“Once we confirm who our Wendira and Laian officers are going to be, I want an all-captains meeting scheduled ASAP,” Morgan told Rogers. “I’ll meet the squadron commanders first, but we’ll need to be moving on the main meeting as well.
“We have three cycles, Bethany,” she said quietly. “That’s when the Wendira are leaving, and our special task group is expected to use their departure as cover.”
“Who are we hiding our mission from, sir?” Rogers asked. “I mean, it’s not like the Infinite are watching us.”
“That we know of,” Morgan replied. “That we know of, Staff Captain.”
Much of the secrecy, though, was that they were operating out of the middle of the Dead Zone, where a hundred stars had been murdered with the very weapons her task group was tasked to deploy.
Standing among the wreckage of dead stars, no one wanted to admit they’d ordered more stars killed.
Chapter Forty-One
Somehow, Rin wasn’t entirely surprised to be summoned to a meeting with Tan!Shallegh at the end of the ship’s day-cycle. The Wendira were in possession of an asset of potentially immense value, but they didn’t know what to do with it.
The Imperials did, but Rin would need a team and to call on expertise from people who weren’t there. Hyperfold and starcom communications could quickly get him a full report on how the Taljzi-modified Dyson swarm was shut down—but he couldn’t ask for it without a reason.
Oxtashah and Tan!Shallegh were the only people in the Fleet Lord’s office when Rin arrived. The door slid shut behind him—and then a second set of security doors, ones he hadn’t realized the space even had, slid shut over those.
“Take a seat, Dr. Dunst,” Tan!Shallegh told him. “At Princess Oxtashah’s request, this room is now sealed against any and all surveillance. No one, aboard Va!Tola or not, can hear or see anything going on in here.”
The A!Tol leveled his eyes, always pitch-black, on Oxtashah as greens and blues—determination and curiosity—flickered across his skin.
“You have requested Dr. Dunst and absolute privacy, Princess Oxtashah,” he noted. “This is, I must admit, a strange set of requests. I hope that you can make matters clear in short order.”
“I can,” she promised. She laid a portable holoprojector on Tan!Shallegh’s desk, and the same image she’d shown Rin earlier appeared in the middle of the room. The Dyson swarm circled its star in quiet certainty, the multilayer creation shedding light that went surprisingly well with the art around the room.
“A stellar swarm,” Tan!Shallegh noted. “Not, I am guessing, the one near Arjtal.”
“No,” Oxtashah agreed. “This one is in the Dead Zone, Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh, some thirty light-years from the Astoroko Nebula. Lost to the records the Mesharom possessed, it remained intact as time and looters stripped the systems and facilities it fed power to.
“It is almost entirely inactive, and we have hesitated to do more than study it for the time we have been aware of its existence,” she told them. “But my understanding is that the Taljzi converted a similar energy-capture swarm into a modified Alavan teleporter cannon and used it to destroy a Mesharom fleet.”
“I do not have the authority to confirm or deny her suspicions, Fleet Lord,” Rin said quietly. “I told her she would have to go to you.”
“If such a thing were the case,” Tan!Shallegh said calmly, “what do you think we can do?”
“I believe that your people disabled the Taljzi weapon,” Oxtashah replied. “And in disabling it, I believe you learned enough to know how to turn our swarm into the same style of weapon—creating a deadly trap that we would be able to lure the next Infinite strike force into.
“A weapon that could eliminate a Mesharom battle fleet would easily turn the tide of battle against the Infinite, could it not?”
Tan!Shallegh was quiet for at least fifteen seconds, colors swirling across his skin as he considered the proposal.
“There was such a weapon,” he finally confirmed. “I do not fully understand what the Taljzi did, but I am told it was a merger of modern and Precursor technology—if nothing else, the Alavan systems had to be taught to recognize an interface drive.
“It was a perversion of a system designed for in-flight refueling of Alavan ships,” the Fleet Lord told her. “Given that the Alava had regular refueling facilities scattered across their entire territory, I do not know if that system will even exist on your stellar swarm.”
“It seems worth the investigation,” Oxtashah said calmly. “Any tool that could protect our people seems worth trying. Do you have the knowledge and personnel to make the attempt?”
“Dr. Dunst?” Tan!Shallegh asked.
“I’ve been going through the Grand Fleet personnel files since Princess Oxtashah raised the possibility with me,” Rin told them. “There are eleven sentients in the Grand Fleet who worked on disabling the Taljzi system. I have identified thirty-six more with skills and knowledge that could potentially assist in the process of duplicating the effect…including myself.”
He had never even seen that Dyson swarm in person.
“From my own previous information and the research I’ve done today, I believe that we should be able to establish relatively quickly whether or not the necessary subsystems exist in this particular Dyson swarm,” he told them. “But we are talking about a system of stations that wraps around an entire star. Relatively quickly is still on the order of five-cycles, at least.
“Even if the subsystems do exist, they need to be operating and linked together,” he continued. “That’s dependent on pure random chance. We don’t know enough about the pre-failure structure of the swarms to say anything else.
“Even if everything in the swarm is the way we need it, I understand that an interface drive was uniquely easy to target with the teleporter system. The Infinite’s propulsive organs may not be as readily targetable—especially given that any fleet used as a lure to bring them to the system will be using interface drives.
“The range is limited to within the system of the swarm,” Rin concluded. “If we manage to get the weapon online, it will require that lure—and we may not be able to easily protect those ships from our own trap.”
“These are all possibilities that must be planned for,” Oxtashah told him and Tan!Shallegh. “But I believe the necessary next step would be to deliver a team of Imperial specialists—those forty-seven individuals—to our facility in the Skiefail System to review the data we have?
“We have allowed very little information on the Skiefail stellar swarm to leave that system,” she warned. “Your team would be transported there on my personal ship.”
“Dr. Dunst?” Tan!Shallegh said.
“Fleet Lord?” Rin guessed what the A!Tol was going to ask.
“Are you prepared to organize and lead this mission?” Tan!Shallegh asked. “You will have clear access to any personnel or resources in the Grand Fleet, but you will need to assemble your team prior to the departure of the Wendira Battle Hives.
“We can easily conceal the departure of Princess Oxtashah’s star hive with the rest of her people’s fleet, but a later movement would be more obvious.”
He glanced at Oxtashah.
“I assume,” the Fleet Lord said calmly, “that you do not wish to bring the Laians in on this project.”
“While relations are improving between our peoples, I do not feel that my Queens would accept them learning of this secret,” the Princess replied. “I will share what I must with your people to make this come to pass, but I cannot include the Laians in this.”
“I understand,” Tan!Shallegh conceded. “But understand that I will take no action that threatens them.”
“We will permit your people to disable the weapon as you leave, if you feel that is necessary,” Oxtashah told him. “Though I must point out that, by its very nature, the system we have discussed is purely defensive.”
“So it appears, always,” the A!Tol agreed. “Please arrange transp
ort for Dr. Dunst and his team to the swarm, Princess Oxtashah. I will authorize whatever assistance is needed to enable the swarm.
“But we will be keeping very close attention on its future fate, do you understand?”
“Of course, Fleet Lord,” she said. “We all wish to see the Infinite defeated and our nations safe. This is merely another tool toward that goal.”
Rin remained after Oxtashah had left, waiting in silence for the Fleet Lord to speak first.
“I do not like sending a group of my people into the unknown like this,” Tan!Shallegh finally said. “But I see the value. Is there anything you will need?”
“Mostly the people,” Rin said after a moment’s reflection. “If I can bring fifty people with me, I think we’ll have the best chance we’re likely to have. A direct encrypted link to certain people at the Institute and at Arjtal may speed things up as well.”
“I will have the communications team set something up,” Tan!Shallegh said. “You will be relaying through Wendira starcoms, however, which does limit our ability to maintain security.”
“I need to talk to the people at Arjtal,” Rin warned. “The people I can bring from the Grand Fleet are only half the answer. We will need the expertise of people who aren’t here.”
“What can be done will be done,” the Fleet Lord told him. “But I must ask that you be extremely circumspect about what is shared on that channel, encrypted as it is.”
“What can be done will be done,” Rin echoed back at the A!Tol. “There’s some equipment we could use as well. A mobile molycirc computer core that we can trust will be essential.”
“Whatever you need,” Tan!Shallegh reiterated. “I’d send a task force with you if I thought it would help.”
“It won’t,” Rin said quietly. “The Wendira probably won’t even tell us where Skiefail is if they can avoid it. The upside of that, I suppose, is that they’re the ones who’ll have to lure the Infinite there.”
“Do you think you can make it work?”
Rin sighed.
“Without a lot more data, I can’t even guess,” he admitted. “If everything we need is intact and linked together, and if we can successfully duplicate the Taljzi’s work, we’re still looking at something that took them fifty long-cycles to prepare—and I doubt we’ll have fifty cycles.”
“Even if you succeed, that will likely cause problems unless you really can disable the weapon as you leave,” Tan!Shallegh warned. “A weapon like this… Defensive or not, it changes the balance here between the Wendira and the Laians.
“And in a war like this, I would not expect to build a weapon without seeing it fired.”
The A!Tol shivered.
“No one has yet created a functional duplicate of Alavan teleporter technology with modern systems,” he noted. “Even the Taljzi just removed intact teleporters and used them in different locations. Their attempts to study the internal components failed—as have the Mesharom’s, according to the data we have from them.
“You will be working with technology and software around the one great mystery of our Precursors. I believe Oxtashah is above the waters, but that does not mean no one will attempt to keep you after you have worked on that tech,” he warned. “If it comes to that, I don’t know if we will be able to retrieve you.”
Rin swallowed. That was not a risk he had considered, but he nodded levelly.
“It should be a safe mission,” he said. “Even with that. I don’t think the Wendira want to start another war.”
“When this is over, they may believe that we may not be able to prevent them detaining you,” Tan!Shallegh said. “And…depending on how badly we get hurt before this is over, they may end up being right.
“You and your people deserve to know what you’re walking into. It should be safe, but you are going into Wendira territory and beyond our reach.”
“I understand, Fleet Lord,” Rin promised. “And I’ll make sure my recruits understand. I don’t think it will be a problem.”
He was reasonably sure everyone in the Grand Fleet was scared of the Infinite by now.
Chapter Forty-Two
The holographic image of an Infinite bioform dominated the conference as Morgan’s new officers joined. Laians, Wendira, humans, A!Tol…all of the captains and flag officers were quieted by the sight of the massive Category Five creature.
“Welcome, everyone,” Morgan told them, concealing a smile at the nervous silence. “I am Division Lord Morgan Casimir of the A!Tol Imperial Navy and the commander of this combined special task group.”
She waited for that to sink in and to make sure no one was going to raise trouble, surveying her new officers. Two human captains, an A!Tol captain and an Anbrai captain made up her Imperial officers. The rest were about what she’d expected.
All nineteen of her Wendira captains were Warrior-caste Wendira. No Royals, no Drones—not even any Worker caste, though the ships’ crews were only about fifty percent Warriors, from her understanding. A Warrior-caste Sub-Commandant named Irisha commanded the Wendira detachment.
On the other hand, only twenty of her twenty-four Laian Republic captains were actually Laian. The others were four different species, including a broccoli-like Shondra, a Lotis—a squat four-armed sentient she wasn’t familiar with—a Zo—an ethereally thin and almost translucent biped with no visible eyes—and an Eerin—a heavily-furred hexapod.
They fell under the command of the Thirty-Eighth Sword of the Republic, a glitteringly black Laian female named Protan.
Everyone’s attention was still focused on the bioform, and Morgan gestured toward it.
“This, officers, was one of the Category Five bioforms that attacked this system,” she told them. “Eight hundred kilometers long, two hundred at her widest point, carrying an estimated eighty thousand missile launchers and capable of generating up to six independent plasma bursts powerful enough to overwhelm even a war-dreadnought—and of creating microsingularities propelled at eleven nines of lightspeed.
“Her ammunition and missile launchers were fortunately limited to what they could manufacture or steal of Laian munitions,” she continued. “A Five-M-type unit, as we have designated this creature, is a cyborg mix of Infinite biotechnology and stolen Laian weapons systems.
“So far as we can tell, this particular creature was not capable of independent hyperspace travel and was limited to their standard reactionless drive, accelerating at one-point-five percent of lightspeed per second.”
Morgan’s recitation of the capabilities of their enemy was holding everyone’s focus, even though they all should know this already.
“A Category Five-M Infinite bioform is capable of engaging an entire Laian war-dreadnought squadron, with escorts, with near certainty of victory,” she concluded. “They are the most powerful bioforms we have yet encountered outside the Astoroko Nebula.”
She tapped a command and the Five-M vanished…replaced with something else.
“This, officers, is a Category Six-A bioform,” she told them as the sphere of hyper-compressed matter appeared amidst them. “The shell was an Alavan mothership, approximately eleven hundred kilometers in diameter and manufactured of hyper-compressed matter. Still far short of theoretical neutronium but significantly tougher than any known modern armor.
“So far as the scans we have from the nebula can tell, the entirety of the shell is filled with an Infinite bioform that has consumed the interior structure—crew, power cores, everything. She is capable of generating an unknown number of independent plasma pulses, as well as extending prehensile tentacles at least a hundred thousand kilometers with enough strength to crack compressed-matter armor.
“We also expect that by the time we encounter the Six-As again, they will have been retrofitted with some form of interface-missile armament.” She smiled thinly. “We also believe it is highly likely that the Six-As, like the rest of the Category Sixes, possess microsingularity cannons.
“This bioform represents a single unit c
apable of threatening the entirety of the Laian First Defense Fleet. Our special task group would stand very little chance against it.”
She wiped the close-up away and replaced it with the scans of the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula.
“The Eye is defended by forty-six Category Six-A bioforms, two hundred and twenty-two unarmored Category Six bioforms—all of whom are significantly larger than their armored cousins—and eight Category Seven creatures averaging sixty thousand kilometers in length.”
Morgan paused again, making sure her people were following her, and then gave the holoprojector one last command.
The scan of the entire Eye vanished, replaced by the reconstructed video of the Queen rising out of the Eye’s gas giant.
“All of it to defend this creature, which we believe to be the oldest of the Infinite and the likely progenitor of at least this cluster,” Morgan told them all. “We have designated her Category Eight…and are mostly calling her the Queen.”
She surveyed her officers.
“Now, does anyone in this room have suggestions as to how our three nations could engage and defeat the forces massed in the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula in conventional battle?” she asked quietly.
A deafening silence answered her.
“My understanding,” Sub-Commander Irisha finally said, “was that we were not planning on doing so.”
“We are not,” Morgan agreed. “That is what this special task group exists to avoid. But it is not easy to stand amidst the ruined worlds of the Dead Zone and readily embrace the concept of murdering stars.
“We all must understand the risks we face in this operation and the reason why this operation has been contemplated,” she told them. “We will need to infiltrate past whatever sentinels the Infinite have set throughout the nebula, recognizing that if we are detected and fail to eliminate the sentinels in time, we will face an utterly overwhelming force.
“Our objective is these stars,” Morgan explained, pulling the zoom out to show the cluster of stars at the heart of the nebula. “Twelve relatively newborn blue giant stars form a gravitationally balanced structure around the not-yet-ignited dwarf at the heart of the Eye.
Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Page 22
