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

The room was silent and Morgan sighed.

“Rogers? I don’t suppose you have it to hand? If these officers weren’t cleared for that, they are now. On my authority.”

She wasn’t sure she had that authority. She did not care.

Rogers stepped over to one of the computers and started tapping commands.

“Villeneuve’s computers have it all,” she told Morgan. “Just need to authorize and… Here we go.”

One of the walls gave way to the image of the Great Mother.

“That, officers, is what the Alava created when they stole Infinite code and clones and created their own bioform,” Morgan said quietly. “Just over two solar masses. Two-point-three million kilometers from tip to tail.

“It was a stellarvore, in a way I don’t believe the Infinite are,” she continued. “The Great Mother, the Great Womb, the sun eater… Its servants called it a bunch of things, but it was smart enough to talk a bunch of Imperial scientists into worshipping it.

“The Alava broke the Mother, I suspect,” she told them. “She would not have thought or acted the same way as the Infinite and had Alavan additions. But biologically, she was fundamentally the same.”

“Plains of fire and water,” Shotilik whispered. “What do we… How do we…”

“First, I suspect we need a taxonomy,” Morgan told them all. “Right now, the sheer scale and oddity of what we’re looking at is making it difficult for us to do any analysis.

“We don’t expect bioships. We don’t expect singularity weapons. We don’t expect to encounter creatures that lived fifty thousand years ago and fought the Alava. We need to get past all of that.

“I think we start by classifying. At the low end, we have the Servants, the small bioships the Mother provided her Imperial worshippers. At the high end, we have the Mother…and we have that.”

Morgan gestured back at the creature that had lifted out of the super-Jovian at the heart of the Astoroko Nebula.

“The Queen,” she murmured. “I don’t think that’s necessarily the mother of them all, but it definitely seemed to be in charge.”

The five officers in the room with her seemed to shake themselves as one.

“Size makes the most sense, I think?” Kadark suggested. “An exponential categorization, and then we break down oddities within each category.”

“That makes sense to me,” Morgan agreed. “Category One being the original Servants we encountered, so…roughly hundred-meter bioforms?”

“And then each exponent is another category,” Ito agreed. “Category Two is kilometer-long ships. All the way up to…” The Pibo gestured helplessly at the screens. “Up to Category Eight, where we can probably put in everything over a hundred thousand kilometers long.”

“I think…I hope…we only need to worry about two of those,” Morgan said. “And one of them is dead.”

There was a long silence in the room as everyone looked at the image of the Great Mother.

“How?” Took finally asked.

“We fired a starkiller into the sun it was eating,” Morgan said flatly. “And part of our job, officers, is to find a better solution than that to the Infinite.”

After two hours of going through the scans, the good news was that there were fewer Category Seven bioforms than Morgan had figured after her initial panicked flight. There were “only” eight bioforms that fell between ten thousand kilometers and a hundred thousand kilometers in length, and only one of those was more than twenty thousand.

Even the largest bioforms were still fascinatingly similar to the Servants Morgan had encountered in the Kosha sector. They had the same basic sperm-like shape, scaled up by half a dozen orders of magnitude. What limited spectrographic analysis they could do from Defiance’s data suggested they were basically the same material: an organic carbon-silicon amalgam in a crystalline form previously unknown to Imperial materials science.

Large and small bioforms alike could generate organic bursts of plasma, superheated jets of fusing plasma traveling at near-lightspeed. That was where the similarities ended, though.

The Servants had used the same organic plasma to propel themselves, and it had been their only weapon systems. A small portion of the Mother’s Category Two and Category Three bioforms, the largest she’d created, had been equipped with the same gravitational-hyperspatial interface momentum engine used by the Imperium—the interface drive.

The Infinite, on the other hand, used some kind of reactionless engine completely unknown to the Imperium. It seemed to lack the near-instantaneous acceleration and vector changes of the interface drive, but it also appeared to lack its hard maximum velocities.

And while they also used plasma bursts as weapons, the Category Seven bioforms had access to the weapon that had wrecked Morgan’s command. Each of the C-7s had at least three projectors capable of firing near-c microsingularities, artificially generated black holes that had torn Defiance apart.

Eight Category Sevens was bad enough.

“I make it somewhere between two and three hundred,” Shotilik finally concluded. “Anyone got it closer?”

“I can definitely identify two hundred and twenty-two Category Six bioforms,” Ito said precisely. “Most of those appear to have been in what Defiance’s crew initially assumed to be an asteroid belt.”

“We don’t generally figure five-thousand-kilometer chunks of ice are going to wake up and start firing black holes at us,” Rogers replied. “And, to be fair, we were distracted by both the Laian cruiser we were fighting and the fact that we’d just found the Alavan fleet.”

“I suggest we classify the Infinite wearing Alavan shells slightly differently,” Morgan told them. “I suspect the armor on those will change the threat level significantly—and we know that Alavan teleporter-based weaponry can still function.

“The Taljzi had several forts online with the damn things, even putting aside the system at PG-Two,” she reminded them. That had technically been a very confused refueling system… One that had wiped out an entire battle fleet of the most powerful warships known to exist.

“We need to expect that we’re going to run into those in the Infinite’s hands,” she said with a sigh. “If we’re lucky, they’ll only show up in the Alavan spheres.”

“Those are all at least one thousand kilometers in