountain…

  They’d looked over the security measures, and she’d left Wellesley behind as she took the elevator up the last floor. Now she stood in the lobby—because the apartment was grand enough that the entryway was definitely a lobby—of her new home.

  The elevator opened behind her again, and she glanced back to see Elon and Morgan Casimir come through the door, accompanied by a smiling Chinese woman in a charcoal pantsuit who was presumably Lovecraft’s replacement.

  “I see that Zhao has…impressive taste,” Elon noted. “I presume he arranged the furniture as well?”

  “That’s what I presume,” Annette admitted. “It’s not like I had any.”

  “Duchess Bond, this is Miss Mei Wan.” Elon gestured to the woman. “Morgan’s new nanny.

  “Miss Wan,” he continued, “Morgan and I will be staying with the Duchess whenever we’re in Hong Kong. Do you know if there’s a staff room?”

  “Zhao bought the place,” she pointed out. “At a guess, it has four.”

  Wan chuckled.

  “How about Morgan and I go look for rooms we like?” she asked in softly accented English.

  Morgan, however, broke free and dashed over to wrap herself around Annette’s waist.

  “Does this mean you’re finally going to be my mommy?” she asked.

  The spike of pure unadulterated panic that blasted through Annette at that question was almost enough for her not to return the little girl’s hug. She forced down that spike and ruffled Morgan’s hair with a careful smile, though.

  “It’s too early to say anything like that,” Elon said firmly. “Both Annette and I have a lot going on. No one wants to be making permanent decisions just yet.”

  “Oh. Okay,” Morgan replied sadly, giving Annette one last squeeze before skipping gaily off with Miss Wan toward the bedrooms.

  “You know,” Elon murmured, “a lot of people are going to start assuming she’s your heir pretty quickly. Even if we were to start trying to keep it quiet, I think half the gossip rags on the planet have already reported on us.”

  “Fuck them,” Annette replied. “I will not permit my private life to be dictated by the media, Elon. Right now, regardless of any other considerations, my heir has to be a legal adult—and someone the A!Tol would trust.”

  “Villeneuve, I presume,” her lover suggested.

  “Of course.” She laughed. “Don’t tell him, though. Right now, the only people on the planet who know that are me, Medit!, and apparently you, who can see right through me.”

  The next name on the list was Elon’s own. She wasn’t sure if he could see through her that well.

  “I like the apartment,” Elon said, looking around. “A quiet, simple little place to call your own.”

  Annette surveyed the space, which had cost roughly two hundred times as much as the last apartment she’d owned, and boggled at his description.

  His grin suggested that he was teasing her, and she waved a warning finger in his direction.

  “You know, Elon, the Imperium may ban the death penalty, but I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first Duchess to have someone quietly assassinated!”

  #

  Elon was saved from the wrath of Ducal assassins by the arrival of Li Chin Zhao, the obese man looking paler than normal and leaning on his bodyguard this morning.

  “Are you all right?” Annette asked as she saw him. He looked terrible.

  “I’ll live,” Zhao replied slowly, his voice more tired than usual. “Epileptic seizure. It’s a rare version. After millions in modern medicine, I still get an occasional episode.”

  “Are you up for this?” she asked, nodding down the street toward Wuxing Tower. According to the starcom transmission from Kimar, the Indiri would be arriving in Sol within the hour. The timing on the closing of her apartment was useful, allowing her to collect her negotiating team in advance.

  “My dear Duchess, I may be willing to show weakness to you, but I am certainly not willing to show it to our alien friends,” Zhao told her with a strained smile. “Who else will be joining us?”

  “James is downstairs, inspecting security. He’ll be joining us in a few minutes. Jean is in orbit, dealing with a personnel issue around the destroyer refit,” she replied. “He’ll join us before the meeting starts, but some of the Militia people on BugWorks needed a big brass hammer to knock sense into them.”

  “Let’s be fair: my people also needed sense knocked into them,” Elon pointed out. “They just believed me when I threatened to fire them by email.”

  “Some of our ex-UESF people still haven’t caught up to the new reality,” Annette agreed. “Though I doubt they’d have succeeded with any of this crap before, either.”

  “Likely not.” Elon glanced at Zhao. “Since I can’t imagine my daughter and my nanny are going to do less than explore every square inch of this place to ‘find themselves rooms,’ should we find seats while we go over our plans? Li looks like he needs one.”

  “Thank you,” the pale man replied.

  #

  Annette was still holding some of her cards close to her chest, which meant there wasn’t much left to discuss in advance of the meeting with the shipbuilding syndicate. The “prep meeting” rapidly turned into the three of them discussing everything else going on, while drinking coffee.

  The administrative details of running a world were such that “business” was inevitably the only topic when members of Annette’s Council gathered. Business varied from the perennial need to upgrade Africa’s education system to the currently recurring argument over whether the Ducal Guard, with its interface-drive assault shuttles, needed air-breathing hyperjet interceptors.

  Wellesley had mostly worked everyone around to agreeing that the expanding ground forces of the Duchy needed maximum capability in all of their operating zones when Annette’s communicator buzzed.

  A tap transferred the call to the hologram emitter she’d dropped on the glass-and-hardwood coffee table, popping up the image of Jean Villeneuve.

  “Your Grace,” he greeted her formally. “We have hyperspace emergence at the one point five light-minute mark. We have not received an announcement hail yet, but we are reading two freighters, what appears to be a private yacht, two Imperial destroyers and six courier ships.”

  “That sounds about right for our order, correct?” she asked him.

  “The freighters are large enough to carry the defensive constellation, and we had six fast couriers on order,” her Admiral confirmed. “It appears to be the Indiri contingent.”

  He paused as something pinged on his end.

  “We have received their transmissions,” he confirmed. “It’s the Indiri House representatives. They have requested an orbit and a flight plan for their people to meet with you.”

  “Send them to Wuxing Tower,” she ordered. “We’ll meet them on the roof. Make sure you’re there yourself.”

  “I’ll beat them down,” Villeneuve promised.

  “Well, Zhao, will they be impressed?” An
nette asked her treasurer. When she’d checked out the intended conference room a few days before, the view had been spectacular, but the room itself had still been undergoing renovation.

  “I can’t speak to the esthetic taste of giant frogs with red fur,” he pointed out. “I think we’ve done a fantastic job, and I’ve laid on dispersers to help keep our amphibious friends moist through the meeting.”

  “I guess we shall see. Shall we be about it, gentlemen?

  #

  Chapter 29

  Almost three quarters of a kilometer into the air, the rooftop shuttle pad of Wuxing Tower had its own weather, completely different from the surface below. Of course, that weather consistently tended toward “windy and cold,” but it was different.

  The designers had taken that into consideration, and five-meter-high walls surrounded the rooftop, sheltering the small garden and landing pad from the whipping winds and allowing the sun to warm up the chill air.

  The Tower’s sheer height and size meant it had to be allowed to flex in the wind, resulting in a degree of sway that was somewhat disconcerting for anyone standing on the roof and made landing on the pad difficult.

  With an interface-drive shuttle, however, the task was easier than it might have otherwise been. The pilot for the Indiri representatives brought the shuttle into a circling hover above the building, judging their timing for a few seconds, then dropped the spacecraft perfectly onto the landing pad.

  Annette stood off to one side with her Councilors and an “honor guard” under Wellesley’s direct command. Despite the mostly ceremonial nature of the six power-armored Ducal Guardsmen, she knew that the weapons they were carrying at port arms included at least one hyper-velocity missile launcher capable of shooting the shuttle down.

  Roughly a minute after the shuttle had settled to its final landing, a ramp lowered from the middle of the craft and the shipbuilders’ delegation started to exit.