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

Then it had been sent to the nearest starcom base to their current location, a military facility intended to support the defense of the Dead Zone, and transmitted into the hyperfold relay network. A dozen hyperfold relays had carried it from there to Jean Villeneuve—and now Morgan Casimir looked at a blinking alert telling her she had a message from her stepmother.

Taking a sip of her wine, Morgan tried to remember the last time she’d sent the Duchess of Terra—or even her father—a message. It hadn’t been since losing Defiance, that was for certain.

Ignoring a twinge of guilt, Morgan started the message.

It was both of her parents. Elon Casimir sat next to his wife on the couch in the penthouse apartment Morgan had grown up in. From the stories Annette Bond had told her children, she’d never been a fan of the luxury of the apartment, but it had already been bought—along with the floor beneath it, converted to security barracks—before anyone really asked her opinion.

“Captain Casimir,” Annette Bond greeted her stepdaughter. She didn’t salute, but she still gave the woman she’d raised the respect of the rank Morgan had earned. “If I’m reading all of the reports right, it might be as much as five or six days before you get this, but I hope you’re well when you do.”

“Even if we learned that you’d lost your ship from Tan!Shallegh,” Elon Casimir added drily.

“Be nice, Elon,” the gracefully aging Duchess told her younger husband with a smile. “You’ve never commanded a starship or been involved in fleet command. I have. Morgan is busy, believe me.”

“Officially, we know nothing about what’s going on out there,” the Ducal Consort told his daughter. “If the Imperium isn’t briefing the Dukes, that tells me a lot all on its own.”

“They’ve told us that they don’t expect the Wendira and Laians to start shooting,” Bond corrected. “But the full details of what you found are still classified at the highest levels.”

Morgan chuckled and took another drink of wine. That was as close as her stepmother was going to come to admitting that the pair of them knew everything. They might not have been briefed as Dukes—the rulers of the Imperium’s various semi-autonomous racial homeworlds—but they were also the primary shareholders of the Imperium’s fifth-largest shipyard.

And Annette Bond was A!Shall’s friend, one the Empress found useful as a sounding board, Morgan suspected.

“I’ve told Victoria what I can,” Bond continued. “I imagine you have as well. She…gets it. I’m sure you knew that, but it can’t hurt to be reiterated. She does command one of my orbital forts, after all.”

Morgan’s parents were almost embarrassingly supportive of her…somewhat complex relationships and love life. The only time they’d drawn a line was when they’d found out she’d slept with one of the Ducal apartment security guards.

That had gone down like a lead balloon. Morgan, at eighteen, had suddenly received an extremely detailed further explanation of the concept of conflict of interest.

“I do wish we’d heard that you’d lost your ship from you,” Elon Casimir said quietly. “That’s not meant to guilt-trip you, Morgan. As Annette said, I don’t fully get how busy you are. But…I do know that’s a hard path to walk, and it’s one that’s always walked alone.

“We love you and we want to have your back, in anything and everything.”

Morgan found herself blinking away tears…and not just in gratitude at her parents’ love.

“Duty is a harsh mistress, Morgan,” her mother reminded her. “But you’re not alone in facing it. Never. Not while you have us, not while you have your sisters—not while you have Victoria and Rin, either.

“Or Tan!Shallegh, for that matter. The old squid will have your back, you know that, right?”

“I do,” Morgan muttered, wondering where all of the tears were coming from.

Over a hundred of her crew had died aboard Defiance. Seven times that many had come back with her and been scattered through Tan!Stalla’s fleet, but she’d lost a hundred souls—and killed some of them herself when she’d ordered a power core ejected to save the ship.

She had to pause the message for a moment, letting the tears flow freely as she finished her wine. There was no one there to see, and she had, for the first time since firing the scuttling charges, a moment to herself without tasks to complete.

Peace wouldn’t last. The creatures they’d found at the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula weren’t going to leave her peace, any more than they’d spared her crew. But right now, she had a quiet moment along with the holographic images of her parents.

Morgan Casimir knew how to handle nightmares and how to handle grief. And sometimes, the best way to remember your dead was to simply let yourself cry.

Her parents would understand if it took her a while to finish their message.

Chapter Fourteen

“So, the exercise for the fleets,” Shotilik rumbled as Morgan and her team gathered in their conference room again. “Do we assume the worst, the best or somewhere in between?”

Morgan snorted and tapped a command, dropping a smaller Category Seven bioform into the hologram above the table they surrounded.

“I was trying to forget those existed,” Rogers said drily. “Fifteen thousand kilometers. Multiple singularity cannons. Probably multiple plasma cannons. Anything else I need to mention?”

“Missiles, hyperdrives, anomaly scanners,” Morgan reeled off. “We know they have tachyon scanners and the full gamut of everything we use for realspace scanning, so we assume the next wave has everything we use for hyperspace scanning.”

“Everything the Laians had on Builder of Tomorrows,” Ito said, the Pibo woman dropping a list of key components next to the giant bioform’s hologram. “Whether the Laian systems grafted onto bioforms or their own biotech equivalent, we can assume they have point-eight-five missiles, hyperfold cannons, hyperfold coms, tachyon scanners…”

Took shivered, the blue-feathered Yin woman considering the list.

“They couldn’t have adopted all those winds in a few dozen cycles, could they?” she asked.

“We have to assume they could,” Morgan replied. “Hence Ito’s point. We