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

the Fleet Lord told him. “But I must ask that you be extremely circumspect about what is shared on that channel, encrypted as it is.”

“What can be done will be done,” Rin echoed back at the A!Tol. “There’s some equipment we could use as well. A mobile molycirc computer core that we can trust will be essential.”

“Whatever you need,” Tan!Shallegh reiterated. “I’d send a task force with you if I thought it would help.”

“It won’t,” Rin said quietly. “The Wendira probably won’t even tell us where Skiefail is if they can avoid it. The upside of that, I suppose, is that they’re the ones who’ll have to lure the Infinite there.”

“Do you think you can make it work?”

Rin sighed.

“Without a lot more data, I can’t even guess,” he admitted. “If everything we need is intact and linked together, and if we can successfully duplicate the Taljzi’s work, we’re still looking at something that took them fifty long-cycles to prepare—and I doubt we’ll have fifty cycles.”

“Even if you succeed, that will likely cause problems unless you really can disable the weapon as you leave,” Tan!Shallegh warned. “A weapon like this… Defensive or not, it changes the balance here between the Wendira and the Laians.

“And in a war like this, I would not expect to build a weapon without seeing it fired.”

The A!Tol shivered.

“No one has yet created a functional duplicate of Alavan teleporter technology with modern systems,” he noted. “Even the Taljzi just removed intact teleporters and used them in different locations. Their attempts to study the internal components failed—as have the Mesharom’s, according to the data we have from them.

“You will be working with technology and software around the one great mystery of our Precursors. I believe Oxtashah is above the waters, but that does not mean no one will attempt to keep you after you have worked on that tech,” he warned. “If it comes to that, I don’t know if we will be able to retrieve you.”

Rin swallowed. That was not a risk he had considered, but he nodded levelly.

“It should be a safe mission,” he said. “Even with that. I don’t think the Wendira want to start another war.”

“When this is over, they may believe that we may not be able to prevent them detaining you,” Tan!Shallegh said. “And…depending on how badly we get hurt before this is over, they may end up being right.

“You and your people deserve to know what you’re walking into. It should be safe, but you are going into Wendira territory and beyond our reach.”

“I understand, Fleet Lord,” Rin promised. “And I’ll make sure my recruits understand. I don’t think it will be a problem.”

He was reasonably sure everyone in the Grand Fleet was scared of the Infinite by now.

Chapter Forty-Two

The holographic image of an Infinite bioform dominated the conference as Morgan’s new officers joined. Laians, Wendira, humans, A!Tol…all of the captains and flag officers were quieted by the sight of the massive Category Five creature.

“Welcome, everyone,” Morgan told them, concealing a smile at the nervous silence. “I am Division Lord Morgan Casimir of the A!Tol Imperial Navy and the commander of this combined special task group.”

She waited for that to sink in and to make sure no one was going to raise trouble, surveying her new officers. Two human captains, an A!Tol captain and an Anbrai captain made up her Imperial officers. The rest were about what she’d expected.

All nineteen of her Wendira captains were Warrior-caste Wendira. No Royals, no Drones—not even any Worker caste, though the ships’ crews were only about fifty percent Warriors, from her understanding. A Warrior-caste Sub-Commandant named Irisha commanded the Wendira detachment.

On the other hand, only twenty of her twenty-four Laian Republic captains were actually Laian. The others were four different species, including a broccoli-like Shondra, a Lotis—a squat four-armed sentient she wasn’t familiar with—a Zo—an ethereally thin and almost translucent biped with no visible eyes—and an Eerin—a heavily-furred hexapod.

They fell under the command of the Thirty-Eighth Sword of the Republic, a glitteringly black Laian female named Protan.

Everyone’s attention was still focused on the bioform, and Morgan gestured toward it.

“This, officers, was one of the Category Five bioforms that attacked this system,” she told them. “Eight hundred kilometers long, two hundred at her widest point, carrying an estimated eighty thousand missile launchers and capable of generating up to six independent plasma bursts powerful enough to overwhelm even a war-dreadnought—and of creating microsingularities propelled at eleven nines of lightspeed.

“Her ammunition and missile launchers were fortunately limited to what they could manufacture or steal of Laian munitions,” she continued. “A Five-M-type unit, as we have designated this creature, is a cyborg mix of Infinite biotechnology and stolen Laian weapons systems.

“So far as we can tell, this particular creature was not capable of independent hyperspace travel and was limited to their standard reactionless drive, accelerating at one-point-five percent of lightspeed per second.”

Morgan’s recitation of the capabilities of their enemy was holding everyone’s focus, even though they all should know this already.

“A Category Five-M Infinite bioform is capable of engaging an entire Laian war-dreadnought squadron, with escorts, with near certainty of victory,” she concluded. “They are the most powerful bioforms we have yet encountered outside the Astoroko Nebula.”

She tapped a command and the Five-M vanished…replaced with something else.

“This, officers, is a Category Six-A bioform,” she told them as the sphere of hyper-compressed matter appeared amidst them. “The shell was an Alavan mothership, approximately eleven hundred kilometers in diameter and manufactured of hyper-compressed matter. Still far short of theoretical neutronium but significantly tougher than any known modern armor.

“So far as the scans we have from the nebula can tell, the entirety of the shell is filled with an Infinite bioform that has consumed the interior structure—crew, power cores, everything. She is capable of generating an unknown number of independent plasma pulses, as well as extending prehensile tentacles at least a hundred thousand kilometers with enough strength to crack compressed-matter armor.

“We also expect that by the time we encounter the Six-As