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

support staff. Consoles ringed the holotank and the Lord’s seat, all facing toward the flag officer to allow ease of communication.

Morgan had seen the flag decks of a dozen different Bellerophons of various different iterations. She’d served aboard the original Bellerophon at the start of the war with the Taljzi before the battleship’s destruction.

But she had never before, in the seventeen years of her career, walked onto a flag deck that was hers. Morgan Casimir commanded this division and the task group that would be assembled around it over the next few days.

That didn’t feel quite real.

“What’s the division’s status?” she asked Rogers as she approached the main hologram. There were no warning icons on the display, so that meant things were acceptable—but acceptable wasn’t the same as ready for a suicide mission.

“All four ships are taking aboard last-minute supplies and munitions,” Rogers told her. “First thing I ordered was a series of tests on the stealth systems. We don’t want to bring them up fully while we’re still around the combined fleets, but we want to know if we’re going to have trouble.”

“Any sign of it so far?” Morgan asked.

“They’ve passed power and stress testing so far,” her chief of staff said. “We’re not going to be able to test them for real until we’re in quieter space, but my understanding is that they should function even better than the Laian systems they’re based on.”

Morgan chuckled.

“And how much other tech is built into the systems?” she asked. “I didn’t think Laians could stealth anything over five megatons.”

“Apparently, it’s just really expensive to build,” Rogers said. “That’s a question for Koumans more than me right now. I’m not as caught up as I’d like to be.”

“Who is?” Morgan asked. “I’m assuming we have both Taljzi and…Dragon tech built into the stealth system?”

“That’s my understanding, but I haven’t had a chance to review the reports yet,” Rogers repeated.

Dragon tech was systems based on the Mesharom Archive: the data Morgan had retrieved from a wrecked war sphere along with the ship’s crew. Officially, it had been done without the Mesharom’s knowledge, and the Mesharom Conclave would probably be pissed if they found out the Imperium had it.

Unofficially, the commander of the ship had given them his access codes in exchange for the rescue of the survivors of the Mesharom fleet. Morgan suspected the blind eye the Mesharom were turning to the Imperium’s recent tech programs was at least partially intentional.

She turned her attention back to the holograms, touching commands as she refamiliarized herself with the flag deck controls. Her training on the software was years old. In the normal course of events, a promotion to flag rank would have come with a refresher course on all of these systems—and probably some high-level academy training around tactics and strategy, too.

Right now, she was being given the command without any prep at all—and told to go blow up a nebula.

“Once we confirm who our Wendira and Laian officers are going to be, I want an all-captains meeting scheduled ASAP,” Morgan told Rogers. “I’ll meet the squadron commanders first, but we’ll need to be moving on the main meeting as well.

“We have three cycles, Bethany,” she said quietly. “That’s when the Wendira are leaving, and our special task group is expected to use their departure as cover.”

“Who are we hiding our mission from, sir?” Rogers asked. “I mean, it’s not like the Infinite are watching us.”

“That we know of,” Morgan replied. “That we know of, Staff Captain.”

Much of the secrecy, though, was that they were operating out of the middle of the Dead Zone, where a hundred stars had been murdered with the very weapons her task group was tasked to deploy.

Standing among the wreckage of dead stars, no one wanted to admit they’d ordered more stars killed.

Chapter Forty-One

Somehow, Rin wasn’t entirely surprised to be summoned to a meeting with Tan!Shallegh at the end of the ship’s day-cycle. The Wendira were in possession of an asset of potentially immense value, but they didn’t know what to do with it.

The Imperials did, but Rin would need a team and to call on expertise from people who weren’t there. Hyperfold and starcom communications could quickly get him a full report on how the Taljzi-modified Dyson swarm was shut down—but he couldn’t ask for it without a reason.

Oxtashah and Tan!Shallegh were the only people in the Fleet Lord’s office when Rin arrived. The door slid shut behind him—and then a second set of security doors, ones he hadn’t realized the space even had, slid shut over those.

“Take a seat, Dr. Dunst,” Tan!Shallegh told him. “At Princess Oxtashah’s request, this room is now sealed against any and all surveillance. No one, aboard Va!Tola or not, can hear or see anything going on in here.”

The A!Tol leveled his eyes, always pitch-black, on Oxtashah as greens and blues—determination and curiosity—flickered across his skin.

“You have requested Dr. Dunst and absolute privacy, Princess Oxtashah,” he noted. “This is, I must admit, a strange set of requests. I hope that you can make matters clear in short order.”

“I can,” she promised. She laid a portable holoprojector on Tan!Shallegh’s desk, and the same image she’d shown Rin earlier appeared in the middle of the room. The Dyson swarm circled its star in quiet certainty, the multilayer creation shedding light that went surprisingly well with the art around the room.

“A stellar swarm,” Tan!Shallegh noted. “Not, I am guessing, the one near Arjtal.”

“No,” Oxtashah agreed. “This one is in the Dead Zone, Fleet Lord Tan!Shallegh, some thirty light-years from the Astoroko Nebula. Lost to the records the Mesharom possessed, it remained intact as time and looters stripped the systems and facilities it fed power to.

“It is almost entirely inactive, and we have hesitated to do more than study it for the time we have been aware of its existence,” she told them. “But my understanding is that the Taljzi converted a similar energy-capture swarm into a modified Alavan teleporter cannon and used it to destroy a