by David Weber
“No offensive action!” Colin ordered harshly.
“Acknowledged.” Tamman’s toneless voice was that of a man intimately wedded to his computers. Dahak’s shield snapped up, anti-missile defenses came alive, and Colin fell silent as others fought his ship.
Sarah Meir was part of Tamman’s tactical net, and she took Dahak instantly to maximum sublight speed. Evasive action began, and the starfield swooped crazily about them. Crimson dots appeared in the holographic display, flashing towards Dahak like a shoal of sharks, tracking despite his attempts to evade.
His jammers filled space and fold-space alike with interference, and blue dots flashed out from the center of the display, each a five-hundred-ton decoy mimicking Dahak’s electronic and gravitonic signature. More than half the red dots wavered, swinging to track the decoys or simply lost in the jamming, but at least fifty continued straight for them.
They were moving at almost eighty percent of light-speed, but so great was the range they seemed to crawl. And why were they moving sublight at all? Why weren’t they hyper missiles? Why—
“Second salvo launch detected,” Dahak announced, and Colin cursed.
Active defenses engaged the attackers. Hyper missiles were useless, for they could not home on evading targets, so sublight counter-missiles raced to meet them, blossoming in megaton bursts as proximity fuses activated. Eye-searing flashes pocked the holographic display, and red dots began to die.
“They mount quite capable defenses of their own, Captain,” Dahak observed, and Colin felt them through his feed. ECM systems lured Dahak’s fire wide and on-board maneuvering systems sent the red dots into wild gyrations, and they were faster than the counter-missiles chasing them.
“Where are they coming from, Dahak?”
“Scanners have detected twenty-four identical structures orbiting Kano-III,” Dahak replied as his close-range energy defenses opened fire and killed another dozen missiles. At least twenty were still coming. “I have detected launches from only four of them.”
Only four? Colin puzzled over that as the last dozen missiles broke past Dahak’s active defenses. He found himself gripping his couch’s armrests; there was nothing else he could do.
Dahak’s display blanked in the instant of detonation, shielding his bridge crews’ optic nerves from the fury unleashed upon him. Anti-matter warheads, their yields measured in thousands of megatons, gouged at his final defenses, but Dahak was built to face things like that, and plasma clouds blew past him, divided by his shield as by the prow of a ship. Yet mixed with the anti-matter explosions were the true shipkillers of the Imperium: gravitonic warheads.
The ancient starship lurched. For all its unimaginable mass, despite the unthinkable power of its drive, it lurched like a broken-masted galleon, and Colin’s stomach heaved despite the internal gravity field. His mind refused to contemplate the terrible fury which could produce that effect as gravitonic shield components screamed in protest, but they, too, had been engineered to meet this test. Somehow they held.
The display flashed back on, spalled by fading clouds of gas and heat, and a damage signal pulsed in Colin’s neural feed. A schematic of Dahak’s hull appeared above his console, its frontal hemisphere marred by two wedge-shaped glares of red over a kilometer deep.
“Minor damage in quadrants Alpha-One and Three,” Dahak reported. “No casualties. Capability not impaired. Second salvo entering interdiction range. Third enemy salvo detected.”
More counter-missiles flashed out, and Colin reached a decision.
“Tactical, take out the actively attacking installations!”
“Acknowledged,” Tamman said, and the display bloomed with amber sighting circles. Each enclosed a single missile platform, too tiny with distance for even Dahak to display visually, and Colin swallowed. Unlike their attackers, Tamman was using hyper missiles.
“Missiles away,” Dahak said. And then, almost without pause, “Targets destroyed.”
Bright, savage pinpricks blossomed in the amber circles, but the two salvos already fired were still coming. Yet Dahak had gained a great deal of data from the first attack, and he was a very fast thinker. Battle Comp was using his predicted target responses well, concentrating his counter-missiles to thwart them, alert now for their speed and the tricks of defensive ECM, killing the incoming missiles with inexorable precision. Energy weapons added their efforts as the range dropped, killing still more. Only three of the second salvo got through, and they were all anti-matter warheads. The final missile of the last salvo died ten light-seconds short of the shield.
Colin sagged in his couch.
“Dahak? Any more?” he asked hoarsely.
“Negative, sir. I detect active targeting systems aboard seven remaining installations, but no additional missiles have been launched.”
“Any communication attempts?”
“Negative, Captain. Nor have they responded to my hails.”
“Damn.”
Colin’s brain began to work again, but it made no sense. Why refuse all contact and attack on sight? For that matter, how had Dahak gotten so deep in-system before being detected? And if attack they must, why use only a sixth of their defensive bases? The four Tamman had destroyed had certainly gone all out, but if they meant to mount a defense at all, why hold anything back? Especially now, when Dahak had riposted so savagely?
“Well,” he said finally, very softly, “let’s find out what that was all about. Sarah, take us in at half speed. Tamman, hold us on Red One.”
Acknowledgments flowed back to him, and Dahak started cautiously forward once more at twenty-eight percent of light speed. Colin watched the display for a moment, then made himself lean back.
“Dahak, give me an all-hands channel.”
“All-hands channel open, sir.”
“All right, people,” Colin said to every ear aboard the massive ship, “that was closer than we’d like, but we seem to’ve come through intact. If anyone’s interested in exactly what happened—” he paused and smiled; to his surprise, it felt almost natural “—you can get the details from Dahak later. But for your immediate information, no one’s shooting at us just now, so we’re going on in for a closer look. They’re not talking to us, either, so it doesn’t look like they’re too friendly, but we’ll know more shortly. Hang loose.”
He started to order Dahak to close the channel, then stopped.
“Oh, one more thing. Well done, all of you. You did us proud. Out.
“Close channel, Dahak.”
“Acknowledged, Captain. Channel closed.”
“Thank you,” Colin said softly, and his tone referred to far more than communications channels and the starship’s courtesy. “Thank you very much.”
Chapter Eight
The holo of what had once been a pleasant, blue-white world called Keerah hung in Command One’s visual display like a leprous, ocher curse. Once-green continents were wind and water-carved ruins, grooved like a harridan’s face and pocked with occasional sprawls where the works of Man had been founded upon solid bedrock and so still stood, sentinels to a vanished population.
Colin stared at it, heartsick as even Defram had not left him. He’d hoped so hard. The missiles which had greeted them had seemed to confirm that hope, and so he had almost welcomed them even as they sought to kill him. But dead Keerah mocked him.
He turned away, shifting his attention to the orbiting ring of orbital forts. Only seven remained even partially operational, and the nearest loomed in Dahak’s display, gleaming dully in the funeral watch light of Kano. The clumsy-looking base was over eight kilometers in diameter, and a shiver ran down Colin’s spine as he looked at it.
Even now, its targeting systems were locked on Dahak, its age-crippled computers sending firing signals to its weapons. He shuddered as he pictured the ancient launchers swinging through their firing sequences again and again, dry-firing because their magazines were empty. It was bad enough to know the long-abandoned war machine was trying to kill hi
m; it was worse to wonder how many other vessels must have died under its fire to exhaust its ammunition.
And if Dahak and Hector were right, most of those vessels had been killed not for attacking Keerah, but for trying to escape it.
“Probe One is reporting, Captain.” Dahak’s mellow voice wrenched Colin away from his frightening, empty thoughts to more immediate matters.
“Very well. What’s their status?”
“External scans completed, sir. Fleet Captain (Engineering) Chernikov requests permission to board.”
Colin turned to the holo image beside his console. “Recommendations?”
“My first recommendation is to get Vlad out of there,” Cohanna said flatly. “I’d rather not risk our Chief Engineer on the miserable excuse for an opinion I can give you.”
“I tend to agree, but I made the mistake of asking for volunteers.”
“In that case,” Cohanna leaned back behind her desk in sickbay, a thousand kilometers from Command One, and rubbed her forehead, “we might as well let them board.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Of course I’m not!” she snapped, and Colin’s hand rose in quick apology.
“Sorry, ’Hanna. What I really wanted was a run-down on your reasoning.”
“It hasn’t changed.” Her almost normal tone was an unstated acceptance of his apology. “The other bases are as dead as Keerah, but there are at least two live hydroponics farms aboard that hulk—how I don’t know, after all this time—and there may be more; we can’t tell from exterior bio-scans even at this range. But that thing’s entire atmosphere must’ve circulated through both of them a couple of million times by now and the plants are still alive. It’s possible they represent a mutant strain that happened to be immune to whatever killed everything on Keerah, but I doubt it. Whatever the agent was, it doesn’t seem to have missed anything down there, so I think it’s unlikely it ever contaminated the battle station.” She shrugged.
“I know that’s a mouthful of qualifiers, but it’s all I can tell you.”
“But there’s no other sign of life,” Colin said quietly.
“None.” Cohanna’s holographic face was grim. “There couldn’t be, unless they were in stasis. Genetic drift would’ve seen to that long ago on something as small as that.”
“All right,” Colin said after a moment. “Thank you.” He looked down at his hands an instant longer, then nodded to himself.
“Dahak, give me a direct link to Vlad.”
“Link open, Captain.”
“Vlad?”
“Yes, Captain?” There was no holo image—Chernikov’s bare-bones utility boat had strictly limited com facilities—but his calm voice was right beside Colin’s ear.
“I’m going to let you take a closer look, Vlad, but watch your ass. One man goes in first—and not you, Mister. Full bio-protection and total decon before he comes back aboard, too.”
“With all respect, Captain, I think—”
“I know what you think,” Colin said harshly. “The answer is no.”
“Very well.” Chernikov sounded resigned, and Colin sympathized. He would vastly have preferred to take the risk himself, but he was Dahak’s captain. He couldn’t gamble with the chain of command … and neither could Vlad.
Vlad Chernikov looked at the engineer he had selected for the task. Jehru Chandra had come many light-years to risk his life, but he looked eager as he double-checked the seals on his suit. Not cheerful or unafraid, but eager.
“Be cautious in there, Jehru.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep your suit scanners open. We will relay to Dahak.”
“I understand, sir.” Chernikov grinned wryly at Chandra’s manifestly patient reply. Did he really sound that nervous?
“On your way, then,” he said, and the engineer stepped into the airlock.
As per Cohanna’s insistence, there was no contact between Chernikov’s workboat and the battle station, but Chernikov studied the looming hull yet again as Chandra floated across the kilometer-wide gap on his suit propulsors. This ancient structure was thousands of years younger than Dahak, but the warship had been hidden under eighty kilometers of solid rock for most of its vast lifespan. The battle station had not. The once bright battle steel was dulled by the film of dust which had collected on its age-sick surface and pitted by micro-meteor impacts, and its condition made Chernikov chillingly aware of its age as Dahak’s shining perfection never had.
Chandra touched down neatly beside a small personnel lock, and his implants probed at the controls.
“Hmmmmm…” The tension in his voice was smoothed by concentration. “Dahak was right, Commander. I’ve got live computers here, but damned if I recognize the machine language. Whups! Wait a minute, I’ve got something—”
His voice broke off for an agonizing moment, then came back with a most unexpected sound: a chuckle.
“I’ll be damned, sir. The thing recognized my effort to access and brought in some kind of translating software. The hatch’s opening now.”
He stepped through it and it closed once more.
“Pressure in the lock,” he reported, his fold-space com working as well through battle steel as through vacuum. “On the low side—’bout point-six-nine atmospheres. My sensors read breathable.”
“Forget it right now, Jehru.”
“Never even considered it, sir. Honest. Okay, inner lock opening now.” There was a brief pause. “I’m in. Inner hatch closed. The main lighting’s out, but about half the emergency lights’re up.”
“Is the main net live, or just the lock computers?”
“Looks like the auxiliary net’s up. Just a sec. Yes, sir. Power level’s weak, though. Can’t find the main net, yet.”
“Understood. Give me a reading on the auxiliary. Then I want you to head up-ship. Keep an eye out for …”
Colin rested in his couch, eyes closed, concentrating on his neural feed as Chandra penetrated the half-dead hulk, gaining in confidence with every meter. It showed even in the technicalities of his conversation with Vlad.
Colin only hoped they could ever dare to let him come home again.
* * *
”…and that’s about the size of it,” Cohanna said, deactivating her personal memo computer. “We hit Chandra’s suit with every decon system we had. As near as Dahak and I can tell, it was a hundred percent sterile before we let him unsuit, but we’ve got him in total isolation. I think he’s clean, but I’m not letting him out of there until I’m certain.”
“Agreed. Dahak? Anything to add?”
“I am still conversing with Omega Three’s core computers, Captain. More precisely, I am attempting to converse with them. We do not speak the same language, and their data transmission speed is appreciably higher than my own. Unfortunately, they also appear to be quite stupid.” Colin hid a smile at the peeved note in Dahak’s voice. Among the human qualities the vast computer had internalized was one he no doubt wished he could have avoided: impatience.
“How stupid?” he asked after a moment.
“Extremely so. In fairness, they were never intended for even rudimentary self-awareness, and their age is also a factor. Omega Three’s self-repair capability was never up to Fleet standards, and it has suffered progressive failure, largely, I suspect, through lack of spares. Approximately forty percent of Omega Three’s data net is inoperable. The main computers remain more nearly functional than the auxiliary systems, but there are failures in the core programming itself. In human terms, they are senile.”
“I see. Are you getting anything at all?”
“Affirmative, sir. In fact, I am now prepared to provide a hypothetical reconstruction of events leading to Omega Three’s emplacement.”
“You are?” Colin sat straighter, and others at the table did the same.
“Affirmative. Be advised, however, that much of it is speculative. There are serious gaps in the available data.”
“Understood. Let’s hear it
.”
“Acknowledged. In essence, sir, Fleet Captain (Biosciences) Cohanna was correct in her original hypothesis at Defram. The destruction of all life on the planets we have so far encountered was due to a bio-weapon.”
“What kind of bio-weapon?” Cohanna demanded, leaning forward as if to will the answer out of the computer.
“Unknown at this time. It was the belief of the system governor, however, that it was of Imperial origin.”
“Sweet Jesu,” Jiltanith breathed. “In so much at least wert thou correct, my Hector. ’Twas no enemy wreaked their destruction; ’twas themselves.”
“That is essentially correct,” Dahak said. “As I have stated, the data are fragmentary, but I have recovered portions of memoranda from the governor. I hope to recover more, but those I have already perused point in that direction. She did not know how the weapon was originally released, but apparently there had been rumors of such a weapon for some time.”
“The fools,” Cohanna whispered. “Oh, the fools! Why would they build something like this? It violates every medical ethic the Imperium ever had!”
“I fear my data sample is too small to answer that, yet I have discovered a most interesting point. It was not the Fourth Imperium which devised this weapon but an entity called the Fourth Empire.”
For just a moment, Colin failed to grasp the significance. Dahak had used Imperial Universal, and in Universal, the differentiation was only slightly greater than in English. “Imperium” was umsuvah, with the emphasis on the last syllable; “Empire” was umsuvaht, with the emphasis upon the second.
“What?” Cohanna blinked in consternation.
“Precisely. I have not yet established the full significance of the altered terminology, yet it suggests many possibilities. In particular, the Imperial Senate appears to have been superseded in authority by an emperor— specifically, by Emperor Herdan XXIV as of Year Thirteen-One-Seven-Five.”