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

In Skiefail, they were not.

As Zokalatan had approached her destination, additional equipment had been provided to the Imperial detachment—including a full holographic setup linked to the star hive’s sensors.

Rin had beaten Lawrence to forbidding any connection of the sensors to their portable computer by about two and a half seconds. The molycirc core—a chandelier-esque structure of crystalline silicon two meters across and three high—was loaded with critical information for their work. Some of that information was probably unknown to the Wendira.

They weren’t going to risk its corruption or theft, even to feed visual data on the swarm into it. All of that data would be recorded, placed on hard-data mediums, sanitized with handheld devices and only then connected to the portable core.

But for now, the sensor link was giving the team a gods’-eye view of the star system they were going to be working in for the next few five-cycles at least—and it was empty.

Every world, every asteroid, every meteorite had been scooped up by Alavan construction ships and fed into immense refineries. If Skiefail was anything like the Dyson swarm in Taljzi space, a significant portion of a second star system had been disassembled to provide raw materials as well.

The Alava had never thought small.

Eventually, even the nerve-wracking nature of the outer system’s emptiness couldn’t pull their attention away from the heart of the problem. Skiefail itself was a bloated wreck of a star, a yellow dwarf forced to twice its original size by failures of the Dyson swarm’s systems.

“I make it about seven thousand intact stations,” Mok observed. “That’s, what, thirty percent survival?”

“Around there, assuming it’s the same as the one we have Archive files on,” Lawrence agreed.

Rin’s subordinates didn’t know the source of the Archive files on the Dyson swarms—but they did know that the Archive included a detailed diagram of an intact Alavan Dyson swarm. That was their baseline for all of this.

“That’s slightly lower than the Taljzi swarm, right?” he asked. “That was thirty-five percent?”

“Yeah,” Lawrence confirmed. “Ten thousand intact or partial platforms. What a goddamn mess that was. Only some of them actually matter, though,” she reminded everyone. “The rest were glorified solar panels, supposed to feed power to the central transmitters by microwave beam.”

“We care about the control center and the teleporters, right,” Rin agreed.

He took control of a portion of the hologram, zooming in on a selection of the platforms. He stared at the space stations for several seconds and shook his head.

“Finding those in this is going to suck, isn’t it?” he asked.

“I’m hoping that the Wendira have cataloged the existing platforms while they’ve studied it,” Lawrence told him. “The primary matter-transfer control center should be one of the larger remaining stations—and the teleporters are visually distinct from the collectors.

“We need a control center, a plasma collector and a teleporter station,” she concluded. “The teleporter stations are most likely to have self-vaporized at some point. The plasma collectors are mostly likely to have been eaten by the star’s expansion…and the Archive diagram says there were only three control centers in the first place.

“So, when do we get access to their files again, Professor?” she asked Rin.

“Once we’re on their support station. None of their data even goes aboard a ship that could leave Skiefail without the Queens’ explicit sign-off.”

“Paranoid. Great.” Lawrence shook her head. “What was our guarantee that they’d let us go when we were done?”

“Nobody wants a three-way war, Kelly,” Rin reassured her. “They don’t want to fight the Infinite and the Imperium.”

“Right. Even after we build them a superweapon,” she said drily. “I’m sure everything will be fine.”

“If nothing else, we’re going to make sure we hold the key to that superweapon,” Rin promised. “I think we’re all on the same page on that point!”

Transferring all of their gear over to the Wendira base station was at least straightforward. Even the molycirc computer core had been designed for portability. It all packed up, and helpful Wendira Drones hauled it all onto the cargo shuttle put aside for them.

“It’s weird,” Lawrence murmured as the shuttle blasted clear of Zokalatan. “Anyone else get the impression that the crew doesn’t even know where they are?”

“I’m actually certain they don’t,” Rin admitted. “From what Oxtashah told me, they’re keeping this whole mission entirely under wraps. The pilot flying us is probably one of the few crew members to know what’s going on.”

“So weird,” Lawrence repeated. “And nerves-inducing.”

“Well, it’s not our problem,” Rin countered. “Eyes front, Commander Lawrence. Our objective awaits.”

The swarm grew larger as the shuttle zipped toward it at half the speed of light. If they’d been able to look directly at the star, Rin suspected that the presence of the platforms would be easily visible to the naked eye now.

Of course, looking directly at a star was a terrible idea, and he was looking at a scanner screen instead.

“We’re two minutes out,” he told his people. “Looks like our destination is a parasite station attached to one of the bigger platforms.” He paused. “Lawrence, does that platform look like what I think it is?”

The cyber-archaeologist was right at his shoulder a moment later, and he heard her sigh in relief.

“If you think that it’s one of the matter-transfer control centers, you are correct,” she told him. “That little baby controlled the transmission of twenty-eight percent of this star’s power output to target systems within fifty light-years.

“The swarm had three of these platforms, each controlling four primary and four secondary teleporter stations. The stations aren’t designed for independent control, so while we’ll need to rig up systems to get the teleporters to work at all, we still need this girl to give them instructions.”

“And I’m guessing her computers are as fucked as every other Alavan computer out there?” Rin asked.

“Yup. The Taljzi had interface modules that allowed the core Alavan operating system to link in to the computer cores they provided, basically rebooting the software on hybrid hardware,” she told him. “That’s going to