Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “Might be the design?” Wolastoq asked.

  “More likely, we’re using up whatever power reserves this thing has left,” Harold admitted grimly. “Or the reserves are localized and prioritized. God knows I’d be more concerned with making sure the airlock worked than—”

  He shut up as his light swung through the now-open door and settled onto the body. If you could even call it that after fifty thousand years had had their way with it.

  “Ah,” Wolastoq said softly as she saw why he’d stopped speaking. “My turn. Can you stand there and hold the light steady, Harold?”

  “Sure,” he agreed. He’d seen more bodies than he liked to think about, and he supposed he should have known there would be dead aliens in the ship, but he hadn’t been expecting to open a door and find one.

  The figure was tall, roughly eight feet in height, but narrow-bodied with a doubled set of shoulders and four arms.

  More than that was hard to see. It wore a black uniform that covered it from the base of its neck all the way to the tips of its feet and fingers. The black material had a similar waxy look to the hull, like it had almost grown on the spacer as it covered its gangly height and six-fingered, two-thumbed hands.

  “Mummified,” Wolastoq said calmly as she knelt next to the corpse. “The ship couldn’t stop itself from ending up with the same atmosphere as outside, but there wasn’t much alive out there to sneak in in the first place.

  “Cold, dry air did the rest.” She shook her head. “After fifty thousand years, there still isn’t much left. If I try to take a sample, he’ll disintegrate. Not that I need a sample to know how he died.”

  The xenoarchaeologist pointed at the dead alien’s head, which was hanging at an angle that was survivable for some species but not most.

  “He broke his neck in the impact. Nobody survived to bury him.”

  “Creepy,” Harold replied. “Any idea what he was?”

  “A sentient spacer aboard a starship that predates the oldest known civilization,” she replied dryly. “As for species? No. Doesn’t match anything I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Or I. And the Imperium briefed us on every race they knew of.”

  Which was a lot. The A!Tol had twenty-seven subject races. The Kanzi had nineteen enslaved species. There were nine Core Powers with members from sixteen species. There were another nine major powers in the Milky Way’s spiral arms, with another fifty-two major species between them.

  Harold couldn’t remember everything about every one of the hundred-plus alien species he’d learned about, but he couldn’t remember any eight-foot-tall humanoids with four arms.

  “We have gear that should be able to take a sample in the camp,” the archaeologist told him. “For now, I’ve taken readings and pictures. I suggest we leave him and find Engineering. If this place still has power, that’s where it is, right?”

  “Exactly,” Harold confirmed. “And if they’ve got a power plant that’s still running after fifty thousand years, I want it.”

  #

  They passed two more corpses along the way to what Harold estimated to be the engineering section. Neither was more than dust in the black uniform now, the warmer air as they approached the core having done what the cold near the hull hadn’t.

  “No signage. No symbols,” Wolastoq observed. “I don’t know much about starships, Harold, but every one I’ve been on had signs and directions.”

  “They all do,” he confirmed. “The nature varies from species to species, but visual cues are almost a universal constant. And yet none…”

  “You sound like you have a thought,” she said.

  “Only two possibilities I see right now,” Harold replied. “Though I’m sure people will come up with hundreds more. First, that everything was labeled, but either in something that didn’t survive fifty millennia or at visual wavelengths you and I can’t see.”

  “The former seems more likely,” Wolastoq told him. “Though if it’s the latter, we’ll pick it up when we go through the footage.”

  “The second,” he said slowly as he knelt by the third corpse, “is that they had some kind of computer implant in their heads so they didn’t need signage, which, given how much this gentleman has decomposed…”

  He poked the debris pile that had been a sentient creature very carefully with the tip of his flashlight and was unsurprised when the dust settled again—and revealed a much-corroded collection of small wires and a blackened waxy material similar to the hull and uniform.

  “Neural implant,” Harold concluded. “None of the Core Powers use them; too many potential problems with people hacking your brains. None of the Arm Powers have the tech for them, so far as I know.

  “Who the hell would trust circuits in their brain?” he asked rhetorically.

  “Someone who thought all of the bugs were worked out of the tech,” Wolastoq replied. “I know I’d risk quite a bit for a reliable way to expand my memory and reduce the number of references I need to look up.”

  Harold shivered.

  “I can see the advantages on a warship, but I’ve always been told even the Core Powers find the tech is too dangerous.” He sighed and rose, checking his bearings. “One more of those weird doors and I think we’re in the core.”

  If the crew had used neural implants to navigate around, the doors had probably opened and closed automatically for them. The “stick your hand in the middle and it will flow open eventually” method was probably an emergency failsafe.

  The last door slid open into a significantly larger open space than he’d expected on the relatively small ship. It probably stretched from the top of the vessel to the bottom, an open void ten meters on a side.

  Struts of metal—not the waxy material of the rest of the ship—held a spherical containment chamber in the center of the room. Harold thought he recognized the struts and he stepped over to rap one.

  Wincing, he gestured Wolastoq over to him.

  “Can you scan this, Ramona?” he asked. “I’m not sure I believe it.”

  She ran her device over it, flipping from one sensor to another, then met his gaze.

  “Compressed matter,” she confirmed. “I don’t know what the numbers it’s giving me mean, though.”

  He leaned over her screen, feeling her breath on his neck as he did so, and sighed.

  “That means the it’s roughly seventy-five percent more compressed than the CM that armors our warships,” he explained. “Last intelligent estimate I saw put even Mesharom armor at only forty percent denser.”

  “Everything about this ship is more advanced than it should be,” Wolastoq agreed. She hadn’t moved away, the two of them still well inside each other’s personal space as they looked at the containment chamber.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “What does your toy say?”

  “It’s the source of the gravity waves and the heat. The waves are too weak for us to feel yet, but they’re stronger as you get closer to it.”

  Harold nodded. That made sense, and he shivered as he looked around the engineering core, realizing what was missing.

  “No hyperdrive.”

  “What?” Wolastoq asked.

  “This ship doesn’t have a hyperdrive. That, that and that.” He pointed at three cylindrical objects against the back of the engineering space. “Those are fusion cores. Smaller than I’m used to, but I wouldn’t bet against their power output.

  “That, I have no idea what it is.” He pointed to a set of long-dead mechanisms that occupied the port and starboard walls, converging to a single point about the spherical containment chamber.

  “And the orb? The thing they have compressed matter holding in place?” Wolastoq asked.

  Harold studied it for a long moment, then shook his head.

  “We’re talking something that’s only at the remote edge of theory for the A!Tol,” he said quietly. “Something even the Core Powers regard as a technological pipe dream. That, Ramona, is a singularity power core. Ove
r fifty thousand years old, it’s decayed to the point where it can barely run the doors, but when it was built, it could probably have sustained an entire planet.

  “We can’t recreate the singularity that fed it, but even learning how it was contained could revolutionize power generation across the galaxy.”

  He shivered again.

  “We need to get outside and commandeer one of Admiral Kurzman’s couriers,” he told her. “We need to do that now.

  “The Duchess needs to know what we’ve found. Hell, the Empress needs to know what we’ve found.”

  Because as soon as anyone else found out, the single division of super-battleships Terra had sent to protect their colony wasn’t going to stand a chance.

  #

  Chapter 17

  The Sol system’s explosively expanding space industry had called for large numbers of interface-drive ships. They didn’t need to be hyper-capable; they just needed to be able to move around the system at a quarter of the speed of light.

  Humanity was the twenty-seventh species the A!Tol had incorporated into their Imperium, however, and far from the first to only barely have scratched the surface of what the interface drive could do. The very first installation the Imperium had arranged to be built on Earth’s surface had been a factory to build cheap, durable, low-velocity interface drives.

  The rich being the rich, several of those drives had ended up attached to luxuriously appointed civilian ships, and through means Annette chose not to question too hard, Zhao had managed to commandeer one of those space yachts for her meeting with the Two Hundred and Eighty-eighth Pincer of the Republic.

  Despite his many duties, Wellesley had somehow managed to reclaim command of her personal bodyguard, leading the eight power-armored Guards—all human today, despite there being several species, including Laians, represented in the Ducal Guard—out around her as they exited her shuttle and formed up to wait for Pincer Kandak’s craft.

  The yacht Jessica, named for the owner’s daughter, as Annette understood, hung exactly halfway between the Laian war-dreadnought and the assembled fleet of Terran and Imperial capital ships. She was outside of energy weapon range of either force…and well inside the missile range of both.

  If someone wanted to kill the Duchess of Terra and the Laian flag officer in one fell swoop, all it would take was a single missile. Jessica had no defenses. That was why the Duchy had suggested her as a meeting place.

  Well, that and the fact that her crew quarters could be sealed off from her guest quarters and landing bay, and the landing bay was large enough to accommodate two shuttles. The crew would never see the meeting taking place aboard her, and both Annette and Kandak were arriving by their own spacecraft.

  The Laian shuttle was a small disk thirty meters in diameter, a design from a species that had used the interface drive for so long that aerodynamics only barely factored into their shuttle designs.

  It hovered in the empty space in the hangar for several moments, then folded out four large legs and settled down onto them. A ramp slid down from the middle of the ship, and four armored Laian soldiers, their power armor suits an inky black that seemed to suck up the light, strode down it.

  They ignored Annette’s waiting party, sweeping out to scan the entire hangar bay before returning to the ramp.

  Four more soldiers and three officers, unarmored and wearing simple harnesses over their dark carapaces, followed them down the ramp. Annette recognize Kandak in the center, the dark red Laian bigger than his escorts—which meant older, though he was hardly the largest Laian she’d met. The High Captain of Tortuga, the leader of the Exiles her Laian citizen had abandoned, had been much bigger than Kandak.

  “Pincer Kandak,” she greeted him. “Welcome aboard Jessica. I have had a space arranged for our discussions and set up some Laian-compatible food.”

  She could have just provided Universal Protein, the hyper-processed, tofu-like food that was biocompatible with every species known. But since she had a Laian enclave, she had access to food that Laians could eat.

  Politeness cost less than missiles and starships, after all.

  “My guards will sweep the ship,” he said flatly. “Once they have confirmed you have no surprises or traps, we may speak.”

  He gestured a pincer, and half of the armored Laians charged back into the ship.

  “I do not know what purpose you seek to gain by this meeting,” he continued. “My orders are clear.”

  “Unless your orders are to start a war, Pincer of the Republic, I hope you have some flexibility,” Annette replied. “I am prepared to alleviate the Republic’s legitimate concerns, but this is the sovereign space of the A!Tol Imperium.

  “We will not be bullied.”

  #

  Kandak proved unsurprisingly silent after that until his guards returned, presumably notifying him by radio that all was clear as they said nothing Annette heard.

  “Very well, Duchess,” he finally spoke again. “Since you seem to believe your words can change something, I will allow you to speak. You had a space set aside?”

  “Yes, Pincer,” she told him. “If you and your officers will follow me.”

  His mandibles clicked in a gesture she recognized as equivalent to a human grunt. If she had to deal with a representative of one of the Core Powers, at least it was one from a species whose body language she had some familiarity with.

  Jessica’s one meeting room was right off of the hangar bay, and the owner had laid in seats for a variety of species, including Laians. Three chairs designed for the upright, carapaced aliens were set up along one side of the black marble conference table, and three of Annette’s favored powered auto-adjusting chairs occupied the other side. Zhao and Villeneuve took the seats on either side, leaving the center one to Annette. She waited on Kandak.

  The Pincer took a seat, his body language radiating surprised pleasure that Annette was quite sure he didn’t think she was picking up. Once he had positioned himself, Annette sat herself down, watching the alien and waiting.

  A robot delivered a tray of Laian-compatible snacks and drinks to the three seated officers. Kandak managed to control his emotions enough not to have an audible mandible-chitter of delight.

  Neither of his subordinates was so self-controlled. The Laians on Earth didn’t have access to much of their homeworld’s native flora, but they’d managed to find Earth-native plants that could provide the same chemicals and nutrition, and several had set themselves to the task of making the best food they could from Earth’s supplies for their people.

  From what Annette had been told—and the two junior Laians’ reaction—they succeeded, at least so far as smell and appearance went.

  “We are not swayed by food and small luxuries, Duchess,” Kandak told her, though he didn’t refuse the food either, snatching up one of what would be canapes for a human and eating it neatly.

  “I do not expect you to be,” she told him. “But a certain respect is owed the representatives of one of the Core Powers.”

  “The only respect I want is for you to hand over our rebels and their stolen ships, as well as any technology you have extracted from them,” he told her. “Once that is done, Duchess, I will be on my way back home.”

  “We have never extracted technology from the ships here,” Annette replied. “And the ships are centuries obsolete by your standards, aren’t they?”

  “There are rules, Duchess Bond, about technology transfer from Core to Arm,” Kandak said. “They are ironclad and forbid what you have done with our ships.”

  “We have done nothing with those ships,” she replied. “They are manned by Laians, and at no point have we attempted to dismantle or even examine them. They were trapped by your kindred so we could do no such thing.”

  Kandak laid a small silver disk on the table and tapped something on a long black panel on his left arm. A hologram sprang up from the disk, showing the final exchange between Liberty and the strange ships that had attacked Alpha Centauri.r />
  Including Captain Rolfson’s deployment of his ship’s plasma lance.

  “That, Duchess, is one of our plasma lances,” he said calmly. “A technology the A!Tol Imperium does not possess but that you, apparently, do. One I must assume you were given by these rebels.”

  “That is a plasma lance,” she confirmed. “A Terran-developed, Terran-built, and Terran-deployed plasma lance. Its development was partially funded by the A!Tol Imperium, and ships of that design”—she gestured at the hologram—“are shortly to enter Imperial service.

  “Which makes it, Pincer, a technology that the A!Tol Imperium does possess.”

  “A technology you stole.”

  “No,” Annette denied. “It was developed based on watching a Laian plasma lance in use, yes. But we have a saying on Earth: once you know it is possible, everything that follows is just engineering.

  “While based on the concept we saw demonstrated, our plasma lance was developed by ourselves—something that, while it is frankly disrespectful to demand, we can prove if we must.”

  Kandak was silent for several moments, sneaking a second snack. Annette suspected that laying on a snack board that the Laians would enjoy was the smartest idea she’d had for this negotiation.

  “I will need to see proof of that,” he finally said. “But all that would change, Duchess, is that I would not need to demand that surrender of your new cruisers.

  “I still will require you to surrender the stolen vessels and the rebels who stole them. If you do not do so, I am required to take them by force.”

  “By force,” Annette echoed softly. “You fly into a star system of a sovereign nation and inform me that I must surrender sentients who have voluntarily become citizens and the ships they arrived on, or you will take them by force?”

  She gestured to Villeneuve.

  “I believe Admiral Villeneuve has stated his position on the surrender of the Laians who have immigrated here, and it seems I must reiterate.