“Unless our own spies are the local branch of the Children,” Comtois muttered. “Someone gave them classified intel to start this whole mess, after all.”
Pierre found himself wishing that Comtois had kept that thought to himself.
Chapter Nineteen
“We have completed the majority of the structural repairs, Captain,” the Rekiki shipyard master told her. Takakek was a larger member of the species’ noble caste, which made him a crocodile with an upright torso and sharp toothy jaws that outweighed Morgan around five to one.
Unfortunately for Takakek’s intimidation factor, Annette Bond had kept a squad of Rekiki among her personal guard for most of Morgan’s childhood. While she wasn’t going to do anything silly, her initial reaction to large Rekiki was still mostly “mobile playground!” not “oh god, monster!”
“So, we could deploy now?” Morgan asked. She’d never actually spent this long with a ship in drydock before. Hawkwing had gone in for a refit at the end of her tour of duty aboard the destroyer, but she’d been transferred to the light cruiser Fleeting Wrath within hours of handing her command over.
Takakek laughed at her question.
“We have replaced or repaired the structural girders and supports of your ship, so I suppose so,” he allowed. “You’d still be short a tenth of your beam weapons and have gaping holes in your armor, but Defiance could accelerate and maneuver at full speed.”
“I’ll wait for the armor and guns, I suppose,” Morgan allowed with a laugh of her own. “How long?”
“Another six to eight cycles,” the Rekiki told her. “It’s not a fast process, sizing compressed-matter plates, Captain.”
“I know.”
She also knew that they’d been in the drydock for six cycles already and Serene Guidance had left three cycles earlier. The destroyer was scheduled to arrive at her destination in another three cycles. If Defiance wasn’t ready to deploy, there was no backup for Commander Isk’s ship if something went wrong.
Of course, backup six cycles away wasn’t much more useful than backup six cycles away that couldn’t leave for six more cycles.
“Everything is repairable, though, right?”
“Without question,” Takakek confirmed. “She’s a sturdy, well-built ship. The Indiri did a good job building her, and we’ll have her back to full fighting stride before you take her out again.”
“Good. Those hits were worse than I expected,” Morgan told the shipbuilder. “You’ve seen the damage now. Anything we can do to minimize it?”
“Don’t get hit,” the shipyard master said. “Near-c plasma is hunter shit and I don’t know where you ran into hatchling plasma lances, but in many ways, they’re just as bad for damage as Defiance’s own heavy plasma beams.
“We’ve got a bit of information on the beam material that we’ve sent to the Echelon Lord’s staff for analysis. We can do a bit with tuning the shields specifically against these beams, but mostly? If they hit you enough times, your shield goes down and even compressed-matter armor isn’t going to do more than limit the damage.”
Morgan nodded her agreement, glancing out the window at her abused ship.
“Don’t get hit,” she repeated. “I’ll try my best, dockmaster.”
“You’re a warship Captain,” Takakek replied. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
Morgan was leaving Takakek’s office when her communicator pinged. The ubiquitous devices took on a lot of different forms, even aboard military ships. Her own preference, inherited from her father and stepmother, was a scroll-like device based on the old UESF communicator.
It folded up to two cylinders, each the size of her thumb, but those easily extended to any length up to forty centimeters. The two cylinders then slid apart, held together by a flexible but strong material that acted as screen and keyboard.
If needed, it could create a forty-centimeter-by-forty-centimeter working and viewing surface—and then use hologram projectors to extend that. Morgan’s default was a ten-centimeter square that acted as a handheld video phone.
She was surprised to see the caller identified as Rin Dunst, however, and took a moment to get into a quiet corner inside the main shipyard office before answering.
“Dr. Dunst, how can I help you?”
“Ah, Captain,” he replied. “Did I catch you at a bad time, Morgan?”
She caught herself smiling at his remembering to use her first name. For a moment, she started to shut the smile down behind the “Captain Mask,” then she remembered she was off-ship and in an only quasi-military office.
Morgan let the smile reach her face and was rewarded with an answering smile from Dunst. Interesting.
“A surprisingly good time, actually,” she told him. “I was just finishing up my appointment at the shipyard, where I learned that I don’t have nearly as much to do right now as I’d like. So, like I said, Rin, how can I help you?”
“I think I might be able to help you, actually,” he replied. “Now that I’m in one place and have access to the proper Archives, I think I’ve learned a bit more about what we’re looking at out here. I’d rather go over it in person. May I buy you dinner?”
Morgan studied the man’s image carefully for a moment. She was quite sure that he was being both entirely aboveboard and had the expected unspoken hopes that came along with a dinner invitation.
“I’m free right now if you are,” she told him. “How about a working lunch instead?”
She wasn’t quite ready to shut the good doctor down, not without a bit more prodding, anyway. If nothing else, she wanted to know what he’d found in the Mesharom Archive.
She’d heard the capital A when he’d been speaking, and she doubted that was unintentional.
“Lunch sounds perfect, Captain,” Dunst told her. “There’s a sushi restaurant near the naval shipyard that’s good for both food and security. It is, after all, next to the only military shipyard for sixty light-years.”
Morgan chuckled.
“Sounds perfect,” she echoed back to him. “I’ll grab a table and discuss our security needs with the staff, and you can meet me there?”
Kosha Station Sushi Restaurant might not have been particularly imaginative in its naming, but its owners had been very imaginative in supplying the necessary materials of their trade. Half of the menu was explicitly sourced from Blue Heart’s oceans, but the rest were specifically un-gene-modified Terran fish.
No engine in the galaxy would allow fish to be delivered to a sushi restaurant three hundred-odd light-years away in the “proper” state for sushi, so Kosha Station Sushi had gone one step further. They’d imported breeding stocks of several key fish for their menu and raised them in carefully designed farms on the station itself.
The water served double duty as part of the station’s reservoirs, and two of the station’s walls were explicitly one-way windows into the fish farms. Between the massive effort made to create an appropriate artificial environment for the fish and the fish themselves, it made for an incredible decoration.
And then Morgan was introduced to the secured dining room the owners kept for military officers.
“Inside the tank?” she asked, making sure she’d heard the host correctly.
“There is an access tube,” the young woman—who appeared to actually be Japanese despite being this far from Earth—assured her. “But the water augments the security systems and renders the space as secure as possible.”
“All right. Lead the way.”
The access tube was standard, but the dining room Morgan was ushered into was amazing. The wall with the tube was covered in a hologram to make it appear to be as transparent as the other five walls…which were transparent.
The room was suspended inside a space currently pretending to be a well-lit lake somewhere on Earth. Like the windows from the restaurant into the tanks, the glass was one-way. The fish couldn’t see the humans, but the humans could see the fish.
“We will bring your gues
t when he arrives,” the host assured her. “I suggest you peruse the menu while you wait; even if you are familiar with sushi, we have our own variations here that take advantage of the opportunities presented by both Blue Heart and, well, the fish tank.”
“Thank you, Ms…”
“Atsuko Ikeda, ma’am,” the young woman told her. “This is my mother’s restaurant.”
“Your mother has done an incredible job,” Morgan said. “Thank you, Ms. Ikeda. I’ll take a look at the menu while I wait for Dr. Dunst.”
“Of course, Captain Casimir,” Ikeda told her. “Only the best for the Duchess’s daughter.”
Morgan let the woman leave before letting her frustration show on her face as she sighed. Hundreds of light-years from home, she couldn’t escape her stepmother’s shadow. There were humans throughout the Imperium now, and humanity’s influence was out of scale with their size and recent entrance into the A!Tol’s sphere.
The shadow of Terra stretched far—and Duchess Annette Bond’s shadow stretched just as far. Morgan had spent her entire life in both of those shadows, and she wasn’t entirely sure how she’d escape either of them.
She loved her stepmother. Her biological mother had died in childbirth. Annette Bond had been her father’s lover when she’d been very young, and then her father had become Ducal Consort when Morgan had been barely more than a toddler.
The Duchess was Morgan’s mother, so far as she was concerned, and she’d been a good one. But Morgan didn’t want to be defined by her Duchess mother or her trillionaire father. She wanted her own story, her own legend.
She knew that was egotistical of her, but she was a warship captain. Ego came with the job.
A knock on the door pulled her attention back to the moment as Ikeda brought Rin Dunst in.
“I like your suggestion, Rin,” she told the scientist. “Let’s take a look at the menu and see what they have before we talk business, shall we?”
Chapter Twenty
They sent the waiter—a young black man who probably wasn’t related to the host and owners—on his way with their list, then Morgan picked up her tea and straightened in her chair, away from the table.
“You said you had some new data on our cultists,” she reminded Dunst. “What did you find?”
“Not so much on the cultists, to be honest,” Dunst admitted. “I’m leaving what’s going on today in the capable hands of your military analysts. I did find something familiar as we were digging through what the Archive had on this region, though.”
Glancing at the door, he laid his communicator down on the table and opened up a hologram. The projected image was only two-dimensional, a file photo filtered through fifty thousand years of memory.
The Mesharom had survived the fall of the Precursors, but their technology hadn’t. Most of the records they’d preserved had been written down immediately after the fall, much of it carved into stone tablets to make certain it was saved.
The image on the stone was a familiar fat teardrop shape.
“Is that one of the bioships?” Morgan asked.
“I think so,” he confirmed. “Unfortunately, either the Mesharom were unable to translate the text that went with it, or it isn’t in the copy of the Archive we have. There’s a few references to their biotech throughout the Archive, but I came away with a surprising evaluation:
“The Alava Hegemony didn’t trust biotech.” He shrugged. “They used it in extremely controlled environments, often with electronic or nanotechnological control and kill switches installed.”
“Even ignoring what we’re seeing here, we found the cloner at Arjtal,” Morgan countered. She didn’t necessarily disbelieve what he’d found, but she wanted to know how that linked together.
“That wasn’t in the Mesharom files,” Dunst said. “My guess is that it was a private science experiment on the far edge of their borders—and it might well have had an electronic control system at one point. When they killed their tech, they’d have killed that, too.”
“So, if they didn’t like biotech, where are these ships coming from?” she asked.
“I think these ships would be the main Alava state’s worst nightmare,” he replied. “They’re either self-replicated or being created by a primary biological source. They could control nanites and anything they had to build, but they didn’t trust that they could control biology. There was a fundamental fear in them of things they couldn’t control.”
“That lines up with a people who killed themselves trying to take control of the laws of physics,” Morgan replied. A chime on the tube warned her that the staff had accessed the far end.
The room was supposed to be one hundred percent secure, and the warning was part of that. She still took a moment to check that the security-field generator she’d set up was running.
“So, do you make it back to Earth often?” Dunst asked slowly, changing the subject as the waiter returned with the first tray of raw fish. From the size, they’d likely get three more, so casual conversation was probably the right choice.
“Once a year, when I can,” Morgan told him. “Not, to the occasional frustration of the Navy’s personnel department, once a long-cycle.”
A long-cycle, the time-frame around which the Imperium ran such things as assigning leave, was one hundred and ninety-five days. Technically, the leave allotment for an Imperial officer was ten cycles per long-cycle.
“That’s…got to take some work,” Dunst said. “We’re a long way from Sol here. It’s not like you can take most of a long-cycle off to go home for Christmas.”
“I’ve spent a good chunk of my career closer to Sol, where I could jump aboard a Navy courier and be home in three to five days,” Morgan replied. The new Navy couriers were the first recipients of the hyperspace-current-manipulating technology the Imperium had also acquired from the Mesharom.
“It’s harder now, but that’s part of the point,” she admitted as she selected several pieces of sushi to try. “My girlfriend is about to get married, and I want them to sort out what the hell they want before I reinsert myself into that mess.”
Morgan took more than a passing delight in the moment of sheer confusion that crossed Rin Dunst’s face there. Confusion, followed by disappointment, followed by more confusion.
She finished off three pieces of sushi while he marshaled his thoughts.
“Your girlfriend is getting married?” he finally asked. The chime announced that a second wave of food was arriving.
“Yeah. Victoria and I have been together since the Taljzi Campaigns, but it was never fair to ask her to wait when I was out of the system fifty-plus weeks of the year. We decided to try an open relationship around…year five or so?” Morgan shrugged. She couldn’t actually remember anymore.
“She and Shelly have been together for six years. Technically, I was still Victoria’s primary partner, but I was only there for two weeks a year.”
There’d even been an attempt to make it work as a triad at one point, though that had fallen through. Morgan found Shelly attractive enough, but the spark needed to maintain things over year-long separation wasn’t there.
“Shelly actually asked me if it was okay before she proposed,” the Captain concluded. It had stung more than she was going to admit to anyone, even if Victoria and Shelly’s marriage explicitly included her as a secondary partner.
“That sounds like it gets complicated,” Dunst said as the third set of food arrived. They’d already demolished the first two, and the waiter removed those trays with a silent bow.
“Not as much as you’d think.” Morgan shrugged. “I spent fifty weeks of the year on a warship I’m in command of, Rin; my opportunities to take advantage of an open relationship are limited.”
The archeologist actually blushed. Morgan had suspected he’d been hoping to make this dinner more personal than business, but she still hadn’t expected to actually get a blush out of a man closer to forty than thirty.
The rotund scientist was about as much Vic
toria Antonova’s opposite as was physically possible, but that was just fine by Morgan.
“Dr. Dunst, you are blushing,” she told him with a laugh. “I thought this was supposed to be a professional lunch.”
“I, I, uh…” He trailed off as the waiter arrived with the last set of food, and she continued to laugh.
“Let’s be specific, shall we?” she finally asked as the waiter bowed out again. “I am in a long-term open relationship where I was recently downgraded to a secondary partner—with my full consent, but still a downgrade—and am a minimum of two months’ flight from my girlfriend.
“I am available and open to the idea of a date, if you are interested, but this was still primarily a working lunch. Does that answer enough of the questions you weren’t sure if you could ask?”
He was still blushing, but he was laughing now, too.
“Touché, Morgan,” he conceded. “I do still have some more data on what was going on out here, now that the waiters should stop coming quite as often, but yes, I was hoping to get to know you better.”
“All right,” she allowed. “You may have one actual date, Dr. Dunst, and then we’ll reevaluate, yes?”
“Do I get a formal report card, or is this more of a small-group evaluation?” he asked with a grin.
“That will depend on how you do, won’t it?” Morgan replied with a wink. “That’s a conversation for later, though,” she continued more seriously. “What else did you find out?”
He nodded slowly, marshaling his thoughts as he inhaled another piece of sushi.
“This is really good,” he noted aloud.
“I figured when the restaurant was in the fish tank,” Morgan replied. “The Alava?”
“The Alava.” He nodded. “The people out here were Alava and they brought a whole working population of the subject races, but they weren’t part of the Hegemony. Not really. They weren’t officially seceded, but they were sending only the minimum data home.
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