“And I will not blink first.”
#
If there’d been any question left in Annette’s mind as to what the Pincer of the Republic was doing, it passed as soon as she entered the command center aboard the starcom platform. Harvester of Glory was moving toward Earth at only twenty percent of lightspeed.
That was a crawl. It was a speed that was intended to give her people time to panic, time to do something stupid—time to make up Kandak’s mind for him.
It had still cut the range down to barely fifteen light-seconds by the time Annette was in the command center and able to bring up a communications system. Her secretary was still catching up to her and the command center’s crew was sparse and unprepared, but she’d commanded a warship once.
She was able to place a glorified phone call.
“Pincer of the Republic Kandak,” she said calmly into the camera. “Your course is a clear sign of hostile intent. Please clarify your actions or we will be forced to engage you in defense of the Imperium’s sovereignty.”
In the time it took her message to reach the Laian ship, Harvester had cut several seconds off the transmission lag. It still took over thirty seconds for Kandak’s response to arrive, the war-dreadnought now barely one and a half million kilometers from the Militia formation.
“Duchess Bond,” the Pincer greeted her. His mandibles chittered in amusement and he waited for a long moment, clearly enjoying leaving her in suspense.
Then Harvester came to a sudden and complete halt, exactly one light-second away from her fleet.
“We have decided to accept your compromise,” he told her. “Your crews have fourteen minutes to evacuate the Ascendancy cruisers. At that point, my marines will board them and take control of the vessels to return them to Laian space.
“Resistance will be met with overwhelming force. Your Militia will not be harmed if they stand down immediately.”
Fourteen minutes was a Laian “clawspan”, less random than it sounded to human ears.
Annette immediately hit a second series of commands, linking her into Villeneuve’s shuttle.
“Jean, they took the compromise,” she told him immediately. “We need to evacuate Tidikat’s ships now and keep the rest of the Militia out of the way.”
“What if it’s a trap?”
“Then we’re no more fucked than we would be trying to fight him at missile range,” Annette pointed out. “Let him have the ships; we can build more ships more easily than we can fight the Republic right now.”
“I’ll pass on the orders,” he told her. “There’s got to be a catch, though. He was too determined until now.”
“I know,” she agreed. “They hacked Hermes Nine. He knows everything we know about the ship. He’s resolving the situation here so he can go straight to Alpha Centauri.”
#
Chapter 24
The starcom messages had been fast and furious over the ten days since they’d left Kimar, and Harriet Tanaka was feeling the frustration of being able to receive messages but not send them.
At least Tan!Shallegh was a smart enough alien not to give her orders via starcom, just situation updates. The Imperial Navy was well aware that the inability of their officers to communicate back to their superiors meant that the information loop was entirely one-way. It wasn’t—it couldn’t be—a command-and-control loop.
“Echelon Lord,” Piditel said brightly, the Rekiki turning from his station to look over at Harriet’s seat next to the central hologram on the flag deck. “New starcom transmission for you.”
“I’m going to suggest that Tan!Shallegh just schedule a daily update,” she replied. “This mess is getting out of hand.”
“This one is from Terra, Echelon Lord,” Piditel told her. “Duchess Bond sent it, under a priority key.”
Harriet exhaled and nodded. She trusted Bond’s judgment on what was important enough to ping a capital ship in motion.
“Relay to my office,” she ordered. “Let me know if anyone else decides there’s something I need to know!”
Piditel hissed and stamped his feet, the lizard-centaur’s version of chuckling as she stepped into the small room off from her flag deck. The door slid shut behind her and Harriet dropped into her chair, tapping a command that caused the built-in robot to bring her a tea.
Sipping the fragrant beverage, she opened Bond’s message.
“Echelon Lord Tanaka,” the Duchess greeted her formally. “I hope that your task group has had no issues and is on schedule. My last update from Kimar would put you roughly thirty hours out from Sol.
“I presume Tan!Shallegh has updated you on what we found in Alpha Centauri, but I’ve attached the files under a your-eyes-only seal for your perusal. The ship is from a race the Imperium knows nothing about, using technology we are completely unfamiliar with.
“She is the prize of the century, and even the Core Powers want her,” Bond concluded bluntly. “Unfortunately, our data security is clearly insufficient in the face of modern Laian electronic warfare.
“Pincer of the Republic Kandak has seized the three Laian Exile warships in my Militia in lieu of attempting to arrest every Laian in Sol—and is leaving. I am…extremely confident that the Pincer and his battle group are heading to Alpha Centauri.
“I’m not certain what he plans on doing there. We have a super-battleship division guarding the planet, but they’re no more able to stop Harvester of Glory than the Militia here in Sol was.”
Bond shook her head, the woman’s eyes shadowed.
“I haven’t quite decided what my response is going to be—but the threat to Terra that you adjusted your deployment to counteract has relocated to Alpha Centauri. I suggest you do the same, though I have no intention of giving you orders.”
Harriet shook her head. Unless she misjudged her old comrade-in-arms, if she went to Centauri, she was going to be seeing Bond soon enough.
“There are two hundred thousand people at Hope,” the Duchess said softly. “We owe them our sword arms. That was our oath—and the Empress’s.
“I cannot order you to Alpha Centauri,” Bond concluded. “But I beg of you, Harriet: redirect immediately. The Duchy’s Militia can’t beat Kandak to Hope—but with the charts you have of the region, you can.”
The message ended and Harriet sighed, rubbing her face with her hands as she considered. She’d redirected her task force, except for a single squadron of sixteen cruisers, to Sol from Alpha Centauri. Now…it seemed the Laians were going to be leading her on a chase.
“Commander Piditel,” she raised her coms officer. “Orders to the task force: the Laians are moving on Alpha Centauri. We are redirecting again.”
#
Chapter 25
“I don’t suppose our winged friends are being particularly helpful as to where they came from or what the hell they wanted?” Kurzman demanded.
“No,” Harold admitted. “We’re getting the Wendira equivalent of name, rank and serial number. They’re all Warriors, not Drones, which means we got hit by one of their higher-tier units, according to Imperial Intelligence.”
“We’ve got what, fifty of them?” the Admiral asked.
“Fifty-six, about half wounded,” Captain Naheed Sommers confirmed. The conference was being held via radio, but Harold and Sommers were in the prefabricated camp rapidly growing around the alien ship.
“They’re being model prisoners,” the Guard officer continued. “They follow orders; they’ve let us know what their needs are.” He shook his head. “I’m pretty sure if we’d captured half of an old Triple-S troop, we wouldn’t have got half the cooperation they’re giving us.”
“I suspect they think we won’t be holding them for long,” Harold said. “Which either means someone is going to show up asking us to turn them over, or—”
“Or someone is going to show up and try and take the damn system away from us,” Kurzman agreed with a sigh. “Someone other than the Laians.”
That piece of news had j
ust reached him and made Harold’s bandaged shoulder twinge. He was still restricted to light duty and had been forced to temporarily turn command of his ship over to Saab.
His “light duty” currently consisted of overseeing the engineers picking through the ancient hull and the surface-to-space missile batteries they’d assembled around the site. New Hope had surface-to-orbit missiles, designed to shoot down landing shuttles.
The dig site now had true SSMs, all up interface drive missiles rated to take down starships up to thirty light seconds away from the planet. Not that the six launchers they’d set up had enough ammunition to fight anything heavier than a destroyer, but they still gave Harold some peace of mind.
“What are we going to do about them?” he asked the Admiral.
“Tanaka is supposed to be redirecting our way; her ETA’s about the same as Kandak’s,” Kurzman added. “I don’t know what Bond and Villeneuve’s plan is yet, but I can guess.”
“Steer to the sound of the guns, from what I know of our Duchess,” Wolastoq said. Harold wasn’t entirely sure how the xenoarchaeologist had ended up in the meeting, other than the fact that she’d barely left his side since the brief battle.
He was sure she couldn’t be around as much as it felt like—she was still running the dig, including taking over directing his technical staff—but her presence was starting to acquire a comforting familiarity.
“Quite possible,” the Admiral agreed. “This system is even more of a backwater than Sol right now, but I have the horrible feeling we’re about to see the biggest confrontation between Arm and Core Powers in several hundred years. If both the Wendira and the Laians are now looking for this ship…”
“We’re going to find ourselves in the middle of a battle we can’t fight,” Harold replied.
“That’s why I’m hoping for as many reinforcements as possible,” Kurzman admitted. “For now, however, that ship is the key. What have we learned?”
“That it’s weird,” Wolastoq told them. “I’m sure no one is surprised to discover she’ll never fly again. But what’s strange is we can’t work out how she ever flew. She doesn’t have an interface drive. She doesn’t have a hyperdrive. She doesn’t have reaction thrusters.
“Even stranger, she doesn’t even have a complete electrical network, according to your Militia engineers. She’s got a partial network of gold and copper wiring, much as we’d use, and then three sets of what look like electrical systems but are made out of materials that don’t conduct enough to be useful.”
“That makes no sense,” Harold said.
“We run, what, a primary and a secondary power network, right?” Wolastoq asked.
“Yeah, but the cabling is basically identical for both,” Harold replied. “You’re saying they had four power distribution systems but three of them don’t work anymore? We’re talking material decay or what?”
“I checked that after the engineers told me their thoughts,” the xenoarchaeologist said. “They’re stable materials, nothing that would degrade or change over time. It’s like…they somehow could transfer power through them.
“And that’s not the only thing that doesn’t make sense.” Wolastoq shook her head. “From what your engineers are saying, as we understand physics, this ship didn’t work. Not doesn’t work anymore, it definitely doesn’t work anymore—it never should have worked.”
Kurzman massaged the bridge of his nose.
“So, whoever Those Who Came Before were, their tech is completely out of our experience,” he concluded.
“Not just out of our experience,” Wolastoq objected. “Impossible. Half of the systems in that ship shouldn’t work at all.” She shivered. “And one of the ones that doesn’t? Their brain implants.”
“What do you mean?” Harold asked.
“Every body we’ve found had an in-head implant to interface with the ship, but they were made up of materials we wouldn’t have expected to work as electronics,” she said. “It’s like…something made the implants stop working all of a sudden—and given how pervasive the implants are…”
“That may have been what killed the crew?” Kurzman said softly.
“So far as I can tell, those implants should never have worked,” Wolastoq repeated, “but clearly, they did. But if they stopped working…any of these guys who wasn’t already dead died damned quickly.”
#
Harold hadn’t felt quite so much of a sense of impending doom since they’d learned about the Kanzi fleet heading for Sol ahead of the Second Battle of Sol. The Wendira had apparently been searching the area for this ship, and if their quiet effort had failed, then the next one was going to be loud.
The Laians were on their way. Once again, the Imperium was charging to the rescue—though at least Tanaka was going to be there before the rocket went up, hopefully.
He’d spent the Second Battle of Sol aboard Tornado as her executive officer. He was looking to spend the Second Battle of Alpha Centauri as an invalid on the surface, his right arm still useless and locked in a cast as the regenerative matrix went to work on the large hole he’d torn through it.
He was doing his best to be useful, collating the data assembled by the engineers on the ancient ship into something remotely coherent. The ship itself seemed to be a barrier to that, so many of its systems destroyed and so much of what was left not making any sense at all.
A sharp knock on his door shattered his concentration, and he dismissed the file with a wave of his hand.
“Come in,” he barked.
Ramona Wolastoq stepped through the door of the officer’s quarters in the prefabricated Guard barracks he’d brought down with him on the first day. She wore a dusty lab coat, which she quickly removed and hung up before sitting down on his bed, facing him while she looked at him appraisingly.
“How are you holding up?” she finally asked.
“Feeling injured and useless,” he replied. “The Militia I serve is about to go into only its second real major battle, utterly outclassed, and I’m stuck down here.”
“You realize that left to its own devices, your body would take weeks to recover from that injury—and you’d potentially be crippled for life?” Wolastoq asked conversationally. “I’ve done archaeology on Earth, too. I’ve seen skeletons of people who died from less-extreme injury.”
“I know,” he admitted. “It’s just…”
“You want to do more,” she said. “So do I, and I’m completely unqualified to help!”
He chuckled.
“Any great inspirations on the starship?” he asked.
“It’s weird,” she echoed her earlier words, patting the bed beside her in a clear invitation.
He shook his head, suddenly awkward. They hadn’t really discussed their kiss during the battle, and he didn’t really regret it, but…
“I’m sorry,” Ramona said quickly. “I…thought…”
“It’s not you,” he told her. “I…I lost someone very dear to me at the Second Battle of Sol, and I’m not really over that yet. You’re the first woman to actually interest me since, but…it doesn’t feel right.”
“That was three years ago,” she said. It wasn’t an argument, really, just a statement. Perhaps a question.
“Seems like yesterday, sometimes.”
“I know that one,” Ramona agreed. “Been five years since my divorce; still feels as much of a shock some days as it was when he walked into my office and told me it was happening. He ‘felt like he was a second husband to my work.’”
She shook her head.
“I probably screwed up half a dozen ways,” she admitted, “but I didn’t expect that. Let a lot of things go in that divorce I might have fought for, had I seen it coming—had I wanted it.”
“Aren’t we a pair?” Harold said with a chuckle. “Sade and I had almost nothing in common except that we’d been stuck in exile with Bond together. That was enough for then. Might not have been enough for forever, but the Kanzi didn’t give us time to find out.�
�
“And you feel guilty because you lived.”
“Survivor’s guilt?” He snorted. “Yeah, there’s a chunk of that. And regret. And grief.”
“At least you don’t know it ended because of you,” Ramona said. “That one… That wound hurts, even now.”
“Bullshit, ‘It ended because of you,’” Harold told her. “There’s a lot of steps short of ‘I want a divorce,’ you know. Man was an idiot.”
She chuckled.
“Glad to hear someone say it, I suppose. Doesn’t silence the gremlin.”
“No.” He carefully rose and joined her on the bed, and she rested her head on his uninjured shoulder. “Between the Annexation, Tornado’s exile, and the Second Battle of Sol…we don’t have a lot of captains or flag officers who haven’t lost friends and family in the service of Terra and Imperium.
“The gremlins—the nightmares—they’re par for the course. Villeneuve hired some damn good counselors, but there’s only so much they can do.”
“Sooner or later, you have to move on on your own,” Ramona said quietly, and Harold realized that, without thinking about it, he’d moved around to face her. She was still leaning on him, they were barely inches apart.
“My shoulder is still locked in a cast,” he reminded her.
She smiled.
“I’ll be gentle, I promise.”
#
Chapter 26
“And breathe for me.”
Annette obeyed with a vague attempt at grace. Regardless of how busy or complex matters had become, she understood the reality of being an almost fifty-year-old pregnant woman, and the attendant necessity of extremely regular checkups.
She didn’t necessarily like it, but she understood it. Empereur de France’s chief surgeon was trying not to appear too intimidated by having the Duchess of Terra in her med bay for a prenatal checkup, too, and succeeding quite well.
Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3) Page 20