Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9)

by Glynn Stewart

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Hundreds of massive biological starships charged through deep space, filling Morgan’s sensors with a slow pulse of radiation and heat she could only describe as a heartbeat. Her thirty surviving starships fled before them at the same speed, keeping exactly ten light-minutes between the two fleets as Morgan considered what she wanted to say.

  Her gaze and attention were inevitably drawn to the image of the Infinite Queen, and she studied the being she was talking to more closely than she ever had before. They had hyperfold-equipped drones surprisingly close in now, and the true visual of the Queen was awe-inspiring.

  The bioform was a pale red color, with blue and purple stripes the width of continents running along her length. It was clear where missile launchers and new systems had been mounted on her hide as cyborg installations—and it was also clear, with actual visual data, where old hardtech systems had been stripped away, leaving scars the size of starships.

  Those weren’t her only scars, either. Massive gouges, at least one the depth of a medium-size planet, had been blasted into the Queen’s flesh over the millennia. The wounds were closed over now, but the dents and scars remained.

  For all of her massive bulk, parts of the Queen were surprisingly delicate. Flaps and tentacles were scattered across her surface, serving purposes Morgan could barely begin to guess—though at least one was definitely concealing a group of infant Infinite bioforms; she saw one of the creatures poke its head out before a muscular flap irresistibly herded it back inside its mother’s flesh.

  Morgan marshaled her thoughts as the situation remained frozen, and then finally activated the recorder.

  “We do not wish to end you,” she told the Infinite. “And I do not believe you wish to end us. We are both afraid. Afraid of what we don’t understand, afraid of a clear and present threat. Our rogues attacked you, but you attacked us.

  “You struck our fleets and our bases, seeking to defend yourself, and so we destroyed and trapped your swarms in turn. If we play this out, we will destroy each other for nothing.

  “You do not need our worlds or stars,” she guessed. “Any system, even ones useless to us, can feed the Infinite. We can share this galaxy and learn from each other.

  “But to do that, the fighting has to stop. There can be another way.”

  How Morgan was going to pull that off, she didn’t know yet, but she kept speaking and the answer fell out of her mouth, almost as much a surprise to her as anyone else.

  “If the Infinite withdraw to this nebula and promise to negotiate for access to systems and resources, I can convince the fleets that are coming to stand down,” she promised. “We can…reset our interactions.

  “We can try again, from the presumption of peace. We can end this war.”

  The Infinite possessed abilities even the Mesharom didn’t understand. The Queen herself had likely seen thousands of years of history prior to the Alavan Fall. They could learn so much from the Infinite, and yet they were so close to destroying each other.

  “Do you think she’ll buy it?” Rogers asked.

  “I think she stopped outside weapons range because she was waiting for something like this,” Morgan told the other woman. “I think the Queen wants peace. I think she wants to talk to us, to learn about the galaxy where she has found herself.

  “But above all else, I think the Queen wants to preserve the Infinite—and these are all that are left.”

  Twenty minutes. For twenty minutes, Morgan waited. She managed not to get up and pace, concealing her nervousness and her fear from her staff. If she’d guessed wrong, the Infinite would destroy her task group.

  Then they’d probably destroy the combined fleet and overrun large chunks of the Wendira and Laian nations. They’d clearly come a long way in upgrading their bioforms with hyperdrives and missiles. Not much was going to stop them now.

  “Incoming message,” Litcha finally reported.

  “TinyLife DivisionLordMorganCasimir, you speak hope, but your promises require faith and trust. You ask the Infinite to risk everything.”

  Morgan bit her lip.

  “But the Infinite betrayed your faith once. We will extend ours in repayment now.”

  “All Infinite ships have ceased their pursuit,” Ort suddenly exclaimed. “They’re holding position.”

  “You have our permission to exit this nebula, TinyLife DivisionLordMorganCasimir,” the Queen told her. “Your DeadFlesh may go with you. We will speak with your leaders…so long as you accompany them into this nebula.

  “Any DeadFlesh that enters the Nebula without you will be destroyed. We will negotiate for peace, DivisionLordMorganCasimir, but we place our trust only in you.

  “That must be enough for hope.”

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Emerging from hyperspace into a section of space that wasn’t a nebula was a relief. Morgan could hear multiple members of her flag staff making assorted signs of relief.

  “Ort, confirm the coordinates,” Morgan ordered, burying her own desire to audibly sigh.

  They’d stopped at one point inside the Astoroko Nebula, still under the guns of a Category Seven, to check in with Tohrohsail. Every fleet in the region was supposedly headed here, to combine into a single hammer for a spoiling attack on the Nebula.

  From what Fleet Lord !Loka had told her, no one was expecting the attack to seize control of the nebula or defeat the Infinite, but it was intended to finish off Swarm Charlie before it could be reinforced.

  But there was no one here.

  “We are in the right place,” Ort replied. “Hyperspace was…cooperative. We are about half a cycle ahead of our expectations.” He paused. “The Ren should be here, but they had the farthest to come.

  “The Wendira shouldn’t be here yet. The Imperials and Laians could be here, but even normal hyperspace densities would have seen them arriving when we originally expected to,” the ops officer told her.

  “So, we wait,” Morgan replied. “Everyone should be receiving a starcom message asking them to rendezvous with us before launching the attack anyway.”

  But there was no way for anyone to tell her that. She hadn’t even been able to respond to Fleet Lord !Loka’s answer to her message.

  “I’ll be in my office,” she told her staff. “Notify me the moment we have any contacts.”

  She’d spent a good chunk of the trip there preparing messages to send to various people scattered through the Imperium—and a few Wendira and Laians, too.

  Morgan wasn’t entirely okay with the fact that she’d been recruited to a secret society, but she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to pull that lever to try to make peace.

  And her stepmother made for a hell of a lever all on her own.

  “I believe the Queen when she says it was paranoia,” Morgan told the recorder. She wasn’t being as careful in her wording as she might have otherwise been. This message was for her parents. She might be asking them to bring their political artillery into the field for her, but they were still her parents.

  “We’ve spent this entire fight acting to neutralize a threat we saw to the galaxy—and the Infinite have spent all this time acting to neutralize a threat they saw to their very existence. Our conspirators managed to burn any chance of a peaceful second contact.”

  Morgan sighed.

  “I’m pretty sure some of those bastards are still alive,” she noted. “The financiers and politicians behind that push for war so they could steal an Alavan fleet… If I find out who any of them are, they’d better watch their step in dark alleys.

  “The Infinite bear their responsibility for what has happened. There are millions of dead people, and the Infinite killed them,” Morgan said. “But the bastards who panicked and shot at them bear some of the blood guilt too.

  “I think…I believe…that I will be able to convince Tan!Shallegh and Voice Tidirok of the chance for peace,” Morgan continued. “But I can’t be certain. I’ve also sent a formal report to A!Shall, but�
��”

  She sighed and shook her head.

  “The Infinite are unique, Mom, Dad,” she told them. “I have seen nothing like them before and I don’t think I ever will again. Even the lobotomized version of their biotech the Alava had created in the cloner and the Great Mother was a pale shadow.

  “I think we can work with them. I think they can do incredible things for us—and we can make it possible for them to live again. My best guess is that the Queen is a hundred thousand years old. Even if she spent half of that trapped in a stellar box, just think of what she has seen and what she knows.

  “We need to talk to them. I need you to convince the Imperium of that.”

  She swallowed.

  “You know I don’t like asking for political favors,” she told them. “I know damn well being your kid has helped propel my career even when it shouldn’t have, but I’ve never asked for you to use your influence on my behalf.

  “Today I am. If A!Shall and the Houses of Imperium decide that we need to try for peace, that’s one of three powers in play already on my side. I know you have a voice there, out of proportion with anything a regular Duchy has.

  “Please. Help me end this war before it’s too late.”

  “Division Lord, we have hyper portals opening.” Ort’s voice echoed around Morgan’s plain office.

  “Understood,” she acknowledged, looking at the list of messages she’d put together. With a sigh, she sent them off to the hyperfold communicator.

  It would take about twenty hours for the messages to reach a starcom. After that, their recipients would have them in minutes. Responses would reach her shortly after that—if anyone decided to respond.

  “Any idea who we’re looking at?” Morgan asked as she shut down her office system and rose.

  Her office was one door away from the flag deck, allowing Ort to answer her question directly instead of via the intercom.

  “I don’t recognize the ships, so I’m guessing the Ren,” he told her. “On the main display.”

  Information was populating around the icons of the new ships as they emerged into realspace. The lead units were mace-shaped capital ships, with four large “flanges” emerging from a cylindrical central hull—a central hull that was just over five kilometers long.

  “Estimate lead units at one hundred twenty megatons,” Ort noted. “Three types of escorts, weighing in at thirty, ten and four megatons.”

  “Those are Ren dreadnoughts, all right,” Morgan agreed. The Ren had a similar escort breakdown to the Imperium as well, though the masses for a given type were very different with thirty-megaton “cruisers,” ten-megaton “destroyers” and four-megaton escorts.

  “Primary armament is a spinal heavy hyperspace projectile cannon for the dreadnoughts,” she continued, reciting from memory. “Estimated range, one light-minute with an instantaneous delivery time.”

  She grimaced.

  “That stuck in my memory,” she admitted. “Don’t remember much of the rest.”

  “Similar to the Laians,” Ort said after a moment’s hesitation. “Mix of hyperfold cannons and point-eight-five interface-drive missiles, with proton beams for short-range backup.

  “If anyone knows how their hyperspace cannon works, they haven’t duplicated it.”

  “I prefer HSMs,” Morgan agreed. “Hail them and welcome them to the rendezvous point. Triple-check your files for proper etiquette. We don’t have a lot of contact with the Ren.”

  As she understood, the Laians had helped the A!Tol Imperium set up an embassy with the Ren in the last few years, but contact was still limited.

  “We’ll be courteous, but I’m waiting on the First Fleet Lord before I talk to anyone in detail,” Morgan concluded.

  Even if the Ren had brought a hundred dreadnoughts, each easily capable of obliterating her fleet.

  The Wendira were next, arriving roughly an hour after the Ren. Morgan had seen the reports, but it was still something of a shock to watch a fleet that should have been two hundred and fifty star hives and thousands of escorts arrive as thirty star hives and four hundred escorts.

  The second surprise was Rin contacting her from Oxtashah’s ship within minutes of the Battle Hive arriving.

  She quickly returned to her office to take the hyperfold call, looking her lover’s hologram up and down for signs that he was okay.

  “What are you doing on a Wendira ship?” she asked. She paused. “It was their Dyson swarm, wasn’t it?”

  He paused in surprise.

  “How did you know about that?” he replied. “All we’ve really told anyone is that the Wendira smashed Swarm Charlie and took heavy losses doing it.”

  “The Infinite showed me their data on it, as part of their argument that we were all Alavan slaves,” Morgan said drily. “I figured you were involved. Are you okay?”

  “I turned an entire star system into a single gun,” Rin pointed out. “That’s a bit against my normal ethos, but…yeah. I’m fine. Caught up on my sleep on our way here.”

  Then he caught up with what she’d said.

  “Wait, the Infinite showed you their data on Skiefail?” he demanded. “You talked to them?”

  “I did,” she confirmed. “It was an interesting discussion in a lot of ways, and it ended with them letting us go.” She shook her head. “We went in with starkillers, but even realizing that, they let us go.”

  Rin shook his head.

  “I would…give a lot to have been in on that conversation,” he admitted.

  “They’re prepared to consider peace, Rin,” she told him. “I won’t say this has all been a bunch of misunderstandings—it sure as hell hasn’t been—but both we and they have been responding to perceived threats.

  “If we can stop and talk out what we actually need, I think we can end this without any more bloodshed. And, well.” She smiled. “There are dozens, if not more, of the Infinite who coexisted with the Alava.

  “I don’t think their perspective on the Alava will be detailed or even accurate, but an outside perspective on them could be fascinating for you.”

  “You have no idea,” Rin said with a chuckle. “My god, there will be people building their entire careers on talking to the Infinite—just about the Alava.

  “Tell me everything, love. If you can, that is?”

  “You know Oxtashah better than I do now, I suspect,” Morgan reminded him. “I may need you to help convince her to talk.”

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  By any reasonable logic, convincing the hundred-thousand-year-old living starship protecting her nest that peace was possible should have been the harder and more intimidating conversation.

  But as Morgan watched the last Imperial ships join the immense globular formation made up of four nations’ fleets, she was nervous. Everyone had agreed to let her speak, and the virtual conferencing gear in her office was calmly running self-checks around her.

  Talking to the Queen, she’d only faced one set of misconceptions and one set of priorities. She doubted that the Infinite were immune to a desire for vengeance, but their position was brittle in many ways.

  They were powerful and numerous, but Morgan suspected that even she had overestimated how quickly the Infinite could replenish their numbers. They had modified and upgraded themselves with stunning speed, but she suspected they hadn’t birthed very many new bioforms in the months since the first encounter.

  If the Infinite nest was destroyed, they were gone. There were no more of them left. Once broken, the Queen and her children were broken forever—where even if the entire four-nation combined fleet gathered around Odysseus was wiped out, another fleet could be assembled in a long-cycle at most.

  A soft chirp from her computers told her that the conference software was ready. With a sigh and a hard swallow, Morgan put her game face on and activated the conference. An illusory space overtook her office, replacing the completely unadorned space with a stylized A!Tol military meeting room.

  She was, as she’d expect
ed, the first one there. The other four people she was meeting were fleet commanders and diplomats. They’d join the conference exactly on time.

  Tan!Shallegh was the first, the A!Tol’s holographic form materializing a full thousandth-cycle before the designated start time. His black eyes focused immediately on Morgan, and a flush of red pleasure flickered across his skin.

  “It is good to see you alive, Division Lord Casimir,” he told her. “I feared I was sending you to your death.”

  “So did I,” Morgan admitted. “But we thought it needed to be done. Now…we may have another option, sir.”

  “So I understand,” he said. “I will wait for you to brief us all. Better to only swim these waters once, I think.”

  His tentacles fluttered in an amused shrug.

  “I’ve already heard from Duchess Bond and Empress A!Shall,” he noted. “Even without their words, I trust your judgment, Division Lord. I will listen.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said softly.

  Another figure flickered into existence around the table before they could say more, a vast, unfamiliar shape. No one would ever accuse a Ren of being small—and Morgan suspected the virtual conferencing software was shrinking Strike Master Koh-Stan to fit in the illusory space.

  Koh-Stan was an eight-limbed behemoth, four meters long with a segmented armored body that would allow them to lift any of their legs to act as a tool-using arm. Each limb had its own set of eyes and its own mouth, creating a rather disturbing creature to human eyes—an impression not helped by Koh-Stan themselves being a hot pink color with black stripes.

  The chlorophyll equivalent on the Ren homeworld had much to answer for.

  “Strike Master,” Tan!Shallegh greeted the Ren fleet commander. “It is a pleasure to speak with you once more.”