Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “But they are definitely lying to me. Ships are moving, fleets being assembled. If they’re not moving against us, I’m not sure who they are moving against.”

  The communique was mostly informational at this point, though Harriet was getting a personal message from the Empress since she was heading to the flashpoint.

  “I want to tell you to refrain from starting a war,” A!Shall concluded, a flash of sadness tinging her skin despite her iron self-control. “I cannot. If it is the Kanzi burning our worlds, crush them. You have my full backing.

  “If it is someone else…” The Empress shivered, tentacles flickering. “You have my full backing,” she repeated. “You are a Fleet Lord of the Imperium. That grants you authority and I will not restrict it.”

  “Hyperspace being what it is, I’m not sure how long it will be before you arrive in Xīn Táiwān. Keep us advised via the hyperfold relay. You are authorized to use any systems up to Black Dragon in the conflict with the Kanzi.”

  She paused.

  “I understand that two of the Bellerophon–class ships are with you. I trust your discretion on the Gold Dragon systems, Fleet Lord, but I would prefer that the Kanzi not become aware of our possession of tachyon sensors or single-portal hyperdrive missiles.”

  The Empress shivered again.

  “I know better than to control distant tides via a one-way communication link, however. I trust your discretion,” she echoed. “Your service does honor to the Imperium.

  “Avenge our dead, Fleet Lord.”

  Harriet hummed softly to herself as she entered her flag bridge. Her staff and their supporting teams were busily working on managing the thousands of details and tasks required to run an entire fleet.

  Her Seventy-Seventh Fleet was still half a day out of Xīn Táiwān, and her staff was already looking overwhelmed. She made a note to see if she could coopt more of the squadron-level staff—or Rolfson’s people, for that matter—to make sure her own people weren’t overwhelmed.

  Her Fleet, after all, was “merely” thirty-two super-battleships, thirty-two cruisers and sixteen destroyers. Adding the Militia’s second squadron, she was up to forty-eight super-battleships, two Bellerophon battleships, forty-eight cruisers and thirty-two destroyers.

  Rolfson’s fleet would add another sixteen cruisers and destroyers, ten more battleships and two super-battleships. She wasn’t up to the strength of the Grand Fleet that Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh was mustering against the Kanzi core worlds, but the fifty-plus capital ships still made up a powerful force for this far out on the frontier.

  “Fleet Lord,” her chief of staff, Sier, greeted her. The tall blue-feathered and black-beaked Yin had been with her since her first cruiser in the Imperial Fleet, rising from her First Sword—executive officer—to her flag captain and now to Division Lord and the effective second-in-command of her fleet.

  “Any news from the fleet?” she asked.

  “Two hundred and sixteen minor disciplinary complaints, sixty-five engineering issues, twelve promotions and one enlisted sentient locked in irons,” he reeled off. “A quiet day. None of that really requires the Fleet Lord’s attention.”

  A hundred and thirty ships, including three squadrons of super-battleships, represented the best part of three hundred thousand sentient crew. That was a quiet day.

  “Any intelligence updates?”

  Sier shrugged, a gesture his race shared with humanity.

  “Nothing meaningful. Imperial Intelligence is still chasing wing shadows to find the flock. There’s something there, but…”

  “That’s much what the Empress said in her communique,” Harriet told him. “I want you to start a new series of training exercises across the fleet.” She hummed thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled wickedly.

  “I want us to exercise our ships against a ‘conceptual enemy’ based off the Bellerophons’ Gold Dragon tech,” she told him. “Someone with an optimal combination of Core Power tech, the most advanced enemy we can conceive.”

  Sier blinked slowly, his eyes meeting hers in a manner that sent atavistic shivers down her spine. The Yin had evolved from large predatory birds. His thoughtful expression reminded her ancestral monkey of an attacking eagle.

  “What are you expecting to fight, Fleet Lord?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but my hunch is that either we aren’t fighting Kanzi, or the Theocracy has some secrets we all missed!”

  “Attention to the Fleet Lord,” Sier called out as Harriet entered the room. A long table in the center of the space contained her officers as well as the Captain of her flagship, Justified. A virtual table continued off into the “distance,” containing Justified’s XO—currently physically on the super-battleship’s bridge—and the rest of her Captains, XOs, Division Lords, and Squadron Lords.

  Only the people physically present were actually expected to stand, but all of her officers made at least an attempt at whatever their species used as an at attention pose until she waved them all back to their seats.

  “All right, people,” she greeted them. “We are currently twelve hours from Xīn Táiwān. If anyone has any concerns about the fighting capabilities of their ship or their formation, I better already know about them!”

  The warm silence that answered was what she expected. Seventy-Seventh Fleet hadn’t deployed in years, but the command staff had been together for ten long-cycles. They’d had months and long-cycles to get their ships exercised together in the shelter of the shielded spot in Jupiter—and many of the virtual exercises had included the Militia officers represented by Vice Admiral Tidikat’s First Squadron.

  “We’ll get a more up-to-date reporting on the local situation once we drop out of hyperspace and can link into the hyperfold network,” Harriet continued. “What we’re getting by starcom is about twenty-five hours out of date right now. We should be hearing from Bellerophon shortly, given the estimate Captain Vong provided when he entered hyperspace, but we’ll get that via hyperfold first.

  “What we do know is that it’s been a quiet week. Our genocidal strangers appear to have disappeared from our space, which makes me nervous,” she admitted as her officers started to look more relaxed.

  “I’m happy to see our worlds and people spared their visits,” she agreed with her people’s unspoken comment, “but I worry about where they may have gone. The force that attacked the Mesharom was of a similar style but deployed ships quite unlike those used in the attacks on our systems.

  “We have very little solid intelligence. We do know that the Kanzi appear to be maneuvering as well, but many of our usual assets in Theocracy space have been unusually quiet. The Emancipators are keeping the Imperium up to date on deployments around the usual flashpoints, but they’re not talking about movements out here.”

  Harriet had few positive impressions of the Kanzi, which meant it had been quite a shock to realize that the Theocracy actually had a live and vibrant, if officially proscribed and occasionally actively purged, abolitionist movement.

  Like the American Confederacy in Earth’s past, the Theocracy’s economy was utterly dependent on slavery. Harriet had little hope that the Emancipators would actually change anything, but to be fair, neither did the Emancipators.

  They didn’t make up the majority of the Imperium’s intelligence assets in their nation by accident, after all.

  “I want to split up Division Lord Peeah’s squadron,” she noted, with a nod to the Pibo officer in question. Pibo were one of the Imperial Races and resembled nothing so much as the Grays of human UFO mythology. Peeah was a lesser-male, a four-foot-tall humanoid with massive black eyes and dark gray skin mottled with spots of orange.

  He also commanded her most modern destroyer squadron.

  “Peeah, I want you to deploy your platforms in a scouting pattern along the border,” she told him. “And by ‘along the border’ I mean ‘inside Kanzi space.’ If the Theocracy has a significant naval force in the region, I want to know where they are before they do; is
that clear?”

  “As summer waters,” Peeah confirmed. “We will detach from the fleet immediately.”

  “The rest of us are going to take up a nodal defense position at Xīn Táiwān,” Harriet continued. “We’ll absorb Vice Admiral Rolfson’s task force and remain above our most vulnerable colony until we have more data. Once Peeah’s initial scouting sweep is complete, we will reassess the situation.”

  She smiled grimly.

  “My current tentative plan is to proceed to Alstroda and neutralize any potential threat from the Theocracy,” she admitted.

  “Whether by diplomacy or violence will depend on them.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Bellerophon shivered around them as Kumari Hume took the Terran battleship deep into the gravity well of the black hole. Systems across the bridge were screaming a dozen alerts, and even Morgan’s tactical console was warning her that half of her weapons weren’t going to work properly.

  “Contact in thirty seconds,” Hume reported. “Please tell me no one over there has guns left. This could get really, really bad.”

  “We’re in control,” Major Phelps reported grimly. “I’ll give you the rest of the details once we’re all back aboard, but it’s not pretty. But we are in control of the bridge, the remaining fusion cores, and the maneuvering jets.

  “No one over here is going to be trying to ram Bellerophon.”

  “Oh, good,” Morgan murmured. Her own focus was on the hyperfold-equipped drones still surveying the accretion disk. It didn’t look like there were more ships out there, but these strange Kanzi had already surprised them more than once.

  “Contact…now.”

  A soft tremor ran through the entire battleship, and Morgan joined in the general sigh of relief.

  “We have hull contact. Engineering is deploying tow cables and I’m extending the interface field,” Hume reported. “At least five minutes until we can move out, but I think I’ve got the descent arrested. Nobody is falling into the singularity now.”

  “Time dilation?” Vong asked softly.

  “Twenty-six percent,” Masters reported. “We’ve been in tau factors for about forty-five minutes, and real-world time has been about fifty-two minutes. If we pull up in five minutes, we’ll have lost about twenty all told.”

  “Could be worse,” the Captain said. “Any problems with the tow cables?”

  “Nothing,” Hume replied. “Proceeding per plan.”

  Morgan, like most of the bridge crew, found herself half-holding her breath for the five minutes it took to hook the wrecked transport up to Bellerophon. Eventually, however, the two ships began moving away. Slowly at first, then faster and faster as Hume grew more confident in the connection.

  With the accretion disk, it would be over an hour until they were in clear space, but the worst was over. They’d danced with the edge of a black hole and come away alive.

  Morgan wasn’t entirely sure why she was in the Guard debriefing once the troopers started returning aboard the battleship—at least not until Major Alexander Phelps approached her and grabbed her hand in his own.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Commander,” he told her fiercely as he shook her hand. His beaming smile flashed white teeth in dark skin, and his skin was warm against hers. For a moment, Morgan found herself mildly distracted by the man’s athletic build and bright blue eyes, but then she forced a smile and met his gaze.

  “For what, Major?” she asked slowly.

  “The bastards tried to blow every damn thing they had that could wreck the ship or kill us,” Phelps told her. “If you hadn’t taken out their antimatter plants, we’d have been vaporized when we tried to board.”

  A shadow passed over his face.

  “It was bad enough, Casimir,” he admitted. “But without you, we’d have all died. I owe you. My Guards owe you.”

  “Major Phelps asked that you be in this briefing so he could thank you personally,” Vong interjected from behind them, and Morgan almost jumped. She’d focused on the Guard more than she’d meant to—a bad habit to get into.

  “And given that you and Commander Masters are going to be dealing with many of the consequences of what the Major has discovered, it seemed wise,” the Captain continued, a twinkle in his eye suggesting that he’d caught Morgan’s distraction.

  “Come, Casimir. The poor Major is going to have to brief us all, and none of this is pretty.”

  Morgan fell into line behind the Captain with a final nod at Phelps, who returned the gesture with a brilliant smile before crossing to the front of the room.

  “All right, everyone,” he said firmly. “We’ve still got teams on the wreck going over everything, but Captain Vong asked me to give an initial ‘what the hell happened’ briefing on what we found.”

  A rough schematic of the ship appeared on the wall behind Phelps as Morgan and the senior officers took their seats.

  “We are forwarding this briefing to our Mesharom guest,” Morgan warned everyone. “I’m not sure if Coraniss will be watching this live or in recording; it will depend on how they function with it best.”

  She figured everyone got her meaning: Dragon-classified items were off the board as much as possible.

  “Well, hopefully, they’ll know something we don’t,” Phelps replied. “These people were complete fanatics. I’ve fought Kanzi raiders and pirates, and I’ve read the files on Imperial Marines going up against their Theocracy counterparts.

  “The Kanzi field ground troops with strong religious fervor, but only a few key units are true zealots,” he noted. “These grunts were fanatics to a smurf.

  “We boarded the ship in the face of heavy resistance and intentionally targeted the fusion cores,” he continued. “That turned out to be a damned good plan. At least one core was already in overload by the time my Guards got to it, and we only barely managed to short-stop it.

  “After that, they flooded a significant portion of the ship with the hydrogen fuel for the cores and ignited it.”

  Morgan winced at the image of hell that brought to mind.

  “We lost seventy-six Guards and have a hundred wounded,” Phelps said levelly. “Most of those were when the bastards lit off the hydrogen. Once we’d seized the cores, Life Support and Engineering, resistance…stopped.”

  “They started surrendering?” Antonova asked.

  Morgan had looked up the files on the Alpha Centauri Incident. She guessed what had actually happened even before Phelps shook his head.

  “No. We have no prisoners, at all. No survivors. Once they realized the ship was lost, they started suiciding—many with poison, some with bombs as they tried to take my Guards with them.

  “They killed themselves to a one to avoid capture.”

  The briefing room was silent for several long seconds as that sank in.

  “That is not very Kanzi of them,” Vong finally said. “I thought the main Kanzi faith was against suicide?”

  “It is,” Morgan confirmed. “What worse way, after all, to end the life of a perfect mirror of God?”

  She tried to keep her tone level, but she suspected more of her opinion of the Kanzi’s insane religion slipped through than she meant to.

  “It’s also against scarification or body mods,” Phelps pointed out. “And these smurfs were scarred, tattooed and pierced like nobody’s business. Patterns, runes, imagery…none of it lines up with our files on the Kanzi.”

  “That is weird,” Masters said. “I though the Kanzi had unified their languages?”

  “More so than humanity, but fringe languages exist and the Theocracy’s insistence on the official ‘Tongue of God’ means we don’t have translator code,” Morgan explained. She then shut up, realizing that she probably shouldn’t be answering questions in this meeting.

  Instead of complaining, however, Captain Vong chuckled.

  “For those who weren’t aware, Lieutenant Commander Casimir’s Academy curriculum was tactics and xenoanthropology. She quite possibly knows more about our enem
y than most of us.”

  “The weird thing, though, is that we could talk to what was left of their computers,” Phelps said after a few moments of quiet. “The dialect was archaic and the software was strange, but all of the interfaces were in the usual Kanzi language.”

  “Anything else we need to immediately know, Major?” Vong asked.

  “These guys may look like the smurfs, Captain, but…they don’t seem to think like them. I’ve fought them and now I’m wondering just what we’re missing!”

  After the staff meeting, Morgan found herself pulled into a private meeting with Commander Masters in his office. Her boss looked tired as he gestured her to a seat.

  “I think better standing,” she reminded him.

  “I know,” he allowed. “On the other hand, I’m tired and my neck hurts, so how about you don’t make me crane it to look at you?”

  It didn’t take a great deal of crankiness on the part of a superior officer to make a question into an order. Morgan sat, folding her hands into her lap as she carefully studied Chin Masters.

  “I owe you an apology, Lieutenant Commander Casimir,” he admitted.

  “I believe it is a basic principle of any military force that no superior ever owes an apology to a junior, sir,” she offered carefully. She wasn’t sure just what had been happening on Bellerophon’s bridge during the battle with the Kanzi, but she was sure that a fight with her boss was not the solution.

  “It is an even more basic principle, Casimir, that when the ship’s Captain calls you into his office and spends forty-five minutes explaining how you have been failing to do your damn job, that said Captain is correct,” Masters said flatly, then sighed and rested his face in his hands.

  “I owe you an apology,” he finally repeated after a few moments. “I assumed you had this position from nepotism, and almost everything I’ve done since you came aboard was, at least on my side, classed as ‘giving you enough rope.’”

  Morgan swallowed. She thought they’d been building a good working relationship, getting past that initial friction. Apparently, she’d been wrong.