Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9)

by Glynn Stewart

  “It’s going to take us a couple of days just to internalize what is known before we can even start looking for the pieces we know we need.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how long we’re looking at to get the weapon online, or if it will even be possible.

  “All I know is that I doubt we’ll be fast enough to be ready for the next swarm, and I’m worried about what that will mean.”

  “A lot of dead people nobody could save,” Lawrence said quietly. “We’ll work fast, Dr. Dunst. I have a damn good idea of what components I’m looking for. By the time we’re done going through whatever they already have, I figure I’ll be able to tell you if it’s impossible.”

  “So, we can cut off before we waste too much time, at least,” Rin concluded. “That won’t make us many friends, but I suppose it’s better than accidentally blowing up a Dyson swarm.”

  “Oh, don’t worry; if we fuck up trying to turn this shit on, we probably won’t have to worry about our reputation,” Lawrence told him. “If we do it right, it’s safe. If we do it wrong, we’ll probably nova the star the swarm is anchored on.”

  “Oh.” Rin stared out into the launch deck, watching another set of Wendira Workers flutter up toward the top of the ship.

  “I’m not sure I realized that part,” he admitted. “But… Well, it doesn’t matter. We have work to do.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The gray void of hyperspace wasn’t necessarily dark, but the feeling of being isolated in a dark and lonely void was about the same for a ship in hyperspace and a ship in deep space. The grayness of hyperspace was brighter, but the chaos of its nature meant that even friends were invisible beyond a certain distance.

  Morgan had spent a significant chunk of her adult life in hyperspace, and she, like most people, consciously turned her office lights just a little bit brighter when underway. She also found herself seeking out other people more as well.

  It was a constant struggle against the unconscious awareness, in every sentient mind, that they just were not supposed to be there. That this place wasn’t designed for them and only incredibly advanced technology had brought them there and kept them alive.

  That brought her to a quiet dinner with Rogers, Koumans and Koumans’ XO, an Indiri named Razh Tal. The damp red-furred amphibian was eating a different meal from the other three, but she seemed to be enjoying it.

  Morgan had no idea what the pale green spheres Tal was eating were—if they were universal protein, someone had done a lot of work with them—but the classic steak-and-potatoes dish Koumans’s steward had served up for the humans went down well.

  “My compliments to your staff, Captain,” Morgan told Koumans. “To turn frozen steak into something that good takes skill and practice.”

  “I’m honestly not sure my staff could handle fresh steak at this point,” Koumans admitted. “I don’t think Odysseus has been within twenty light-years of Earth. Ever.”

  She raised a glass to Tal.

  “She was built by the Indiri, not your father’s yards. I’m surprised she was named for a human hero, given that.”

  “My people name ships from lists provided by the Navy,” Tal noted, swallowing the last gelatinous green piece of her meal. “The Bellerophon class, for example, has a list of twenty heroes from each of the Imperium’s races. Almost six hundred names—and that barely swims the surface of the pond of our aggregate mythologies.”

  “And the Indiri shipbuilders always like to keep things nice and stable,” Morgan said. “We borrowed a lot of their best practices when we set up the Raging Waters of Friendship Yards—including naming ships based on the Navy’s list rather than all after our own heroes.”

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t think that’s solely responsible for lifting us to the third-largest shipbuilder in the Imperium, but it didn’t hurt.”

  That ranking ignored, of course, that the rest of the top ten yards were either A!Tol or Indiri. Humanity had one very successful shipyard that had helped propel the Duchy of Terra to major economic prominence, but the Indiri had six across four star systems—and the A!Tol and the three Imperial Races had another twenty across more systems.

  Even those five species combined only accounted for sixty percent of the Imperium’s shipbuilding, but that still meant that roughly three percent of all Imperial warships were built in Sol.

  Morgan’s father had certainly not grown any less rich in the last thirty-plus years.

  “I have to wonder, Casimir, why the daughter of the man who owns that yard is a military officer,” Koumans said. “Unless that’s…intrusive.”

  Morgan chuckled.

  “The plan was…somewhat different,” she noted. “But remember that my father is looking at another century to two centuries of healthy, active life managing his businesses. He owns fifty-five percent of a one-third stake in Raging Waters of Friendship—I don’t own anything.

  “I could have worked my way up in the company and taken over, but I also wanted to follow in the Duchess’s footsteps.” She shrugged. “I joined the Militia, got dragged into the Taljzi Campaign, and then when the Navy took over, they asked me to step across to provide my experience.

  “A few long-cycles later and here we are.” She gestured around them, taking in the warship and the task group it led. “And, well—like my father, I’ve got a few centuries left to run a full Navy career and go into business.

  “If I can do good serving the Imperium now, it’s worth it.”

  The stewards arrived to sweep away the dishes and leave behind glasses of wine—four of them, as Indiri processed Terran alcohol safely, if not necessarily in the same way as humans.

  “House Tal is mostly shipbuilders,” Razh Tal noted as the four women relaxed. “Joining the Navy isn’t discouraged, but making a career of it is. Having military knowledge is handy when designing and building warships, but my House generally prefers to make money, not war.

  “I joined for the experience toward my family’s work and, well…I ended up in the right place at the right time and led an emergency rescue team that saved sixteen hundred lives on a civilian liner.

  “After that, I decided I could do more good in an Imperial uniform than in an engineer’s pond.”

  Rogers laughed.

  “Yeah, I hear you there,” she told the Indiri. “As one of the first kids born on the new colonies, there was a bit of pressure to ‘show the flag’ by signing up for the military, but none of us were really planning on staying.

  “I never had quite so dramatic a sign that I was in the right place as saving a passenger ship!” She toasted Tal. “I found the service suited me, though, so here I am.”

  Morgan leaned back in her chair and half-toasted, half-saluted her chief of staff.

  “And then you got saddled with me,” she noted, carefully shifting the conversation so that Koumans wouldn’t have to answer the implicit question if she didn’t want to. She had access to the confidential portions of the woman’s file, after all, and some people were more sensitive about certain things than others.

  “I could have ended up with worse commanders,” Rogers replied. “Captain, what brought you into the service?”

  Morgan’s attempt to get Koumans out of the question had clearly failed. Fortunately, the Captain didn’t look particularly bothered. She shrugged.

  “I was nineteen and dumb,” she admitted. “My partner and I wanted a baby, and I didn’t want to use a tube. So, I enlisted to get Imperial healthcare, which ran me to the front of the line for the womb-growth procedure.”

  Koumans shook her head with the half-bitter chuckle of old foolishness.

  “Then, of course, I discovered that while I had been growing a womb and going through basic training at the same time, my partner had been fucking around and had got my best friend pregnant,” she said. “So, when the offer to attend the Academy on A!To for officer’s training instead of enlisting came up, I flipped him the bird and took it.”

  “I’m…not even su
re how intensive that procedure is,” Rogers said after a long moment. “But I can’t imagine doing that while going through basic training is any fun.”

  “It is not,” Koumans agreed genially. “My ex was an asshole. The Imperium is my family now, and I married the Navy. I’m busy enough here!”

  “Aren’t we all,” Morgan murmured. “Aren’t we all.”

  A dark pall descended over the meeting as they considered their mission.

  “Honestly, sir. What are our chances?” Koumans finally asked.

  “Fifty-fifty,” Morgan admitted calmly. “We don’t know for sure that we can actually stealth past the Infinite—that’s why we brought four HSM-equipped battleships. The hope is that if stealth fails, we can snipe any Infinite before they can report in.

  “But we also don’t know what their FTL communications look like. They could be better than ours. They could be nonexistent. We don’t know—so even the sniping plan is risky.

  “The truth is,” Morgan reminded them all, “that if we lose stealth, we are doomed. We have a small chance of being able to hide and sneak out carefully, but most likely, failure will end us all.”

  “My math says that so long as we blow at least a couple of the stars in the rosette, the effects will keep the Infinite contained for at least half a long-cycle,” Rogers pointed out. “As long as we get in, we can make a difference.”

  “If it comes down to that, none of this fleet will be going home,” Morgan said quietly. “I’ll take that option if I have no choice—it’s pretty obvious that even trading this entire fleet for only ninety cycles of time is entirely worth it—but I would very much prefer to bring everyone back.

  “Imperial. Laian. Wendira.” She shook her head. “Everybody lives, if I can make that happen.”

  “Except the Infinite,” Koumans murmured. “I wish they’d talk to us.”

  “The only communication we’ve had with them is demands and missiles,” Morgan said. “They haven’t exactly been making a warm and fuzzy impression on the Imperium.”

  The room was silent, and Morgan finished her wine with a sigh.

  “In the end, our orders are clear. Our weaknesses are clear. Our strengths, thankfully, are clear. We know ourselves, though we don’t really know our enemy. That’s enough for fifty-fifty, so far as I read Sun Tzu.”

  And it had to be enough.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The Skiefail System was disturbing in its emptiness.

  Rin Dunst had lost count of the individual star systems he’d visited in his life. It was easy to become blasé about the sheer scale and size of a solar system when you traveled between six of them in any given year. Easy to forget that any given inhabited planet probably contained more cultural diversity than every city and spaceport he’d seen combined.

  But he knew what a solar system should look like. There should be asteroids and planets and gas giants. The proportions and orders should vary based on a billion factors over the life of the star system, but those worlds and worldlets should be there.

  In Skiefail, they were not.

  As Zokalatan had approached her destination, additional equipment had been provided to the Imperial detachment—including a full holographic setup linked to the star hive’s sensors.

  Rin had beaten Lawrence to forbidding any connection of the sensors to their portable computer by about two and a half seconds. The molycirc core—a chandelier-esque structure of crystalline silicon two meters across and three high—was loaded with critical information for their work. Some of that information was probably unknown to the Wendira.

  They weren’t going to risk its corruption or theft, even to feed visual data on the swarm into it. All of that data would be recorded, placed on hard-data mediums, sanitized with handheld devices and only then connected to the portable core.

  But for now, the sensor link was giving the team a gods’-eye view of the star system they were going to be working in for the next few five-cycles at least—and it was empty.

  Every world, every asteroid, every meteorite had been scooped up by Alavan construction ships and fed into immense refineries. If Skiefail was anything like the Dyson swarm in Taljzi space, a significant portion of a second star system had been disassembled to provide raw materials as well.

  The Alava had never thought small.

  Eventually, even the nerve-wracking nature of the outer system’s emptiness couldn’t pull their attention away from the heart of the problem. Skiefail itself was a bloated wreck of a star, a yellow dwarf forced to twice its original size by failures of the Dyson swarm’s systems.

  “I make it about seven thousand intact stations,” Mok observed. “That’s, what, thirty percent survival?”

  “Around there, assuming it’s the same as the one we have Archive files on,” Lawrence agreed.

  Rin’s subordinates didn’t know the source of the Archive files on the Dyson swarms—but they did know that the Archive included a detailed diagram of an intact Alavan Dyson swarm. That was their baseline for all of this.

  “That’s slightly lower than the Taljzi swarm, right?” he asked. “That was thirty-five percent?”

  “Yeah,” Lawrence confirmed. “Ten thousand intact or partial platforms. What a goddamn mess that was. Only some of them actually matter, though,” she reminded everyone. “The rest were glorified solar panels, supposed to feed power to the central transmitters by microwave beam.”

  “We care about the control center and the teleporters, right,” Rin agreed.

  He took control of a portion of the hologram, zooming in on a selection of the platforms. He stared at the space stations for several seconds and shook his head.

  “Finding those in this is going to suck, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “I’m hoping that the Wendira have cataloged the existing platforms while they’ve studied it,” Lawrence told him. “The primary matter-transfer control center should be one of the larger remaining stations—and the teleporters are visually distinct from the collectors.

  “We need a control center, a plasma collector and a teleporter station,” she concluded. “The teleporter stations are most likely to have self-vaporized at some point. The plasma collectors are mostly likely to have been eaten by the star’s expansion…and the Archive diagram says there were only three control centers in the first place.

  “So, when do we get access to their files again, Professor?” she asked Rin.

  “Once we’re on their support station. None of their data even goes aboard a ship that could leave Skiefail without the Queens’ explicit sign-off.”

  “Paranoid. Great.” Lawrence shook her head. “What was our guarantee that they’d let us go when we were done?”

  “Nobody wants a three-way war, Kelly,” Rin reassured her. “They don’t want to fight the Infinite and the Imperium.”

  “Right. Even after we build them a superweapon,” she said drily. “I’m sure everything will be fine.”

  “If nothing else, we’re going to make sure we hold the key to that superweapon,” Rin promised. “I think we’re all on the same page on that point!”

  Transferring all of their gear over to the Wendira base station was at least straightforward. Even the molycirc computer core had been designed for portability. It all packed up, and helpful Wendira Drones hauled it all onto the cargo shuttle put aside for them.

  “It’s weird,” Lawrence murmured as the shuttle blasted clear of Zokalatan. “Anyone else get the impression that the crew doesn’t even know where they are?”

  “I’m actually certain they don’t,” Rin admitted. “From what Oxtashah told me, they’re keeping this whole mission entirely under wraps. The pilot flying us is probably one of the few crew members to know what’s going on.”

  “So weird,” Lawrence repeated. “And nerves-inducing.”

  “Well, it’s not our problem,” Rin countered. “Eyes front, Commander Lawrence. Our objective awaits.”

  The swarm grew larger as the shuttle zipped toward i
t at half the speed of light. If they’d been able to look directly at the star, Rin suspected that the presence of the platforms would be easily visible to the naked eye now.

  Of course, looking directly at a star was a terrible idea, and he was looking at a scanner screen instead.

  “We’re two minutes out,” he told his people. “Looks like our destination is a parasite station attached to one of the bigger platforms.” He paused. “Lawrence, does that platform look like what I think it is?”

  The cyber-archaeologist was right at his shoulder a moment later, and he heard her sigh in relief.

  “If you think that it’s one of the matter-transfer control centers, you are correct,” she told him. “That little baby controlled the transmission of twenty-eight percent of this star’s power output to target systems within fifty light-years.

  “The swarm had three of these platforms, each controlling four primary and four secondary teleporter stations. The stations aren’t designed for independent control, so while we’ll need to rig up systems to get the teleporters to work at all, we still need this girl to give them instructions.”

  “And I’m guessing her computers are as fucked as every other Alavan computer out there?” Rin asked.

  “Yup. The Taljzi had interface modules that allowed the core Alavan operating system to link in to the computer cores they provided, basically rebooting the software on hybrid hardware,” she told him. “That’s going to be our first step, I suspect.”

  “There’s no steps, Kelly,” Rin reminded her. “We need to do this all as simultaneously as possible. A team on the computers, a team on the teleporter, a team on the plasma collector.”

  “Fuck. Let’s leave the plasma collector, then,” she said. “Unless we’ve got a lot more Wendira resources than I think.”

  “Is that…safe?” Rin asked.

  “No,” Lawrence told him bluntly. “We’ll be sequencing two teleporters, one to pull matter in and one to throw matter out. Without the plasma collector to provide exact control of how much mass is in the pickup zone, we might overwhelm the containment system at the teleporter station.”