Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7)

by Glynn Stewart

  “You tell me, Dr. Dunst,” Nguyen replied. “Most of my data suggests that they should be.”

  Given the archeologist’s role on this mission, Morgan had stuck him in the bridge’s solitary observer chair. She’d served on ships with an entire peanut gallery, designed with the thought of carrying diplomats or flag officers who weren’t in immediate command.

  Like most of Defiance’s compromises, it was another way in which she was designed as a pure weapons platform. The survey work Morgan was supposed to be doing out there was one of the few non-conflict roles the Armored Dream class was capable of.

  In the long run, she suspected that limitation would be the doom of the class. Even Armored Dream wasn’t built along the most practical lines, with the wing-arches projected from her core hull, but the A!Tol required multiple functions to go with the form of their ships.

  A cruiser that could not act as a flagship or a diplomatic vessel was eventually going to be replaced by a ship that could. For now, however, the Imperium still needed the maximum number of HSM launchers in the fleet.

  “Most of them should be,” Dunst agreed. “Would we detect something like the shipyard ring from the Taljzi Campaigns, though?”

  That had been a massive space station wrapped around an entire super-Jovian gas giant, using the station for fuel and a planet-carving mining operation in a nearby star system for raw materials.

  “Fifty-fifty,” Nguyen admitted. “It depends on power levels, of course.” She turned her attention back to Morgan.

  “We’re getting more refined data every second,” she told her boss. “But I’m not seeing any power signatures or any sign of Serene Guidance.”

  “I wouldn’t expect to see much of Commander Isk’s ship until we get much closer,” Morgan admitted. “But nothing at all?”

  That seemed unlikely.

  “Nothing we can detect from over a light-hour away,” Nguyen corrected. “Minor installations on the planets, ships with drives down in occluded positions, anything with any kind of stealth field…there are a lot of things we could still be missing.”

  “What we have managed to analyze from D-L-K-Six suggests there was an Alava facility here,” Dunst told them. “Very little detail, though I wouldn’t read the information as suggesting a colony. More one of their refueling stations.”

  The Precursors—the Alava—had used a very different FTL drive from the current galactic civilization. A range-limited instantaneous jump, it had been much more fuel-intensive than hyperspace, and the Precursors had scattered glorified “truck stops” throughout their territories. The refueling stations were little more than a starcom and a set of cloudscoops on a convenient gas giant, but they were the most common type of Alava settlement anyone had found.

  “If nothing else, a refueling station should have a local star map, unless the Children have already vaporized this one as well,” Morgan replied. They’d found Arjtal by chasing those maps, after all.

  “Agreed. I believe my role here is to give advice?” the scientist asked carefully.

  “It is,” Morgan allowed.

  “If there is an Alava refueling facility, it is the most likely place for the Children to have set up operations and may provide us with valuable details on Alava operations in the region either way. Confirming its presence would be valuable.”

  Morgan nodded. She’d been thinking much the same, but having the confirmation from the civilian side was useful.

  “What are we seeing on Delta?” she asked Nguyen.

  “Whoever bought the colonization rights is going to be kicking themselves,” the tactical officer replied. “Habitable zone, clearly a functioning biosphere…but under ten percent atmospheric oxygen and less than two percent surface water.

  “Even the Ivida are going to find that one a hard place to settle. It’s probably going to be worth more as a case study for the biologists and terraformers than as a potential colony.”

  That was in character for the Precursors. The Alava themselves had apparently been more adaptable than any known current galactic race, capable of adjusting to temperatures and oxygen levels that would kill a human in minutes. They’d used that to set up colonies where their subject races had to live in climate-controlled barracks and the Alava could survive outside.

  “All right, people,” Morgan told her bridge crew. “Hold the ship at battle stations. I’m making a transmission upstairs, and then we’re going in closer.”

  She waited a moment to see if anyone raised intelligent objections. In the absence of a reason not to carry on her mission, she activated the privacy shield around her chair and began recording.

  “Echelon Lord Davor, we have arrived in the K-Seven-Seven-D-L-T-Three System,” she reported. “We have detected no sign of Serene Guidance, but we are scanning from far enough out to prevent detection of drive trails or sufficiently diffuse debris fields.

  “From a distance of just over one light-hour, we have detected no signs of hostile activity or Precursor structures. Dr. Dunst’s data suggests there is a refueling station on the fourth planet, which will be the likely location of any Children base.

  “In the absence of a clear and present threat, I will be carefully moving Defiance deeper into the system to investigate further. My intention is to report in every half-cycle in the absence of new information or an immediate threat.”

  It wasn’t much of a report, but it was all she had right now. She hit the transmit button and began to raise the privacy shield.

  Then she noticed a warning icon next to her transmission request.

  “Commander Nystrom,” she said slowly. “Check your systems. Do we have a live hyperfold link? To anyone?”

  The tension in the bridge tightened again.

  “Negative, sir,” the green-eyed officer said softly. “All hyperfold transmissions are failing. The system isn’t even able to tell me why. It has a closed-circuit transmission test with a receiver at the opposite end of the ship from the transmitters, and that receiver isn’t picking up our transmissions.”

  “We’re not transmitting?” Morgan asked. “Or what?”

  “We’re transmitting, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere,” Lesser Commander Nystrom reported. “In the nine hundred and twenty-two meters of the closed loop, something is dampening the transmission to the point where it isn’t registering at all.

  “There’s no way our long-range transmissions are getting out.”

  “Well, that explains why we didn’t hear from Serene Guidance,” Morgan said grimly. “Would Commander Isk’s ship have had a similar test circuit?”

  “Serene Guidance is two hundred and eight meters long, sir,” Rogers interjected, the First Sword listening in through a dedicated intercom channel. Everyone in Secondary Control saw and heard everything on the bridge unless Morgan actively blocked them.

  “It’s entirely possible that the transmission is still clear enough after a two-hundred-meter circuit for Guidance not to have realized she wasn’t transmitting.”

  “At which point, Commander Isk would have proceeded in-system without ever knowing that he was shouting into the void unheard,” Morgan concluded. “Any idea how far this effect reaches?”

  “Less than three light-years, since we had no problems at our check-in stop,” Rogers suggested. “We have no records of such an effect nor any idea how such a phenomenon could be produced.”

  Neither, so far as Morgan knew, did the Mesharom. That…wasn’t good.

  “Sir, we should withdraw and report,” Rogers suggested. “Even the existence of this phenomenon is critical intelligence.”

  “We also give up any chance of surprise if we leave and return,” Morgan countered, but she knew her First Sword was right. “On the other hand, we arguably have already lost that. Nystrom, did any of our messages get through?”

  “I’m checking now… Wait, that’s funny.”

  “Commander? ‘Funny’ is not a useful status report,” Morgan told her subordinate drily.

&
nbsp; “Sorry, sir. We set up an automated arrival report to make sure that we sent a transmission even if we were attacked on arrival. That transmission went out without any problems. It looks like we were blocked about thirty seconds afterwards.”

  There was no way the lightspeed data from their arrival had reached a Children position at that point—it still hadn’t reached any of the system’s planets—which suggested that they had detected the hyperfold transmission itself.

  “That also needs to be reported,” she concluded with a sigh. “Commander El-Amin? Plot us a course to get out of here. Let’s try one light-month to start—at a right angle to the direct course back to Kosha.”

  She smiled grimly.

  “After all, we’re not going back to Kosha.”

  She turned to Nguyen.

  “And while El-Amin is plotting that, Commander Nguyen, I need you to power up the hyperfold cannons. Something is smothering our hyperfold transmissions. I need to know what’s happening to the guns that run on the same principles.”

  Morgan had to conceal a sigh of relief as they shot through the portal back into hyperspace. There’d been nothing in the system to present an immediate threat, but a jamming system the Imperial crew couldn’t identify, let alone counter, left the back of her neck crawling.

  “Nguyen? Those tests didn’t look great,” she told her tactical officer. “What have we got?”

  “The guns are a powerful-enough and short-ranged enough pulse that they’re not being stopped; that’s the good news,” the petite woman replied. “The bad news is we’re losing about a quarter of our range and nearly half our hitting power at any given range.

  “That dampening field is a nightmare.”

  “So, we have a new objective,” Morgan said. “We need to retrieve that dampener. Potentially, our scientists can work out a way to counter it if we have a copy.”

  “Or perhaps even a way to tune it so we can still use our hyperfold systems, as we can do with our jammers,” Nystrom suggested. “If we could shut down everyone else’s coms and guns while still having ours at full power, that could be useful.”

  Morgan shivered at the thought. That kind of trick would have its limits—any peer power would duplicate the system eventually, but it would make for some one-sided fights the first few times it was deployed.

  “It’s potentially Alavan technology,” Dunst reminded them. “That means it may be harder to duplicate than we think.”

  And it was almost certainly not working as designed. The fragments of Precursor tech that still worked often did so in ways dramatically different from their original intent. The supernova-inducing starkillers in the arsenal of every major power had been originally born as attempts to duplicate the Precursor star drive, after all.

  “I could live with never running into active Precursor tech ever again,” Morgan noted. “For now, El-Amin, what’s our ETA?”

  “Hyperspace is pretty dense here,” her navigator replied. “Another few minutes.”

  “We’ll stay at battle stations, then,” she decided aloud. “Just in case something really weird is going on here.”

  Her crew turned their attention back to their consoles, a grim calmness spreading over the bridge as they watched their screens.

  “Nothing in hyperspace near us,” Nguyen told her after a minute. “I’m seeing a few distortions that suggest there have been people out here, but there’s nothing out here right now.”

  “So, our only problem is in that system,” Morgan concluded. “That gives us a starting point.”

  “Portal in twenty seconds,” El-Amin reported. “Hang on.”

  A countdown appeared on the main display, ticking away the seconds before Defiance lunged back into ordinary space.

  Those seconds passed in silence, and Morgan watched her reports as the cruiser’s exotic-matter emitters woke again, tearing a hole back into reality.

  “Emergence.”

  They plunged back into realspace and Morgan checked the scanners immediately.

  “Screens are clear,” Nguyen reported. “No contacts, no contacts.”

  Defiance’s Captain concealed a sigh of relief. The dampening field was making her twitchy. If Nguyen said they were clear, that meant there was nothing within the five-light-minute real-time range of the tachyon scanners.

  “Nystrom?” she asked.

  “Transmitter…clear,” Lesser Commander Nystrom replied. “Tests are green; we can transmit at your command.”

  “All right. Take us down from battle stations, Commander Rogers,” Morgan ordered. “Nystrom, Dunst—I want the two of you to put together a full report on everything we can sort out on that dampener and if it ties back to anything we know of in Precursor technology.

  “Everyone else, we’re going to take one watch, a quarter-cycle, to rest. Then we’re going right back to D-L-T-Three loaded for bear. Check in with your departments and make sure you have a refreshed team ready for combat at the end of the watch.

  “We might not have seen anything there yet, but I doubt that dampener just happens to be jamming coms out of a useless system.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  There was no lurking around at the edge of the system this time. Defiance’s hyper portal opened exactly four light-minutes from K77DLT3-Delta, the heavy cruiser plunging into regular space at a distance where she’d have real-time data on her most likely destination.

  “You know, that moon is giving me flashbacks,” Rogers observed as they studied their destination. Delta had a large moon, smaller than D-L-K-6-Beta’s but still comparable to Earth’s Luna.

  “At least it isn’t habitable at all,” Morgan replied after a glance at the data. No atmosphere, no biosphere. Just a dead rock.

  “Doesn’t mean it’s harmless,” her First Sword replied.

  “Agreed. Nguyen, focus your scanners on Delta, but let’s not ignore the moon. Do we have any signs of hostiles?”

  “Negative,” her tactical officer replied. “Delta local space remains clear.” She paused. “We do have signs of recent combat; I’m picking up diffuse patterns suggesting plasma fire and the signs of a drive trail.”

  “So, Serene Guidance made it this far,” Morgan replied. “Can we locate her? Or her debris, at least?”

  “Working on it.”

  “El-Amin, take us in closer,” Morgan ordered. She studied the world in front of her. An uninhabitable desert, it still had a biosphere and an atmosphere. Just not one that any species she knew would like living in.

  “Any signs of our bioships?”

  “They’ve been here and they shot Guidance to hell,” Nguyen said grimly. “If she took out any of them, the corpses have been moved or destroyed.”

  “Or buried,” Dunst suggested. “The Children appear to have built their religion around the source of the bioships; they might well have some kind of veneration for the creatures themselves.”

  The range was dropping slowly, El-Amin bringing them in at a paltry twenty percent of lightspeed.

  “Sir, I have a contact on the surface,” Nguyen reported. There was no urgency in her voice, only sadness. “It…appears to be Serene Guidance. I’m pinging her black box, but it looks like she went down and went down hard.”

  With an interface drive, a vessel’s velocity was a property of the drive field and not the ship. A missile worked by explosively releasing that velocity energy in an impact. Planetary gravity wells screwed with the drive as well, rapidly reducing maximum velocity as the surrounding natural gravity increased.

  If Guidance had catastrophically lost her drive field and then continued to be fired at, she could still have gone down at hundreds or thousands of kilometers per second. The impact would have killed everyone aboard, artificial gravity or not.

  “Black box is not responding,” Nguyen continued. “We’re getting better data of the impact crater, and it doesn’t look good for anyone.”

  The bridge went very quiet as the big holotank filled with information and computer-generated
imagery.

  “It looks like she hit at just over two percent of lightspeed,” the tactical officer said softly. “Even her electronics would have been nearly liquefied, and the debris cloud…” She shook her head. “If that planet was any less of a shithole to begin with, I’d say the biosphere was doomed. As it is, it might survive.”

  A five-hundred-thousand-ton ship impacting at two percent of lightspeed made even Earth’s dinosaur-killer look like a toy. Two teratons of explosive forces. To call the impact site a crater was understating things. On a more oceanic planet, a continent would have been obliterated.

  It was easy to forget just how much energy was wrapped up in even a small modern starship at any given moment.

  “Make sure your data is being saved,” Morgan said quietly. “This planet was different enough that it’s worth something.”

  And it didn’t look like anyone else would be getting any images of Delta’s biosphere as it had been.

  “Hold us at thirty light-seconds, El-Amin,” she ordered. Nine million kilometers was still out of range for Defiance’s energy weapons and, hopefully, out of the effective range of the bioships. So far, twenty-two light-seconds had been the maximum range they’d seen, but that was assuming the Precursor creatures didn’t have bigger siblings somewhere.

  “Nguyen, focus our sensors on the moon. Nystrom, any luck tracing the source of the jamming?” she asked.

  “It’s hard to say for sure, but it’s definitely somewhere in the Delta planetary system,” the com officer replied. “If it’s on the planet, it was unaffected by the impact.”

  “Everything I’m seeing suggests the moon,” Rogers said quietly. “Where would the Precursors have put a starcom there?”

  The Precursor starcom had been a smaller and more easily built installation than the one available to modern races, but it had still been fundamentally the same. The layout and structure were identical, but the materials and scale had been different.

  “We’ve seen them built into the ground before, but it would still be on the highest point they could find, probably on a side facing away from the planet,” Dunst reeled off.