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

“Portal in thirty seconds.”

She’d taken the mission. There was only so much self-reflection she could do over its morality.

“Task group will transit as instructed,” she ordered calmly.

The gray void of hyperspace washed over Morgan’s command as they ever-so-slowly drifted away from the Wendira fleet. Once the last of her ships were clear of the visibility sphere of the rest of the fleet, she breathed a small sigh of relief.

They were most vulnerable to someone asking weird questions while they were inside the distance where people could see them as more than a dot on an anomaly scanner.

And as for those hyperspace anomalies…

“Do we have solid communication links?” Morgan asked.

“Directed laser links established with all ships,” her new communications officer, an A!Tol named Lo!ko, confirmed. “Should be solid through the stealth fields.”

“Distance to the nearest Wendira ship?”

“Five hundred thousand kilometers and rising,” Rogers reported. “What are you thinking?”

“We’re not scheduled to go into stealth for another hundredth-cycle, but…pass the orders,” Morgan said. “The sooner we go dark, the sooner we get to the Astoroko Nebula and the sooner we can end this nightmare.”

“Understood. Updated orders being distributed,” Lo!ko replied. “Standing by for your command.”

“Let me know when all ships have confirmed receipt,” Morgan ordered. “Let’s not risk a lone trailer.”

A few seconds passed by as messages flickered along beams of coherent light.

“All ships have warmed up their stealth generators and are waiting for your command,” Rogers finally reported. “Timing sequencing will be tight—we have a full quarter-second delay on the farthest units.

“Set a shared time for execution of thirty seconds from my mark,” Morgan replied. “Simultaneous execution.

“Lo!ko—stand by to transmit. The mark is…now.”

“Time stamp recorded, orders transmitted,” the A!Tol replied.

Seconds ticked away. There was no noticeable sensation when Odysseus’s stealth field activated, wrapping all of her signatures—even the hyperspace anomaly signature—in a blanket of technological wizardry.

The main display was clear on the moment when everyone else activated their stealth fields. The entire task group vanished as one. The delay on seeing the farther units vanish was barely noticeable, but it still marked that the ships had actually stealthed simultaneously.

Over the course of the following seconds, the ships reappeared on Odysseus’s tactical plot as the laser links stabilized.

“Telemetry links holding with all units,” Lo!ko reported. “Full communication maintained.”

“Understood. Everyone has the course?” Morgan asked, confirming for the last time.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then let’s be about it.”

Chapter Forty-Five

The hardest thing to get used to aboard the Wendira ship was the gravity. Rin was used to adjusting to gravity swings and atmospheric difference, but they were usually relatively small. No species in the A!Tol Imperium breathed less than nineteen percent oxygen or came from a planet with a gravity of less than ninety percent of Earth’s.

The actual standard atmosphere mix and gravity set for most multispecies space facilities in the Imperium was twenty-three percent oxygen and point-nine-seven gravities. Laian facilities were at slightly higher oxygen and gravity than Imperial ones.

The star hive Zokalatan—Ambitious Sword, in English—was set at twenty-one percent oxygen and point-eight gravities. The air was similar to the average on Earth, if denser and damply humid in near-exact contrast to the Laian ships Rin had visited, but the dramatically reduced gravity took getting used to.

“Dense atmosphere and low gravity,” Lawrence observed as they watched one of their hosts actually fly across a drop that plunged deep into the ship. “I think I always assumed their wings were vestigial.”

“Warriors’ wings are,” one of their companions noted. The Imperials had been given a set of rooms that looked out over the carrier’s central launch tube, a twenty-meter-wide column that seemed to run the full height of the ship.

The speaker, Abraxis Mok, was a Tosumi doctor and physicist. He’d acted as medic on the expedition to the Dyson swarm near Arjtal while also working as part of the team itself—a dual role the four-armed avian had taken on a dozen expeditions before that and was taking on this mission.

“The Warriors make up for it with armor that gives them flight capabilities,” Mok continued. “But Workers and Royals can both fly in their natural environment. Drones and Warriors, for whatever evolutionary reason, cannot. A trade for proportionally more-powerful muscles in general, I suspect.”

“Any problems with our hosts?” Rin asked. Lawrence and Mok were the senior members of his team, as much as his team was standing on any kind of hierarchy. Everyone with Rin was either military or military-adjacent, but they were also all scientists.

“I’ll admit I’d like to adjust the atmosphere mix in our quarters, but it sounds like that isn’t possible,” Mok told him. “My species finds this level of oxygen concentration…difficult.”

“It’s what humans are used to, but that doesn’t make it fun for you,” Rin agreed. “Have we asked?”

“I have, and they were not promising,” the doctor told him. “I am not certain the crew is entirely clear on why we are even aboard, let alone how helpful they should be to us.”

“I guarantee you, Abraxis, that the crew has no idea why we are aboard,” Rin warned. “And we are not to change that. Zokalatan has not yet diverted from the main fleet, but I suspect we will see significant lockdown of external-sensor availability once we do.

“I doubt even the crew of Princess Oxtashah’s personal ship know about our destination. That’s going to cause some complications.”

“How much of all of this are we keeping secret?” Lawrence asked.

“We have full authority to share everything we learn with the Imperial Institute and Tan!Shallegh,” Rin told them. “The Imperium has been asked to keep this all classified, but we are not restricted in what we share with the people we have authorized on our side.

“In exchange for that, we have to try not to expose any unnecessary information to unbriefed Wendira. They are to control information procedures on their side,” he concluded. “It’s a fair deal, even if it means the people responsible for feeding and housing us have no idea what we’re doing here.”

“This was pitched to me as the