Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7)

by Glynn Stewart

  “I know,” she agreed. “I hope Commander Vichy gets some useful answers out of them, because this situation is making me nervous. I don’t like not knowing what I’m digging through, Dr. Dunst.”

  “Nor me, Captain.” He shook his head. “I must admit, I don’t like the whole ‘doctor’ title. I can’t even do basic first aid. Call me Rin, Captain.”

  She chuckled and offered him her hand.

  “As the senior civilian aboard, I suppose you can call me Morgan,” she allowed. “Just not in front of my crew!”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Well, we have an ID on this one,” Susskind told Pierre, gesturing at the image hovering above his desk.

  “That is the one Dr. Dunst knocked out with a door?” Pierre asked, studying the blond man in the hologram.

  “Exactly,” the military police officer told him. Gerard Susskind was a small man with dark hair and piercing green eyes, currently focused on the hologram. “Dr. Dunst got a first name for him. It’s not much, but it was enough.”

  “So who am I looking at?” Pierre asked.

  “Karl Aafjes, thirty-eight years old,” Susskind reeled off. “Place of birth, Amsterdam in Franco-Germany. No current residence on record. He acquired a merchant officer’s certificate from the Frankfurt Ducal Merchant Academy at age twenty-two, signed on as junior watchstander on a ship named Matronymic, and left Earth forever.”

  “Family or crew?”

  “He’s not registered as crew on any ship in the Imperial records,” the MP replied. “No marriage or children on record, either. Neither of those is a solid guarantee. Even officer positions are only registered when the ship needs something from the government or the bank.”

  “And even the father being around does not always mean children are on the paperwork, oui.” Pierre shook his head. “But most likely single and quite possibly operating in gray shipping.”

  “It’s a clean record, which means we’re the first to catch him,” Susskind said drily. “I’ve sent a request off for more detailed information. I could easily be missing his marriage licenses or his kids’ birth certificates. I’d definitely know if he’d got another shipper’s certificate or a criminal record somewhere.”

  “But he’s definitely not a known pirate,” the Marine concluded. He shook his head. “Ça n’a aucun sens. An officer slip and a decade-plus experience? There’s a thousand freighters begging for a man like him. Unless he got blacklisted for something that wasn’t criminal, there’s no reason for him to be out here playing pirate.”

  “You can ask him. That we have a name and an ID bumps him to the top of my list for interviews,” Susskind pointed out. “We don’t have many people qualified for interrogation aboard. Really, it’s just me.”

  “And enough of this is classified that Captain Casimir wanted me involved,” Pierre told him. “Come on, Speaker. Let’s go talk to Mr. Aafjes.”

  Defiance’s medics had very clearly focused on fixing Aafjes’s potential concussion over such niceties as his black eye. There were clear marks where regeneration matrix had been used to rebuild shattered bones in the man’s face, and those only added to the bruising.

  The two burly MPs who’d handcuffed him to the chair stood by the door as Pierre and Susskind took their seats across from the blond prisoner.

  “We will be fine,” Pierre told them. “Leave us.”

  “I want to see a lawyer,” Aafjes told them calmly. “The Imperium recognizes the right to counsel.”

  “The situation is more complicated than that, Mr. Aafjes,” Susskind replied. “You were taken in active combat with Imperial forces and arrested in the act of piracy. Plus, we have evidence tying your operation on Beta to slavery.

  “So, you see, Mr. Aafjes, you are not a civilian prisoner. You are an Imperial military prisoner. Your rights ever so subtly change in that case. Most notably, you do not have the right to counsel.”

  Pierre managed not to shake his head. By not bringing in counsel—a necessity, given that Defiance didn’t carry civilian defense lawyers on board, for some reason—they also limited themselves to questions directly related to the circumstances Aafjes had been detained for.

  Of course, they also had more than enough evidence to jail the pirate for the rest of his life, even if this interview got thrown out in court.

  “I am not a pirate,” the prisoner snapped.

  “You were part of an illegal armed operation that attacked and seized an Imperial archeology site in a system claimed by the Imperium,” Susskind laid out. “You illegally detained over one hundred employees of the Imperial government, and the operation attempted to transfer thirty-seven of those employees into the slave market.

  “We can prove all of that, so I’d save your breath,” the MP concluded. “I am not sure what label to apply to you other than pirate, Mr. Aafjes.”

  “I am not a pirate,” he repeated. “I am bound to a higher law and a higher calling.”

  “Really.”

  Susskind’s single-word response hung in the air unchallenged.

  “Then who do you work for?” Pierre asked. “What higher law authorizes your actions?”

  Aafjes smiled, shaking his head like a teacher dealing with a slow student.

  “I am of the Children,” he said. “We obey Her commands, and secular law and lord pale in comparison to Her will.”

  “The Children?” Susskind asked. “That’s an astonishingly vague phrase, Mr. Aafjes. Would you care to expand?”

  “We are all Children of the Stars, Speaker,” Aafjes replied. “You don’t yet know what you fail to understand. I obey Her will, the will of our true God.”

  “I am uncertain how a god’s will leads to the murder and kidnapping of an Imperial research team or the vandalism of a historical site of near incalculable value,” Pierre said. “You are a merchant officer, Mr. Aafjes. The Imperium is rich in opportunities for a man like you. What brings you out here and to these…depths?”

  “You do not know what you fail to understand,” Aafjes repeated, a small smile playing around his lips. “This is all proceeding according to Her plan.”

  “Really,” Susskind said. “And who is She?”

  “The Mother of All, the Womb of Existence,” their prisoner told them. “She cannot be explained, only experienced. Cannot be described, only touched. I have walked in the presence of God.”

  He shrugged.

  “What power do you wield that could scare me now?” he asked. “It was clearly Her will that I be here to attempt to explain your failures.”

  “If we wished to be…initiated into this wonder, where would we go?” Pierre asked.

  Aafjes laughed.

  “You are not ready and you are not worthy. If it is Her will that you join her Children, you will be shown ways. It is not my place to speak for the Divine Mother.”

  “You realize, Mr. Aafjes, that the Imperium does not recognize religion as grounds for murder?” Susskind noted. “Your crimes are more than sufficient to condemn you to hard labor for the rest of your life. Assistance in tracking down your colleagues may buy you clemency.”

  “Her will was that I was here to tell you of Her existence,” Aafjes told them. “Anything more is not my task from Her.” He smiled that small smile again. “You can ask whatever questions you wish, but I believe I will wait for that lawyer before I answer them.”

  He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, leaving Pierre with a grim certainty that they weren’t going to get much of use out of him.

  “How did your people know about the expedition?” the Marine demanded.

  Only silence answered him.

  He traded glances with Susskind, who gave him a “go ahead” gesture.

  It didn’t look like they were going to get answers, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have to ask the questions.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Most of what we pulled from their computers is just our stuff, boss,” Lawrence told Rin. Given several days of attention from
Defiance’s medical staff and real food, she looked much better than she had in the cell.

  “Information security or just…?” he asked. The two archeologists were sharing a meal in the corner of an officer’s mess. It was better than the main crowded messes straining to feed an extra hundred-plus bodies, but not by much. Still, it had some level of quiet and privacy built into its design.

  “I’m not sure and neither are Defiance’s techs,” she admitted. “It looks like most of what we’ve got our hands on are secondary machines. If they had a central server on Beta, they slagged it so hard, the Marines didn’t ID it as a computer.”

  “That’s not reassuring, Kelly,” Rin said. “These people scare me. We know nothing about them.”

  “We got a name out of the files,” she told him. “The Children of the Stars. That’s what they call themselves. A bunch of what we got looked like…first-draft religious texts.”

  “First draft?” Rin asked with a chuckle.

  “Yeah,” she confirmed, clearly thinking it through as she spoke. “You see the stages when you do historical research, the initial revelations, the follow-on texts, the first-draft analysis and compilation—and then later, the rationalizations, the standardizations and purges of texts outside the accepted structure.

  “These are in the follow-on-text mode. Maybe even some of the initial revelations, but there’s enough intentional vagueness that I think we’re seeing a specific selection of stuff.” She shrugged. “Between that and the fact that I found three variations on the same text, I stick with ‘first draft.’

  “We’re looking at a cult, boss. I’d leave guessing size and threat level and such to the soldiers, as my expertise ends there.” Lawrence shook her head. “Classic human mystery cult, to be honest. The aliens are new, but the style is familiar.”

  Rin nodded his understanding while taking a bite of his meal. One of the advantages of being on a ship intended to be crewed by one race was that there was actual real food aboard. In a multispecies setup like the Lost Dragon expedition, they’d been living off Universal Protein. While that substance was inoffensive at its worst, it took skill to make it taste good. The chicken curry the officer’s mess was serving had actual chicken in it and tasted amazing after months of UP.

  “A cult worshipping the Alava,” he guessed. “That’s going to be trouble.”

  “No shit,” Lawrence agreed. “I mean, I can kind of see it. Some of the things the Alava built…they’re beyond awe-inspiring. I’ve never seen an intact megastructure firsthand, but I can’t help but wonder how it feels. Especially when you didn’t know what was coming.”

  “Their awe became my terror, so my sympathy is limited,” Rin said drily. “Did we get anything useful from them? What kind of crap is in these religious texts?”

  “A lot of stuff about the Mother and the Womb, their God who created all reality,” Lawrence told him. “Some of it’s probably allegorical, but I’m guessing some of it is referring to an Alava structure of some kind. I mean, if the Taljzi hadn’t already had a religious structure to slot the cloner into, I could see it taking a shape like this.”

  “The last thing we need is for someone to start treating the Alava as gods and their ruins as holy sites,” Rin said. “Everything I’ve seen suggests they weren’t anyone we’d want to meet, let alone worship.”

  “And the fact that if a big-enough group started worshiping them, we’d have problems getting clearance to excavate their ruins isn’t a factor at all, is it, boss?” Lawrence asked with a chuckle.

  “There’s that,” he conceded. “Digging into Alava tech is one thing. The Imperium is never going to stop doing that, dangerous as it occasionally is. We don’t need to excavate their cities to do that, though it helps lead us to their actual technological sites.

  “I just wish we had a more complete set of records for out here. This particular branch of the Alava seems to have left even their leaders scratching their heads. I don’t suppose any of the images we took of the star projection are in what we retrieved?”

  “Looks like everything on the star projection was destroyed,” she admitted. “Reading between the lines of the religious texts and other notes, they originally found one on Beta-A. ‘Sacred answers hidden in yellow fog,’ according to the religious texts.”

  Beta-A was less pressurized than Venus, but the air would still be toxic to humans. That it had a living ecosystem was probably going to be fascinating to lots of people. Rin wasn’t one of them—he was more interested in how the Alava sites had survived fifty thousand years of it.

  “So, this cult knows more about what we’re looking for than we do.” Rin sighed. “What a mess.”

  “We got one thing from that, though,” Lawrence told him. “I’m not a hundred percent certain, but the Navy techs I was working with clammed up pretty hard at one point. I think they had more data on what the cult ships were doing than I did and it lined up with something we found.”

  “The cult ships?” Rin asked. “Wait, you think the Navy knows where they went from D-L-K-Six?”

  “Quite possibly, so I’m surprised we’re not headed there right now,” Lawrence admitted.

  Rin nodded slowly. From his conversation with Casimir, the only place Defiance was going was a repair yard. The cruiser had come off far more roughly from her encounter with the Alava bioships than the Captain was letting the civilians know.

  Part of the problem with having that information was that she was clearly trusting him not to disseminate it.

  “I don’t think Casimir wants to go into a possible battle with civilians on board,” he said instead. “She’ll drop us on the colony at Kosha and check in with her commanders. There’s a Navy base at Kosha, too. She’ll pick up reinforcements.”

  He patted the table.

  “Defiance is an impressive ship to you and me, but she’s still only a midweight warship at best,” he concluded. “And no Captain is going to turn down reinforcements when facing the unknown.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kosha was one of three systems out this far with a name. It was named for the neuter caregiver of the Pibo officer who’d originally surveyed the system, a cheap concession from the colonization corporation to the Navy when they’d bought the rights.

  Now, the broad rolling plains of Blue Heart, Kosha’s third planet, were home to just over five million of the centaur-like crocodilian Rekiki. About half a million members of other races, mostly human and Pibo, lived in the capital city and in orbit.

  Morgan’s records suggested about ten thousand of those were officers and enlisted of the A!Tol Imperial Navy. The system was a direct satrapy of the Imperium, with an appointed colonial governor and a single seat in the House of Worlds.

  There was only one large space station in orbit above Blue Heart. It served as a transfer station for cargo going to the surface, a refueling and resupply depot for civilian ships, and a fully stocked Imperial Navy logistics base.

  Most critical for the current state of Morgan’s command, Kosha Station had a repair slip that could fit Defiance.

  “We’re cleared into the repair slip, sir,” Nystrom told her. “Lord Davor has requested a direct line with you as soon as possible but has already authorized our repairs and transport for the civilian passengers.”

  “Understood.” Morgan skimmed through the status reports. Defiance was still intact in every significant sense, but she was more than a bit battered around the edges. She’d need several sections of her compressed-matter armor completely replaced.

  Fortunately, Kosha Station had the replacements. Her ship would be in good hands in a few minutes.

  “I’ll be in my office if I’m needed,” she told Nystrom. “You have the watch, Lesser Commander.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Nystrom was the most junior department head on the ship and usually stood the watch with a more senior officer as backup. Morgan was reasonably sure the young woman could get the ship through a thirty-minute flight to a docking bay
in friendly space.

  “Echelon Lord Davor,” Morgan saluted. “It’s good to speak to you in real time.”

  Hyperfold communications had an odd timing lag. Anything inside about a light-month was real-time or near enough to make no difference. A light-year, on the other hand, took just under an hour to cover. It rose linearly with the number of light-years after that up to about eleven light-years, where it jumped a hundredfold again.

  The Imperium, like most powers with hyperfold coms, used relays spaced ten light-years apart to transfer messages as effectively as possible, resulting in an effective long-range communications speed of about nine thousand times lightspeed.

  Those relays led back to starcoms, which were instantaneous anywhere within the galaxy. Starcom transmitters were massive and complicated devices that had to be built in place and never moved. Starcom receivers were, thankfully, more easily transported. Kosha Station had one, which cut Echelon Lord Davor’s com loop with the Imperial government in half.

  “It’s good to see you, Captain Casimir,” Davor told her. The red-faced Ivida officer didn’t show any sign of that, but Ivida faces didn’t show emotion. Morgan couldn’t see quite enough of the alien woman’s form to truly read her body language. “Defiance appears in almost worse shape than your reports suggested.”

  “We’re bruised and battered, Echelon Lord, but I think Kosha Station should have us cleaned up and ready for action in short order,” Morgan promised. “We made some interesting discoveries while we were in hyperspace. My staff has prepared an update.”

  “With regards to these pirates?” Davor asked. “I was hoping we had some answers.”

  “Not as many as we’d like,” Defiance’s Captain admitted. “We now know we’re looking at a cult of between ten and twenty thousand members. They appear to be Precursor worshippers and had access to Dragon Protocol–secured information on this region long before we started even planning our current operations.