Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1)

by Glynn Stewart

  “And how many missiles do you think it would take to disable the Kanzi fleet?” the Captain asked.

  So far, the Alstroda Fleet hadn’t moved in-system. They were assembling their formations at their emergence point—and they’d emerged unusually far out.

  “We’ll have probes at twenty light-seconds to provide real-time tachyon scanning in just over three minutes,” she noted. “Given that real-time data, I think we can probably guarantee the destruction of a battleship with a full salvo from Bellerophon’s batteries, and be reasonably confident in the destruction of the destroyers with a single battery salvo.”

  The cruisers she’d probably want to hit with twice that, either half of Bellerophon’s armament or two Thunderstorms—and the super-battleships would take twice the firepower of their lesser sisters. The numbers didn’t look pleasant.

  “At least three thousand hyper missiles,” she concluded. “And that’s assuming they made no attempt to adjust for the new threat environment. If we were lucky, we could probably destroy the super-battleships before they reached their weapon range of us.”

  At which point, the battleships and escorts would have a roughly ten-to-one advantage over Bellerophon and her escorts and would crush them. Thirty super-battleships for one battleship, however advanced, and a sparsely populated star system…that was a trade a lot of people would make.

  “Well, then, I think we should make sure we have those drones in position,” Vong told her. “But we will not commence firing until we’ve had a chance to communicate.”

  He smiled sadly.

  “And let’s give them the chance to do that first. Every second they delay is one less second we’re waiting for Fleet Lord Tanaka.”

  To Morgan’s surprise, the Kanzi stayed right where they were. The formation they took up was a defensive one, not an assault pattern. Some of the destroyers moved deeper into the Xīn Táiwān System, but they were clearly acting as drone tenders, allowing the Kanzi equivalent to her AMESDs to study the star system.

  “We’ve got drones heading for us and the planet, sir,” she reported as the Kanzi sweep continued. “We can take them out, but…”

  She studied the drones. That didn’t look right.

  “But what, Lieutenant Commander?” Masters asked sharply.

  “We can take them out way too easily. Their stealth systems have been turned off. The only way they could be more obviously asking permission would be if they, well, asked permission.”

  “I’d prefer it if they did,” her boss noted. “Captain? That sounds like more of a command decision.”

  Vong snorted.

  “Let them scan the planet. Blow anything that comes within a light-second of our ships.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Even the Sword turrets were powerful enough to destroy the incoming drones. It took Morgan a few seconds to program the limit the Captain had set into their systems. A single Kanzi drone crossed that line and disappeared in a ball of fire.

  Two more died before the robots picked up on the perimeter and followed their instructions, sweeping around the Terran ships to scan the world behind them.

  “What are you thinking, Mr. Smurf?” Morgan murmured. “You know you can take us, so what game are you playing?”

  “Captain!” Antonova turned in her chair, the coms officer looking surprised. “I have an incoming transmission from Fleet Master Cawl!”

  “Well, that’s unexpected,” Vong replied. “Let’s see what the blue bastard has to say. Put him through.”

  The Kanzi were far enough away that the transmission was a recording, probably sent as soon as their drones had reported in on the status of Xīn Táiwān.

  Cawl, like most Kanzi, looked like a petite fourteen-year-old human with blue fur. In his case, the fur was some of the darkest Morgan had seen in pictures of his race, a navy blue so deep as to be almost purple.

  His fur had once been a single solid color, also unusual among his race, but age had taken its toll. Streaks of a grayer blue were scattered through his fur, and the white splash of growth over a scar crossed his face and his right eye. The eye had been regrown since, but the scarring remained.

  “Imperial Militia warship, I am Shairon Cawl, Fleet Master of the Kanzi Theocracy and commander of the Alstroda Fleet,” he said calmly. “I apologize for my violation of your borders, but I arrive in the direct trail of the monsters responsible for the destruction of multiple systems and the deaths of millions.

  “My scans show that they have brought their horror here and I offer my condolences for your losses. I am not here to threaten your worlds or your ships. If at all possible, I would speak with your local military commander directly.

  “It seems that for the first time in some lifetimes, our two nations share an enemy. We both have a duty to act on that.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Fleet Lord Harriet Tanaka probably shouldn’t have been in the first wave out of hyperspace. There were arguments both ways, but the Imperial Navy tended to prefer that its flag officers lead from the middle, not the front.

  With a planet at risk because of her decisions, however, Justified led the way out of hyperspace with her entire squadron, followed almost immediately by Vice Admiral Tidikat’s First Squadron.

  The thirty-two Vindication-class super-battleships were the armored gauntlet at the heart of her fleet, and she entered the Xīn Táiwān System prepared to challenge any enemy.

  What she found was entirely different.

  “I have the Alstroda Fleet on scanners,” Sier announced. “Four light-minutes away at eighty-five by thirty-six.”

  That was odd. That put them in almost perfect parallel with her fleet’s emergence point and well away from any position where they could attack anyone. They might have been trying to ambush her, but that would imply more information than she hoped they had—and they’d got it wrong.

  “Bring the Fleet around,” Harriet ordered. “Defensive formations; super-battleships will cover the emergence of the fleet.”

  The Kanzi were out of weapons range right now, but the Imperial Fleet couldn’t move the hyper portal. They could close the distance in minutes, well before she could finish deploying her fleet.

  “Sir, they’re in a defensive formation,” Sier reported. “Other than basic in-place evasive maneuvers, they’re not moving. They’re…waiting?”

  “Hyperfold transmission from Bellerophon! Captain Vong is requesting to speak to the Fleet Lord immediately.”

  “Put him through to my seat,” Harriet ordered. Hopefully Vong had something resembling answers.

  The Vietnamese Terran Militia officer looked surprisingly unstressed for having an entire enemy battle fleet in the star system. He didn’t look good, he still looked exhausted and strained, but not nearly as bad as Harriet would have expected from someone who’d been under threat for at least twenty-four hours.

  “Fleet Lord Tanaka, I must urge you not to engage the Kanzi fleet,” he said quickly. “Fleet Master Cawl entered Xīn Táiwān in pursuit of the people who destroyed Avidar. He and I have had some limited discussions, but since I knew you were on your way, I wanted to leave any serious negotiations to you.”

  Vong shook his head.

  “He didn’t get here in time and neither did we,” he admitted. “The strangers arrived and bombarded the colony. The locals, however, were smarter than any of us gave them credit for and had thrown together an improvised emergency bunker.

  “Governor MacChruim didn’t save everybody. But he got over a quarter of his people to safety, sir. That’s better than we had any right to expect.”

  Harriet felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. She had been the one to withdraw her ships from Xīn Táiwān. MacChruim had reduced the impact of her mistake, saved thousands of lives that she’d condemned, but tens of thousands had still died because of her.

  Their deaths were a drop in the bucket compared to what had been lost to these bastards so far, but they were her fault.

  �
�It was,” she finally allowed. “Have the Kanzi given you any trouble?”

  “None at all,” Vong said. “I was hoping to scare them off with a demonstration of the hyperspace missiles, but they haven’t threatened us at all. Cawl wants to speak to you, since we share an enemy.”

  He grimaced.

  “I’m not sure if the smurf knows more about these people than we do, but he seems just as determined to see them stopped. He’s not talking about what the Kanzi have lost, but we know about Avidar, sir.

  “That’s a lot of dead. More than we’ve lost.”

  “We share an enemy, as you say, Captain,” Harriet agreed thoughtfully. “I can’t afford to fight Cawl, not if there’s still a genocidal enemy fleet on the loose, so I may as well hear what he has to say.”

  She considered the situation.

  “Do we know where the bastards went from here?” she asked.

  “We didn’t have the hulls to sweep for old light,” Vong admitted. “Cawl may have; I’m not certain.”

  “Then I will need to speak to Division Lord Peeah before I speak to Cawl,” Harriet concluded aloud. “Even a truce with the Kanzi won’t help us if we can’t find these murderers.”

  “Fleet Master Shairon Cawl, I am Fleet Lord Harriet Tanaka of the A!Tol Imperium,” Harriet said calmly into the recorder. “Your presence in this system is arguably an act of war, but we both know we’re far enough out on the edge of nowhere, the normal rules don’t really apply.

  “The same people that attacked your Avida System have attacked several A!Tol systems—and a Mesharom Frontier Fleet Squadron. All evidence we have suggests that they are Kanzi, which makes your presence here something of a problem.”

  She smiled grimly.

  “I have enough evidence to suggest that they are not Theocracy, however, which means I’m prepared to at least let you explain your presence here. If you know something about these attackers that I do not, I would appreciate the explanation.

  “As things stand, I am prepared to tentatively extend a one-cycle truce to allow for this discussion. At the end of that cycle, if your fleet does not withdraw from A!Tol space, I will be forced to destroy you.”

  She settled back in her seat to see how the Kanzi replied. She had more capital ships than the Kanzi and a lot more super-battleships. That wasn’t even taking into account the dual-portal hyperspace missiles all of her capital ships had stored in their shuttle bays, or the three battleships and sixteen cruisers carrying S-HSM launchers.

  If she decided to fight the Kanzi, she had a decent chance of annihilating Cawl’s entire fleet before he could even get into range of her. That would require her expending her entire long-range firepower, though, and she suspected she was going to need those hyperspace missiles when they caught up to the real enemy.

  The Kanzi didn’t have hyperfold communicators, so her message would take a while to wing its way over to the other fleet, and their response would take just as long to come back. She wasn’t used to having to wait this long for messages anymore, but she was prepared to be patient.

  It was better than killing people, even if those people were smurfs. There weren’t many people in the Imperium with a lot of sympathy for the Kanzi.

  “Incoming transmission, sir.”

  “Play it.”

  The Kanzi that appeared on Harriet’s screen was probably the oldest individual of that race she’d ever seen, though Kanzi medicine was up to Imperial standards. That told her a lot about the injury that had claimed Cawl’s eye at one point and left the scar behind. Even the eye was fixed, but it was hard to completely remove scars.

  “Fleet Lord Tanaka, I appreciate your tolerance,” he greeted her. The underlying sound of his voice under the translation was fascinating to Harriet, a series of purring meows that had a calming effect on her nerves. If she understood Kanzi as well as she thought she did, Cawl was trying to be conciliatory.

  A good chunk of what humans portrayed in tone the Kanzi portrayed in different levels of, well, purring or hissing along with their speech. Cawl probably wasn’t as calm as he was projecting, but he was at least trying to be friendly.

  “You are correct both in that the creatures that have bombarded our worlds are biologically Kanzi,” he allowed, “and that I know more of what we face than you do. I do not understand how these creatures exist in such numbers or have access to such firepower, but I know who they are.

  “You mourn a pair of worlds and a few hundred thousand. I mourn a claw’s worth and millions, Fleet Lord Tanaka. Our blood has been shed even more freely than yours, but I know my enemy now. If they have made themselves your enemy, that is not a blade I shall toss aside lightly.

  “I would meet with you in person, Fleet Lord. Neither of us would be able or willing to meet aboard the other’s flagship, but I do have several unarmed logistics ships with decent facilities for such a discussion.”

  He smiled. Like most Kanzi gestures, it was very human.

  “I would, of course, gladly meet aboard one of your ships if that is your preference. I have little to hide in terms of technology or munitions, however, and I am not certain the same is true for you these cycles.

  “I await your response, Fleet Lord.”

  He bowed and the message ended, leaving Harriet with even more questions than she’d started with.

  “You can’t seriously plan on agreeing to that, can you, sir?” Sier asked.

  “I don’t see a choice, Division Lord,” she told her chief of staff. “I am, however, going to require that we meet on his unarmed ship, between our fleets…with an Imperial destroyer standing by, in case he gets clever.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Harriet was more than a little surprised by the readiness with which Cawl agreed to her terms. Within two hours of her return to the Xīn Táiwān System, she found herself approaching an unarmed Kanzi logistics ship aboard the destroyer Impulsive.

  Regardless of what Cawl thought, Impulsive and her Rekiki crew weren’t the biggest threat the Kanzi freighter faced. Vong and his cruiser escorts had now joined up with Seventy-Seventh Fleet, and they’d adjusted the screen to put all sixteen of the S-HSM armed Thunderstorm-Ds on this side of her fleet.

  That single squadron of Militia cruisers could probably take on half of Cawl’s fleet on their own. Punching out the single freighter wouldn’t even register as a task.

  “We are at the agreed distance, Fleet Lord,” the Rekiki Captain Ikoto told her. The crocodilian centaur was of her species’ noble caste, looming well over not only Harriet but also most of her Rekiki crew.

  “Your shuttle awaits.”

  “Thank you, Ikoto,” Harriet replied. “Are you ready if something goes wrong?”

  “We’re localizing her power plants now,” Ikoto replied. “My Marines are standing by, in their power armor and locked into their shuttles. If the Kanzi wish to play, we will play.”

  “Let’s hope this goes more smoothly than that,” Harriet murmured, “but it’s good to know you are standing by. Thank you for the ride.”

  “Always a pleasure.”

  More power-armored Marines fell in around Harriet as she left the bridge and headed for the boat bay. From the moment she’d put on a Captain’s uniform in the Imperium’s service, her bodyguards had been Tosumi.

  Now, almost twenty years later, she understood just what message assigning guards from one of the Imperial Races to the newest Captain from the newest member species of the Imperium sent. The only stronger sign of support would have been to assign A!Tol guards—and that would have been favoritism.

  “We’ve confirmed Cawl is aboard,” her senior bodyguard told her as they reached the shuttle. “Are you sure this is safe, Fleet Lord?”

  Harriet chuckled.

  “No, Initiate,” she told the Marine. “I don’t think it’s safe. But if we can make sure that both of our empires have their fleets pointed at the people bombarding planets instead of at each other, I think that’s worth the risk.

  “It
comes with the job.”

  “You’re the Fleet Lord. We will protect you.”

  Harriet nodded her understanding to her Marines and hummed thoughtfully to herself as she boarded the shuttle.

  A meeting like this was almost unheard-of—but unheard-of actions tended to have unheard-of results.

  There was an honor guard of Kanzi ground troops waiting for Harriet as she stepped off her shuttle. She’d never even been this close to Kanzi of any stripe before, and the almost-human blue-furred troopers set her on edge.

  The guard was carefully chosen too. They were all within a couple of centimeters of each other’s height, about a hundred and forty centimeters tall. They had slightly different facial patterns, but the rest of their fur was invisible beneath black ceramic body armor.

  It wasn’t power armor, but it would probably shed a plasma bolt or two. The twenty Kanzi troopers, however, had made the same concession to diplomacy as her four Tosumi power-armored guards: none of the troops were armed.

  Shairon Cawl stood at the end of the line, and Harriet was surprised to realize the Kanzi couldn’t stand unassisted. Even in his black leather uniform, the exoskeletal brace he wore around his right leg was clearly visible, and even with it, he was leaning on a silver-topped black metal cane.

  Nonetheless, he came forward to meet her, his movements slow but smoothly practiced. Whatever had limited the old Fleet Master’s mobility had happened long ago.

  “Greetings, Fleet Lord Tanaka,” he told her, offering a gloved hand. “It is an honor to meet one who has met the challenges of race and station as thoroughly as you have. May the Light of God shine upon us in our discussions today. We have much to speak of.”

  Harriet shook Cawl’s hand, studying the Kanzi with careful eyes. He looked and acted like a kindly grandfather in two-thirds scale with blue fur, but she knew the reputation of the sentient across from her.