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

currently showing the strategic map of the Dead Zone and the Astoroko Nebula. A dozen consoles were positioned in the main room, all facing toward the holotank but leaving enough space for the senior ops team to stand around the holotank and use it as a planning board.

One wall of the FOC was a massive screen, providing an additional shared working space for the entire team, and the opposite wall was home to six offices—for the ops officer and their top five officers and senior noncoms.

It was only slightly smaller than Defiance’s bridge had been and was designed for only two-thirds as many sentients. Right now, Morgan was the only person in the space, and she stepped up to the holotank, tapping commands to bring up the files she’d transferred over from Jean Villeneuve.

The Queen appeared in the center of the display, a small scale at the bottom corner marking the almost-incomprehensible size of the immense Infinite creature.

She was easily over a hundred thousand kilometers long; they never had got a solid-enough look to get a definite number. The Queen was the entity Morgan had communicated with—and she wasn’t even sure if the Queen was an individual or if the Infinite shared some kind of hive mind.

The latter seemed unlikely to her, but it was a scenario she had to consider.

With a sigh, she swept the hologram away, bringing up the data they had on the force that had driven off the blockading fleet. The final estimates had been broken down on the trip to the Grand Fleet.

Not that they were reassuring.

Eleven hundred—plus/minus about fifty—bioforms had put out approximately a million missiles in each salvo. Morgan wished she could break them down by category. She had to hope that there’d been a significant number of larger bioforms in there; otherwise, her estimates of the enemies’ firepower were badly off.

“They said I’d find you here,” Rin’s voice said from behind her. “Already gazing into the mind of the enemy?”

“The factories of the enemy, more like,” she told him without turning around. “A million launchers and at least five million missiles.”

She shook her head.

“According to the Laians, Builder of Tomorrows could have produced that, but it would have required a lot of raw materials, and we’re not sure if they could have accessed that much, say, raw iron in the middle of the nebula.”

“Outside my expertise,” Rin admitted. He pulled a chair over to the holotank and plopped down on it. “You don’t have to answer those questions alone, either. This space seems designed for a few more than one.”

He gestured around the FOC.

“Seventeen or so,” Morgan agreed. “I have a list. I need to expand it.”

She shook her head.

“I just… I’m worried I’m missing something, Rin,” she admitted. “And they’re basing the entire deployment of fleets around my advice and analysis. There’s only so comfortable I can be with that!”

“Would you trust someone else to do it?” he asked quietly.

That question shocked a sudden laugh from Morgan—especially because the answer was immediate and definitive in her head.

“No,” she admitted. “I take your point.”

She waved away the data on the Infinite swarm and brought back the strategic display again.

“Their main body is still here.” She tapped the Eye of the Astoroko Nebula—a rosette of newborn blue stars that screwed up hyperspace around them with gravity signatures, part of why the Infinite had never been found.

“The strength we’ve seen there is basically unimaginable,” she noted. “Even if we brought the massed battle fleets of the Core Powers into play, I’m not sure we can actually breach the Eye and destroy the Queen.

“Certainly, we can’t do it with the resources we have right now. So, it’s a holding play still, even if containment has failed.”

“It looks like the Alava held them in this region for a while,” Rin noted. “There’s some odd mining sites that the Laians took me to investigate that looked like biotech. With hindsight, I’d say they were Infinite extraction sites.

“They can access resources fast, if that site is an example,” he warned her. “But that was from Alavan times. They still dug up most of the planet over the course of a year, which suggests they were there for a year.”

Morgan grimaced.

“Short of Alavan-style chopping planets in half to get at the core, that’s still probably the fastest I’ve heard of someone exploiting most of a planet,” she pointed out. The Infinite seemed to work on the same scale as the Alava, and that meant the current galaxy was feeling badly out of scale.

“So, what do you think their next steps are?” her boyfriend asked.

Morgan tapped a command, highlighting a crescent of stars in orange.

“There are fourteen uninhabited systems within five cycles’ hyperspace flight of where we engaged the Infinite,” she told him. “None have seen significant scouting from anybody, as they have no habitable planets.”

Anything in that zone that had been habitable was gone now—and so was its star. The Laians and Wendira had been very thorough about trying to genocide each other before they’d eventually wised up.

A little, at least.

“And we’re preparing based on the assumption they’re tearing those systems apart for resources, I would guess?” Rin asked.

“Exactly. And my team needs to work out what they’re turning those resources into,” she said grimly. “We now know it took them under fifty cycles to create and deploy a hyperspace drive out of their biotech.

“I’m hoping they weren’t doing parallel development of other systems, but that means I’m expecting about the same time period before they start deploying either biotech missiles or biotech hyperfold guns.”

She shivered.

“I’m guessing missiles,” she admitted. “They haven’t seen hyperfold cannons since leaving the Nebula, so they’ll recreate the systems they’re already using and we’ve used against them. Their priorities may change after the first regular-space engagement.”

“Wouldn’t they have seen hyperfold cannons from the conspirators?” Rin asked.

“Yep, and they have samples on board Builder of Tomorrows,” Morgan agreed. “But the big fights they’ve had with real fleets have been missile duels, so I suspect we’ll