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

Rin nodded grimly, but he remembered the reports out of the Taljzi campaigns. Thirty Mesharom war spheres had been lured into a trap by the Taljzi—a trap built of malfunctioning Alavan technology—and destroyed.

“You’re assuming they’ve rebuilt enough of a fleet to be willing to send out anything,” he told Tan!Shallegh.

“I know,” the A!Tol admitted, his skin still dark in the unlit office. “Others will come, I think, but I wonder if they can possibly come fast enough to turn the course of what lies before us.”

“They have to, sir,” Rin said. “But even if they don’t, I trust we will find a way. We always have, sir.”

There was a harshly amused beak snap.

“I trust—I believe—that we can defeat these Infinite in the end,” Tan!Shallegh admitted. “What is open to question, I fear, is how many worlds will be sacrificed first.”

Chapter Eighteen

It had been Morgan Casimir’s task to estimate what the Infinite were doing and how quickly they would be able to upgrade their resources. Now, in the aftermath of defeat, it was very clear she’d got it wrong.

The days that had passed didn’t make any of it easier, though they’d at least allowed her to pull together every scrap of data they had on the Infinite from Korodaun’s charge. None of it was game-changing—they’d never penetrated the visibility bubble with anything except missiles, and those didn’t come back to provide updates.

She was sitting alone in the conference room that served as her team’s office, studying a rotating hologram of the best scan data they had of the Infinite’s missiles, when someone coughed behind her.

With a swallowed sigh, Morgan turned and arched an eyebrow at Bethany Rogers as her subordinate stepped forward and wordlessly offered her a black glass bottle.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Beer,” Rogers replied. “Guinness, to my surprise. I didn’t expect to find anything of real value aboard even a mixed-race ship.”

“I’m on duty,” Morgan said.

“No, you’re not,” Rogers told her. “You’ve been off duty for three and a half hours, sir. If you insist on staying up and staring at a hologram, you can at least do it with a beer in your hand.” She paused. “Sir.”

Morgan chuckled and tapped the three-point sequence that released the bottle cap. Pocketing the cap, she raised the bottle to Rogers.

“To the Infinite, who might just wreck my career on their way to eating the galaxy.”

Rogers opened her own bottle after clinking them together. “I didn’t think the smell of beer was that much of a depressant.”

“Fair. Apologies, Rogers,” Morgan said. “I know better, intellectually, than to blame myself for Korodaun and her people. But I’ll be damned if I don’t feel like I should have done better.”

“The whole team does, sir,” her subordinate admitted after taking a swallow. “Which means you and I need to shut that story down and shut it down hard. If the team starts wallowing, we’re fucked.”

“We might be fucked anyway,” Morgan replied. “I’m not sure I’d keep this team together if I was Tan!Stalla.”

“Who else knows as much as we do?” Rogers asked. “Nobody, that’s who. Nobody knows anything, sir. We’ve been neck-deep for longer than anyone else, and yeah, we got it wrong.

“But right now? Even getting it wrong is data.” She gestured at the hologram of the missile. “Take this. What do we know about it that we didn’t before the fight?”

“We know that it’s a standard Laian long-range attack missile,” Morgan told her. “We also have acquired a few bits of data about Laian missiles they probably don’t realize we did. Those go back to my father and his friends inside Jupiter.”

DragonWorks was the Imperium’s utterly secret, arguably treaty-violating research facility where entire new generations of military tech had been developed from samples of Mesharom and Alavan systems—alongside stolen examples of other Core Power technology.

And, as Morgan suggested, it was buried inside Jupiter, contained in a powerful shield bubble fifty kilometers beneath the gas giant’s normal surface.

“I already checked for software back doors the Laians might have built into their missiles,” Rogers told her. “No remote kill switches for us, sadly.”

“We do know one thing, I suppose,” Morgan noted as she studied the missile. “They fired just over six million of the effing things at Korodaun.”

And the rest of the fleet, but Korodaun’s charge had distracted those missiles.

“And?”

“And that, plus the million or so missile launchers to fire them, represents almost ninety percent of Builder of Tomorrows’s production capacity since the estimated time of capture,” Morgan told her subordinate. “Assuming they had another salvo in reserve, those missiles consumed every scrap of the shipyard manufacturing ability that could be even remotely used for missiles.

“That limits what else they did. We know they mounted hyper emitters on bioforms before, but if they had that many missiles? I know, with absolute certainty, that the emitters for the second fleet were not built by Builder of Tomorrows.

“So, either they were taken from the wreckage of the conspirators’ ships, which I don’t think would have given them enough, or they have their own version of a hyper-portal emitter derived from their biology.”

“Which is terrifying enough,” Rogers said. “But I see the positives of it. And another one, I suppose.”

“Which is?” Morgan asked. She realized her beer was half-empty and she didn’t consciously recall drinking any of it.

“If they used up that much of the capacity of their only modern industrial node on them…I’m going to guess that they haven’t worked out how to do biotech interface drives and missiles.”

“Yet,” Morgan said drily. “But you’re right. That does give us one thing to work with: Builder of Tomorrows can only produce about seventy thousand missiles a cycle, and that is assuming a ready supply of raw material.”

“They’ll have that soon enough,” Rogers admitted. “We can’t prevent them diving into empty systems now. That’s probably what they were looking for.”

“My guess as well,” Morgan confirmed. “They came out of the Astoroko Nebula so they could get