On to the Armageddon Inheiritance.
The sensor array was the size of a very large asteroid or a very small moon, and it had orbited the G6 star for a very, very long time, yet it was not remarkable to look upon. Its hull, filmed with dust except where the electrostatic fields kept the solar panels clear, was a sphere of bronze-gold alloy, marred only by a few smoothly-rounded protrusions, with none of the aerials or receiver dishes which might have been expected by a radio-age civilization. But then, the people who built it hadn't used anything as crude as radio for several millennia prior to its construction.
The Fourth Imperium had left it here fifty-two thousand one hundred and eighty-six Terran years ago, its electronic senses fueled only by a trickle of power, yet the lonely guardian was not dead. It only slept, and now fresh sparkles of current flickered through kilometers of molecular circuitry.
Internal stasis fields spun down, and a computer roused from millennia of sleep. Stronger flows of power pulsed as testing programs reported, and Comp Cent noted that seven-point-three percent of its primary systems had failed. Had it been interested in such things, it might have reflected that such a low failure rate was near miraculous, but this computer lacked even the most rudimentary of awarenesses. It simply activated the appropriate secondaries, and a new set of programs blinked to life.
It wasn't the first time the sensor array had awakened, though more than forty millennia had passed since last it was commanded to do so. But this time, Comp Cent observed, the signal which had roused it was no demand from its builders for a systems test. This signal came from another sensor array over seven hundred light-years to galactic east, and it was a death cry.
Imperial remote sensor array is "the size of a large asteroid or small moon." 7% system failure in 52 millenia of deployment without maintenence. Imeprial hardware may not last forever, but it's probably the next best thing. Probably because, like Dahak, it keeps parts not boing used in stasis until needed. 700 LY transmission range at least. 40,000 years since last systems test.
Comp Cent's hypercom relayed the signal another thousand light-years, to a communications center which had been ancient before Cro-Magnon first trod the Earth, and awaited a response. But there was no response. Comp Cent was on its unimaginative own, and that awakened still more autonomous programs. The signal to its silent commanders was replaced by series of far shorter-ranged transmissions, and other sensor arrays stirred and roused and muttered sleepily back to it.
Comp Cent noted the gaping holes time had torn in what once had been an intricately interlocking network, but those holes were none of its concern, and it turned to the things which were. More power plants came on line, bringing the array fully alive, and the installation became a brilliant beacon, emitting in every conceivable portion of the electromagnetic and gravitonic spectra with more power than many a populated world of the Imperium. It was a signpost, a billboard proclaiming its presence to anyone who might glance in its direction.
1000 LY range for hypercomm, the sensor post starts active broadcast as "loud" as possible to sucker in the Achuultani and try to get intel on them.
Comp Cent's sensitive instruments detected the incoming hyper wake weeks before it arrived. Once more it reported its findings to its commanders, and once more they did not respond. Comp Cent considered the silence, for this was a report its programming told it must be answered. Yet its designers had allowed for the remote possibility that it might not be received by its intended addressees. And so Comp Cent consulted its menus, selected the appropriate command file, and reconfigured its hypercom to omni-directional broadcast. The GHQ signal vanished, replaced by an all-ships warning addressed to any unit of Battle Fleet.
Man, I wish whoever had designed these things was still around.
The starships came closer still at twenty-eight percent of light-speed, approaching the sensor array whose emissions had attracted their attention, and Comp Cent sang to them, and beckoned to them, and trolled them in while passive instrumentation probed and pried, stealing all the data from them that it could. They entered attack range and locked their targeting systems upon the sensor array, but no one fired, and impulses tumbled through fresh logic trees as Comp Cent filed that fact away, as well.
The starships approached within five hundred kilometers, and a tractor beam—a rather crude one, but nonetheless effective, Comp Cent noted—reached out to the sensor array. And as it did, Comp Cent activated the instructions stored deep within its heart for this specific contingency.
Matter met anti-matter, and the sensor array vanished in a boil of light brighter than the star it orbited. The detonation was too terrible to call an "explosion," and it reduced the half-dozen closest starships to stripped atoms, ripped a dozen more to incandescent splinters, damaged others, and—just as its long-dead masters had intended—deprived the survivors of any opportunity to evaluate the technology which had built it.
0.28 c sublight speed for Achuultani warships. Just above half Dahak's sublight speed. 500 km range for Achuultani tractor beams. First time Achuultani try to capture a warning satellite. Warning satellite self-destruct.
It was raining in the captain's quarters.
More precisely, it was raining in the three-acre atrium inside the captain's quarters. Senior Fleet Captain Colin MacIntyre, self-proclaimed Governor of Earth and latest commanding officer of the Imperial planetoid Dahak, sat on his balcony and soaked his feet in his hot-tub, but Fleet Captain Jiltanith, his tall, slender executive officer, had chosen to soak her entire person. Her neatly-folded, midnight-blue uniform lay to one side as she leaned back, and her long sable mane floated about her shoulders.
Black-bottomed holographic thunderheads crowded overhead, distant thunder rumbled, and lightning flickered on the "horizon," yet Colin's gaze was remote as he watched rain bounce off the balcony's shimmering force field roof. His attention was elsewhere, focused on the data being relayed through his neural feeds by his ship's central command computer.
"Rain" in Captain's Quarters aboard Dahak. A way to water the plants and provide a breakup to routine with holographic clouds and thunder. Of course, the furniture is all force-field protected, as are any of the crew who wish it, for the one thing we ever see personal force-fields deal with is water. Captain's quarters atrium 3 acres.
"I suppose we could turn back and deliver it in person," Colin thought aloud. "We're only two weeks out. . . ."
"Nay," Jiltanith disagreed. "Should we turn about 'twill set us back full six weeks, for we must needs give up the time we've but now spent, as well."
Later we learn Dahak is 29 LY out from Earth, so they're making decent time.
He smiled down at her, tempted to shuck off his own uniform and join her . . . if he hadn't been a bit afraid of where it might lead. Not that he had any objection to where it could lead, but there was plenty of time (assuming they lived beyond the next two years), and that was one complication neither of them needed right now.
From which we can safely infer that while Colin and 'Tanni may like and respect each other a great deal now, they haven't gotten physical yet.
He drew his toes from the tub and activated a small portion of his own biotechnics. The water floated off his feet on the skin of a repellent force field, and he shook the drops away and pulled on his socks and gleaming boots.
Force field used for instant drying.
"Go ahead," he said with another smile, and stepped off the edge of the balcony onto a waiting presser. It floated him gently to the atrium floor, and his implant force fields were an invisible umbrella as he splashed through the rain to the door/hatch on the far side of his private park.
"Presser" elevator, most likelt an anti-gravity thing to slow his fall. Force field used to stay dry.
It opened at his approach, and he stepped through it into a yawning, brightly-lit void over a thousand kilometers deep. He'd braced himself for it, yet he knew he appeared less calm than he would have liked—and felt even less calm than he managed to look as he plunged downward at an instantly attained velocity of just over twenty thousand kilometers per hour.
Transit shaft, gravity manipulation means you "fall" towards your destination at incredible speeds until Dahak decides you should stop falling. See why the cars are convenient for beginners? Anu's people had lots of transit shaft "accidents," Dahak has never had one, but that's still the ultimate trust-fall, I can't imagine the implants would substantially help if Dahak didn't catch you at the end.
Oh, and 20,000 kph is actually the speed Dahak dialed the shafts down to, to keep the new crew from freaking out too much.
Yet the captain's quarters were scarcely a hundred kilometers from Command One—a mere nothing aboard Dahak—and the entire journey took only eighteen seconds. Which was no more than seventeen seconds too long, Colin reflected as he came to a sudden halt. He stepped shakily into a carpeted corridor, glad none of his crew were present to note the slight give in his knees as he approached Command One's massive hatch.
Captain's quarters 100 km from Command One. Colin's still not used to the shafts.
The three-headed dragon of Dahak's bas relief crest looked back from it. Its eyes transfixed him for a moment across the starburst cradled in its raised forepaws, fierce with the fidelity which had outlasted millennia, and then the hatch—fifteen centimeters of Imperial battle steel thick—slid open, and another dozen hatches opened and closed in succession as he passed through them to Command One's vast, dim sphere.
I don't think they ever explain why the main bridge has a dozen armored hatches, one after another, if the Imperium never had a mutiny before.
The command consoles seemed to float in interstellar space, surrounded by the breath-taking perfection of Dahak's holographic projections. The nearest stars moved visibly, but the artificiality of the projection was all too apparent if one thought about it. Dahak was tearing through space under maximum Enchanach Drive; at seven hundred and twenty times light-speed, direct observation of the cosmos would have been distorted, to say the very least.
Command One, still awesome. In case anyone was wondering.
"I have the con, Commander." He slipped into the vacated couch, and it squirmed under him as it adjusted to the contours of his body. There was no need for Tamman to give him a status report; his own neural feed to the console was already doing that.
Neural link. In amoment they repeat the crew composition, but I've already put that up, 14 from Nergal, 100 redeemed mutineers, 100,000 mostly from elite special forces, with some navy and air force personnel from around the world.
"I suppose," the general continued unabashedly, "that I should've told you we've deliberately set a schedule no one could make. That way we've got an excuse to scream at people, however well they're doing." He shrugged. "It's not nice, but when a four or five-star general screams at you, you usually discover a few gears you weren't using. Wonderful thing, screaming."
Things are going resonably well on integrating the world's militaries, besides the Asian Alliance.
"The Asian Alliance, of course." Hatcher made a wry face. "Our deadline hasn't quite run out, and they still haven't gotten off the fence and decided whether to fight us or join us. It's irritating as hell, but not surprising. I don't think Marshal Tsien's decided to oppose us actively, but he's certainly dragging his feet, and none of the other Alliance military types will make a move until he commits himself."
Case in point.
All three of his senior generals were "Westerners" as far as Tsien and his people were concerned. The fact that Anu and his mutineers had manipulated Terran governments and terrorist groups to play the First and Third Worlds off against one another was just beginning to percolate through Western brains; it would be a while yet before the other side could accept it on an emotional basis. Some groups, like the religious crackpots who had run places like Iran and Syria, never would, and their militaries had simply been disarmed . . . not, unhappily, without casualties.
Old hatreds run deep, even when told these hatreds were engineered. Also, Iran and Syria forcibly disarmed.
"I wish we had about a thousand times as much Imperial equipment, but the situation's improving now that the orbital industrial units Dahak left behind are hitting their stride.
"A lot of their capacity's still going into replicating themselves, and I've diverted some of their weapons-manufacturing tonnage to planetary construction equipment, but we should be all right. It's a geometric progression, you know; that's one of the beauties of automated units that don't need niggling little things like food or rest.
"We're just about on schedule setting up the tech base Anu brought down with him, and the part Dahak landed directly is up and running. We're hitting a few snags, but that's predictable when you set about building a whole new industrial infrastructure. Actually, it's the planetary defense centers that worry me most, but Geb's on that."
Status of Imperial equipment and arming up. There's still not enough tools, implants and weapons to go around, but they're working on it.
There were all too few Imperials available to run the construction equipment they already had, and if purely Terran equipment was taking up a lot of the slack, that was rather like using coolie labor in light of their monumental task.
Geb and Horus had rejected the idea of reconfiguring Imperial equipment—or building new—to permit operation by unenhanced Terra-born. Imperial machinery was designed for operators whose implants let them interface directly with it, and altering it would degrade its efficiency. More to the point, by the time they could adapt any sizable amount of equipment, they should be producing enhanced Terra-born in sufficient numbers to make it unnecessary.
Quicker and simpler to just give people the implants to run Imperial hardware than to modify the hardware to be used by the unenhanced.
"Yes, but it only makes another problem worse. Everyone we enhance is going to be out of action for at least a month—more probably two or three—while they get the hang of their implants. So every time we enhance one of our top people, we lose him for that long."
One minor problem. Recovery times a lot less than the 6 months COlin spent aboard Dahak after his surgery, but it was all so new then, and a lot of that was training to be a proper captain.
"Tell me about it," Hatcher said sourly. "Do you realize—well, of course you do. But it's sort of embarrassing for the brass to be such wimps compared to their personnel. Remember my aide, Allen Germaine?" Horus nodded. "I dropped by the Walter Reed enhancement center to see him yesterday. There he was, happily tying knots in quarter-inch steel rods for practice, and there I sat in my middle-aged body, feeling incredibly flabby. I used to think I was pretty fit for my age, too, damn it! And he'll be back in the office in another few weeks. That's going to be even more depressing."
My heart bleeds.
"From what I understand of the technology, it looks pretty good, but I'd feel better if we had more depth to our orbital defenses. I've been reading over the operational data Dahak downloaded—and that's another thing I want: a neural link of my own—and I'm not happy about how much the Achuultani seem to like kinetic weapons. Can we really stop something the size of, say, Ceres, if they put shields on it before they throw it at us?"
"Geb says so, but it could take a lot of warheads. That's why we need so many launchers."
"Fine, but if they settle in for a methodical attack, they'll start by picking off our peripheral weapons first. That's classic siege strategy with any weaponry, and it's also why I want more depth, to allow for attrition of the orbital forts."
From the begining, they expect to be pelted with asteroids, and possibly shielded moons. Because that's how the Achuultani roll.
"Agreed. But we have to put the inner defenses into position first, which is why I'm sweating the PDC construction rates. They're what's going to produce the planetary shield, and we need their missile batteries just as badly. Not even Imperial energy weapons can punch through atmosphere very efficiently, and when they do, they play merry hell with little things like jet streams and the ozone layer. That's one reason it's easier to defend nice, airless moons and asteroids."
"Um-hum." Hatcher plucked at his lip. "I'm afraid I've been too buried in troop movements and command structures to spend as much time as I'd like boning up on hardware. Vassily's our nuts-and-bolts man. But am I correct in assuming your problems're in the hyper launchers?"
"Right the first time. Since we can't rely on beams, we need missiles, but missiles have problems of their own. As Colin is overly fond of pointing out, there are always trade-offs.
"Sublight missiles can be fired from anywhere, but they're vulnerable to interception, especially over interplanetary ranges. Hyper missiles can't be intercepted, but they can't be launched from atmosphere, either. Even air has mass, and the exact mass a hyper missile takes into hyper with it is critical to where it re-enters normal space. That's why warships pre-position their hyper missiles just inside their shields before they launch."
Hatcher leaned forward, listening carefully. Horus had been a missile specialist before the mutiny; anything he had to say on this subject was something the general wanted to hear.
"We can't do that from a planet. Oh, we could, but planetary shields aren't like warship shields. Not on habitable planets, anyway. Shield density is a function of shield area; after a point, you can't make it any denser, no matter how much power you put into it. To maintain sufficient density to stop really large kinetic weapons, our shield is going to have to contract well into the mesosphere. We can stop most smaller weapons from outside atmosphere, but not the big bastards, and we can't count on avoiding heavy kinetic attack. In fact, that's exactly what we're likely to be under if we do need to launch from planetary bases."
"And if the shield contracts, the missiles would be outside it where the Achuultani could pick them off," Hatcher mused.
"Exactly. So we have to plan on going hyper straight from launch, and that means we need launchers big enough to contain the entire hyper field—just over three times the size of the missiles—or else their drives will take chunks out of the defense center when they depart." Horus shrugged. "Since a heavy hyper missile's about forty meters long and the launcher has to be air-tight with provision for high-speed evacuation of atmosphere, we're talking some pretty serious engineering just to build the damned things."
PDCs (Planetary Defense Centers) will serve as emitters for the planetary shield, as well as a base for ground-based fighters and missiles. Relative strengths of sublight and hyper missiles. Limitations of planetary shield. Difficulties in building ground-based hyper missile silos. Heavy hyper missile 40 m in length.
Impassive and bulky in his uniform greatcoat, Tsien had headed the military machine of the Asian Alliance for twelve tumultuous years, and he had earned that post through decisiveness, dedication, and sheer ability. His authority had been virtually absolute, a rare thing in this day and age. Now that same authority was like a chain of iron, dragging him remorselessly towards a decision he did not want to make.
In less than fifty years, his nation had unified all of Asia that mattered—aside from the Japanese and Filipinos, and they scarcely counted as Asians any longer. The task had been neither cheap nor easy, nor had it been bloodless, but the Alliance had built a military machine even the West was forced to respect. Much of that building had been his own work, the fruit of his sworn oath to defend his people, the Party, and the State, and now his own decision might well bring all that effort, all that sacrifice, to nothing.
Marshall Tsien Tao-ling, absent all the Party officials who were working with Anu military dictator of China and the Asian Alliance. In the future of Mutineer's Moon, China has united all Asian nations save Japan and the Philipines under the banner of resisting Western Imperialism.
"The Party has not been well-advised," Quang muttered. "It is a trick."
"A trick, Comrade General?" Tsien's small smile was wintry as the wind. "You have, perhaps, noticed that there is no longer a moon in our night skies? It has, perhaps, occurred to you that anyone with a warship of that size and power has no need of trickery? If it has not, reflect upon this, Comrade General." He nodded in the direction of the waiting Imperial cutter. "That vehicle could reduce this entire base to rubble, and nothing we have could even find it, much less stop it. Do you truly believe that the West, with hundreds of even more powerful weapons now at its disposal, could not disarm us by force as they already have those maniacs in Southwest Asia?"
A little dissension in the ranks as Tao-ling prepares to treat with Horus. Also, the moon turned all coppery with a great 3-headed dragon on it, then disappeared all together. Kind of hard to argue with that evidence.
After so many years of enmity, it was difficult to think with cold logic about any proposal from the West, yet in his heart of hearts, he could not believe they were lying. The scope of their present advantage was too overwhelming. They were too anxious, too concerned over the approach of these "Achuultani," for the threat to be an invention.
His waiting pilot saluted and allowed him to precede her into the cutter, then settled behind her controls. The small vehicle rose silently into the heavens, then darted away, climbing like a bullet and springing instantly forward at eight times the speed of sound. There was no sense of acceleration, yet Tsien felt another weight—the weight of inevitability—pressing down upon his soul. The wind of change was blowing, sweeping over all this world like a typhoon, and resistance would be a wall of straw before it.
More convincing still, Imperial cutter can do at least Mach 8 when not trying to be stealthy.
And at least China's culture was ancient and there were two billion Chinese. If the promises of this Planetary Council were genuine, if all citizens were to enjoy equal access to wealth and opportunity, that fact alone would give his people tremendous influence.
I love and respect Tao-Ling, but he's just so damn cute when he's trying to be devious and political. Still, it's clear that integration is still going to be a headache.
"Marshal, the world as we have known it no longer exists," the American said softly. "We may regret that or applaud it, but it is a fact. I won't lie to you. We've asked you to join us because we need you. We need your people and your resources, as allies, not vassals, and you're the one man who may be able to convince your governments, your officers, and your men of that fact. We offer you a full and equal partnership, and we're prepared to guarantee equal access to Imperial technology, military and civilian, and complete local autonomy. Which, I might add, is no more than our own governments have been guaranteed by Governor MacIntyre and Lieutenant Governor Horus."
"And what of the past, General Hatcher?" Tsien asked levelly. "Are we to forget five centuries of Western imperialism? Are we to forget the unfair distribution of the world's wealth? Are we, as some have," his eyes shifted slightly in Chernikov's direction, "to forget our commitment to the Revolution in order to accept the authority of a government not even of our own world?"
"Yes, Marshal," Hatcher said equally levelly, "that's precisely what you are to forget. We won't pretend those things never happened, yet you're known as a student of history. You know how China's neighbors have suffered at Chinese hands over the centuries. We can no more undo the past than your own people could, but we can offer you an equal share in building the future, assuming this planet has one to build. And that, Marshal Tsien, is the crux: if we do not join together, there will be no future for any of us."
Got to love a serious meeting to decide the survival of our planet, where Marxism gets brought up.
He watched another of the sublight parasites Dahak had left for Earth's defense—the destroyer Ardat, he thought—hover above the seething dust, her eight-thousand-ton hull dwarfed by the gaping hole which would, when finished, contain control systems, magazines, shield generators, and all the other complex support systems. Her tractors plucked up multi-ton slabs of a mountain's bones, and then the ship lifted away into the west, bearing yet another load of refuse to a watery grave in the Pacific. Even before Ardat was out of sight, the Terra-born work crews swarmed over the newly-exposed surface of the excavation in their breath masks, drills screaming as they prepared the next series of charges.
8,000 ton sublight destroyer parasite, 10% the weight of a battleship. Also, use of tractor beams and energy weapons to reshape the landscape in a hurry.
This absolutely flat surface of raw stone had once been the top of Ecuador's Mount Chimborazo, but that was before its selection to house Planetary Defense Center Escorpion had sealed the mountain's fate. The sublight battleships Shirhan and Escal arrived two days later, and while Escal hovered over the towering peak, Shirhan activated her main energy batteries and slabbed off the top three hundred meters of earth and stone. Escal caught the megaton chunks of wreckage in her tractors while Shirhan worked, lifting them for her pressers to toss out of the way into the ocean. It had taken the two battleships a total of twenty-three minutes to produce a level stone mesa just under six thousand meters high, and then they'd departed to mutilate the next mountain on their list.
Oh yeah, the space warhips are actually pretty handy for engineering purposes.
PDC Escorpion, one of forty-six such bases going up across the surface of the planet, each a project gargantuan enough to daunt the Pharaohs, and each with a completion deadline of exactly eighteen months. It was an impossible task . . . and they were doing it anyway.
46 PDCs, whose construction is pretty involved even with enhanced workers and Imperial gear.
The power bore floated a rock-steady half-meter off the ground, and Geb's implants tingled with the torrent of focused energy. A hot wind billowed back from the rapidly sinking shaft, blowing a thick, plume of powdered rock to join the choking pall hanging over the site, and he stepped still further back. Another thunderous explosion burst in on him, and he shook his head, marveling at the demonic energy loosed upon this hapless mountain. Every safety regulation in the book—Imperial and Terran alike—had been relaxed to the brink of insanity, and the furious labor went on day and night, rain and sun, twenty-four hours a day. It might stop for a hurricane; nothing less would be permitted to interfere.
Power bore, breackneck pace of work.
The cutting head died, and the power bore operator backed away from the vertical shaft. A Terra-born, Imperial-equipped survey team scurried forward, instruments probing and measuring, and its leader lifted a hand, thumb raised in approval. The dust-covered woman responded with the same gesture and moved away, heading for the next site, and Horus turned to Tegran.
"Nice," he said. "I make that a bit under twenty minutes to drill a hundred-fifty-meter shaft. Not bad at all."
"Um," Tegran said. He walked over to the edge of the fifty meter-wide hole which would one day house a hyper missile launcher and stood peering down at its glassy walls. "It's better, but I can squeeze another four or five percent efficiency out of the bores if I tweak the software a bit more."
20 minutes to drill 150 m shaft in solid stone with Imperial power bore. Still less than it is ultimately capable of, but Imperial gear is built with very generous safety margins and longevity in mind.
"What's this I hear about non-military enhancement?" he asked, his tone elaborately casual.
Geb eyed him thoughtfully. A few other Imperials had muttered darkly over the notion, for the Fourth Imperium had been an ancient civilization by Terran standards. Despite supralight travel, over-crowding on its central planets had led to a policy restricting full enhancement (and the multi-century lifespans which went with it) solely to military personnel and colonists. Which, Geb reflected, had been one reason the Fleet never had trouble finding recruits even with minimum hitches of a century and a half . . . and why Horus's policy of providing full enhancement to every adult Terran, for all intents and purposes, offended the sensibilities of the purists among his Imperials.
That's the line I was thinking of earlier. Full-package enhancement was reserved for soldiers and colonists in the Fourth Imperium, htough Colin and Horus wish to make them universal. Apparently this was more an overpopulation issue than just wanting a carrot to get people to join the military. Also, Fourth Imperium signed people on for 150 year hitches.
The first enhanced Terra-born crewmen were training in the simulators now. Within a month, he'd have skeleton crews for most of the major units Dahak had left behind. In another six, he'd have crews for the smaller ships and pilots for the fighters. They'd be short on experience, but they'd be there, and they'd pick up experience quickly.
Maybe even quickly enough.
Military enhancement surgeries well under way.
The Fourth Imperium had arisen from the sole planet of the Third which the Achuultani had missed. It had dedicated itself to the destruction of the next incursion with a militancy which dwarfed Terran comprehension, but that had been seven millennia before Horus's birth, and the Achuultani had never come. And so, perhaps, there were no Achuultani. Heresy. Unthinkable to say it aloud. Yet the suspicion had gnawed at their brains, and they'd come to resent the endless demands of their long, regimented preparation. Which explained, if it did not excuse, why the discontented of Dahak's crew had lent themselves to the mutiny which brought them to Earth.
Recapped history of the Fourth Imperium and background to the mutiny. If Horus committed Heresy, can I call it the Horus Heresy? :ducks: Sorry, I had to slip that in somehow.
The shattered wreckage tumbled away, and the Achuultani settled into their formation. Normal-space drives woke, and the mammoth cylinders swept in-system, arrowing towards the planet of Mers at twenty-eight percent of light-speed while their missile sections prepped their weapons.
Achuultani scouts wipe out a minor spacefaring civilization. As in, they were just exploring the system's outer planets.
The endless, twenty-meter-wide column of lightning fascinated him. It wasn't really lightning, but that was how Vlad Chernikov thought of it, though the center of any Terran lightning bolt would be a dead zone beside its titanic density. The force field which channeled it also silenced it and muted its terrible brilliance, but Vlad had received his implants. His sensors felt it, like a tide race of fire, even through the field, and it awed him.
He turned away, folding his hands behind him as he crossed the huge chamber at Dahak's heart. Only Command One and Two were as well protected, for this was the source of Dahak's magic. The starship boasted three hundred and twelve fusion power plants, but though he could move and fight upon the wings of their power, he required more than that to outspeed light itself.
This howling chain of power was that more. It was Dahak's core tap, a tremendous, immaterial funnel that reached deep into hyper space, connecting the ship to a dimension of vastly higher energy states. It dragged that limitless power in, focused and refined it, and directed it into the megaton mass of his Enchanach Drive.
The core tap, repeat of 312 fusion plants providing Dahak's non-FTL needs.
And with it, the drive worked its sorcery and created the perfectly-opposed, converging gravity masses which forced Dahak out of normal space in a series of instantaneous transpositions. It took a measurable length of time to build those masses between transpositions, but that interval was perceptible only to one such as Dahak. A tiny, imperfect flaw the time stream of the cosmos never noticed.
Which was as well. Should Dahak dwell in normal space any longer than that, catastrophe would be the lot of any star system he crossed. As those fields converged upon his hull, he became ever so briefly more massive than the most massive star. Which was why ships of his ilk did not use supralight speed within a system, for the initial activation and final deactivation of the Enchanach Drive took much longer, a time measured in microseconds, not femtoseconds. Anu had induced a drive failure to divert the starship from its original mission for "emergency repairs," and a tiny error in Dahak's crippled return to sublight speeds explained the irregularity of Pluto's orbit which had puzzled Terran astronomers for so long. Had it occurred deep enough in Sol's gravity well, the star might well have gone nova.
Enchanach drive works in such a way as to create a massive gravitational disturbance, which is really only an issue when entering or leaving FTL. Dahak's emergency transition due to Anu's sabotage it what screwed up Pluto's orbit. Also, an important note is that Dahak's FTL limit in a system is not because jumping further in would be dangerous or impossible for him, but because using Enchanach drive any closer
could break the star.
Dahak had a crew once more—understrength, perhaps, by Imperial standards, but a crew—and that was as it should be. Not just because he had been lonely, but because he needed them to provide that critical element in any warship: redundancy. It was dangerous for so powerful a unit to be utterly dependent upon its central computer, especially when battle damage might cut Comp Cent off from essential components of its tremendous hull.
So it was good that men had returned to Dahak at last. Especially now, when the very survival of their species depended upon him.
The reason Dahak needs, and is deliriously happy to have, a crew again.
Dozens of faces looked back at him from around the table, but at least he'd gotten used to facing so many eyes. Dahak was technically a single ship, but one with a full-strength crew a quarter-million strong, a normal sublight parasite strength of two hundred warships, and the firepower to shatter planets. His commander might be called a captain, yet for all intents and purposes he was an admiral, charged with the direction of more destructiveness than Terra's humanity had ever dreamed was possible, and the size of Colin's staff reflected that.
Power of a planetoid captain. Also, traditionally in the Fourth Imperium's Battlefleet, all senior officers, department heads etc. would be Fleet Captains, usually followed by their position/department, with the vessel's ultimate commander being the Senior Fleet Captain. For now, they've worked out a compromise where everyone is technically a Fleet Captain, but around Colin get called commander.
"Would you care to begin with a general overview, XO?" he asked.
"Certes, Captain," Jiltanith said, and turned confident eyes to her fellows. "Our Dahak hath been a teacher most astute—aye, and a taskmaster of the sternest!" That won a mutter of laughter, for Dahak had driven his new crew so hard ten percent of even his capacity had been committed full-time to their training and neural-feed education. "While 'tis true I would be better pleased with some small time more of practice, yet have our folk learned their duties well, and I say with confidence our officers and crew will do all mortal man may do if called."
Meet Colin's staff, 'Tanni is the XO, and the new crew are all enhanced up and mostly trained.
"Ground Forces?"
"The ground forces are better organized than we could reasonably expect," the hawk-faced Marine replied, "if not yet quite as well as I'd like.
"We have four separate nationalities in our major formations, and we'll need a few more months to really shake down properly. For the moment, we've adopted Imperial organization and ranks but confined them to our original unit structures. Our USFC and SAS people are our recon/special forces component; the Second Marines have been designated as our assault component; the German First Armored will operate our ground combat vehicles; and the Sendai Division and the Nineteenth Guards Parachute Division are our main ground force."
Hector MacMahan, Horus' "greatest" grandson, USMC Colonel, and the mastermind behind the plan to get into Anu's enclave commands the "Marines" aboard Dahak.
He turned to General Georgi Treshnikov, late of the Russian Air Force and now commander of the three hundred Imperial fighters Dahak had retained for self-defense. "Parasite Command?"
"As Hector, we are ready," Treshnikov said. "We have even more nationalities, but less difficulty in integration, for we did not embark complete national formations to crew our fighters."
Don't know him yet, Dahak kept only one battleship and 300 fighters for parasites.
"Thank you. Intelligence, Commander Ninhursag?"
"We've done all we can with the non-data Dahak has been able to give us, Captain. You've all seen our reports." The stocky, pleasantly plain Imperial who had been Nergal's spy within Anu's camp shrugged. "Until we have some hard facts to plug into our analyses, we're only marking time."
'Hursag was one of the northener's two agents inside the enclave. Now she commands Dahak's group of intel analysts.
"I understand. Biosciences?"
"Bioscience is weary but ready, Captain," Fleet Captain (B) Cohanna replied. Fifty thousand years in stasis hadn't blunted her confidence . . . or her sense of humor. "We finished the last enhancement procedures last month, and we're a little short on biotechnic hardware at the moment—" that won a fresh mutter of laughter "—but other than that, we're in excellent shape."
Cohanna is one of the mutineers kept in stasis after the mutiny, having no part in Anu's subsequent crimes. She's a bit too eager to tinker with nature to be comfortable with, and can get really involved in her work, but her heart's in the right place.
"Thank you. Maintenance?"
"We're looking good, Captain." Fleet Captain (M) Geran was another of Nergal's "children," but, aside from his eyes, he looked more like a Terran, with dark auburn hair, unusually light skin for an Imperial, and a mobile mouth that smiled easily. "Dahak's repair systems did a bang-up job, and he slapped anything he wasn't using into stasis. I'd like more practice on damage control, but—" He raised his right hand, palm upward, and Colin nodded.
Not a lot more to say. Interesting they have seperate maintenance and engineering departments, but that's probably Star Trek's influence on me.
"Understood. Hopefully you'll have lots of time to go on practicing. We'll try to keep it that way. Tactical?"
"We're in good shape, sir," Tamman said. "Battle Comp's doing well with simulators and training problems. Our Terra-born aren't as comfortable with their neural feeds as I'd like yet, but that's only a matter of practice."
Tamman is another kid from
Nergal and is thus Colin's number 2 man.
"Logistics?"
"Buttoned up, sir," Fleet Commander (L) Caitrin O'Rourke said confidently. "We've got facilities for three times the people we've actually got aboard, and all park and hydroponic areas have been fully reactivated, so provisions and life support are no sweat. Magazines are at better than ninety-eight percent—closer to ninety-nine—and we're in excellent shape for spares."
Supply.
"Engineering?"
"Engineering looks good, sir," Chernikov replied. "Our Imperials and Terra-born have shaken down extremely well together. I am confident."
Vlad Chernikov was the 2nd best Engineer known to
Nergal, Terra-born northener, and infiltrated NASA as an astronaut. A friend of Colin's before he met Dahak.
He started for the door, and a mellow voice spoke again.
"Attention on deck," it repeated, and Colin swallowed a resigned sigh as his solemn-faced officers stood once more.
Because I missed the last few jokes with Dahak being determined to enforce the dignity of a Captain against Colin's will.
Dahak was at battle stations, and a matching team under Jiltanith manned Command Two on the far side of the core hull. The holographic images of Command Two's counterparts sat beside each of his officers, which made his bridge seem a bit more crowded but meant everyone knew exactly what was happening . . . and that he got to sit beside Jiltanith's image on duty.
Another cool concept, since there's a bridge and a backup bridge, each keeps holograms of the other's crew right beside their counterparts so everyone's up to speed.
Dahak had gone sublight at the closest possible safe distance from Sheskar, but that was still eleven light-hours out. Even at his maximum sublight velocity, it would have taken almost twenty-four hours to reach the primary, yet it had become depressingly clear that there was no reason to travel that deep into the system, and Colin had stopped five light-hours out to save time when they left.
FTL-limit again. Sheskar's 3 worlds have been reduced to floating debris.
"That is true," Dahak observed, then hesitated briefly, as if he faced a conclusion he wanted to reject. "I regret to say, Captain, that the destruction matches that which would be associated with our own Mark Tens. In point of fact, and after making due allowance for the time which has passed, it corresponds almost exactly to the results produced by those weapons."
Sometimes, you just have to feel tremendously sorry for Dahak. Seriously, I now want to give the moon a hug.
"Inaccurate, Captain. No Earth-like planets remain, but Sheskar was selected for a Fleet base because of its location, not its planets, and it now possesses abundant large asteroids for installation sites. Indeed, the absence of atmosphere would make those installations more defensible, not less."
As pointed out, atmosphere attenuates energy weapons, makes launching hyper missiles a pain, and can even be problematic with shields. A collection of rocks in space are much more defensible, and the Fourth Imperium had the technology to even make them comfortable.
"Agreed, Captain," Dahak said. "Indeed, there is another point. For Fleet vessels to have participated in this action would require massive changes in core programming by at least one faction. Without that, Fleet Central Alpha Priority imperatives would have precluded any warfare which dissipated resources and so weakened Battle Fleet's ability to resist an incursion. This would appear to support Fleet Commander Ninhursag's analysis."
The evidence would seem to suggest an Imperial Civil War. 'Hursag thinks this may have been between those who disbelieved in the Achuultani and objected to the constant war footing and the old guard.
Imperial Fleet vessels have Alpha (top) Priority instructions not to harm the Imperium, or the war effort.
"How far away is it?"
"One hundred thirty-three-point-four light-years, Captain."
"Um . . . bit over two months at max. That means a round trip of just over eleven months before we could get back to Earth."
"Approximately eleven-point-three-two months, Captain."
Sheskar's a bust, and since whatever side won seems uniterested in maintaing the heavily-armed frontier, they're moving on to Defram, the closest major civilian syste,. 133.4 LY in 2 months.
"Good," Hatcher said again, then leaned back with a smile. "In that case, Marshal, we're ready to run the first thousand personnel of your selection through enhancement as soon as your people in Beijing can put a list together."
"Ah?" Tsien sat a bit straighter. This was moving with speed, indeed! He had not expected these Westerners— He stopped and corrected himself. He had not expected these people to offer such things so soon. Surely there would be a period of testing and evaluation of sincerity first!
But when he looked across at the American, the slight, ironic twinkle in Hatcher's eyes told him his host knew precisely what he was thinking, and the realization made him feel just a bit ashamed.
"Comrade General," he said finally, "I appreciate your generosity, but—"
"Not generosity, Marshal. We've been enhancing our personnel ever since Dahak left, which means the Alliance has fallen far behind. We need to make up the difference, and we'll be sending transports with enhancement capability to Beijing and any other three cities you select. Planetary facilities under your direct control will follow as quickly as we can build them."
First round of enhancements in the Asian Alliance, now that Tao-ling is on board.
"We ought to've seen it coming. In fact, we did; we just didn't expect it so soon because we'd forgotten how many people are crammed into this world. Hard and fast as we're working, only a small minority are actively involved in the defense projects or the military. All the majority see is that their governments have been supplanted, their planet is threatened by a menace they don't truly comprehend and are none too sure they believe in, and their economies are in the process of catastrophic disruption. This particular riot was touched off by a combination of hunger, inflation, and unemployment—regional factors that pre-date our involvement but have grown only worse since we assumed power—and the realization that even those with skilled trades will soon find their skills obsolete."
Riot in Africa is brutally put down, Horus is displeased.
"But there'll be other factors soon enough." Councilor Abner Johnson spoke with a sharp New England twang despite his matte-black complexion. "People're people, Governor. The vested interests are going to object—strenuously—once they get reorganized. Their economic and political power's about to go belly-up, and some of them're stupid enough to fight. And don't forget the religious aspect. We're sitting on a powder keg in Iran and Syria, but we've got our own nuts, and you people represent a pretty unappetizing affront to their comfortable little preconceptions." He smiled humorlessly.
" 'Mycos? Birhat?' You don't really think God created planets with names like that, do you? If you could at least've come from a planet named 'Eden' it might've helped, but as it is—!" Johnson shrugged. "Once they get organized, we'll have a real lunatic fringe!"
And then there's that, society is getting all shook up, the economy turned upside down, every physicists knowledge of science is suddenly hardly greater than a dabblers etc. And everyone is being told that aliens are real and coming to kill us and we have to all work together to survive.
"All right," he sighed finally, "I don't like it, but you may be right." He turned to Gustav van Gelder, Councilor for Planetary Security. "Gus, I want you and Geb to increase the priority for getting stun guns into the hands of local authorities. And I want more of our enhancement capacity diverted to police personnel. Isis, you and Myko deal with that."
Doctor Isis Tudor, his own Terra-born daughter and now Councilor for Biosciences, glanced at her ex-mutineer assistant with a sort of resigned desperation. Isis was over eighty; even enhancement could only slow her gradual decay and eliminate aches and pains, but her mind was quick and clear. Now she nodded, and he knew she'd find the capacity . . . somehow.
"Until we can get local peace-keepers enhanced," Horus went on, "I'll have General Hatcher set up mixed-nationality response teams out of his military personnel. I don't like it—the situation's going to be bad enough without 'aliens' popping up to quell resistance to our 'tyrannical' ways—but a dozen troopers in combat armor could have stopped this business with a tenth the casualties, especially if they'd had stun guns."
Oh, the fun things you have to think about when under siege.
The cutter headed for Minya Konka, the mountain which had been ripped apart to hold PDC Huan-Ti, and he grimaced as he ran a finger around the tight collar of his tunic.
He lowered his hand, wondering once again if it had been wise to adopt Imperial uniform. While it had the decided advantage of not belonging to any of the rival militaries they were trying to merge, it looked disturbingly like the uniform of the SS. Not surprisingly, considering. He'd done what he could to lessen the similarities—exaggerating the size of the starbursts the Nazis had replaced with skulls, restoring the serrated hisanth leaves to the lapels, adopting the authorized variation of gold braid in place of silver—but the over-all impact still bothered him.
Yeah, in-universe, the SS uniforms were based off of the Battlefleet Infantry uniforms worn by Anu's crew. With the modifications mentioned above. Regular Fleet personnel wear the same cut in royal blue, with shiny gold buttons.
He died a happy man, and six hundred and eighty-six other men and women died with him. They died because one of McMurphy's men activated his rock drill, and that man didn't know someone had wired his controls to eleven hundred kilos of Imperial blasting compound.
The explosion rivaled a three-kiloton nuclear bomb.
Imperial "blasting compound" roughly 3 times as powerful as equivalent weight of TNT. Terrorist strike on
Huan-ti by disaffected members of the Asian Alliance.
Almost, but not quite. Its standard commercial drive had never been designed for such abuse, and it impacted nose-first at six hundred kilometers per hour.
Imperial version of a forklift flies at speeds up to 600 kph.
"Forward!" General Quang Do Chinh screamed. "Kill them! Kill them now!"
His troopers advanced at the run, closing on the unfinished control block, and Quang's heart flamed with triumph. Yes, kill the traitors! And especially the arch-traitor who had tried to shunt him aside! What a triumph to begin their war against the invaders!
As he and his men sprinted forward, construction workers raced to drag dead and wounded away from the explosion site, and six other carefully infiltrated assault teams produced automatic weapons and grenades. They concentrated on picking out Imperials, but any target would do.
Quang isn't very clever, or he'd pick another time and place for this. Of course, he's still not getting or disbelieving the "desperate war for our survival" part.
"Can you get that sniper without getting yourself killed, Al?"
"A pleasure, sir," Germaine said coldly. His eyes were unfocused as his implants sought the source of the fire, then he crouched and took one step to the side. He moved with the blinding speed of his biotechnics, and the grav gun hissed out a brief burst, spitting three-millimeter explosive darts at fifty-two hundred meters per second.
General Hatcher's enhanced aide (the generals are all too valuable right now to be laid up getting enhanced) easily locates and kills a sniper. Grav-gun muzzle velocity is up a hair.
Her name was Litanil, and, disregarding time spent in stasis, she was thirty-six. It took her precious moments to realize what was happening, and a few more to believe it when she had, but then cold fury filled her.
Litanil hadn't thought very deeply when Anu's people recruited her, for she'd been both young and bored. Now she knew she'd also been criminally stupid, and, like her fellows, she'd labored with the Breaker's own demons on her heels in an effort to atone. Along the way, she'd come to like and admire the Terra-born she worked with, and now hundreds of them lay dead, butchered by the animals responsible for this carnage. She didn't worry about why. She didn't even consider the monstrous treason to her race the attack implied. She thought only of dead friends, and something snarled inside her.
She turned her power bore towards the fighting, and her neural feeds sought out the safety interlocks. It was supposed to be impossible for any accident to get around them—but Litanil was no accident.
...
Litanil goosed her power bore to max, snarling across the stony plain at almost two hundred kilometers per hour. Not even a gravitonic drive could hold the massive bore steady at that speed, but she rode it like a bucking horse, her implant scanners reaching out, and her face was a mask of fury as she raised the cutting head chest-high.
The problem with construction sites is they aboud with things terribly useful as improvised weapons. And in this case, with people somewhere between Spartans and Space Marines. Power bore can fly at almost 200 kph.
Allen Germaine went down on one knee, bracing his grav gun over his left forearm, as the first three raiders hurled themselves over the lip of the topmost ramp, assault rifles on full automatic.
They got off one long burst each before their bodies blew apart in a hurricane of explosive darts.
Yeah, this was the best choice of targets.
Litanil wiped out Private Pak's team and raged off after fresh targets. Ahead of her, half a dozen bioenhanced Terra-born construction workers armed with steel reinforcing rods and Imperial blasting compound began working their way around the flank of a second assault group.
Very bad choice of targets.
Two grenades hit short or exploded against the outer wall; the third headed straight into the door, and Germaine's left hand struck it like a handball. The explosion ripped his hand apart, and shrapnel tore into his chest and shoulder.
Agony stabbed him, but his implants stopped the flow of blood to his shredded hand and flooded his system with a super-charged blast of adrenalin. The first wave came up the ramp after the grenades, and he cut them down like bloody wheat.
Medical implants again, hand shredded in explosion, serious shrapnel wounds to the torso. Bleeding stops almost immediatly and he's back in the fight within seconds.
A sudden burst of explosions ripped the dusty smoke as the construction workers tossed their makeshift bombs. The attack squad faltered as three of their number were blown apart. A fourth emptied a full magazine into a charging man. He killed his assailant, but he never knew; the steel rod his victim had carried impaled him like a spear.
His six surviving comrades broke and ran—directly in front of Litanil's power bore.
I may go so far as to say this was an
exceptionally poor chance of targets.
Eight more of Quang's men died, but a ninth slammed a heart-rupturing burst into Allen Germaine. Major Germaine was a dead man, but he was a bioenhanced corpse. He stayed on his feet long enough to aim very carefully before he squeezed the trigger.
Heart shot, actually a burst of shots to the heart, enough to kill enhanced man. Even in death, Al has time for a final "screw you."
Quang's number four attack squad had a good position between two huge earth-movers, but there were no more targets in their field of fire. It was time to go, and they began to filter back in pairs, each halting in turn to provide covering fire for their fellows. It was a textbook maneuver.
As the first pair reached the ends of their shielding earth-movers, a pair of bioenhanced hands reached out from either side. Fingers ten times stronger than their own closed, and two tracheas crushed. The twitching bodies were tossed aside, and the crouching ambushers waited patiently for their next victims.
Need I say it? This is almost like a burglar breaking into the Avengers mansion.
Litanil swung her power bore again and knew they were winning.
The attackers had achieved the surprise they sought, but they hadn't realized what they were attacking. Most of the site personnel were unenhanced Terra-born, but a significant percentage were not, and those who were enhanced had full Fleet packages, modified at Colin MacIntyre's order to incorporate fold-space coms. They might be unarmed, but they were strong, tough, fast, and in unbroken communication.
And, as Litanil herself had proved, a construction site abounded in improvisational weapons.
Way back when, only officers had fold-space comms. That's why Dahak wasn't able to raise any loyalists for instructions when he self-repaired. Colin is clearly determined to learn from history.
