Relics of Eternity (Duchy of Terra Book 7) by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart [Stewart, Glynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faolan's Pen Publishing
Published: 2020-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Emergence.”

If someone dropped a pin on Defiance’s bridge, Morgan suspected it would have been stopped in midair by the tension before it was heard in the silence. The previous jaunt out of hyperspace to report that they were a cycle out from D-L-T-Three had been calm enough, but data from several light-years away wasn’t going to tell them anything.

“Portal locus confirmed; we are sixty-three light-minutes from K-Seven-Seven-D-L-T-Three,” El-Amin reported, his voice calm. “Holding position for further orders.”

“Nguyen, what do we see?” Morgan said.

They had some limited data on the physical geography from long-range scans from Kosha, but that data was almost two decades old due to the distance. They knew that D-L-T-Three was a large F-sequence star with fourteen planets, six of them gas giants and one in the habitable zone.

D-L-T-Three-Delta had a high chance of being a good candidate for human colonization, depending on its atmosphere and surface water. Before the current mess, it had been scheduled for a survey in around two long-cycles.

“I’m not detecting any obvious artificial structures or energy signatures,” Nguyen reported after a few seconds. “No megastructures, no secret colonies.”

“Would an inactive megastructure be easily discerned at this distance?” Dunst asked.

“You tell me, Dr. Dunst,” Nguyen replied. “Most of my data suggests that they should be.”

Given the archeologist’s role on this mission, Morgan had stuck him in the bridge’s solitary observer chair. She’d served on ships with an entire peanut gallery, designed with the thought of carrying diplomats or flag officers who weren’t in immediate command.

Like most of Defiance’s compromises, it was another way in which she was designed as a pure weapons platform. The survey work Morgan was supposed to be doing out there was one of the few non-conflict roles the Armored Dream class was capable of.

In the long run, she suspected that limitation would be the doom of the class. Even Armored Dream wasn’t built along the most practical lines, with the wing-arches projected from her core hull, but the A!Tol required multiple functions to go with the form of their ships.

A cruiser that could not act as a flagship or a diplomatic vessel was eventually going to be replaced by a ship that could. For now, however, the Imperium still needed the maximum number of HSM launchers in the fleet.

“Most of them should be,” Dunst agreed. “Would we detect something like the shipyard ring from the Taljzi Campaigns, though?”

That had been a massive space station wrapped around an entire super-Jovian gas giant, using the station for fuel and a planet-carving mining operation in a nearby star system for raw materials.

“Fifty-fifty,” Nguyen admitted. “It depends on power levels, of course.” She turned her attention back to Morgan.

“We’re getting more refined data every second,” she told her boss. “But I’m not seeing any power signatures or any sign of Serene Guidance.”

“I wouldn’t expect to see much of Commander Isk’s ship until we get much closer,” Morgan admitted. “But nothing at all?”

That seemed unlikely.

“Nothing we can detect from over a light-hour away,” Nguyen corrected.

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