Empire from the Ashes

by David Weber

  "All right," he said. "In that case, I see no reason not to resume construction on the other class units. Gerald? Do you or Tao-ling disagree?"

  "No," Hatcher said after a brief glance at the star marshal.

  "Then let's do it. Is there anything else we need to discuss?" Heads shook, and he sighed. "Then we'll see you all Thursday." He stood, still holding Jiltanith's hand, and the others rose silently as they left the room.

  * * *

  Senior Fleet Admiral Ninhursag MacMahan was angry with herself. Few would have guessed it from looking at her, but after a century of hiding her feelings from Anu's security thugs, her face said exactly what she told it to.

  She sat behind her desk and drew a deep breath. It was time to return to the needs of the living. Gus van Gelder and her ONI assistants had been carrying her load, and that they'd done it superlatively was scant comfort. It was her job; if she couldn't do it, it was time to curl up and die. For a time she'd considered doing just that, but even at her worst, a stubborn part of her had mocked the bad melodrama of the thought.

  Now, deliberately, she buried the temptation forever and felt herself coming back to life as she set her grief aside. It wasn't easy, and it hurt, but it also felt good. Not as it once had, but so much better than the dull, dead disinterest which had gripped her for far too long, and she plugged her feed into her computer and called up the first intelligence summary.

  * * *

  Colin sat on the rug, watching the fire and rubbing Galahad's ears. The dog lay beside him before the library hearth, eyes half-closed, massive head resting on Colin's thigh while they both stared into the crackling flames. To the outward eye they must present the classic picture of a man and his dog, Colin thought, but Galahad certainly wasn't his pet. Galahad and his litter-mates shared a very dog-like exuberant openness, insatiable curiosity, and a need for companionship, but they belonged only to themselves.

  Now Galahad emitted a contented snuffle and rolled onto his back, waggling his feet in the air to invite his friend to scratch his chest. Colin complied with a grin, and chuckled as the dog wiggled with soft, chuffling sounds of sensual delight. That grin felt good. The four-footed members of the imperial family had done more than anyone else would ever suspect to help with his and 'Tanni's grief. They shared it, for they, too, had loved the twins, but there was a clean, healthy simplicity to their caring, without the complex patterns of guilt and subliminal resentment even the best humans felt while they grappled with their own loss.

  "Like that, do you?" he said, working his scratching fingertips into Galahad's "armpits," and the big dog sighed.

  "Of course," his vocoder replied. "It is a pity we do not have hands. I would enjoy doing this for the others."

  "But not as much as you'd enjoy having them do it for you, huh?" Colin challenged, and Galahad sneezed explosively and rolled upright.

  "Perhaps not," he agreed, and Colin snorted. None of the dogs ever lied. That seemed to be a human talent they couldn't (or didn't want to) master, but they were getting pretty darn good at equivocating.

  "I think humans are a bad influence on you. You're getting spoiled."

  "No. It is only that we are honest about things we enjoy."

  "Yeah, sure." Colin reached under Galahad's massive chest and stroked more gently. The standing dog's chin rested companionably on his shoulder, and he glanced over at the corner where Galahad's sister Gwynevere sat very upright, watching Jiltanith move her queen. Gwynevere cocked her head, ears pricking as she considered the move. She was the only one of the dogs to develop a taste for chess—it was a bit too cerebral for the others—and by human standards she wasn't all that good. Galahad and Gawain were killers at Scrabble, and he'd been horrified to discover Horus had taught all of them to play poker (though none of them—except, perhaps, Gaheris—could bluff worth a damn), but Gwynevere was determined to master chess. And, to be fair about it, she was improving steadily.

  The really funny thing, he thought, was that while Jiltanith was an excellent strategist in real life, Gwynevere beat her quite often. 'Tanni was too direct—and impatient—for a game which emphasized the indirect approach.

  "Excuse me, Colin," Dahak's voice said, "but Ninhursag has just arrived at the Palace."

  "She's here now?" Colin looked up, and Jiltanith met his eyes with matching surprise. It was very late in Birhat's twenty-eight-hour day.

  "Indeed. And she appears quite agitated."

  " 'Hursag is agitated?" Colin shook his head and scrambled to his feet. "Tell her to come on down to the library."

  "She is already on her way. In fact—"

  The library door burst open. Admiral MacMahan came through it like a thunder squall, and Colin rocked back on his heels—literally. Ninhursag was only middling tall, and the mood he usually associated with her was one of deliberate consideration, but tonight she was a titan wrapped in vicious, killing rage.

  " 'Hursag?" he said tentatively as she came to a halt just inside the door. Every movement was rigidly over-controlled, as if each of them took every ounce of will she had, and she chopped a nod.

  "Colin. Jiltanith." Her voice was harsh, each word bitten off with utter precision. "Sit down, both of you. I have something to tell you."

  Colin looked at Jiltanith, wondering what could have transformed Ninhursag so, but 'Tanni met his eyes with a shrug of ignorance and a slight gesture at the chairs before the hearth. They settled into them, listening to the crackle of burning logs as Galahad and his siblings ranged themselves to either side, and every eye, human and canine alike, watched Ninhursag grip her hands behind her and make herself take a quick, wordless turn about the room. When she turned to face them, her face was calmer, but it was a surface calm, built solely from professionalism and self-discipline.

  "I'm sorry to burst in on you, but I just turned up something... interesting. Or, rather, I just confirmed something interesting."

  She inhaled again, sharply, and gave herself a tiny shake.

  "I've been slacking off at ONI for months," she continued in a flat voice. "You know that, Colin, though you haven't said anything. I'm sorry. You know why I have. But I'm getting myself back together, and yesterday I started through a stack of reports that've been accumulating since, well—" She broke off with another shrug, and Colin nodded. Jiltanith held out a hand to him, and he took it as Ninhursag cleared her throat.

  "Yes. Anyway, most of them were fairly routine. Gus and Commodore Sung have handled the hot stuff as it came in. But one of them—an accidental death report—caught my attention. It was the date, I think. It happened two days after Imperial Terra hypered out for Urahan, and it covered an entire family." Fresh pain tightened her lips, but she went harshly on.

  "They were civilians, and it was a traffic accident, so I wondered why ONI had it, until I looked more closely," Ninhursag went on in that flat voice. "The husband was Vincente Cruz. He wasn't military, strictly speaking, but—" she paused, and her eyes were cold "—he worked for BuShips."

  Colin felt Jiltanith's hand twitch in his and stiffened. It was no more than a vague stirring of suspicion, but the bitterness in Ninhursag's eyes turned something cold and wary deep inside him.

  "I don't know why that stuck in my mind, but it did, and when I looked more closely I found a couple of things that seemed... out of kilter.

  "The Cruzes lived on Birhat, since he worked for BuShips, but they were killed on Earth. I checked and found out they usually vacationed in North America, but Cruz had returned from there less than three months before, so I wondered why they'd gone back so soon. Then I found out his wife and family had stayed there—visiting friends—and he'd gone back to collect them.

  "Again, I don't know why that bothered me, but it did. So I did some more checking. Cruz's two older children were enrolled for education here on Birhat, and I discovered that he hadn't warned the education people they'd be staying on Earth. He notified them only after he got back, but two years ago, when he left them to visit family in Mexico
, he'd notified their teachers over a month before they left. He was concerned with making certain they didn't lose any ground shifting back and forth between the two school systems.

  "That seemed odd, so I checked the hypercom and mat-trans logs. In the ten weeks they stayed on Earth, he neither sent to them nor received from them a single hypercom message. Nor did he use the mat-trans to visit them in person. There was no communication between them at all for ten weeks... and he and his wife had a ten-month-old baby."

  Colin's eyes began to burn with a green fire that matched the fury in Ninhursag's bitter brown stare, and the admiral nodded slowly.

  "The accident report looks completely aboveboard, if a bit freakish. It was a high-speed event—a ridge-line collision at almost Mach six—and the flight recorder was totaled, but the altimeter was recovered, and analysis indicated it was under-reading by about two hundred meters. That was enough to put it into the ridge, but when I did a little discreet checking, no one seemed to know who Cruz's family had been visiting. I did a computer search of Earth's credit transactions—as a BuShips employee, he and his wife both held Fleet cards—and I couldn't find a single transaction for Elena Cruz on Earth.

  "I can't prove it wasn't an 'accident,' but there are too many coincidences. Especially—" Ninhursag's hands went back behind her, clenched about one another, and her voice was very, very quiet "—when Vincente Cruz was assistant project chief for Imperial Terra's cybernetics."

  "Son-of-a-bitch!" Colin whispered, and she nodded coldly.

  "I haven't checked his work logs yet—that comes next—but I'm already certain what I'm going to find," she said, and this time Colin understood her murderous fury perfectly.

  Chapter Twelve

  The mood around the conference table was very different this time.

  " ... so there's a fifteen-minute hole in his work log," Ninhursag said, "smack in the middle of his work on Terra's core software. Unfortunately, there are eight other holes, from just under a minute to almost an hour long, in the same log, and we've found an intermittent defect in his terminal that looks completely normal." Her curled lip showed what she thought of that.

  "But why?" Horus asked softly. "I don't question your conclusions, 'Hursag, but in the Maker's name, why?"

  "We can't prove 'why' until we know 'who,' " Ninhursag's voice was harsh, "but I see only two motives. Destroy Imperial Terra, one, because of what she was—our most powerful warship—or, two, because of who was aboard."

  "Sean and Harry," Colin grated, and Ninhursag nodded.

  "Whoever set this up went to tremendous lengths—and ran tremendous risks. What else could his objective have been?"

  "Sweet Jesu," Jiltanith whispered. "Full eighty thousand people and the children of our dearest friends to kill my babes?" Her face was drawn, but more than despair burned in her black eyes, and her knuckles were white about the hilt of the dagger she always wore.

  "Bastards!" Hector MacMahan's stylus snapped in his hand. He looked down at the broken pieces and slowly and carefully crushed each of them between enhanced fingertips.

  "Agreed," Colin's voice was ice, "but the other kids may have been targets as well. Look how it's affected all of us. 'Hursag blames herself for 'slacking off,' but have any of us done better? And whoever the son-of-a-bitch is, he damned well knew what it would do to us!"

  "I must agree," Tsien said. Amanda nodded beside him, eyes smoking, and he touched her hand where it lay upon the table. "Yet I am also certain 'Hursag's other deduction is equally correct. Whoever did this must have a powerful organization and penetration at the highest levels. Without such an organization he could not have acted; without such penetration he could have known neither which ship to attack nor whom to use for that attack."

  "Agreed," Gerald Hatcher sounded even grimmer. "They had to pick someone with access who was also vulnerable. Anybody this ruthless might have popped one of his own people to cut the chain of evidence, but why kill an entire family? No, they knew exactly which poor bastard to pick, held his family hostage to make him play, then killed them all to cover their tracks."

  "There's another pointer." Adrienne Robbins' voice was cold; Algys McNeal had been her friend, and twenty more of her midshipmen had been aboard Imperial Terra. "Cruz didn't pop a single security flag. He must have known how small a chance he had of getting them back alive, but he went for it without telling anyone. He never even tried to get help, so maybe he knew they had enough penetration to know if he'd talked to any of 'Hursag's people."

  Cold, bitter silence enveloped the council room, then Colin nodded.

  "All right. There's someone out there cold enough to murder an entire family and eighty thousand of our people, and I want the son-of-a-bitch. How do we get him?"

  "Dust off the lie detectors and put everybody—and I mean everybody—on them," MacMahan grated.

  "We can't," Horus said. Eyes turned to him, and he shrugged. "If we're right about how far we've been penetrated, the bad guys—whoever they are—will know the instant we start that. If they're our own people, well and good; all they can do is run and identify themselves for us. But if they're tapped in from the outside, they'll be operating through a blizzard of cutouts, and whoever's really in charge will just pull in his horns. If he disengages, we may never get another shot at him."

  "It's worse than that," Colin sighed. "We don't have 'probable cause' for that kind of sweep."

  "Bullshit!" MacMahan snarled. "This is a security matter. We can pull in anybody in uniform we want to!"

  "No, we can't." MacMahan started to speak again, but Colin raised a hand. "Hold it, Hector. Just wait a minute. Goddamn it, I want this bastard as badly as you do, but think about it. We know 'Hursag's right, but there's not a single piece of hard evidence. Everything except the disappearance of Cruz's family is covered by plausible 'technical failures.' And while it's true his family did disappear from our records, that by itself doesn't prove a thing. No law requires people to report their whereabouts to us—our subjects are also free citizens. The fact that we don't know where they were actually works against us; Cruz never indicated they were being held against their will, and if we don't even know where they were, we can hardly prove they were prisoners!

  "Even if we could, we'd have to be very specific about who we questioned. The Charter provides no protection against self-incrimination, so we can ask anything we like under a lie detector... but only in a court. That particular civil right is absolutely guaranteed specifically because there's no protection against self-incrimination.

  "Now, you're right that we can question anyone in uniform as long as we make it a security matter, but we still have to furnish them and their counsel with a list of areas we intend to cover—approved by a judge—before we start asking. There's no way we could process legal paperwork on the scale we need without its coming to the attention of anyone with the sources to target Cruz, and what happens when our Mister X finds out about it? We don't want his sources, Hector—we want him."

  MacMahan looked rebellious, but he subsided with a muttered curse and a grudging nod. Colin was glad to see it, and even gladder to see the life flowing back into his eyes as he realized he had an enemy. Sandy's death was no longer a senseless act by an uncaring universe. Hector had someone besides God to hate, and perhaps that would bring those inner barricades down.

  "Very well, then," Tsien said, "what steps shall we take?"

  "First we start taking security real serious," Amanda said. "Whoever went after the kids may be religious nuts, anarchists, out of their fucking minds, or planning a coup, but they don't get you two—or Horus—by God!"

  "Damn straight," Adrienne approved amid a snarl of agreement, and Colin swallowed. He heard their hunger to destroy whoever had done this to them, but these weren't just his senior officers or angry, bereaved parents. These were friends, determined to protect him and Jiltanith.

  "For Colin and 'Tanni, yes," Horus said after a moment, "but not me." Colin raised his eyebrows, and the
old man shrugged. "We can reinforce your security quietly, but we can't slap armed guards all over White Tower. Your 'Mister X' could hardly miss that."

  "Nay, Father! Shalt not risk thyself thus!"

  "Oh, hush, 'Tanni! Who'd want to kill me? Unless we're talking about a total maniac, and I don't think we are, given how smoothly this whole thing went down, what possible motive could he have? Maybe after they got the two of you I'd become a target—not before."

  "I believe Horus has a point, 'Tanni," Dahak put in. "While it is possible this was a crime of hate and not of logic, whoever perpetrated it did so in a most rational fashion." The computer's voice was as mellow as ever, but they all heard its anger. "At present, this would appear to be the first step in an attempt to decapitate the Imperium, and if that is, indeed, the case, Horus becomes a logical target only in the endgame of the conspiracy."

  "Umm." Ninhursag rubbed her forehead. "I don't know, Dahak. You may be right, but you're a bit prone to believe everyone operates on the basis of logic. And whoever it is did go for the kids first."

  "True, yet analysis suggests this was a crime of opportunity. Security for the twins was very tight, however it might appear to the uninformed. In the Bia System, they were attended by my own scanners at all times and, save for their field trips, continuously guarded by other security arrangements, as well. I do not say it would have been impossible to assassinate them, but it would have been difficult—and it could not have been done without being recognized as an act of murder. In this instance, the killer was able to strike when they were beyond my own surveillance or that of any regular security agency. Moreover, had you not pursued your own intuition in the matter of the Cruz family's murders, the fact that Sean and Harriet's deaths had been deliberately contrived would never have been known."