Unofficially, the counterweight to his presence had been the Terran Militia and Seventy-Seventh Fleet. The Imperium had refused to publicly move forces, but Harriet had seen her reinforcements tick up…and she also knew that the Imperium had paid for the first run of Bellerophons. All of which were entering Terran service.
“If these strangers hit Avida, then Cawl is responding to them just as we are,” Rolfson noted.
“That is true,” Harriet agreed. “But since the Kanzi won’t talk to us, they knew we were moving here and they did us no such courtesy.
“No. We have no choice. All ships will report readiness within the twentieth-cycle and we will proceed from there. Barring unexpected news or readiness issues, this fleet will deploy to Avida within a tenth-cycle.”
And that was that. Harriet Tanaka had committed her fleet to move in a little over two hours—and even if everything the Kanzi were doing was above board, she might have just ordered the beginning of the war the Imperium had dreaded for longer than humanity had known either alien nation existed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Thank you for coming to me so quickly,” Coraniss told Morgan.
The big caterpillar-esque alien still hadn’t shown their face to Morgan. Like the previous times Morgan had visited the Mesharom aboard the pod, Coraniss faced their computer monitors while speaking.
“We’ve communicated mostly by text,” Morgan reminded the alien. “A request to visit was unusual enough to bring me quickly.”
Masters had honored his commitment to bring her into the loop and give her the level of involvement in shipwide affairs she should have had. The extra work, of course, was leaving her completely swamped. His support had helped mitigate the impact, at least, and she was feeling mostly in control of her duties.
She was still missing a drill of the plasma lance crew to be here.
“That is fair,” Coraniss admitted.
“Is there anything you need?” Morgan asked. One of the reasons she’d rushed down was concern that the Mesharom might be missing something key to their health or the pod’s function.
“No, the connected umbilicals have served perfectly,” the alien confirmed. “Universal Protein is no more pleasant for me than any other race, but it serves. I have information to pass on.”
Morgan took a seat in the chair one of Coraniss’s worm-like segmented robots placed for her and waited patiently.
“Information?” she asked carefully.
“I am linked into the hyperfold relay network for the Frontier Fleet,” the Mesharom told her. “My superiors have been receiving my reports, but I have not received more than basic acknowledgement.”
Morgan couldn’t see Coraniss’s front, so she was spared the full effect of the multi-limb shiver that was their shrug. She’d seen it before, however, and recognized it.
“I did not expect more until a ship was dispatched to retrieve me.”
No human would have been nearly as calm when faced with the lack of communication, but Mesharom weren’t human.
“So, a ship has been dispatched?” Morgan asked.
There was a chittering sound. It took Morgan several seconds to realize Coraniss was laughing—it wasn’t a sound she’d heard from Mesharom before, and it was out of character for most members of the race. It wasn’t that they didn’t have senses of humor, but they were very restrained by human standards.
“That was all I expected, but I did not consider context,” the Interpreter admitted. “With the data on your engagement with the strangers, the decision has been made to intervene directly.”
A chill ran down Morgan’s spine. They’d demonstrated a lot of technology they weren’t supposed to have in that fight. An “intervention” could just as easily be intending to bring the Imperium back into line as anything else.
“A full task force of the Frontier Fleet is on its way,” Coraniss told her. “Elements of the Core Fleet are also being deployed, but they will take time to arrive. They are not close.”
Morgan wasn’t even certain what a “full task force” of the Frontier Fleet would entail. The Imperium certainly didn’t have records of more than single six-ship squadrons getting involved in anyone’s affairs.
And the Mesharom Core Fleet? They weren’t even in the records. The Core Fleet was a legend. A myth, not a real force.
“How long?” Morgan couldn’t keep herself from asking.
“Approximately sixty-three days for the Frontier Fleet,” Coraniss told her. The actual phrase they used, Morgan realized, was “quarter-orbit.” The Mesharom homeworld was closer to a duller sun than Earth, orbiting in just over two hundred and fifty days, but the translator software turned that into something its audience would know immediately.
“One hundred twenty-six days for the warships of the Core Fleet.”
“Warships?”
“Of course,” Coraniss confirmed. “Frontier Fleet’s ships serve many purposes. Only the Core Fleet contains the Mesharom’s true warships.”
The briefing room was silent as Morgan reiterated Coraniss’s words to the rest of the senior officers aboard Bellerophon.
“If what we’ve seen of the Mesharom aren’t warships, what are they?” Antonova asked, the blonde communications officer looking concerned.
“Patrol ships, basically,” Morgan told her. “Definitely military ships, armed craft…but not true warships. Coraniss didn’t give me much on what their warships actually look like, beyond ‘much bigger’ than their battlecruisers.”
She sighed.
“I don’t get the impression that Coraniss has ever actually seen a Core Fleet deployment,” she continued. “Certainly, I checked the records. There hasn’t been a Core Fleet deployment in at least two or three centuries, and that was on the opposite side of the galaxy from us against a Core Power we know almost nothing about.”
“The Anditch,” Vong confirmed. “I checked the files myself. We know at least the physical appearance and size of territory of most of the Core and Arm Powers. We don’t know that about the Anditch, only that they challenged the Mesharom and are no longer a player in Core politics.”
A shiver ran around the room. The Mesharom were slow to develop tech and slow to respond to provocation. They were losing their edge over the other Core Powers with each passing decade—but three hundred years ago?
“We do know that they still exist, right?” Antonova asked. “The Mesharom didn’t…exterminate them?”
“Imperial Intelligence doesn’t think so, but a lot of our usual sources for background data dry up rapidly when the Anditch are mentioned,” Vong told her.
“All of this, however, is thankfully a problem for later. We can look forward to Frontier Fleet reinforcements in the medium-term future, and if things truly go to shit, these Core Fleet ‘warships’ may come along in time to save our hides.
“For now, however, we need to consider the enemy in front of us,” he concluded. “Surgeon-Commander Miyamoto, if you can brief us all on the results of your autopsies, then Major Phelps will fill us in on what we’ve learned of their tech.”
Surgeon-Commander Masuyo Miyamoto looked like there was a sumo wrestler or twelve in his background, a heavily overweight man who moved with a delicate grace and had some of the longest and most careful hands and fingers Morgan had ever seen.
“My and Major Phelps’s people pulled physical samples from two thousand and eleven individuals,” he said in precise, Japanese-accented English. Everyone aboard Bellerophon had the same translator earbuds as the Imperial Navy, but the Militia still tended to insist on English for all communications.
Just in case the Imperial-built translation hardware and software failed.
“When we did our autopsies and genetic analysis, however, we had to go back and reverify all of our samples,” Miyamoto told them. “Because on initial examination, it appeared that we only had samples from seventeen individuals.”
“I wondered why you asked,” Phelps interjected, the Marine looking con
cerned. “I don’t think my people messed anything up.”
“They did not,” the doctor told him. “Neither did mine. Two thousand and eleven separate individuals. Seventeen unique genetic codes. Some minor variations that we detected once we looked deeper, but at the core: seventeen genomes.”
“I don’t understand, Miyamoto,” Captain Vong admitted.
“They’re clones, Captain. We examined over two thousand clones based on seventeen individuals.” The surgeon shook his head, his jowls wobbling. “Mass-produced spacers, I would guess. It would explain the enemy’s cavalier attitude towards their personnel’s lives.”
Morgan swallowed hard. Clones?
“I didn’t think that even Imperial technology was up to mass cloning,” Masters pointed out. “Is this a Core Power thing?”
“We retrieved several functionally intact corpses for more detailed examination,” Miyamoto replied. “All of them show signs of accelerated growth. At least one of the corpses we examined was a full adult, but examination of bone growth patterns and musculature suggested that the individual was less than five Terran years old.
“That kind of forced growth is beyond any known technological base,” he concluded. “Yesterday, I would have told you that mass-producing trained adult soldiers in five years would be impossible.
“Today…today I must admit that it has happened. They are Kanzi, not human…but Kanzi and human biology is as similar as any two species from different worlds can be.”
“My god.”
Morgan wasn’t sure which of the officers had muttered. It might have even have been her.
“Appropriate,” Miyamoto stated. “Whatever technology is behind this is nearly godlike so far as we are concerned. We can make no assumptions on enemy population or resources. If they can mass-produce spacers, what is to say they cannot mass-produce miners? Farmers? Scientists?”
“It has to be Precursor technology,” Morgan said into the silence that followed. “An intact Precursor facility, clearly fallen into the wrong hands.”
“What do we do?” Masters asked slowly.
“We fight,” Captain Vong told them all grimly. “We have seen their limits. Bellerophon can demonstrably fight them at a two-to-one tonnage disadvantage…though that may not be enough, given what Dr. Miyamoto just described.
“Major Phelps? What do we know about the enemy technology?”
“Masters and Casimir might be more helpful than me,” the Marine told them all. “Examining the freighter didn’t tell us much we didn’t already know. In many ways, she was crude and old-fashioned. You can clearly see the Kanzi derivation in her design and tech, but the language used was antiquated and a lot of the systems were even more so.
“And then there were pieces like nothing I’d ever seen,” he continued. “Their hand weapons are comparable to ours, but their squad support weapons are hell. Whatever they hit just…disappears.”
Phelps shook his head.
“We’ve reviewed the sensor data, and it looks like they’re managing to transport the target into hyperspace…but not any layer of hyperspace we’re familiar with. Mechanical or organic, nothing survives the process.”
“Masters?” the Captain asked.
“That aligns with what our records show of their short-range energy weapons,” Morgan’s boss confirmed. “Anything they hit is simply obliterated. A transfer into an unstable hyperspace layer would…fit.
“Their longer-range weaponry is based around much the same base principles as the Core and Arm Powers. They possess a point eight five cee interface-drive missile that is notably smaller than ours. They don’t seem to have any weapon between those two in range, though given that they appear to have a perfect defense against proton beams…”
“Our Bellerophon outmatches them,” Vong concluded. “But the rest of the Imperial Navy is only barely up to their weight class at best. And we have no idea how many ships they may have.”
“So, what do we do?” Masters repeated.
“We make sure everyone knows what we’ve learned and that the Imperium is ready for what’s lurking beyond our borders,” the Captain told them. “Then we move to Asimov and dig in.”
He shook his head.
“This enemy seems to have moved out of our space, but I can’t risk expecting that to last.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
There were few things in the galaxy that were allowed to interrupt the limited family time that Annette managed to squeeze out with Elon and their children. She and Elon were both swamped with work at the best of times, and the current crisis didn’t alleviate that.
Leah and Carol, the older twins, shared the general status of “Heirs,” even though Leah was the older by several minutes and was actually Annette’s designated successor. They were hip-deep in an intensive pre-college prep program—by their own choice, to Annette’s surprise—and spent much of their free time shadowing one or the other of their parents.
The two younger girls, at ten and eight, weren’t being dragged into any of that yet. Megan Bond was just old enough to understand that something was currently very wrong in the galaxy. Alexis Bond, however, was not.
She was also too young to really understand the board games the rest of her family might prefer and had insisted on Monopoly. Which, despite Elon’s success in the real business world and her elder sisters’ training in economics, she was cleaning up at.
“That’s Boardwalk, Mom!” she crowed. “You owe me fourteen hunned!”
Annette’s sparse pile of brightly colored currency didn’t stretch to that, and she turned her gaze to her equally sparse collection of property to see if she could mortgage anything—and then her communicator buzzed.
Elon and the twins froze. They understood what it meant for someone to interrupt the four-hour Sunday evening block the Duchess of Terra had fought to keep open for her family through thick and thin, peace and war.
“Well? Where’s my money?” Alexis asked brightly.
“It’ll have to wait a moment, love,” Annette said quietly. “Elon, I think I’m bankrupt anyway. Can you take over foreclosing me for Zhao’s future replacement?”
Her Consort chuckled, but it was forced.
“Of course.”
Annette stepped out of the room, a chill in her heart as she opened her communicator.
Maria Robin-Antionette had been her personal secretary for over fifteen years and was married to Annette’s press secretary. The two gorgeously attractive women were about the only thing keeping Annette from going insane dealing with Earth’s press and bureaucrats—and the Robin-Antionettes were a large portion of why she got her family evenings.
“What is it, Maria?” Annette asked, the chill expanding to consume any anger she’d felt at the interruption.
“We received a starcom request from a Mesharom AI,” her secretary told her. “No specification on who is asking, but they’ve requested a live starcom channel with you immediately.”
Annette considered all of the things they’d done that could have pissed the Mesharom off, and sighed. Bellerophon had done exactly what they needed to, but there were going to be prices to be paid for what the Imperium had done to be able to build her.
“Can we relay to my secure office or should I be grabbing a shuttle?” she asked. She trusted Robin-Antionette to know what was needed.
“The only people we directly use the starcom to hide from are the Mesharom,” her secretary pointed out. “I’ll have them make the connection to your office once you initiate the lockdown protocol.”
“You know what you’re interrupting,” Annette said. “I hope this isn’t as bad as it could be.”
“Good luck, Your Grace.”
There was still some dim evening light shining into the office when Annette entered, and she took a moment to look out over Hong Kong’s skyline before she activated the lockdown.
She’d needed a city the whole world knew to act as her capital, and her own status as an American had meant that ch
oosing New York would have been favoritism. That had left her with only a handful of options, and Hong Kong had fit their needs well.
Wuxing Tower, the main center of the Duchy’s government, was easily visible from her penthouse apartment. Several smaller towers around the city had been absorbed into the government now as well. Annette’s determination to maintain a lean government had collided with the sheer necessity of governing a planet of some eleven billion people.
The Terran Development Corporation took up almost as much space in Hong Kong as the Duchy did, with its just-sufficient separation of authority from the Duchy to meet the Imperial standard. The Duchy owned every world and star system within forty light-years of Sol—that was how the Imperium met their Kovius Treaty obligations—but those worlds were governed by the Imperium.
That over half of the Board of Directors of the TDC were also members of Annette’s Ducal Council was an expected reality of that situation.
With a sigh, she pressed the button next to the window that took her office into lockdown. Heavy shutters closed over the doors and windows, and a dozen other less obvious security measures took effect.
Sitting at her desk, she made sure the channel linking her to the starcom station in orbit was active and encrypted, and then waited for the Mesharom to make contact.
Thankfully, she didn’t have to wait long. Within a minute of her signaling that she was available to the AI setting up the call, the half-scale holographic image of a Mesharom appeared in front of her desk.
The shrunken caterpillar-like creature was familiar, and she inclined her head.
“Interpreter-Captain Adamase,” she greeted the alien. The Mesharom final-bearer had led the flotilla that had intervened at Alpha Centauri.
“Interpreter-Shepherd Adamase,” the Mesharom corrected calmly, and Annette nodded in understanding. Adamase, it seemed, had gone up in the world since the Centauri Incident.
Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1) Page 14
