Then a hologram appeared in the air above them. The image was both familiar and unfamiliar, and he sucked in a breath of shocked surprise as he studied the hologram.
The star was a red giant, a grossly expanded former main-sequence star that had either begun to run low on fuel or been damaged by some failure of advanced technology. The presence of the outer layers of an Alavan Dyson Swarm suggested the latter, the orbiting plates blocking much of the view of the trapped star.
The star was wrong, and even the Swarm was slightly different from the one out near the Taljzi, but it was the same style of massive Alavan artifact that the Taljzi had turned on the Mesharom.
“Do you know what this is, Dr. Dunst?” Oxtashah asked.
“I think so,” he said quietly.
“But you can’t tell me, can you?” she said. She chittered in amusement again. “So, I will tell you. This is a stellar-energy-capture swarm built by Those Who Came Before, designed to send energy via a modification of their teleporter systems to facilities in several surrounding star systems.”
Her wings flickered in a shrug.
“Fate, time and the Mesharom obliterated the facilities this swarm supported,” she noted. “But somehow, they missed the swarm itself. My people discovered it while surveying the wreckage of the Dead Zone for fleet base locations after the War of Mistakes.
“We have studied it for centuries and we hesitate to do more than touch it,” she admitted. “But I understand, from the rumors I have heard, that the Taljzi turned a stellar-capture swarm into some kind of superweapon and destroyed a Mesharom battle fleet.
“A weapon that could destroy thirty Mesharom war spheres could perhaps turn the tide against the Infinite, could it not?” she asked. “We do not know what was done to the swarm by Arjtal. We cannot duplicate it.
“But we have a stellar-capture swarm, Dr. Dunst, which leaves me with a question for you that I hope you will feel able to answer.
“Do you believe that you can duplicate the Taljzi weapon, given a swarm in this state of disrepair?”
Rin was silent for a while. He wasn’t sure how much time—enough that he worried about how Oxtashah was going to take it—passed before he finally sighed and spread his hands.
“I can tell you that the weapon had many limitations,” he said quietly. “I’m not sure it would be the game changer you seem to think it would be. I can also say that I don’t have the skill to replicate what was done alone.
“But…it is possible that I could assemble a team from the Grand Fleet who might.”
He was reasonably sure that Kelly Lawrence was somewhere on the fleet, for example. His former cyber-archaeologist friend had decided that joining Imperial Fleet Intelligence was a use for her skills that would put Marines between her and any more space pirates.
And Lawrence had been on the team that had disabled the Taljzi Dyson swarm.
“That would require me to reveal one of the deepest secrets of the Grand Hive to, at the very least, the team you assembled,” Oxtashah said quietly.
“We would need to bring Tan!Shallegh in at a minimum,” Rin told her. “That decision is yours. I will not betray your secrets, Princess Oxtashah, but to do what you want, we will need to bring in others.”
“Thank you, Dr. Dunst,” Oxtashah said. “I will consider my options. I appreciate your assistance and your honesty.”
Rin, for his part, kept his gaze on the hologram of the Dyson swarm. The Alava had never thought small.
He had to wonder if that was related to how they’d convinced the Infinite that the entire Alavan species needed to die.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
To a very real extent, Morgan had never bothered to unpack on Va!Tola. She’d never quite had time, and it appeared that had been the right call. She’d served as an analyst team lead for Tan!Shallegh for less than thirty cycles.
Once everything was packed away, she took a few minutes to sit on the bed and breathe. She still needed to meet with her team and let them know she was shipping out, but everything was running at maximum velocity.
Her ulterior motive proved out, though, as Rin knocked on the door before she gathered herself enough to leave.
“Come in,” she told him.
Her boyfriend took in the neatly packed duffel on the bed and her posture with a calm expression, then his gaze focused on her collar.
“Division Lord, huh?” he asked. “Congratulations.”
“It’s temporary, theoretically, but they needed an Imperial officer both a Wendira and Laian detachment would listen to,” she said. “I’m commanding a special joint mission—can’t say much more than that, I don’t think.”
“But you’re shipping out,” he concluded, sitting down on the bed next to her and squeezing her hand. “And you had no warning, so there’s nothing to blame you for, is there?”
Morgan chuckled. She hadn’t been thinking about that, not really, but the worry had been there.
“Still good to hear that you don’t blame me,” she told him. “How was your meeting with the Wendira Princess?”
“Complicated,” he murmured. “I… I can’t talk about it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I gave her my word.”
That was strange, but Morgan knew she couldn’t press him. She squeezed his hand back and leaned her head on his shoulder for a few precious moments.
“You have a thousand and one things to be doing, I’m sure,” Rin told her. “I saw you weren’t at your station, and thought I could steal some emotional support, but I don’t want to get in the way.”
“You only get in the way when you think it’s the right thing to do?” Morgan asked, reflecting on the time he’d gone over her head to get himself attached to a mission as a civilian advisor. He’d been right—not least because they’d needed to keep some of her clearances and knowledge secret—but that hadn’t made it less aggravating.
“Sometimes, that’s what it takes,” he agreed. “Professionally and personally, I’m supposed to have your back. Regardless of what you think about it at a given moment.”
She sighed.
“Right now, you’re probably right in sending me on my way,” she admitted. “I just needed a moment to breathe and, well, hoped that you’d see I was off duty and check in.”
“Well, here I am,” Rin said with a grin. “And you’ve told me that you’re leaving, which sucks, but I always knew what I was getting into, Division Lord.”
“Be nice, Doctor,” she countered with a smile of her own. “You think you’ll survive on your own?”
“I did before; I will again. Tan!Shallegh appears to have adopted me,” Rin told her. “I don’t know if I’m being nearly as much use as I’d like, though. It’s not like we’re going to find a forgotten Alavan archaeology site with all of the answers about the Infinite.”
“Would be nice, though,” she admitted. “Feels like we don’t have nearly enough answers.”
And she was about to make sure they never got those answers. Obliterating the main core of the Infinite was unlikely to convince the survivors to sit down for informational interviews.
“Well, either way, it looks like you need to get to it,” Rin told her. “Up and at them, Morgan. Space waits better than the tides did, but duty waits for no one.”
“It waits a little,” she replied, then kissed him fiercely. Coming up for air, she smiled at him. “But not much. I’ll be back, Rin.”
“Don’t make promises you don’t know you can keep, Morgan.”
Rin’s words were echoing in Morgan’s mind as she walked into Va!Tola’s Fleet Operations Center. Her entire team was on duty, but the moment she walked in, everyone stopped and turned to look at her.
Shotilik was there a moment later, the big Noble-caste Rekiki saluting fist to chest.
“I see the news already made it,” Morgan said drily—and then noticed that Shotilik had acquired a third gold pip on her insignia, marking her promotion to full Captain. “And that congratulations are in order, Staff Captain Shot
ilik.”
“We were informed a hundredth-cycle ago,” Shotilik confirmed. “I was informed…a hundredth-cycle before that? Along with the promotion.”
“So, you’re taking over, I hope?”
“Until the Fleet Lord finds someone better,” the Rekiki said. “Or you come back. Whichever works.”
“The only person I can think of who even might be better is going with me,” Morgan told Shotilik with a chuckle. “So, you’ll be keeping the job.”
She stepped past the Rekiki and faced the rest of the team. She hadn’t had a chance to get to know most of them as well as she’d have liked, but they were still her people.
“Everything about this team has been a rush,” she told them. “So, I guess it’s no surprise that my leaving is a rush. I’m transferring to the battleship Odysseus within the twentieth-cycle.”
Her duffel was probably already on her shuttle, waiting for her to catch up.
“The entirety of three fleets is now armed with the knowledge and analysis this team has done,” she continued. “Given the limited information and time available to us, we have done amazing things in projecting and analyzing this enemy.
“Our knowledge of them remains far from perfect, and refining that knowledge will continue to fall on you. That’s why you are remaining a separate team, even as the data you’ve provided is absorbed by Fleet Operations.
“I would have liked to have had more time with you, but duty calls us all,” she told them. “And I have faith in you and in Staff Captain Shotilik, that you will continue to provide the Grand Fleet and Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh with the knowledge they need.
“Thank you.”
“We’ll do our job, sir,” Shotilik promised quietly. “I’m getting the impression yours is going to be…fraught.”
“Duty is duty,” Morgan told her. “We do what we must.”
She had to agree with Tan!Shallegh. The mission she’d been asked to take on was dirty business—but the other option was to risk everything.
Chapter Forty
Morgan’s shuttle ramp extended smoothly to the deck, matching positions with a perfectly turned out double file of Tosumi Marines. The four-armed avians, distinctive in midnight-black ceremonial armor that offset the raucous colors of their feathers, held plasma rifles at port arms and formed a path across Odysseus’s flight bay.
Two women were waiting at the far end of that path as Morgan traded salutes with the Marines and boarded her new flagship. One of them was the petite redheaded woman who’d stood at her right hand as she’d taken Defiance into one crisis after another, now promoted to Captain Bethany Rogers.
The other was a stranger to Morgan, a situation that couldn’t be allowed to last. Captain Cathrine Koumans was the senior of her four captains—technically, in fact, she would have been about three years senior to Captain Morgan Casimir—and Morgan knew she would need to depend heavily on her Flag Captain.
Koumans was a tall and broad-shouldered woman, with a shaven scalp and heavyset features that returned Morgan’s assessing gaze evenly.
“Welcome aboard Odysseus, Division Lord Casimir,” she greeted Morgan. “I believe you know Staff Captain Rogers?”
“I do indeed,” Morgan agreed, clasping hands with her new chief of staff. “The Fleet Lord apparently felt that I shouldn’t be allowed out without my usual minder.”
She then turned and took Koumans’ firm handshake.
“And I know you by reputation, Captain Koumans,” she told Odysseus’s commander. “But I don’t believe we’ve served together at all.”
“No, I was on the Coreward Kanzi frontier while you were dealing with their murderous cousins,” Koumans confirmed. “We also serve who stand and wait, they say, but it goes against the grain nonetheless.”
“Someone had to watch our backs,” Morgan agreed. “Let’s not forget that the Kanzi civil war started because some of their fleet commanders did try to backstab us.”
That had not ended well for them, and the civil war had given the High Priestess and her chosen partner, High Warlord Shairon Cawl, the chance to rebuild the entire Theocracy. Morgan couldn’t necessarily approve of dragging out the civil war the way Cawl and his mistress had done, but she could see the need.
Slavery was not a societal structure that died easily.
“My officers are swamped, preparing to ship out,” Koumans said after a moment’s silence. “Normally, I’d have my officers and your staff here to greet you, but most of your staff is still on their way and, well…”
“Your people have work to do that’s far more important than stroking the new division commander’s ego,” Morgan said with a chuckle. “There will be time for everyone to get to know each other. This mission should be…straightforward enough, in some ways, but my understanding is that if we succeed, I get to keep the division.”
The division in question was the 73-2-2—the Seventy-Three-Twenty-Two in the English-translated parlance of the fleet’s officers. The Second Division of the Second Echelon of the Seventy-Third Battle Squadron.
Of course, since the Houses of the Imperium were still arguing over trying to reduce the fleet strength back to the fifty battle squadrons it had been limited to when Earth had been conquered, Morgan was unsure how long the Seventy-Third Battle Squadron would exist.
On the other hand, the Infinite were a great argument in favor of keeping the fleet at seventy-five squadrons.
“Then we will have plenty of time, yes,” Koumans agreed. “Shall I give you the tour, Division Lord?”
“Or should you, perhaps, be returning to helping your officers deal with that pile of work?” Morgan asked. “I can find my own way to the flag deck, Captain. I’m familiar enough with the basic Bellerophon design for that, and I know what our time pressure looks like.”
Koumans had solid self-control, but Morgan still picked up the other woman’s internal struggle over that. Tradition said the Captain showed the new flag officer around—but the plan was for the special task group to ship out in less than three cycles.
“I…would probably be better served helping my people, yes, sir,” she conceded.
“Staff Captain Rogers and I will be on the flag deck if you need us,” Morgan told her. “If you can break time free for yourself and your officers to dine with me this evening, that may work best for us all.”
“I will make it happen, sir,” Koumans replied.
The flag officer’s suggestions, after all, carried the weight of orders from someone else.
Odysseus’s flag deck was quiet when Rogers and Morgan entered. A standard task force information graphic hung in the middle of the holotank, currently showing data on the four battleships of the Seventy-Three-Twenty-Two.
The flag officer’s seat was right next to the tank, with a clear space in front of it for Morgan to stand and study the tank—or pace in front of it, as she’d known some officers to do. Like the FOC aboard Va!Tola that she’d just given back, the flag deck had the space for a dozen officers and support staff. Consoles ringed the holotank and the Lord’s seat, all facing toward the flag officer to allow ease of communication.
Morgan had seen the flag decks of a dozen different Bellerophons of various different iterations. She’d served aboard the original Bellerophon at the start of the war with the Taljzi before the battleship’s destruction.
But she had never before, in the seventeen years of her career, walked onto a flag deck that was hers. Morgan Casimir commanded this division and the task group that would be assembled around it over the next few days.
That didn’t feel quite real.
“What’s the division’s status?” she asked Rogers as she approached the main hologram. There were no warning icons on the display, so that meant things were acceptable—but acceptable wasn’t the same as ready for a suicide mission.
“All four ships are taking aboard last-minute supplies and munitions,” Rogers told her. “First thing I ordered was a series of tests on the stealth systems. We don’t wa
nt to bring them up fully while we’re still around the combined fleets, but we want to know if we’re going to have trouble.”
“Any sign of it so far?” Morgan asked.
“They’ve passed power and stress testing so far,” her chief of staff said. “We’re not going to be able to test them for real until we’re in quieter space, but my understanding is that they should function even better than the Laian systems they’re based on.”
Morgan chuckled.
“And how much other tech is built into the systems?” she asked. “I didn’t think Laians could stealth anything over five megatons.”
“Apparently, it’s just really expensive to build,” Rogers said. “That’s a question for Koumans more than me right now. I’m not as caught up as I’d like to be.”
“Who is?” Morgan asked. “I’m assuming we have both Taljzi and…Dragon tech built into the stealth system?”
“That’s my understanding, but I haven’t had a chance to review the reports yet,” Rogers repeated.
Dragon tech was systems based on the Mesharom Archive: the data Morgan had retrieved from a wrecked war sphere along with the ship’s crew. Officially, it had been done without the Mesharom’s knowledge, and the Mesharom Conclave would probably be pissed if they found out the Imperium had it.
Unofficially, the commander of the ship had given them his access codes in exchange for the rescue of the survivors of the Mesharom fleet. Morgan suspected the blind eye the Mesharom were turning to the Imperium’s recent tech programs was at least partially intentional.
She turned her attention back to the holograms, touching commands as she refamiliarized herself with the flag deck controls. Her training on the software was years old. In the normal course of events, a promotion to flag rank would have come with a refresher course on all of these systems—and probably some high-level academy training around tactics and strategy, too.
Right now, she was being given the command without any prep at all—and told to go blow up a nebula.
Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Page 21