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

were as certain of that as the Wendira Royal. He’d left Captain Casimir behind, hoping the Imperial officer could find her reinforcements, and fled here to warn these people.

“We have had minimal contact from Captain Casimir and Lord Tan!Stalla,” he interjected. It probably wasn’t his place to speak, but Tan!Shallegh had brought him there. He doubted the A!Tol had expected him to stay quiet.

“We cannot assume a lack of news means the Infinite remain contained,” he pointed out. “They now possess a Laian mobile shipyard. We have no idea how long it will take them to adapt our hyperspace technology to their biology.”

“I hope,” Tidirok noted, “that even my traitors were wise enough to destroy Builder of Tomorrows before she fell into the Infinite’s hands.”

“We cannot count on that,” Tan!Shallegh replied. “Since Dr. Dunst already revealed the situation in the Kosha region, I feel justified in saying our analysis suggested that the Mother had already reverse-engineered a biotech hyperdrive. She simply didn’t have the power to open a portal to move her own immense body.

“But the Mother was a sun eater,” he noted. “She was as large as the stars she consumed. The Infinite are not. I imagine it will not take them long to construct hyper-portal emitters—and even less time for them to mount the Laian technology on cyborg versions of themselves.”

“They have already consumed and subsumed the hulls of an Alavan war fleet,” Rin pointed out. “Those motherships were larger than anything our current technology could move through hyperspace: thousand-kilometer spheres of hyper-compressed matter. Even if all the Infinite retain from those ships is their armor, those shells make them dangerous to us.”

“The Republic has accepted the threat,” Tidirok said grimly. “I have communicated with the other Voices of the Republic. We are deploying other ships to reinforce Squadron Lord Tan!Stalla…but so long as a Wendira armada threatens our borders, my fleet must remain facing the Dead Zone.”

Oxtashah snorted.

“You blame me for your lack of action?” she demanded. “But it is your own traitors who have delivered the key to escaping their trap into the Infinite’s hands. Why, then, do you expect us to help you?”

When Rin had first delivered the news of the Infinite, Oxtashah had seemed sufficiently, well, afraid to allow him some hope. Now she’d clearly communicated with her Queens and received updated orders. He couldn’t read Wendira body language, but he had to wonder if she was truly as determined to cause trouble as her translated words suggested.

“The Republic has learned not to trust your Queens without confirmed commitments and action,” Tidirok told her. “I am prepared to forego our righteous demands for recognition and satisfaction for our dead if you do the same.

“As you have said, we are children before the might of Those Who Came Before. If we stand together, perhaps we can protect our people. But if we continue to glare at each other across the Dead Zone, we make ourselves vulnerable to an enemy even gods could not defeat.”

Oxtashah closed her jewel-like eyes, bowing her head and allowing her antennae to droop.

“The Queens do not fully believe in this tale of conspiracy you have spun,” she admitted. “They accept the existence and threat of the Infinite, but they—we—believe this conspiracy is an attempt by the Republic to deflect the responsibility for your actions onto an imaginary third party.

“We”—she didn’t mistake the pronoun this time—“believe this is a crisis entirely of the Republic’s making, and while we recognize the threat on our borders, we are not prepared to ignore the recent actions of the Republic’s fleet.”

“Are you mad?” Tidirok asked.

“You must be, if you think we will allow the Republic to brush aside our murdered children and call us to help you deal with the monster you have unleashed.”

Oxtashah hadn’t yet opened her eyes. She wasn’t being nearly as effectively diplomatic as Rin suspected her Queens would like.

She was, unless he missed his guess, doing everything she could short of begging Tidirok to agree to her Queens’ price.

The Eleventh Voice of the Republic was unmoved. He gazed levelly at the larger Wendira Royal and was silent.

“Are you all lost to reason?” Tan!Shallegh demanded, his skin a burnt-orange color of anger and fear. “There are single bioforms in the scans from Defiance that outmass your entire fleets, and you are arguing over responsibility?”

“My Queens do not believe we are responsible for protecting the Laians against their own folly,” Oxtashah said. “We did not deliver a mobile shipyard into the hands of these Infinite. While we recognize the threat, we are not yet convinced it is directed at us.”

Her eyes were still closed.

“We recognize the threat,” she repeated, “so we are prepared to assist the Republic in this matter if our most recent grievances are laid to rest. This is the will of the Queens and, as such, is beyond my contestation.”

That was as close as Oxtashah was going to get to admitting that she had no say in this, Rin figured. She’d been overruled.

“I will speak with the Parliament,” Tidirok finally said. “But I suspect your demands will fall on closed ears, Princess Oxtashah. There were as many Wendira in the conspiracy that brought us here as Laians, after all.”

Rin wasn’t sure of that—but it wasn’t like he’d stolen the conspirators’ personnel files while he’d been acquiring the data he’d used to find the Infinite.

It wasn’t lost on him that all of this was his fault, either.

Chapter Three

Morgan wasn’t entirely surprised to find Commander Bethany Rogers waiting for her when she found her new “office.” The young redhead had been her executive officer aboard Defiance and was just as at loose ends as Morgan was.

“Captain Casimir,” Rogers greeted her with a salute. “I’d say I was about to go looking for you…but in all honesty, I just found our new department myself.”

Morgan grimaced.

“Not much of a department,” she told her subordinate. “You’re assigned to me? I haven’t had a chance to check the personnel list.”

“Seems like the Squadron Lord didn’t want