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

fifteen minutes. I look forward to seeing you and any officers you feel necessary for our conversation then.”

“Prott, Casimir,” Tan!Stalla snapped the moment the channel closed. “With me. We’ll need Marines. Honor guard only.”

“I’ll arrange it,” Ashmore promised. “They’ll meet you in the shuttle bay.”

Fifteen minutes was more than enough time. Probably.

Morgan and the Ivida chief of staff fell in around Tan!Stalla as the Squadron Lord exited the flag deck.

“Is surrendering command a good idea, sir?” Prott asked. “I know we decided it in advance, but I worry. We have not seen a recognition of the depth of the waters yet from the Laians.”

“Korodaun appears to understand,” Tan!Stalla replied. “But even if she didn’t, we have no choice. As I told her, this is Laian space—or, at least, the portion of the Dead Zone they still claim.

“We have no real authority here, and she has more firepower than we do. By any reasonable logic, this is her command, and we are now the supporting allies we were always supposed to be.”

“Besides, aren’t there more Laian ships on the way?” Morgan said. “Another twenty war-dreadnoughts at least.”

“Over the next ten cycles, yes. Our Grand Fleet is remaining with the main Laian Dead Zone defense force, the First Defense Fleet, until the storms stop thundering at each other.”

“I had higher hopes for the Wendira, but I guess I don’t know them well,” Morgan admitted.

Prott clicked his tongue in a soft chuckle. His people’s faces didn’t move, but she still felt his bitter amusement.

“None of us do and we hesitate to take the Laians’ opinion at surface value,” he said. “But it seems that this kind of game is normal for them. The Queens do not comprehend that anything can threaten them.”

“Even Oxtashah has done her duty as a Royal caste,” Tan!Stalla reminded them. “She is mother to ten thousand children. No Royal caste who has not done the same would be permitted to leave the Queens’ reach.

“They guard their bloodlines and their power obsessively. Even the Mesharom never truly convinced the Queens that they were a threat.”

Morgan shivered.

“I saw a Mesharom battle fleet,” she murmured. Ten war spheres could outmass the entire Wendira military—and the Mesharom had possessed over a hundred of the planetoid warships before the Taljzi campaigns. “Ignoring that takes…imagination.”

Tan!Stalla flashed blue and red in amused acceptance, snapping her beak in surprise laughter.

“Yes, it does take a certain ability to twist the waters of reality,” she conceded. “The Laians, for their arrogance and their flaws, are at least more realistic about the galaxy they live in. That, I think, is why we have managed to make allies of them.”

A shuttle was already waiting for them as they stepped into the shuttle bay, a squad of Marines falling into place around it. To Morgan’s surprise, the Marines were all human—and led by her former Marine CO, Battalion Commander Pierre Vichy.

“Aren’t you a little senior for a platoon command?” she murmured as they stepped up to the tall dark-haired Frenchman.

“Oui,” he agreed. “But flashy medals and insignia are a necessity for honor-guard duty, and everyone believed mine would be most…readily available and ready to go.

“Pour quelque raison.” He grinned.

“Are we ready, Battalion Commander?” Tan!Stalla asked.

“The shuttle is fueled and prepped,” he confirmed with a crisp salute. “I have an honor guard of twenty Marines ready to go in dress uniforms. No weapons.”

“Good, good.” Tan!Stalla paused, studying the sleek lines of the Imperial assault shuttle. “Then let us get to the waters. Duty awaits.”

Jean Villeneuve massed twenty-one million tons. She was twenty-five-hundred meters from bow to stern, with flared arch-like wings that stretched to a full kilometer in width and height. She was the largest warship the A!Tol Imperium had yet deployed.

And against Scion’s Sword and her sisters, she looked like a toy. Scion’s Sword was nine kilometers in length and three wide, a long beetle-like dome that resembled her builders’ carapaces. Just under ten times Villeneuve’s mass, she carried roughly fifteen times as many interface-drive missiles, proton beams, and hyperfold cannons.

Her sensors were keener and her missiles were smarter than the Imperial ship’s—but ton for ton, her armor and shields were actually weaker, and she lacked any equivalent to the faster-than-light weaponry of the Imperium’s hyperspace missiles.

When Morgan had been a child, a single war-dreadnought had been enough to threaten the entire Imperium. Now the ship she was approaching was no match for a squadron of well-handled Imperial ships that matched her mass.

Time marched on and the galaxy changed. The Laians, once enemies, were now friends. The Imperium, once irrelevant to the Core Powers, was now rapidly approaching membership in their ranks.

“The Category Five we saw would tear them apart at close range,” Prott murmured as they approached their destination. “The sheer scale of the Infinite’s larger bioforms renders anything we bring…”

“Underweight,” Morgan finished the thought after Prott was silent for a few seconds. “Any Category Four could take down Scion’s Sword if they made it into range.”

“That’s the big if, isn’t it?” Tan!Stalla told them. “Maneuverability and range are our advantages over the Infinite. Size is their edge over us. Do we have any idea, yet, how much firepower they can even put out at close range?”

“Not really,” Morgan admitted. “My team has been going over the data from the probes we passed through their formation, but only the lighter ships engaged there.”

She shrugged.

“We’re still deriving most of our assessment of their armament from the Servants,” she said. “But projecting from that…well, the Category Five probably couldn’t one-shot a war-dreadnought unless they hit with everything.”

The shuttle was silent and she heard Prott click his tongue.

“But it would win the fight against a war-dreadnought,” the chief of staff concluded.

“It would win the fight against all ten, if it could bring them to plasma range,” Morgan said. “As Tan!Stalla noted, if they get in range of us, we are doomed.”

Chapter Twelve

A wave of almost superheated dry air swept into the shuttle as the ramp slid open. The air