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

fiddling with a device and laid it down as he looked at her. Rin wasn’t an expert by any means, but he was reasonably sure it was a privacy generator that meant Va!Tola’s crew couldn’t see what was going on.

“Dr. Dunst, I appreciate you meeting with me,” she told him. “I understand that I have no real call on your time or expertise except through the alliance with your government—an alliance that is…”

“Struggling?” he suggested drily.

“No,” she said. “Difficult, yes. But I do not believe the alliance itself is in danger, which is actually both promising and reassuring. The Infinite have done us a favor, even as they threaten destruction.”

“A common enemy often brings together old foes,” Rin agreed. “How may I assist you, Princess Oxtashah?”

“I have questions, Dr. Dunst, questions I know you know the answer to,” she said calmly. “I do not know if you feel you can answer them, but I know you know the answers.”

That was never reassuring. Rin tested the water carefully in lieu of answering. It wasn’t as bad as he’d been afraid of—whoever had brought it in had probably been aware of both the temperature of the room and the timeline before it was going to be drunk. There was ice in the bottle still.

“Ask,” he suggested. “I know many things I am not permitted to share even with my fellow Imperials, let alone the representatives of an ally who was recently an enemy.”

She chittered her wings in amusement.

“The Taljzi Campaigns, Dr. Dunst,” she said calmly. “A Mesharom battle fleet, dozens of war spheres, joined the Imperium to campaign against an enemy in possession of the technology of Those Who Came Before.

“And yet none of the reports that had spread from your Imperium, none of the stories of the battles and victories, even seared of facts as they are, even mention the war spheres,” she noted. “A mighty fleet, one that outmassed and outgunned any Core Power, just…disappeared.

“What happened, Dr. Dunst?”

Rin swallowed an ice cube and coughed against the chill running down his throat. He did know the answer to what she was asking—it had been an Alavan artifact the Taljzi had turned against the Mesharom—but she was correct in her first guess.

He couldn’t answer that question.

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” he said quietly. “Even if I knew…”

“You know,” Oxtashah said calmly. “But you are bound by oath. I understand that. But there are rumors that have reached me about what happened. That an artifact of Those Who Came Before served as a deadly trap that destroyed the Mesharom, smashing their greatest fleet like it was a toy.”

“I can’t speak to those rumors,” Rin said. “I’m not sure I can help you.”

“Please, Dr. Dunst, I have more than merely a desire to push the boundaries of your oaths,” Oxtashah told him. “In fact, I must ask if I may have your oath—and if you will honor a promise of secrecy to me as thoroughly as your promise to your Empress.”

Rin hesitated. That was a dangerous promise to make.

“So long as it does not threaten the Imperium, I will keep secret what you ask me to keep secret,” he finally said.

“More than sufficient, I think,” Oxtashah said. For a moment, the office was silent, and Rin wondered what the hell was going on.

Then a hologram appeared in the air above them. The image was both familiar and unfamiliar, and he sucked in a breath of shocked surprise as he studied the hologram.

The star was a red giant, a grossly expanded former main-sequence star that had either begun to run low on fuel or been damaged by some failure of advanced technology. The presence of the outer layers of an Alavan Dyson Swarm suggested the latter, the orbiting plates blocking much of the view of the trapped star.

The star was wrong, and even the Swarm was slightly different from the one out near the Taljzi, but it was the same style of massive Alavan artifact that the Taljzi had turned on the Mesharom.

“Do you know what this is, Dr. Dunst?” Oxtashah asked.

“I think so,” he said quietly.

“But you can’t tell me, can you?” she said. She chittered in amusement again. “So, I will tell you. This is a stellar-energy-capture swarm built by Those Who Came Before, designed to send energy via a modification of their teleporter systems to facilities in several surrounding star systems.”

Her wings flickered in a shrug.

“Fate, time and the Mesharom obliterated the facilities this swarm supported,” she noted. “But somehow, they missed the swarm itself. My people discovered it while surveying the wreckage of the Dead Zone for fleet base locations after the War of Mistakes.

“We have studied it for centuries and we hesitate to do more than touch it,” she admitted. “But I understand, from the rumors I have heard, that the Taljzi turned a stellar-capture swarm into some kind of superweapon and destroyed a Mesharom battle fleet.

“A weapon that could destroy thirty Mesharom war spheres could perhaps turn the tide against the Infinite, could it not?” she asked. “We do not know what was done to the swarm by Arjtal. We cannot duplicate it.

“But we have a stellar-capture swarm, Dr. Dunst, which leaves me with a question for you that I hope you will feel able to answer.

“Do you believe that you can duplicate the Taljzi weapon, given a swarm in this state of disrepair?”

Rin was silent for a while. He wasn’t sure how much time—enough that he worried about how Oxtashah was going to take it—passed before he finally sighed and spread his hands.

“I can tell you that the weapon had many limitations,” he said quietly. “I’m not sure it would be the game changer you seem to think it would be. I can also say that I don’t have the skill to replicate what was done alone.

“But…it is possible that I could assemble a team from the Grand Fleet who might.”

He was reasonably sure that Kelly Lawrence was somewhere on the fleet, for example. His former cyber-archaeologist