Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  Internment wasn’t going to happen. Not with eight Imperial capital ships against a Laian war-dreadnought, even with a dozen destroyers and almost fifty cruisers in support.

  “We’re getting an update tight-beamed from Emperor of China,” Piditel reported. “It’s…not good.”

  Harriet pulled the data onto her repeaters with a gesture. Her coms officer was understating it. President Washington was damaged but combat-operational, but the Militia had already had one ugly exchange with the Laians.

  An extremely uneven exchange that they’d forced to a draw only because Kandak hadn’t expected to lose any ships. That wasn’t promising.

  And the surface situation…

  “Battalion Commander Indus may be confident she can defeat that ground force, but she is assuming we don’t have more stealthed transports in system,” Harriet said aloud. “The fast battleships are to deploy their Marine contingents for a combat drop on the Corellian Plateau. Duchess of Terra and Guardian will both deploy their second battalion as well.”

  The fast battleships only carried a half-battalion of Marines. Her two super-battleships each carried a short regiment of two battalions. Four battalions, with assault shuttles and power armor, would double the odds against the Wendira.

  “Yes, Echelon Lord.”

  “The assault shuttles will deploy directly from here,” she continued after a moment’s humming thought. “The task force will continue its pursuit of Harvester of Glory. Piditel—see if we can coordinate with Admiral Kurzman.

  “I’ll feel a lot happier standing off against Kandak with eight capital ships than with six.”

  #

  Chapter 33

  Jean Villeneuve stood in the center of his flag deck, doing everything in his power to radiate calm, wise elder. He had a lot of practice with that by now and was quite confident in his ability to appear completely calm and in control, regardless of his surroundings.

  “The currents are against us, sir,” Captain Ruan, Empereur de France’s commander warned with a dissatisfied grunt. “The transit is taking longer than we hoped. We’re going to be late.”

  “We allow a window for travel times, Captain Ruan,” Jean reminded him. “While I would certainly prefer to arrive early, we know hyperspace is not controllable.”

  “Sir, I mean that unless something changes, we are going to arrive after our expected window,” Jun-Ho Ruan said. The Chinese-Korean officer, once a member of the Chinese Party’s secret spaceborne military, was a squat man who looked more Mongolian than either of his official ethnicities.

  “I see. How late?”

  “At least two hours,” Ruan told him. “We are still at least sixteen hours out.”

  “A lot can happen in sixteen hours,” Jean said. “But we must accept that we cannot change it. Thank you, Captain Ruan. Keep me updated.”

  The private channel from the bridge closed, and Jean continued to survey the holograms aboard Empereur de France’s flag deck. The data on the fleet was unreliable at best, relayed ship-to-ship via the one-light-second bubble each could transmit in. The anomaly scanners let them stay in formation, but it took time for the absence of a ship to be noted.

  He’d picked out that Tornado was missing some time before, though even he hadn’t been briefed on Bond’s plans.

  “Sir.” A staff officer approached from behind.

  “Commander Soun,” he greeted her, recognizing his intelligence officer, Commander Channary Soun, by her voice. Her normal role was an interface with A!Tol Imperial Intelligence, though in combat, she was an electronic warfare specialist.

  Neither of those roles gave her much to do while the fleet was in motion.

  “I’ve been reviewing our ship-to-ship relay communications,” she said quietly, standing close enough to him that no one else could hear their conversation. “Tornado is missing. There’s a program loaded in Empereur’s computer that is faking her status updates.”

  “Ah,” Jean acknowledged. “I wondered why no one had mentioned the absence.”

  “Someone covered their tracks.” The intelligence officer paused. “While I hesitate to make accusations, sir, the code appears to be Consort Casimir’s.”

  Jean chuckled.

  “Why am I not surprised Elon got dragged into this?” he observed. At some point, the Ducal Consort had caught up with Imperial programming as well as technology. There was a reason Elon Casimir sat at the Duchess’s right hand, and it certainly wasn’t because he was pretty.

  “What’s going on, sir? Shouldn’t I have been briefed on any kind of covert mission?”

  “Commander Soun, I wasn’t briefed,” Jean told her. “I have my guesses, but all I know for certain is that Duchess Bond detached from us on a secret diplomatic mission.”

  He shook his head, minimally but enough that Soun would see it.

  “I will not share my guesses,” he warned her, “only my hope that we will see her again at Alpha Centauri—and that, as usual, Her Grace may save us all.”

  “Yes, sir,” Soun replied stiffly. She paused for a moment, then continued.

  “I’ve reviewed what little data there was in the briefing Imperial Intelligence provided on the Wendira, sir.”

  “And?”

  “Something doesn’t quite add up,” she admitted. “We, ah, may have had some off-the-record conversations with Pincer Kandak’s intelligence staff.”

  “Spies,” Jean said with a sigh. “Regardless of the species, you’re all the same.”

  “We bought a listing of Wendira officers from them,” Soun told him. “Cheap, too. They’re perfectly willing to screw over the Wendira.”

  “And?” the Admiral asked.

  “Hive Commandant Ashtahkah does command a star hive, yes, but…she’s a Royal, not a Warrior. She’s only been an officer for two years; her rank is due to her blood, not her talents.”

  “So, she might be less of a threat than the weight of metal suggests,” Jean concluded with a sigh.

  “Yes, but…” Soun sighed, still standing out of his line of sight. “They wouldn’t send an inexperienced Royal on this kind of detached duty, sir. The Royals command most of the star hives, but they’re aware of the limitations of the freshly commissioned ones.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They’d send a Warrior Hive Commandant on this kind of op, sir. Ashtahkah commands Wing’s Nightmare, but there is no way she’s in command of the deployment.”

  Jean sighed.

  “There’s a second star hive, isn’t there?”

  #

  Annette took the flag officer’s seat on Tornado’s flag deck, watching the tactical holograms as her old ship fell into formation with the three Mesharom battle cruisers.

  “We’re receiving course information from the Mesharom,” Amandine reported. “I take it we’re going with them?”

  “I’m not going to argue with the battlecruisers that outmass, out-tech, and outgun us ten times over if they’re sending us an invitation, Captain,” she told him. “If they want us to go with them, we go with them.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. Just wanted to confirm,” the Captain replied. “Falling into formation now.”

  He chuckled a moment later.

  “Damn, look at their positions, Your Grace. Makes me feel all important!”

  One battlecruiser had fallen in directly ahead of Tornado, and the other two were flanking her. It was a clear escort formation. The Mesharom apparently wanted to be sure that Annette made it through this intact—and while Tornado’s mix of tech meant she still punched above her weight class by Imperial standards, she was an obsolete toy compared to the ships around her.

  “They’re opening a hyper portal,” Amandine reported. “Um. Duchess? They’re asking us to shut down our interface drive.”

  “Why?” Annette asked, looking over at Ki!Tana. The A!Tol fluttered her tentacles in an alien shrug.

  “They aren’t being that communicative,” the Captain said. “There’s no talking. Just…instructions and
data. I get the feeling they don’t like us.”

  “They don’t like anyone, Captain,” Ki!Tana reminded Amandine. “It’s not personal; it’s just what the Mesharom are like. If they want us to shut the drive down, I suggest we do so. They have no reason to harm us and every reason to help us.”

  After all, if Annette didn’t get to Alpha Centauri, no one there would know about the deal they’d agreed to.

  “You’re probably right,” Amandine said. “Your Grace?”

  “Do it,” Annette ordered.

  For a moment, Tornado halted in space. With proper shutdown, the interface drive’s momentum and energy were lost back to hyperspace and the cruiser returned to her original velocity from Earth orbit.

  That wasn’t nothing, especially given how far away they were from Earth, but it wasn’t the point five cee she’d been maintaining before.

  The stop was only momentary, however, before Tornado leapt forward again.

  “Captain?”

  “They appear to have extended and merged their interface-drive fields to include us,” Amandine reported. “We are now moving at point six cee and the Mesharom are taking us through the hyper portal.”

  The usual momentary sense of discomfort washed over Annette, and they were in hyperspace, continuing to be pulled along by their new…allies? Friends? Customers?

  Annette wasn’t quite sure what to think of the Mesharom, but they appeared to mostly be on her side so long as she was prepared to pay their price.

  Perhaps that made them mercenaries.

  “That current wasn’t there before,” Amandine said quietly, and she turned her attention back to the hologram.

  He was right. The upgraded anomaly scanners Tornado carried were capable of picking out hyperspace currents—that was how they were mapped in the first place. She could see the one they’d arrived on, at the limits of the scanners’ range.

  And there was another one, right in front of them. A new one, exactly on the course they needed to follow…

  As she watched, it extended forward and their escorts tucked into it.

  “They can create hyperspace currents?” she asked Ki!Tana.

  “I…I did not know that,” the Ki!Tol admitted. “But it explains a lot. That is a level of control over hyperspace I did not believe was possible.”

  “They’re pulling out all of the tricks today,” Annette said, half-amazed and half-shocked.

  The Mesharom were afraid. Terrified, it seemed, of the potential consequences of the ship of Those Who Came Before falling into the wrong hands.

  “Given the current, what’s our ETA?” she asked Amandine.

  “The fact they can make it at all is incredible, but it’s not that strong a current,” Tornado’s Captain admitted. “I call it eight hours. Maybe seven.”

  Annette nodded and leaned back in her seat. The race, it seemed, continued.

  #

  Chapter 34

  The tanks went first.

  The A!Tol Imperium’s H25-AC-K main battle tank was an impressive piece of machinery, far more expensive than the Terran Ducal Guard had been able to justify acquiring. It was a multirole combat vehicle, capable of hovering anything from one centimeter to one kilometer above the battlefield and carrying enough intelligence and firepower to act as both air and ground support.

  It was also, despite the best efforts of its Imperial designers, approximately as stealthy as a giant bonfire. Indus sent all twelve of them forward ahead of the rest of her force, testing to see just what her enemies could throw at them.

  The tanks could take a lot more damage than her power-armored soldiers, but they were also bigger targets.

  Harold watched them advance from the command center, hoping they would be enough.

  That meant he got to watch them die.

  The force that had landed wasn’t a small, covert team using jamming and stealth fields to cover their approach and take their enemies at close range. This was an assault force, with the full technology and will of a Core Power behind it.

  The sky ahead of the advancing Imperial Marines lit up with a thousand golden glowing sparks, rising from launchers the Wendira had brought with them as they deployed. With access to the full array of satellites overhead, Harold could tell that those sparks were drones. About thirty centimeters across. Maybe a kilogram.

  They jumped over the horizon, scanned for their enemies, and struck. They carried no weapons, just interface drives.

  They couldn’t manage the velocity of the missiles Harold had shot down their transport with, but a thousand or so kilometers a second was more than enough. Each of the drones hit with the force of over a hundred tons of explosive.

  The shields and armor of the A!Tol armored vehicles had laughed at Earth’s best when they’d landed on Earth. They stood off the first drone. The second. In some cases, even the third or fourth.

  A dozen drones swarmed each tank—and the rest went after the front line of the Marines.

  “Antimissile defenses!” Indus snapped.

  Harold was already moving. The Marines didn’t have much to hand that could stop high-velocity weapons—they generally relied on shooting down the source, but the Wendira attack drones were coming from launchers well out of sight.

  The mobile surface-to-space launchers Harold had brought down with him, however, each carried a stripped-down version of a Sword turret. It was a last-ditch system, almost as dangerous to the launchers as what it was shooting at, but they could protect the launchers or a nearby city when anything else would fail.

  And now those turrets sprang to life. Systems intended to target missiles moving at eighty-five percent of the speed of light had no problem with drones that had to stop in the air to orient themselves.

  But there were so many drones.

  “I’m covering you as best we can, Battalion Commander,” Harold told Indus. “And you’ve got reinforcements dropping from on high. I don’t know what else to tell you!”

  “Keep covering us,” the Yin snapped. “And relay every scrap of visual data you can to those assault shuttles—someone needs to kill those drone launchers for me!”

  #

  The Marines did the only thing they could do while under fire—they charged. With power armor augmenting their limbs, it didn’t matter which species a given soldier was. They all moved at about the same speed—and with Harold’s turrets providing them cover, they made it through the hail of hyper-velocity-missile drones.

  The first line of troops they hit were physically smaller than the soldiers that had assaulted the camp before. Maybe a hundred and thirty centimeters tall in power armor, these were Wendira drones. Despite their lack of bulk, their armor was easily a match for the Imperium’s.

  Plasma fire lit up Harold’s scanners, and the HVM drones were still hammering the rear of Indus’s formation—and some were now trying to target the surface-to-space missile launchers as well. The defense turrets were working so far, but they weren’t intended for this heavy of a use.

  He wasn’t surprised when the first turret threw up an overheat error.

  “Indus, watch the sky,” Harold barked. “I’m down one turret and—”

  The ground rumbled as the drones struck home and one of his launchers came apart under the pounding.

  “Make that two turrets,” he continued grimly. “They’re all overheating; you’re going to lose your cover far too damned quickly.”

  He didn’t need acknowledgement from the Yin. She had more important things on her mind, so he focused on pulling through the data he had, localizing the launchers.

  There!

  They were monstrously ugly things, basically just big tubes mounted on ten robotic legs and followed around by ammunition hoppers. Shields and stealth screening covered them, protecting them from counter-fire and surveillance—but each clump of drones localized another launcher.

  “Incoming assault shuttles; I’m sending you target coordinates,” he transmitted to the inbound Imperial Marines. “Hit them
as soon as you can with everything you’ve got!”

  “This is Battalion Commander Diti!,” a calm-sounding translated voice replied. The underlying clicks and tones told him the speaker was A!Tol. “We have received your coordinates. We are still at least three thousandth-cycles from landing, but we can launch bombardment from here.

  “Confirm distance of local forces,” the Battalion Commander requested.

  Harold ran the numbers. Four minutes from landing, but…

  “Closest elements are still six kilometers from the target zone.”

  “Understood. Please pass on orders for Battalion Commander Indus to hold position. Sky fire incoming.”

  Harold nodded and switched channels.

  “Indus, hold position at your current distance,” he said briskly. “Fire from on high inbound!”

  Marine assault shuttles didn’t carry any weapon capable of threatening a starship. Their limited arsenal of interface-drive missiles was designed to two do things: shoot down other shuttles and bombard landing sites.

  They were designed to do those two things very well.

  Harold’s crudely rigged sensor setup promptly failed to count how many weapons had been launched. At fifteen percent of lightspeed, each missile hit with the force of a twenty-five-megaton bomb.

  The bombardment only lasted ten seconds, but when it was done, the drone launchers were gone.

  So were the enemy transports and at least half of their troops—and Diti!’s shuttles swept in barely two minutes later with several thousand more Marines.

  “Admiral Kurzman,” Harold pinged Emperor of China. “Ground site is secure. For now.”

  “The Laians appear to be trying to lure us out of position to try and get their own troops down,” the Vice Admiral warned. “I wouldn’t count on those being the last troops you have to face, Captain.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  #

  Chapter 35