"Then compute time to reactivate to limited combat readiness."

 

 

"Computing, Sire," Mother responded, and fell silent for a disturbingly long period. Almost a full minute passed before she spoke again. "Computation complete. Probable time required: four-point-three-nine months. Margin of error twenty-point-seven percent owing to large numbers of imponderables."

 

 

Colin closed his eyes and felt Jiltanith tremble against him. Four months-five-and-a-half outside. It would be close, but they could do it. By all that was holy, they could do it!

 

 

"There," Tamman said quietly as a green circle bloomed on Dahak's visual display, ringing a tiny, gleaming dot. The dot grew as Dahak approached, and additional dots appeared, spreading out in a loose necklace of worldlets.

 

 

"I see them," Colin replied, still luxuriating in his return to Command One and a world he understood. "Big bastards, aren't they, Dahak?"

 

 

"I compute that the largest out-mass Dahak by over twenty-five percent. I am not prepared to speculate upon the legitimacy of their parentage."

 

 

Colin chuckled. Dahak had been much more willing to engage in informality since his return from Fleet Central, as if he recognized Colin's shock at suddenly finding himself an emperor. Or perhaps the computer was simply glad to have him back. Dahak was a worrier where friends were concerned.

 

 

He watched the planetoids grow. If Vlad was right about the Empire's technology, those ships would be monsters in action-and monsters were exactly what they needed.

 

 

"Captain, look here." Ellen Gregory, Sarah Meir's Assistant Astrogator, placed a sighting circle of her own on the display, picking out a single starship. "What do you make of that, sir?"

 

 

Colin looked, then looked again. The stupendous sphere floating in space was only roughly similar to the only Imperial planetoid he'd ever seen, but one thing was utterly familiar. A vast, three-headed dragon spread its wings across the gleaming hull.

 

 

"Well looky there," he murmured. "Dahak, what d'you make of that?"

 

 

According to the data Fleet Central downloaded to my data base," Dahak replied, "that is His Imperial Majesty's Planetoid Dahak, Hull Number Seven-Three-Six-Four-Four-Eight-Niner-Two-Five."

 

 

"Another Dahak?"

 

 

"It is a proud name in Battle Fleet." Dahak sounded a bit miffed. "Rather like the many ships named Enterprise in your own United States Navy. According to the data, this is the twenty-third ship to bear the name."

 

 

"It is, huh? Well, which one are you?"

 

 

"This unit is the eleventh of the name."

 

 

"I see. Well, in order to avoid confusion, we'll just refer to this young whippersnapper as Dahak Two, if that's all right with you, Dahak."

 

 

"Noted," Dahak said calmly, and continued to close on the silently waiting, millennia-dead hulls they intended to resurrect.

 

 

"By the Maker, I've got it!"

 

 

Colin jumped half out of his couch as Cohanna's holo image materialized on Command One. The biosciences officer looked terrible, her hair awry and her uniform wrinkled, but her eyes were bright with triumph.

 

 

"Try penicillin," he advised sourly, and she looked blank, then grinned.

 

 

"Sorry, sir. I meant I've figured out what happened on Birhat-why it's got that incredible bio-system. I found it in Mother's data base."

 

 

"Oh?" Colin sat straighter, his eyes more intent. "Give!"

 

 

"It's simple, really. The zoos-the Imperial Family's zoos."

 

 

"Zoos?" It was Colin's turn to look blank.

 

 

"Yes. You see, the Imperial Family had an immense zoological garden. Over thirty different planets' flora and fauna in sealed, self-sufficient planetary habitats. Apparently, they lasted out the plague. I'd guess the automated systems responsible for restraining plant growth failed first in one of them, and the thing cracked. Once it did, its inhabitants could get out, and the same vegetation attacked the exterior of other surviving habitats. Over the years, still more oxy-nitrogen habitats were opened up and started spreading to reclaim the planet. That's why we've got such a screwy damned ecology. We're looking at the survivors of a dozen different planetary bio-spheres after forty-five thousand years of natural selection!"

 

 

"Well I'll be damned," Colin mused. "Good work, Cohanna. I'm impressed you could keep concentrating on that kind of problem at a time like this."

 

 

"Time like this?"

 

 

"While we're making our final approach to the Imperial Guard," Colin said, raising his eyebrows, and Cohanna wrinkled her nose.

 

 

"What's an Imperial Guard?"

 

 

Vlad Chernikov shuddered as he and Baltan floated down the lifeless, lightless transit shaft. This, he thought, is what Dahak would have become if Anu had succeeded all those years ago.

 

 

It was depressing in more ways than one. Actually seeing this desolation gnawed away at the confidence that anything could be done about it, and even if he succeeded in rejecting the counsel of despair, he could see it would be a horrific task. Dead power rooms, exhausted fuel mass, control rooms and circuit runs which had never been properly stasissed when the ship died. There was even meteor damage, for the collision shields had died with everything else. One of the planetoids might well be beyond repair, judging by the huge hole punched into its south pole.

 

 

Still, he reminded himself, everyone had his or her own problems. Caitrin O'Rourke was practically in tears over the hydroponic farms, and Geran was furious to find so much perfectly good equipment left out of stasis. But Tamman was probably the most afflicted of all, for the magazines had been left without stasis, as well, and the containment fields on every anti-matter weapon had failed. At least the warhead fail-safes had worked as designed and rotated them into hyper as the fields went down, but huge chunks of magazine bulkheads had gone with them. Of course, if they hadn't worked...

 

 

He shuddered again, concentrating on the grav sled he and Baltan rode. It was far slower than an operable transit shaft, but they dared not use even its full speed. They were no transit computer to whip around unexpected bends in the system!

 

 

He craned his neck, reading the lettering above a hatch. Gamma-One-One-Nine-One-One. According to Dahak's downloaded schematics, they were getting close to Engineering.

 

 

So they were. He tapped Baltan's shoulder and pointed, and the commander nodded inside the force bubble of his helmet. The sled angled for the side of the shaft and nudged against the hatch-which, of course, stayed firmly shut.

 

 

Chernikov smothered a curse, then grinned as he recalled Colin's account of his "coronation." The Captain-Emperor!-had exhausted the entire crew's allocation of profanity for at least a month, by Chernikov's estimate. He chuckled at the thought and climbed off the sled, dragging a cable from its power plant behind him and muttering Slavic maledictions. No power meant no artificial gravity, which-unfortunately-did not mean no gravity. A planetoid generated an impressive grav field all its own, and turned bulkheads into decks and decks into bulkheads when the power failed.

 

 

He found the emergency power receptacle and plugged in, and the hatch slid open. He waved, and Baltan ghosted the sled inside, angling its powerful lamps to pick out the emergency lighting system.

 

 

Chernikov did some more cable-dragging and, after propitiating Murphy with a few curses, brought it alive. Light bathed Central Engineering, and the two engineers began to explore.

 

 

The long-dead core tap drew them like a magnet, and Chernikov felt a tingle of awe as his eyes and implants traced circuit runs and control systems. This thing was at least five times as powerful as Dahak's, and he wouldn't have believed it could be without seeing it. But what in the galaxy could they have needed that much power for? Even allowing for the more powerful energy armament and shield, there had to be some other reason-

 

 

His thoughts died as his implants followed a massive power shunt which shouldn't have been there. He clambered over a control panel which had become the floor, slightly vertiginous as he tried to orient himself, then gasped.

 

 

"Baltan! Look at this!"

 

 

"I know," his assistant said softly, approaching from the far side. "I've been following the control runs."

 

 

"Can you believe this?"

 

 

"Does it matter? And it would certainly explain all the power demand."

 

 

"True." Chernikov moved a few more yards, examining his find carefully, then shook his head. "I must tell the Captain about this."

 

 

He keyed his com implant, and Colin answered a moment later, sounding a bit harassed-not surprisingly, considering that every other search party must be finding marvels of its own to report.

 

 

"Captain, I am in Mairsuk's Central Engineering, and you would not believe what I am looking at."

 

 

"Try me," Colin said wearily. "I'm learning to believe nineteen impossible things before breakfast every day."

 

 

"Very well, here is number twenty. This ship has both Enchanach and hyper capability."

 

 

There was a pregnant pause.

 

 

"What," Colin finally asked very carefully, "did you say?"

 

 

"I said, sir, that we have here both an Enchanach and a hyper drive, engineered down to a size that fits both into a single hull. I am not yet positive, but I would judge that the combined mass of both units is less than that of Dahak's Enchanach Drive, alone."

 

 

"Great day in the morning," Colin muttered. Then, "All right. Take a good look, then get back over here. We're having an all-departments meeting in four hours to discuss plans for reactivation.

 

 

"Understood," Chernikov said, and broke the connection. He and Baltan exchanged eloquent shrugs and bent back to the study of their prize.

 

 

"... can't be specific until we've got the computers back up and run a complete inventory," Geran said, "but about ten percent of all spares required controlled condition storage. Without that-" He shrugged.

 

 

Most of Colin's department heads were present in the flesh, but a sizable force from the recon group was prowling around other installations, and Hector MacMahan and Ninhursag attended via holo image from the battleship Osir's command deck. Now all eyes, physical and holographic alike, swiveled to Colin.

 

 

"All right." He spoke quietly, leaning his forearms on the crystalline tabletop to return their gazes. "Bottom line. Mother's time estimate is based on sixteen-hour shifts for every man and woman after we put at least one automated repair yard back on line. According to the reports from Hector's people, we can probably do that, but I expect to find ourselves pushing closer to twenty-hour shifts by the time we're done. We could increase the odds and decrease the workload by concentrating on a dozen or so units. I'm sure that's going to occur to a lot of people in the next few weeks. However-" his eyes circled their faces "-we aren't going to do it that way. We need as many of these ships as we can get, and, ladies and gentlemen, I mean to have every single one of them."

 

 

There was a sound like a soft gasp, and he smiled grimly.

 

 

"God only knows how hard they're working back on Earth, but we're about to make up for our nice vacation on the trip out. Every one of them, people. No exceptions. We will leave this system no later than five months from today, and the entire Imperial Guard Flotilla will go with us when we do."

 

 

"But, sir," Chernikov said, "we may ask for too much and lose it all. I do not fear hard work, but we have only a finite supply of personnel. A very finite supply."

 

 

"I understand, Vlad, but the decision is not negotiable. We've got highly motivated, highly capable people aboard this ship. I feel certain they'll understand and give of their very best. If not, however, tell them this.

 

 

"I'll be working my ass off right beside them, but that doesn't mean I won't be keeping tabs on what they're doing. And, people, if I catch anyone shirking, I'm going to be the worst nightmare he ever had."

 

 

His smile was grim, but even its micrometric amusement looked out of place on his rock-hard face.

 

 

"Tell them they can depend on that," he finished very, very softly.

 

 

BOOK TWO

 

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

 

Assistant Servant of Thunders Brashieel of the Nest of Aku'Ultan folded all four legs under him on his duty pad as he bent his long-snouted head, considering his panel, and slid both hands into the control gloves. Eight fingers and four thumbs twitched, activating each test circuit in turn, and he noted the results cheerfully. He had not had a major malfunction in three twelves of twelve watches.

 

 

Equipment tests completed, he checked Vindicator's position. It was purely automatic, for there could be no change. Once a vessel entered hyper space it remained there, impotent but inviolate, until it reached the pre-selected coordinates and emerged into normal space once more.

 

 

Brashieel did not understand those mysteries particularly well, for he was no lord-not even of thunders, much less of star-faring-but because Small Lord of Order Hantorg was a good lord, he had made certain Vindicator's nestlings all knew whither they were bound. Another yellow sun, this one with nine planets. Once it had boasted ten, but that had been before the visit of Great Lord Vaskeel's fleet untold high twelves of years before. Now it was time to return, and Vindicator and his brothers would sweep through it like the Breath of Tarhish, trampling the nest-killers under hooves of flame.

 

 

It was well. The Protectors of the Nest would feed their foes to Tarhish's Fire, and the Nest would be safe forever.

 

 

"Outer perimeter tracking confirms hyper wakes approaching from galactic east," Sir Frederick Amesbury said.

 

 

Gerald Hatcher nodded without even looking up. His neural feed hummed with readiness reports, and his eyes were unfocused.

 

 

"Got an emergence locus and ETA, Frederick?"

 

 

"It's bloody rough, but Plotting's calling it fifty light-minutes and forty-five degrees above the ecliptic. Judging from the wake strength, the buggers should be arriving in about twelve hours. Tracking promises to firm that up in the next two hours."

 

 

"Fine." Hatcher acknowledged the last report and blinked back into focus, wishing yet again that Dahak had returned. If Colin MacIntyre had been gone this long, it meant he hadn't found aid at Sheskar and must have decided he had no choice but to hope Earth could hold without him while he sought it elsewhere. And that he might not be back for another full year.

 

 

He activated his com panel, and Horus's taut face appeared instantly.

 

 

"Governor," the general reported, knowing full well that Horus already knew what he was about to say and that he was speaking for the record, "I have to report that I have placed our forces on Red Two. Hyper wakes presumed to be hostile have been detected. ETA is approximately-" he checked the time through his neural feed "-seventeen-thirty hours, Zulu. System defense forces are now on full alert. Civil defense procedures have been initiated. All PDC and ODC commanders are in the net. Interceptor squadrons are at two-hour readiness. Planetary shield generators and planetary core tap are at stand-by readiness. Battle Squadrons One and Four are within thirty minutes of projected n-space emergence; Squadrons Two and Six should rendezvous with them by oh-seven-hundred Zulu. Squadrons Three, Five, Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten, with escorts, are being held in-system as per Plan Able-One.

 

 

"Have you any instructions at this time, Governor?"

 

 

"Negative, General Hatcher. Please keep me informed."

 

 

"I will, sir."

 

 

"Good luck, Gerald," Horus said softly, his tone much less formal.

 

 

"Thanks, Horus. We'll try to make a little luck of our own."

 

 

The screen blanked, and Gerald Hatcher turned back to his console.

 

 

Assistant Servant Brashieel checked his chronometer. Barely four day twelfths until emergence, and tension was high in Vindicator, for this was the Demon Sector. It was not often the Protectors of the Nest encountered a foe with an advance technical base-that was why they came, to crush the nest-killers before they armed themselves-but five of the last twelve Great Visits to this sector had been savaged. They had triumphed, but at great cost, and the last two had been the most terrible of all. Perhaps, Brashieel thought, that was the reason Great Lord Tharno's Great Visit had been delayed: to amass the strength the Nest required for certain success.

 

 

That alone was cause enough for concern, yet the disquiet among his nestmates had grown far worse since the first nest-killer scanner stations had been detected. More than one scout ship had been lured to his death by the fiendish stations, and the explosions which slew them meant their surviving consorts had learned absolutely nothing about the technology which built those stations... except that it was advanced, indeed.

 

 

But this star system would offer no threat. Small Lord Hantorg had revealed the latest data scan shortly after Vindicator entered hyper for this last jump to the target. It was barely three twelves of years old, and though electronic and neutrino emissions had been detected (which was bad enough), there had been none of the more advanced signals from the scanner arrays. Clearly the Protectors must see to this threat, yet these nest-killers would have only the lesser thunder, not the greater, and they would be crushed. Nothing could have changed enough in so short a time to alter that outcome.

 

 

Captain Adrienne Robbins sat in her command couch aboard the sublight battleship Nergal. Admiral Isaiah Hawter, the senior member of the Solarian Defense Force actually in space, rode Nergal's bridge with her, but he might as well have been on another planet. His attention was buried in his own console as he and his staff controlled Task Force One.

 

 

Captain Robbins had been a sub-driver, and she'd never expected to command any flagship (subs still operated solo, after all), far less one leading the defense of her world against homicidal aliens, but she was ready. She felt the tension simmering within her and adjusted her adrenalin levels, pacing her energy. The bastards would be coming out of hyper in less than two hours, and tracking had them pegged to a fare-thee-well. TF One knew where to find them; now all they had to do was wreck as many as they could before the buggers micro-jumped back out on them.

 

 

And, she reminded herself, pray that these Achuultani hadn't upgraded their technology too terribly in the last sixty thousand years or so.

 

 

She did pray, but she also remembered her mother's favorite aphorism: God helps those who help themselves.

 

 

"Task Force in position for Charlie-Three."

 

 

"Thank you," Hatcher said absently.

 

 

The images of Marshals Tsien and Chernikov shared his com screen with Generals Amesbury, Singhman, Tama, and Ki. Chiang Chien-su had a screen all to himself as he waited tensely in his civil defense HQ, and Hatcher could see the control room of PDC Huan Ti behind Tsien. The marshal had made it his HQ for the Eastern Hemisphere Defense Command, and a brief flicker of shared memory flashed between them as their eyes met. Tama and Ki sat in their Fighter Command operations rooms, and Singhman was aboard ODC Seven, serving as Hawter's second-in-command as well as commanding the orbital fortifications.

 

 

"Gentlemen, they'll emerge in thirty minutes, well inside our own heavy hyper missile range of a planetary target, so I want the shield brought to maximum power. Keep this com link open." Heads nodded. "Very well, Marshal Chernikov; activate core tap."

 

 

Lieutenant Andrew Samson winced as the backlash echoed in his missile targeting systems. ODC Fifteen, known to her crew as the Iron Bitch, floated in her geosynchronous orbit above Tierra del Fuego. Which, Samson now discovered, was entirely too close to Antarctica for his peace of mind.

 

 

He adjusted his systems, edging away from the core tap's hyper bands, and sighed with relief. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, after all, but that was one hell of a jump from the test runs! God help us all if they lose it, he prayed-and not just because of what it'll do to the Bitch's power curves.

 

 

Howling wind and flying ice spicules flayed a night-struck land. The kiss of that wind was death, its frigid embrace lethal. There was no life here. There was only the cold, the keening dirge of the wind, and the ice.

 

 

But the frigid night was peeled back in an instant of fiery annunciation. A raging column of energy, pent by invisible chains, impaled the heavens, glittering and terrible as it pierced the low-bellied clouds.

 

 

The beacon of war had been lit, and its fury flowed into the mighty fold-space power transmitters. Man returned Prometheus's gift to the heavens, and Earth's Orbital Defense Command drank deep at Vassily Chernikov's fountain.

 

 

"Here they come, people," Captain Robbins said softly. "Stand by missile crews. Energy weapons to full power."

 

 

Acknowledgments flowed back through her neural feed, and she hunkered deeper into her couch without realizing she had.

 

 

Assistant Servant of Thunders Brashieel gave his instruments one last check, though there could be no danger here. They would pause only to select a proper asteroid, then be on their way, for there were many worlds of nest-killers to destroy. But he was a Protector. It was a point of pride to be prepared for anything.

 

 

My God, the size of those things! They've got to be twenty kilometers long!

 

 

The observation flared over the surface of Captain Robbins' brain, but beneath that surface trained reactions and responses flowed smoothly.

 

 

"Tactical, missiles on my command. Take target designation from the Flag." She paused a fraction of a second, letting the computers digest the latest updates from the admiral's staff while more monster starships emerged from hyper. Ship after cylindrical ship. Dozens of them. Scores. And still they came, popping into reality like demon djinn from a flask of curses.

 

 

"Fire!" she snapped.

 

 

Brashieel gaped at his read-outs. Those ships could not exist!

 

 

But his panic eased-a bit-as he digested more data. There were but four twelves of them, and they were tiny things. Bigger than anyone had expected, with no right to be here, but no threat to Vindicator and his brothers.

 

 

He did not have time to note the full peculiarity of the energy readings before the enemy fired.

 

 

Adrienne Robbins winced as the universe blew apart. She'd fired gravitonic and anti-matter warheads before (the Fleet had reduced significantly the number of Sol's asteroids during firing practices) but never at a live target. The hyper missiles flicked up into hyper space, then back down, and their timing was impeccable. The Achuultani shields had not yet stabilized when the first mighty salvo arrived.

 

 

Brashieel cried out in shock, shaming himself before his nestmates, but he was not alone. What were those things?

 

 

A twelve of ships vanished in a heartbeat, and then another. His scanners told the tale, but he could not believe them. Those weapons were coming through hyper space! From such tiny vessels? Incredible!

 

 

He felt his folded legs tremble as those insignificant pygmies ravaged the lead squadrons. Ships died, blown apart in fireballs vast beyond belief, and others tumbled away, glowing, half-molten, more than half-destroyed by single hits. Such power! And those strange warheads-the ones which did not explode, but tore a ship apart in new and horrible ways. What were they?

 

 

But he was a Protector, and Vindicator had a reputation to uphold. His hands were rock-steady in the control gloves, arming his own weapons, and Small Lord Hantorg's furious voice pounded in his ears.

 

 

"Open fire!" the Small Lord snarled.

 

 

Adrienne Robbins made herself throttle her exultation. Sixty of the buggers in the opening salvo! They knew they'd been nudged, by God! But those had been the easy kills, the sitting ducks with unstable shields. Now her sensors felt those shields slamming into stability, and the first return fire spat towards TF One.

 

 

She opened her cross feed to the electronic warfare types as decoys went out and jammers woke. She would have felt better with some idea of Achuultani capabilities before the engagement, but that was what this was all about. Task Force One was fighting for the data Earth needed to plan her own defense, and she studied the enemy shields. Pretty tough, but they damned well should be with the power reserves those monsters must have. Technically, they weren't as good as Nergal's; only the difference in power levels made them stronger. Which was all very well, but didn't change facts.

 

 

The first Achuultani missiles slashed in, and Captain Robbins got another surprise. They were normal-space weapons, but they were fast little mothers. Seventy, eighty percent light-speed, and that was better than anything of Nergal's could do in n-space. They were going to give missile defense fits.

 

 

Assistant Servant of Thunders Brashieel snarled as his first salvo smote the nest-killers. Half a twelve of missiles burst through all their defenses, ignoring their infernally effective decoys, and the Furnace roared. Matter and anti-matter merged, gouging at the nest-killers' shield, and Brashieel's inner eyelids narrowed at its incredible resistance. But his thunder was too much for it. It crumbled, and Tarhish's Breath swept the ship into death.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Captain Robbins cursed as Bolivia burned. Those fucking warheads were incredible! Their emission signatures said they were anti-matter, and great, big, nasty ones. At least as big as anything Earth's defenders had.

 

 

Bolivia was the first to go, but Canada followed, then Shirhan and Poland. Please, Jesus, she prayed. Slow them down!

 

 

But the huge Achuultani ships were still dying faster than TF One. Which was only because they were getting in each other's way, perhaps, but true nonetheless, and Adrienne Robbins felt a fierce exultation as yet another fell to Nergal's missiles.

 

 

"Close the range," Admiral Hawter said grimly, and Adrienne acknowledged. Nergal drove into the teeth of the Achuultani fire.

 

 

"Stand by energy weapons," she said coldly.

 

 

They were not fleeing. Whatever else these nest-killers might be, they had courage. More of them perished, blazing like splinters of resinous mowap wood, but the others advanced. And their defenses were improving. The efficiency of their jammers had gone up thirty percent while he watched.

 

 

Captain Robbins smiled thinly. Her EW crews were getting good, hard data on the Achuultani targeting systems, and they knew what to do with it. Another three ships were gone, but the others were really knocking down the incoming missiles now.

 

 

Whatever happened, that data would be priceless to the rest of the Fleet and to Earth herself. Not that Adrienne had any intention of dying out here, but it was nice to know.

 

 

Aha! Energy range.

 

 

Brashieel gaped as those preposterous warships opened a heavy energy fire. Tiny things like that couldn't pack in batteries that heavy!

 

 

But they did, and quarter-twelves of them synchronized their fire to the microsecond, slashing at their Aku'Ultan victims. Overload signals snarled, and frantic engineers threw more and more power to their shields, but there simply was not enough. Not to stop missiles and beams alike.

 

 

He watched in horror as Avenger's forward quadrant shields went down. A single nest-killer beam pierced the chink in his armor and ripped his forward twelfth apart. Hard as it was for any Protector to admit another race could match the Aku'Ultan, Brashieel knew the chilling truth. He had never heard of weapons which could do what that one was doing.

 

 

He groaned as Avenger's hull split like a rotten istham, and then another impossible, Tarhish-spawned warhead crumpled the wreckage into a mangled ball. Avenger's power plants let go, and Vindicator's brother was no more.

 

 

But Brashieel bared his teeth as his display changed. Now the nest-killers would learn, for his hyper launchers had been given time to charge at last!

 

 

"Hyper missiles!" Tactical shouted, and Adrienne threw Nergal into evasive action. Ireland and Izhmit were less fortunate. Ireland's shield stopped the first three; the next four-or five, or possibly six-got through. Izhmit went with the first shot. How the hell had they popped her shield that way?

 

 

It didn't matter. TF One was losing too many ships, but the Achuultani were dying at a three-to-one ratio even now. A hyper missile burst into n-space, exploding just outside the shield, shaking Nergal as a terrier shook a rat, but the shield held, and she and her ship were one. They closed in, energy weapons raving, and her own sublight missiles were going out now.

 

 

Lord of Order Furtag was gone with his flagship, and command devolved upon Lord Chirdan. Chirdan was a fighter, but not blind. They were destroying the nest-killers, but his nestlings were dying in unreasonable numbers, for they had no weapon to equal those deadly beams. He could smash these defenders even at this low range, but only at the cost of too many of his own. He gave the order, and the scouts of the Aku'Ultan micro-jumped away.

 

 

The enemy vanished.

 

 

They shouldn't be able to do that, Adrienne Robbins thought. Not to just disappear that way. We should have detected the hyper field charging up on something that size, even for an itty-bitty micro-jump. But we didn't. Well, that's worth knowing. Won't help the bastards much when they get too far in-system to micro-jump, but it's going to be a bitch out here.

 

 

And the buggers can fight, she thought grimly, shaken by her read-outs. Task Force One had gone in with forty-eight ships; it came out with twenty-one. The enemy had lost ten times that many, possibly more... but the enemy had more than ten times as many starships as Earth had battleships.

 

 

Admiral Hawter turned in-system. Magazines were down to sixty percent, thirty percent for hyper missiles, and half his survivors were damaged. If the enemy was willing to run, then so was he. He'd gotten the information Earth needed for analysis; now it was time to get his surviving people home.

 

 

The first clash was over, and humanity had won-if fifty-six percent losses could be called a victory. And both sides knew it could. The Aku'Ultan had lost a vastly lower percentage of their total force, but there came a point at which terms like "favorable rate of exchange" were meaningless.

 

 

Yet it was only the first clash, and both sides had learned much. It remained to be seen which would profit most from the lessons they had purchased with so much blood.

 

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

 

 

The great ringed planet of this accursed system floated far below him, but Lord of Order Chirdan had no eyes for its beauty as he watched his engineers prepare their final system tests.

 

 

The asteroids they had already hurled against the nest-killers' planetary shield had shown Battle Comp that small weapons would not penetrate, while those of sufficient mass were destroyed by the nest-killers' weapons before impact. They would continue to hurl asteroids against it, but only to force it back so that they might smite the fortresses with other thunders.

 

 

But this, Chirdan thought, was another matter. It would move slowly, at first, but only at first, and it was large enough to mount shields which could stop even the nest-killers' weapons. His nestlings would protect it with their lives, and it would end these demon-spawned nest-killers for all time. Battle Comp had promised him that, and Battle Comp never lied.

 

 

"I don't like it," Horus said. "I don't like it, and I want a way around it. Do any of you have one?"

 

 

His chiefs of staff looked back from his com screen, weary faces strained. Gerald Hatcher's temples were almost completely white, but Isaiah Hawter's eyes were haunted, for he'd seen seventy percent of his warships blown out of existence in the last four months.

 

 

One face was missing. General Singhman had been aboard ODC Seven when the Achuultani warhead broke through her shield.

 

 

There were other gaps in Earth's defenses, and the enemy ruled the outer system. They were slow and clumsy in normal space, but their ability to dart into hyper with absolutely no warning more than compensated as long as they stayed at least twenty light-minutes out.

 

 

Earth had learned enough in the last few months to know her technology was better, but it was beginning to appear her advantage might not be great enough, for the Achuultani had surprises of their own.

 

 

Like those damned hyper drives. Achuultani ships were slow even in hyper, but their hyper drives did things Horus had always thought were impossible. They could operate twice as deep into a stellar gravity well as an Imperial hypership, and their missile launchers were incredible. Achuultani sublight missiles, though fast, weren't too dangerous-Earth's defenders had better computers, better counter-missiles, and more efficient shield generators-but their hyper missiles were another story. Somehow, and Horus would have given an arm to know how, the Achuultani generated external hyper fields around their missiles, without the massive on-board hyper drives human missiles required.

 

 

Their launchers' rate of fire was lower, but they were small enough the Achuultani could pack them in in unbelievable numbers, and they tended to fire their salvos in shoals, scattered over the hyper bands. A shield could cover only so many bands at once, and with luck, they could pop a missile through one the shield wasn't guarding-a trick which had cost Earth's warships dearly.

 

 

Their energy weapons, on the other hand, relied upon quaint, short-ranged developments of laser technology, which left a gap in their defenses. It wasn't very wide, but if Earth's defenders could get into it, they were too close for really accurate Achuultani hyper missile-fire and beyond their effective energy weapon range. The trick was surviving to get there.

 

 

And they really did like kinetic weapons. So far, they'd managed to hit the planetary shield with scores of projectiles, the largest something over a billion tons, and virtually wiped out Earth's orbital industry. They'd nailed two ODCs, as well, picking them off with missiles when the main shield was slammed back into atmosphere behind them by kinetic assault.

 

 

To date, Vassily had managed to hold that shield against everything they threw at him, but the big, blond Russian was growing increasingly grim-faced. The PDC shield generators had been designed to provide a fifty percent reserve-but that was before they knew about Achuultani hyper missiles. Covering the wide-band attacks coming at him took every generator he had, and at ruinous overload. Without the core tap, not even the PDCs could have held them.

 

 

Which was largely what this conference was about.

 

 

"I don't see an option, Horus," Hatcher said finally. "We've got to have that tap. If we shut down and they hit us before we power back up-"

 

 

"Gerald," Chernikov said, "we never meant this tap to carry such loads so long. The control systems are collapsing. I am into the secondary governor ring in places; if it goes, there are only the tertiaries to hold it."

 

 

"But even if we shut down, will it be any safer to power back up?"

 

 

"No," Chernikov conceded unhappily. "Not without repairs."

 

 

"Then, Vassily, it is a choice between a possibility of losing control and the probability of losing the planet," Tsien said quietly.

 

 

"I know that. But it will do us no good to blow up Antarctica and lose the tap-permanently-into the bargain."

 

 

"Agreed." Horus's quiet voice snapped all eyes back to him. "Are your replacement components ready for installation, Vassily?"

 

 

"They are. We will require two-point-six hours to change over, but I must shut down to do it."

 

 

"Very well." Horus felt responsibility crushing down upon him. "When the first secondary system goes down, we'll shut down long enough for complete control replacement."

 

 

Tsien and Hatcher looked as if they wanted to argue, but they were soldiers. They recognized an order when they heard it.

 

 

"Now." Horus turned his attention to Admiral Hawter. "What can you tell us about your own situation, Isaiah?"

 

 

"It's not good," Hawter said heavily. "The biggest problem is the difference in our shield technologies. We generate a single bubble around a unit; they generate a series of plate-like shields, each covering one aspect of the target, with about a twenty percent overlap at the edges. They pay for it with a much less efficient power ratio, but it gives them redundancy we don't have and lets them bring them in closer to the hull. That's our problem."

 

 

Heads nodded. Hyper missiles weren't seeking weapons; they went straight to their pre-programmed coordinates, and the distance between shield and hull effectively made Earth's ships bigger targets. All too often, a hyper missile close enough to penetrate a human warship's shield detonated outside an Achuultani ship's shields-which, coupled with the Achuultani's greater ability to saturate the hyper bands, left Hawter's ships at a grievous disadvantage.

 

 

"Our missiles out-range theirs, and we've refined our targeting systems to beat their jammers-which, by the way, are still losing ground to our own-but if we stay beyond their range, we can't get our warheads in close enough, either. Not without bigger salvos than most of our ships can throw. As long as they stay far enough out to use their micro-jump advantage, as well, we can only fight them on their terms, and that's bad business."

 

 

"How bad?" General Ki asked.

 

 

"Bad. We started out with a hundred and twenty battleships, twice that many cruisers, and about four hundred destroyers. We're down to thirty-one battleships, ninety-six cruisers, and one hundred and seven destroyers-that's a loss of five hundred and thirty-six out of an initial strength of seven hundred and seventy. In return, we've knocked out about nine hundred of their ships. I've got confirmed kills on seven hundred eighty-two and probables on another hundred fifty or so. That's one hell of a lot more tonnage than we've lost, and, by our original estimates, that should have been all of them; as it is, it looks like a bit less than fifty percent.

 

 

"What it boils down to is that they've ground us away. If they move against us in force, we no longer have the mobile units to meet them in deep space."

 

 

"In short," Horus interjected softly, "they've won control of the Solar System beyond the reach of Earth's own weapons."

 

 

"Exactly, Governor," Hawter said grimly. "We're holding so far, but by the skin of our teeth. And this is only the scouting force."

 

 

They were still staring at one another in glum silence when the alarms shrieked.

 

 

Both of Brashieel's stomachs tightened as Vindicator moved in-system. The Demon Sector was living up to its name, Tarhish take it! Almost half the scouts had died striving against this single wretched planet, and if the scouts were but a few pebbles in the avalanche of Great Lord Tharno's fleet, there were many suns in this sector-including the ones which must have built those scanner arrays. It could not have been these nest-killers, for none of their ships were even hyper-capable. But if these nest-killers had such weapons, who knew what else awaited the Protectors?

 

 

Yet they were pushing the nest-killers back. Lord of Thought Mosharg had counted the nest-killers they had sent to Tarhish carefully, and few of their foes' impossibly powerful warships could remain.

 

 

Still, it seemed rash to press an attack so deep into the inner system. The nest-killers were twice as fast as Vindicator when he could not flee into hyper. If this was an ambush, the Great Visit's scouts could lose heavily.

 

 

But Brashieel was no lord. Perhaps the purpose was to evaluate the nest-killers' close defenses before the Hoof of Tarhish was released upon them? That made sense, even to an assistant servant like him, especially in light of their orders to attack the sunward pole of the planet. Yet to risk a half-twelve of twelves of scouts in this fashion took courage. Which might be why Lords Chirdan and Mosharg were lords and Brashieel was an assistant servant.

 

 

He settled tensely upon his duty pad as they emerged from hyper and headed for the blue-white world they had come so far to slay.

 

 

"Seventy-two hostiles, inbound," Plotting reported. "Approximately two hundred forty additional hostiles following at eight light-minutes. Evaluate this as a major probe."

 

 

Isaiah Hawter winced. Over three hundred of them. He could go out to meet them and kick hell out of them, but it would leave him with next to nothing. Those bastards lying back to cover their fellows with hyper missiles made the difference. He'd lose half his ships before his energy weapons even engaged the advanced force.

 

 

No, this time he was going to have to let them in.

 

 

"All task forces, withdraw behind the primary shield," he said. "Instruct Fighter Command to stand by. Bring all ODC weaponry to readiness."

 

 

Adrienne Robbins swore softly as she retreated behind the shield. She knew going out to meet that much firepower would be a quick form of suicide, but Nergal had twenty-seven confirmed kills and nine probables, more than any other unit among Earth's tattered survivors, and letting these vermin close without a fight galled her. More, it frightened her, because whether anyone chose to admit it or not, she knew what it meant.

 

 

They were losing.

 

 

Vassily Chernikov made a minute adjustment through his neural feed, nursing his core tap like an old cat with a single kitten. He'd been right to insist on building it, but all he felt now was hatred for the demon he had chained. It was breaking its bonds, slowly but surely, under the strain of continuous overload operation in a planetary atmosphere; when they snapped, it would be the end.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Lieutenant Samson's belly tightened as he watched the developing attack pattern. They were coming in from the south this time-had they spotted the core tap? Realized how vital to Earth it was?

 

 

Either way, it made little difference to Samson's probable fate. The Iron Bitch was right in their path, floating with five other ODCs to help her bar the way... and the planetary shield was drawn in behind them.

 

 

"Red Warning! Prepare for launch! Prepare for Launch! Red Warning!"

 

 

The fighter crews, Terra-born and Imperials distinguishable now only by their names, charged up the ladders to their cockpits. General Ki Tran Thich settled into the pilot's couch of his command fighter and flashed the commit signal over his neural feed. Drives hummed to life, EW officers tuned their defensive systems and weaponry, and the destruction-laden little craft howled up from their PDC homes on the man-made thunder of their sonic booms.

 

 

Brashieel blinked inner and outer lids alike as his display blossomed with sudden threat sources. Great Nest! Sublight missiles at this range?

 

 

But his consternation eased slightly as he saw the power readings. No, not missiles. They were something else, some sort of very small warships. He had never heard of anything like them, but, then, he had never heard of most of the Tarhish-spawned surprises these demon nest-killers had produced.

 

 

"Missile batteries, stand by," Gerald Hatcher ordered softly. This was going to be tricky. He and Tao-ling had trained to coordinate their southern-hemisphere PDCs, but this was the first time the bastards had come really close.

 

 

He spared a moment to be thankful Sharon and the girls were safely under the protection of Horus's Shepard Center HQ. It was just possible something was coming through this time.

 

 

Andrew Samson swallowed as the interceptors drilled through the shield's polar portal and it closed behind them. They were such tiny things to pit themselves against those kilometers-long Leviathans. It didn't seem-

 

 

"Stand by missile crews." Captain M'wange's voice was cold. "Shield generators to max. Deploy first hyper salvo."

 

 

The hyper missiles floated out of their bays, moored to the Bitch by chains of invisible force, and the Achuultani swept closer.

 

 

"All ODCs engage-now!" Isaiah Hawter snapped.

 

 

Nest Lord! Those were missiles!

 

 

Slayer and War Hoof vanished from his scanners, and Brashieel winced. The nest-killers no longer used the greater thunder; they had come to rely almost entirely on those terrible warheads which did not explode... and for which the Nest had no counter. Slayer crumpled in on himself as a missile breached his shields; War Hoof simply disappeared, and the range was far too long for his own hyper missiles. What devil among the nest-killers had thought of putting hyper drives inside their missiles that way?

 

 

More missiles dropped out of hyper, and Vindicator lurched as his shields trembled under a near-miss. And another. But Small Lord Hantorg had nerves of steel. He held his course, and Brashieel's own weapons would range soon.

 

 

He made his fingers and thumbs relax within the control gloves. Soon, he promised himself. Soon, my brothers!

 

 

The small warships darted closer, and he wondered what they meant to do.

 

 

Andrew Samson whooped as the huge ship died. That had been one of the Bitch's missiles! Maybe even one of his!

 

 

"All fighters-execute Bravo-Three!" General Ki barked, and Earth's interceptors slashed into the Achuultani formation, darting down to swoop up from "below" at the last moment. They bucked and twisted, riding the surges from the heavy gravitonic warheads Terra hurled to meet her attackers, and their targeting systems reached out.

 

 

Brashieel twitched in astonishment as the tiny warships wheeled, evading the close-in energy defenses. Only a few twelves perished; the others opened fire at pointblank range, and a hurricane of missiles lashed the Aku'Ultan ships. They lacked the brute power of the nest-killers' heavy missiles, but there were many of them. A great many of them.

 

 

Half a twelve of Vindicator's brothers perished, like mighty qwelloq pulled down by tiny, stinging sulq. Clearly the nest-killers' lords of thought had briefed them well. They fought in teams, many units striking as one, concentrating their fire on single quadrants of their victims' shields, and when those isolated shields died under the tornadoes of flame blazing upon them, the ships they had been meant to save died with them.

 

 

In desperation, Brashieel armed his own launchers without orders. Such a breach of procedure might mean his own death in dishonor, yet he could not simply crouch upon his duty pad and do nothing! His fingers twitched and sent forth a salvo of normal-space missiles, missiles of the greater thunder. They converged on a quarter-twelve of attacking sulq, and when their thunder merged, it washed over the nest-killers and gave them to the Furnace.

 

 

"Good, Brashieel!" It was Small Lord Hantorg. "Very good!"

 

 

Brashieel's crest rose with pride as he heard Vindicator's lord ordering other missile crews to copy his example.

 

 

General Ki Tran Thich watched the tremendous Achuultani warship rip apart under his fire. He and Hideoshi had drawn lots for the right to lead the first interception, and he smiled wolfishly as he wheeled his fighter. The full power of the Seventy-First Fighter Group rode at his back as he searched for another target. There. That one would do nicely.

 

 

He never saw the ten-thousand-megaton missile coming directly at him.

 

 

* * *

 

 

"Missile armaments exhausted," General Tama Hideoshi's ops officer reported, and Tama grunted. His own feeds had already told him, and he could feel his fighters dying... just as Thich had died. Who would have thought of turning shipkillers into proximity-fused SAMs? His interceptors' energy armaments weren't going to be enough against that kind of overkill!

 

 

"All fighters withdraw to rearm," he ordered. "Launch reserve strike. Instruct all pilots to maintain triple normal separation. They are to engage only with missiles-I repeat, only with missiles-then withdraw to rearm."

 

 

"Yes, sir."

 

 

Earth's fighters withdrew. Over three hundred of them had perished, yet that was but a tithe of their total strength, and the Achuultani probe had been reduced to twenty-seven units.

 

 

The flight crews streamed back past the ODCs, heading for their own bases. It was up to the orbital fortifications, now-them, and the fire still slamming into the Achuultani from Earth's southernmost PDCs.

 

 

Brashieel watched the small warships scatter, fleeing his fire. The Protectors had found the way to defeat them, and he-he, a lowly assistant servant of thunder-had pointed the way!

 

 

He felt his nestmates' approval, yet he could not rejoice. Two-thirds of Vindicator's brothers had died, and the nest-killers' missiles still lashed the survivors. Worse, they were about to enter energy weapon range of those waiting fortresses. None of the scouts had done that before; they had engaged only with missiles at extreme range. Now was the great test. Now was the Time of Fire, when they would learn what those sullen fortresses could do.

 

 

Andrew Samson watched the depleted fighters fell back. Imagine swatting fighters with heavy missiles! We couldn't've gotten away with it; our sublight missiles are too slow, too easy to evade.

 

 

The full Achuultani fire shifted to the Bitch and her sisters, and the ODC shuddered, twitching as if in fear as the warheads battered her shield. Her shield generators heated dangerously as Captain M'wange asked the impossible of them. They were covering too many hyper bands, Samson thought. Sooner or later, they would miss one, or an anti-matter warhead would overload them. And when that happened, Lucy Samson's little boy Andrew would die.

 

 

But in the meantime, he thought, taking careful aim... and bellowed in triumph as yet another massive warship tore apart. They were coming to kill him, but if they had not, how could he have killed them?

 

 

"Stand by energy weapons," Admiral Hawter said harshly. ODCs Eleven, Thirteen, and Sixteen were gone; there was going to be one hell of a hole over the pole, whatever happened. Far worse, some of their missiles had gotten through to Earth's surface. He didn't know how many, but any were too many when they carried that kind of firepower. Yet they were down to nineteen ships. He tried to tell himself that was a good sign, and his lips thinned over his teeth as the Achuultani kept coming.

 

 

They were about to discover the difference between the beams of a battleship and a three-hundred-thousand-ton ODC, he thought viciously.

 

 

Brashieel flinched as the waiting fortresses exploded with power. The terrible energy weapons which had slain so many of Vindicator's brothers in ship-to-ship combat were as nothing beside this! They smote full upon the warships' shields, and as they smote, those ships died. One, two, seven-still they died! Nothing could withstand that fury. Nothing!

 

 

"All right!" Andrew Samson shouted. Six of them already, and more going! He picked a target whose shields wavered under fire from three different ODCs and popped a gravitonic warhead neatly through them. His victim perished, and this time there was no question who'd made the kill.

 

 

"Withdraw."

 

 

The order went out, and Brashieel sighed with gratitude. Lord of Thought Mosharg must have learned what they had come to learn. They could leave.

 

 

Assuming they could get away alive.

 

 

"They're withdrawing!" someone shouted, and Gerald Hatcher nodded. Yes, they were, but they'd cost too much before they went. Two missiles had actually gotten through the planetary shield despite all that Vassily and the PDCs could do, and thank God those bastards didn't have gravitonic warheads.

 

 

He closed his eyes briefly. One missile had been an ocean strike, and God only knew what that was going to do to Earth's coastlines and ecology. The other had hit Australia, almost exactly in the center of Brisbane, and Gerald Hatcher felt the weight of personal despair. No shelter could withstand a direct hit of that magnitude, and how in the name of God could he tell Isaiah Hawter that he had just become a childless widower?

 

 

The last Aku'Ultan warship vanished, fleeing into hyper before the reserve fighter strike caught it. Three of the seventy-two which had attacked escaped.

 

 

Behind them, the southern hemisphere of the planet smoked and smoldered under twenty thousand megatons of destruction, and far, far ahead of them, Lord Chirdan's engineers completed their final tests. Power plants came on line, stoking the furnaces of the mighty drive housings, and Lord Chirdan himself gave the order to engage.

 

 

The moon men called Iapetus shuddered in its endless orbit around the planet they called Saturn. Shuddered... and began to move slowly away from its primary.

 

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 

 

Servant of Thunders Brashieel crouched upon his new duty pad in master fire control. He still did not know how Vindicator had survived so long, but Small Lord Hantorg seemed to believe much of the credit was his. He was grateful for his small lord's confidence, and even more that his new promotion gave him such splendid instrumentation.

 

 

He bent his eyes on the vision plate, watching the rocky mass which paced Vindicator. The Nest seldom used such large weapons, but it was time and past time for the Protectors to finish these infernal nest-killers and move on.

 

 

Gerald Hatcher felt a million years old as he propped his feet on the coffee table in Horus's office. Even with biotechnics, there was a limit to the twenty-two-hour days a man could put in, and he'd passed it long ago.

 

 

For seven months they had held on-somehow-but the end was in sight. His dog-weary personnel knew it, and the civilians must suspect. The heavens had been pocked with too much flame. Too many of their defenders had died... and their children. Fourteen times now the Achuultani had driven hyper missiles past the planetary shield. Most had struck water, lashing Earth's battered coasts with tsunamis, wracking her with radiation and salt-poisoned typhoons, but four had found targets ashore. By God's grace, one had landed in the middle of the African desert, but Brisbane had been joined by over four hundred million more dead, and all the miracles his people had wrought were but delays.

 

 

How Vassily kept his tap up was more than Hatcher could tell, but he was holding it together, with his bare hands for all intents and purposes. The power still flowed, and Geb and his zombie-like crews kept the shield generators on line somehow. They could shut down no more than a handful for overhaul at any one time, but, like Vassily, Geb was doing the impossible.

 

 

Yes, Hatcher thought, Earth had its miracle-workers... but at a price.

 

 

"How-" He paused to clear his throat. "How's Isaiah?"

 

 

"Unchanged," Horus said sadly, and Hatcher closed his eyes in pain.

 

 

It had been terrible enough for Isaiah to preside over the slaughter of his crews, but Brisbane had finished him. Now he simply sat in his small room, staring at the pictures of his wife and children.

 

 

His friends knew how magnificently he'd fought, rallying his battered ships again and again; he knew only that he hadn't been good enough. That he'd let the Achuultani murder his family, and that most of the crews who'd fought for him with such supreme gallantry had also died. So they had, and too many of the survivors were like Isaiah-burned out, dead inside, hating themselves for being less than gods in the hour of their world's extremity.

 

 

Yet there were the others, Hatcher reminded himself. The ones like Horus, who'd assumed Isaiah's duties when he collapsed. Like Adrienne Robbins, the senior surviving parasite skipper, who'd refused a direct order to take her damaged ship out of action. Like Vassily and Geb, who'd somehow risen above themselves to perform impossible tasks. Like the bone-weary crews of the ODCs and PDCs who fought on day after endless, hopeless day, and the fighter crews who went out again and again, and came back in ever fewer numbers.

 

 

And, he thought, the people like Tsien Tao-ling, those very rare men and women who simply had no breaking point... and thank God for them.

 

 

Of the Supreme Chiefs of Staff, Singhman and Ki had been killed... and so had Hawter, Hatcher thought sadly. Tama Hideoshi had taken over all that remained of Fighter Command, but Vassily was chained to Antarctica, Frederick Amesbury was working himself into his own grave in Plotting, trying desperately to keep tabs on the outer system through his Achuultani-crippled arrays, and Chiang Chien-su couldn't possibly be spared from his heartbreaking responsibility for Civil Defense. So even with Horus taking over the remnants of Hawter's warships and ODCs, Hatcher had been forced to hand the entire planet-side defense net over to Tsien while he himself concentrated on finding a way to keep the Achuultani from destroying Earth.

 

 

But he was a general, not a wizard.

 

 

"We've had it, Horus." He watched the old Imperial carefully, but the governor didn't even flinch. "We're just kicking and scratching on the way to the gallows. I don't see how Vassily can keep the tap up another two weeks."

 

 

"Should we stop kicking and scratching, then?" The question came out with a ghost of a smile, and Hatcher smiled back.

 

 

"Hell no. I just needed to say it to someone before I go back and start kicking again. Even if they take us out, we can make sure there are less of them for the next world on their list."

 

 

"My thoughts exactly." Horus squeezed the bridge of his nose wearily. "Should we tell the civilians?"

 

 

"Better not," Hatcher sighed. "I'm not really scared of a panic, but I don't see any reason to frighten them any worse than they already are."

 

 

"Agreed."

 

 

Horus rose and walked slowly to his office's glass wall. The Colorado night was ripped by solid sheets of lightning as the outraged atmosphere gave up some of the violence it had been made to absorb, and a solid, unending roll of thunder shook the glass. Lightning and snow, he thought; crashing thunder and blizzards. Too much vaporized sea water, too many cubic kilometers of steam. The planetary albedo had shifted, more sunlight was reflected, and the temperature had dropped. There was no telling how much further it would go... and thank the Maker General Chiang had stockpiled food so fanatically, for the world's crops were gone. But at least this one was turning to rain. Freezing cold rain, but rain.

 

 

And they were still alive, he told himself as Hatcher stood silently to leave. Alive. Yet that, too, would change. Gerald was right. They were losing it, and something deep inside him wanted to curl up and get the dying finished. But he couldn't do that.

 

 

"Gerald," his soft voice stopped Hatcher at the door, and Horus turned his eyes from the storm to meet the general's. "In case we don't get a chance to talk again, thank you."

 

 

The Hoof of Tarhish pawed the vacuum. Not even the Aku'Ultan could accelerate such masses with a snap of the fingers, but its speed had grown. Only a few twelves of tiao per segment, at first, then more. And more. More!

 

 

Now Vindicator rode the mighty projectile's flank, joined with his brothers in a solid phalanx to guard their weapon.

 

 

They must be seen soon, but the Hoof's defenses were strong, and the nest-killers could not even range accurately upon it without first blasting aside the half-twelve of great twelves of scouts which remained. They would defend the Hoof with their own deaths and clear a way through what remained of the nest-killers' defenses, for they were Protectors.

 

 

"Oh my God."

 

 

Sir Frederick Amesbury's Plotting teams were going berserk trying to analyze the Achuultani's current maneuvers, for there was no sane reason for them to be clustered that way on a course like that. But something about the whisper cut through the weary, frantic background hum, and he turned to Major Joanna Osgood, his senior watch officer.

 

 

"What is it, Major?" But her mahogany face was frozen and she did not answer. He touched her shoulder. "Jo?"

 

 

Major Osgood shook herself.

 

 

"I found the answer, sir," she said. "Iapetus."

 

 

Her Caribbean accent's flattened calm frightened Amesbury, for he knew what produced that tone. There was a realm beyond fear, for when no hope remained there was no reason to fear.

 

 

"Explain, Major," he said gently.

 

 

"I finally managed to hyper an array out-system and got a look at Saturn, sir." She met the general's gaze calmly. "Iapetus isn't there anymore."

 

 

"It's true, Ger." Amesbury's weary face looked back from Hatcher's com screen. "It took some time to get a probe near enough to burn through their ships' energy emissions and confirm it, but we found it right enough. Dead center in their formation: Iapetus-the eighth moon of Saturn."

 

 

"I see." Hatcher wanted to curse, to revile God for letting this happen, but there was no point, and his voice was soft. "How bad is it?"

 

 

"It's the end, unless we can stop the bloody thing. This is no asteroid, Ger-it's a bleeding moon. Six times the mass of Ceres."

 

 

"Moving how fast?"

 

 

"Fast enough to see us off," Amesbury replied grimly. "They could have done that simply by dropping it into Sol's gravity well and letting it fall 'downhill' to us, but we'd've had too much time. They've put shields on it, but if we could pop a few hyper missiles through them, we might be able to blow the bugger apart before it reaches us. That's why they're bringing it in under power; they don't want to expose it to our fire any longer than they have to.

 

 

"Their drives are much slower than ours are, but they've got the ruddy gravity well to work with, too. I don't know how they did it-even if they hadn't been picking off our sensor arrays, we were watching the asteroids, not the outer-system moons-but I reckon they started out with a very low initial acceleration. Only they're coming from Saturn, Ger. I don't know when they actually started, but we're just past opposition, which means we're over one-and-a-half billion kilometers apart on a straight line. But they're not on a straight-line course... and they've been accelerating all the way.

 

 

"They're coming at us at upwards of five hundred kilometers per second-seven times faster than a 'fast' meteorite. I haven't bothered to calculate how many trillions of megatons that equates to, because it doesn't matter. That moon will punch through our shield like a bullet through butter, and they'll reach us in about six days. That's how long we've got to stop them."

 

 

"We can't, Frederick," Hatcher sighed. "We just can't do it."

 

 

"I bloody well know we can't," Amesbury said harshly, "but that doesn't mean we don't have to try!"

 

 

"I know." Hatcher made his shoulders straighten. "Leave it with me, Frederick. We'll give it our best shot."

 

 

"I know," Amesbury said much more softly. "And... God bless, Ger."

 

 

Faces paled as the news spread among Earth's defenders. This was the end. When that stupendous hammer came down, Earth would shatter like a walnut.

 

 

Some had given too much, stretched their reserves too thin, and they snapped. Most simply retreated from reality, but a handful went berserk, and their fellows were almost grateful, for subduing them diverted their minds from their own terror.

 

 

Yet only a minority broke. For most, survival, even hope, were no longer factors, and they manned their battle stations without hysteria, cold and determined... and desperate.

 

 

Servant of Thunders Brashieel noted the changing energy signatures. So. The nest-killers knew, and they would strive to thrust the Hoof aside, to destroy it. Already the orbital fortresses were moving, concentrating to meet them, but many smaller hooves had been prepared to pelt the planetary shield, driving it back, exposing those fortresses to the Protectors' thunder. They would clear a path for the Hoof, and nothing could stop them. The nest-killers could not even see the Hoof to fire upon it unless they destroyed Vindicator and his brothers, and they would never do that in time.

 

 

He watched his magnificent instruments as Lord of Order Chirdan shifted formation, placing a thicker wall of his nestlings between the Hoof and the nest-killers' world. Vindicator anchored one edge of that wall.

 

 

Lieutenant Andrew Samson felt queerly calm. Governor Horus had shifted his remaining forts to give the Bitch support, but the Achuultani had expected that. Kinetic projectiles had hammered the planetary shield back for days, stripping it away from the ODCs. Raiding squadrons had charged in, paying a high price for their attacks but picking off the battered ODCs. Of the six which originally had protected the pole, only the damaged Bitch remained, and she'd expended too much ammunition defending herself. Without Earth's orbital industry, just keeping up with expenditures was difficult... not to mention the risk colliers ran between the shield and the ODCs to resupply them.

 

 

Andrew Samson had long ago abandoned any expectation of surviving Earth's siege, but he'd continued to hope his world would live. Now he knew it probably would not, and that purged the last fear from his system, leaving only a strange, bittersweet regret.

 

 

The last fleet units would make their try soon. They'd been hoarded for this moment, waiting until the Achuultani were within pointblank range of Earth's defenses. Their chances of surviving the next few hours were even lower than his own, but the ODCs would do what they could to cover them. He checked his remaining hyper missiles. Thirty-seven, and less than four hundred in the Bitch's other magazines. It wouldn't be enough.

 

 

Acting Commodore Adrienne Robbins checked her formation. All fifteen of Earth's remaining battleships, little more than a single squadron, were formed up about her wounded Nergal. Half Nergal's launchers had been destroyed by the near-miss which had pierced her shield and killed eighty of her three hundred people, but she had her drive... and her energy weapons.

 

 

The threadbare remnants of the cruisers and destroyers-seventy-four of them, in all-screened the pitiful handful of capital ships. Eighty-nine warships; her first and final task force command.

 

 

"Task Force ready to proceed, Governor," she told the face on her com.

 

 

"Proceed," Horus said quietly. "May the Maker go with you, Commodore."

 

 

"And with you, sir," she replied, then shifted to her command net, and her voice was clear and calm. "The Task Force will advance," she said.

 

 

Brashieel watched in grudging admiration as the nest-killers advanced. There were so few of them, and barely a twelve of their biggest ones. Their crews must know they would be chaff for the Furnace, yet still they came, and something within him saluted their courage. In this moment they were not nest-killers; they were Protectors, just as truly as he himself.

 

 

But such thoughts would not stay his hand. The Nest had survived for uncountable higher twelves of years only by slaying its enemies while they were yet weak. It was a lesson the Aku'Ultan had learned long ago from the Great Nest-Killers who had driven the Aku'Ultan from their own Nest Place.

 

 

It would not happen again.

 

 

Gerald Hatcher felt sick as Commodore Robbins led her ships out to die. But the fire control of his orbital and ground-side fortresses couldn't even see Iapetus unless an opening could be blown for them, and those doomed ships were his one hope to open a way.

 

 

"If we get a fix, lock it in tight, Plotting," he said harshly.

 

 

"Acknowledged," Sir Frederick Amesbury replied.

 

 

"Request permission to engage," Tama Hideoshi said from his own screen, and Hatcher noted the general's flight suit. They had more fighters than crews now, but even so Hideoshi had no business flying this mission. Yet there was no tomorrow this time, and he chose not to object.

 

 

"Not yet. Hold inside the shield till the ships engage."

 

 

"Acknowledged." Tama's voice was unhappy, but he understood. He would wait until the Achuultani were too busy punching missiles at Robbins' ships to wipe his own fragile craft from the universe.

 

 

"Task Force opening fire," someone said, and another voice came over the link, soft and prayerful, its owner not even aware he had spoken.

 

 

"Go, baby! Go!" it whispered.

 

 

Adrienne Robbins had discussed her plan with Horus, not that there was much "planning" to it. There was but one possible tactic: to go right down their throat behind every missile she had. Perhaps, just perhaps, they could swamp the defenses, get in among them with their energy weapons. None would survive such close combat, but they might punch a hole before they died.

 

 

And so Earth's ships belched missiles at her murderers, hyper and sublight alike. Their launchers went to continuous rapid fire, spitting out homing sublight weapons without even worrying about targeting. The lethal projectiles were a cloud of death, and the first hyper missiles from Earth came with them.

 

 

Lord of Order Chirdan's head bobbed in anguish as his nestlings died. He had known the nest-killers must come forth and hurl their every weapon against him, yet not even Battle Comp had predicted carnage such as this!

 

 

The missile storm was a whirlwind, boring into the center of the wall defending the Hoof. Anti-matter pyres and gravitonic warheads savaged his ships, and his inner lids narrowed. They sought to blow a hole and charge into it with their infernal energy weapons! They would die there, but in their dying they might expose the Hoof to their fellows upon the planet.

 

 

He could not allow that, and his orders went out. The edges of his wall of ships thinned, drawing together in the center to block the attack, and his own, shorter-ranged missiles struck back.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Time had no meaning. There was only a shrieking eternity of dying ships and a glare that lit Earth's night skies like twice a hundred suns. Adrienne Robbins saw it reaching for her ships, saw her lighter destroyers and cruisers burning like coals from a forge, and she adjusted her course slightly.

 

 

The solid core of her out-numbered task force drove for the exact center of that vortex of death, and their magazines were almost dry.

 

 

"Go!" Tama Hideoshi snapped, and Earth's last surviving interceptors howled heavenward. He rode his flight couch, his EW officer at his side, and smiled. He was fifty-nine years old, and only his biotechnics made this possible. Three years before, he'd known he would never fly combat again. Now he would, and if his world must die, at least he had been given this final gift, to die in her defense as a samurai should.

 

 

Nest Lord! Their small ships were attacking, too! Brashieel had not thought so many remained, but they did, and they charged on the heels of their larger, dying brothers, covered by their deaths.

 

 

A few of the Bitch's launchers still had hyper missiles, but Andrew Samson was down to sublight weapons. It was long range, too much time for the bastards to pick them off, but each of his weapons they had to deal with was one more strain on their defenses. He sent them out at four-second intervals.

 

 

Lord Chirdan cursed. The nest-killers were dying by twelves, yet they had cut deep into his formation. Six twelves of his ships had already perished, and the terrible harvest of the nest-killer beams was only starting.

 

 

Their warships vanished into the heart of his own, robbing his outer missile crews of targets, and they retargeted on the orbital fortresses.

 

 

Gerald Hatcher's face was stone as the first ODC died. Missiles pelted the planetary shield, as well, but he almost welcomed those. Even if they broke through, killed millions of civilians, he would welcome them, for each missile sent against Earth was one not sent against his orbital launchers.

 

 

He sat back and felt utterly useless. There was no reserve. He'd committed everything he had. Now he had nothing to do but watch the slaughter of his people.

 

 

Missiles coated the Iron Bitch's shield in a blinding corona, and still she struck back.

 

 

Andrew Samson was a machine, part of his console. His magazine was down to ten percent and dropping fast, but he didn't even think of slowing his rate of fire. There was no point, and he pounded his foes, his brain full of the thunder wracking the Achuultani formation.

 

 

He never saw the hyper missile which finally popped the Bitch's shields. He died with his mind still full of thunder.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Tama Hideoshi's fighters slammed into the Achuultani, and their missiles flashed away. Scores of Achuultani ships died, but the enemy formation closed anyway. Commodore Robbins' ships vanished into the maelstrom, and the fighters were dying too quickly to follow.

 

 

They exhausted their missiles and closed with energy guns.

 

 

Adrienne Robbins was halfway through the Achuultani, but her cruisers and destroyers were gone. The back of her mind burned with the image of the destroyer London as her captain took her at full drive directly into one of the Achuultani monsters behind the continuous fire of his energy weapons, bursting through its weakened shield and dragging it into death with him. Yet it wasn't enough. She and her battleships were alone, the only units with the strength to endure the fury, and even they were going fast. Nergal herself had taken another near miss, and tangled skeins of atmosphere followed her like a trail of blood.

 

 

Another Achuultani ship died under her energy weapons, but another loomed beyond it, and still another. They wouldn't break through after all.

 

 

Adrienne Robbins drove her crippled command forward, and Nergal's eight surviving sisters charged at her side.

 

 

Tsien Tao-ling's scanners told him Commodore Robbins would not succeed. Yet... in a way, she might yet. His eyes closed as he concentrated on his feed, his brain clear and cold, buttressed against panic. Yes. Robbins had drawn most of the defenders onto her own ships, thickening the center of their formation but thinning its edges. Perhaps-

 

 

The hail of missiles from the PDCs stopped as his neural feed overrode their firing orders. He felt Hatcher's shock through his cross feed to Shepard Center, but there was no time to explain.

 

 

And then the launchers retargeted and spoke, hurling their massed missiles at a sphere of space barely three hundred kilometers across. Two thousand gravitonic warheads went off as one.

 

 

Twenty kilometers of starship went mad, hurled end-for-end as the wave of destruction broke across it. Servant of Thunders Brashieel clung to his duty pad, blood bursting from his nostrils as the universe exploded about him, and Tsien Tao-ling's fury spat Vindicator forth like the seed of a grape.

 

 

"Contact!" Sir Frederick Amesbury screamed, his British reserve shattered at last. Tsien had blown a brief hole through the Achuultani flank, and Amesbury's computers locked onto Iapetus. The data flashed to the PDCs and surviving ODCs, and their missiles retargeted once more.

 

 

Lord Chirdan cursed and slammed a double-thumbed fist into the bulkhead. No! They could not have done that! Not while the Hoof had so far to go!

 

 

But he fought himself back under control, watching missiles rip at the Hoof even as his ravaged nestlings raced to reposition themselves. Shields guttered and flared, and one quadrant failed. A missile dodged through the gap, its anti-matter warhead incinerating the generators of yet another quadrant, but it was too late.

 

 

Without direct observation, not even these demon-spawned nest-killers could kill the Hoof before it struck, and his scouts had already spread back out to deny them that observation and hide the damaged shield quadrants.

 

 

He bared his teeth in a snarl, turning back to the five surviving nest-killer warships. He would give them to the Furnace, and their deaths would fan the Fire awaiting their cursed world.

 

 

Hatcher's momentary elation died. It had been a magnificent try, but it had failed, and he felt himself relax into a curious tranquillity of sorrow for the death of his planet, coupled with a deep, abiding pride in his people.

 

 

He watched almost calmly as the thinning screen of Achuultani ships moved still closer. There were no more than three hundred of them, four at the most, but it would be enough.

 

 

"General Hatcher!" His head snapped up at the sudden cry from Plotting. There was something strange about that voice. Something he could not quite put his finger upon. And then he had it. Hope. There was hope in it!

 

 

Nergal was alone, the last survivor of Terra's squadrons.

 

 

Adrienne Robbins had no idea why her ship was still alive, nor dared she take time to consider it. Her mind blazed hotter than the warheads bursting against her shield, and still she moved forward. There was no sanity in it. One battleship, her missiles exhausted, could never stop Iapetus. But sanity was an encumbrance. Nergal had come to attack that moon, and attack she would.

 

 

The wall was thinning, and she could feel the moon through her scanners. She altered course slightly, smashing at her foes-

 

 

-and suddenly they vanished in a gut-wrenching fury of gravitonic destruction that tossed Nergal like a cork.

 

 

Lord Chirdan saw without understanding. Three twelves of warships-four twelves-five! Impossible warships. Warships vaster than the Hoof itself!

 

 

They came out of nowhere at impossible speeds and began to kill.

 

 

Missiles that did not miss. Beams that licked away ships like tinder. Shields that brushed aside the mightiest thunders. They were the darkest nightmare of the Aku'Ultan, fleshed in shields and battle steel.

 

 

Lord Chirdan's flagship vanished in a boil of flame, and his scouts died with him. In the end, not even Protectors could abide the coming of those night demons. A pitiful handful broke, tried to flee, but they were too deep in the gravity well to escape into hyper, and-one-by-one-they died.

 

 

Yet before the last Protector perished, he saw one great warship advance upon the Hoof. Its missiles reached out-sublight missiles that took precise station on the charging moon before they flared to dreadful life. A surge of gravitonic fury raced out from them, even its backlash terrible enough to shake the wounded Earth to her core, triggering earthquakes, waking volcanoes.

 

 

Yet that was but an echo of their power. Sixteen gravitonic warheads, each hundreds of times more powerful than anything Earth had boasted, flashed into destruction... and took the moon Iapetus with them.

 

 

Gerald Hatcher sagged in disbelief, too shocked even to feel joy, and the breathless silence of his command post was an extension of his own.

 

 

Then a screen on his com panel lit, and a face he knew looked out of it.

 

 

"Sorry we cut it so close," Colin MacIntyre said softly.

 

 

And then-then-the command post exploded in cheers.

 

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

 

 

General Hector MacMahan watched the shoals of Imperial assault boats close in about his command craft, then turned his scanners to the broken halves of the Achuultani starship tumbling through space in the intricate measures of an insane dance. The planetoid Sevrid hovered behind her shuttles, watching over them and probing the wreckage. There was still air and life aboard that shattered ship, and power, but not much of any of them.

 

 

MacMahan grunted in satisfaction as Sevrid's tractors snubbed away the wreck's movement. Now if only the ship had a bay big enough to dock the damned thing, he and his people might not have to do everything the hard way.

 

 

He had no idea how many live Achuultani awaited his assault force, but he had six thousand men and women in his first wave, with a reserve half that size again. The cost might be high, but that wreck was the single partially intact Achuultani warship in the system. If they could take it, capture records, its computers, maybe even a few live Achuultani....

 

 

"Come on, people, tighten it up," he murmured over his com, watching the final adjustment of his formation. There. They were ready.

 

 

"Execute!" he snapped, and the assault boats screamed forward.

 

 

Servant of Thunders Brashieel waited in the wreckage in his vac-suit. One broken foreleg was crudely splinted, but aside from the pain it was little inconvenience. He still had three good legs, and with the loss of the drive gravity had become a ghost.

 

 

He watched his remaining instruments, longing to send the thunder against the foe, but his launchers had died. Perhaps a fifth-twelfth of Vindicator's energy weapons remained serviceable, but none of his launchers, and no weapons at all on the broken tooth of his forward section.

 

 

Brashieel tried to reject the nightmare. The nest-killers' world still lived, and these monstrous warships foretold perils yet more dire. The lords of thought had believed this system stood alone. It did not. The makers of those ancient scanner arrays had rallied to its defense, and they were powerful beyond dreams of power. Why should they content themselves with merely stopping the Protectors' attack? Why should they not strike the Nest itself?

 

 

He wondered why they had not simply given Vindicator to the Fire. Did their own beliefs in honor demand they face their final foes in personal combat? It did not matter, and he turned from his panel as the small craft advanced. He had no weapons to smite them, but he had already determined where he and his surviving nestlings of thunder would make their stand.

 

 

MacMahan flinched as the after section of the wrecked hull lashed his shuttles with fire. The crude energy weapons were powerful enough to burn through any assault boat's shield, but they'd fired at extreme range. Only three were hit, and the others went to evasive action, ripping at the wreck with their own energy guns. Sevrid's far heavier weapons reached past them, and warp beams plucked neat, perfect divots from the hull. Air gushed outward, and then the first-wave assault boats reached their goal.

 

 

Their energy guns blasted one last time, and they battered into the holes they'd blown on suddenly reversed drives. They crunched to a halt, and assault teams charged into the violated passages of the broken starship, their soot-black combat armor invisible in the lightless corridors. A handful of defenders opened fire, and their weapons spat back, silent in the vacuum.

 

 

MacMahan's command boat led the third wave, staggering drunkenly as it slammed to a halt, and the hatches popped. His HQ company formed up about him, and he took them into the madness.

 

 

Brashieel waited. There was no point charging blindly to meet the nest-killers. Vindicator was dead; only the mechanics of completing his nestlings' deaths remained, and this was as good a place to end as any.

 

 

He examined his nestlings' positions in the light of his helmet lamp. They had made themselves what cover they could, a hoof-shaped bow of them protecting the hatch to main control, and Brashieel wished Small Lord Hantorg had survived to lead their final fight.

 

 

His nostrils flared in bitter amusement. While he was wishing, might he not wish that he knew what he was about? He and his nestlings were servants of thunders-they smote worlds, not single nest-killers! He cudgeled his brain, trying to remember if he had ever heard of Protectors and nest-killers actually facing one another so directly. He did not think he had, but his mind was none too clear, and it really did not matter.

 

 

It was as impossible to coordinate the battle as MacMahan had expected it to be. Not even Imperial technology could provide any clear picture of this warren of decks and passages, sealed hatches and lurking ambushes.

 

 

He'd done his best in the pre-assault briefing; now it was up to his combat teams. The Second Marines provided the bulk of his firepower, but each company had an attached Recon Group platoon, and they were-

 

 

A stream of slugs wrenched him back to the job at hand, and he popped his jump gear, leaping aside as his point man went down and more fire clawed the space he himself had occupied a moment before. Leaking air and globules of blood marked a dead man as Corporal O'Hara's combat armor tumbled down the zero-gee passage, and MacMahan's mouth tightened. These crazy centaurs didn't have an energy weapon worth shit, but their slug weapons were nasty.

 

 

Still, they had their disadvantages. For one thing, recoil was a real problem-one his own people didn't face. And for all their determination to fight to the death, Achuultani didn't seem to be very good infantrymen. His people, on the other hand...

 

 

Two troopers eased forward, close to the deck, and an entire squad hosed the area before them with rapid, continuous grav gun fire. The super-dense explosive darts shredded the bulkheads, lighting the darkness with strobe-lightning spits of fury, and Captain Amanda Givens-Tamman rose suddenly to her knees. Her warp rifle fired, and the defending fire stopped abruptly.

 

 

MacMahan shuddered. He hated those damned guns. Probably the first people to meet crossbows had felt the same way about them. But using a hyper field on anyone, even an Achuultani-!

 

 

He chopped the thought off and waved his people forward once again. A new point man moved out, armor scanners probing for booby traps and defenders alike, and another sealed hatch loomed ahead.

 

 

Brashieel shook himself into readiness as he felt vibration in the steel.

 

 

"Stand ready, my brothers," he said quietly. "The nest-killers come."

 

 

The hatch simply vanished, and Brashieel's crest flattened in dread. Somehow these nest-killers had chained the hyper field itself for the use of their protectors!

 

 

Then the first nest-killer came through the hatch, back-lit from the corridor behind, lacing the darkness with fire from its stubby weapon, and Brashieel swallowed bile at the ugliness of the squat, four-limbed shape. But even in his revulsion he felt a throb of wonder. That was a projectile weapon, yet there was no recoil! How was that possible?

 

 

The question fluttered away into the recesses of his mind as the nest-killer's explosive darts ripped two of his nestlings apart. How had it seen them in the blackness?! No matter. He sighted carefully, bracing his three good legs against the bulkhead, and squeezed his trigger. Recoil twisted his broken leg with agony, but his heavy slugs ripped through the biped's armor, and Brashieel felt a stab of savage delight. They had taken his thunders from him, but he would send a few more to the Furnace before they slew him!

 

 

The chamber blossomed with drifting globules of blood as more nest-killers charged through the hatch. Darkness was light for them, and their fire was murderously accurate. His nestlings perished, firing back, crying out in agony and horror over their suit communicators as darts exploded within their bodies or the terrible hyper weapons plucked away their limbs. Brashieel shouted his hate, holding back the trigger, then fumbled for another magazine, but there was no time. He hurled himself forward, his bayonet stabbing towards the last nest-killer to enter.

 

 

* * *

 

 

"General!" someone shouted, and MacMahan whirled. There was something wrong with the charging centaur's legs, but not with its courage; it was coming at him with only a bayonet, and his grav gun rose automatically-then stopped.

 

 

"Check fire!" he shouted, and tossed the grav gun aside.

 

 

Brashieel gaped as the puny nest-killer discarded its weapon, but his heart flamed. One more. One more foe to light his own way into the Furnace! He screamed in rage and thrust.

 

 

MacMahan's gauntleted hand slashed its armored edge into the Achuultani's long, clumsy rifle, driven by servo-mech "muscles," and the insanely warped weapon flew away.

 

 

The alien flung itself bodily upon him, and what kind of hand-to-hand moves did you use against a quarter horse with arms? MacMahan almost laughed at the thought, then he caught one murderously swinging arm, noting the knife in its hand only at the last moment, and the Achuultani convulsed in agony.

 

 

Careful, careful, Hector! Don't kill it by accident! And watch the vac suit, you dummy! Rip it and-

 

 

He moderated his armor's strength, and a furiously kicking hoof smashed his chest for his pains. That smarted even through his armor. Strong bastard, wasn't he? They lost contact with decks and bulkheads and tumbled, weightless and drunken, across the compartment. A last Achuultani gunner tried to nail them both, but one of his HQ raiders finished it in time. Then they caromed off a bulkhead at last, and MacMahan got a firm grip on the other arm.

 

 

He twisted, landing astride the Achuultani's back, and suppressed a mad urge to scream "Ride 'em, cowboy!" as he wrapped his armored arms around its torso and arms. One of his legs hooked back, kicking a rear leg aside, and his foe convulsed again. Damn it! Another broken bone!

 

 

"Ashwell! Get your ass over here!" he shouted, and his aide leapt forward. Between them, they wrestled the injured, still-fighting alien into helplessness, pinning it until two other troopers could bind it.

 

 

"Jesus! These bastards don't know how to quit, Gen'rl!" Ashwell panted.

 

 

"Maybe not, but we've got one alive. I expect His Majesty will be pleased with us."

 

 

"His Majesty friggin' well better be," someone muttered.

 

 

"I didn't hear that," MacMahan said pleasantly. "But if I had, I'd certainly agree."

 

 

Horus watched Nergal's mangled hull drop painfully through the seething electrical storm and tried not to weep. He failed, but perhaps no one noticed in the icy sheets of rain.

 

 

Strange ships escorted her, half again her size, shepherding her home. He winced as another drive pod failed and she lurched, but Adrienne Robbins forced her back under control. The other ships' tractors waited, ready to ease her struggle, but Horus could still hear Adrienne's voice.

 

 

"Negative," she'd said, tears glittering beneath the words. "She got us this far; she'll take us home. On her own, Goddamn it! On her own!"

 

 

And now the strange ships hovered above her like guards of honor as the broken battleship limped down the last few meters of sky. Two landing legs refused to extend, and Robbins lifted her ship again, holding her rock-steady on her off-balance, rapidly failing drive, then laid her gently down upon her belly. It was perfect, Horus thought quietly. A consummate perfection he could never have matched.

 

 

There was no sound but the cannonade of Earth's thunder, saluting the return of her final defender with heaven's own artillery. Then the emergency vehicles moved out, flashers splintering in the pounding rain, sirens silent, while the gleaming newcomers settled in a circle about their fallen sister.

 

 

Colin rode the battleship Chesha's transit shaft to the main ramp and stepped out into the storm. Horus was waiting.

 

 

Something inside Colin tightened as he peered at him through the unnatural sheets of sleety rain. Horus looked more rock-like than ever, but he was an ancient rock, and the last thirty months had cut deep new lines into that powerful old face. Colin saw it as the old Imperial stared back at him, his eyes bright with incredulous joy, and climbed the ramp towards him.

 

 

"Hello, Horus," he said, and Horus reached out and gripped his upper arms, staring into his face as he might have stared at a ghost.

 

 

"You are here," he whispered. "You made it."

 

 

"Yes," Colin said, the quiet word washed in thunder. And then his voice broke and he hugged the old man close. "We made it," he said into his father-in-law's shoulder, "and so did you. My God, so did you!"

 

 

"Of course we did," Horus said, and Colin had never heard such exhaustion in a human voice. "You left me a planet full of Terra-born to do it with, didn't you?"

 

 

General Chiang Chien-su was frantically busy, for the final shock of earthquakes and spouting volcanoes waked by Iapetus's destruction had capped the mounting devastation he'd fought so long. Yet he'd seemed almost cheerful in his last report. His people were winning this time, and the mighty planetoids riding solar orbit with the planet were helping. Their auxiliaries were everywhere, helping his own over-worked craft rescue survivors from the blizzards, mud, water, and fire which had engulfed them.

 

 

Except for him, Earth's surviving chiefs of staff sat in Horus's office.

 

 

Vassily Chernikov looked like a two-week corpse, but his face was relaxed. The core tap was deactivated at last, and he hadn't lost control of it. Gerald Hatcher and Tsien Tao-ling sat together on a couch, shoulders sagging, feet propped on the same coffee table. Sir Frederick Amesbury sat in an armchair, smoking a battered pipe, eyes half-shut.

 

 

Tama Hideoshi was not there. Tamman's son had found the samurai's death he'd sought.

 

 

Colin sat on the corner of Horus's desk and knew he'd never seen such utter and complete fatigue. These were the men, he thought; the ones who had done the impossible. He'd already queried the computers and learned what they'd endured and achieved. Even with the evidence before him, he could scarcely credit it, and he hated what he was going to have to tell them. He could see the relaxation in their faces, the joy of a last-minute rescue, the knowledge that the Imperium had not abandoned them. Somehow he had to tell them the truth, but first...

 

 

"Gentlemen," he said quietly, "I never imagined what I'd really asked you to do. I have no idea how you did it. I can only say-thank you. It seems so inadequate, but..." He broke off with a small, apologetic shrug, and Gerald Hatcher smiled wearily.

 

 

"It cuts both way, Governor. On behalf of your military commanders-and, I might add, the entire planet-thank you. If you hadn't turned up when you did-" It was his turn to shrug.

 

 

"I know," Colin said, "and I'm sorry we cut it so close. We came out of supralight just as your parasites went in."

 

 

"You came-" Horus's brows wrinkled in a frown. "Then how in the Maker's name did you get here? You should've been at least twenty hours out!"

 

 

"Dahak was. In fact, he and 'Tanni are still about twelve hours out. Tamman and I took the others and micro-jumped on ahead," Colin said, then grinned at Horus's expression. "Scout's honor. Oh, we still needed Dahak's computers-we were plugged in by fold-space link all the way-but he couldn't keep up. You see, those ships carry hyper drives as well as Enchanach drives."

 

 

"They what?!" Horus blurted.

 

 

"I know, I know," Colin said soothingly. "Look, there's a lot to explain. The main thing about how we got here is that those ships are faster'n hell. They can hyper to within about twelve light-minutes of a G0 star, and they can pull about seventy percent light-speed once they get there."

 

 

"Maker! When you get help, you get help, don't you?"

 

 

"Well," Colin said slowly, folding his hands on his knee and looking down at them, "yes, and no. You see, we couldn't find anyone to come with us." He looked up and saw the beginning of understanding horror in his father-in-law's eyes. "The Imperium's gone, Horus," he said gently. "We had to bring these ships back ourselves... and they're all that's coming."

 

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

 

Dahak's transit shaft deposited Horus at his destination, and the silent hatch slid open. He began to step through it, then stopped abruptly and dodged as fifty kilos of black fur hurled itself head-first past him. Tinker Bell disappeared down the shaft's gleaming bore, her happy bark trailing away into silence, and he shook his head with a grin.

 

 

He stepped into the captain's quarters, still shaking his head. The atrium was filled with 'sunlight,' a welcome relief from the terrible rains and blizzards flaying the battered Earth, and Colin rose quickly to grip his hand and lead him back to the men sitting around the stone table.

 

 

Hector MacMahan looked up with a rare, wide grin and waved a welcome, and if Gerald Hatcher and Tsien Tao-ling were more restrained, their smiles looked almost normal again. Vassily wasn't here; he and Valentina were visiting their son and making appropriately admiring sounds as Vlad explained the latest wonders of Imperial engineering to them.

 

 

"Where's 'Tanni?" Horus demanded as he and Colin approached the others.

 

 

"She'll be along. She's collecting something we want to show you."

 

 

"Maker, it'll be good to see her again!" Horus said, and Colin grinned.

 

 

"She feels the same way... Dad."

 

 

Horus tried to turn his flashing smile into a pained expression, but who would have believed 'Tanni would have the good sense to wed Colin? Especially given the way they'd first met?

 

 

"Hi, Granddad." Hector didn't stand; his left leg was regenerating from the slug which had punched through his armor in the final fighting aboard Vindicator. "Sorry about Tinker Bell. She was in a hurry."

 

 

"A hurry? I thought she was a loose hyper missile!"

 

 

"I know," Colin laughed. "She's been that way ever since she discovered transit shafts, and Dahak spoils her even worse than Hector does."

 

 

"I didn't know anyone could," Horus said, eyeing Hector severely.

 

 

"Believe it. He doesn't have hands, but he's found his own way to pet her. He'll only route her to one of the park decks unless someone's with her, but he adjusts the shaft to give her about an eighty-kilometer airstream, and she's in heaven. He barks at her, too. Most horrible thing you ever heard, but he swears she understands him better than I do."

 

 

"Which would not require a great deal of comprehension," a voice said, and, despite himself, Horus flinched. The last time he'd heard that voice with his own ears had been during the mutiny. "And that is not precisely what I have said, Colin. I simply maintain that Tinker Bell's barks are much more value-laden then humans believe and that we shall learn to communicate in a meaningful fashion, not that we already do so."

 

 

"Yeah, sure." Colin rolled his eyes at Horus.

 

 

"Welcome aboard, Senior Fleet Captain Horus," Dahak said, and Horus's tension eased at the welcome in that mellow voice. He cleared his throat.

 

 

"Thank you, Dahak," he said, and saw Colin's smile of approval.

 

 

"Join the rest of us," his son-in-law invited, and seated Horus at one end of the table. Wind rustled in the atrium leaves, a fountain bubbled nearby, and Horus felt his last uneasiness soaking away into relaxation.

 

 

"So," Hatcher said, obviously picking up the thread of an interrupted conversation, "you found yourself emperor and located this Guard Flotilla of yours. I thought you said it was only seventy-eight units?"

 

 

"Only seventy-eight warships," Colin corrected, sitting on the edge of the table. "There are also ten Shirga-class colliers, three Enchanach-class transports, and the two repair ships. That makes ninety-three."

 

 

Horus nodded to himself, still shaken by what he'd seen as his cutter approached Dahak. The space about Terra seemed incredibly crowded by huge, gleaming planetoids, and their ensigns had crowded his mind with images... a crouching, six-limbed Birhatan crag cat, an armored warrior, a vast broadsword in a gauntleted fist, and hordes of alien and mythological beasts he hadn't even recognized. But most disturbing of all had been seeing two of Dahak's own dragon. He'd expected it, but expecting and seeing were two different things.

 

 

"And you managed to bring them all back with you," he said softly.

 

 

"Oh, he did, he did!" Tamman agreed, stepping out of the transit shaft behind them. "He worked us half to death in the process, too." Colin grinned wryly, and Tamman snorted. "We concentrated on the mechanical systems-Dahak and Caitrin managed most of the life support functions through their central computers once we were underway-but it's a good thing you didn't see us before we had a chance to recuperate on the trip back!"

 

 

The big Imperial smiled, though darkness lingered in his eyes. Hideoshi's death had hit him hard, for he had been the only child of Tamman's Terra-born wife, Himeko. But Tamman had grown up when there had been no biotechnics for any Terra-born child; a son's death held an old, terrible familiarity for him.

 

 

"Yeah," Colin said, "but these ships are dumb, Horus, and we don't begin to have the people for them. We managed to put skeleton crews on six of the Asgerds, but the others are riding empty-except for Sevrid, that is. That's why we had to come back on Enchanach Drive instead of hypering home. We can't run 'em worth a damn without Dahak to do their thinking for them."

 

 

"That's something I still don't understand," Horus said. "Why didn't the wake-up work?"

 

 

"I will be damned if I know," Colin said frankly. "We tried it with Two and Herdan, but it didn't seem to make any difference. These computers are faster than Dahak, and they've got an incredible capacity, but even after he dumped his entire memory to them, they didn't wake up."

 

 

"Something experiential?" Horus mused. "Or in the core programming?"

 

 

"Dahak? You want to answer that one?"

 

 

"I shall endeavor, Colin, but the truth is that I do not know. Senior Fleet Captain Horus, you must understand that the basic construction of these computers is totally different from my own, with core programming specifically designed to preclude the possibility of true self-awareness on their part.

 

 

"My translation programs are sufficient for most purposes, but to date I have been unable to modify their programs. In many ways, their core software is an inextricable part of their energy-state circuitry. I can transfer data and manipulate their existing programs; I am not yet sufficiently versatile to alter them. I therefore suspect that the difficulty lies in their core programming and that simply increasing their data bases to match my own is insufficient to cross the threshold of true awareness. Unless, of course, there is some truth to Fleet Captain Chernikov's hypothesis."

 

 

"Oh?" Horus looked at Colin. "What hypothesis is that, Colin?"

 

 

"Vlad's gone metaphysical on us," Colin said. It could have been humor, but it didn't sound that way to Horus. "He suspects Dahak's developed a soul."

 

 

"A soul?"

 

 

"Yeah. He thinks it's a factor of the evolution of something outside the software or the complexity of the computer net and the amount of data in memory-a 'soul' for want of a better term." Colin shrugged. "You can discuss it with him later, if you like. He'll talk both your ears off if you let him."

 

 

"I certainly will," Horus said. "A soul," he murmured. "What an elegant notion. And how wonderful if it were true." He saw Hatcher's puzzled expression and smiled.

 

 

"Dahak is already a wonder," he explained. "A person-an individual- however he got that way. But if he does have a soul, if Man has actually brought that about, even by accident, what a magnificent thing to have done."

 

 

"I see your point," Hatcher mused, then shook himself and looked back at Colin. "But getting back to my point, do I understand you intend to continue as emperor?"

 

 

"I may not have a choice," Colin said wryly. "Mother won't let me abdicate, and every piece of Imperial technology we'll ever be able to salvage is programmed to go along with her."

 

 

"What's wrong with that?" Horus put in. "I think you'll make a splendid emperor, Colin." His son-in-law stuck out his tongue. "No, seriously. Look what you've already accomplished. I don't believe there's a person on Earth who doesn't realize that he's alive only because of you-"

 

 

"Because of you, you mean," Colin interrupted uncomfortably.

 

 

"Only because you left me in charge, and I couldn't have done it without these people." Horus waved at Hatcher and Tsien. "But the point is, you made survival possible. Well, you and Dahak, and I don't suppose he wants the job."

 

 

"You suppose correctly, sir," the mellow voice said, and Horus grinned.

 

 

"And whether you want it or not, someone's going to have to take it, or something like it. We've gotten by so far only because supreme authority was imposed from the outside, and this is still a war situation, which requires an absolute authority of some sort. Even if it weren't, it's going to be at least a generation before most of Earth is prepared for effective self-government, and a world government in which only some nations participate won't work, even if it wouldn't be an abomination."

 

 

"With your permission, Your Majesty," Tsien said, cutting off Colin's incipient protest, "the Governor has a point. You are aware of how my people regard Western imperialism. That issue has been muted, and, perhaps, undermined somewhat by the mutual trust our merged militaries and cooperating governments have attained, but our union is more fragile than it appears, and many of our differences remain. Cooperation as discrete equals is no longer beyond our imagination; effective amalgamation into a single government may be. You, as a source of authority from outside the normal Terran power equations, are quite another matter. You can hold us together. No one else-with the possible exception of Governor Horus-could do that."

 

 

Colin hadn't been present to witness Tsien's integration into Horus's command team. He still tended to think of the marshal as the hard-core military leader of the Asian Alliance, and Tsien's calm, matter-of-fact acceptance took him somewhat aback, but the marshal's sincerity was unmistakable.

 

 

"If that's the way you all feel, I guess I'm stuck. It'll make things a lot simpler where Mother is concerned, that's for sure!"

 

 

"But why is she so determined?" Hatcher asked.

 

 

"She was designed that way, Ger," MacMahan said. "Mother was the Empire's Praetorian Guard. She commanded Battle Fleet in the emperor's name, but because she wasn't self-aware, she was immune to the ambition which tends to infect humans in the same position. Her core programming is incredible, but what it comes down to is that Herdan the Great made her the conservator of empire when he accepted the throne."

 

 

"Accepted!" Hatcher snorted.

 

 

"No, the Empire's historians were a mighty fractious lot, pretty damned immune to hagiography even when it came to emperors who were still alive. And as far as I can determine from what they had to say, that's exactly the right verb. He knew what a bitch the job was going to be and wanted no part of it."

 

 

"How many Terran emperors admitted they did?"

 

 

"Maybe not many, but Herdan was in a hell of a spot. There were six 'official' Imperial governments, with at least twice that many civil wars going on, and he happened to be the senior military officer of the 'Imperium' holding Birhat. That gave it a degree of legitimacy the others resented, so two of them got together to smash it, but he wound up smashing them, instead. I've studied his campaigns, and the man was a diabolical strategist. His crews knew it, too, and when they demanded that he be named dictator in the old Republican Roman tradition to put an end to the wars, the Senate on Birhat went along."

 

 

"So why didn't he step down later?"

 

 

"I think he was afraid to. He seems to have been a mighty liberal fellow for his times-if you don't believe me, take a look at the citizens' rights clauses he buried in that Great Charter of his-but he'd just finished playing fireman to put out the Imperium's wars. Like our Colin here, it was mostly his personal authority holding things together. If he let go, it would all fly apart. So he took the job when the Senate offered it to him, then spent eighty years creating an absolutist government that could hold together without becoming a tyranny.

 

 

"The way it works, the Emperor's absolute in military affairs-that's where the 'Warlord' part of his titles comes in-and a slightly limited monarch in civil matters. He is the executive branch, complete with the powers of appointment, dismissal, and the purse, but there's also a legislative branch in the Assembly of Nobles, and less than a third of its titles are hereditary. The other seventy-odd percent are life-titles, and Herdan set it up so that only about twenty percent of all life-titles can be awarded by the Emperor. The others are either awarded by the Assembly itself-to reward scientific achievement, outstanding military service, and things like that-or elected by popular vote. In a sense, it's a unicameral legislature with four separate houses-imperial appointees, honor appointees, elected, and hereditary nobles-buried in it, and it's a lot more than a simple rubber stamp.

 

 

"The Assembly confirms or rejects new emperors, and a sufficient majority can require a serving emperor to abdicate-well, to submit to an Empire-wide referendum, a sort of 'vote of confidence' by all franchised citizens-and Mother will back them up. She makes the final evaluation of any new emperor's sanity, and she won't accept a ruler who doesn't match certain intelligence criteria and enjoy the approval of a majority of the Assembly of Nobles. She'll simply refuse to take orders from an emperor who's been given notice to quit, and when the military begins taking its orders from his properly-appointed successor, he's up shit creek in a leaky canoe."

 

 

"Doesn't sound like being emperor's a lot of fun," Horus murmured.

 

 

"Herdan designed it that way, I think," MacMahan replied.

 

 

"My God," Hatcher said. "Government   la Goldberg!"

 

 

"It seems that way," MacMahan agreed with a smile, "but it worked for five thousand years, with only half-a-dozen minor-league 'wars' (by Imperial standards), before they accidentally wiped themselves out."

 

 

"Well," Horus said, "if it works that well, maybe we can learn something from it after all, Colin. And-"

 

 

He broke off as Jiltanith and Amanda stepped off the balcony onto Dahak's pressers. Amanda carried a little girl, Jiltanith a little boy, and both infants' hair was raven's-wing black. The little girl was adorable, and the little boy looked cheerful and alert, but no one with Colin's nose and ears could ever be called adorable-except, perhaps, by Jiltanith.

 

 

Horus's eyebrows almost disappeared into his hairline.

 

 

"Surprise," Colin said, his smile broad.

 

 

"You mean-?"

 

 

"Yep. Let me introduce you." He held out his arms, and Jiltanith handed him the little boy. "This little monster is Crown Prince Sean Horus MacIntyre, heir presumptive to the Throne of Man. And this-" Jiltanith smiled at her father, her eyes bright, as Amanda handed him the baby girl "-is his younger twin sister, Princess Isis Harriet MacIntyre."

 

 

Horus took the little girl in immensely gentle hands. She promptly fastened one small fist in his white hair and tugged hard, and he winced.

 

 

"Bid thy grandchildren welcome, Father," Jiltanith said softly, putting her arms around her father and daughter to hug them both, but Horus's throat was too tight to speak, and tears slid down his ancient cheeks.

 

 

" ... and the additional food supplies from the farms aboard your ships have made the difference, Your Majesty," Chiang Chien-su said. The plump general beamed at the assembled officers and members of the Planetary Council. "There seems little doubt Earth has entered a 'mini-ice age,' and flooding remains a severe problem. Rationing will be required for some time, but with Imperial technology for farming and food distribution, Comrade Redhorse and I anticipate that starvation should not be a factor."

 

 

"Thank you, General," Colin said very, very sincerely. "You and your people have done superbly. As soon as I have time, I intend to elevate you to our new Assembly of Nobles for your work here."

 

 

Chiang was a good Party member, and his expression was a study as he sat down. Colin turned to the petite, smooth-faced Councilor on Horus's left.

 

 

"Councilor Hsu, what's the state of our planet-side industry?"

 

 

"There has been considerable loss, Comrade Emperor," Hsu Yin said. Obviously Chiang wasn't the only one feeling her way into the new political setup. "Comrade Chernikov's decision to increase planetary industry has borne fruit, however. Despite all damage, our industrial plant is operating at approximately fifty percent of pre-siege levels. With the assistance of your repair ships, we should make good our remaining losses within five months.

 

 

"There are, however, certain personnel problems, and not this time-" her serious eyes swept her fellow councilors with just a hint of wry humor "-in Third World areas. Your Western trade unions-specifically, your Teamsters Union-have awakened to the economic implications of Imperial technology."

 

 

"Oh, Lord!" Colin looked at Gustav van Gelder. "Gus? How bad is it?"

 

 

"It could be much worse, as Councilor Hsu knows quite well," the security councilor said, but he smiled at her as he spoke. "So far, they are relying upon propaganda, passive resistance, and strikes. It should not take them long to realize other people are singularly unimpressed by their propaganda and that their strikes merely inconvenience a society with Imperial technology." He shrugged. "When they do, the wisest among them will realize they must adapt or go the way of the dinosaurs. I do not anticipate organized violence, if that is what you mean, but I have my eye on the situation."

 

 

"Well thank God for that," Colin muttered. "All right, I think that clears up the planetary situation. Are there any other points we need to look at?" Heads shook. "In that case, Dahak, suppose you bring us up to date on Project Rosetta."

 

 

"Of course, Sire." Dahak was on his best official behavior before the Council, and Colin raised one hand to hide his smile.

 

 

"Progress has been more rapid than originally projected," the computer said. "There are, of course, many differences between Achuultani-or, to be correct, Aku'Ultan-computers and our own, but the basic processes are not complex. The large quantity of hard-copy data obtained from the wreckage also will be of great value in deciphering the output we have generated.

 

 

"I am not yet prepared to provide translations or interpretations, but this project is continuing." Colin nodded. Dahak meant the majority of his capability was devoted to it even as he spoke. "I anticipate at least partial success within the next several days."

 

 

"Good," Colin said. "We need that data to plan our next move."

 

 

"Acknowledged," Dahak said calmly.

 

 

"What else do you have for us?"

 

 

"Principally observational data, Sire. Our technical teams and my own remotes have completed their initial survey of the wreckage. I am now prepared to present a brief general summary of our findings. Shall I proceed?"

 

 

"Please do."

 

 

"The present data contain anomalies. Specifically, certain aspects of Aku'Ultan technology do not logically correspond to others. For example, they appear to possess only a very rudimentary appreciation of gravitonics and their ships do not employ gravitonic sublight drives, yet their sublight missiles employ a highly sophisticated gravitonic drive which is, in fact, superior to that of the Imperium though inferior to that of the Empire."

 

 

"Could they have picked that up from someone else?" MacMahan asked.

 

 

"The possibility exists. Yet having done so, why have they not applied it to their starships? Their relatively slow speed, even in hyper space, is a severe tactical handicap, and, logically, they should recognize the potentials of their own missile propulsion, yet they have not taken advantage of them.

 

 

"Nor is this the only anomaly. The computers aboard this starship are primitive in the extreme, but little advanced over those of Earth, yet the components of which they are built are very nearly on a par with my own, though far inferior to the Empire's energy-state systems. Again, their hyper technology is highly sophisticated, yet there is no sign of beamed hyper fields, nor even of warp warheads or grenades. This is the more surprising in view of their extremely primitive, energy-intensive beam weapons. Their range is short, their effect limited, and their projectors both clumsy and massive, but little advanced from those of pre-Imperium Terra."

 

 

"Any explanation for these anomalies?" Colin asked after a moment.

 

 

"I have none, Sire. It would appear that the Aku'Ultan have chosen, for reasons best known to themselves, to build extremely inefficient warships by the standards of their own evident technical capabilities. Why a warrior race should do such a thing surpasses my present understanding."

 

 

"Yours and mine both," Colin murmured, drumming on the conference table edge. Then he shook his head.

 

 

"Thank you, Dahak. Keep on this for us, please."

 

 

"I shall, Sire."

 

 

"In that case," Colin turned to Isis and Cohanna, "what can you tell us about how these beasties are put together, Ladies?"

 

 

"I'll let Captain Cohanna begin, if I may," Isis said. "She's supervised most of the autopsies."

 

 

"All right. Cohanna?"

 

 

"Well," Dahak's surgeon said, "Councilor Tudor's seen more of our live specimen, but we've both learned a fair bit from the dead ones.

 

 

"To summarize, the Achuultani are definitely warm-blooded, despite their saurian appearance, though their biochemistry incorporates an appalling level of metals by human standards. A fraction of it would kill any of us; their bones are virtually a crystalline alloy; their amino acids are incredible; and they use a sort of protein-analogue metal salt as an oxygen-carrier. I haven't even been able to identify some of the elements in it yet, but it works. In fact, it's a bit more efficient than hemoglobin, and it's also what gives their blood that bright-orange color. Their chromosome structure is fascinating, but I'll need several months before I can tell you much more than that about it.

 

 

"Now," she drew a deep breath, "none of that is too terribly surprising, given that we're dealing with an utterly alien species, but a few other points strike me as definitely weird.

 

 

"First, they have at least two sexes, but we've seen only males. It is, of course, possible that their culture doesn't believe in exposing females to combat, but an incursion's personnel spend decades of subjective time on operations. It seems a bit unlikely, to me, at any rate, that any race could be so immune to the biological drives as to remain celibate for periods like that. In addition, unless their psychology is entirely beyond our understanding, I would think that being cut off from all procreation would produce the same apathy it produces in human societies.

 

 

"Second, there appears to be an appalling lack of variation. I've yet to unravel their basic gene structure, but we've been carrying out tissue studies on the cadavers recovered from the wreck. By the standards of any species known to Terran or Imperial bioscience, they exhibit a statistically improbable-extremely improbable-homogeneity. Were it not for the very careful labeling we've done, I would be tempted to conclude that all of our tissue samples come from no more than a few score individuals. I have no explanation for how this might have come about.

 

 

"Third, and perhaps most puzzling, is the relative primitivism of their gross physiognomy. To the best of our knowledge, this same race has conducted offensive sweeps of our arm of the galaxy for over seventy million years, yet they do not exhibit the attributes one might expect such a long period of high-tech civilization to produce. They're large, extremely strong, and well-suited to a relatively primitive environment. One would expect a species which had enjoyed technology for so long to have decreased in size, at the very least, and, perhaps, to have lost much of its tolerance for extreme environmental conditions. These creatures have done neither."

 

 

"Is that really relevant?" Amesbury asked. "Humanity hasn't exactly developed the attributes you describe, either here or in Imperial history."

 

 

"The cases aren't parallel, Sir Frederick. The Terran branch of the race is but recently removed from its own primitive period, and all of human history, from its beginnings on Mycos to the present, represents only a tiny fraction of the life experience of the Achuultani. Further, the Achuultani's destruction of the Third Imperium eliminated all human-populated planets other than Birhat-a rather draconian reduction in the gene pool."

 

 

"Point taken," Amesbury said, and Cohanna gestured to Isis.

 

 

"Just as Cohanna has noted anomalies in Achuultani physiology," the white-haired physician began, "I have observed anomalies in behavioral patterns. Obviously, our prisoner-his name is 'Brashieel,' as nearly as we can pronounce it-is a prisoner and so cannot be considered truly representative of his race. His behavior, however, is, by any human standard, bizarre.

 

 

"He appears resigned, yet not passive. In general, his behavior is docile, which could be assumed, genuine, or merely a response to our own biotechnics. Certainly he's deduced that even our medical technicians are several times as strong as he is, though he may not realize this is due to artificial enhancement. He is not, however, apathetic. He's alert, interested, and curious. We are unable to communicate with him as yet, but he appears to be actively assisting our efforts in this direction. I submit that for a soldier embarked upon a genocidal campaign to exhibit neither resistance to, nor even, so nearly as we can determine, hostility towards the species he recently attempted to annihilate isn't exactly typical of a human response."

 

 

"Um." Colin tugged on his nose. "How are his injuries responding?"

 

 

"We can't use quick-heal or regeneration on such an unknown physiology, but he appears to be recovering nicely. His bones are knitting a bit faster than a human's would; tissue repairs seem to be taking rather longer."

 

 

"All right," Colin said, "what do we have? A technology with gaping holes, a species which seems evolutionarily retarded, and a prisoner whose responses defy our logical expectations. Does anyone have any suggestions which could account for all those things?"

 

 

He looked around expectantly, but the only response was silence.

 

 

"Well," he sighed after a moment, "let's adjourn for now. Unless something breaks in the meantime, we'll convene again Wednesday at fourteen hundred hours. Will that be convenient for all of you?"

 

 

Heads nodded, and he rose.

 

 

"I'll see you all then," he said. He wanted to get home to Dahak anyway. The twins were teething, and 'Tanni wasn't exactly the most placid mommy in human history.

 

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

 

Brashieel, who had been a servant of thunders, curled in his new nest place and pondered. It had never occurred to him-nor to anyone else, so far as he knew-to consider the possibility of capture. Protectors did not capture nest-killers; they slew them. So, he had always assumed, did nest-killers deal with Protectors, yet these had not.

 

 

He had attempted to fight to the death, but he had failed, and, strangely, he no longer wished to die. No one had ever told him he must; had they simply failed, as he, to consider that he might not? Yet he felt a vague suspicion a true thinker in honor would have ended slaying yet another nest-killer.

 

 

Only Brashieel wished to live. He needed to consider the new things happening to and about him. These strange bipeds had destroyed Lord Chirdan's force with scarcely five twelves of ships. Admittedly, they were huge, yet it had taken but five twelves, when Lord Chirdan had been within day-twelfths of destroying this world. That was power. Such nest-killers could purge the galaxy of the Aku'Ultan, and the thought filled him with terror.

 

 

But why had they waited so long? He had seen this world's nest-killers now, and they were the same species as those who crewed those stupendous ships. Whether they were also the nest-killers who had built those sensor arrays he did not know. It seemed likely, yet if it were so those arrays must have told them long ago that the Great Visit was upon them, so why conceal their capability until this world had suffered such losses? And why had they not killed him? Because they sought information from him? That was possible, though it would not have occurred to a Protector. Which might, Brashieel admitted grudgingly, be yet another way in which his captors out-classed the Nest. But stranger even than that, they did not mistreat him. They were impossibly strong for such small beings. He had thought it was but the nest-killer's powered armor which had made him a fledgling in his hands... until he saw a slight, slender one with long hair lift one of their elevated sleeping pads and carry it away to clear his nest place. That was sobering proof of what they might have done to him had they chosen to.

 

 

Instead, they had tended his wounds, fed him food from Vindicator's wreck, provided air which was pleasant to breathe, not thin like their own-all that, when they should have struck him down. Was he not a nest-killer to their Protectors? Had he and his nestmates not come within a segment of destroying their very world? Were they so stupid they did not realize that they were-must be, forever-enemies to the death?

 

 

Or was it simply that they did not fear him? Beside those monster ships, the greatest ships of the Nest were fledglings with toy bows of mowap wood. Were they so powerful, so confident, that they did not fear the nest-killers of another people, another place?

 

 

That was the most terrifying thought of all, one which reeked of treason to the Nest, for there was-must always be-the fear, the Great Fear which only courage and the Way could quench. Yet if that was not so for these nest-killers, if they did not fear on sight, then was it possible they might not be nest-killers?

 

 

Brashieel curled in his new nest place, eyes closed, and whimpered in his sleep, wondering in his dreams which was truly the greater nightmare: to fear the nest-killers, or to fear that they did not fear him.

 

 

Colin and Jiltanith rose to welcome Earth's senior officers and their new starship captains. There were but fourteen captains. If they took every trained, bio-enhanced man and woman Earth's defenses could spare, they could have provided minimal crews for seventeen of the Imperial Guard's warships; they had chosen to crew only fifteen, fourteen Asgerds and one Vespa.

 

 

The Empire had gone in for more specialized designs than the Imperium, and the Asgerds were closest in concept to Dahak, well-rounded and equipped to fight at all ranges, while the Trosans were optimized for close combat with heavy beam armaments and the Vespas were optimized for planetary assaults. But the reason for manning only fifteen warships was simple; the other personnel would crew the three Enchanach-class transports, each vast as Dahak himself, for Operation Dunkirk.

 

 

In hyper, the round-trip to Bia would take barely six months, and each stupendous ship could squeeze in upward of ten million people. With luck, they had time to return for a second load even if the Imperial Guard failed to halt the Achuultani, which meant they could evacuate over sixty million humans to the almost impregnable defenses of the old Imperial capital and the housing Mother's remotes were already building to receive them. General Chiang was selecting those refugees now; they were Colin's insurance policy.

 

 

The Achuultani's best speed, even in hyper, seemed to be just under fifty times light-speed. At absolute minimum, they would take seventeen years to reach Bia. Seventeen years in which Mother and Tsien Tao-ling could activate defensive systems, collect and build additional warships, and man them. If the Achuultani ever reached Bia, they would not enjoy the visit.

 

 

Colin looked down the table at Tsien. The marshal was as impassive as ever, but Colin had seen the hurt in his eyes when he lost the coin toss to Hatcher. Yet, in a way, Colin was pleased it was Tsien who was going. He hadn't learned to know the huge man well, but he liked what he knew. Tsien was a man of iron, and Colin trusted him with his life. With far more than his life, for his children would be returning to Birhat.

 

 

Without 'Tanni. She was the commander of Dahak Two, the reserve flagship, and that was as far from Colin as she was going. Because she loved him, yes, but also because he would be going to meet the Achuultani, and the killer in her could not resist that battle.

 

 

Had their roles been reversed, Colin thought he might have made himself go out of a sense of duty, but 'Tanni couldn't. He might have tried ordering her to... if he hadn't understood and loved her.

 

 

The last officer-Senior Fleet Captain Lady Adrienne Robbins, Baroness Nergal, Companion of the Golden Nova and CO of the planetoid Emperor Herdan-found her place, and Colin glanced around the conference room, satisfied that this was the best Earth could boast, committed to her final defense. Then he stood and rapped gently on the table, and the quiet side conversations ended.

 

 

"Ladies and gentlemen, Dahak has broken into the Achuultani data base. We finally know what we're up against, and it isn't good. In fact, it may be bad enough to make Operation Dunkirk a necessity, not just an insurance policy."

 

 

Horus watched Colin as he spoke. His son-in-law looked grim, but far from defeated. He remembered the Colin MacIntyre he'd first met, a homely, sandy-haired young man who'd strayed into an unthinkably ancient war, determined to do what he must, yet terrified that he was unequal to his task.

 

 

That homely young man was gone. By whatever chain of luck or destiny history moved, he had met his moment. Preposterous as it seemed, he had become in truth what accident had made him: Colin I, Emperor and Warlord of Humanity-Mankind's champion in this dark hour. If they survived, Horus mused, Herdan the Great would have a worthy rival as the greatest emperor in human history.

 

 

"-not going to count ourselves out yet, though," Colin was saying, and Horus shook himself back into the moment. "We've got better intelligence than anyone's ever had on an incursion, and I intend to use it. Before I tell you what I hope to accomplish, however, it's only fair that you know what we're really up against. 'Tanni?" He nodded to his wife and sat as she stood.

 

 

"My Lords and Ladies," she said quietly, "we face a foe greater than any who have come before us. 'Twould seem the Achuultani do call this arm of our galaxy common 'the Demon Sector' for that they have suffered so in their voyages hither. So have they mustered up a strength full double any e'er dispatched in times gone by, and this force we face with scarce four score ships.

 

 

"Our Dahak hath beagled out their numbers. As thou dost know, Achuultani calculations rest upon the base-twelve system, and 'tis a great twelve cubed-near to three million, as we would say-of warships which come upon us."

 

 

There was a sound. Not a gasp, but a deep-drawn breath. Most of the faces around the table tightened, but no one spoke.

 

 

"Yet that telleth but a part," Jiltanith went on evenly. "The scouts which did war 'pon Terra these months past were but light units. Those which come behind are vaster far, the least near twice the size of those which have been vanquished here. We scarce could smite them all did our every missile speed straightway to its mark, and so, in sober fact, we durst not meet them all in open battle."

 

 

Officers exchanged stunned glances, and Colin didn't blame them. His own first reaction would have done his reputation for coolness no good at all.

 

 

"Yet I counsel not despair!" Jiltanith's clear voice cut through the almost-fear. "Nay, good My Lords and Ladies, our Warlord hath a plan most shrewd which still may tumble them to dust. Yet now will I ask our General MacMahan to speak that thou mayst know thine enemies."

 

 

She sat, and Horus applauded silently. Colin's human officers spoke, not Dahak. Everyone here knew how much they relied upon Dahak, yet he could see them drawing a subtle strength from hearing their own kind brief them. It wasn't that they distrusted Dahak-how could they, when their very survival to this point resulted only from the ancient starship's fidelity?-but they needed to hear a human voice expressing confidence. A human who was merely mortal, like themselves, and so could understand what he or she asked of them.

 

 

"Ladies and gentlemen," Hector MacMahan said, "Fleet Captain Ninhursag and I have spent several days examining the data with Dahak. Ninhursag's also spent time with our prisoner and, with Dahak's offices as translator, she's been able to communicate with him after a fashion. Oddly enough, from our perspective, though he hasn't volunteered data, he's made no attempt to lie or mislead us.

 

 

"We've learned a great deal as a result, and, though there are still huge holes in our knowledge, I'll attempt to summarize our findings. Please bear with me if I seem to wander a bit afield. I assure you, it's pertinent.

 

 

"The Achuultani, or the People of the Nest of Aku'Ultan, are-exclusively, so far as we can determine-a warrior race. Judging from some of Brashieel's counter-questions, they know absolutely nothing about any other sentient race. They've spent millions of years hunting them down and destroying them, yet they've learned nothing-literally nothing-about any of them. It's almost as if they fear communicating might somehow corrupt their great purpose. And that purpose is neither less nor more than the defense of the Nest of Aku'Ultan."

 

 

A few eyebrows rose, and Hector shook his head.

 

 

"I found it hard to believe at first myself, but that's precisely how they see it, because at some point in their past they encountered another race, one their records call 'the Great Nest-Killers.' How they met, why war broke out, what weapons were used, even where the war was fought, we do not know. What we do know is that there were once many 'nests.' These might be thought of as clans or tribes, but they consisted of millions and even billions of Achuultani. Of all those nests, only the Aku'Ultan survived, and only because they fled. From what we've learned, we're inclined to believe they fled to an entirely different galaxy-our own-to find safety.

 

 

"After their flight, the Achuultani organized to defend themselves against pursuit, just as the Imperium organized to fight the Achuultani themselves. And just as the Imperium sent out probes searching for the Achuultani, the Achuultani searched for the Great Nest-Killers. Like our ancestors, they never found their enemy. Unlike our ancestors, they did find other sentient life forms. And because they regarded all other life forms as threats to their very existence, they destroyed them."

 

 

He paused, and there was a deep silence.

 

 

"That's what we're up against: a race which offers no quarter because it knows it will receive none. I don't say it's a situation which can never be changed, but clearly it's one we cannot hope will change in time to save us.

 

 

"On another level, there are things about the Aku'Ultan we don't pretend to understand.

 

 

"First, there are no female Achuultani." Several people looked at him in open disbelief, and he shrugged. "It sounds bizarre, but so far as we can tell, there isn't even a feminine gender in their language, which is all the more baffling in light of the fact that our prisoner is a fully functional male. Not a hermaphrodite, but a male. Fleet Captain Cohanna suggests this may indicate they reproduce by artificial means, which might explain why we see so little variation among them and, perhaps, their apparent lack of evolutionary change. It does not explain why any race, especially one as driven to survive as this one, should make the extraordinary decision to abandon all possibility of natural procreation. We asked Brashieel about this and got a totally baffled response. He simply didn't understand the question. It hadn't even occurred to him that we have two sexes, and he has no idea at all what that means to our psychology or our civilization.

 

 

"Second, the Nest is an extremely rigid, caste-oriented society dominated by the High Lords of the Nest and headed by the Nest Lord, the highest of the high, absolute ruler of all Achuultani. Exactly how High Lords and Nest Lords are chosen was none of Brashieel's business. As nearly as we can tell, he was never even curious. It was simply the way things were.

 

 

"Third, the Aku'Ultan inhabit relatively few worlds; most of them are always away aboard the fleets of their 'Great Visits,' sweeping the galaxy for 'nest-killers' and destroying them. The few planets they inhabit seem to be much further away than the Imperium ever suspected, which is probably why they were never found, and the Achuultani appear to be migratory, abandoning star systems as they deplete them to construct their warships. We don't know exactly where they are; that information wasn't in Vindicator's computers or, if it was, was destroyed before we took them. From what we've been able to determine, however, they appear to be moving to the galactic east. This would mean they're constantly moving away from us, which may also help to explain the irregular frequency of their incursions in our direction.

 

 

"Fourth, the Nest's social and military actions follow patterns which, as far as we can tell, have never altered in their racial memory. Frankly, this is the most hopeful point we've discovered. We now know how their 'great visits' work and how to derail the process for quite some time."

 

 

"We do?" Gerald Hatcher scratched his nose thoughtfully. "And just how do we do that, Hector?"

 

 

"We stop this incursion," MacMahan said simply. There was a mutter of uneasy laughter, and he smiled very slightly. "No, I mean it.

 

 

"The Achuultani possess no means of interstellar FTL communication other than by ship. How they could've been around this long and not developed one is beyond me, but they haven't, which means that once a 'great visit' is launched, they don't expect to hear anything from it until it gets back."

 

 

"That's good news, anyway," Hatcher agreed.

 

 

"Yes, it is. Especially in light of some of their other limitations. Their best n-space speed is twenty-eight percent of light-speed, and they use only the lower, slower hyper bands-again, we don't understand why, but let's be grateful-which limits their best supralight speed to forty-eight lights; seven percent of what Dahak can turn out, six percent of what the Guard can turn out under Enchanach Drive, and two percent of what it can turn out in hyper. That means they take a long time to complete an incursion. Of course, unlike Enchanach Drive, there's a time dilation effect in hyper, and the lower your band, the greater the dilation, which means their voyages take a lot less time subjectively, but Brashieel's ship had already come something like fourteen thousand light-years to reach Sol. So if the incursion sent a courier home tomorrow, he'd take just under three centuries to get there. Which means, ladies and gentlemen, that if we stop them, we've got almost six hundred years before a new 'great visit' can get back here. And that we know where to go looking for them in the meantime."

 

 

A soft growl came from the assembled officers as they visualized what they could do with five or six centuries to work with.

 

 

"I'm glad to hear that, Hector," Hatcher said carefully, "but it leaves us with the little matter of three million or so ships coming at us right now."

 

 

"True," Colin said, waving MacMahan back down. "But we've learned a little-less than we'd like, but a little-about their strategic doctrine.

 

 

"First, we have a bit more time than we'd thought. The incursion is divided into three major groups: two main formations and a host of sub-formations of scouts which do most of the killing. The larger formations are mainly to back up the scout forces, each of which operates on a different axis of advance. Aside from the one which already hit us, they're unlikely to hit anything but dead planets as far as we're concerned, and a half-dozen crewed Asgerds could deal with any of them. If we can stop the main incursion, we'll have plenty of time to hunt them down and pick them off.

 

 

"The real bad news is coming at us in two parts. The first-what I think of as the 'vanguard'-is about one and a quarter million ships, advancing fairly slowly from rendezvous to rendezvous in n-space to permit scouts to send back couriers to report. We may assume one's already been dispatched from Sol, but it can't pass its message until the vanguard drops out of hyper at the rendezvous, thirty-six Achuultani light-years from Sol. Given the difference in length between our years and theirs, that's about forty-six-point-eight of our light-years. The vanguard won't reach their rendezvous for another three months; we can be there in about three and a half weeks with Dahak, and a hell of a lot less than that for the Guard in hyper.

 

 

"And take on a million ships when you get there?" Hatcher said.

 

 

"Tough odds, but I've got a mousetrap planned that should take them out. Unfortunately, it'll only work once.

 

 

"That's our problem. Even if we zap the vanguard, that still leaves what I think of as the 'main body': almost as numerous and with some really big mothers, under their supreme commander, a Great Lord Tharno.

 

 

"Now, the vanguard and main body actually keep changing relative position-they 'leapfrog' as they advance-and their rendezvous are much more tightly spaced than the scouts' are. Again, this is to allow for communication; the scouts can't pass messages laterally, and they only send one back to the closest main fleet rendezvous if they hit trouble, but the leading main formation sends couriers back to the trailing formation at each stop. If there's really bad news, the lead force calls the trailer forward to link up, but only after investigating to be sure they need help, since it plays hell with their schedules. In any case, however, at least one courier is always sent back and there's a minimum interval of about five months before the trailer can come up. With me so far?"

 

 

There were nods, and he smiled grimly.

 

 

"All right, that's our major strategic advantage: their coordination stinks. Because they use hyper drives, their ships have to stay in hyper once they go into it until they reach their destination. And because their maximum fold-space com range is barely a light-year, the rear components of their fleet always jump to the origin point of the last message from the lead formation. Even in emergencies, the follow-on echelon has to jump to to almost exactly the same point, assuming they mean to coordinate with the leaders, because with their miserable communications they can't find each other if they don't."

 

 

"Which means," Marshal Tsien said thoughtfully, "that your own ships may be able to ambush their formations as they emerge from hyper."

 

 

"Exactly, Marshal. What we hope to do is mousetrap the vanguard and wipe it out; I think we'll get away with that, but we don't know where the rendezvous point before this one is. That means we can't stop the vanguard's couriers from telling Lord Tharno about our trap, meaning that the main body will be alerted and ready when it comes out.

 

 

"So we probably will have to fight the main body. That pits seventy-eight of us against one-point-two million of them: about fifteen thousand to one."

 

 

Someone swallowed audibly, and Colin smiled that grim smile again.

 

 

"I think we can take them. We may lose a lot of ships, but we ought to be able to swing it if they pop into n-space where we expect them."

 

 

A long silence dragged out. Marshal Tsien broke it at length.

 

 

"Forgive me, but I do not see how you can do it."

 

 

"I'm not certain we can, Marshal," Colin said frankly. "I am certain that we have a chance, and that we can destroy at least half and more probably two-thirds of their force. If that's all we accomplish, we may not save Earth, but we will save Birhat and the refugees headed there. That, Marshal Tsien-" he met the huge man's eyes "-is why I'm so relieved to know we're sending one of our best people to take over Bia's defenses."

 

 

"I am honored by your confidence, Your Majesty, yet I fear you have set yourself an impossible task. You have only fifteen partially-manned warships-sixteen counting Dahak."

 

 

"But Dahak is our ace in the hole. Unlike the rest of us, he can fight all of our unmanned ships with full efficiency as long as he's in fold-space range of them."

 

 

"And if something happens to him, Your Majesty?" Tsien asked quietly.

 

 

"Then, Marshal Tsien," Colin said just as quietly, "I hope to hell you have Bia in shape by the time the incursion gets there."

 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

 

 

"Hyper wake coming in from Sol, ma'am."

 

 

Adrienne Robbins, Lady Nergal (and it still felt weird to be a noble of an empire which had died forty-five thousand years ago), nodded and watched Herdan's holographic projection. The F5 star Terran astronomers knew as Zeta Trianguli Australis was a diamond chip five light-years astern, and the blood-red hyper trace indicator flashed almost on a line with it.

 

 

Adrienne's stupendous command floated with three other starships, yet alone and lonely. The four of them were deployed to cover almost a cubic light-year of space, and Tamman's Royal Birhat was already moving to intercept. Well, that was all right; she'd killed enough Achuultani at the Siege of Earth.

 

 

"Captain, we've got a very faint wake coming in from the east, too," her plotting officer said, and Lady Adrienne frowned. That had to be the Achuultani vanguard, and it was way ahead of schedule.

 

 

"Emergence times?"

 

 

"Bogey One will emerge into n-space in approximately seven hours twelve minutes, ma'am; make it oh-two-twenty zulu," Fleet Commander Oliver Weinstein said. "Bogey Two's a real monster to show up at this range at all. We've got a good hundred hours before they emerge, maybe as much as five days. I'll be able to refine that in a couple of hours."

 

 

"Do that, Ollie," she said, relaxing again. The vanguard wasn't as far ahead of schedule as she'd feared, just a bigger, more visible target than anticipated.

 

 

Adrienne sighed. It had been easier to command Nergal. The battleship's computers had been no smarter than Herdan's, but they'd had nowhere near as much to do. If she'd needed to, she could be anywhere in the net through her neural feed, but Herdan was just too damned big. Even with six thousand crewmen aboard, less than five percent of her duty stations were manned. They could get by-barely-with that kind of stretch, but it was a bitch and a half. If only this ship were half as smart-hell, even a tenth as smart!-as Dahak. But they had only one Dahak, and he couldn't be committed to this job.

 

 

"Herdan," she said aloud.

 

 

"Yes, Captain?" a soft soprano replied, and Adrienne's mouth curled in a reflexive smile. It was silly for a ship named for the Empire's greatest emperor to sound like a teenaged girl, but apparently the fashion in the late Empire had been to give computers female voices, and hang the gender.

 

 

"Assume Bogey Two has scanners fifty percent more efficient than those of the scouts which attacked Earth and will emerge into n-space twelve hours from now. Compute probability Bogey Two will be able to detect detonation of Mark-Seventy gravitonic warheads at spatial and temporal loci of Bogey One's projected emergence into n-space."

 

 

"Computing." There was a brief pause. "Probability approaches zero."

 

 

"How closely?"

 

 

"Probability is one times ten to the minus thirty-second," Herdan responded. "Plus or minus two percent."

 

 

"Well, that's pretty close to zero at that, I guess," Adrienne murmured.

 

 

"Comment not understood."

 

 

"Ignore last comment," Adrienne replied, suppressing a sigh. It wasn't Herdan's fault she was an idiot, but after talking to Dahak-

 

 

"Acknowledged," Herdan said, and Lady Adrienne pressed her lips firmly together.

 

 

"Scout emergence into n-space in fourteen minutes, sir."

 

 

"Thank you, Janet," Senior Fleet Captain Tamman said, wishing he could share his tension with Amanda, and wasn't that a silly thought when he'd taken such pains to insure that he couldn't? Well, he admitted, "pains" was the wrong word, but he'd only gotten away with it because he'd found out about Colin's compulsory personnel orders assigning all pregnant Fleet personnel to the Operation Dunkirk crews a good month before Amanda had.

 

 

He thought she would forgive him someday, but he'd almost lost her once in La Paz, and then a rifle slug went right through her visor aboard Vindicator. It was only the Maker's own grace it hadn't shattered, and she'd used up most of her helmet sealant and all of her luck. He was taking no chances this time.

 

 

"Emergence in five minutes," Janet Santino said politely, and Tamman shook his head. Woolgathering, by the Maker!

 

 

"Come to Red One," he said, and his command staff settled into even more intimate communion with their consoles. His own eyes focused dreamily on the red circle delineating their target's locus of emergence, barely twenty light-seconds from their present position, while his brain concentrated on his neural feed, "seeing" directly through Birhat's superb scanners.

 

 

That courier had done a bang-up job of timing its jump, given the crudity of its computers, to hit this close to an exact rendezvous with the vanguard.

 

 

"Emergence in one minute," Santini said.

 

 

"Alpha Battery," Tamman said gently, "you are authorized to fire the moment you have a firm track."

 

 

"Emergence in thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five. Now!"

 

 

The red circle suddenly held a tiny red dot. There was a brief, eternal heartbeat of tension, and then the missiles fired.

 

 

They were sublight in order to home, but only barely so. They flashed across the display, and the dot vanished without fuss or bother, twenty kilometers of starship ripped apart by gravitonic warheads it had probably never even seen coming.

 

 

"Target," Birhat's velvety contralto purred, "destroyed."

 

 

"Thank you, Darling," someone murmured. "I hope it was good for you, too."

 

 

"Well, that's the first hurdle," Colin said as he digested Tamman's brief hypercom transmission.

 

 

"As thou sayst," Jiltanith agreed.

 

 

Colin nodded and looked around, admiring Dahak Two's spacious command deck and awesome instrumentation, and knew he would trade it all in a heartbeat for Dahak's outmoded bridge. Not that Two wasn't a fantastic fighting machine; she just wasn't Dahak. But Dahak couldn't fly this mission, and Colin refused to send his people to fight without him. Assuming anyone survived the next few months, that might be something he'd have to get used to. For now, it wasn't.

 

 

At the moment, Two was tearing through space at better than eight hundred times light-speed. Herdan was closest to the vanguard's projected emergence, and the ships which had spread out to cover the courier's probable emergence points hurried toward her. They could have made the trip in a fraction of the time in hyper, but then the vanguard might have seen them coming.

 

 

It was all right, he told himself again. Those Achuultani clunkers were so slow all twelve of the ships he'd committed to the operation would be in position long before they emerged.

 

 

"Approaching supralight shutdown, Captain," a female voice said.

 

 

"My thanks, Two," Jiltanith replied, and that was another strange thing. Colin might be an emperor and a warlord; he was also a passenger. Two could not be in better hands, but it felt odd to be riding someone else's command after all this time, even 'Tanni's.

 

 

He turned his attention to the display, and the bright green dots of his other ships blinked as Two went sublight and the stars suddenly slowed. There came Tor, the last of them, closing up nicely. Good.

 

 

"All units in position, Sire," Jiltanith said formally. "Stealth fields active."

 

 

"Thank you, Captain," Colin said with equal formality. "Now we wait."

 

 

Great Lord of Order Sorkar hated rendezvous stops, especially in the Demon Sector. Battle Comp assured him there was no real danger, and Nest Lord knew Battle Comp was always right, but there were too many horror stories about this sector. Sorkar was not supposed to know them-great lords were above the gossip of lower nestlings-but unlike most of his fellows, Sorkar had won his lordship the hard way, and he had not forgotten his origins as thoroughly as, perhaps, he ought to have.

 

 

Still, this visit had been almost boring, despite those odd reports of long-abandoned sensor arrays. Sorkar had longed for a little action more than once, for the urge to hunt was strong within any great lord, but Protectors were a commodity to be preserved for the service of the Nest, and he was too shrewd a commander to regret the tedium. Mostly.

 

 

He split his attention between his panel and the chronometers as they clicked over the last segment, and a corner of his brain double-checked the override between Battle Comp and his own panel. Battle Comp seldom took a hand directly, but it was comforting to know it could.

 

 

There! Emergence.

 

 

He watched his instruments approvingly. It was impossible to coordinate the translation between hyper space and n-space perfectly for so many units, but the time spread looked more than merely satisfactory, and the spacing was exemplary. His Protectors had learned their duties well over the-

 

 

"Alarm! Alarm! Incoming fire! Incoming fire!" a voice yelped, and Great Lord Sorkar jerked half-upright. They were light-years from the nearest star-who could be firing on them here?

 

 

But someone was, and he watched in horror as missiles of the greater thunder and something else, something beyond belief, shredded his proud starships like blazing tinder.

 

 

Nest-killers! The Demon Nest-Killers of the Demon Sector! But how? He'd studied all the previous great visits to this sector. Never-never!-had nest-killers struck until one or more of their worlds had been cleansed! Had those mysterious sensor arrays alerted them after all? But even if they had, how could they have known to find the rendezvous? It was impossible!

 

 

Yet the missiles continued to bore in, sublight and hyper alike, and his scanners could not even see the attackers! What wizardry-?

 

 

A raucous buzzer cut through his thoughts, and his eyes flashed to Battle Comp's panel. Data codes danced as the mighty computers took over his fleet, and Great Lord Sorkar was a passenger as his ships deployed. They spread apart, thinning the nest-killers' target even as they groped blindly to find their enemy. It was a good plan, he thought, but it was costing them. Tarhish, how it was costing them! But if there truly was a nest-killer force out there, if this was not, indeed, the night-demons of frightened legend, then they would find them. Terrible as his losses were, they were as nothing against his entire force, and when Battle Comp found a tar-

 

 

A target source appeared on his panel. Another blinked into sight, and another, as his nestlings spent their lives merely to find them, and Nest Lord, they were close! Some sort of cloaking technology. The thought was an icicle in his brain, for it was far better than anything the Nest had, but he had targets at last. He moved to order his nestlings to open fire, but Battle Comp had acted first. He heard his own voice, calm and dispassionate, already passing the command.

 

 

"Burn, baby! Burn!" someone whooped.

 

 

"Silence! Clear the net!" Adrienne Robbins cracked, and the exultant voice vanished. Not that she could blame whoever it had been, for their opening salvos had been twice as effective as projected. Unfortunately, that was because they were three times as close as planned. The hyper drives aboard these larger ships were slightly different from those the scouts had mounted, and their calculations had been off. By only a tiny amount, perhaps, but minute computational errors had major consequences on this scale.

 

 

They were going to burn through the stealth field a hell of a lot quicker than anyone had expected. She knew she had more experience against the Achuultani than anyone else, and perhaps her earlier losses had affected her nerve, but, damn it, those buggers were inside their own sublight and hyper missile range! Herdan's defenses were incomparably better than Nergal's, and her shield covered twenty times the hyper bands, but her sheer size meant it extended even further from the hull than Nergal's had, and there were going to be a lot of missiles headed her way very soon.

 

 

"Stand by missile defense; stand by ECM!" she snapped, and then, Dear Jesus, here it came.

 

 

Great Lord Sorkar spit an incredulous curse. A twelve of them! A single twelve had already slain a greater twelve and more of his ships, and their defenses were as incredible as their firepower. Targeting screens blossomed with false images, sucking his sublight weapons off target. Jammers hashed the scan channels. Titanic shields shrugged the greater thunder contemptuously aside. And still his ships died and died and died....

 

 

Yet nothing could stop the twelves of twelves of twelves of missiles his ships were hurling, and he bared his teeth as the first hyper missile slashed through a nest-killer shield. There! That should show them that-

 

 

He blinked, and his blood was ice. What sort of monster could absorb a direct hit from the greater thunder and not even notice it?

 

 

Alarms screamed as a ten-thousand-megaton warhead exploded almost on top of Royal Birhat. The huge ship quivered as the furious plasma cloud carved an incandescent chasm twenty kilometers into her armored hull. Air exploded from the dreadful wound, blast doors slammed... and Birhat went right on fighting.

 

 

"Moderate damage to Quadrant Theta-Two," the sexy contralto said calmly. "Four fatalities. Point zero-four-two percent combat impairment."

 

 

Colin winced as the flashing yellow band of combat damage encircled Birhat. He'd lost track of the kills they'd scored, but he'd fucked up. They were too frigging close!

 

 

"All ships, open the range," he snapped, and the Imperial Guard darted suddenly astern at sixty-five percent of light-speed.

 

 

Tarhish, they were fast! Sorkar had never seen anything but a missile move that quickly in n-space. They fell back out of range of his sublight weapons, retreating toward the edge of his hyper missile envelope, but their own weapons seemed totally unaffected, and he had never seen such accurate targeting. Indeed, he had never seen anyone do anything these nest-killers were doing to him, but that did not make them night-demons. It only meant his Protectors faced a test worse than he had ever imagined, and they were Protectors.

 

 

And, he thought under the surface of his battle orders, perhaps it was not as bad as it might have been. These nest-killers had known where to meet his ships, and not even those arrays could have told them that, so they must have already destroyed one scout force-probably Furtag's, given the timing-and followed its couriers hither. Yet if they could muster but a single twelve of ships, however powerful, against him, then the ships under his command were more than enough to feed them to the Furnace. Even at this extreme range, he had an incalculable advantage in launchers. Not so good as theirs, perhaps, but more than enough to make up any disadvantage.

 

 

"Colin, they press us sore," Jiltanith said, and Colin nodded sharply. The plan had been to empty their magazines into the Achuultani, but the shit was too deep for that. Birhat had taken only one hit, but Two had taken three and Tor had taken five. Five of those monster warheads!

 

 

These ships were tough beyond belief, but any toughness had its limits. He winced as yet another massive salvo exploded against Two's shield and the big ship plowed through the plasma like a drunken windjammer. It was only a matter of time until-

 

 

"Tor reports shield failure," Two's Comp Cent announced. "Attempting to withdraw into hyper." Colin's eyes darted to Tor's cursor, and the flashing yellow circle was banded in crimson. He stared at it in horror, willing the ship's hyper drive to take her out of it, as missile after missile went home-

 

 

"Withdrawal unsuccessful," Two said emotionlessly, and Colin's face went bone-white as Tor's dot vanished forever.

 

 

"Execute Bug Out," he grated.

 

 

"Acknowledged," Jiltanith said coolly.

 

 

The nest-killers vanished.

 

 

Sorkar stared in disbelief at the reports of his hyper scanners. Almost a greater twelve times light-speed? How was it possible?

 

 

But what mattered was that it was possible. And that his scanner crews had noted the charging hyper fields in time to get good readings on them. He knew where they would emerge-at that bright star less than a quarter-twelve of light-years ahead of his fleet.

 

 

It could not be their homeworld, not so coincidentally close to the rendezvous, but whatever it was, Sorkar knew what to do if they were stupid enough to tie themselves to its defense, too deep in its gravity well to escape into hyper. He could wade into their fire, take his losses, and crush them by sheer numbers, for he had already proven they could be destroyed.