Ten Thousand Fleets Chapter 18: 18. The Swarm

Read chapter 18 of Ten Thousand Fleets by DavidNiemitz on NovelPedia.

18. The Swarm Auctoritas Station, Terra Imperium Stellarum September 25, 2847 Altair Janus Solaris, twenty-sixth emperor of the Imperium Stellarum, left a pair of imperial guards outside the airlock and stepped into the situation room on Auctoritus Station, to find it already awhirl with activity. At the center of the room, a projected, holographic map of the Imperium hovered over the recessed floor, just above eye level. Twenty systems, extending out from Terra at the center of the map in an uneven explosion of blue light, encompassed twenty-seven settled worlds, three Alu’kan ringworlds built around stars which should never have supported life, four Torean ark-fleets, and and dozens of moons, asteroid mining bases, orbital stations and shipyards. Those lights, Altair knew, represented nearly seventy billion sapient lives. On the upper edge of the map, five systems shone cerulean, shaded with just enough green to let an observer pick them out from the rest of the Imperium at a glance. Those were the worlds of the LeShaii, the most recent species to join the Imperium, and the reason, Altair knew, that he’d been called to the situation room. But before addressing the current crisis, he couldn’t help but let his eyes drift to the wedge of red light that cut toward the heart of the Imperium, ending just thirty-one light years from Terra at Wolf 1069. The Singularity. The very sight of it stuck in his craw: five breakaway systems whose continued existence destabilized the very foundations of the realm his ancestors had spent centuries building. Before his thoughts could twist his lip in that long-held, simmering anger, Altair smoothed his face and turned toward the small group of men and women who awaited him. “My apologies for interrupting your day, Emperor,” Admiral Jack Nakagami began, stepping forward to offer a hand to his liege. Nakagami, despite the best telomere therapy the Imperium’s doctors and gene therapists could devise, was showing his age. The son of a Mikaboshi-born mother and a spacer father, Altair knew that he’d spent a miserable childhood enduring the scorn of the Nightside upper class for his mixed heritage. It had driven the man off-world and into fleet, and the Imperium couldn’t have been more fortunate. Without Nakagami’s leadership during the Singularity War, there might not even be an emperor. Altair not only took Nakagami’s hand in his own, he reached around with his left hand to pat his old friend on the shoulder. It was a level of intimacy that few, outside of his own family, had earned. “What have we got, Jack?” he asked. Around the room, the admiral’s staff officers worked at their stations, collating data and running projections as they tried to anticipate the old man’s needs. “Probable Swarm contact here,” Nakagami said, reaching up to take hold of the projected map with his hands. Optical sensors placed around the ceiling and walls of the room read his movements and seamlessly translated them into instructions, and the map zoomed in to center on LeShaii space. “LHS 1140, a red dwarf with a single inhabited planet.” “Hav’eth,” Ambassador An’cet said, stepping forward. “An ocean world with a sprinkling of islands grouped into three major archipelagos. It is where my people first encountered the Alu’ka, actually. They were scouting it out for their own use.” “Ambassador.” Altair stepped in to take the LeShaii’s hand in turn. “I presume that I’m going to have to break that habit, and get used to addressing you as ‘senator’ in the near future.” “I’m not certain whether I should congratulate you on that, or not,” Jack Nakagami said. “You’d have to shoot my knees out to get me to sit down in that senate chamber. I asked the ambassador here to join us because we haven’t even started integrating LeShaii officers into our chain of command yet, your imperial majesty, and we’ve only got spotty intel on Hav’eth.” “I would have preferred that we had a decade or so to get ourselves into shape before this happene