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

“Which will basically be, what, miniature bioforms?”

“Most likely,” she said. She shook her head. “I need to pull that team together and sit down and have this conversation with them. Can you see if you’ll be available? We’re clearing them for everything we know about the Alava, and I’d like you to brief them.”

She heard him inhale and then release a long sigh.

“That could take a while,” he admitted with a chuckle. “But I think I know what’ll be relevant. I’ll be here when you need me, Morgan. I hope what I know can help.”

“So do I,” she said. “Because I’d love it if we found an easy answer to this mess—because I’m not sure I see a solution once they start moving Category Sixes and Sevens out of the nebula!”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Despite his assorted commitments, Rin still managed to find time to steal moments in the massive superbattleship’s observation domes and breathe. Dragging Morgan along on those moments was harder, but he managed it.

His reward was to watch the tightly wound blonde slightly—ever so slightly—relax a bit as she looked out at the gas giant “beneath” Va!Tola. The lights of the ships and the Tohrohsail Fleet Base detracted slightly from the calming appearance, but the gas giant itself was quite pretty.

“My team is ready,” she said after several minutes. “I’m going to hold you to that briefing, if we have time.”

“I haven’t heard much news of significance,” he told her. “Things are quiet for now.”

“Which makes me nervous as well.” She shook her head at him. “We’re in position to see them move, so why haven’t we seen them move?”

“You’re supposed to be relaxing,” Rin countered. He was enough of a workaholic himself to recognize that Morgan was overdoing it, but even as her lover, he only had so much clout to get the woman to relax.

“I’m also supposed to have a briefing for the combined command staff in two cycles, once the Wendira arrive,” Morgan replied. “One that we’re going to base our war strategy off of for the next few weeks at least.”

“And you’ll be better prepared to draft and give that briefing if you rest once in a while,” Rin told her. They were alone in the observation dome at the moment, though that probably wouldn’t last. Enough of the crew would swing through on a given work shift to make the privacy with the view rare and precious.

“Fair,” she conceded to his point, but he could tell that she was still thinking away.

“I was hoping the planet would be more successful at distracting you than I am,” Rin told her with a smile. “It is much prettier, after all.”

She turned away from the big window to look at him and shook her head. Rin figured she knew he wasn’t particularly bothered by his looks or weight—but it was hard to argue that the red, green and blue gas giant wasn’t absolutely gorgeous.

“You do better than you give yourself credit for,” she said anyway. “Even when you’re being serious, not self-deprecating.”

She gave him an exaggerated leer.

“And besides, what follows me looking at you is very distracting and relaxing,” she murmured.

The train of thought was interrupted by the dome door opening, revealing a pair of black-armored Wendira Warrior caste. They swept the room with multi-faceted eyes, their gazes rested on Morgan and Rin for a few moments, then they withdrew.

Rin was about to wonder what had happened when Oxtashah stepped through the door the Warriors had just checked, the Wendira Royal folding her wings in closely to fit through the portal.

“Ah, Dr. Dunst, Captain Casimir,” Oxtashah greeted them. “Are you also here to watch the arrival?”

“Is it time?” Morgan asked while Rin was still processing what the Wendira had said. “It’s not normally so predictable.”

“The first scouts arrived a few moments ago,” Oxtashah said. “We needed to be certain that there was a clear section for the Battle Hives to emerge into. I believe… Yes, there.”

She pointed a pincer at a section of space visible past the gas giant, well beyond where Rin figured most of the ships would be visible even as dots.

While the next steps for everything in Tohrohsail were predicated on the arrival of the Wendira ships, he hadn’t actually paid that much attention to when the three Battle Hives were due to arrive. It made sense, of course, that Oxtashah had been.

“I believed it would be worth watching,” the Wendira Princess noted. “I do not believe that fleets of my people and the Laians of such size have ever shared a system without a major battle.

“It is a first—and perhaps a promising one, one that speaks to a new era for both our species and those around us.”

It started with a tiny blue spark. To Rin’s surprise, Morgan tapped on the glass of the observation dome, and the area they were looking at suddenly expanded as concealed optics and screens zoomed in at a command sequence he hadn’t known.

The tiny blue spark was just one portal, maybe a dozen kilometers across. It was joined by others. First a handful. Then dozens. Then immense portals, a thousand kilometers across, that unleashed entire star hive carrier groups.

They had enough zoom to watch the ships emerge in their delicate-seeming formations, the ten-million-ton star shields leading the way in their hundreds. The star hives themselves were the center point, smooth pyramid-like shapes multiple kilometers high, arranged into formations of fives surrounded by star shield battleships.

More lights glinted around the capital ships, smaller vessels invisible even at this scale.

“Two hundred and fifty star hives, twelve hundred star shields, and nine hundred lighter escorts,” Oxtashah said softly. “Three Battle Hives of the Wendira, to stand alongside our ancient foes against these Infinite.

“They should never have picked this fight.”

Rin kept his peace. He wasn’t entirely sure the Infinite, trapped as they were in the Eye, had really had a choice. As soon as someone had shown up with a