Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2)

by Glynn Stewart

  “That said, if you see even a hint they know we’re here, we need to be gone. Keep your eyes open.”

  #

  The discovery of the Kanzi task force had driven every other concern out of Harriet and her bridge crew’s minds. An entire fleet was priority over anything else—they’d been chasing ghosts, and instead they’d found the knife about to stab the Imperium in the back.

  The alert that beeped out on Vaza’s console sounded echoingly loud in the silence of the bridge as they pored over the data on the warships. Harriet turned to it, forgetting for a moment just what that alert was supposed to be.

  “We found a stealth ship,” Vaza declared, staring at his screen, then dropping a hazy red sphere onto the holotank. “It’s definitely still here; trying to narrow down its location.” He paused.

  “Data is twenty-two thousandth-cycles old.”

  Twenty-eight minutes, Harriet reflected. If the ship was moving under interface drive, somehow invisible to her scanners that would detect both a ship’s heat radiation and an interface drive’s hyperspace signature, it could have closed as much as fifteen light-minutes in that time.

  “Where is it?” she demanded.

  “We have a twelve-light-second error on the location,” the Indiri replied, “but it was there.”

  Not even that far away. Five light-minutes. The stealth ship could be on top of them and they wouldn’t even know—the A!Tol Imperium had no idea what range a stealth screen would function at.

  “Stay on passive sensors,” she ordered. “Localize the signature if you can. Ides—start moving us back and prep for a low-profile hyper entry. The Fleet Lord needs to know what we’ve found.”

  “It’s all a mess of murky water,” Vaza told her. “I can narrow down the location, but I think it started moving toward us about when they would have seen our emergence.”

  “Chikushō,” she swore. “Ides, I need that escape portal now!”

  “Contact!” Vaza bellowed, and something swam out of the deeps of space, shimmering into existence like a desert mirage as the strange vessel dropped its stealth screen.

  The ship was less than a light-second away, inside suicide range if it carried any kind of weaponry, and for a moment, Harriet thought she and her crew were going to die.

  Instead, the dark green, egg-like ship, completely different from anything she’d seen before or in the A!Tol files, coasted to a zero-velocity rendezvous ten thousand kilometers from Hunter’s Horn and waited.

  “We…are receiving a communication,” Speaker Piditel, her coms officer, reported. “Imperial link protocols.”

  “I think our friend’s antics deserve a response,” Harriet said slowly. “Two-way link, in the tank.”

  The last thing Harriet was expecting to see on the other side of the radio channel was an A!Tol. The stealth ship was definitely not of Imperial or even Kanzi design, but…there she was.

  The tentacled alien stood in the middle of a gleaming white bridge with no other occupants. It was hard to be sure, but Harriet thought that the stranger was the single biggest A!Tol she’d ever seen.

  “Ah, a human,” the A!Tol said, her skin flashing red and blue with curious pleasure. “That does make things easier.”

  “This is Captain Tanaka of the Imperial warship Hunter’s Horn,” Harriet replied. “You just buzzed my ship in apparently hostile territory. Identify yourself or be fired upon!”

  “My name is Ki!Tana,” the massive alien replied. “Please don’t shoot at this ship; I can’t replace her and she is literally defenseless. The favor that got me a stealth screen didn’t stretch so far as to get me an armed ship.”

  Ki!Tana. The name sounded familiar, but the prefix wasn’t one she was familiar with.

  The shock the rest of her crew was staring at the tank with, however, suggested it was important.

  “This is hardly the place, Ki!Tana,” Harriet said slowly, “for a pleasant visit. Perhaps you should explain what you want?”

  “I am bound by contract to the Duchess of Terra,” Ki!Tana said. “In pursuit of that contract, I have been scouting these systems and discovered this fleet, much as you have.

  “I believe both Terra and the Imperium would be best served if we compared notes,” she continued. “If you are prepared to allow me to dock my ship with yours, I believe I can extend the stealth screen to cover both of our ships.”

  Harriet glanced at Sier, who looked back at her levelly—and sent a text message to her screen.

  She is Ki!Tol. She can be trusted. I think.

  “Very well,” Harriet told the alien. The strange little ship was barely a tenth of Horn’s size and could easily dock with her airlocks.

  “I will come aboard once I have docked,” Ki!Tana told her. “I look forward to meeting with you, Captain Tanaka.”

  #

  The channel dropped and Harriet turned to her XO again. Sier was staring at the holotank in silence, the blue-feathered Yin blinking slowly.

  “Commander,” she snapped. “Commander Sier.”

  Sier snapped his beak as he shook himself, finally returning to the moment.

  “My apologies, Captain,” he said. “I did not expect to ever meet a Ki!Tol in my life.”

  “I seem to recall that this Ki!Tana was working with Duchess Bond,” Harriet replied. “Beyond that, though, I’m not certain what a Ki!Tol even is.”

  Something that, from what she was recognizing as shock and awe on her bridge crew’s faces, everyone else on her bridge did know.

  Sier took a moment, marshaling his thoughts.

  “You know how female A!Tol die, correct?” he finally asked.

  “Suicide, usually,” Harriet said. A!Tol reproduction was a messy cycle that saw their young literally eat their way out of their mothers. They’d long ago mastered in vitro pregnancies, only to discover that their brains and bodies wouldn’t let them off that easily.

  “They all enter the birthing madness,” Sier confirmed. “Their bodies tell them they must breed or die…so, one way or another, they all die.”

  The concept of pregnancy being fatal was mind-boggling to Harriet. Her son’s birth had been one of the happiest moments of her life. She still wasn’t sure what A!Tol reproduction had to do with Ki!Tana, however.

  “Except the Ki!Tol,” Sier concluded. “Those who manage to survive the birthing madness find a new sanity on the other side. A Ki!Tol is almost unkillable, extremely old and…well, unquestionably insane.”

  Harriet looked at her executive officer, hoping he was joking. From the half-awed, half-terrified expressions of the rest of her bridge crew, however, he was not.

  “So, she’s an insane ancient matriarch with a ship the Imperium didn’t build…who works for the ruler of Terra?”

  “I don’t know how this contract works,” Sier admitted, “but Ki!Tol are often advisors or guides in A!Tol myth.” He paused. “History and myth both say about the same thing: they’re honest…but rarely straightforward.”

  Harriet shook her head.

  “Well, let’s go see what she wants, shall we?”

  #

  Hunter’s Horn had been built by the A!Tol and designed to easily handle members of any of almost thirty different species. Even though Ki!Tana was even larger than Harriet had thought, looming nearly three meters high on her locomotive tentacles, she easily fit through the main airlock.

  Alone.

  “Will any of your crew be escorting you?” Harriet asked the Ki!Tol politely, trying not to be intimidated by the alien’s size.

  Ki!Tana clicked her beak in laughter.

  “It’s a Mesharom scout ship, Captain Tanaka,” she replied. “The Mesharom don’t like each other very much, so a lot of their ships are designed for one sentient. The AI handles everything else.”

  “I see,” Harriet responded slowly. The Mesharom were one of the Core Powers, an old, very intelligent, very advanced species whose ships made even the Imperium’s look like toys.

  They were also four meters
long, had approximately eighty limbs, required six genders to reproduce, and were generally introverted to a level humanity would regard as insane. If they weren’t incredibly intelligent and long-lived, no one was certain they’d even have developed a civilization at all, let alone potentially the most advanced one in the galaxy.

  How had Ki!Tana acquired one of their ships was a question Harriet wasn’t sure she should ask.

  “I’ve had my crew prepare a meeting room,” she finally said. “Shall we, Captain Ki!Tana?”

  The A!Tol clacked her beak in laughter again.

  “As you wish, Captain Tanaka.”

  #

  Harriet was impressed with what her crew had pulled together on short notice. They’d found a proper A!Tol couch for the meeting room and even food Ki!Tana could eat that wasn’t Universal Protein.

  The Ki!Tol’s skin flashed bright red at the sight of the food.

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said reverently. “I’ve been living on UP bars for a long-cycle. Mesharom food processing facilities are…not useful for feeding A!Tol.”

  “How did you even end up with a Mesharom ship?” Harriet asked, unable to restrain her curiosity.

  “Someone owed me a favor,” Ki!Tana replied. “From the amount of help the Mesharom have given me over the years, I’m not sure I want to know what they owe me a favor for, but I got a ship out of it this time.”

  “And decided to come poke around the Kovius Zone of Sol?”

  “It might help understand the context, Captain, if I point out that Kovius is a Mesharom system,” the A!Tol told her. “Part of the reason I was given Darkest Depths was to keep an eye on Sol.

  “The Mesharom created the Kovius Treaty and it’s the Mesharom Frontier Fleet that will wreck the business of anyone who breaks it,” Ki!Tana concluded. “Darkest Depths is a Frontier Fleet ship on loan to me. I would be very surprised to discover that it does not have a starcom I wasn’t told about.”

  “Great,” Harriet said. “More aliens poking around.”

  “I also owe the Duchess of Terra some long-cycles of service,” the alien noted. “This seemed an opportunity to benefit many friends in one dive. I wasn’t expecting a Kanzi task fleet.”

  “I don’t think anyone was,” Harriet replied. “You said we should compare notes. I doubt we know anything you don’t.”

  “Perhaps not,” Ki!Tana agreed. “Except…I don’t know Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh’s current positions. I suspect you do.”

  “We’re over twenty cycles from Kimar,” Harriet pointed out. “These bastards can be at Sol in twelve.”

  She could meet the Fleet Lord at Centauri in about the same time frame, but that still left Sol in danger.

  “Darkest Depths has an…impressive set of sensors,” Ki!Tana told her. “Better than I thought were possible, actually. Thanks to those sensors, I now have better charts of this area of hyperspace than you or the Kanzi.”

  That sounded…promising.

  “And?”

  “There is a current nearby. Not on a direct course for Sol, but one that would cut entire cycles off of your trip.”

  Hyperspace did not correlate to real space at a consistent rate. Any given section of hyperspace could be compressed at anything from ten to one to ten thousand to one. Sections of the latter tended to be in strips that could be used to bypass chunks of space with blistering speed—currents.

  Even the A!Tol didn’t have sensors that could detect that correlation. The only thing their charts really recorded was how long it took to get from a given system to another system.

  “I can provide you with charts that will allow you to ride that current,” Ki!Tana told her. “You could reach Sol in nine cycles. Kimar in perhaps fourteen.”

  Harriet sighed.

  “The Fleet Lord has a forward position at Alpha Centauri,” she admitted. “If I can reach there in nine cycles…”

  “The current will bring his ships back here almost as quickly,” the Ki!Tol told her. “I can remain here, Captain, and keep an eye on our blue-furred friends. If they leave, I can beat them to Sol by at least three cycles. Four, if their charts are as bad as I suspect they are.”

  “Why would you care?” Harriet asked. “What’s Earth to you?”

  “Nothing,” Ki!Tana agreed cheerfully. “But Dan!Annette Bond? She’s a friend. And the Mesharom asked me to keep an eye on your species, Captain.”

  A!Tol wore their emotions on their skin. Harriet didn’t know if Ki!Tol were different, but the alien’s enthusiasm at the food suggested otherwise. There was no deception in Ki!Tana’s coloring or body language.

  She seemed to truly be trying to help.

  “I’m guessing the stealth ship that’s been confusing our patrols was you?” she finally asked.

  “The Imperium and I have a turbulent relationship, Captain,” Ki!Tana told her. “I cannot be around males of my species, which makes interacting with my race’s military…difficult. It was easier to avoid contact until I needed you.”

  “To be your courier,” Harriet replied.

  “Yes,” the alien agreed. “And to help save your species from slavery, Captain Tanaka.”

  “You are assuming Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh will act.”

  Ki!Tana’s beak clacked together in laughter.

  “You have met our Empress’s brood-sister’s child, haven’t you?”

  #

  Chapter 48

  Imperial scanners were almost entirely incapable of judging gradients in hyperspace. Harriet and her crew were completely reliant on Ki!Tana’s charts until they finally drew close enough to Alpha Centauri for the system’s stars to register as gravity wells.

  “Exactly where they should be, Captain,” Ides told Harriet as they swept in toward the trio of markers showing Alpha Centauri’s two stars and the nearby Proxima Centauri. “These charts are a huge advantage,” the pale blue Tosumi told her. “Any navigator in the Imperial Navy would kill for sensors that could chart like this at a distance.”

  “If I was going to commit for Mesharom technology, I might aim for something more immediately useful than sensor tech,” Harriet admitted. “Missiles or beam weapons or something.”

  “Rumor has it the Mesharom use faster-than-light missiles,” Vaza told her. “Some form of miniaturized hyperdrive, presumably.”

  Harriet shivered, realizing once again that the Core Powers outstripped the A!Tol by as large a margin as the A!Tol Imperium outstripped Earth.

  “What’s our estimated arrival in Centauri?” she asked Ides.

  “Exactly on schedule,” he replied. “A little over a tenth-cycle.”

  Two and a half hours, give or take.

  “I’ll be in my office, finalizing the briefing for the Fleet Lord,” she told them. “Vaza has the bridge. Page me if anything comes up.”

  #

  Bursting into the Alpha Centauri system, Harriet couldn’t help but be struck by the similarities to the scene they’d left the Kanzi in. Unlike the Kanzi’s anchor, the world Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh’s squadron orbited was habitable, a cold but living world humanity had named Hope.

  Otherwise, the scene was similar. Four tankers, a refit ship and a dozen freighters orbited underneath the mobile shield of a full Imperial battle squadron and escorts. Sixteen battleships, escorted by thirty-two cruisers and an equal number of destroyers.

  The A!Tol capital ships were a bit larger than their Kanzi counterparts, hopefully newer, more powerful vessels.

  “Send a transmission to the flagship,” Harriet ordered. “I need to speak with the Fleet Lord immediately upon our arrival.” She paused, swallowed, then continued. “The code is Tsunami. I repeat, the request is to be transmitted under code Tsunami.”

  The A!Tol had become amphibious early in their development, but they had always remained a species intimately tied to the water and the ocean. The effect of a tsunami had generally been even more devastating to their settlements than they had been to islands like Harriet’s native Japan.

 
; A more equivalent code word in a human navy would have been “Armageddon.”

  Code word Tsunami meant an invasion was incoming.

  #

  The squadron and its escorts had become a gratifying hive of activity by the time Hunter’s Horn cut through a cleared path toward the replenishment ships. Small craft swarmed across every vessel as the warships made ready for deep space.

  “That is…gratifying,” Sier said quietly into Harriet’s ear.

  “What?” she asked. “I didn’t send our highest-priority code word expecting them to sit on their hands.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But you are the very first human ship commander in the Imperium. Many flag officers might have waited to review your proof before accepting that you’d used the code appropriately.”

  Harriet was struck for a moment by both how petty and how very human that kind of response would have been—and then smiled as she realized it hadn’t even occurred to her.

  At some point, she’d stopped being “the human officer” inside her own head and become simply the Captain of Hunter’s Horn. She’d trusted her superiors to do the right thing…and they had fulfilled that trust.

  “Trust begets trust, Commander,” she finally told Sier. “Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh understands that, I think.”

  “That’s why he keeps getting the mixed-race ships, I think,” the Yin replied thoughtfully. “I always wondered why a flag officer with his connections kept getting the ships the Navy regards as broken wings.”

  “I imagine because he asks for us, Commander Sier,” Harriet told him. “And it wouldn’t do for us to disappoint him, would it?”

  “No, Captain,” Sier agreed. “I’ll have your shuttle prepared.”

  #

  The A!Tol Imperial Navy battleship Shield of Innocents was, to Harriet’s understanding, the oldest, weakest unit in the Twenty-Fifth Battle Squadron. Logically, there was no reason why Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh, a close relative of the Empress, commanded from aboard her.