Eyes of Tomorrow (Duchy of Terra Book 9) by Glynn Stewart (best e book reader TXT) 📕

in picking officers, I recommend consulting I!Lorak’s advice. He is familiar with the intelligence teams of the various squadrons under my command.”

“Of course, sir. Thank you, sir.” Morgan paused. “We screwed up with our guess of how quickly they could develop hyper systems, sir. We could get it wrong again. We might have got the assumptions we’ve already made wrong.”

“You might,” he agreed. “In fact, you will inevitably get something wrong. That is the analysis game, Staff Captain. You provide the best information you can to me, and I make the decision based on it. Right now, I will make those decisions in company with Voice Tidirok and, shortly, Royal Commandant Ronoxosh.”

“We know the Wendira commander then?” Morgan asked.

“Oxtashah has provided some information on her brother, yes,” Tan!Shallegh told her. “The Royal castes are very much a family business, of course. I assume there is a Warrior-caste Royal Commandant with the Battle Hives as well, to act as Ronoxosh’s backup, but Ronoxosh has earned his command over thirty years of service.”

The A!Tol fluttered his tentacles in a shrug.

“After fathering some thirty thousand of the next generation, of course,” he noted. “The Wendira will always seem strange to me.”

Morgan said nothing. A!Tol reproduction involved their young eating their way out of their mother’s body—something entirely replaced with artificial gestation chambers now but still how their bodies were designed.

The A!Tol had no grounds to call anyone strange, in her mind.

“What do you expect me to do with this team, sir?” she finally asked.

“What you did for Tan!Stalla but with more resources,” he told her. “We now have some more data on the Infinite—if nothing else, an estimate of the time frame it took them to develop an organic hyperdrive.

“So, I want you to redo all of your analysis with that estimate. Run it through the computers we’ve got. Give your team access to the relevant parts of the Mesharom Archive if you must,” he concluded. “I will bear the burden for that authorization.”

“Are you certain, sir?” she asked quietly. The Mesharom Archive was a complete download of the files and library databases of a Mesharom war sphere, acquired during the Taljzi campaigns when Morgan herself had led a rescue mission into a fleet wrecked in a Taljzi trap.

That the Imperium possessed the Archive was one of its most closely guarded secrets. Even Rin, who had every scrap of data regarding the Alava from the Archive stored in a computer chip implanted at the base of his spine, did not know the origin of that information.

“Don’t tell them where the data comes from,” Tan!Shallegh said with a skin-flushing chuckle. “But the Alavan portions, the ones Dr. Dunst has access to, may be useful for your team. I would rather give them too much and hold them to higher security standards later than not give them enough to make the right judgments.

“This enemy is…” The Fleet Lord trailed off. “‘They come from strange waters bearing strange weapons and we know not their intent.’”

Morgan didn’t know the words, but she recognized it as a quote of some kind.

“An outside-context problem,” she murmured. “That’s what it was called in my training for the Duchy of Terra Militia. A threat we couldn’t anticipate because we didn’t have the data. The Taljzi were an outside-context problem, but the Infinite are…even more so.”

“Exactly, Staff Captain. I look to you to provide the context,” he told her. “I’ve seen the estimate of the capabilities of the X-type bioforms, Casimir. I want you to validate those estimates with a new team—and then I want you to tell me how long it's going to be before I should expect to face an enemy with every weapon I have mounted on a warship the size of a planet.”

“I still believe, sir, that they are limited in their ability to update the larger bioforms beyond implanting hardware on the surface,” Morgan noted. “That leaves the possibilities of Category One bioforms serving as symbiotic systems on the larger bioforms but does limit how much firepower they can truly bring to bear.”

“And that, Captain Casimir, is exactly the analysis and breakdown we need,” he told her. “I need to know the threat level, because right now? Right now, I am assuming the threat level is functionally infinite, and I can’t fight that.”

The phrasing was probably even intentional, and Morgan bowed her head in acknowledgement of Tan!Shallegh’s point.

“Resources, timelines, logic and tactics,” she murmured. “We’ll break them all down as best as we can. I should probably get started.”

“Yes,” the Fleet Lord agreed. “Take the coffee with you,” he noted, indicating Morgan’s barely touched cup. “I have a noncom arriving in a few thousandth-cycles to take you to your new office.

“Whatever you need for your team, talk to my chief of staff, !Pana,” he continued. “We will make it happen. Knowledge is the greatest weapon against all foes but the sea, Captain.”

Morgan nodded her acknowledgement—but her mind finished the old A!Tol saying.

Knowledge is the greatest weapon against all foes but the sea—and the sea cannot be defeated.

The noncom left Morgan alone in her new working space, and she took a few moments to just absorb what she had to work with. The Fleet Operations Center wasn’t a portion of an Imperial capital ship where she’d spent a lot of time before—she’d been due for a tour as a task force operations officer before she was promoted to flag rank, but she hadn’t held the role yet.

The FOC supported the flag bridge by providing a separate space for the operations officer to stuff the team of analysts and technicians that backed them up. Often, it was little more than a glorified version of the conference room she’d run her Infinite team out of aboard Jean Villeneuve.

Ashmore had been making full use of Villeneuve’s FOC. Here, though, Tan!Shallegh’s operations officer was aboard a different ship entirely, which left the ridiculously well-equipped space for Morgan’s new special analysis team.

It was an oval room anchored on a four-meter-long holotank,