Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9), Glynn Stewart [reading well .TXT] 📗

really that the Imperium didn’t trust their allies. It was that they all knew the Wendira and the Laians had spent the last several hundred years killing each other in numbers that made any sense of scale impossible.

And all of it mostly because a Laian looked like a Wendira Worker caste with no wings.

Chapter Ten

Watches in the endless void were a quiet thing. Jean Villeneuve and her companions were dozens of light-years from anything other than the Astoroko Nebula. Their reinforcements weren’t due for cycles yet, and their enemy hadn’t demonstrated any ability to threaten them through the hyper barrier.

The flag deck didn’t have formal watches the way a ship’s bridge did, but there was still a schedule to make sure at least one senior officer of the flag staff was on the deck if the Squadron Lord wasn’t.

Tonight, that officer was Morgan Casimir. She was trying to keep an eye on everything going on on the flag deck, which was overwhelming for any soul. Practice was teaching her what she needed to watch, which made the whole endeavor good training.

She could follow the sensor data more easily than some of the other reports feeding to the fleet’s command center, which meant she was giving the tactical plot the smallest portion of her attention—and she almost missed it when things changed.

“Wait,” she murmured. “Speaker Atraxis, can you double-check the anomaly scanner for me? I’m seeing something odd.”

Atraxis, an Ivida officer in Ashmore’s Operations department, leapt to obey. He pulled the anomaly scanners up on his own screen as Morgan brought them up on the main holographic tank at the center of the flag deck.

“They’re leaving,” Atraxis said quietly, confirming what was now obvious on the larger display.

Anomaly tracks for a moving ship were strangely stretched, an artifact of a faster-than-light travel signature that arrived at lightspeed, but the pattern was clear. The entire Infinite force that had been lurking “next” to them in hyperspace was moving away.

“I make their course for the Astoroko,” Morgan said. “You see the same?”

“I do, sir,” Atraxis confirmed. “Should I confirm with Villeneuve Tactical?”

“Please, Speaker,” she told him. “Let’s make certain what we’re looking at—then I’ll brief the Squadron Lord. If the Infinite are going away, that’s a relief for everyone.”

She still watched the tracks stretch across her display. It was hard to judge the speed—or anything, really—of the anomaly from regular space, but they could get an estimate. The Infinite swarm was up to about a third of the speed of light in hyperspace—and hundreds of times it in regular-space pseudovelocity.

“What changed?” Morgan murmured. “I was expecting you to stick around until the Laians kicked you off. We didn’t do anything, and the bugs are still five days out.”

She shivered. It looked like good news…which meant that she didn’t trust it at all.

The mist units in Tan!Stalla’s office were running at full power as Morgan reported to her former Captain. Humidity was always high in the A!Tol portions of Imperial ships, but this much water was new to Morgan.

“Sir,” she greeted the Squadron Lord with a crisp salute…that squelched slightly as her hand touched her damp chest.

“Take a seat, Staff Captain,” Tan!Stalla ordered. “I saw the report from the sensor teams. It looks like good news.

“So, what do you think is actually going on?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” Morgan admitted truthfully. “We can’t guarantee that the Infinite are operating on any set of principles we understand, sir. If it were one of our forces, though…”

She trailed off but Tan!Stalla gestured for her to continue.

“Finish your thought, Casimir,” the Squadron Lord ordered. “No one knows anything. Your guesses are as valuable as anyone else’s.”

“They either had a strict timeline they were supposed to return on all along, or they got a recall message,” Morgan guessed with a shrug. “Either seems…iffy, given that they have no ability to open a hyper portal.

“On the other hand, they could have kept a set of portal emitters at the Eye, in which case they might be able to get everything except the Category Five back into regular space there.”

Tan!Stalla snapped her beak in thought.

“I would have held on to at least one set of spare emitters,” she admitted. “That wouldn’t help them send out new fleets, not without the ability to create portals at the target, but it could let them bring their bioforms ‘home’ in this kind of situation.”

“We’re assuming the Infinite attaches value to the individual bioforms,” Morgan warned. “We don’t know that. The Great Mother certainly didn’t seem to—but that doesn’t prove anything. She was…not Infinite. Not culturally, so to speak.”

“That’s an important distinction,” Tan!Stalla agreed. “The Tosumi, Ivida and Pibo are not A!Tol physically, but…culturally, most of their culture is A!Tol-derived. That is why they are the Imperial Races.”

Those three were the species the A!Tol had annexed and uplifted before they learned how to do so without wrecking the preexisting cultures. Morgan’s understanding was that Imperial integration was still considered a work in progress, with humanity—the current ‘latest acquisition’—being held up a sign of their progress and success.

“Where the Taljzi were biologically Kanzi but not culturally Kanzi anymore,” Morgan suggested. “Their separation from the main body of their species and their reliance on the Alavan cloner made them something very different.”

“And the Great Mother had no exposure to the Infinite, as I understand it,” Tan!Stalla said. “So, we are better judging the Infinite by their actions than by her. Their actions so far do not provide a definitive answer, but they suggest that they place a value on at least the larger bioforms.”

“Ease of replacement may also be a factor,” Morgan said. “So long as they are trapped in Astoroko, we don’t know if they can create new bioforms at all—and I suspect the larger bioforms take hundreds of long-cycles to reach that scale.”

“Or thousands,” Tan!Stalla murmured, tapping a command that adjusted a sprayer to point more directly at her. “A hundred thousand long-cycles in the dark, Staff Captain. It is