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

a clear view of the galaxy, including EM signatures. They’ll know which systems in the Dead Zone and near the Nebula are inhabited now.

“No matter what, I suspect they’ll move in on at least one system we can’t watch,” she agreed. “We don’t have the time, data, or hulls to prevent that. If we want to restore containment, we need to guess what they’re going to do after that.”

“No small ask, sir,” Rogers told her. “But I think we have a chance. At the end of the day, we can guess their needs, and that leads to their objectives.”

“Yeah.” Morgan drained the rest of her beer bottle. “And before you say a word, Commander, I think both of us will do that better with some rest.”

“Yes, we will,” Rogers agreed. “See you in the morning, sir?”

“We’re expecting to have new orders from Tan!Shallegh by then,” Morgan said. “Flag staff meeting. After that, though, we’ll start digging into the brain and logic of a monster the size of a planet.”

Chapter Nineteen

By the time Morgan joined Tan!Stalla and the rest of the senior staff for the briefing in the morning, she’d slept, showered, braided her hair, and put on a fresh uniform. It felt like she was wasting time while she was doing all of it, but she felt more human and more competent with her hair braided and everything under control.

Looking around the other officers, she suspected she wasn’t the first to need to force herself through a total mental reset—and there were still officers on the staff who were going to need to do something equivalent.

Tan!Stalla looked surprisingly on the ball, unlike her officers. She stood at the front of the standard conference room, inside a section that had clearly been rigged with additional humidifiers. The presentation stage was visibly misty, a countermeasure to the Squadron Lord’s skin issues, and she leveled beady black eyes on her team.

“We have new orders from Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh,” she told them. “They are, I suspect, what most of us expected. We are to finish rounding up the last of Korodaun’s strays and fall back to rendezvous with the First Defense Fleet.”

“Sir, shouldn’t we at least make some attempt to maintain containment still?” Ashmore asked, the human operations officer’s freshly shaved scalp gleaming. That had apparently been his mental reset.

“We never had the resources to maintain containment in the face of an active offensive from the Infinite,” Tan!Stalla replied. “This was not an unknown factor, Commander Ashmore. If the Infinite were able to deploy significant numbers of hyperdrives before we were able to bring the Grand Fleet and the First Defense Fleet into position—preferably with the Wendira Battle Hives in support—we were always going to be driven off.

“We did everything reasonable to maintain containment, but it is better to return as the clan than die as the tribe. We will fall back and make rendezvous with our fleet and our allies.”

Tan!Stalla’s bullet-shaped torso turned to allow her to survey the rest of her officers.

“We were defeated, yes,” she told them. “And we retreated, yes. But we did so because to fight would have been without purpose. If we had taken every unit of this task force and every one of Korodaun’s cruisers forward with her, we would have died with her.

“She chose to save a fleet.”

“Perhaps we should use it,” Morgan said quietly, before she even realized she was speaking. Every eye in the room was suddenly on her.

“Staff Captain?” Tan!Stalla intoned.

“You said our orders were to bring the entirety of our force and Korodaun’s cruisers back to the First Defense Fleet,” Morgan said slowly, the thought taking shape in her head as she poked at it. “But who remains if we do that?”

“No one,” Ashmore replied. “We pull everyone back to stand as one fleet, where we’re safe.”

“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not where ships were built to be,” Morgan quoted back. “I understand the intent of our orders, sir,” she told Tan!Stalla, “but there is always a degree of discretion allowed to a flag officer that I suspect Tan!Shallegh is expecting us to take.

“Between our cruisers, the destroyers and the Laian cruisers, we possess over a hundred hulls,” Morgan continued. “They are not able to stand against the Infinite and we wouldn’t want them to try.

“But they are able to maintain a sensor watch over the Nebula and track where follow-up Infinite forces go. They can evade and they can run to escape any attempt by the Infinite to bring them down—but they can keep us up to date on what our enemy is doing.

“If we take everything back to the rendezvous, we blind everyone.”

The room was silent.

“I suspect you are correct in that Tan!Shallegh might have been thinking similarly,” Tan!Stalla agreed. “I had my own thoughts upon those waters as well, but the orders from the Eleventh Voice of the Republic were to recall all ships. Were the orders solely from our own chain of command, I would agree with you.

“But I also hesitate to defy our allies in our operations in their space.”

“Then we ask,” Nitik suggested, the communications officer’s voice raspy to Morgan’s ears. Ivida didn’t cry like humans did, or she’d have suspected the other woman had been weeping. “Pincer Sokotal will be able to judge the desires of his military command better than we can—but these are also their stars we risk leaving unwatched.”

“It’s the Dead Zone,” Ashmore murmured. “Do these stars really belong to anybody?”

“Given that the Laians and Wendira have fought at least one war through this region since they burnt it to the surface, I will not disagree with their ownership claims,” Tan!Stalla replied. “But yes, Commander Nitik. I think that may be our best course.

“Staff Captain Casimir, join me in my office after the meeting. I think you will be of service as we draft the scouting plans.”

Pincer Sokotal was noticeably younger than Pincer Korodaun had been—to Morgan, at least, who’d grown up with the Laian