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

weapons that can fire black holes at your ships,” Tan!Shallegh noted. “How do you plan on containing that once the Infinite do have hyperdrives?”

“Carefully,” Tidirok replied. “And with friends. It would be easier if I was not also watching the border for the Wendira.”

And that was why everyone was still there. The Wendira used hundred-million-ton star hives, supercarriers stuffed full of close-range starfighters piloted by short-lived Drones, instead of the war-dreadnoughts—but Rin’s understanding was that the hundred-and-twenty-billion-ton number was probably about right for them, too.

“I have made the Queens’ position clear,” Oxtashah said calmly. “Once the Republic takes responsibility for the actions of its officers along the Dead Zone and provides appropriate recompense, then we will be prepared to consider discussions around a shared containment protocol.

“As you yourself said, we have time. The A!Tol data suggests one of their long-cycles before the creatures will be able to leave the Nebula in force.”

“That is extremely optimistic,” Rin interrupted, his thoughts around Morgan’s words having clicked together into a final point. “That estimate is based on the known capabilities of the Great Mother, the sun eater.

“But you have to understand what the Great Mother was.”

Oxtashah’s wings flicked wide in irritation, but Tidirok held up a claw.

“Princess Oxtashah, Professor Dunst is the A!Tol Imperium’s foremost expert on Those Who Came Before,” he noted. “More, he is the only expert on this creature. Please, Professor.”

He gestured for Rin to continue.

“The Great Mother was a product of a rogue Alavan faction,” Rin said quietly. “They had samples and potentially even live specimens of the Infinite, and they were attempting to co-opt Infinite biotechnology for their own purposes.

“We saw two major instances of this: the cloning facility the Taljzi used to turn a few dozen transports of refugees into an expansionist empire that threatened both the original Kanzi nation and the Imperium, and the Great Mother itself.

“The cloner was an interesting example. It predates the Mother and was based on a brute-force duplication of Infinite biotech. While the cell structure is the same—it’s clearly based on cloned Infinite organs—it was both a sophisticated and a crude adaptation at the same time.

“It was also, without question, completely non-sentient,” he said. “At its full extent, after several hundred years of the Taljzi feeding it every scrap of organic matter they could acquire, it could be argued it was a Category Five bioform. But because it was based on cloned organs, not cloned entities, it did not think. It simply duplicated whatever was fed into it—and did so far more perfectly than any cloning technology available to our current galactic civilization.

“In the cloner at Arjtal, we see what that rogue Alavan faction was trying to perfect: Infinite biotech without Infinite minds.”

Rin now had everyone’s attention, a situation he was used to…but not at quite this level of political power. He concealed a swallow, realizing that his next words could change the course of the next few months…and could decide whether the Infinite were actually contained or not.

No pressure at all.

“They created the entity we now call the Great Mother as a local self-sustaining defense node,” he told them. “The creature’s purpose was to draw on the mass and energy of a star to assemble a fleet that would protect a system against low-grade threats.

“I suspect that the ships it originally could make were more in line with Alavan warships than the ones it made to face us,” Rin noted. “Certainly, the Servants would have been almost useless against an Alavan mothership.

“But the key thing to realize is that the Great Mother was born with a computer for a brain,” he said. “We can see it in the iconography and images we have from the Alavan structures in the region. They were impressed with themselves for managing it, but the Mother was never intended to be independently intelligent.

“She had a control center, manned by an Alavan crew, roughly the size of a Wendira star shield,” he told them. His audience would be more familiar with the ten-megaton warships the Wendira used as star hive escorts than they would be with A!Tol battleships.

“Like all other Alavan technology, that control center died when their systems broke,” Rin concluded. He didn’t know if his audience was aware of exactly how that had happened—he’d heard the Mesharom story of a dangerous experiment to modify the laws of physics to accelerate their ships.

An experiment gone very wrong, to the point where all Alavan computers stopped working—including the ones they’d installed in their own heads.

“Without its control center, the Mother had no mind of its own,” he told them quietly. “It still fed on the star, however, and it eventually got bigger. A lot bigger—enough bigger for the intentionally shriveled leftover of its brain to become sentient in its own right.

“The Great Mother was not raised by Infinite. By their standards, she was basically a lobotomized child,” he noted. “I would guess that she basically recreated the concept of the Servants from fragments of her pre-sentience memories.

“The Infinite did not come to awareness alone in the dark,” Rin told his audience. “They were never lobotomized or damaged or built to be a tool. They will be smarter and more capable than the Mother was.

“And, as we pointed out, all evidence was that the Mother created organic hyper-portal emitters within six months,” he concluded. “If you assume it will take the Queen that long, you are risking a lot.

“You are assuming that the peak specimen of a species will have the same abilities as that species’s lobotomized giants.”

He shook his head.

“Whatever time you expect the Infinite will take to be ready, they will be ready faster,” he said quietly. “We cannot judge the Infinite by the bastardization of their cloned flesh the Alava built.”

The room was silent.

“I see,” Oxtashah said quietly. “I… My Queens are stubborn. I will speak with them. But I also sense an answer that I think we might have all missed.”

“Highness?” Rin asked.

“If that is what the Alava did to the Infinite, no