“It frees up the upper limbs for delicate tasks like toolmaking,” the human officer replied. “Certainly, we know humanity was around more than fifty thousand years ago, even if we were still working out fire at the time.”
The Ivida made a deep rumbling noise it took Pat a moment to identify as laughter.
“For all of our protestations of high culture, none of the Imperial Races were far ahead of you,” they said. “A hundred thousand long-cycles ago, my ancestors were just working out that if you followed the thunder-mountain-beast herds as they migrated, it was easier to keep track of your main source of food. Domesticating them wouldn’t occur to us for another thirty thousand long-cycles.”
It was telling, in many ways, that the Ivida used the A!Tol long-cycle to measure time, something humanity still did only in official Imperial documents. It wasn’t even particularly suited to their home planet…but whatever measurement they’d use for time before the A!Tol came was lost to myth and history now.
Give it another few thousand long-cycles, and the A!Tol might start getting over their collective guilt about the set of accidental cultural genocides that had created the Imperial Races. Maybe.
“I’m more concerned about today,” Pat replied. “There seem to be a lot of players in this game, and I don’t know any of them well. Doesn’t even feel like we even know the Kanzi well anymore.”
“Indeed. What is the estimated time on the Laian battle group?”
“Twenty-six to thirty-eight hours, depending on which currents they know about and how well hyperspace cooperates,” Pat told him. “Tanaka is…thirty to thirty-five hours out. The Militia is forty-four to forty-six.”
“A race, then, between my Echelon Lord and this Pincer of the Republic.”
“And that’s assuming no spoilers from the Kanzi, the Wendira or the Mesharom.”
“Indeed.” A shadow passed over the Ivida’s white eyes. “I have met Wendira Royals,” they said. “They are very aware of the castes of their race…and class any non-Wendira beneath even the lowest Drone.”
“That doesn’t sound promising for negotiation.”
“The Wendira do not negotiate unless they are certain they cannot simply take,” Torandus replied. “The Mesharom will make an offer first. The Laians…will ask. Once.”
“And if we aren’t prepared to surrender the ship to any of them?” Pat asked.
“That, Vice Admiral, is why Lord Tanaka is bringing a task force. If we will not surrender to the Core Powers’ whims, then no matter how the tide turns, we will have to fight someone.”
#
Chapter 28
With the resupply complete, the Solar Squadron of the Duchy of Terra Militia finally moved out. Even more than usual, it was a horrendously unbalanced force. Four super-battleships led the way with Empereur de France in the lead.
Echelon Lord Kas!Val’s A Dawning of Swords followed them, her four escort cruisers tucked in close around her as the Imperium joined its vassal in preparing for war.
Behind A Dawning of Swords came the two Manticore-class battleships, flanking the only Terran cruiser in the force: Tornado.
Last of all, a single echelon, eight ships, of Capital-class destroyers trailed the rest of the fleet.
Once the Solar Squadron left the system, only eight destroyers and the orbital platforms would remain to defend Sol. It was a calculated risk—one the weight of the defensive orbital platforms made reasonable.
But still a risk.
Annette, in the end, was actually traveling on Tornado again. The old XC cruiser was unique in the galaxy now, with her combination of Pre-Annexation Terran technology, Laian Exile technology, and the blend of Imperial and Terran tech that had become the hallmark of the Militia.
There had been two incomplete hulls like her that had survived everything. Both had been claimed by the Imperial government in the end, though the payment had been more than sufficient to salve wounded Terran pride.
“Is everything in order?” she asked Villeneuve from Tornado’s flag deck. Her chief Admiral was back aboard Empereur, leading the fleet from the front.
“So far as I can tell,” he said. “I am…mal à l'aise with both you accompanying the fleet and leaving Earth so lightly defended.”
“No one is coming to attack Earth—this week,” she replied. “But if we can’t short-stop this disaster before the shooting starts, we could find the Imperium at war with at least one Core Power.”
“I don’t need to be told how that scenario ends,” the man who had led Earth’s failed defense against the A!Tol said sadly. “My memories of that kind of technological mismatch are vivid.”
“We do what we must, my old friend,” Annette told him. “We take the risks and the sacrifices we have to. The galaxy moves on.”
“Whether it moves on with us included is an entirely different question,” Villeneuve told her. “Captain Amandine has orders to do whatever you command, you know. No one is going to question if Tornado is late to the party.”
Annette hadn’t told the old French Admiral anything, but he winked at her.
“If I turn into a stereotypical pregnant woman and have to return to Earth for fries and anchovies?” she asked sweetly.
He laughed.
“Ma chère Duchess, the day you turn into a stereotype of any sort is the day I retire!”
She chuckled.
“I hope, Jean, that your return to retirement will be sooner than that,” she said gently. “I feel guilty for dragging you back into the harness, you know.”
“I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the universe,” Villeneuve said. “My world needs me. You need me.”
“I do,” she admitted. “You’re my strong right arm, as Zhao is my left and Elon is my support. I’d have made this work without you three, I’m arrogant enough to think that, but you made it so much easier.”
“You’re talking like we’re going to die, Annette,” her Admiral replied. “I don’t plan on it anytime soon. This is a show of force, nothing more. If everything goes right, we won’t have to fight a battle.”
She chuckled bitterly.
“When has it ever gone that smoothly for us, Jean?”
He sighed.
“There is always a first time, n’est-ce pas?”
#
Annette found herself counting the minutes after they passed through the portal into hyperspace, the strange gray dimension swallowing her entire fleet like it had never existed. Only Manticore and Griffon were still within the one-light-second range where they could actually be seen.
The rest were visible only on the anomaly scanner, blips in the void that contained tens of thousands of her friends and people. They looked to her for leadership, never realizing that it was she who owed them everything.
An hour passed and it was time. Ki!Tana and Wellesley fell in with her as she made her way from the flag deck to the bridge. There were two Guards waiting for her there, flanking the door—a normal security measure, but these had been briefed in advance.
They saluted and overrode door security, allowing her onto the bridge without announcement.
No one on the bridge even blinked. There was no one aboard Tornado who would question anything Annette Bond chose to do. If she wanted to half-sneak onto the bridge of her old ship, no one here was going to stop her.
She crossed to the Captain’s command chair and stepped up beside Captain Amandine.
“Cole.”
“Your Grace,” the ethereally tall, space-born Captain replied. “What do you need of me?”
“We need to shut down the interface drive,” she told him. “Drift for a bit, let the rest of the fleet get out of range of the anomaly scanners.”
“Ah.”
Amandine didn’t even question or hesitate.
“Mister Lawrence,” he barked. “All stop. Bring the drive down.”
“Yes, sir!”
“I presume Captain Van der Merwe and Captain Darzi know something is up?” the Captain murmur
ed.
“No details. I’m not even going to give you details—sorry, Cole—but they know we’re going to drop out of formation. No one will ask questions.”
Amandine chuckled.
“Your Grace, it’s you. No one would ask questions.”
Without the interface drive, Tornado went from moving along at point four five cee, keeping pace with the super-battleships, to a relative halt. The distance between her and the Militia formation expanded quickly, inasmuch as such things could be judged in hyperspace.
“Mister Lawrence.” Annette waved the navigator over. “I need you to surrender your station to Ki!Tana. Where we’re going is classified at the highest levels.”
“Of course, Your Grace,” the Lieutenant Commander agreed instantly. “I’ll send my staff off-duty and stand by myself for any assistance needed.”
“Good man,” she said. “Ki!Tana?”
“We need more distance,” the A!Tol replied as she slid in behind Lawrence’s station. The powered chairs aboard Tornado had been updated to adjust for multiple species back when Annette had run the ship with a crew of exiled Terran officers and recruited alien pirates.
The seat adjusted to hold Ki!Tana’s immense bulk with ease.
“How much time do you need to set up your course?” Annette asked.
“None,” Ki!Tana said. “It’s all preset. As soon as we’re clear of the sensors of the rest of the fleet…”
“Always hard to judge that,” Amandine noted. “We’ll lose them in about thirty seconds, but they may still have us on their scopes for a bit after that.”
“We’ll give them ten minutes to be clear,” Annette declared. “Then we’ll move. This meeting is necessary, but time is of the essence.”
“And you’re not going to tell us where we’re going?” the Captain asked.
“I don’t even know myself,” she said. “I know who we’re meeting, though, and that’s enough.”
#
Ten minutes seemed to take an eternity to pass, but Ki!Tana finally took over control of the ship, bringing up the interface drive and taking off at a course almost perpendicular to their original one.
Without needing to stick with the rest of the fleet, she quickly brought them past half of lightspeed, then dropped them into a hyperspace current that the Imperium was aware of but found useless, as it didn’t go anywhere.
They followed that current for three and a half hours, the entire bridge watching as the Ki!Tol made careful adjustments, guiding them to a point in space Annette wasn’t even sure Ki!Tana knew with certainty.
“Here.”
The single word echoed in the soft quiet of the bridge, with the undercurrent of clicks that was Ki!Tana’s actual voice. As she spoke, she changed the direction of the ship, pulling them out of the hyperspace current and out into the featureless void.
“There’s nothing here,” Amandine reported. “No gravity sources. No planets. No sun…nothing.”
“Do you understand, then, why getting here wasn’t as easy as it looked?” Ki!Tana asked. “Opening hyper portal.”
Annette was used to the hyperspace portal spilling the light and warmth of a star system into the gray void when it was opened. Here, in the depths between the stars, it simply opened up the gray void to reveal black void.
Slipping through the portal, however, it quickly became clear that the “void” was filled with stars. There were stars too dim to be seen in any star system, but they were clear when you were this far out into the middle of nowhere.
“There’s still nothing here,” Amandine said.
“Wait,” Ki!Tana replied.
They waited.
The stars shimmered.
Three massive egg-like white shapes, each easily five times Tornado’s size, appeared out of nowhere as they dropped their stealth fields.
“What are those?” someone asked.
“Mesharom Frontier Fleet battlecruisers,” Ki!Tana told them. “And today, we are their guests. Please be polite.”
#
There was no communication from the enigmatic white ships, but Ki!Tana knew the protocols. She and Annette took a single shuttle, with just one crew member to pilot it, and flew over to the center ship.
“There’s no airlock or hangar,” the pilot told them as they approached. “Just…hull.”
“I know,” Ki!Tana told him. Her manipulator tentacles fluttered across the controls. “Take the course I just plugged in and transmit the code on the frequency I gave you.”
“That’s…a collision course.”
“Trust me,” the A!Tol said brightly. “I’ve had to do this myself, and it is unnerving. But follow the protocol and we’ll be fine.”
The young man at the controls swallowed hard but obeyed. The shuttle continued to approach the battlecruiser.
“They’re what… six million tons? Twelve hundred meters?” Annette asked her alien friend.
“Twelve million tons,” Ki!Tana corrected. “About fourteen hundred meters long, six hundred at the widest. They have significantly less living space than an Imperial ship and heavier armor, so Mesharom ships are much denser.”
They were slowing as they approached. Now the shuttle was moving at a crawl for an interface-drive ship, barely a dozen meters per second, as they approached the coordinates and pulsed the code that Ki!Tana had provided.
For a moment, nothing happened and Annette was terrified they were going to crash into the side of the alien ship—then the hull seemed to ripple. The white exterior flowed away, exposing a surprisingly normal-looking compressed-matter hull with a hangar airlock door.
“Okay, that’s just weird.”
“Outer hull is an ablative layer of microbots,” Ki!Tana said quietly. “Similar in concept to the hull of the ship you found on Hope, though less advanced.”
That was a terrifying thought, one that Annette found herself fixating on as the shuttle drifted closer to the Mesharom warship.
The Mesharom were the unquestioned galactic elders, the most advanced race known. Their own cultural and psychological peculiarities kept them from advancing as fast as most other races, so they were slowly losing ground—but they’d had a twenty-thousand-year head start over even the other Core Powers.
But the crashed fifty-millennia-old ship on Hope was more advanced than the Mesharom ships were.
#
Annette rose to exit the shuttle and was surprised when Ki!Tana remained seated in her couch.
“Aren’t you coming along?” she asked. “I don’t know the protocols from here.”
“There are few protocols from here,” the Ki!Tol told her. “But they’ll only talk to one person at a time. By Mesharom standards, the Interpreter on each ship is insanely extroverted, which means they will speak to aliens.
“But only one at a time.”
“That’s…strange.”
“Mesharom don’t like each other, let alone anyone else,” Ki!Tana reminded her. “The only reason they manage to get six genders to work together for reproduction is because they only need two of them in one place at a time.
“I don’t know who you will be meeting, only that it will be the ship’s Interpreter. Be straightforward, be honest…be you. You’ll be fine.”
“And if I screw it up?”
Ki!Tana’s tentacles fluttered in uncertainty.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I think the worst case is you’ll have to agree to give them the ship. So long as you’re willing to do that, I think our people are safe.”
Annette shook her head.
“I hate dealing with the Core Powers.”
“So does everyone. Good luck.”
#
Annette stepped out of the shuttle and into the hangar bay. This clearly wasn’t the main small-craft hangar for the ship—it was far too small, barely large enough for the Terran craft to safely land. The walls were the same stark white as the outer hull, though, so it was possible they were made of the same active microbots as the outer hul
l and the rest of the hangar was simply closed off.
Two metallic figures wormed their way over to her. They were clearly robots—if for no other reason than they were far smaller than she understood the Mesharom to be. Serpentine constructions built of flexible plates and a smoothly flowing black fluid she guessed to be similar to the hull.
“We are your escorts,” the left robot announced in perfect English. “Interpreter-Captain Adamase is waiting in the meeting space. Please follow us. Divergence from the designated path is not permitted.”
The two mechanical serpents weren’t visibly armed, but Annette presumed there were weapons of some kind concealed inside their shells. Breaking protocol would be uncomfortable at best—and quite possibly fatal.
“Lead on,” she told the escorts.
The one that had spoken turned and moved away from her. The other waited, clearly intending to fall in behind, and Annette followed the first one.
Fortunately, she wasn’t bothered by snakes, or the escorts would have been terrifying. As it was, they were disturbing, slithering across the unmarked floor as they led her away from her shuttle.
A gap in the stark white wall opened, leading her into a thankfully ordinary-looking ship’s corridor. The escorts continued to guide her through the ship as she noted signs and symbols that, despite being in a different language, were otherwise familiar.
Her translator earbud could tell her what the signs meant if she asked, but for now, the robots knew where she was going and she simply followed. When negotiating with dragons, one did not ask questions about the art collection in the foyer.
As she moved through the ship, the sheer scale of it all began to sink in on Annette. Initially, it had all seemed normal, but…the scale was off. This was not a ship built for bipeds two meters tall at most.
This was a ship built for creatures that could squash down to a meter tall if they wanted, but were much, much larger. The doors were easily three and a half meters tall and perfectly square. The robot serpents escorting her came up to her waist in motion, but could easily rear up to dwarf her—and they were tiny compared to their masters.
Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Page 22
