by David Weber
“Commander Cohanna?” he said finally.
“We still don’t know how they did it,” Cohanna replied, “but we’re pretty sure what they did. I’m not certain I can accept Dahak’s explanation just yet, but it fits the observed data, assuming they had the ability to implement it.
“For all practical purposes, we can think of their weapon as a disease lethal to any living organism. Obviously, it was a monster in every sense of the word. We may never learn how it was released, but the effect of its release was the inevitable destruction of all life in its path. Any contaminated planet is dead, ladies and gentlemen.
“On the other hand—” as Colin had, she drew out the pause for emphasis, “—we’ve also determined that the weapon had a finite lifespan. And whatever that lifespan was, it was less than the time which has passed. We’ve established test habitats with plants and livestock from our own hydroponic and recreational areas, using water and soil collected by remotes from all areas of Keerah’s surface. From Governor Yirthana’s records, we know the weapon took approximately thirty Terran months to incubate in mammals, and we’ve employed the techniques used in accelerated healing to take our sample habitats through a forty-five-month cycle with no evidence of the weapon. While I certainly don’t propose to return those test subjects to Dahak’s life-support systems, I believe the evidence is very nearly conclusive. The bio-weapon itself has died, at least on Keerah and, by extension, upon any planet which was contaminated an equivalent length of time ago.
“That concludes my report, Captain.”
“Thank you.” Colin squared his shoulders and spoke very quietly as the full weight of his responsibility descended upon him. “On the basis of these reports, I intend to proceed immediately to Birhat and Fleet Central.”
Someone drew a sharply audible breath, and his face tightened.
“What we’ve discovered here makes it extremely unlikely Birhat survived, but that, unfortunately, changes nothing.
“I don’t know what we’ll find there, but I do know three things. One, if we return with no aid for Earth, we lose. Two, the best command facilities at the Imperium’s—or Empire’s—disposal would be at Fleet Central. Three, logic suggests the bio-weapon there will be as dead as it is here. Based on those suppositions, our best chance of finding usable hardware is at Birhat, and it’s likely we can safely reactivate any we find. At the very least, it will be our best opportunity to discover the full extent of this catastrophe.”
“We will depart Keerah in twelve hours. In the meantime, please carry on about your duties. I’ll be in my quarters if I’m needed.”
He stood, catching the surprise on more than one face when his audience realized he did not intend to debate the point.
“Attention on deck,” Dahak intoned quietly, and the officers rose.
Colin walked out in silence, wondering if those he’d surprised realized why he’d foreclosed all debate.
The answer was as simple as it was bitter. In the end, the decision was his, but if he allowed them to debate it they must share in it, however indirectly, and he would not permit them to do so.
He couldn’t know if Dahak’s presence was required to stand off the Achuultani scouts, but he hoped desperately that it was not, for he, Colin MacIntyre, had elected to chase a tattered hope rather than defend his home world. If he’d guessed wrong about Horus’s progress, he had also doomed that home world—a world which it had become increasingly obvious might well be the only planet of humanity which still existed—whatever he found at Birhat.
And the fact that logic compelled him to Birhat meant nothing against his fear that he had guessed wrong. Against his ignorance of Horus’s progress. His agonizing suspicion that if Fleet Central still existed, it might be another Omega Three, senile and crippled with age … the paralyzing terror of bearing responsibility for the death of his own species.
He would not—could not—share that responsibility with another soul. It was his alone, and as he stepped into the transit shaft, Senior Fleet Captain Colin MacIntyre tasted the full, terrible burden of his authority at last.
The moss was soft and slightly damp as he lay on his back, staring up at the projected sky. He was coming to understand why the Imperium had provided its captains with this greenery and freshness. He could have found true spaciousness on one of the park decks, where breezes whipped across square kilometers of “open” land, but this was his. This small, private corner of creation belonged to him, offering its soothing aliveness and quiet bird-song when the weight of responsibility crushed down upon him.
He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, extending his enhanced senses. The splash of the fountains caressed him, and a gentle breeze stroked his skin, yet the sensations only eased his pain; they did not banish it.
He hadn’t noted the time when he stretched out upon the moss, and so he had no idea how long he’d been there when his neural feed tingled.
Someone was at the hatch, and he was tempted to deny access, for his awareness of what he’d done was too fresh and aching. But that thought frightened him suddenly. It would be so easy to withdraw into a tortured, hermit-like existence, and it was over six months to Birhat. A man alone could go mad too easily in that much time.
He opened the hatch, and his visitor stepped inside. She came around the end of a thicket of azaleas and laurel, and he opened his eyes slowly.
“Art troubled, my Colin,” she said softly.
He started to explain, but then he saw it in her eyes. She knew. One, at least, of his officers knew exactly why he’d refused to discuss his decision.
“May I sit with thee?” she asked gently, and he nodded.
She crossed the carpet of moss with the poised, cat-like grace which was always so much a part of her, straight and slim in her midnight-blue uniform, tall for an Imperial, yet delicate, her gleaming black hair held back by the same jeweled clasp she’d worn the day they met. The day when he’d seen the hate in her eyes. The hate for what he’d done, for the clumsy, cocksure fumbling which had cost the lives of a grandnephew and great-nieces she loved, but even more for what he was. For the threat of punishment he posed to her mutineer-father. For the fullness of his enhancement while she had but bits and pieces. And for the fact that he, who had never known of Dahak’s existence, never suspected her own people’s lonely, hopeless fight against Anu, had inherited command of the starship from which she had been exiled for a crime others had committed.
There was a killer in Jiltanith. He’d seen it then, known it from the first. The mutiny had cost her her mother and the freedom of the stars, and the endless stealth of her people’s shadowy battle on Earth had been slivered glass in her throat, for she was a fighter, a warrior who believed in open battle. Those long, agonizing years had left dark, still places within her. Far more than he could ever hope to be, she was capable of death and destruction, incapable of asking or offering quarter.
But there was no hate in her eyes now. They were soft and gentle under the atrium’s sun, their black depths jewel-like and still. Colin had grown accustomed to the appearance of the full Imperials, yet in this moment the subtle alienness of her beauty smote him like a fist. She had been born before his first Terran ancestor crawled into a cave to hide from the weather, yet she was young. Twice his age and more, yet they were both but children against the lifespan of their enhanced bodies. Her youthfulness lay upon her, made still more precious and perfect by the endless years behind her, and his eyes burned.
This, he thought. This girl-woman who had known and suffered so much more than he, was what this all was about. She was the symbol of humankind, the avatar of all its frailties and the iron core of all its strength, and he wanted to reach out and touch her. But she was the mythic warrior-maid, the emblem, and the weight of his decision was upon him. He was unclean.
“Oh, my Colin,” she whispered, looking deep into his own weary, tormented eyes, “what hast thou taken upon thyself?”
He clenched his hands at his sides, grippin
g the moss, and refused to answer, but a sob wrenched at the base of his throat.
She came closer slowly, carefully, like a hunter approaching some wild, snared thing, and sank to her knees beside him. One delicate hand, slender and fine-boned, deceiving the eye into forgetting its power, touched his shoulder.
“Once,” she said, “in a life I scarce recall, I envied thee. Yea, envied and hated thee, for thou hadst received all unasked for the one treasure in all the universe I hungered most to hold. I would have slain thee, could I but have taken that treasure from thee. Didst thou know that?”
He nodded jerkily, and she smiled.
“Yet knowing, thou didst name me thy successor in command, for thine eyes saw more clear than mine own. ’Twas chance, mayhap, sent thee to Dahak’s bridge, yet well hast thou proven thy right to stand upon it. And never more than thou hast done this day.”
Her hand stroked gently from his shoulder to his chest, covering the slow, strong beating of his bioenhanced heart, and he trembled like a frightened child. But her fingers moved, gentling his strange terror.
“Yet thou art not battle steel, my Colin,” she said softly. “Art flesh and blood for all thy biotechnics, whate’er thy duty may demand of thee.”
She bent slowly, laying her head atop her hand, and the fine texture of her hair brushed his cheek, its silken caress almost agony to his enhanced senses. Tears brimmed in the corners of his eyes, and part of him cursed his weakness while another blessed her for proving it to him. The sob he had fought broke free, and she made a soft, soothing sound.
“Yea, art flesh and blood, though captain to us all. Forget that not, for thou art not Dahak, and thy humanity is thy curse, the sword by which thou canst be wounded.” She raised her head, and his blurred eyes saw the tears in her own. One moss-stained hand rose, stroking her raven’s-wing hair, and she smiled.
“Yet wounds may be healed, my Colin, and I am likewise flesh, likewise blood,” she murmured. She bent over him, and her mouth tasted of the salt of their mingled tears. His other hand rose, drawing her down beside him on the moss, and he rose on an elbow as she smiled up at him.
“Thou wert my salvation,” she whispered, caressing his unruly sandy hair. “Now let me be thine, for I am thine and thou art mine. Forget it never, my dearest dear, for ’tis true now and ever shall be.”
And she drew him down to kiss her once again.
The computer named Dahak closed down the sensors in the captain’s quarters with profound but slightly wistful gratitude. He had made great strides in understanding these short-lived, infuriatingly illogical, occasionally inept, endlessly inventive, and stubbornly dauntless descendants of his long-dead builders. More than any other of his kind, he had learned to understand human emotions, for he had learned to share many of them. Respect. Friendship. Hope. Even, in his own way, love. He knew his presence would embarrass Colin and Jiltanith if it occurred to them to check for it, and while he did not fully understand the reason, they were his friends, and so he left them.
He gave the electronic equivalent of a sigh, knowing that he could never comprehend the gentle mysteries which had enfolded them. But he did not need to comprehend to know how important they were, and to feel deeply grateful to his new friend ’Tanni for understanding and loving his first friend Colin.
And now, he thought, while they were occupied, he might add that tiny portion of his attention which constantly attended his captain’s needs and desires to another problem. Those encoded dispatches from the courier Cordan still intrigued him.
His latest algorithm had failed miserably, though he had finally managed to crack the scramble and reduce the messages to symbol sets. Unfortunately, the symbols were meaningless. Perhaps a new value-substitution subprogram was in order? Yet pattern analysis suggested that the substitution was virtually random. Interesting. That implied a tremendous symbol set, or else there was a method to generate the values which only appeared random…
The computer worried happily away at the fascinating problem with a fragment of his capacity while every tiny corner of his vast starship body pulsed and quivered with his awareness.
All the tiny corners save one, where two very special people enjoyed a priceless gift of privacy made all the more priceless because they did not even know it had been given.
The last crude spacecraft died, and the asteroid battered through their wreckage at three hundred kilometers per second. Bits of debris struck its frontal arc, vanishing in brief, spiteful spits of flame against its uncaring nickel-iron bow. Heat-oozing wounds bit deep where the largest fragments had struck, and the asteroid swept onward, warded by the defenders’ executioners.
Six Achuultani starships rode in formation about the huge projectile as it charged down upon the blue-and-white world which was its target. They had been detached to guard their weapon against the pygmy efforts of that cloud-swirled sapphire’s inhabitants, and their task was all but done.
They spread out, distancing themselves from the asteroid, energy weapons ready as the first missiles broke atmosphere. The clumsy chemical-fueled rockets sped outward, tipped with their pathetic nuclear warheads, and the starships picked them off with effortless ease. The doomed planet flung its every weapon against its killers in despair and desperation … and achieved nothing.
The asteroid hurtled onward, an energy state hungry for immolation, and the starships wheeled up and away as it tasted air at last and changed. For one fleeting instant it was no longer a thing of ice-bound rock and metal. It was alive, a glorious, screaming incandescence pregnant with death.
It struck, spewing its flame back into the heavens, stripping away atmosphere in a cataclysm of fire, and the Achuultani starships hovered a moment longer, watching, as the planetary crust split and fissured. Magma exploded from the gaping wounds, and they spread and grew, racing like cracks in ice, until the geologically unstable planet itself blew apart.
The starships lingered no longer. They turned their bows from the ruin they had wrought and raced outward. Twenty-one light-minutes from the primary they crossed the hyper threshold and vanished like soap bubbles, hastening to seek their fellows at the next rendezvous.
Chapter Ten
Horus stood on the command deck of the battleship Nergal, almost unrecognizable in its refurbished state, and watched her captain take her smoothly out of atmosphere. A year ago, Adrienne Robbins, one of the US Navy’s very few female attack submarine skippers, had never heard of the Fourth Imperium; now she performed her duties with a competence which gave him the same pleasure he took from a violin virtuoso and a Mozart concerto. She was good, he decided, watching her smooth her gunmetal hair. Better than he’d ever been, and she had the confident, almost sleepy smile of a hungry tiger.
He turned from the bridge crew to the holo display as Nergal slid into orbit. Marshal Tsien, Acting Chief of the Supreme Chiefs of Staff, towered over his right shoulder, and Vassily Chernikov stood to Horus’ left. All three watched intently as Nergal leisurely overtook the half-finished bulk of Orbital Defense Center Two, and Horus suddenly snapped his fingers and turned to Tsien.
“Oh, Marshal Tsien,” he said, “I meant to tell you that I spoke with General Hatcher just before you arrived, and he expects to return to us within the next four or five weeks.”
Relief lit both officers’ eyes, for it had been touch and go for Gerald Hatcher. Though Tsien’s first aid had saved his life, he would have lost both legs without Imperial medical technology, assuming he’d lived at all, yet that same technology had nearly killed him.
Hatcher was one of those very rare individuals, less than one tenth of a percent of the human race, who were allergic to the standard quick-heal drugs, but the carnage at Minya Konka had offered no time for proper medical work-ups, and the medic who first treated him guessed wrong. The general’s reaction had been quick and savage, and only the fact that that same medic had recognized the symptoms so quickly had prevented it from being fatal.
Even so, it had taken months to
repair his legs to a point which permitted bioenhancement, for if the alternate therapies were just as effective, they were also far slower. Which also meant his recuperation from enhancement itself was taking far longer than normal, so it was a vast relief to all his colleagues and friends to know he would soon return to them.
And, Horus thought, remembering how Hatcher had chuckled over Tsien’s remark at Minya Konka, as the first enhanced member of the Chiefs of Staff.
“I am relieved to hear it, Governor,” Tsien said now. “And I am certain you will be relieved to have him back.”
“I will, but I’d also like to congratulate you on a job very well done these past months. I might add that Gerald shares my satisfaction.”
“Thank you, Governor.” Tsien didn’t smile—Horus didn’t think he’d ever seen the big man smile—but his eyes showed his pleasure.
“You deserve all the thanks we can give you, Marshal,” he said quietly.
In a sense, Hatcher’s injuries had been very much to their advantage. If any other member of the chiefs of staff was his equal in every way, it was Tsien. They were very different; Tsien lacked Hatcher’s ease with people and the flair which made exquisitely choreographed operations seem effortless, but he was tireless, analytical, eternally self-possessed, and as inexorable as a Juggernaut yet flexibly pragmatic. He’d streamlined their organization, moved their construction and training schedules ahead by almost a month, and—most importantly of all—stamped out the abortive guerrilla war in Asia with a ruthlessness Hatcher himself probably could not have displayed.
Horus had been more than a little horrified at the way Tsien went about it. He hadn’t worried about taking armed resisters prisoner, and those he’d taken had been summarily court-martialed and executed, usually within twenty-four hours. His reaction teams had been everywhere, filling Horus with the fear that Hatcher had made a rare and terrible error in recommending him as his replacement. There’d been an elemental implacability about the huge Chinese, one that made Horus wonder if he even cared who was innocent and who guilty.