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

company and taken over, but I also wanted to follow in the Duchess’s footsteps.” She shrugged. “I joined the Militia, got dragged into the Taljzi Campaign, and then when the Navy took over, they asked me to step across to provide my experience.

“A few long-cycles later and here we are.” She gestured around them, taking in the warship and the task group it led. “And, well—like my father, I’ve got a few centuries left to run a full Navy career and go into business.

“If I can do good serving the Imperium now, it’s worth it.”

The stewards arrived to sweep away the dishes and leave behind glasses of wine—four of them, as Indiri processed Terran alcohol safely, if not necessarily in the same way as humans.

“House Tal is mostly shipbuilders,” Razh Tal noted as the four women relaxed. “Joining the Navy isn’t discouraged, but making a career of it is. Having military knowledge is handy when designing and building warships, but my House generally prefers to make money, not war.

“I joined for the experience toward my family’s work and, well…I ended up in the right place at the right time and led an emergency rescue team that saved sixteen hundred lives on a civilian liner.

“After that, I decided I could do more good in an Imperial uniform than in an engineer’s pond.”

Rogers laughed.

“Yeah, I hear you there,” she told the Indiri. “As one of the first kids born on the new colonies, there was a bit of pressure to ‘show the flag’ by signing up for the military, but none of us were really planning on staying.

“I never had quite so dramatic a sign that I was in the right place as saving a passenger ship!” She toasted Tal. “I found the service suited me, though, so here I am.”

Morgan leaned back in her chair and half-toasted, half-saluted her chief of staff.

“And then you got saddled with me,” she noted, carefully shifting the conversation so that Koumans wouldn’t have to answer the implicit question if she didn’t want to. She had access to the confidential portions of the woman’s file, after all, and some people were more sensitive about certain things than others.

“I could have ended up with worse commanders,” Rogers replied. “Captain, what brought you into the service?”

Morgan’s attempt to get Koumans out of the question had clearly failed. Fortunately, the Captain didn’t look particularly bothered. She shrugged.

“I was nineteen and dumb,” she admitted. “My partner and I wanted a baby, and I didn’t want to use a tube. So, I enlisted to get Imperial healthcare, which ran me to the front of the line for the womb-growth procedure.”

Koumans shook her head with the half-bitter chuckle of old foolishness.

“Then, of course, I discovered that while I had been growing a womb and going through basic training at the same time, my partner had been fucking around and had got my best friend pregnant,” she said. “So, when the offer to attend the Academy on A!To for officer’s training instead of enlisting came up, I flipped him the bird and took it.”

“I’m…not even sure how intensive that procedure is,” Rogers said after a long moment. “But I can’t imagine doing that while going through basic training is any fun.”

“It is not,” Koumans agreed genially. “My ex was an asshole. The Imperium is my family now, and I married the Navy. I’m busy enough here!”

“Aren’t we all,” Morgan murmured. “Aren’t we all.”

A dark pall descended over the meeting as they considered their mission.

“Honestly, sir. What are our chances?” Koumans finally asked.

“Fifty-fifty,” Morgan admitted calmly. “We don’t know for sure that we can actually stealth past the Infinite—that’s why we brought four HSM-equipped battleships. The hope is that if stealth fails, we can snipe any Infinite before they can report in.

“But we also don’t know what their FTL communications look like. They could be better than ours. They could be nonexistent. We don’t know—so even the sniping plan is risky.

“The truth is,” Morgan reminded them all, “that if we lose stealth, we are doomed. We have a small chance of being able to hide and sneak out carefully, but most likely, failure will end us all.”

“My math says that so long as we blow at least a couple of the stars in the rosette, the effects will keep the Infinite contained for at least half a long-cycle,” Rogers pointed out. “As long as we get in, we can make a difference.”

“If it comes down to that, none of this fleet will be going home,” Morgan said quietly. “I’ll take that option if I have no choice—it’s pretty obvious that even trading this entire fleet for only ninety cycles of time is entirely worth it—but I would very much prefer to bring everyone back.

“Imperial. Laian. Wendira.” She shook her head. “Everybody lives, if I can make that happen.”

“Except the Infinite,” Koumans murmured. “I wish they’d talk to us.”

“The only communication we’ve had with them is demands and missiles,” Morgan said. “They haven’t exactly been making a warm and fuzzy impression on the Imperium.”

The room was silent, and Morgan finished her wine with a sigh.

“In the end, our orders are clear. Our weaknesses are clear. Our strengths, thankfully, are clear. We know ourselves, though we don’t really know our enemy. That’s enough for fifty-fifty, so far as I read Sun Tzu.”

And it had to be enough.

Chapter Forty-Seven

The Skiefail System was disturbing in its emptiness.

Rin Dunst had lost count of the individual star systems he’d visited in his life. It was easy to become blasé about the sheer scale and size of a solar system when you traveled between six of them in any given year. Easy to forget that any given inhabited planet probably contained more cultural diversity than every city and spaceport he’d seen combined.

But he knew what a solar system should look like. There should be asteroids and planets and gas giants. The proportions and orders should vary based on a billion factors over the life of the star system, but those