Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9)

by Glynn Stewart

  “This rosette of stars creates a massive realspace and hyperspace anomaly that interferes with hyper portals, hyperfold weapons and even our hyperspace missiles,” she noted. “It forms the bars of the Infinite’s prison, and we are going to implode that prison on them.”

  Eight of the stars, selected after careful calculation, flashed red.

  “Targets Astoroko One through Eight,” Morgan said calmly. “The plan is to preposition one stealthed starkiller at each of them. The STG will then withdraw at least one realspace light-year and send a hyperfold detonation code that should trigger simultaneous detonation of all eight stars.”

  A simulation started on the hologram, the stars rapidly expanding to fill the Eye with fire and radiation.

  “There is a high likelihood, that my staff has estimated at seventy-five plus/minus ten percent, that the sequence will trigger sympathy novas in the other four stars,” Morgan noted. “Whether or not those occur, we believe the gravitational effects of the novas will keep the Infinite contained in the rosette while the realspace effects wipe them out.”

  “Sounds straightforward enough,” Protan observed. “Every ship in the group is stealthed. Even the Wendira shouldn’t be able to screw this up.”

  Morgan had a hand up before Irisha could speak.

  “Sword Protan, make one more prejudicial comment, and I will be asking Voice Tidirok for a new Laian squadron commander,” she told the Laian calmly. “We cannot afford to be at each other’s throats. If we fail, large portions of the Grand Hive and the Republic alike will be sacrificed to buy time for the galaxy to muster the forces necessary to overcome the Infinite.

  “Am I understood?” she asked.

  There was a long silence, and then Protan bowed her head.

  “I offer my apologies, Sub-Commandant Irisha,” she said, though the words didn’t sound entirely sincere to Morgan. “For the good of the Republic, I will control my words in future.”

  Morgan turned her attention to Irisha, whose body language she couldn’t read. After several seconds of silence, Irisha’s vestigial wings snapped inward.

  “I acknowledge your apology, Sword,” he declared. “Let it fall.”

  “Good.” Morgan gestured to the three-dimensional image of the Astoroko Nebula. “Now, we’ve talked about what we’re planning to do, but that requires our stealth fields to be completely impermeable to the Infinite and our hyperfold communicators to be reliable enough to send the activation codes to starkillers in terminal mode.”

  While the command module of a starkiller was hyper-capable on its own, no one wanted to cut that timing any closer than they had to.

  “What all of us are here to discuss and work out as a group is what we do when that perfect world fails to be our reality.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  “You want me to what?” Kelly Lawrence demanded, the athletic computer specialist almost physically recoiling from Rin as he finished his initial explanation.

  She took a deep breath and then rose from her chair in his borrowed office. He’d brought the privacy-field generator with him when he’d boarded the cruiser Lawrence served aboard, making certain no one on the ship would listen in on their conversation.

  He let Lawrence pace the office for a good thirty seconds before he cleared his throat.

  “We have access to an Alavan Dyson swarm,” he repeated. “We’re putting together a team of experts—people who either worked on the Taljzi one or have enough other background to be useful—to see if we can duplicate the Taljzi’s trap.”

  Lawrence put her hands on her hips and turned back to him, probably consciously accentuating the uniform she wore—that of a Lesser Commander of the Imperial Navy.

  “I am the senior intelligence officer for Division Lord Scheinberg,” she pointed out. “Part of the command staff of an entire squadron of Imperial cruisers. And I took a job with Navy Intelligence because I decided that serving in the Navy was safer than poking around Alavan ruins.

  “Now you want me to go back into the unquestionably most dangerous type of those ruins and try to duplicate the most insane thing anyone ever did with those ruins?”

  “There will be fifty of us, Kelly,” Rin told her. “We’ll have the full support of the Wendira research team as well. It’s not like I’m asking you to do it alone—and you went into the Taljzi swarm knowing you might have to leave on a bloody fusion rocket!”

  “I was younger and dumber then,” Lawrence replied. “And, frankly, the only man I was interested in in a hundred light-years was making the same trip, and I was twenty-five and horny.”

  “This is safer than that,” he argued. “We’re looking at an inactive system and seeing if we can turn it on. Even if we manage to turn it on, we’ll know how to turn it off.

  “But the possibility of trapping an entire Infinite swarm is really tempting, I have to say. We could save a lot of lives if we pull this off…and of the eleven people in the Grand Fleet who worked on that project, you were the most senior and the most involved in the actual weapon system.”

  “Yes,” she conceded. “Which means I know how nuts the task you’re talking about is. How’s your Alavan code, Rin?”

  “Better than it was,” he told her. It was probably better than hers now. He’d been practicing the strange coding rules and symbology required to work with what little functional Alavan software existed.

  “How’s your Taljzi code?” she noted. “How do you feel about trying to duplicate the MacGyver kludge assembled by a team of people who, thanks to some seriously fucked-up cloning tech, effectively had two hundred and fifty years each of experience working on the system?”

  “Given that we know what they did, and we know it worked, pretty good, actually,” Rin said. “But I’ll feel a lot better with you on the team.”

  Lawrence was still standing, glaring down at him.

  “You want to fuck with a Dyson swarm and an industrial teleporter,” she pointed out. “Those are both technologies no one in the galaxy can duplicate.”

  “And us working on them will make us targets for a lot of people,” Rin agreed calmly. “But if we don’t get some kind of gamechanger in play, the odds of any of the three fleets we’ve been working with surviving the next long-cycle are tiny.

  “We lost half a million people retaking Tohrohsail, Kelly. How bad do you think it will be if, say, the First Defense Fleet is shattered?”

  “Bad,” she said quietly. “Millions on the war-dreadnoughts alone.”

  “If we can take down the next swarm with a trap, we can save those lives.”

  The room was silent, Lawrence standing thoughtfully.

  For at least a minute, neither of them said anything. Then she finally exhaled and nodded.

  “You’re insane, Rin Dunst,” she told him. “I mean, I should have figured that out when I found out you had a computer implanted in your ass.”

  “Somewhat higher than that,” Rin objected, but he was grinning at her as he spoke.

  “All right. I’m in, I guess. I’m assuming there’ll be formal orders?” she asked.

  “Yeah. It’s volunteer-only, so Tan!Shallegh wasn’t issuing those until we’d confirmed people were in.” He slid a chip across the desk to her. “That will cover everything you need. Everyone has to report aboard Oxtashah’s ship within a cycle.

  “We’re starting to run short on time. Nobody is cleared to know about this mission. We haven’t even told the Laians the Dyson swarm exists.”

  “This just gets better and better,” Lawrence said with a resigned sigh. She picked up the chip and gave him a vague salute. “Into the shadows we go. Lead on, Professor.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Despite their losses, the three Wendira Battle Hives still assembled thousands of starships. Their separation from the other two fleets and movement toward the hyper limit was a sea change, looking more like a tidal effect on the main tactical display than a movement of individual ships.

  And tucked away in one c
orner of that tidal effect were the forty-seven starships of Morgan’s new command. If the Wendira movement had been on a smaller scale, she might even have worried that her non-Wendira ships would stick out.

  With over a thousand capital ships alone, Morgan was utterly unconcerned about that. Her four battleships were easily within a margin of error of the mass of a star shield to a broad scan—and the fleet commanders would be actively discouraging narrow scans of the departing fleet for multiple reasons.

  “Lead Wendira units are opening portals,” Rogers announced. “STG ships maintaining courses and profiles as ordered. No problems.”

  Morgan nodded. There wasn’t much to say at this point. Billions of tons of starships were vanishing into hyperspace, and her relatively tiny command would enter their portals in the final third of the formation.

  “All ships confirmed ready for hyperspace and stealth,” her chief of staff continued. “We have full tactical telemetry.”

  And that was part of why an Imperial officer was in command of the STG, Morgan knew. Right now, she knew more about the ships under her command than either side was willing to let their ancient enemies know.

  Especially the starkillers.

  “Portal in four minutes and counting,” Captain Koumans’ navigator reported.

  “We have the course laid in for once we transit?” Morgan asked.

  “Follow the Wendira for two tenth-cycles, activate the stealth field and run straight for the nebula,” Rogers replied. “Charts say we should be between eight and ten cycles on the trip.”

  “Good, good.” Morgan watched the display continue to flare with Cherenkov radiation pulses as hyper portals opened again and again. She still hated the mission. There were too many unknowns—they didn’t even know enough about the Infinite for her to be okay with obliterating them—but she agreed with the logic.

  Whatever ships got out of the nebula before she blew it to hell would still be a problem, but it seemed likely she’d take out most of the Category Sixes and larger. That would change the entire tone of the war.

  “Portal in thirty seconds.”

  She’d taken the mission. There was only so much self-reflection she could do over its morality.

  “Task group will transit as instructed,” she ordered calmly.

  The gray void of hyperspace washed over Morgan’s command as they ever-so-slowly drifted away from the Wendira fleet. Once the last of her ships were clear of the visibility sphere of the rest of the fleet, she breathed a small sigh of relief.

  They were most vulnerable to someone asking weird questions while they were inside the distance where people could see them as more than a dot on an anomaly scanner.

  And as for those hyperspace anomalies…

  “Do we have solid communication links?” Morgan asked.

  “Directed laser links established with all ships,” her new communications officer, an A!Tol named Lo!ko, confirmed. “Should be solid through the stealth fields.”

  “Distance to the nearest Wendira ship?”

  “Five hundred thousand kilometers and rising,” Rogers reported. “What are you thinking?”

  “We’re not scheduled to go into stealth for another hundredth-cycle, but…pass the orders,” Morgan said. “The sooner we go dark, the sooner we get to the Astoroko Nebula and the sooner we can end this nightmare.”

  “Understood. Updated orders being distributed,” Lo!ko replied. “Standing by for your command.”

  “Let me know when all ships have confirmed receipt,” Morgan ordered. “Let’s not risk a lone trailer.”

  A few seconds passed by as messages flickered along beams of coherent light.

  “All ships have warmed up their stealth generators and are waiting for your command,” Rogers finally reported. “Timing sequencing will be tight—we have a full quarter-second delay on the farthest units.

  “Set a shared time for execution of thirty seconds from my mark,” Morgan replied. “Simultaneous execution.

  “Lo!ko—stand by to transmit. The mark is…now.”

  “Time stamp recorded, orders transmitted,” the A!Tol replied.

  Seconds ticked away. There was no noticeable sensation when Odysseus’s stealth field activated, wrapping all of her signatures—even the hyperspace anomaly signature—in a blanket of technological wizardry.

  The main display was clear on the moment when everyone else activated their stealth fields. The entire task group vanished as one. The delay on seeing the farther units vanish was barely noticeable, but it still marked that the ships had actually stealthed simultaneously.

  Over the course of the following seconds, the ships reappeared on Odysseus’s tactical plot as the laser links stabilized.

  “Telemetry links holding with all units,” Lo!ko reported. “Full communication maintained.”

  “Understood. Everyone has the course?” Morgan asked, confirming for the last time.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then let’s be about it.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The hardest thing to get used to aboard the Wendira ship was the gravity. Rin was used to adjusting to gravity swings and atmospheric difference, but they were usually relatively small. No species in the A!Tol Imperium breathed less than nineteen percent oxygen or came from a planet with a gravity of less than ninety percent of Earth’s.

  The actual standard atmosphere mix and gravity set for most multispecies space facilities in the Imperium was twenty-three percent oxygen and point-nine-seven gravities. Laian facilities were at slightly higher oxygen and gravity than Imperial ones.

  The star hive Zokalatan—Ambitious Sword, in English—was set at twenty-one percent oxygen and point-eight gravities. The air was similar to the average on Earth, if denser and damply humid in near-exact contrast to the Laian ships Rin had visited, but the dramatically reduced gravity took getting used to.

  “Dense atmosphere and low gravity,” Lawrence observed as they watched one of their hosts actually fly across a drop that plunged deep into the ship. “I think I always assumed their wings were vestigial.”

  “Warriors’ wings are,” one of their companions noted. The Imperials had been given a set of rooms that looked out over the carrier’s central launch tube, a twenty-meter-wide column that seemed to run the full height of the ship.

  The speaker, Abraxis Mok, was a Tosumi doctor and physicist. He’d acted as medic on the expedition to the Dyson swarm near Arjtal while also working as part of the team itself—a dual role the four-armed avian had taken on a dozen expeditions before that and was taking on this mission.

  “The Warriors make up for it with armor that gives them flight capabilities,” Mok continued. “But Workers and Royals can both fly in their natural environment. Drones and Warriors, for whatever evolutionary reason, cannot. A trade for proportionally more-powerful muscles in general, I suspect.”

  “Any problems with our hosts?” Rin asked. Lawrence and Mok were the senior members of his team, as much as his team was standing on any kind of hierarchy. Everyone with Rin was either military or military-adjacent, but they were also all scientists.

  “I’ll admit I’d like to adjust the atmosphere mix in our quarters, but it sounds like that isn’t possible,” Mok told him. “My species finds this level of oxygen concentration…difficult.”

  “It’s what humans are used to, but that doesn’t make it fun for you,” Rin agreed. “Have we asked?”

  “I have, and they were not promising,” the doctor told him. “I am not certain the crew is entirely clear on why we are even aboard, let alone how helpful they should be to us.”

  “I guarantee you, Abraxis, that the crew has no idea why we are aboard,” Rin warned. “And we are not to change that. Zokalatan has not yet diverted from the main fleet, but I suspect we will see significant lockdown of external-sensor availability once we do.

  “I doubt even the crew of Princess Oxtashah’s personal ship know about our destination. That’s going to cause some complications.”<
br />
  “How much of all of this are we keeping secret?” Lawrence asked.

  “We have full authority to share everything we learn with the Imperial Institute and Tan!Shallegh,” Rin told them. “The Imperium has been asked to keep this all classified, but we are not restricted in what we share with the people we have authorized on our side.

  “In exchange for that, we have to try not to expose any unnecessary information to unbriefed Wendira. They are to control information procedures on their side,” he concluded. “It’s a fair deal, even if it means the people responsible for feeding and housing us have no idea what we’re doing here.”

  “This was pitched to me as the most important mission of the war,” Lawrence said with a chuckle. “Shame nobody told the chef that.”

  “What, you don’t like unflavored universal protein with vitamin powder?” Abraxis Mok asked.

  All three chuckled. UP was a gray tofu-like substance that had been chemically reduced to contain absolutely nothing that could threaten any species. It could provide a lot of the basic needs of almost every known species, with the remainder made up for by vitamin powders.

  With work, it could even be made palatable. The Wendira were not bothering to put that work into the food they were providing their Imperial guests.

  “I didn’t think we’d need to include a cook on the mission,” Rin admitted. “My mistake, it turns out. We’ll survive.”

  “Some of us have lower caloric reserves than others,” Lawrence complained, but there was no real heat to it.

  “How long?” Mok asked.

  “My understanding is about five cycles to the Skiefail System,” Rin told them. “The Wendira have restricted almost all of their information on the Skiefail swarm to the system itself. Very little data has left Skiefail, so they can’t give us information to prep.