Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “And to be clear, I have spoken with Empress A!Shall,” she assured the Laians. “She was quite specific in her instructions to me, which leaves me with little more choice in my answers than you would have me believe you have.”

  Annette leaned forward against the table, grateful that the powered chair was smart enough to pull her slightly back as she did so, to avoid the indelicacy of bouncing her pregnant stomach off the gorgeous black table.

  “There are no Laian rebels here,” she said calmly. “There are, I will concede, the descendants of Laians who fought in the civil war between the Ascendancy and the Republic—though I must note that the Exiles are descendants of the Ascendancy, which was the ruling government of your race before the war. That does raise interesting questions of who were the rebels, does it not?”

  “The attaintment travels by hive and lineage,” Kandak told her. “They remain enemies of the Republic. The ships remain ours, with technology more advanced than the A!Tol have developed. You have no choice, Duchess. You will surrender them to us.”

  “Neither Terran nor Imperial law recognizes any such transfer of guilt,” Annette replied. “If you could prove specific war crimes by a specific individual, we would be prepared to consider extradition, but the Laians in the Duchy of Terra are now citizens of the A!Tol Imperium. Simply being descendants of the losers of your civil war is not enough for me to blithely hand them over.”

  “Then I will regretfully be forced to take them,” the Pincer of the Republic said levelly.

  “Past my Militia,” Annette said. “Past the Imperial Navy. Past my Ducal Guard and the Imperial Marines on the surface, because both of those forces will defend the Laian enclave as fiercely as any other city on my world.

  “Are you truly prepared to start a war over this, Pincer of the Republic Kandak?”

  “My orders do not leave me flexibility, Duchess. Surrender the criminals, or I will be forced to take them.”

  “I know perfectly well, Pincer, that the Republic has solved the starcom mobility problem and that your Harvester of Glory has the ability to ‘phone home’,” Annette told him. “Neither I nor my Empress are prepared to be dictated to by the Laian Republic, Pincer.”

  She and her companions rose as if they’d been reading her mind.

  “There may well be compromises we are prepared to consider,” she allowed, “but so long as you claim that we must either abjectly surrender or you will attack my world, then all I can say is: bring it on.

  “And either you will fail, or when the fragile bonds that keep galactic civilization together collapse and the Republic burns as the Ascendancy did, you will know it was your choice that started it all.”

  #

  Chapter 18

  Super-battleships had one distinctive advantage over their smaller siblings: none of the fast battleships and only a small number of battleships carried starcom receivers. Super-battleships were large enough, however, that all of the A!Tol Imperium’s super-battleships had the receivers.

  They couldn’t transmit at all and the bandwidth was atrocious while in hyperspace, but it meant that Echelon Lord Harriet Tanaka could still receive updates as her new task group made its way toward Alpha Centauri.

  Not that the updates were anything she wanted to hear, just what she needed to.

  Laians.

  Not the ex-pirates turned immigrant settlers of the Exiles and Earth’s enclave, but the communist-on-crack fanatics of the Core Power Laian Republic. The Republic wasn’t the strongest or most advanced Core Power, but they were far from the weakest.

  And even the weakest Core Power was completely out of the A!Tol Imperium’s weight class.

  Fifty starships followed the currents of hyperspace from Kimar to Alpha Centauri, the cruisers and fast battleships forming a rough defensive sphere around the two super-battleships at the heart of the formation.

  It wasn’t the most powerful force Harriet Tanaka had ever seen—that honor still went to the ten-squadron battle fleet the Imperium had mustered after the Kanzi attack on Terra, a fleet that had never had to go into action.

  It was, however, a more powerful force than she’d ever commanded, with almost fifty thousand sentients of twenty-one different species under her command. It had been a force level selected to make certain that any logical follow-up wave to the four destroyers they’d seen would be utterly outclassed.

  She had just under a hundred million tons of warships, equal tonnage to the Laian task group at Sol, but the technological advantage was more like four or five to one…in the opposite direction.

  A!Tol intelligence on Laian war-dreadnoughts was limited, but Harriet went through what they had. She didn’t even have enough information to identify the warship’s age, let alone its class. What data she had suggested somewhere between two and four hundred missile launchers, each firing missiles rated at point eight five cee, plus multiple versions of whatever the Laians had replaced the plasma lance with.

  The Republic was quite cagey about that. Their internal politics required a large amount of publicity around the military, but they’d managed, despite it all, to keep the exact specifications of their warships secret.

  “Captain Sier, to my office, please,” she ordered over the intercom.

  If she was going to have this kind of headache, she might as well share it and see if her Yin flag captain had any thoughts on the next step.

  #

  When the tall, blue-feathered Captain arrived at Harriet’s office, she had two sets of holograms hovering in the air, humming as she regarded them thoughtfully. One had four smaller ships, the other a single, absolutely immense vessel.

  “Echelon Lord,” Sier greeted her. “How may I assist?” He looked at the two floating holograms. “What am I seeing here?” he asked.

  “These”—Harriet gestured at the four smaller ships—“are the vessels that attacked Alpha Centauri. Destroyer-sized, near–Core Power tech levels. Fast, dangerous, complete unknowns.”

  “The ships that we are on our way to make certain don’t show up again,” Sier agreed, eyeing the other, far more immense vessel. “And this…this is a Laian war-dreadnought.”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “Specifically, Harvester of Glory under Two Hundred and Eighty-eighth Pincer of the Republic Kandak. With twenty attack cruisers for escorts, though they didn’t seem worth including in the screen.

  “Currently, Harvester is in a trailing orbit of Terra, demanding that the Duchy surrender the Laian Exiles and their ships, seeing as how they are apparently still regarded as rebels against the Republic.”

  “Shadowed clouds,” Sier cursed. “And we, of course, are the closest task group to either system. What are our orders?”

  “We have no new orders,” Harriet said grimly. “Our objective remains to secure the Alpha Centauri system, but I cannot see leaving a war-dreadnought moving around our territory as a secondary priority.”

  She hummed softly again, studying the two ships.

  “We don’t know enough about Laian capital ships for me to be happy trying to engage or intimidate her,” she said quietly. “I wish we could communicate with Admiral Kurzman—on the one hand, we need somebody in Alpha Centauri, but on the other, I’d feel somewhat more comfortable trying to convince the Pincer to back down with eight super-battleships instead of six.”

  “I’m not sure even twelve A!Tol capital ships would intimidate a Laian dreadnought,” Sier admitted, studying the hologram of the massive vessel. “She was designed to fight Wendira, after all, and the Grand Swarm is…well, a lot scarier than we are.”

  The Wendira and the Laians were both insect-like sentients with exoskeletal carapaces…and that was where the resemblance ended. The Laians’ culture discouraged nuclear families in favor of lineage marriages that raised children in common, but that was a cultural thing, not a biological thing.

  Only one of the four Wendira castes/subspecies was actually capable of having children. The other three subspecies—Warrior, Worker and Drone
—were all hatched from eggs laid by Wendira Royal females.

  Harriet wasn’t quite sure if the clash between the Laians and the Wendira was biological, cultural or political, but they were the two Core Powers most regularly in direct conflict with each other. The Laian war-dreadnought’s most likely enemy was a Wendira star hive—what Harriet’s race would call a supercarrier.

  Harriet wasn’t sure how the Wendira had designed a one-sentient spacecraft that moved at point eight cee without killing the occupant with hyperspace radiation—and A!Tol intelligence suggested that to a large degree, they simply hadn’t. Wendira Drone-castes weren’t exactly expendable, but they were functionally infinite in number, after all.

  “Which leaves us with one specific problem,” Harriet concluded. “We can either continue on our current mission, which would position us where we could support Terra if the Laians do pick a fight…assuming Villeneuve could spin the fight out for a few days, at least. Or we can go to Terra and hope to help talk this Kandak down but leave Alpha Centauri vulnerable.”

  “If I may make a small suggestion, Echelon Lord?” Sier asked slowly.

  “There’s no other reason I asked you to meet me,” she said. “Please, Captain.”

  “You’re thinking like a Division Lord, not a task group commander,” he pointed out. “You have fifty warships.”

  Harriet paused, her hum cutting off as she considered.

  “Sixteen of our Stalwart-class cruisers would be more than enough to deal with, say, four cruisers on the same level as those destroyers, wouldn’t they?” she murmured. “And the cruisers are going to be irrelevant to any attempt to intimidate Kandak into standing down.”

  “I would suspect so, Echelon Lord.”

  As Harriet opened her mouth to thank her flag captain and begin to give orders, her intercom pinged again. She tapped it.

  “Tanaka.”

  “Echelon Lord,” Commander Piditel greeted her over the channel. “We have just received an encoded message over the starcom. It appears to be from Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh—and is marked as for your attention only.”

  “Forward it to my office,” Harriet ordered swiftly, then turned to her captain. “Thank you, Sier. Once I’ve heard what Tan!Shallegh has to say, I will pass orders to the task group.”

  #

  After Sier had returned to his duties, Harriet slowly locked down the security measures on her office. Attached to her flag deck, it wasn’t necessarily the most physically secure or safest location on the ship, but once she’d activated the full confidentiality suite, it didn’t matter if someone had bugged her office somehow.

  No message was getting out through the Faraday cage her office had temporarily become.

  The full suite rendered her unable to communicate with the rest of her flagship, which meant it could only be used for the most restricted of communiques—and was almost never used outside of hyperspace.

  The codes attached to Tan!Shallegh’s message required it, though, and she sealed herself in before activating the video.

  A hologram of the A!Tol Fleet Lord appeared above her desk. He looked tired, his skin mostly gray despite shocking streaks of black and green.

  “Echelon Lord Tanaka,” the recording began. “This message is classified Lowest Void. While I expect you to use this information to make your plans, it is not to be distributed to any of your staff or Captains.”

  That had Harriet’s attention. She was aware of the “Lowest Void”–level classification—somewhere well past Top Secret, as the UESF had classified things—but nothing in her current files had that level of secrecy.

  “Nothing at Lowest Void is kept in digital records,” Tan!Shallegh told her. “This message will purge itself one cycle after being recieved. These are not affairs we can officially acknowledge the existence of, but be aware that we will be advising Duchess Bond of the same information.

  “We have certain allies among the Core Powers, individuals and factions that act to keep the old races from abusing their power as much as possible. We have deep, dark channels they can communicate with us through, but those channels are slow.

  “They risked much to pass on Ki!Tana’s warning at Sol six long-cycles ago fast enough. Such risks were not taken this time, but that has left us a problem.”

  The gray on his skin was exhaustion. It wasn’t a shade Harriet had seen on A!Tol often.

  “We have now, somewhat too late, been warned about Harvester of Glory,” Tan!Shallegh noted. “But that was one part of a longer message, and the rest is…disturbing.”

  The Fleet Lord gestured his manipulator tentacles, and an image appeared on the hologram.

  “We know why the Laians are here,” he told her. “We are not entirely surprised by their presence.

  “Nobody knows who the strange Kanzi who attacked Alpha Centauri are. We’re watching for them, but they’re an unknown factor—which means they cannot be our priority compared to what we know is coming.”

  The image was a vessel, something entirely outside of Harriet’s personal experience. A broad-based cone formed of increasingly smaller stepped circles. Without scale, it was hard to guess the size…but then she recognized just what she was looking at.

  “Our contacts have also confirmed that there is a Wendira star hive in the region,” Tan!Shallegh said. “They are…hunting something. It’s not Harvester; our contacts don’t believe that Hive Commandant Ashtahkah is aware of Harvester’s presence.

  “The Wendira think there is something in the Terran Kovius Zone worth deploying a hundred-million-ton carrier to search for. Harvester of Glory is bad enough, but Wing’s Nightmare is easily equivalent to Pincer Kandak’s entire battle group.

  “And either of them could take multiple squadrons of our best.”

  Harriet stared at the star hive. It was ugly to human eyes, but she could pick out the launch decks, the missile launchers, the beam weapons. A star hive could deploy starfighters to swarm any lesser ship. Conquer a planet with the Warriors and Drones aboard. It was the ultimate multipurpose vessel, and powerful enough to be able to do each of its tasks well.

  “My fear, Echelon Lord, is that the Hive Commandant is hunting the same thing the Kanzi were,” Tan!Shallegh concluded grimly. “Whatever it is, it has attracted the attention of a Core Power and an unknown player to your species region.

  “I have requested reinforcements, but…” He fluttered his tentacles, an A!Tol shrug. “I would not engage either vessel without a minimum of four squadrons of super-battleships. I have been promised those ships and more, but it will take time to gather them.

  “I need you to buy me time, Echelon Lord. You and the Duchy of Terra Militia must keep the Wendira and the Laians from starting a depths-sunk war before we can get there.”

  There was a long pause in the message, but the recording didn’t end.

  “Our contacts didn’t tell us everything,” he finally admitted. “They don’t pass on the sources of their information or any validating sources, though we have found them reliable. What we are quite certain of, however, is that our contacts specifically do not provide us with information on Mesharom movements in our region of space.

  “We have reason to believe that there is a Mesharom Frontier Fleet deployment near Sol as well. I would like to say they are potential allies, but the Mesharom have their own plans and objectives.”

  Harriet sighed. Of course it couldn’t be simple.

  “There are a lot of players on the move around Sol right now and we don’t know why,” Tan!Shallegh told her. “We will gather reinforcements and move as quickly as possible, but I must gather sufficient force to make the gesture meaningful.

  “All I can offer is information and warm waters. Good luck, Echelon Lord.”

  #

  Three Core Powers. Plus an unknown group with basically Core Power–level tech.

  Harriet wasn’t sure just what the hell anyone was looking for, but it couldn’t be worth this level of attention!

  Whatever she
thought, however, those four players had wandered into the area around her homeworld, and dealing with them was going to fall on her as one of the senior Imperial officers in the region.

  She had to decide what to do, and much as she hated the idea, splitting her forces was looking like the only option. With a sigh, she wiped the message from Tan!Shallegh and took down her office’s security suite

  “Piditel,” she pinged her coms officer. “I want an all-Captains, all-Lords video conference in twenty minutes.”

  “Yes, Echelon Lord.”

  The plan she and Sier had worked up while they were only looking at the Laians was going to have to do. Without more information on the Mesharom, the strangers or the Wendira, all she could spare was a cruiser squadron.

  The only change she was going to make was sending the lion’s share of her courier ships to Alpha Centauri. If someone else showed up there, she wanted to know as soon as possible, not have to wait for a warship to be broken free and sent over.

  They needed to spin out the clock for Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh to gather his fleet—but at the same time, she doubted time was the A!Tol Imperium’s friend.

  #

  Chapter 19

  Vice Admiral Patrick Kurzman massaged the bridge of his nose, studying the imagery that Rolfson had sent back up from the planet.

  “All right, people,” he finally said, glancing around the small gathering in his flag briefing room aboard Emperor of China. Rolfson was there, as were the flagship’s Captain Fang and Pat’s aide, Heng Chan. Commodore (retired) Kulap Metharom, a tiny Thai woman who’d been instrumental in developing the original Terran interface drive and had emigrated to Hope, had agreed to join them by video from the surface.

  Commander Teykay of Plainsfang joined them to speak for the Imperium, the Rekiki clearly surprised that Emperor had chairs for his race. Clearly, despite being assigned to humanity’s first colony, he hadn’t looked into the history of just how Terra had become a Duchy.