Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Do you really think that our own designs are so worthless when the Navy has tasked us with upgrading every warship in the Imperium?”

  Kas!Val made a flicking gesture with one of her manipulator tentacles.

  “I warned them that such a program would make you arrogant,” she noted. “Tan!Shallegh’s strange attachment to your species appears to be risking the strategic stability of the Imperium. You should tread carefully, Duchess Bond.”

  “I remind you, Echelon Lord, that this is my star system.” Annette echoed what she’d told the young bodyguard. “I will not be threatened, Kas!Val. And if you will not work with my people, I will ask the Empress to send me someone who will.”

  That probably wouldn’t end Kas!Val’s career…but it would be a huge black mark when she came up for promotion to Squadron Lord. There were only twenty-eight species in the A!Tol Imperium—and only thirty Duchies. Annette Bond spoke for both one of the Duchies and one of the species.

  And the Empress had personally stated the depth of the debt the Imperium owed Terra for short-stopping the early stages of what could easily have been another war with the Kanzi. She would not appreciate an officer who got on Annette’s bad side.

  It wasn’t a lever she’d pull often, but Kas!Val wasn’t doing herself any favors—and her orange-yellow skin acquired whirls of purple and black. Stress and fear. The A!Tol was realizing she might have picked a bit more of a fight than she was ready for.

  “I did not intend to threaten,” she said carefully. “I am, of course, fully willing to work with your people and to assess these Manticores. It is necessary to note that the likelihood that these ships will meet Navy standards is low.”

  “I believe you underestimate them, and I suggest you keep an open mind,” Annette told her. “But first, I suggest you tell me exactly what you said to one of my best Captains that I’m going to need you to apologize for.”

  “I said noth—”

  Annette held up a hand.

  “I know Patience Van der Merwe,” she said flatly. “So, unless you want me to be powering up the starcom specifically to complain about you, I suggest you explain what you did—and I require that you apologize to her for it!”

  #

  One graceless apology, undercut by the tone of Kas!Val’s skin but as good as Annette was going to get, later, the Duchess of Terra stepped onto a raised platform against the observation deck’s window. Behind her, the two dark lumps of the Manticore-class battleships floated in space, waiting for the command to bring them online for their space trials.

  “By now, all of you know how I feel about speeches,” she told the gathered crowd. “Believe me, being pregnant has not improved my opinion of standing up, blathering on and on. But today…today is important.

  “Captain Van der Merwe, Captain Darzi, get up here,” Annette ordered.

  The two Captains could not have been a sharper contrast to Annette’s own American Midwest pale skin and blond braid. Van der Merwe was a tall black woman, broad-shouldered and powerfully built if not necessarily conventionally attractive. Captain Arash Darzi was ten centimeters shorter but only a few skin shades lighter, the Iranian officer wearing a white turban that matched the two Captains’ stark white dress uniforms perfectly.

  “These are your formal orders,” she told them, handing each Captain an archaic piece of parchment. “But we all know what they are: Captain Patience Van der Merwe, you will take command of Manticore in my service. Captain Arash Darzi, you will take command of Griffon.

  “Fail in this charge at your peril, et cetera, et cetera,” Annette said grimly. “These two ships represent a turning point for the Duchy, our first homebuilt capital ships.

  “They have every innovation built into them that we have sold the Imperium, and while they are smaller than the super-battleships that have anchored the Militia so far, they are and will always be special.

  “So, we entrust them to two of our finest Captains and we have faith in you to do us proud! Thank you, Captains.”

  Annette was relatively sure that Van der Merwe, at least, suspected that Villeneuve and Annette had tried to give one of the ships to Harold Rolfson, but Liberty’s CO had refused on the basis that he’d only been in command of the Thunderstorm for six months.

  There was more going on there, she suspected, but she’d only been a mediocre counselor even when she’d been a captain. As a Duchess, her job description required her to leave that to others.

  “Mister Fernandez?”

  Tais Fernandez, Nova Industries’ Chief of Construction, was a short and tanned Hispanic man. He’d once led the secret research facility that had developed Annette’s Tornado. Now he led Earth’s largest construction project.

  And if BugWorks still existed somewhere, well, that was a task for more junior, less visible men and women now. And it wasn’t something Annette would talk about in this public of a setting.

  “Everything is in order, Your Grace. Captains, the ships are yours,” he told them. “If Miss Casimir would do the honors?”

  A pair of big blue buttons marked a panel at the end of the dais, and Annette waved her stepdaughter forward. Memories of Tornado’s commissioning, five years earlier, flickered through her mind as the little girl stepped up and hit the right-hand button.

  A pneumatic cannon fired a bottle of champagne into space, glinting in the lights of the yard as it flashed across the fifty or so meters between it and Manticore. A zoomed-in image of the bottle overlaid several chunks of the window as it smashed home, scattering broken glass and golden bubbles across the battleship’s prow.

  Then her running lights flickered to life, a spiraling pattern of light and power as Manticore officially came alive. She still had six months of space trials ahead of her, but the lights marked her formal activation.

  The second button repeated the process for Griffon, another glittering bottle of champagne smashing across a dark gray compressed-matter hull.

  “There’s a lot of work left to do, Captains,” Annette reminded them. “But we also have a small party set up in your honor, and I suggest we be about it.”

  #

  Chapter 9

  Hermes Four had, according to her original schedule, been supposed to get James back to Sol in time for the launching ceremonies for the new battleships. Commander McPhail’s apologies aside, however, he was hardly surprised to be late.

  No matter how competent the captain—and Commander Mary McPhail was as confidently skilled as a courier skipper as she had been a shuttle pilot, with thankfully less opportunity to add to James’s gray hairs—the currents of hyperspace were not entirely predictable.

  A navigator could have a mostly predictable route if they had a chart of the local currents and avoided them…but it would be a very slow route. Most navigators took those charts and rode the currents instead, cutting as much as half or two thirds off of their travel time.

  The hyperspace currents around Sol and Alpha Centauri were well charted now, but that merely made travel safe and quick. It didn’t make it any more predictable.

  His understanding, of course, didn’t keep James from standing at the back of Hermes Four’s bridge, watching McPhail’s navigator prepare to open the hyper portal back into Sol. Generations of social conditioning and years of practice meant that he was almost as calm and steady as he appeared, but he dreaded the conversations he was about to have with his husband—who had known Harrison well before the man had left Earth—and his Duchess.

  “We’re on approach for the Raging Waters of Friendship Yards,” the navigator reported. “We have confirmed location on the system perimeter hyper buoys. Emergence in thirty seconds and counting.”

  A starship could detect an interface drive at a hyperspace distance easily equivalent to several light-months, but anything else had a far shorter distance. The solution the Imperium used for navigation in its core systems was to emplace thirty or so devices whose sole purpose was to have an interface drive up for pure location maintenance: hy
per buoys .

  They marked the point where it was safe to open a hyper portal. A good navigator would be able to tell that regardless, but they were a useful aid, so the Duchy had acquired them.

  “Portal opening.”

  The strange grayness of hyperspace “tore” open in front of Hermes Four as her exotic-matter arrays energized. The hole in space they opened glittered with natural light, the familiar yellow glow of James’s home sun.

  Even as the courier flashed through the portal, a quick but uncomfortable process, that familiar light allowed him to relax a bit. He relaxed more as he saw spread out before them the glittering lights of the massive yard complex that provided over eighty percent of the Duchy’s Imperial credit revenue.

  “We are on target,” McPhail told him. “We should have you to the main station in under five minutes.”

  The redheaded Commander shook her head.

  “Lot of metal out there, sir,” she continued, studying her repeater displays. “Tornado on one side with a pair of super-battleships for escorts, four Imperial cruisers and a battlewagon on the other. All playing nice so far.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything else,” he said. “Even our Militia ships are, technically, Imperial warships, after all.”

  “Don’t remind me,” McPhail replied dryly. “I accept the Duchess’s choice; doesn’t mean I like being a subject race.”

  James chuckled.

  “I’m English, Commander,” he replied. “Being a subject race is just the universe’s normal irony for us.”

  #

  Hermes Four edged toward the station and James found himself with an enviable view of the two battleships coming fully online. The last few shuttles made their way over to the starships, and they finally began to move.

  Both the new ships and the courier were going at a snail’s pace relative to the capabilities of their engines as they passed, their total speed barely passing a single percent of light. Hermes continued on her way toward the station and continued to slow down, though, and Manticore and Griffon began to speed up.

  By the time the courier finally docked, the two battleships had peaked at half of lightspeed and were well on their way to the outer system. Five percent of light faster than their Imperial equivalents, faster than any capital ship in the region except the Imperium’s “fast battleships” that were half their size.

  James wasn’t entirely aware of what trade-offs had been made to build a compressed-matter-armored battleship that could out-pace her contemporaries, only that trade-offs had been made.

  They were still damned impressive ships.

  “Docking in just over a minute, sir,” McPhail told him. “Hermes isn’t a big ship, but it will take you more than that to get down to the hatch—and Station Control just told me you’ve got two Admirals and a Duchess waiting for you at the dock.”

  James smiled thinly. He wouldn’t allow himself more than that, but if there were two Admirals, then one was almost certainly his husband, Vice Admiral Pat Kurzman—and if Pat hadn’t been among his greeting party, McPhail would have told him that.

  “Thank you, Commander. This ranks among my most pleasant flights with you,” he said calmly. “We didn’t end up embedded in an enemy base or anything.”

  “As I recall, sir, burying you in the middle of the base was the order,” she replied.

  “The order was ‘get us down’,” James corrected primly. “Inside the planet was a little extreme.”

  She laughed.

  “Your husband, my boss, and the woman who is both of our ultimate bosses, are waiting for you, General. Get off my bridge. Shoo!”

  #

  Annette Bond waited calmly while her second-ranked Militia flag officer and highest-ranked Ducal Guards embraced and kissed. Centauri was a calm backwater still; she had no worries about what might have happened while Wellesley was there—and it was two days’ travel away, so a few minutes were hardly a risk either way.

  However, once Wellesley stepped away from Vice Admiral Kurzman, a broad-shouldered stocky man who was a sharp contrast to his tall and slim husband, his face was even grimmer than his usual aristocratic British stoicism.

  “We have a problem,” he told his greeting party flatly. “Division Lord Harrison is dead. Hope was attacked by an unknown force.”

  Annette was suddenly glad that the two men had taken time to greet each other appropriately, because she knew what the rest of the day was going to look like. The sinking feeling of solid ground dropping out beneath her feet was all too familiar.

  “How bad?” she asked.

  “The Navy picket was shattered, over fifty percent losses, including both cruisers. Liberty identified the intruders before they arrived, however, and engaged them successfully in the end.

  “There was a ground landing using stealth fields that we managed to localize and defeat before they could disappear, but…” He shook his head. “They were looking for something and they brought Core Power–level tech to the party. Faster engines, more powerful shields, some kind of energy weapon we’d never seen before.”

  “No idea who?” Villeneuve asked. “Because I’ve some guesses.”

  “Landing party was Kanzi,” Wellesley confirmed. “But…while the designs were Kanzi and the troops were Kanzi, the tech was centuries ahead of what they’re supposed to have.”

  “Half the picket?” Annette echoed. And Harrison. One of only two human flag officers in the Imperium, and a measurable percentage of the human personnel in the Imperial Navy with him. “We need to inform the Navy if the Theocracy is moving again…”

  “I don’t know, Your Grace,” her Guard commander replied. “They were Kanzi, but everything was wrong for them to be Theocracy.”

  “The Theocracy would not permit a major rogue faction,” Villeneuve argued. “They fought a civil war over that three hundred years ago.”

  “Even if they somehow weren’t Theocracy, the Imperium will need to summon the Theocracy for answers,” Annette said grimly. “There’s no point in a peace treaty or recognition of the Kovius zone or all of the crap involved in the Sol Treaty if we make excuses for them, gentlemen.”

  She sighed.

  “And we have an Imperial Echelon Lord on hand,” she continued. “You’ll need to brief us more completely, James, and sadly, I think we need to include Kas!Val.”

  #

  Annette wondered if the Echelon Lord—roughly equivalent to a Rear Admiral in her Militia or the old UESF—was always grumpy and uncomfortable, or if it was just that Kas!Val really didn’t like humans.

  She wasn’t taking bets either way, but the A!Tol flag officer wore her orange and yellow skin tones with a degree of self-confidence she doubted many humans could carry if they knew everyone around them knew they were grumpy.

  “I’ve been reviewing the specifications and performance of your battleships,” the A!Tol told Annette. “That is a process I can complete more quickly without interruption.”

  The unspoken comment of and everyone would like me to be gone, including me was so obvious, Annette half-expected the translator to pick it up.

  “We have a problem, Echelon Lord,” Annette told the A!Tol quietly. “A potential strategic threat to the Imperium. We have reports that will be forwarded to Navy command and Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh, but I wanted to pull you into the initial briefing so you can pass on your own thoughts as well.”

  That Annette expected those thoughts to be slanted against Terra didn’t invalidate that need. Not including Kas!Val would appear disloyal, especially in a Duchy so new—and especially in a Duchy whose proximity to the border with the Theocracy meant they were pouring a lot more resources into the Ducal military than was common.

  There were other reasons for that, and to Annette’s amusement, while she was certain the Imperium knew about the new BugWorks project, Kas!Val clearly did not.

  “As you must,” Kas!Val conceded. She pulled up one of the wide stools the many-tentacled A!Tol used in place of chairs, and settled in.<
br />
  “General Wellesley.” Annette turned to the Englishman. “I know you gave us the high level before and that there are full reports we have access to, but I suggest you run through the sequence of events as you are aware of them for all of our sakes.”

  “I can do that,” Wellesley confirmed, stepping up to the front of the conference room while Annette sank, more gratefully than she’d let anyone see, into one of the powered, self-adjusting chairs that surrounded the long black table.

  The General faced the group, which included both of Kas!Val’s aides as well as Annette, Kurzman, Villeneuve, Elon and Zhao. Between the Ducal Guards assigned to most of the Terrans and Kas!Val’s Marines, there were easily twenty armed sentients guarding the relatively small doors into the room.

  “I was not present for the initial portion of the incident,” he noted calmly. “I can only summarize what Captain Rolfson told me.

  “He and Liberty were on a courtesy patrol of hyperspace around the Alpha Centauri system when they detected four unscheduled arrivals making a high-speed—point six cee—approach to the system.

  “He attempted to approach to a range he could challenge them at, per the Duchy’s agreements with the Centauri Development Corporation, and they opened fire with missiles that are well beyond our current technology.”

  “How far beyond are we talking?” Kas!Val asked, clearly having engaged a professional brain Annette hadn’t been certain the alien had.

  “They were point eight five cee missiles,” Wellesley told her. “Now, I’m a ground soldier, so I’m sure that means more to you all, but my understanding is that that’s about the theoretical maximum of an interface drive. You can’t build faster missiles.”

  “That’s the fastest you can build an interface drive missile, yes,” Kurzman confirmed for his husband. He seemed about to say more, but a glance at Kas!Val shut him up.

  “The Mesharom have supposedly built a hyperspace-capable weapon,” the A!Tol Echelon Lord said reluctantly. “But short of that, you are correct.”