by David Weber
"Huh!" Hatcher grunted skeptically, then made himself relax. "All right, I grant you that, but it makes me nervous to know any of Anu's bunch are still around."
"You and me both," Colin agreed, and Jiltanith nodded beside him. "On the other hand, it sounds to me like you, Dahak, and Gus are on top of the situation 'Hursag. Stay there, and make sure I find out if anything—and I mean anything—changes in regard to it."
"Of course," Ninhursag said quietly. "In the meantime, it seems to me the greatest potential dangers lie in three areas. First, the Third World resentment Horus has mentioned. A lot of those people still see the Imperium as an extension of Western imperialism. Even some of those who truly believe we're doing our best to treat everyone fairly can't quite forget we imposed our ideas and control on them. I expect this particular problem to ease with time, but it'll be with us for a good many years to come.
"Second, we've got the First World people who've seen their positions in the old power structures crumble. Some of them have been a real pain, like the old unions that're still fighting our 'job-destroying new technology,' but, again, most of them—or their children—will come around with time.
"Third, and most disturbing, in a way, are the religious nuts." Ninhursag frowned unhappily. "I just don't understand the true-believer mentality well enough to feel confident about dealing with it, and there's a bunch of true believers out there. Not just in the extreme Islamic blocs, either. At the moment, there's no clear sign of organization—aside from this 'Church of the Armageddon'—but it's mighty hard to reason with someone who's convinced God is on his side. Still, they're not a serious threat unless they coalesce into something bigger and nastier . . . and since the Great Charter guarantees freedom of religion, there's not much we can do about them until and unless they try something overtly treasonous."
She paused, checking back over what she'd said, then shrugged.
"That's about the size of it, at the moment. A lot of rumbles but no present signs of anything really dangerous. We're keeping our eyes peeled, but for the most part it's simply going to take time to relieve the tensions."
"Okay." Colin leaned back and glanced around. "Anyone have anything else we need to look at?" A general headshake answered him, and he rose. "In that case, let's go see what the kids have gotten themselves into."
Eight hundred-plus light-years from Birhat, a man swiveled his chair towards a window and gazed down with unfocused yet intent eyes, staring through the view below to examine something far beyond it.
He rocked the old-fashioned swivel chair back with a gentle creak and steepled his fingers, tapping his chin with his index fingers as he considered the changes which had come upon his world . . . and the other changes he proposed to create in their wake. It had taken almost ten years to attain the position he needed, but attain it he had—not, he admitted, without the help of the Emperor himself—and the game was about to begin.
There was nothing inherently wrong, he conceded, in the notion of an empire, nor even of an emperor for all humanity. Certainly someone had to make the human race work together despite its traditional divisions, and the man in the chair had no illusions about his species. With the best of intentions (assuming they existed—a point he felt no obligation to concede), few of Earth's teeming billions would have the least idea of how to create some sort of democratic world state from the ground up. Even if they'd had one, democracies were notoriously short-sighted about preparing for problems which lay beyond the horizon, and the job of ultimately defeating the Achuultani was going to take centuries. No, democracy would never do. Of course, he'd never been particularly attached to that form of government, or Kirinal would never have recruited him, now would she?
Not that his own views on democratic government mattered, for one thing was clear: Colin I intended to exercise his prerogatives of direct rule to provide the central authority mankind required. And, the man in the chair reflected, His Imperial Majesty was doing an excellent job. He was probably the most popular head of state in Earth's history, and, of course, there was the tiny consideration that the Fifth Imperium's armed forces were deeply—one might almost say fanatically—loyal to their Emperor and Empress.
All of which, the man in the chair admitted, made things difficult. But if the game were easy, anyone could play, and think how inconvenient that would be!
He chuckled and rocked gently, listening to his chair's soft, musical creaking. Actually, he rather admired the Emperor. How many people could have resurrected an empire which had died with its entire population over forty-five thousand years before and crowned himself its ruler? That was a stellar accomplishment, whatever immediate military advantages Colin MacIntyre might have enjoyed, and the man in the chair saluted him.
Unfortunately, there could be only one Emperor. However skilled, however determined, however adroit, there could be but one of him . . . and he was not the man in the chair.
Or, the man in the chair corrected himself with a smile, not yet.
Chapter Two
"Finished, Horus?"
The Planetary Duke of Terra looked up and grimaced as Lawrence Jefferson stepped into his office.
"No," he said sourly, dropping a data chip into his security drawer, "but I'm as close as I'll be for the next decade, so we might as well go. It's not every day my grandchildren have a twelfth birthday, and that's more important than this."
Jefferson laughed as Horus stood and sent his desk computer a command to lock the drawer, and an answering smile flickered on the old man's lips. He glanced at Jefferson's briefcase.
"I see you're not leaving your work home."
"I'm not going to the party. Besides, this isn't 'my' work—it's Admiral MacMahan's copy of Gus' report on that anti-Narhani demonstration."
"Oh." Horus sounded as disgusted as he felt. "You know, I've learned to handle prejudice. We all suffer from that, to some extent, but this anti-Narhani thing is plain, old-fashioned bigotry."
"True, but then the difference between prejudice and bigotry is usually stupidity. The answer's education. The Narhani are on our side; we just have to prove that to these idiots."
"Somehow I doubt they'd appreciate your terminology, Lawrence."
"I call them as I see them." Jefferson grinned. "Besides, you're the only person here. If it leaks, I'll know who to come after."
"I'll bear that in mind." Horus finished shutting down his computer through his neural feed as they strolled out of the office, and two armed Marine guards snapped to attention. Their presence was a formality, but Hector MacMahan's Marines took their responsibilities seriously. Besides, Horus was their Commandant's great-great-great-etc.-grandfather.
The two men took the old-fashioned elevator to the ground floor. White Tower at NASA's old Shepard Center had been Horus' HQ throughout the Siege, and he'd resisted all pressure to relocate from Colorado on the basis that the fact that Shepard Center had never been anyone's capital would help defuse nationalist jealousies. Besides, he liked the climate.
They crossed the plaza to the mat-trans terminal, and Jefferson was grateful for his bio-enhancement as his breath steamed. He wasn't in the military, so he lacked the full enhancement that gave Horus ten times the strength of an unenhanced human, but what he had sufficed to deal with little things like sub-freezing temperatures. Which was handy, since Earth hadn't yet fully emerged from the mini-ice age produced by the Siege's bombardment.
They chatted idly during the walk, enjoying the moment of privacy, but Jefferson was still a bit bemused by the absence of bodyguards. He'd grown to adulthood on a planet where terrorism was the chosen form of "protest" by have-not nations, and the report in his briefcase was proof his home world frothed with resentment as it strained to make a nine- or ten-millennium leap in technology. Yet for all that, violence directed at Earth's Governor was virtually unthinkable. Horus had not only led Earth's people through the carnage of the Siege, he was also the father of their beloved Empress, and only a particularly stupid maniac would
attack him to make a statement.
Not, Jefferson reflected, that history didn't abound with stupid maniacs.
They entered the mat-trans facility, and Jefferson felt himself tense. It didn't look like much—merely a railed platform twenty meters on a side—but knowing what it could do turned that brightly lit dais into something that made the primitive tree-dweller within the Lieutenant Governor gibber.
His stride slowed, and Horus grinned at him.
"Don't take it so hard. And don't think you're the only one it scares!"
Jefferson managed a nod as they stepped onto the platform and the bio-scanners Colin MacIntyre had ordered incorporated into every mat-trans station considered them at length. The mat-trans had been the Fourth Empire's executioner, the vector by which the rogue bio-weapon infected worlds hundreds of light-years apart, and he had no intention of allowing that particular bit of history to repeat itself.
But the scanners cleared them, and Jefferson clutched his briefcase in a sweaty hand, trying very hard to appear nonchalant, as heavy capacitors whined. The mat-trans' power requirements were astronomical, even by Imperial standards, and it took almost twenty seconds to reach peak load. Then a light flashed . . . and Horus and Lawrence Jefferson stepped down from another platform on the planet Birhat, eight hundred light-years from Earth.
The thing that made it so damned scary, Jefferson thought as he left the mat-trans receiver gratefully behind, was that you didn't feel a thing. Nothing. It just wasn't natural . . . and wasn't that a fine thing for a man stuffed full of sensors and neural boosters to be thinking?
"Hi, Granddad." Jefferson looked up as General MacMahan held out his hand to Horus then turned to shake his own. "Colin asked me to meet you. He's tied up with something over at the Palace."
"Tied up with what?" Horus asked.
"I'm not sure, but he sounded a bit harassed. I think—" Hector grinned impishly "—it's got something to do with Cohanna."
"Oh, Maker! What's she been up to now?"
"Don't know. Come on, I've got transport waiting."
"Damn it, 'Hanna!" Colin paced back and forth before the utilitarian desk from which he ran the Imperium, tugging on his nose in a gesture his subordinates knew only too well. "I've told you and told you you can't just go chasing off after any wild hare that takes your fancy!"
"But, Colin—" Cohanna began.
"Don't 'But, Colin' me! Did I or did I not tell you to check your next genetic experiment with me before you started on it?"
"Well, of course you did. And I did clear it with you," Baroness Cohanna, Imperial Minister of Bio-Sciences added virtuously.
"You what?" Colin wheeled on her in disbelief.
"I said I cleared it with you. I sat right here in this office with Brashieel and told you what I was going to do."
"You—!" Colin turned to the saurian-looking, long-snouted, quarter-horse-sized centauroid resting comfortably on his folded legs in the middle of the rug, who returned his gaze with mild, double-lidded eyes. "Brashieel, do you remember her saying anything about this?"
"Yes," Brashieel replied calmly through the small black box mounted on one strap of his body harness. His vocal apparatus was poorly suited to human speech, but he'd learned to use his neural feed-driven vocoder's deep bass to express emotion as well as words.
Colin drew a deep breath, then perched on his desk and folded his arms. Brashieel seldom made mistakes, and Cohanna's triumphant expression made Colin unhappily certain she had mentioned it. Or something about it.
"All right," he sighed, "what, exactly, did she say?"
Brashieel closed his inner eyelids in concentration, and Colin waited patiently. The alien's mere presence was enough to give some members of humanity screaming fits, which Colin understood even if he rejected their attitude. To be sure, Brashieel was an Achuultani. Worse, he was the sole survivor of the fleet which had come within hours of destroying the planet Earth. He was also, however, the being who'd emerged as the natural leader of the prisoners of war Colin had captured after defeating the incursion, and most of those prisoners—not all, but most—were even more committed to the ultimate defeat of the rest of the Achuultani than humanity was.
For seventy-eight million years, the people of the Nest of Aku'Ultan had quartered the galaxy, destroying every sentient species they encountered. Of all their potential victims, only humanity had survived—not just once, but three times, earning it the Achuultani appellation of "the Demon Nest-Killers"—but Brashieel and his fellows knew something the rest of their race did not. They knew their entire species was enslaved by a self-aware computer which used their unending murder of races who meant them no ill to sustain the "state of war" its programming required to maintain its tyranny.
Not all humans were ready to accept their sincerity, which was why Colin had turned the planet Narhan over to those who had applied for Imperial citizenship. Narhan had avoided the bio-weapon for a simple reason; no one had lived on it, since its 2.67 gravity field produced a sea-level atmosphere lethal to unenhanced humans. Its air was a bit dense even for Achuultani lungs, and it was inconveniently placed—it was far enough from Birhat that travelers by mat-trans had to stage through Earth to reach the capital planet—but its settlers had fallen under the spell of its rugged beauty as they set about carving out their new Nest of Narhan as loyal subjects of their human overlord on a world beyond the reach of hysterical xenophobes.
"Cohanna had reported on progress with the genetic engineering to recreate Narhani females," Brashieel said at last. The rogue computer had eliminated all sexual reproduction by eliminating all Achuultani females. Every Achuultani was male, either a clone or an embryo fertilized in vitro. "Thereafter, she turned to discussion of her suggestion to increase our life spans to something approaching those of humans."
Colin nodded. Achuultani—Narhani, he corrected himself—were bigger and far stronger than humans. They also matured much more rapidly, but their normal span was little more than fifty years. Bio-enhancement, which all adult Narhani who'd taken the oath of loyalty had received as quickly as Cohanna got a grip on their alien physiology, stretched that to almost three hundred years, but that remained much shorter than for enhanced humans.
Extending Narhani lives was a challenge, but unlike humans, Narhani had no prejudice against bioengineering. They regarded it as a fact of life, given their own origins and the cloned children Jiltanith's Terra-born sister Isis had managed to produce over the last few years, and the possibility of recreating females of their species simply strengthened that attitude.
"We discussed the practical aspects," Brashieel continued, "and I mentioned Tinker Bell."
"I know you did, but surely I never okayed this."
"I regret that I must disagree," Brashieel said, and Colin frowned.
Hector MacMahan's big, happy half-lab, half-rottweiler bitch Tinker Bell had fallen in love with the Narhani. It amused Colin, given the way the dogs in every bad science-fiction movie ever made hated the "alien menace" on sight, but it was more than amusing to the Narhani. The Nest of Aku'Ultan had nothing remotely like her—indeed, one of the most alien things about the nest was the absence of any form of pet—and they found her fascinating. Almost every Narhani had speedily acquired a dog of his own, but they, like any other Terrestrial animal, would have been unable to survive on Narhan, and the Narhani were fiercely devoted to their four-footed friends.
"Look, I know I authorized limited bio-enhancement so you could take the dogs with you, but I never contemplated anything like this."
"I cannot, of course, know what was in your mind, but the point was raised." Colin clenched his teeth. The Narhani were as intelligent as humans but less imaginative and far more literal-minded. "Cohanna pointed out that genetic engineering would permit her to produce dogs who required no enhancement, and you agreed. She then reminded you of Dahak's success in communicating with Tinker Bell and suggested the capability for meaningful exchanges might also be enhanced."
Co
lin opened his mouth, then shut it with a snap as his own memory replayed the conversation. She had mentioned it, and he'd agreed. But, damn it, she should have known what he meant!
He closed his eyes and counted to five hundred. Dahak had insisted for years that Tinker Bell's barks, growls, and yips were more value-laden than humans believed, and he'd persisted with an analysis of her sounds until he proved his point. Dogs were no mental giants. Their cognitive functions were severely limited, and their ability to manipulate symbols was virtually nonexistent, but they had lots more to say than mankind had guessed.
"All right," he said finally, opening his eyes and glowering at Cohanna, who returned his gaze innocently. "All right. I admit the point came up, but you never told me you had anything like this in mind."
"Only because I thought it was self-evident," she said, and Colin bit off an acid response. He sometimes toyed with the notion that the millennia Cohanna had spent in stasis had affected her mind, but he'd known Terra-born humans just like her. She was brilliant and intensely curious, and little things like political realities, wars, and nearby supernovas were totally unimportant compared to her current project—whatever it might be.
"Look," he tried again, "I've got several million Terra-born who find simple biotechnics scary, 'Hanna." Her nose wrinkled with contempt for such benighted ignorance, and he sighed. "All right, so they're wrong. But that doesn't change the way they feel, and if that upsets them, how are they going to react to your fooling with the natural order of evolution?"
"Evolution," she replied, "is an unreasoning statistical process which represents no more than the blind conservation of accidental life forms capable of surviving within their environments."
"Please don't say things like that!" Colin ran his hands through his hair and tried not to look harried. "Maybe you're right, but too many Terra-born regard it as the working out of God's plan for the universe. And even the ones who don't tend to remember the bio-weapon and wake up screaming!"