It was entirely possible that something was a realspace light-day or more away and would still be in position by the time they reached the edge of the impermeable zone. On the other hand, they weren’t already there.
That gave Morgan at least some hope.
She checked the reports coming in from her task group. Everything was showing green except for munitions stocks and the escorts. There was no way to replenish their missiles there, or to repair the battered escorts that had borne the brunt of the missiles that hadn’t found starkillers.
If they had to fight, it would be over quickly one way or another.
“Wait,” Ort suddenly snapped. “Anomaly contacts! Multiple anomaly contacts!”
Morgan’s attention jerked to the main screen as their destination zone suddenly acquired purple-red contacts. The contacts were moving fast—it was hard to tell what their hyperspace velocity was, but their pseudovelocity was massive multiples of c.
“Portal opening.”
One moment, everything had been quiet.
The next, the largest hyperspace portal Morgan had ever seen tore through the barrier between realspace and hyperspace. A full light-second across, it overwhelmed their anomaly scanners into useless static—and the waves of Cherenkov radiation pulsing out from it rendered half of their other sensors blind.
“Sensors are blinded,” Ort announced. “Passive visuals are down. Infrared is down. Radar is overwhelmed. Tachyon scanners are still live; I have contacts coming through the portal.”
“ID them now!” Morgan ordered.
“I make them Category Seven,” Rogers said, her voice suddenly flat and utterly toneless. “I repeat, multiple Category Seven contacts. Estimate at least five, possibly six.”
“We’ve only seen eight of the bastards in total,” Morgan replied. “What the hell?”
She could see the same reports, the reports that had broken Rogers’ hope for escape. The massive, eighty-thousand-kilometer-long forms of the Category Sevens stood out starkly on the anomaly scanners.
There were other bioforms there too, at least fifty Sixes and Fives, but the Sevens dwarfed everything else into insignificance.
And then the entire portal pulsed again as a new contact came through, the one that had required the portal to be that large and whose presence overwhelmed the Category Sevens as thoroughly as they’d overwhelmed everything else.
“I have a Category Eight contact,” Ort announced uselessly, staring at his screens as the portal closed and the Infinite Queen was suddenly fully visible to every scanner Morgan’s fleet possessed.
Chapter Sixty-Two
This time, there was no gas giant to conceal the full extent of the Queen’s leviathan bulk. She was the same roughly spermatoid shape as her lesser siblings, but she dwarfed even the already-immense Category Sevens.
Forty thousand kilometers across at her widest point and almost two hundred thousand kilometers long, the behemoth exceeded anything mobile Morgan had ever seen except the sun eater. That had been an Alava-modified Infinite that had consumed multiple entire suns over the last fifty years.
The Queen was larger than worlds. Larger than gas giants, though not as large as the immense super-Jovian near-star she’d slumbered in. Nothing that large had any right to move at all, but the Queen moved.
And moved quickly.
“I’m reading interface-drive signatures on all of them,” Ort reported quietly. “The Queen is moving at point-seven c.”
“Bring us about,” Morgan ordered desperately. “Get us away from them. Now.”
She suspected the Infinite were still having problems localizing her fleet. So, they’d brought enough ships that it didn’t matter.
“Sir…”
It took Morgan a moment to place the officer speaking. Her communications officer hadn’t been a critical part of their mission for a while, with the only communications being inside the task force.
“What is it?” she asked the Catach officer.
“We are receiving a transmission from the Queen,” the carapaced mammal said quietly.
“Sanitize and play,” Morgan ordered. “Everybody else, keep us running. Take us to full speed.”
She’d communicated with the Queen before—but that had ended badly. She didn’t see any reason why this would change.
There were twenty light-minutes between them and the Infinite were gaining at twenty percent. Her orders would cut that to ten, but full speed reduced the effectiveness of their stealth.
The Wendira and Laian units could get up to point-six-five c, but the Imperial ships couldn’t do that without going to sprint mode—and sprint mode could only be pushed for about ten hours.
“Playing the message,” Litcha reported.
The voice wasn’t the booming overwhelm of poorly translated and modulated voice transmission that the Queen had used before—or that the sun eater had adopted. It was a calmer voice now, speaking in Laian instead of Alava.
“Your NestBurner escorts are gone. Tell us, TinyLife, are you still slaves?”
Morgan looked at Litcha.
“Commander? Is that it?” she asked.
“Yes, sir,” the Catach confirmed. Much of the young alien’s face was invisible, their armor plating having unconsciously compressed around their snout and eyes in a defensive mode.
“We are not slaves,” Morgan murmured. “What do they think is going on?”
“You said…” Rogers trailed off.
“Rogers?”
“You said the starkillers were Alavan star drives,” her chief of staff said slowly.
“Yeah. Almost exact duplicates for the standard unit,” Morgan agreed.
“The Infinite might have thought they were Alavan ships,” Rogers pointed out. “That would explain why they targeted them first, almost as well as them knowing what the starkillers were.”
Morgan exhaled a breath.
“Well, that’s an interesting disaster, isn’t it?” she murmured. “Do we play along to see what she says…or tell the truth?”
“We can’t outrun them, sir,” Rogers told her. “They’ve got us pinned against the rosette, and I don’t think we can make it far enough for the stealth fields to hide us.”
Morgan considered the message and stared at the massive bioforms hunting her fleet. She could lie…and maybe squeeze her fleet out.
But this was the first time any warship had received communications from the Infinite since she’d fled from them in Defiance. Truth might buy them something more important than one fleet.
Truth might buy them peace.
“Radio transmission, I assume?” she asked Litcha.
“Yes, sir.
“Then we’ll send one back. Translate into Laian for them.”
“Yes, sir,” the Catach confirmed.
“We were never slaves,” Morgan said into the recorder. “The Nest Burners are long, long dead.”
She considered adding more, then shrugged.
“Send it.”
The transmission time was dropping rapidly, but the Infinite were still almost twenty light-minutes away. Every ten minutes that passed took away another light-minute of that safety, but it still took four minutes for Morgan to get a response.
“Message received, sir,” Litcha reported.
“Play it.”
“The NestBurners could not die,” the Queen’s voice insisted. “They were un-destroyable. You serve them as all who came before you did.”
Morgan sighed again, considering what she could do.
“Time to HSM range?” she asked softly.
“Seventy thousandth-cycles,” Ort reported quietly. “They are at one-light-hundredth-cycle.”
Morgan nodded and looked at her staff.
“I figure we talk,” she told them. “We try to convince her of the truth and see if maybe, just maybe, we can talk her down.”
“The odds are not in your favor, sir,” Rogers pointed out.
“Oh, the odds are fucked,” Morgan agreed bl
untly. “But it’s the only chance I see.”
She gestured for Litcha to record and leaned into the microphone.
“I am Division Lord Morgan Casimir of the A!Tol Imperial Navy,” she told the Infinite firmly. “I am not and have never been a slave. The Nest Burners, the Alava, destroyed themselves fifty thousand years ago.
“We serve no one. We defend ourselves against you and the war you bring to us.”
She ended the recording and considered whether that was the right tack to take for several seconds.
In the end, she shook her head. It was what her stepmother would have done.
“Send it,” she ordered.
The response would be faster now. They were sliding closer and closer to the extreme range at which they could fire—and Morgan had few illusions. There were hundreds of bioforms pursuing her, including some of the largest she’d ever seen.
When their singularity teleporters came into range of her fleet, they were all going to die.
“We have a response, sir,” Litcha said quietly. “Playing.”
“TinyLife in DeadFlesh are ever slaves and ever bound. And you say this is no more?” The Queen’s voice was curious more than angry. “If not NestBurners, what did we destroy? Why do you fight?”
Every eye on Odysseus’s flag bridge was on Morgan as she breathed and thought.
“Range?” she asked.
“Nine light-thousandth-cycles.”
“All right. All non-Imperial ships will go to maximum velocity at eight light-thousandth-cycles,” Morgan ordered calmly. “The battleships will go to full sprint at seven light-thousandth-cycles.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t like leaving the Wendira and Laians behind, but what else can we do?” she asked rhetorically. “We buy time.”
Her task group began to separate on her screen as the Core Power ships pulled ahead by five percent of lightspeed.
“And the Queen?” Rogers asked.
“We keep talking,” Morgan replied. “Litcha, get ready to transmit.”
Everyone turned to their tasks and Morgan marshaled her thoughts, trying to find not just the words that would save her fleet…but potentially the words that could end the war.
The Queen hadn’t spoken to anyone else, after all.
“We came here with weapons of great power,” Morgan finally said. “We came here to destroy you and your nest, to save our children and our nests from the war you have brought to us.
“We did not choose this lightly, but your attacks upon our worlds left us no choice. We did not wish this war, but we will destroy you to protect our own.”
She gestured for Litcha to send the message before she could rethink it, and caught herself holding her breath as the lightspeed lag passed.
“Battleships are activating sprint mode,” Rogers told her. “We are now holding the range at seven light-thousandth-cycles.” The Staff Captain paused. “Do you think this is the right track to take, sir?”
“I don’t know,” Morgan confessed. “But I feel like lies might save us…but the truth might save everyone.”
They passed the twenty-minute mark and Morgan did hold her breath. No response came. Silence.
“Sir,” Ort said slowly. “The Infinite…they’ve cut their velocity to point-six-five. They’ve matched vee and course with the Wendira-Laian formation and are holding the range at seven light-thousandth-cycles.”
“What?” Morgan asked. “That makes no…”
“Incoming message.”
Litcha didn’t even ask. They played the message instantly.
“We… The Infinite know you, TinyLife DivisionLordMorganCasimir,” the Queen said. “You were the first to find us. When we were desperate. When we were mad. And you spoke then as you speak now.
“Those who came after you did not speak. They unleashed fire upon the Infinite. Only fire has passed between the Infinite and those we believed were NestBurnerSlaves since.
“And NestBurner weapons have been turned upon us, and you bore death into our very nests. We know you, TinyLife DivisionLordMorganCasimir, but no other TinyLife has attempted speech except the afraid.”
“Oh, good, they remember me,” Morgan said faintly. “Which Alavan weapon did we turn on them?”
“I don’t know,” Rogers admitted. “But that might fit with our original assumption that Swarm Charlie had been badly defeated. They might well have been relocating her and the Cat-Sevens when we started looking like a handy contained sample for a discussion.”
“Fuck.” Morgan looked at the main display. The Queen was holding position at seven light-thousandth-cycles—basically ten light-minutes from the closest of Morgan’s ships. The Infinite were clearly waiting for something. “Would you believe me if I told you that the people who shot at you were rogues, given that I don’t think we’ve tried to talk to them since?”
“To be fair, they shot first when they met Tan!Stalla,” Rogers pointed out. “Everybody has been real trigger-happy. Facing the unknown does that.”
“Fuck,” Morgan repeated. “And yet…she’s waiting because she wants to hear what we have to say.”
“Yep. All on you, Division Lord. Did your stepmother teach you how to handle impossible negotiations with overwhelming force?”
“Yeah. Have a trump card,” Morgan replied. “I don’t have one. All I have is the truth.”
“Then make that your trump card, sir,” Rogers suggested. “Because so far…it’s working.”
Morgan inhaled and nodded.
“Right. Litcha, record, please.”
She leaned into the microphone again.
“We met here, you and I,” she told the Infinite. “Among the ring of stars that trapped you for fifty thousand years. I offered peace and you fired on my ship. Those who came after were hunters, renegades like the ship I destroyed inside that same ring of stars.”
That she’d fought and destroyed a conspirator cruiser in the Eye before realizing the Infinite were there should help, she hoped.
“They came for the Nest Burner ships you destroyed fifty thousand years ago,” she told the Infinite. “To turn those ships upon our nests and betray their kin. As I suspect you know some Nest Burners did.
“I offered you peace once, and you unleashed fire upon me. When our ships met yours again, you unleashed fire once more without a word of warning. This is all the Infinite’s doing, and everything we have done has been to defend our nests.”
Morgan paused, breathing in as she reached for the right words.
“Is there another way?”
The message left, winging its way across ten light-minutes of the void as Morgan refused to even dare hope that the answer could be what she needed.
“Sir, we’re receiving a data transmission,” Litcha said. “Laian format and protocol. I’m sanitizing, but it will take a moment.”
“No audio?” Morgan asked.
“Not yet.”
“Show me the data once it’s ready.”
That took a full two minutes, eventually resolving in a Laian-style tactical plot that Litcha was able to project into the middle of the flag deck. The iconography was…wonky, but Morgan could make out that she was looking at an Infinite force—she guessed Swarm Charlie—entering a hyper portal.
“Fascinating; they’re getting live updates from realspace,” Rogers noted. “Relayed from the ships that have already gone through. We have problems doing that.”
“Why are they showing us this?” Morgan asked—and then the bioforms started disappearing. Big bioforms. Just vanishing in balls of…starstuff.
“My god,” she whispered. “Did they give us data on the rest of the system?”
“Some, sir,” Litcha confirmed. “Showing now.”
It confirmed what Morgan suspected.
“We duplicated the Taljzi Dyson swarm weapon,” Morgan said. “My god, they must have pulled Rin and dozens of others into that.”
“And they gutted Swarm Charlie with a weapon that was unq
uestionably Alavan in origin,” Rogers concluded. “Damn.”
“Audio transmission coming in now, sir,” Litcha reported.
“This is the work of your TinyLife,” the Queen told Morgan. “NestBurner weapons. We have seen these. We have seen these tear apart worlds and murder nests. This is what your TinyLife have wrought.
“And now fleets of your kin swarm toward this nest. They believe they have an advantage, but there is not enough DeadFlesh in these stars to challenge a Nest of the Infinite. But.”
There was a long pause, and Morgan thought the message had ended.
“We have searched the stars,” the Queen resumed again. “We have searched the light of untold suns and rocks and nebulae, and not one scrap of our kindred remains. We do not know what horror the NestBurners unleashed, but the Infinite are no more.
“But we remain and we will not die.”
Morgan was silent, considering the Queen’s position.
“Rogers,” she murmured. “Do we know enough about the Alavan special project to say if the rosette might have shielded the Eye from some of its effects?”
“No,” her chief of staff said with a bitter chuckle. “Literally all we know is that they broke the laws of physics and rewrote the conductivity potential of seventy-plus percent of inorganic material in the galaxy.”
“But it would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Morgan said. “If the rosette delayed some of the impact of the change, the Infinite inside the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula might have adapted without even realizing it.
“But the Infinite outside would have died with their enemies. Potentially, the Alavan modifications to the cloner and the Great Mother saved them, but the rest of the Infinite didn’t have those. These are literally all that is left of their species.”
“And if they’re going to eat suns and worlds, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, sir,” her chief of staff told her.
“Except they’re not,” Morgan noted. “They held Tohrohsail for days and harmed no one who didn’t fight them. They allowed humanitarian cargo missions; they…acted like reasonable occupiers who happened to be giant organic starships.”
“What are you thinking, sir?” Rogers asked.
“I think we have a chance to do the goddamn impossible,” Division Lord Morgan Casimir told her subordinate. “I think we have a chance to end a war that never should have happened and save a species that is utterly unique in the galaxy.”
Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Page 32
