Davor snapped her mouth in a twitch-inducing sound. Humor, Rin thought.
“I would expect you to argue against destroying the Womb,” the Echelon Lord noted calmly.
“It is an artifact of the Alava, and those tend to be dangerous beyond our worst fears,” Rin replied. “Plus, this particular one we know is creating biological warships that appear to be under control of a cult that is delving into everything from slavery to terrorism.
“I accept that its destruction is probably necessary, in which case I want to study it beforehand, both so we know as much as we can and so that we can more safely destroy it,” he concluded. “I need to be on Defiance, Echelon Lord.
“I need you to overrule Captain Casimir.”
And now he’d said that, he knew he’d just killed any relationship with her. He regretted that—a lot—but he had to do his job.
“You understand, Dr. Dunst, that what you are asking me to do may well have serious consequences for both Captain Casimir’s career…and yours,” Davor warned him. “For me to formally overrule her would hang over her as a black mark for long-cycles to come—and no officer of the Imperial military will be comfortable working with you again.
“Leaving aside the personal consequences for you and Captain Casimir,” the Ivida concluded.
Rin was taken aback…and then realized he probably shouldn’t have been. He’d had a Marine escort that reported to the Echelon Lord the previous night, after all.
“The personal consequences will fall as they will, Echelon Lord,” Rin said quietly. “Duty drives us, even when personal affairs would interfere. I suspect she will understand better than most…eventually.
“I would prefer not to cause her long-term trouble, but I need to be there. The Imperium needs to be there.”
There was another long silence.
“I agree.” Davor studied him. “I don’t believe that Captain Casimir has formally banned you from her ship so much as declined to invite you as a civilian advisor under her own authority.
“Since there is no record of her refusing you, I see a solution that should serve all of our needs…but that, as you say, Dr. Dunst, serves the Imperium above all other waters.”
Chapter Forty
“All departments, check in,” Morgan ordered from the central seat on Defiance’s bridge. “Are we ready to go?”
“Tactical is green,” Nguyen reported. “All magazines are full, all weapon systems reporting green on unpowered self-check.”
“Navigation is green,” El-Amin reported from the front of the bridge. “All tanks are full, all engines are green.”
“Engineering is green, all systems check out at ninety-eight percent operating efficiency or higher,” Liepins reported.
“The Marines are ready to be bored out of our minds for the trip,” Vichy said. “I’ve picked up some new training sims and some playing cards.”
“All tanks and supplies are topped up,” Trifonov, the Logistics officer, added. “We’re behind on paperwork, but when aren’t we?”
“We’ll catch up on the trip,” Morgan promised her junior-most department head. The paperwork exchange was almost traditional, in her experience.
“I’ve heard that before,” the young man replied.
There was a silence where Morgan was expecting her last department head to check in.
“Nystrom?” she asked. “Does coms have a reason we should be holding off?”
“Apologies, sir, yes, sir,” Nystrom told her rapidly. “We’ve received a hold request from Echelon Lord Davor’s staff; we are apparently having a civilian team added to the mission, and they haven’t reached the dock yet.”
“A civilian team, Commander?” Morgan demanded. Her suspicions raised a spike of anger in her gut. Would Rin Dunst have seriously gone over her head like that?
“Yes, sir. The Echelon Lord has detached several experts on Precursor artifacts and technology, including two cyber-archeology specialists familiar with Precursor computer systems, to support us. Dr. Dunst appears to be in charge?”
“I see,” Morgan replied, keeping her tone level. The traditional humor and jokes of a starship underway were gone now. For a few seconds, she seriously considered ordering El-Amin to take Defiance out anyway.
It was, at least theoretically, her right to refuse a team like that. But she’d end up spending a lot of time explaining why—and since her own access to knowledge around the Precursors wasn’t covered under the current classification rules and breakdowns, that explanation would get messy.
It wasn’t that Morgan wasn’t supposed to know what she knew. It was that most of the people under the current rules weren’t supposed to know why Morgan knew what she knew. Her clearance level had been retroactively labeled “Old Wyrm” and was held by several dozen people who’d learned about the Precursors and the Mesharom before they started carving up the Mesharom Archive.
Most of the people who were cleared for the Old Wyrm Protocols had been involved in stealing the Archive in the first place. Explaining that Morgan didn’t need Dunst and his people would be hard enough—explaining that she didn’t want to risk everyone in the system who knew anything about the Precursors would risk all kinds of questions about personal entanglement.
Probably valid questions.
“El-Amin, hold us until the civilian team is aboard,” she ordered with a concealed sigh. “Trifonov, find quarters for them. In a block, if you please. They’ll be restricted to quarters for operational security until I say otherwise. Get Susskind to provide MPs to enforce that.”
“Yes, sir,” Trifonov replied instantly. “I’ll have someone meet them when they come aboard.”
“Thank you, Commanders,” Morgan said, her tone less distracted that she felt.
She’d had damn good reasons to keep Rin Dunst off her ship. The Imperium needed an expert present when they reached the Womb, yes, but she was entirely capable of being that expert.
They also needed an expert in place to take over if something happened to Defiance. An expert on Dunst’s level shouldn’t be going anywhere near a high-threat environment. His presence aboard her ship would limit her options in ways she hadn’t wanted to deal with.
And if she’d also potentially wanted to keep an adorable but squishy man out of the line of fire, that hadn’t been part of her official reasoning. And her official reasoning had been enough.
It seemed Echelon Lord Davor hadn’t agreed.
Morgan wasn’t entirely surprised when Rogers stepped into her office several hours later, shortly after Defiance entered hyperspace.
“First Sword,” Morgan greeted her as the other woman dropped into the seat across the desk.
“You want to talk about it?” Rogers asked bluntly.
“Talk about what, Commander?” Morgan replied.
“Why we have the same civilian advisor we had for our last cruise aboard, but this time he’s restricted to quarters?” the First Sword said. “Was he that bad in bed?”
Morgan glared at her subordinate, who met her gaze calmly.
“Marines acting as bodyguards keep a lot of secrets from a lot of people, but they don’t keep who the Captain is sleeping with from the First Sword,” Rogers told her bluntly. “I doubt they’ve even told Vichy that, but they did tell me.
“Because that’s part of their job, and managing the Captain is part of mine. So, just why is the man who knows more about what we’re flying into than anyone else and is sleeping with my Captain locked up again?”
“I would argue that having slept with your Captain does not imply a continuing arrangement,” Morgan countered. “I’d need different permission from my girlfriend for that.”
Which she explicitly had, but that wasn’t Rogers’ business.
“Honestly, I’m only concerned about the personal part because it appears to be spilling into the professional part,” Rogers said. “What’s going on, sir?”
“What’s going on is that I explicitly told Dunst that he wasn’t coming
on this trip, because the Imperium would be better served by him checking out the Womb from the observation deck of a battleship,” Morgan said flatly. “He’s one of our top experts on the Precursors. We already accidentally took him into one battle with the Servants and the Children; he’s too valuable in what is inevitably going to be a high-risk scouting run at a hostile megastructure.”
“And he went to the Echelon Lord,” Morgan’s XO concluded. “Okay. Damn.”
“Yeah. So he went behind my back and over my head to get on my ship on a mission he’s too damn valuable to be risked on,” Morgan replied. “We need a Precursor expert for this, yes, but I know almost as much about this as he does.
“Now we probably have the only four people in fifty light-years who can tell you who the Alava’s primary subject races were on board this ship. We almost certainly have the only people who can recognize Precursor biotech from cellular analysis.
“The restriction to quarters isn’t necessary, but neither is allowing civilians the run of the ship,” Morgan concluded. “If they wanted privileges, they shouldn’t have pissed me off.”
She’d looked at the list of who Dunst had brought with him. If the suggestion had been raised instead of imposed, she’d have been perfectly happy to bring Kelly Lawrence or one of the other cyber-archeologists with her.
The concentration of knowledge now aboard Defiance was what she’d wanted to avoid. Only even more so.
“Make sure that they have a lab with proper sensor access and so forth when we reach Target One,” Morgan told Rogers. “We’ve got them, so we’ll use them, but I’ll be fucked if I pretend I like having them aboard.”
Her First Sword swallowed something that sounded suspiciously like a giggle.
“What?” Morgan snapped.
“Phrasing, sir,” Rogers finally said. “My understanding is that ‘getting fucked’ would definitely be among the reasons to like having Dr. Dunst aboard.”
“That is not happening, First Sword,” she said flatly. “Even if a certain male hadn’t just decided to ignore my own authority over my own ship, I would not be sleeping with anyone aboard a ship under my command.”
“Oh, I know,” Commander Rogers agreed swiftly, then shook her head. “I’ll touch base with Dr. Dunst and his team and see what they need for a lab.”
“Thank you.” Morgan raised a hand as Rogers turned to go. “And, Commander Rogers?”
“Yes, sir?”
“No matchmaking. Rin dug his own bloody grave on this one.”
“Of course, sir.”
Chapter Forty-One
In Pierre Vichy’s considered opinion, his Marines were most likely going to be completely useless on this trip.
They had zero data on what kind of structure they were looking at in the case of the Womb and even less data on what kind of facility the Children would be operating there. He was running his people through a series of boarding and intrusion scenarios, but without data, it was just generic training.
That didn’t make it a bad thing; it just meant it wasn’t going to change their effectiveness against the target on the board much.
Despite his best efforts, he hadn’t even acquired any new stealth shuttles. The report on his screen was his almost complete review of their performance with feedback from his Speakers and NCOs.
The executive summary was “get me more.” The stealth shuttles had been instrumental in taking Child of the Great Mother at all, let alone taking her intact.
Their whirlwind return to Kosha Station had barely given him time to have his shuttles fully serviced, let alone try and poach stealth ships from the station.
He was still staring at the screen, considering how best to incorporate the phrase these save lives into the final paragraphs when his com chimed.
“Battalion Commander Vichy,” he responded instantly.
“Commander Vichy, this is Dr. Dunst,” the familiar voice of the archeologist greeted him.
“Ah, Doctor. Comment ça va?” He’d known Dunst was aboard, though he hadn’t seen the man yet.
“Bored,” Dunst said drily. “I’m restricted to the quarters we’ve been assigned, but I was wondering if you’d be willing to join me for dinner. I think my fellow scientists and I might kill each other if we don’t get a distraction shortly.”
“I didn’t realize you were restricted,” Pierre admitted. That would have been an MP task, he supposed, with his Marines only being called in if needed. He doubted that Dunst or the other archeologists were causing trouble, though.
“Oui, eh bien, je sais pourquoi,” Dunst told him in atrociously accented French. As he said, he obviously knew why and was tolerant of it.
Pierre didn’t know why, but he doubted the scientist wanted him to ask over the intercom.
“I could break some time for dinner tonight,” he told the other man. “We’re still barely halfway to Target One. C’est un long voyage.”
Eight cycles in, at least six or so more to go. Target One wouldn’t have been in the first wave of systems the Navy would have scouted on their own, as Vichy understood it.
“Je sais,” Dunst agreed. “Don’t get me wrong, Battalion Commander; I like the people I’ve brought with me. But I spent a week in a cell next to Kelly Lawrence, for example. We ran out of things to talk about a long time ago.”
Pierre chuckled.
“Dinner it is, then,” he promised. “I’ll see you shortly.”
Despite the current “not quite welcome” status of the civilian team, Pierre was unsurprised to see that the steward staff were still being entirely helpful and cooperative with Dr. Dunst. The archeologist had made a generally positive impression on Defiance’s crew.
That meant that the dining room attached to their rooms had been done up with proper tablecloths and such, and that the stewards had put together a meal that looked surprisingly appetizing.
Pierre himself had brought a bottle of wine from a French vineyard—owned by some cousin; even he couldn’t keep track of his cousins upon cousins without a spreadsheet some days—as a gift.
“Commander Vichy,” Dunst greeted him brightly. “Please, come, have a seat. You, after all, get to leave this little corner of the ship once dinner is over.”
The Marine placed the bottle carefully on the table and glanced around. He wasn’t familiar with the other two scientists at the table. One was a four-armed Tosumi with deep blue and green feathers, their vestigial wings hidden beneath a simple toga-like wrapped cloak.
The other was a familiar-looking woman with short black hair and brown eyes he could easily see someone getting lost in. It took him a few moments after he took the seat to even recognize her anymore.
“Miz Lawrence, I apologize, I didn’t recognize you,” he admitted. “You look much better.”
The cyber-archeologist had been ill and starved when he’d first met her. She looked far healthier and better at a proper weight.
“I don’t believe you’ve met On Rai,” Dunst gestured to the other person at the table. On Rai’s meal looked almost identical to the carefully arranged rice dish the humans had been served, which suggested major effort on the stewards’ part.
Defiance wouldn’t have been equipped to feed a Tosumi anything but Universal Protein and vitamin powders. The ship’s storage would have been filled with human food—food that would have been actively poisonous to Tosumi metabolisms.
“I have not,” Pierre confirmed, bowing slightly to the avian alien. “A pleasure, On Rai. I’m aware of Dr. Dunst and Miz Lawrence’s specialties. You’re another computer expert?”
“If you call poking at rocks that should never have carried electricity and trying to determine if they were computers or just rocks being an expert, yes,” On Rai rumbled. The only nonhuman on the ship, they’d taken the unusual courtesy of attaching a translator speaker to their shoulder.
“Sometimes, we can sort of make Alava computers work,” Lawrence agreed. “Sometimes, we’re pretty sure we’re poking at what was suppos
ed to be decorative sculpture that just looks like a computer.”
“Some of their tech definitely works,” Pierre pointed out. “I heard stories of the star cannon out by Arjtal.”
“I was on the expedition that finally shut that down,” On Rai admitted. “Even cutting in dangerously close through hyperspace like the Fleet did when rescuing the Mesharom, it was still a month’s flight in realspace to reach the platform.”
The “star cannon” had targeted any vessel with an operating interface drive. No one in the Imperium was used to operating with spacecraft that measured their maneuverability in meters per second squared.
“And six weeks to work out enough of the system to shut it down,” Lawrence pointed out. “I did most of my Master’s on your work there, On Rai. It sounded amazing.”
“You’ve done enough of it now to know it’s really just boring,” the Tosumi replied. “Our work involves a lot of swimming in place, changing things ever so slightly and seeing what happens.”
“Mine is generally more…active,” Pierre told them with a chuckle. “I apologize for the restriction right now. We’re often cautious about where civilians are allowed aboard warships.”
“We understand,” Dunst said with a wave of dismissal. “We’ve been transported on warships before, Battalion Commander. We’ve been promised a lab for examining the Womb when we arrive; I’m honestly content with that.”
There was something else going on, Pierre suspected. Dunst didn’t strike him as the type to blithely accept what even Pierre thought was an odd level of restriction unless he thought he’d done something to deserve it.
“Have you spoken with Captain Casimir?” Pierre asked. “While this is not nonstandard, necessity required us to give you more freedom when we had the entire expedition aboard.”
Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) Page 24