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

“Sir, we’re receiving a data transmission,” Litcha said. “Laian format and protocol. I’m sanitizing, but it will take a moment.”

“No audio?” Morgan asked.

“Not yet.”

“Show me the data once it’s ready.”

That took a full two minutes, eventually resolving in a Laian-style tactical plot that Litcha was able to project into the middle of the flag deck. The iconography was…wonky, but Morgan could make out that she was looking at an Infinite force—she guessed Swarm Charlie—entering a hyper portal.

“Fascinating; they’re getting live updates from realspace,” Rogers noted. “Relayed from the ships that have already gone through. We have problems doing that.”

“Why are they showing us this?” Morgan asked—and then the bioforms started disappearing. Big bioforms. Just vanishing in balls of…starstuff.

“My god,” she whispered. “Did they give us data on the rest of the system?”

“Some, sir,” Litcha confirmed. “Showing now.”

It confirmed what Morgan suspected.

“We duplicated the Taljzi Dyson swarm weapon,” Morgan said. “My god, they must have pulled Rin and dozens of others into that.”

“And they gutted Swarm Charlie with a weapon that was unquestionably Alavan in origin,” Rogers concluded. “Damn.”

“Audio transmission coming in now, sir,” Litcha reported.

“This is the work of your TinyLife,” the Queen told Morgan. “NestBurner weapons. We have seen these. We have seen these tear apart worlds and murder nests. This is what your TinyLife have wrought.

“And now fleets of your kin swarm toward this nest. They believe they have an advantage, but there is not enough DeadFlesh in these stars to challenge a Nest of the Infinite. But.”

There was a long pause, and Morgan thought the message had ended.

“We have searched the stars,” the Queen resumed again. “We have searched the light of untold suns and rocks and nebulae, and not one scrap of our kindred remains. We do not know what horror the NestBurners unleashed, but the Infinite are no more.

“But we remain and we will not die.”

Morgan was silent, considering the Queen’s position.

“Rogers,” she murmured. “Do we know enough about the Alavan special project to say if the rosette might have shielded the Eye from some of its effects?”

“No,” her chief of staff said with a bitter chuckle. “Literally all we know is that they broke the laws of physics and rewrote the conductivity potential of seventy-plus percent of inorganic material in the galaxy.”

“But it would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Morgan said. “If the rosette delayed some of the impact of the change, the Infinite inside the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula might have adapted without even realizing it.

“But the Infinite outside would have died with their enemies. Potentially, the Alavan modifications to the cloner and the Great Mother saved them, but the rest of the Infinite didn’t have those. These are literally all that is left of their species.”

“And if they’re going to eat suns and worlds, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, sir,” her chief of staff told her.

“Except they’re not,” Morgan noted. “They held Tohrohsail for days and harmed no one who didn’t fight them. They allowed humanitarian cargo missions; they…acted like reasonable occupiers who happened to be giant organic starships.”

“What are you thinking, sir?” Rogers asked.

“I think we have a chance to do the goddamn impossible,” Division Lord Morgan Casimir told her subordinate. “I think we have a chance to end a war that never should have happened and save a species that is utterly unique in the galaxy.”

Chapter Sixty-Three

Hundreds of massive biological starships charged through deep space, filling Morgan’s sensors with a slow pulse of radiation and heat she could only describe as a heartbeat. Her thirty surviving starships fled before them at the same speed, keeping exactly ten light-minutes between the two fleets as Morgan considered what she wanted to say.

Her gaze and attention were inevitably drawn to the image of the Infinite Queen, and she studied the being she was talking to more closely than she ever had before. They had hyperfold-equipped drones surprisingly close in now, and the true visual of the Queen was awe-inspiring.

The bioform was a pale red color, with blue and purple stripes the width of continents running along her length. It was clear where missile launchers and new systems had been mounted on her hide as cyborg installations—and it was also clear, with actual visual data, where old hardtech systems had been stripped away, leaving scars the size of starships.

Those weren’t her only scars, either. Massive gouges, at least one the depth of a medium-size planet, had been blasted into the Queen’s flesh over the millennia. The wounds were closed over now, but the dents and scars remained.

For all of her massive bulk, parts of the Queen were surprisingly delicate. Flaps and tentacles were scattered across her surface, serving purposes Morgan could barely begin to guess—though at least one was definitely concealing a group of infant Infinite bioforms; she saw one of the creatures poke its head out before a muscular flap irresistibly herded it back inside its mother’s flesh.

Morgan marshaled her thoughts as the situation remained frozen, and then finally activated the recorder.

“We do not wish to end you,” she told the Infinite. “And I do not believe you wish to end us. We are both afraid. Afraid of what we don’t understand, afraid of a clear and present threat. Our rogues attacked you, but you attacked us.

“You struck our fleets and our bases, seeking to defend yourself, and so we destroyed and trapped your swarms in turn. If we play this out, we will destroy each other for nothing.

“You do not need our worlds or stars,” she guessed. “Any system, even ones useless to us, can feed the Infinite. We can share this galaxy and learn from each other.

“But to do that, the fighting has to stop. There can be another way.”

How Morgan was going to pull that off, she didn’t know yet, but she kept speaking and the answer fell out of her mouth, almost as much a surprise to her as anyone else.

“If the Infinite withdraw to this nebula and