Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) Glynn Stewart (100 books to read .txt) 📖

buy less time—and the time we don’t buy gets bought with inhabited star systems.”

A chill ran down Rin’s spine.

“We thought the sun eater was going to eat Kosha, colony and all,” he murmured. “Are we looking at something like that?”

“We don’t know how the Infinite will react to a civilian population, but they have fired on every single ship they have seen since leaving the Nebula,” Morgan said quietly. “I am afraid, Rin. I’m afraid that if we get this wrong, we’re going to lose an entire star system of innocents.

“The smallest bioform we’ve seen is eighty meters long,” she reminded him. “That was one of the Servants. We haven’t actually seen a Category One bioform from the Infinite yet. Do they even conceive of us as individuals or sentiences?

“Or will the population of whatever planet they capture simply qualify as available raw resources?”

“They might just…eat a civilian population?” he whispered.

“It’s… It’s more likely than not, but not certain,” she told him. “We don’t know enough about them. We don’t know enough about how they dealt with the Alava.”

“The Alava were terrified of them,” Rin admitted. “They didn’t even tell their subject races that the Infinite—the ‘Enemy,’ as they called them—existed. Something happened between the Alava and the Infinite that made their war to the death.

“If the Infinite were eating Alavan worlds, population and all…that could have been it.”

“Because I needed more nightmares,” Morgan whispered. “I don’t think they’re going to eat a civilian population…but I don’t know.”

She turned to look at the screen on her wall, which showed a map of the area around Tohrohsail and the Astoroko Nebula.

“I have to wonder if I think they’ll leave civilians alone because I think a civilized people would,” she murmured. “But then I look at that map—at a region where hundreds of stars and trillions of sentients were killed.

“It’s hard to maintain hope for a civilized conflict when you’re stationed on the edge of the Dead Zone.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Tohrohsail’s fortresses and defensive frigates faded behind Va!Tola while Morgan watched in the operations center’s holotank. The midsized defensive starships were the only mobile guardians remaining behind, looking small and fragile against the massive walls of metal moving outward toward agreed hyper-portal points.

It was hard to look at the fleet at a level where individual ships even registered. The FOC’s hologram showed the fleets by squadron, and even that was overwhelming. Twenty ten-ship squadrons of Laian war-dreadnoughts. Fifty five-ship squadrons of Wendira star hives—and two hundred squadrons of the ten-megaton star shields. Twenty sixteen-ship squadrons of Imperial capital ships.

Almost two thousand capital ships and over four thousand escorts maneuvered away from the gas-giant fleet base. There was no way to assemble a coherent formation, so each fleet was moving in their own formation in a designated “lane” at least a million kilometers across.

“All right, team,” Morgan said clearly, pulling the eyes of her team away from the holotank and back to her. “We now know what we have, for at least the next few five-cycles.

“We know where we’re going and we know what we’re watching for,” she continued. “All of that falls on the regular Fleet Operations staff. Our job remains what it always was: analyze what we’ve seen of the Infinite’s movements and project their next steps.

“They’ve been disturbingly silent for a while now. I want your ideas as to why.”

Shotilik leaned her snout thoughtfully on top of her console.

“Because they’re waiting to see what we do next?” she suggested. “They don’t know how we’re going to jump or how much firepower we have.”

“And what if they have the full databases available aboard Builder of Tomorrows?” Morgan countered. “So, they know roughly what the strength of the Laian and Wendira Dead Zone fleets is. They know where the Laian bases are, potentially even know where the Wendira bases are. They know the Imperium is here, and they know about the alliances and security agreements.”

“Would they understand them?” Ito asked softly. Morgan turned her attention to the Pibo woman. “We have to assume they have the databases, yes, but they have no context whatsoever,” Ito pointed out. “They don’t know who the players are, they don’t know the races, the tech, the territory.

“Even the astrography has changed over fifty thousand years—the Dead Zone didn’t exist then. They’ve worked out hyperdrives, but have they worked out how to read Laian hyper-density maps?”

“That would slow down their movement out of the nebula,” Morgan conceded. “For worst-case planning, we need to operate on the assumption that they do know everything, but we also need to make a realistic estimate of what they’re doing.”

“My concern is: what happened to Swarm Bravo?” Shotilik asked. “We know a major force left the nebula but we haven’t seen it since. Presumably, they were scouting and taking in realspace scans to validate the maps they had, but that doesn’t explain where they went after that.”

“They could have made it back in before we had a scouting fleet in position to see them, but it seems unlikely,” Morgan agreed. “Where could they be?”

“Anywhere,” Ito said instantly. “Anywhere in the Dead Zone, anyway, and well into Laian or Wendira space. If they have the hyper-density maps, they could be dozens to hundreds of light-years from the nebula by now.

“I just have no idea why they’d go that far without an objective.”

“We don’t know what objectives they have,” Morgan said quietly. “What if they’re looking for another cluster of the Infinite? If they have some idea of where the other Infinite were when their drives stopped…they could be trying to find reinforcements.

“If there were other Infinite out there, wouldn’t we have seen them?” Took asked, the Yin turning to study the holotank with dark eyes. “The cluster in the Astoroko Nebula was uniquely concealed.”

“If we had encountered them, we would know,” Ito agreed. “But if they were in systems that were useless to us, that we only did long-range surveys of, we likely would write off sleeping Infinite as asteroids.

“We did that at quite