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

powerful and numerous, but Morgan suspected that even she had overestimated how quickly the Infinite could replenish their numbers. They had modified and upgraded themselves with stunning speed, but she suspected they hadn’t birthed very many new bioforms in the months since the first encounter.

If the Infinite nest was destroyed, they were gone. There were no more of them left. Once broken, the Queen and her children were broken forever—where even if the entire four-nation combined fleet gathered around Odysseus was wiped out, another fleet could be assembled in a long-cycle at most.

A soft chirp from her computers told her that the conference software was ready. With a sigh and a hard swallow, Morgan put her game face on and activated the conference. An illusory space overtook her office, replacing the completely unadorned space with a stylized A!Tol military meeting room.

She was, as she’d expected, the first one there. The other four people she was meeting were fleet commanders and diplomats. They’d join the conference exactly on time.

Tan!Shallegh was the first, the A!Tol’s holographic form materializing a full thousandth-cycle before the designated start time. His black eyes focused immediately on Morgan, and a flush of red pleasure flickered across his skin.

“It is good to see you alive, Division Lord Casimir,” he told her. “I feared I was sending you to your death.”

“So did I,” Morgan admitted. “But we thought it needed to be done. Now…we may have another option, sir.”

“So I understand,” he said. “I will wait for you to brief us all. Better to only swim these waters once, I think.”

His tentacles fluttered in an amused shrug.

“I’ve already heard from Duchess Bond and Empress A!Shall,” he noted. “Even without their words, I trust your judgment, Division Lord. I will listen.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said softly.

Another figure flickered into existence around the table before they could say more, a vast, unfamiliar shape. No one would ever accuse a Ren of being small—and Morgan suspected the virtual conferencing software was shrinking Strike Master Koh-Stan to fit in the illusory space.

Koh-Stan was an eight-limbed behemoth, four meters long with a segmented armored body that would allow them to lift any of their legs to act as a tool-using arm. Each limb had its own set of eyes and its own mouth, creating a rather disturbing creature to human eyes—an impression not helped by Koh-Stan themselves being a hot pink color with black stripes.

The chlorophyll equivalent on the Ren homeworld had much to answer for.

“Strike Master,” Tan!Shallegh greeted the Ren fleet commander. “It is a pleasure to speak with you once more.”

“Indeed,” a rumbling, interlaced chorus of eight voices replied. “I look forward to Division Lord Casimir’s briefing. If nothing else, more intelligence on our enemy is always valuable.”

“I appreciate your open-mindedness, Strike Master,” Morgan told them.

Any further conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the virtual forms of Voice Tidirok and Princess Oxtashah, and Morgan concealed a hard inhalation as she faced the quartet of beings who would decide whether anyone would speak to the Infinite before they went in shooting.

“Voice Tidirok, Princess Oxtashah,” she greeted the two aliens she knew. “I appreciate all four of you making time for this. I understand that it is not really the position of a junior flag officer to have made some of the promises and suggestions I made, but I was the sentient there, speaking to the Infinite.”

“An impressive qualification all on its own, Division Lord,” Tidirok told her. “The Infinite have not spoken to anyone else, after all. Only issued orders to civilians, at most.”

“I regard their actions as speech enough,” Oxtashah observed. “But I am prepared to listen, Division Lord. Speak.”

“Agreed,” Tan!Shallegh said. “You have asked for this meeting, Casimir. We are prepared to listen to what you have learned. So speak.”

Morgan nodded, swallowing as she looked down at the notes she’d written.

“As you all know, I was sent into the Astoroko Nebula to deliver a set of starkillers and hopefully destroy the Infinite nest there,” she reminded them. “That mission failed in short order, I’m afraid.

“We forgot that our starkillers are derived from an attempt to duplicate the Alavan star drive,” she told them. From the way Koh-Stan rippled, the Ren officer might not have even known that—but there was no point in concealing ancient history.

“Because of that, we doomed our own use of stealth fields,” she said calmly. “The Infinite are clearly able to detect the Alavan star drive technology through any concealment we have available.

“However, they believed that meant we were being escorted by a squadron of Alavan ships,” Morgan noted. “So, when they ambushed us, they targeted the starkillers first and destroyed them all. This focus allowed my task group to prevail in our first encounter with them, but we were all too aware of the overall strength of the Infinite.

“We evaded further contact as best as we could, but they were attempting to trap us. Eventually, however, the news of Swarm Charlie’s defeat clearly reached the nebula, and those forces were redeployed.”

She shook her head.

“This was also a trap,” she admitted. “The Queen wished to contain a small force of our ships to interrogate them. My belief that we had a somewhat clear escape allowed her to succeed in this mission.

“Without the ability to escape the force of Category Seven bioforms the Queen had brought with her, I didn’t see much alternative to responding to her queries,” Morgan concluded.

“The Queen was under the impression that we, like the Mesharom and other species that shared space travel with the Alava, were Alavan slaves. She called them the ‘Nest Burners,’ which does suggest why the Alava and the Infinite were trying to exterminate each other before the Fall.

“While it took some doing to convince her that we weren’t slaves and had been defending ourselves against her actions, she also brought up that on her second encounter with us, we’d opened fire without communicating.”

Morgan grimaced.

“That encounter was with the conspirators who tried to start a war between the Wendira and