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

by Glynn Stewart

  “To us, sir, the Kanzi are the bogeyman,” Morgan said slowly. “We’ve trained to fight them, we’ve seen video of their slave raids, but it’s not personal to the younger crew the way it is for the senior people.

  “We can work with them. Hell, we can honestly mourn their dead—no one deserves what the Taljzi have done to these worlds. I don’t know if that’s what you want to hear…”

  “It is,” Vong said with a sharp intake of breath. “I need to know, Commander Casimir, that my subordinates are not blinded by prejudice. There’s going to be enough of that in my colleagues…and in my mirror.”

  “We’ll try to yank you up short politely if it looks like you’re going off the deep end, sir,” Morgan promised.

  The Captain chuckled.

  “God willing, it will never come to that. I just don’t trust these people as far as I can throw Bellerophon.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  Annette let her words hang in her living room. This wasn’t even a meeting of the kitchen-cabinet portion of her Council. This was Li Chin Zhao, an old friend, visiting her at home while she and Elon dealt with a sick eight-year-old.

  Alexis Bond had had every immune booster vaccine, nanotechnology, and medical science the galaxy could offer. She was still an eight-year-old child attending a school full of other eight-year-old children, a situation generously referred to as a plague breeding pit.

  And even the A!Tol Imperium hadn’t managed to come up with a vaccine that covered every strain of the common cold. Alexis had worn her nose red with sneezing and tissues, and while her caretaker had been with the family since before Annette had married Elon, sometimes a little girl just needed her parents.

  “I’m not,” Zhao insisted, passing a box of tissues over to Annette. “Fleet Master Cawl has the authority to commit the Theocracy to at least some of that. Anything he promises is preliminary until verified by actual plenipotentiaries at one of the capitals, but his word does bind the High Priestess.”

  “A nonaggression pact and potential alliance,” Annette considered. “With slavers.”

  A hand half-consciously traced the thin line across her face. She’d lost an eye to a slaver once, and her crew had been short enough on regen matrix that scarring had been unavoidable by the time they’d fixed her up.

  She’d seen Kanzi try and conquer her world. She’d seen Kanzi kidnap and attempt to rape her crew. She knew, despite everything she and the Imperium had done, that there were human slaves in the Theocracy now.

  “I think Cawl knows what the price of admission is,” Zhao reminded her. “The Imperium has always been clear: we will not negotiate anything with the Theocracy while any sentient from a member race of the Imperium is a slave in Kanzi space.

  “To even start talks beyond this preliminary promise of nonaggression will require them to free tens of thousands of our people. I don’t know if the High Priestess will go for it…but that alone might be worth it, Annette.”

  Alexis sneezed and her nanny swept in with a damp cloth to clean her face—and the Duchess of Terra’s suit.

  “They’re terrified,” Annette finally said as Alexis’s sneezes dissolved into soft crying on her mother’s shoulder. “These Taljzi…they really have the Kanzi scared.”

  “Cawl is afraid, yes. And one of their best tacticians,” Zhao agreed carefully. “I think he knows his enemies.”

  Annette didn’t miss the plural. She stroked the tiny blond head resting against her as she met her treasurer’s gaze.

  “What are you implying?”

  “Our files say Cawl is an Emancipator,” Elon said bluntly, dropping onto the couch next to her and offering Alexis a cup of steaming tea. “Or at least a sympathizer. Part of that branch of their religion, if not actually part of the movement itself.”

  “You two think he’s using this as a lever against his own nation?” she asked. “My read of his file says he’s loyal.”

  “He is. He won’t betray the Theocracy…but he may try and lever some reformations into it,” her consort told her. “It’s up to you, my love.”

  “It’s A!Shall’s decision,” she pointed out.

  Elon shook his head as he gently extricated Alexis from Annette, coaxing her into his lap to take a sip of the tea.

  “You know damn well she’ll listen to you if you have an opinion, especially if you speak in favor of it,” he pointed out.

  Annette sighed. He wasn’t wrong. And she couldn’t turn down the chance to make sure they didn’t accidentally stab each other in the back while facing an unknown enemy.

  “I’ll talk to her,” she concluded. “You can watch Alexis?”

  Her husband chuckled. “That’s part of the job description included in daddy, I believe. Go, my love. Find out what new surprises the galaxy has in store.”

  With her office locked down once again, Annette connected into the starcom and made the request to speak to A!Shall. It seemed that she was on a high-priority list, as the Empress was on the line within a minute.

  “Dan!Annette,” A!Shall greeted her. “You have news.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “I do. Thirty hours ago, Fleet Lord Tanaka made contact with the Alstroda Fleet under the command of Fleet Master Cawl. They did not engage each other, and Fleet Master Cawl has offered a temporary nonaggression agreement to allow us both to focus on the Taljzi.”

  There was a flash of color across the Empress’s controlled gray skin, over so quickly Annette didn’t catch the hue.

  “That is quite the offer,” she concluded. “Does Tanaka trust him?”

  Annette chuckled.

  “I don’t think many of our military officers would trust a Kanzi Fleet Master, no matter what,” she pointed out. “Tanaka believes he is serious, though, and concerned about the return of the Taljzi.

  “Our attackers apparently had at least two, potentially three fleets moving through our space and Kanzi space. They have communicated with the Kanzi, which is more than they’ve done with us or the Mesharom, but the Kanzi don’t know about the cloning factor.”

  Annette grimaced. The concept of mass-producing soldiers made her skin itch.

  “So, they have no idea how a handful of fleeing ships turned into an attacking armada. They may still be underestimating their old enemy.”

  “I am not,” A!Shall said grimly. “Are we certain of this, though? This could all be a trick.”

  “The Mesharom told us the same story,” Annette reminded her Empress. “The evidence pulled from the ships Bellerophon engaged also support it. We have data suggesting the Kanzi are moving their fleets—and the fact that the Emancipators aren’t updating us on those movements suggests that they believe there is a real threat to their people.”

  “I’ve heard nothing from Arjzi,” the Empress noted. “The High Priestess and her ambassadors are being very quiet these days. It worries me.”

  “I think they’re terrified, Your Majesty. The Taljzi want to exterminate them.” Annette shivered. “Unless I’m misunderstanding both the information Cawl provided and my conversation with Adamase, the Taljzi want to exterminate everyone who isn’t Kanzi—potentially even all of the non-Taljzi Kanzi, at this point.”

  The channel was silent for almost a full minute.

  “!Olarski is already on his way to Sol with his fleet,” A!Shall finally said slowly. “More ships will follow. I will not redeploy Tan!Shallegh and the Grand Fleet, not yet, but we will begin to assemble a second Grand Fleet at Sol.”

  “We are already mass-producing S-HSM batteries, tachyon scanners and hyperfold cannons,” Annette promised. “We can refit at least a portion of the ships as they arrive.”

  “Your Consort will have to see to that,” her Empress told her. “You should prepare for a long swim, Dan!Annette Bond. I may have a new task for you.”

  “My liege?”

  “Someone must go to Arjzi and negotiate with the High Priestess,” A!Shall explained. �
�We shall speak with their ambassadors here to confirm the preliminaries, but if they are prepared to meet my price, then you will travel to Arjzi and speak with them.

  “I must send someone I can trust and…” The Empress allowed a flash of blue and red to flush over her skin, showing a testing amusement. “I must send the Kanzi someone who can lie if needed. I want true peace with them, Dan!Annette.

  “But you know my price. I do not believe the High Priestess will pay it—but I think they will work with us for this war. And who knows? Perhaps the tides will stop.”

  Or the horse will learn to sing.

  The A!Tol Imperium would never truly make peace with Kanzi until they gave up slavery.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Even with the hyperfold relay network, a response from the Imperium would take over two days. The initial decision to agree to Cawl’s offer of nonaggression and working together was on Harriet Tanaka, and she made the only decision she could.

  “Fleet Master Oska has received your message,” she told Cawl. “Our destroyer Underwater Shining will remain in the system to relay communications and keep an eye on affairs.”

  The old Kanzi in the hologram shook his head.

  “Days away, and you can talk to him in a ten of spans,” he noted. A span was roughly a quarter a Terran hour. “There’s a reason I was sent out here to prevent more provocations. Did Oska send a message to me?”

  “There is an encrypted package attached to Captain Leeare message, yes,” Harriet confirmed. “It should already have been forwarded to your flagship.”

  She didn’t need to tell Cawl that her Pibo officer had copied the message and decrypted it before forwarding the original encrypted version. There was nothing in the message that was unexpected—and for that matter, she was certain both Oska and Cawl had assumed anything they sent via the Imperium’s hyperfold communicators was being read by their not-quite-enemies, not-quite-allies.

  “Depending on what routes they took, the Taljzi may be arriving in Alstroda at any time in the next turning,” Cawl warned. “Oska’s fleet is not as weak as I feared, but our intelligence suggests the Taljzi have multiple squadrons of battleships and their technology is superior.”

  “If all of the forces we know of have combined, there are least five super-battleships on top of that,” Harriet warned. “Those would be the survivors of the force that attacked the Mesharom.”

  Cawl visibly shivered, then ran one furred finger down the scar on his face.

  “I do not even understand what they were thinking, to provoke the Mesharom,” he admitted. “Our own nations are mighty enough; why would they challenge the oldest and greatest of the Core Powers as well?”

  “The Taljzi do not seem particularly bothered by who they provoke,” she said. “I think with the Mesharom, they wanted to destroy the local Frontier Fleet before it could get involved. There are no other Mesharom fleet units nearby, though forces have been deployed to counter this invasion.”

  “Invasion.” Cawl let the word hang on the channel. “Invasions seek to conquer, Fleet Lord Tanaka. The Taljzi seem to seek only to destroy. Their goals, their old mission, would be to at least conquer the Kanzi and change our minds to match theirs. Instead, though, they have simply burned worlds and murdered millions.”

  If Harriet’s math was remotely correct, the Taljzi had killed far more of their distant cousins than they had of any other race. She doubted that was unintentional—and she wondered if the aliens’ apparent access to Precursor technology was part of that.

  If they could clone and raise programmed children who they knew would believe as they did, why convince anyone? Why bother talking at all when you could level worlds and repopulate them with indoctrinated clones?

  The sheer callousness with which the Taljzi seemed to treat all lives—their own as well as their enemies’—was utterly foreign to Harriet. They seemed determined to leave entire swathes of the galaxy in ashes.

  “I do not pretend to understand what they are thinking or what they want,” she finally told Cawl. “They are, at least biologically, your species, Fleet Master—and I am not under the impression that you understand them.

  “I will settle for grasping their objectives so I can counter them.”

  Cawl raised his cane in a vague salute.

  “I agree,” he said. “I don’t know what cruelty, what evil has warped their minds. I only know that to serve my oaths and my people, they must be stopped.”

  “How confident are we in Fleet Master Oska?” Rolfson asked at the flag officer meeting a couple of hours later.

  Harriet shook her head.

  “We don’t know much about her, unlike Cawl,” she noted. “Kailur?”

  Her Tosumi intelligence officer, Division Lord Kailur Fo Nadit, shook his feathered head.

  “Our last information on Karilee Oska has her as a Guard Master commanding a small task group on their spinward flank,” Fo Nadit told them all.

  Guard Master was equivalent to an Imperial Echelon Lord or a Terran Rear Admiral. Fleet Master was equivalent to Harriet’s own Fleet Lord or a Terran full Admiral.

  “How old is that?” she asked Fo Nadit.

  “Four long-cycles,” he told her. “If she’s a Fleet Master now, she’s almost certainly freshly promoted and has advanced rapidly over those four long-cycles. That suggests either victories, unlikely to have occurred on one of their quieter borders, or a high level of political and religious reliability.”

  “Which raises a fascinating question,” Sier pointed out. “Was she coming to support the wind under Cawl’s wings…or steal it?”

  “Reading between the lines of my conversations with him, he’s regarded as politically reliable but a religious outsider,” Harriet replied. “He hasn’t talked about Oska like she was sent out to replace him, but I could see her being sent out to keep an eye on him as she reinforces his strength in a time of crisis.”

  “I didn’t think the Kanzi tolerated ‘religious outsiders,’” Rolfson rumbled.

  “The fact that the Emancipator movement exists suggests otherwise, now that I have to think about it,” she admitted. “According to Cawl, if you push far enough to get declared a heretic, it ends very badly, but there’s a degree of tolerance for some deviation.”

  She snorted.

  “Presumably alongside a significant amount of social ostracization and disapproval.” Which made the Kanzi sound more like her Japan back on Earth in many ways. That was a disturbing thought.

  “So, we’re not certain of her competence,” Tidikat noted. “Against this enemy, I find that more concerning than helpful.”

  “Competence be damned,” Division Lord Iffa stated, the rippling multi-voiced sound of their voice echoing around the translation. “She has thirty battleships and ten super-battleships. Even with the Taljzi’s superior weapons, that is a force to make them hesitate.”

  “Except it’s a weaker force than Fleet Master Cawl’s,” Rolfson pointed out. “And they had good-enough intelligence to locate a Frontier Fleet squadron none of us knew existed.”

  “And she’s short on escorts,” Fo Nadit warned them all. “She only has twenty regular cruisers from the Theocracy Navy, not even attack cruisers. She’s making up the numbers by drafting local Clan ships, which has given her another fifty regular and attack cruisers, but…”

  “But they’re Clan, and they intentionally cripple the Clan fleets,” Harriet finished for her intelligence officer. “Those ships are worth maybe half their tonnage versus modern units.

  “We cannot assume that Alstroda will hold,” she told her people. “We are at least seven cycles away. The Taljzi may have already arrived, we won’t hear for almost twenty hours after they do. We can do nothing to change Fleet Master Oska’s fate that we haven’t already done.

  “The question, officers, is what we do if Alstroda falls.”

  There was no point in trying to send a message to Captain Leeare. The Rekiki destroyer commander was in position to watch what
happened in Alstroda, but there was no way his single destroyer could change what was going to happen.

  Plus, Harriet was certain that any message she sent Leeare would arrive after the Taljzi. There was nothing anyone in Xīn Táiwān could do for Alstroda—and the necessity of remaining linked into the hyperfold relay network meant she couldn’t even take her fleet into hyperspace.

  She didn’t know where the Taljzi would go from Alstroda. She wouldn’t know until they left, at which point Leeare would update her and she and Cawl would scramble to get their fleets into position to stop the bastards.

  Their only real advantage was that the Taljzi seemed to be moving relatively slowly. They had no evidence that the Taljzi ships were slower than theirs, in or out of hyperspace. In fact, Bellerophon’s encounters with the Taljzi suggested that they were roughly equal for strategic mobility.

  But it seemed that they were pulling back to rendezvous points between attacks and slowly working their way down a list. That left her nervous in presuming that Oska could defeat the fleet heading toward Alstroda, but it gave them time.

  This time, there were destroyers scattered around Alstroda, too. Peeah’s entire squadron was moving in to keep an eye on the hyperspace around the system. They would give Oska a few hours’ warning, and they might, just might, allow Harriet and Cawl to track the bastards back to somewhere worth hitting.

  Or get in front of them. One way or another, this “Return” needed to be stopped. Harriet was grimly certain there’d be more to come, but she didn’t know where the Taljzi were coming from.

  All she could do was find the fleet they had moving around and smash it into pieces.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  You and the Kanzi can fight together? Work together?