James Wellesley, however, had served Annette Bond as her bodyguard and ground force commander since before Earth had fallen to the A!Tol. He knew her. And when his visibly pregnant boss stormed from the meeting room, he knew things had not gone according to plan.
He and the other armored Guard trooper fell in behind her in silence. Now was not the time to be asking questions.
Halfway back to the shuttle, his suit communicator pinged.
“James, this is Villeneuve,” the man in charge of Sol’s defenses said in his ear. “Do you have Bond with you?”
“Yes. I’m guessing the negotiations didn’t go smoothly, because she’d about ready to chew cars and spit nails at the next person who talks to her.”
“Magnifique,” Villeneuve said. “She has her earbud turned off. You need to get her back onto the shuttle ASAP and into space, General.”
“What’s going on?” James asked.
“Hermes Nine just emerged from hyper portal squawking a priority-one Imperial security code. They’re refusing to transmit details, since we have a foreign warship in the system, and are heading straight for the starcom.”
James took a second to process that, letting habit and training keep him moving after Bond.
“I’ll advise her as soon as we’re aboard the shuttle,” he concluded. “And then we’ll get ourselves over to the starcom platform. I suggest you have as many Councilors as you can find on short notice meet us there—plus Echelon Lord Kas!Val.
“I suspect Commander Sadik will appreciate only having to give that kind of briefing once.”
“Agreed,” Villeneuve confirmed after a moment. “Casimir and Ki!Tana are already on their way. The living-room cabinet will be there; I’m not sure who else I can get into orbit in time.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance of hiding all of this from the Laians?” James asked.
“I’m still only eighty percent sure how many stealthed scout ships they have around the system, let alone where the three we know of are,” the Militia’s commander admitted bitterly. “I’m relatively sure they already decrypted the message from Commander Sadik, and I’m not even entirely confident they won’t have broken Hermes Nine’s firewalls and airgap security before she reaches the starcom.
“It’s entirely possible that Kandak will know about whatever’s going on in Alpha Centauri before we do, so I suggest you get Annette moving. We’re on a time limit—and I don’t know how long it is!”
#
As soon as they arrived on the shuttle, James sent a text order and course to the pilot. Then he removed his helmet and dropped down opposite Bond.
“I take it he didn’t like our compromise,” he said genteelly.
“He feels he has his duty,” the Duchess replied. “That’s a word I’m very familiar with and sometimes wish wasn’t quite so barbed and explosive.” She shook her head. “We need to get Villeneuve on the line. I don’t think Kandak is going to move immediately, but he’s functionally ruled out any chance of a peaceful resolution—and it sounds like his superiors have dumped the whole mess on him.”
“We’re heading to meet Villeneuve now,” James told her. “We have a problem. Hermes Nine has arrived from Centauri and has requested a hard link to the starcom and an in-person briefing. I don’t know what they found in Centauri, but I suspect it’s about to blow up in our faces.”
“With three fucking Core Powers circling like vultures,” Bond said in disgust. James carefully did not notice her protectively cupping her stomach. “They’re not leaving us a lot of choices, are they?”
“What are you going to do, Your Grace?” James asked softly. “We can’t fight Kandak, or the Wendira—or the Mesharom, for that matter. Peaceful annexation isn’t an option this time either,” he concluded.
“No, it’s not.” Bond shook her head at him. “Let’s see what Commander Sadik has for us—and operate on the assumption that Kandak’s people have hacked it out of his systems by the time we hear it.”
“Shouldn’t Sadik’s confidential data be on cold, unlinked storage?” James asked. He’d been wondering that since his conversation with Villeneuve.
“Yes,” Bond confirmed. “And we have reason to believe that isn’t enough against some of the data-extraction tools the Core Powers have available. The Imperium has some guesses as to how it works, but the basic conclusion from Intelligence is to assume that a Core Power ship has complete access to your databases.”
James swallowed.
“What about BugWorks?” he asked softly.
“They have to know the database exists to access it,” she reminded him. “And BugWorks Two isn’t mentioned in a single database on Earth. We made damned sure of it.”
“Is there anything from Two we can use?” James suggested. “If we’re down to the wire against Core Powers…”
“Nothing yet,” Bond admitted. “We’re at least two years from prototype hardware, let alone any usable ships.
“No, my friend, we will fight this battle with the weapons we have to hand—but believe me, we will fight it.”
She smiled grimly at him.
“I will not leave a broken Duchy to my children.”
#
One of the reasons the starcom transceivers took so long to build was the sheer size of the station required. A starcom platform took the form of a central sphere with four equilateral triangular “wings” that acted, roughly, as antennae.
The sphere was forty kilometers across, most of it taken up by power-generation equipment. A super-battleship ran on six antimatter power cores backed up by sixteen hyper-compressed fusion cores. A starcom required sixty antimatter cores and over two hundred fusion cores, enough power to run half of Earth’s cities and industries.
The “wings”, each containing nearly incalculable amounts of gold and platinum wiring, plus multiple exotic-matter arrays, were sixty kilometers high, two thick and fifty deep.
Combined, a starcom platform was sixty kilometers tall and over a hundred and twenty kilometers across, requiring a crew of some twenty-two thousand sentients and enough robots, drones, and semi-sentient AI programs that Annette wasn’t sure anyone had a total count.
Hermes Nine was linked up to the docking spire, a deceptively frail-looking tower on the “top” of the sphere. Frail as the tower appeared, it was thicker than the courier was long, with lots of space for the shuttle to tuck in and dock as well.
Manticore and Griffon hovered above the docking spire, their own immense bulk dwarfed into near-insignificance by the starcom. Villeneuve was apparently there already, and the Duchy’s two most modern warships would defend their Admiral and Duchess until the end.
“Docking complete,” the pilot reported, and Wellesley offered her his hand.
“Shall we, Your Grace?” the English General asked.
“Lead on, General.”
Her smile tightened as the rest of her Guard detachment fell in around them. Unlike Wellesley, the other seven Guards still wore their power armor. Even there, the most defended facility in Sol, her Ducal Guard were concerned for her safety.
After the last few years, she couldn’t blame them.
#
Commander Sadik was a short and squat Turkish man, his eyes and hair dark as he stood at the front of the briefing room, visibly sweating as the senior members of his government and military organization took their seats.
“You wanted a personal briefing, Commander,” Villeneuve told him, and Annette could hear the reassuring gentleness in the old Admiral’s voice. “Now you have us all. Why don’t you begin?”
“Yes, sir,” Sadik said loudly, then swallowed and wiped his face with a linen handkerchief.
“Vice Admiral Kurzman locked everything we were carrying down under a Council-only seal, though he said he believed you’d want to pass this on to the Imperium as quickly as possible.”
“I understand,” Annette confirmed. Whatever they’d found, it was enough that Kurzman was leaving the call over whether
or not to inform their overlords to her. It was unlikely she wouldn’t, but Kurzman had always chafed under being a subject race.
“Dr. Wolastoq found what the Kanzi force was looking for,” the courier captain said simply. “They traced a series of radioactive particles and debris to what appeared to be a crash site for a starship.
“An old starship. The details are in the files, but the estimate I saw was that the ship was fifty-five thousand and seven hundred years old,” Sadik said levelly. “Dr. Wolastoq and Captain Rolfson managed to successfully enter the vessel, which still has some limited power.”
“Wait, you’re telling me a fifty-thousand-year-old ship has power?” Villeneuve demanded.
“The details are in the files,” Sadik repeated, “but my briefing is, well…”
He tapped a command on his communicator, and the screen behind him lit up with an image of a strange chamber, clearly inside a ship but unlike anything Annette had ever seen before. A single metallic orb was suspended by gray-black struts in the middle of the space, and the walls were a gray, waxy material.
“This appears to be some form of power core based around a gravitational singularity,” Sadik told them after wiping the sweat from his face again. “The struts are compressed matter, but the hull is a semi-motile organic material controlled by interlaced nanotech. The hull is self-repairing, though most of the ship’s equipment is nonfunctional—but the core is still producing a small trickle of power.”
There was a hard snap and Annette glanced over at Ki!Tana. The A!Tol’s skin was black as night, a shade of pure fear and terror that she’d never seen on the old alien before.
“Ki!Tana?” she asked softly.
“Not here,” the alien answered instantly. “Finish your briefing, Commander. I apologize for the interruption.”
“There isn’t much more for now,” Sadik admitted. “The details are in the files,” he repeated for the third time, “but that’s the core of it. We have found an unknown alien vessel that dates to before known galactic civilization and contains technology we do not understand.
“Admiral Kurzman stated his intent to hold his force at Centauri to protect the ship and recommended the immediate deployment of whatever forces we could find to reinforce him. I’m not sure if he was aware of the Laian presence when he gave that recommendation,” the Commander told them, “but he felt that this discovery was…”
“Of the highest strategic importance,” Annette finished for him. “And it is. Thank you, Commander Sadik. Please make sure the files are available to us all, and have a copy prepared for transmission via starcom.
“We need to inform Imperial Navy HQ as soon as possible.”
The Duchess of Terra smiled grimly.
“The situation has grown more complicated. Again.”
#
Chapter 23
The conference room was silent for several long seconds after Sadik left the leaders of the Duchy of Terra alone. Annette turned a questioning gaze on Ki!Tana, but the A!Tol didn’t elaborate on her earlier comments.
Her skin remained the inky black of fear, though, which was far from reassuring.
“So, what do we do?” she said into the silence, looking to her husband and Villeneuve. “Obviously, we pass all of this information on to the Imperium, but where do we go from there?”
“Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh has promised significant reinforcements,” the old French Admiral reminded her. “The same multi-squadron force that he was gathering to shield the Imperium from Pincer Kandak and Hive Commandant Ashtahkah can be used to shield this ship from potential claimants as well.”
“It’s a matter of timing,” Annette explained. “And politics. We don’t want a war, but if someone else takes possession of Alpha Centauri ahead of Tan!Shallegh’s arrival, a war is the only way he’ll dislodge them.”
“We know this wasn’t what Kandak was looking for,” Elon said. “But it seems likely that it’s what the Kanzi raiders and the Wendira were after. Do we know how they knew about it?”
“Hell, the Theocracy are claiming they had nothing to do with it,” Zhao replied. “They might even be telling the truth, which begs the question of who is looking for this and what they’ll do to seize it.”
“Everyone.”
Annette turned back to Ki!Tana as the alien spoke harshly.
“Everyone is looking for Those Who Came Before, even if they don’t know it,” she told them. “The Wendira and the strangers, unquestionably. How either knew there was a ship of Those Who Came Before in Centauri, I do not know, but it is the only thing they can be seeking.”
The A!Tol’s tentacles fluttered in uncertainty.
“This specific ship is not why the Mesharom are here…but the hunt for artifacts of Those Who Came Before is why the Mesharom Frontier Fleet exists,” she concluded. “Everything else the Frontier Fleet has done over the thousands of long-cycles it has existed has been in service of that search.”
“You know more than you have told me,” Annette accused Ki!Tana, but there was no heat in the words. She knew Ki!Tana had secrets she hadn’t shared. From what Annette understood of the process of becoming a Ki!Tol, Ki!Tana had secrets even she didn’t know she did.
“Always,” Ki!Tana confirmed. “These secrets are not mine to share, and there are oaths I have sworn, stories that would break the history of our sector. I must…speak to others before I say more.”
Others almost certainly meant Ki!Tana’s contacts with the Mesharom Frontier Fleet. Ki!Tana was technically under an indentured-servitude contract to Annette, but the Duchess knew the Ki!Tol had other loyalties, other allies.
“Do what you must,” Annette told her, giving her alien friend the permission she knew Ki!Tana didn’t need.
She turned to the rest.
“For now, we must consider how much we can afford to spare,” she told them quietly. “With Harvester of Glory in the system, I don’t think we can afford to send any of our ships to Alpha Centauri—but Echelon Lord Tanaka is due to arrive within the next forty-eight hours.
“I intend to contact her via starcom and divert her to Alpha Centauri. Whatever is going to happen here is going to happen regardless of whether Tanaka’s half-dozen capital ships are present, but they may make all the difference at Hope.”
“We have an entire world to protect,” Villeneuve said quietly, but it wasn’t truly an objection.
“I know. But…Kandak can smash us anytime he chooses. Tanaka’s task force wouldn’t change that; it would only add to how many ships died trying to stop him.”
Annette looked around the room, meeting each of her Councilors’—her friends’—gazes in turn.
“We must begin to face the reality that we will not be able to stop Kandak and may not be able to negotiate a compromise,” she told them. “I see no choice but to activate Operation Denmark.”
“Denmark requires…sacrifices,” Zhao said bluntly. “Do the Laians know what we need to ask of them?”
“Orentel and Tidikat are aware of the plans for Denmark,” Annette confirmed. “They… Fuck.”
The Duchess of Earth swallowed angry tears, placing her hands on her pregnant belly and facing her Treasurer.
“They understand what must be done,” she grated out.
Operation Denmark called for hiding much of the Laian population on Earth—but the Republic knew there were Laians on the surface.
To save as many as possible, the only plan they had left called for roughly one tenth of the Laian Enclave to allow themselves to be captured or killed, along with the crews of Tidikat’s ships.
#
The meeting had barely broken up and half of them were still in the room when Villeneuve’s communicator suddenly blared an emergency alert. Annette froze, staring at the device in her Admiral’s hand like it was a pair of snakes as he yanked it open.
“Villeneuve here,” he snapped.
“Harvester is moving,” a vaguely familiar voice said quickly. “And her escorts—on a direct c
ourse for the fleet.”
“Merde. Understood. I will be back aboard Empereur de France immediately.”
Annette shared a helpless look with Villeneuve. They’d delayed too long. They needed time to execute Denmark, to hide most of the Laians on Earth. The price had been too high and they’d failed.
“Get to your ship, Admiral,” she ordered. “I’ll get aboard Defense One.”
“You need to return to the planet, Your Grace,” Villeneuve told her. “We cannot lose you. Not now.”
“I will not stand by and watch men and women die on my orders without sharing their fate.”
“Yes. You will,” Wellesley said, stepping up beside her. “Because the succession isn’t unquestioned. Because the Duchy needs you. Because if you die, your children die with you.”
“You bastard,” Annette hissed, her hands half-instinctively covering her stomach.
“I am a son of the Duke of Wellington,” her General replied. “I am an asshole, but I am quite certain I am not a bastard.
“I am also right.”
“He is,” Villeneuve agreed. “You have to return to the surface. My people need to know you’re safe.”
“My place—”
“—is on Earth, showing people that things are going to be okay,” the Admiral told her. “It is not with the fleet. This is no longer a political affair.”
She shook her head, glaring at them both.
“You’re right,” she conceded. “I will remain aboard the starcom, where it’s safe. But if I am to step out of the way once it is ‘no longer a political affair,’ then as God is my witness, I am going to make this a political affair.”
“I suspect Pincer Kandak is done listening,” Villeneuve replied.
“Harvester was already in range of the Militia,” Annette said, the realization sinking home as she spoke. This was still political. There might still be a chance to save her people. “If he was truly done listening, he’d already have started shooting. I don’t know what Laians call it, but I think our friend is playing chicken.
Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Page 19