“We underestimated the Infinite. We cannot afford to do so again.”
Chapter Seventeen
The conference room at the heart of Va!Tola was as silent as a tomb. Quieter, for that matter—Rin had been in tombs that had more noise from wildlife than the conference room had from anything.
A frozen hologram hung above the table, stuck at the end of the recording of Pincer Korodaun’s doomed—and all-too-necessary—charge.
“Further reports from Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla and Three Hundred and Eighty-Four—I mean, Three Hundred and Eighty-Third Pincer of the Republic Sokotal confirm that Pincer Korodaun did some level of damage to the Infinite force,” Tan!Shallegh said quietly. “However, they continued on their vector without apparent interruption.”
“And what was their mission?” Oxtashah demanded.
“We can’t be certain, as it was necessary for the remnants of the blockade fleet to withdraw as quickly as possible,” Tidirok said smoothly, before Tan!Shallegh could speak. “Most likely, they exited hyperspace somewhere outside the nebula to acquire scan data to compare against the maps acquired from our traitors.”
“So, they now know what surrounds them,” the Wendira Princess concluded. “And the likelihood that your reinforcements will be able to restore containment?”
“Zero,” Tidirok admitted. “I’ve already ordered them diverted to rendezvous with the First Defense Fleet. The first ships will join my fleet in roughly twelve cycles.”
He paused, then snapped his mandibles and pincers simultaneously.
“As will I. These negotiations have become a pointless waste of my time, Princess Oxtashah. We prevented a war between our peoples cycles ago, but it is clear that your people have no interest in making common cause against this enemy.
“I can no longer afford to be away from my fleet, arguing that a pile is gold instead of shit,” the Laian said bluntly. “See to your borders, Princess, and we will see to ours. I suspect you will regret your choices.”
“Ten war-dreadnoughts destroyed without even slowing the enemy,” Oxtashah noted. “This changes things, Voice Tidirok. Give me…time. Three cycles. I must commune with my Queens.”
“And what difference is it going to make, Princess?” the Voice demanded. “Another hundred thousand of my people are dead. I cannot afford to waste more time.”
“I can not guarantee anything, Voice Tidirok,” she admitted. “But I swear to you, upon the hive of my hatching and the shells of my progeny, I will do all I can to convince them. As I have done all along…but this changes things.”
Rin concealed a snort. He’d suspected for a while that Oxtashah was more on-side with the proposed alliance against the Infinite than her Queens had been. She was a loyal servant of the Grand Hive and had followed her orders, but her true position had slipped out before.
“I cannot wait that long,” Tidirok told her. “The First Defense Fleet must begin operations against the Infinite immediately if we are to have any chance of protecting the Republic’s worlds.
“I must return to my fleet.”
“Then I will accompany you,” Oxtashah said, her wings snapping to their full spread and glittering in the conference room’s lights. “If you will permit it, of course, Zokalatan will accompany your flagship to the First Defense Fleet as a gesture of good will.”
Rin wasn’t even sure Oxtashah had the authority to do that…but she also had clearly made her decision. The xenoarchaeologist wasn’t as good at reading Laian emotion as he’d like, but he was pretty sure he was picking up Tidirok’s hesitation.
“I…will allow it,” the Voice finally said. “Tan!Shallegh: may I ask that your flagship escort the star hive? Closely.”
“If the Princess’s people will permit it,” Tan!Shallegh echoed, the A!Tol’s skin flickering red and blue in amused agreement.
“They will,” Oxtashah said grimly. “Pincer Korodaun’s fate will be shared by far too many if we continue to argue like hatchlings. You have my pledge of honor, upon the hive of my hatching and the shells of my progeny, that we will do you no harm.”
“I accept your honor, Princess,” Tidirok conceded. “We will be underway shortly. I recommend you return to your ship and have them commence preparations.”
Rin found Tan!Shallegh in the Fleet Lord’s office, all of the screens dark as the A!Tol sat there. He wouldn’t even have been certain the sentient was in the room if the door hadn’t opened to let him in, though Va!Tola’s systems said that’s where he was.
“Fleet Lord?” he asked the darkness.
“I’m here,” Tan!Shallegh told him. There was a flicker of movement, but the A!Tol was barely visible, his skin gray-black in exhausted fear. “I…”
The room fell silent and Rin Dunst let the door close behind him. He had been in the room often enough that he was able to find a seat, and he simply waited.
“You are a student of history,” the Fleet Lord said in the darkness. “Of the wars and tribulations not just of your race or even the Imperium.”
“Not primarily of war, but yes,” Rin agreed. “I mostly study everything we know about the Alava, and we really don’t know much of their wars.”
“It seems that may change,” Tan!Shallegh noted. “Tell me, Dr. Dunst, does it end? Does it ever end? Or will I be drawn into the waters of one war after another, each with the fate of worlds and races on the line?”
“The Imperium has been at peace more than at war, Fleet Lord,” Rin reminded the other being. “Even in your lifetime. Even in mine, and I was a child when you came to Earth.”
Tan!Shallegh had been a Fleet Lord of the Imperium for as long as Rin Dunst had been alive. If there was any being that had deserved retirement or rest more, Rin didn’t know them. He wasn’t sure what the A!Tol wanted from him, though.
“Perhaps,” Tan!Shallegh murmured. “It seems…worse, I’m afraid, because there have been so many wars where we feared for so much. I have done my duty, Doctor. But I think this may be the last war I have in me.”
“I don’t think anyone will begrudge you that, Fleet Lord,” Rin said.
“You’d be surprised,” Tan!Shallegh said with a flush of blue through the darkness of his skin. “It will depend, I know, upon how this war fares. My oaths and promises stand, and I will fight these Infinite.
“But I hope and pray there is some answer in your histories, Dr. Dunst, that I do not see,” he admitted. “This enemy was beyond the Alava. We have studied the Alava’s technology more than any others but the Mesharom, I think, and I know how far short of their power we fall.
“Can we win this?”
“The Alava broke everything, sir,” Rin reminded Tan!Shallegh. “That definitely included whatever the Infinite used for FTL and likely included many of their weapons. Certainly, none of the weapons we’ve seen from them so far match the weapons we believe the Alava possessed.”
“This is true. And perhaps even the Mesharom will join us for this war,” Tan!Shallegh suggested. “The last true heirs of the Alava. If there is anyone who can fight these people, it’s them.”
Rin nodded grimly, but he remembered the reports out of the Taljzi campaigns. Thirty Mesharom war spheres had been lured into a trap by the Taljzi—a trap built of malfunctioning Alavan technology—and destroyed.
“You’re assuming they’ve rebuilt enough of a fleet to be willing to send out anything,” he told Tan!Shallegh.
“I know,” the A!Tol admitted, his skin still dark in the unlit office. “Others will come, I think, but I wonder if they can possibly come fast enough to turn the course of what lies before us.”
“They have to, sir,” Rin said. “But even if they don’t, I trust we will find a way. We always have, sir.”
There was a harshly amused beak snap.
“I trust—I believe—that we can defeat these Infinite in the end,” Tan!Shallegh admitted. “What is open to question, I fear, is how many worlds will be sacrificed first.”
Chapter Eighteen
It had been Morgan Casimir’s task to estimate what the Infinite were doing and how quickly they would be able to upgrade their resources. Now, in the aftermath of defeat, it was very clear she’d got it wrong.
The days that had passed didn’t make any of it easier, though they’d at least allowed her to pull together every scrap of data they had on the Infinite from Korodaun’s charge. None of it was game-changing—they’d never penetrated the visibility bubble with anything except missiles, and those didn’t come back to provide updates.
She was sitting alone in the conference room that served as her team’s office, studying a rotating hologram of the best scan data they had of the Infinite’s missiles, when someone coughed behind her.
With a swallowed sigh, Morgan turned and arched an eyebrow at Bethany Rogers as her subordinate stepped forward and wordlessly offered her a black glass bottle.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Beer,” Rogers replied. “Guinness, to my surprise. I didn’t expect to find anything of real value aboard even a mixed-race ship.”
“I’m on duty,” Morgan said.
“No, you’re not,” Rogers told her. “You’ve been off duty for three and a half hours, sir. If you insist on staying up and staring at a hologram, you can at least do it with a beer in your hand.” She paused. “Sir.”
Morgan chuckled and tapped the three-point sequence that released the bottle cap. Pocketing the cap, she raised the bottle to Rogers.
“To the Infinite, who might just wreck my career on their way to eating the galaxy.”
Rogers opened her own bottle after clinking them together. “I didn’t think the smell of beer was that much of a depressant.”
“Fair. Apologies, Rogers,” Morgan said. “I know better, intellectually, than to blame myself for Korodaun and her people. But I’ll be damned if I don’t feel like I should have done better.”
“The whole team does, sir,” her subordinate admitted after taking a swallow. “Which means you and I need to shut that story down and shut it down hard. If the team starts wallowing, we’re fucked.”
“We might be fucked anyway,” Morgan replied. “I’m not sure I’d keep this team together if I was Tan!Stalla.”
“Who else knows as much as we do?” Rogers asked. “Nobody, that’s who. Nobody knows anything, sir. We’ve been neck-deep for longer than anyone else, and yeah, we got it wrong.
“But right now? Even getting it wrong is data.” She gestured at the hologram of the missile. “Take this. What do we know about it that we didn’t before the fight?”
“We know that it’s a standard Laian long-range attack missile,” Morgan told her. “We also have acquired a few bits of data about Laian missiles they probably don’t realize we did. Those go back to my father and his friends inside Jupiter.”
DragonWorks was the Imperium’s utterly secret, arguably treaty-violating research facility where entire new generations of military tech had been developed from samples of Mesharom and Alavan systems—alongside stolen examples of other Core Power technology.
And, as Morgan suggested, it was buried inside Jupiter, contained in a powerful shield bubble fifty kilometers beneath the gas giant’s normal surface.
“I already checked for software back doors the Laians might have built into their missiles,” Rogers told her. “No remote kill switches for us, sadly.”
“We do know one thing, I suppose,” Morgan noted as she studied the missile. “They fired just over six million of the effing things at Korodaun.”
And the rest of the fleet, but Korodaun’s charge had distracted those missiles.
“And?”
“And that, plus the million or so missile launchers to fire them, represents almost ninety percent of Builder of Tomorrows’s production capacity since the estimated time of capture,” Morgan told her subordinate. “Assuming they had another salvo in reserve, those missiles consumed every scrap of the shipyard manufacturing ability that could be even remotely used for missiles.
“That limits what else they did. We know they mounted hyper emitters on bioforms before, but if they had that many missiles? I know, with absolute certainty, that the emitters for the second fleet were not built by Builder of Tomorrows.
“So, either they were taken from the wreckage of the conspirators’ ships, which I don’t think would have given them enough, or they have their own version of a hyper-portal emitter derived from their biology.”
“Which is terrifying enough,” Rogers said. “But I see the positives of it. And another one, I suppose.”
“Which is?” Morgan asked. She realized her beer was half-empty and she didn’t consciously recall drinking any of it.
“If they used up that much of the capacity of their only modern industrial node on them…I’m going to guess that they haven’t worked out how to do biotech interface drives and missiles.”
“Yet,” Morgan said drily. “But you’re right. That does give us one thing to work with: Builder of Tomorrows can only produce about seventy thousand missiles a cycle, and that is assuming a ready supply of raw material.”
“They’ll have that soon enough,” Rogers admitted. “We can’t prevent them diving into empty systems now. That’s probably what they were looking for.”
“My guess as well,” Morgan confirmed. “They came out of the Astoroko Nebula so they could get a clear view of the galaxy, including EM signatures. They’ll know which systems in the Dead Zone and near the Nebula are inhabited now.
“No matter what, I suspect they’ll move in on at least one system we can’t watch,” she agreed. “We don’t have the time, data, or hulls to prevent that. If we want to restore containment, we need to guess what they’re going to do after that.”
“No small ask, sir,” Rogers told her. “But I think we have a chance. At the end of the day, we can guess their needs, and that leads to their objectives.”
“Yeah.” Morgan drained the rest of her beer bottle. “And before you say a word, Commander, I think both of us will do that better with some rest.”
“Yes, we will,” Rogers agreed. “See you in the morning, sir?”
“We’re expecting to have new orders from Tan!Shallegh by then,” Morgan said. “Flag staff meeting. After that, though, we’ll start digging into the brain and logic of a monster the size of a planet.”
Chapter Nineteen
By the time Morgan joined Tan!Stalla and the rest of the senior staff for the briefing in the morning, she’d slept, showered, braided her hair, and put on a fresh uniform. It felt like she was wasting time while she was doing all of it, but she felt more human and more competent with her hair braided and everything under control.
Looking around the other officers, she suspected she wasn’t the first to need to force herself through a total mental reset—and there were still officers on the staff who were going to need to do something equivalent.
Tan!Stalla looked surprisingly on the ball, unlike her officers. She stood at the front of the standard conference room, inside a section that had clearly been rigged with additional humidifiers. The presentation stage was visibly misty, a countermeasure to the Squadron Lord’s skin issues, and she leveled beady black eyes on her team.
“We have new orders from Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh,” she told them. “They are, I suspect, what most of us expected. We are to finish rounding up the last of Korodaun’s strays and fall back to rendezvous with the First Defense Fleet.”
“Sir, shouldn’t we at least make some attempt to maintain containment still?” Ashmore asked, the human operations officer’s freshly shaved scalp gleaming. That had apparently been his mental reset.
“We never had the resources to maintain containment in the face of an active offensive from the Infinite,” Tan!Stalla replied. “This was not an unknown factor, Commander Ashmore. If the Infinite were able to deploy significant numbers of hyperdrives before we were able to bring the Grand Fleet and the First Defense Fleet into position—preferably with the Wendira Battle Hives in sup
port—we were always going to be driven off.
“We did everything reasonable to maintain containment, but it is better to return as the clan than die as the tribe. We will fall back and make rendezvous with our fleet and our allies.”
Tan!Stalla’s bullet-shaped torso turned to allow her to survey the rest of her officers.
“We were defeated, yes,” she told them. “And we retreated, yes. But we did so because to fight would have been without purpose. If we had taken every unit of this task force and every one of Korodaun’s cruisers forward with her, we would have died with her.
“She chose to save a fleet.”
“Perhaps we should use it,” Morgan said quietly, before she even realized she was speaking. Every eye in the room was suddenly on her.
“Staff Captain?” Tan!Stalla intoned.
“You said our orders were to bring the entirety of our force and Korodaun’s cruisers back to the First Defense Fleet,” Morgan said slowly, the thought taking shape in her head as she poked at it. “But who remains if we do that?”
“No one,” Ashmore replied. “We pull everyone back to stand as one fleet, where we’re safe.”
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not where ships were built to be,” Morgan quoted back. “I understand the intent of our orders, sir,” she told Tan!Stalla, “but there is always a degree of discretion allowed to a flag officer that I suspect Tan!Shallegh is expecting us to take.
“Between our cruisers, the destroyers and the Laian cruisers, we possess over a hundred hulls,” Morgan continued. “They are not able to stand against the Infinite and we wouldn’t want them to try.
“But they are able to maintain a sensor watch over the Nebula and track where follow-up Infinite forces go. They can evade and they can run to escape any attempt by the Infinite to bring them down—but they can keep us up to date on what our enemy is doing.
“If we take everything back to the rendezvous, we blind everyone.”
Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Page 11
