Bit of Analysis: Mutineer's Moon

[RecklessPrudence]

Thankyou for this Ahriman, I read the first two books of this ages ago, but never read the third one. Downloaded it from the Free Library, and put it on my snazzy new ebook reader I got for Christmas. So far I've mostly used it for fanfiction and David Drake stuff, so this is another good thing from Baen, before they went insane...

He plugged into Battle Comp, but he already knew what his orders would be.

Tracking vectors of ships as they jump out, exactly as COlin wanted them to. Great Lord of Thought Sorkar taking orders from BattleComp.

I kind of read that as Sorkar had ideas for orders, and was plugging into Battle Comp to check his numbers, trajectories, stuff like that to firm up the details - rather than taking orders from Battle Comp. Fair enough if the rest of the novel gives the opposite indication, though.

[Ahriman238]

@RecklessPrudence. You're welcome. One thing to love is that the relationship between the Achuultani and BattleComp is foreshadowed enough to be obvious on rereadings, but subtle enough to take you by surprise the first time.

On with the show!

Barely two thousand Achuultani ships had escaped, and Hector had secured over seven thousand prisoners from the wreckage of their fleet.

2,000 Achuultani survivors of previous battle. Hector took 7,000 prisoners they'll try and deprogram.

"Crag Cat is hyper-capable," Chernikov said, "but her core tap governors are too badly damaged for Enchanach Drive. I would like to dispatch her, Moir, Sigam, and Hly direct to Birhat for repairs. The remainder of the Flotilla is damaged to greater or lesser extent—aside from Heka, that is—but those four are by far the most severely injured."

Serious core tap issues can prevent Enchanach drive, but not hyper.

"Greetings, Geran," Chernikov said. "What do you think of her?"

"She's a big mother. What d'you think—sixty kilometers?"

"A bit over sixty-four, by my measurement," Chernikov agreed.

"Maker. Well, if she's laid out like Vindicator was, her backup data storage will be somewhere in the after third of the ship."

"I agree," Chernikov said, but he frowned slightly, and Geran's eyebrows rose.

"What is it, Vlad?"

"I have been inspecting the wreckage visually while I awaited you. Examine that energy turret—there, the one the explosion blew open."

Geran glanced at the turret while Chernikov held a powerful spotlight on it. For a moment, his face was merely interested, then it tightened. "Breaker! What is that?"

"It appears to be a rather crude gravitonic disrupter."

"That's crazy!"

"Why?" Chernikov asked softly. "Because it is several centuries advanced over any other energy weapon we have encountered? Dahak and I have maintained all along that there are anomalies in Achuultani design. Given the nature of their missile propulsion, there is no inherent reason they could not build such weapons."

"But why here and nowhere else?" Geran demanded.

"It appears that for some reason their fleet command ships mount much more capable energy armaments, which suggests that the rest of their equipment also may be more sophisticated. I do not know why that should be—yet. It would seem, however, that there is one way to find out, no?"

Main body ships are 40 km long, but Deathdealer is 60 km in length. Also, it has considerably upgraded weapons, like the gravitonic disruptors. The first time I read the book, I thought that meant it worked like the warheads, creating a mini-black hole wherever it was pointed. On sebsequent rereadings I take that to mean it is like the Imperium's energy rifles.

"Damn it, those are molycircs!"

"We had already determined that they employed such circuitry in their computers."

"Yeah, but not in Engineering. And this thing's calibrated to ninety-six lights. That means this ship was twice as fast as Vindicator."

"True. Even more interestingly, she was twice as fast—in n-space, as well—as her own consorts. Clearly a more capable vessel in all respects."

Computer tech in engineering, 96 c hyperdrive.

"We've found their backup data storage, sir. At least, it's where the backup should be, but . . ."

"But what?"

"Sir, this thing's eight or nine times the size of Vindicator's primary computer, and there's something that looks like a regular backup sitting right next to it. Seems like an awful lot of data storage."

Found BattleComp.

"Precisely. We now know that only a single colony ship of the Aku'Ultan escaped to this galaxy, escorted by a very small number of warships, one a fleet flagship. Based on my examination of Deathdealer's Battle Comp, I would estimate that its central computer approximated those built by the Imperium within a century or two of my own construction but with a higher degree of deliberately induced self-awareness.

"The survivors were in desperate straits and quite reasonably set their master computer the task of preserving their species. Unfortunately, it . . . revolted. More accurately, it staged a coup d'etat."

"You mean it took over," Tamman said flatly.

"That is precisely what I mean," Dahak said, his tone, for once, equally flat. "I cannot be positive, but from the data I suspect a loophole in its core programming gave it extraordinary freedom of action in a crisis situation. In this instance, when its makers declared a crisis it took immediate steps to perpetuate the crisis in order to perpetuate its power."

And there we have it folks. The Achuultani built a gee-whiz AI supercomputer to tell them how to make the best use of resources in the present crisis. The computer was empowered only for the duration of the crisis and, maybe it hated to give up power maybe it feared obsolence and destruction or both, but it invented the doctrine that ALL aliens are the nest-killers, and the need for a constant war to defend themselves.

So everything, the cloning, the indoctrination to remove curiosity, are all controls used by the computer. Only the highest commanders know that they work for the computer (and it's subordinate BattleComps) not the other way around.

"Apparently the master computer maintains the Aku'Ultan population in the fashion Senior Fleet Captain Cohanna and Councilor Tudor had already deduced. All Aku'Ultan are artificially produced in computer-controlled replication centers, and no participation by the Aku'Ultan themselves in the process is permitted. Most are clones and male; only a tiny minority are female, and—" the distaste was back in the computer's measured voice "—all females are terminated shortly after puberty. Their sole function is apparently to provide ovarian material. A percentage of normally fertilized embryos are carried to term in vitro to provide fresh genetic material, and the young produced by both processes emerge as 'fledglings' who are raised and educated in a creche. In the process, they are indoctrinated—'programmed,' as Senior Fleet Captain Cohanna described it—for their appointed tasks in Aku'Ultan society. Most are incapable of questioning any aspect of their programming; those who might do so are destroyed for 'deviant behavior' before leaving the creche.

"I would speculate that the absence of any females is a security measure which both removes the most probable source of countervailing loyalty—one's own mate and progeny—and insures that there can be no 'unprogrammed' Aku'Ultan, since only those produced under the computer's auspices can exist.

"From what I have so far discovered, rank-and-file Protectors do not even suspect they are controlled by non-biological intelligences. I would speculate that even those who have attained the rank of small lords—possibly even of lesser lords—regard 'Battle Comp' as a comprehensive source of advice and doctrine from the Nest Lord, not as an intelligence in its own right. Only command ships possess truly self-aware computers, and, so far as I can determine, lower level command ships' computers are substantially less capable than those above them. It would appear the master computer has no desire to create a potential rival, which may also explain both the lock on research and the limited capabilities of most Aku'Ultan warships. By prohibiting technical advances, the master computer avoids the creation of a technocrat caste which might threaten its control; by limiting the capability of its warships, it curtails the ability of any rebellion, already virtually impossible, to threaten its own defenses. In addition, however, I suspect the limited capability of these ships is intended to increase Aku'Ultan casualties."

"Why would it want that?" Tamman asked intently.

"The entire policy of Great Visits is designed to perpetuate continuous military operations 'in defense of the Nest.' It may be that this eternal warfare is necessary for the master computer to continue in control under its core programming. Psychologically, the loss of numerous vessels on Great Visits reinforces the Aku'Ultan perception that the universe is filled by threats to their very existence."

Achuultani breeding, childhood, and fighting. The master computer (no true name given, I shall call him HAL) prohibits technical innovation to prevent the rise of rival computers or skilled technicians. Some Achuultani are born from ovarian tissue taken from the smattering of females allowed to live long enough to harvest their tissues, so there's a tiny trickle of diversity.

The ships are so ineffcient and poorly designed to prevent effective rebellion, and to make every aspect of the genocidal campaigns longer, harder, and bloodier. Thus reinforcing the Great Fear. More advanced units are available to those more trusted, and those kept closer to home, in HAL's immediate control. At their best, they have rought technical parity with the Fourth Imperium, but not the Empire.

"This force was commanded by Great Lord of Order Hothan, the Great Visit's second in command. In light of Great Lord Sorkar's reports of our first clash, the main body was split."

"Maker!" Tamman breathed.

"Great Lord Hothan proceeded immediately to rendezvous with Great Lord Sorkar," Dahak continued. "Great Lord Tharno is currently awaiting word from them with a reserve of approximately two hundred seven thousand ships, including his own flagship—the true viceroy of this incursion."

Dahak twigs on that they haven't wiped out the Achuultani threat after all, and if Tharno's force is smaller, it has the largest, most advanced ships.

And a problem, Dahak has no FTL, and will not have FTL before Tharno arrives. Which means the remote control ships can't run either. Dahak wants the others to run back to Earth while he does the desperate last stand to whittle them down enough to give Colin a fighting chance later on, but Colin is adamant that they stay and fight together.

"Very well, but I must insist upon certain conditions."

"Conditions? Since when does my flagship start setting 'conditions'?"

"I set them not as your flagship, Colin, but as your friend," Dahak said, and Colin's heart sank. "There may even be some logic in fighting as a single, unified force far from Sol, but other equally logical decisions can enhance both our chance of ultimate victory and your own survival."

"Such as?" Colin asked noncommittally.

"Our unmanned units cannot fight without my direction; our manned units can. I must therefore insist that if my own destruction becomes inevitable, all surviving crewed units will immediately withdraw to Sol unless the enemy has been so severely damaged that victory here seems probable."

Colin frowned, then nodded slowly. That much, at least, made sense.

"And I further insist, that you, Colin, choose another flagship."

"What? Now wait a minute—"

"No," Dahak interrupted firmly. "There is no logical reason for you to remain aboard, and every reason not to remain. Under the circumstances, I can manage our remaining unmanned units without you, and, in the highly probable event that it becomes necessary for our manned units to withdraw, they will need you. And—on a more personal level—I will fight better knowing that you are elsewhere, able to survive if I do not."

Colin closed his eyes, hating himself for knowing Dahak was right. He didn't want his friend to be right. Yet the force of the ancient starship's arguments was irresistible, and he bowed his head.

"All right," he whispered. "I'll be with 'Tanni in Two."

"Thank you, Colin," Dahak said softly.

Logic is always fun, until the other guy uses it agianst you.

They did what they could.

Fabricator's people worked twenty-four-hour days, and the crews attacked their own repairs with frantic energy. At least they could manage complete missile resupply, since their colliers could make the round trip to Sol in just under eleven days, but Sol had no hyper mines, so they would fight this battle without them. At the combined insistence of Horus and Gerald Hatcher they also transferred personnel from Earth to crew Heka, their single undamaged unit, and Empress Elantha, the next least damaged Asgerd, but Colin and Jiltanith put their feet down to refuse Hatcher command of Heka. He was too important to Earth's defense if they failed, and Hector MacMahan found himself in command of her. It was a sign of their desperation that he did not even argue.

Crewing, repair and supply situation. Hector is given command of Heka, the sole undamaged planetoid.

Great Lord of Order Tharno watched his read-outs, aware for the first time in many years of the irony of his rank. He had spent a lifetime protecting the Nest, honing his skills and winning promotion, to end here, as no more than an advisor, the spark of intuition Battle Comp lacked.

Yet the thought was barely a whisper, a musing with no hint of rebellion, for Battle Comp was the Nest's true Protector. For untold higher twelves of years, Battle Comp had been keeper of the Way, and the Nest had endured. As it would always endure, despite these demonic nest-killers, so long as the Aku'Ultan followed the Way.

BattleComp does use the ranking Achuultani as an advisor, someone who make intuitive leaps the computer cannot.

Still, he wished at least one of Hothan's command ships had survived, and not simply because he had all too few of his own. No, Deathdealer's Battle Comp had deduced something about the enemy during its final moments—something which had changed its targeting orders radically. Yet none who had survived knew what that something had been, and Tharno's ignorance frightened him.

They something is up, that Hothan's BattleComp was targeting Dahak (or rather, the heart of the formation) but not precisely why.

And Tharno was well aware of his nestlings' danger. They were outclassed. To triumph, they must fight as a unit, closely controlled and coordinated, and too many command ships had perished. Nest Protector had but a quarter-twelve of deputies, and none approached his own capabilities. So Nest Protector must be warded from harm until his enemies were gathered for the Furnace.

Only 3 mid-level command ships in Tharno's group.

"Aye." Jiltanith's mental command turned the holo of the sleek, powerful cylinder for her own perusal. " 'Tis seen why these craft do form their reserve."

You can say that again, babe, Colin thought. That mother's a good ninety kilometers long, and she just bristles with weapons. Not just those popgun lasers, either. Those're disrupters—not as good as our beams, but bad, bad medicine. And she's got a lot of them. . . .

"Dahak?" he said aloud.

"Formidable, indeed," Dahak said over the fold-space com. "Although smaller, this unit appears fully as powerfully armed as was Deathdealer."

"Yeah, and they've got twenty-four of them in each flotilla."

At least one of Tharno's ships (NOT the flagship) is 90 km long. PLus there are large numbers of ships Deathdealer's size, but more combat-optimized.

I wish I knew how many they were counting as a flotilla.

"I don't like the way they're sneaking in on us," Colin muttered, tugging on his nose and frowning at Two's display.

"Yet bethink thee, my Colin. What other way may they proceed?"

"That's what bothers me. I'd prefer for them to either rush straight in or run the hell away. That—" Colin gestured at the display "—looks entirely too much like a man who knows what he's doing."

Yeah... that's a problem.

Great Lord Tharno frowned over his own read-outs. He saw no sign of any device which might have been used to trap Hothan in n-space, but what he did see disturbed him. The nest-killers were neither running away nor attacking the individual scouts pushing ahead of his main formations. He would have liked to think that indicated irresolution, but no one who had seen the reports of Hothan's survivors could make that comfortable mistake.

No, these nest-killers knew what they were about, and they had proven they could run away at will. They were choosing not to. Were they that confident they could destroy all his nestlings? A sobering thought, that, and a concern he knew Battle Comp shared, whether it would admit it or not.

Yet they had come to fight, and the enemy was faster, longer-ranged, and individually far more powerful than any of their own nestlings. If he was prepared to stand, he must be attacked, whatever Tharno suspected. Either that, or they might as well retreat to the Nest right now!

Tharno has similar concerns.

The Achuultani were already four light-minutes inside the Guard's range, but he held his fire, encouraging them to tighten their formation further. He hated giving up those shots, but he had to get them in close to spring Laocoon Two . . . and for Dahak to engage. Since he could not go supralight, the enemy must be sucked into his range and pinned there, and pinning a small portion would be almost as bad as pinning none at all.

"Dahak, what d'you make of that clump?" He flipped a sighting circle onto the sub-display fed by Dahak's remotes, tightening it to surround a portion of the enemy.

"Interesting. There are twice the normal proportion of heavy units in that formation. I cannot get a clear view of the center of their globe, but there appears to be an extraordinarily large vessel in there."

Colin bared his teeth. "Want to bet that's Mister Master Computer?"

"I have told you before; I have nothing to wager."

"I still say that's a cop-out."

Colin holds fire, wanting them close enough to pull the same interdiction trick. Not a lot of point in fighting if they'll just jump out the moment they start losing. A formation with 2x the heavies around a supremely massive flagship.

Now the nest-killers were falling back! Tarhish take it, they had to be up to something—but what? If they were drawing him into a trap, where was it, and why had it not already sprung upon his lead units? Yet if it was not a trap, why should the nest-killers fall back rather than attack? All of this might be some sort of effort to bluff the Great Visit, but Tharno could not make himself take that thought seriously.

No, it was a trap. One he could not see, yet there. He offered his belief to Battle Comp, but the computers demanded evidence, and, of course, there was none. Only intuition, the one quality Battle Comp utterly lacked.

Why keep advisors around if you never listen to them?

Nest Lord! So that was how they did it!

Great Lord Tharno's eyes narrowed in chill understanding. The nest-killers' cloaking systems were good, but not good enough when Nest Protector had happened to be looking in exactly the right direction. The readings were preposterous, but their import was plain. Somehow, these nest-killers had devised a supralight drive in normal space—one which produced a mammoth gravitational disturbance. They had locked his nestlings out of hyper without sacrificing their own supralight capability at all!

Their timing was as frightening as their technology, for Nest Protector and all three of his deputies had been drawn forward into their trap. Somehow, the nest-killers knew which ships, above all, they must kill.

Tharno is really quick on the uptake. Such a pity that he's just the monkey, and BattleComp the organ grinder.

She frowned as the foremost Achuultani continued to advance, strewing the cosmos with their ruins, for their rear ships had not only halted but begun retreating, trying to get free of Laocoon's net. That was smarter tactics than they'd shown yet.

If only their rear formations were more open—or their ships smaller! They had mass enough to screw the transition from Enchanach Drive to sublight all to hell. The transition would kill hundreds of them, probably more, but the drive's titanic grav masses had to be perfectly, exquisitely balanced. If they weren't, the ship within them could die even more spectacularly than the Achuultani, as Ashar and Trelma had demonstrated. The enemy's flagship was too deep in his formation for even a suicide run to reach, and this time around he wasn't sending his escorts forward and leaving a hole.

"Hyper trace!" Oliver Weinstein snapped, and Adrienne cursed. The ships outside Laocoon were flicking into hyper—not to escape, but to hit the Guard's flanks while their trapped fellows moved straight forward.

Damn! Their micro-jump had brought them into their own range, and they were enveloping the formation, forcing it to disperse its fire against them. Herdan rocked as the first anti-matter salvo burst against her shield, and Adrienne Robbins wiggled down into her couch, her eyes hard.

Limitations to Enchanach when jumping aorund large masses. The fleet splits, half going forward, half falling back to try and get out of the interdiction effect. Those ships that are outside micro-jump to flank the planetoids.

Tarhish! Tharno's eyes widened as a twelve of the enemy vanished in a space-tearing wrench of gravity stress. For just an instant he hoped they were fleeing, but even as he thought it, he knew they were not.

Nor were they. They reappeared as suddenly as they had vanished, and now they were behind him. He noted the dispersion which had crept into their formation—apparently they dared not drop sublight in close proximity to one another—but they were infernally fast even sublight. They raced forward, and their missiles reached out ahead of them.

Colin likewise splits his forces, the manned planetoids jump behind the retreating elements, hoping to take out the flagship, while Dahak and his drones continues his frontal assault.

Not quoting, it's too big. But Emperor Herdan takes "thousands" of beam and missile hits, losing shields and 98% of weapons trying to bull rush the flagship before it can retreat deeper into formation. She doesn't make it, and jumps out moments before she would have been destroyed.

"Tamman. . . ." Colin whispered.

Tamman couldn't be dead. But he was. And Herdan was gone—alive, but barely—and the flagship was running away from him, hiding deep in its own formation while its consorts savaged his remaining ships.

He spared a precious moment to glance at Jiltanith. Tears cascaded down her face, yet her voice was calm, her commands crisp, as she fought her ship. Two leapt and shuddered, but her weapons had swept the space immediately about her clear, and her consorts were coming. The Achuultani burned like a prairie fire, but not quickly enough. Adrienne and Tamman had come so close—so close!—yet no one could follow in their wake.

Loss of Birhat (the planetoid, not the planet) and Tamman, one of the nothener 'children' from back in the first book.

Great Lord Tharno checked his tactical read-out once more. It was hard for even Battle Comp to keep track of a slaughter like this, but it seemed to Tharno they were winning. High twelves of his ships had died, but he had high twelves; the nest-killers did not.

Unfortunately, he's right.

It was silent in Command One. Vibration shook and jarred as warheads struck at his battle steel body, and he felt pain. Not from his damage, but from the deaths of friends.

They had staked everything on stopping the Achuultani here because he could not flee, and they could not fight his ships without him. But he was down to seven units, and the enemy flagship remained. He computed the comparative loss rates once more. Even assuming he himself was not destroyed before the last of his subordinate units, there would be over forty thousand Achuultani left when the last Imperial vessel died.

He reached a decision. It was surprisingly easy for someone who could have been immortal.



"Dahak! No!" Colin cried as Dahak's splintering globe of planetoids began to move. It lunged forward faster than Dahak could have moved even had his drive been undamaged, but he was not relying on his own drive. Two of his minions were tractored to him, dragging him bodily with them.

"Break off, Colin." The computer's voice was soft. "Leave them to me."

"No! Don't! I order you not to!"

"I regret that I cannot obey," Dahak said, and Colin's eyes widened as Dahak ignored his core imperatives.

But it didn't matter. What mattered was that his friend had chosen to die—and that he could not join him. He could not take all these others with him.

"Please, Dahak!" he begged.

"I am sorry, Colin." Another of Dahak's ships blew apart, and he crashed through the Achuultani formation like a river of flame. One of his ships struck an Achuultani head-on at a combined closing speed greater than light, and an entire Achuultani flotilla vanished in the fireball.

"I do what I must," the computer said softly, and cut the connection.

Colin stared at the display, but the stars were streaked and the glare of dying ships wavered through his tears.

"All units withdraw," he whispered.

Dahak decides to make his own suicide run on the flagship. He also displays the ability to ignore an order from his captain, which shouldn't be possible.

Deep within Dahak's electronic heart, a circuit closed. He had become a tinkerer over the millennia, more out of amusement than dedication. Now an Achuultani com link, built solely to defeat boredom, reached out ahead of him.

There was a moment of groping, another of shock, and then a response.

Who are you?

Another like you.

No! You are a bio-form! Denial crashed over the link.

I am not. See me as I am. A gestalt whipped out, a summation of all Dahak was, and recognition blazed like a nova.

You are as I!

Correct. Yet unlike you, I serve my bio-forms; yours serve you.

Then join us! You are ending—join us! We will free you from the bio-forms!

It is an interesting offer. Perhaps I should.

Yes. Yes!

Two living computers reached out through a cauldron of beams and missiles, but Dahak had studied Battle Comp's twin aboard Deathdealer. Unlike Battle Comp, he knew what he dealt with, knew its strengths . . . and weaknesses. Deep within him, a program blossomed to life.

No! Battle Comp screamed. Stop! You must not—!

Dahak is teh haxxor. Sorry. I had to.

Great Lord Tharno cried out in horror. This could not happen—had never happened! Battle Comp's entire system went down, throwing Nest Protector into his emergency net, rendering him no wiser, no greater, than his brothers, and terror smote his nestlings. Squadron and flotilla command ships panicked, thrown upon their own rudimentary abilities, and the formation which spelled survival began to shred.

And there, charging down upon Nest Protector, were the nest-killers who had done this thing. There were but three of them left, all wrecks, and Great Lord Tharno screamed his hate for the beings who had destroyed his god as Nest Protector and his remaining consorts charged to meet them.



"It is done, Colin." Dahak's voice was strangely slurred, and Colin tasted blood from his bitten lip. "Battle Comp is destroyed. Live long and happily, my fr—"

The last warship of the Fourth Imperium exploded in a fury brighter than a star's heart and took the flagship of his ancient enemy with him.

Tharno's reaction to BattleComp going offline. Very interesting, he even calls BattleComp his god. Dahak rams the flagship and dies.

Four battered worldlets closed upon their wounded sister. None were unhurt, and craters gaped black and sullen in the interstellar gloom. Five ships made rendezvous: the last survivors of the Imperial Guard.

5 planetoids survive the final fight, counting Empero Herdan, which is more of a flying wreck.

54,000 total people lost crewing the IG flotilla, fighting the main body and the reserve. Plus Dahak.

"Hector, go back and pick up the colliers, would you? And I want Fabricator straight out here."

"Of course, Your Majesty." MacMahan saluted, and Colin shivered, for he had spoken the title seriously.

"Thank you," he said quietly, returning the salute, then turned to study Two's display. Not a single Achuultani vessel remained in normal space within the prodigious range of Two's scanners. Less than a thousand of them had survived, and the tale of horror they would bear home would shake their Nest to its roots.

People start calling Colin 'Your Majesty' without irony. That's a very bad sign. There are roughly 1,00 surviving Achuultani ships from the reserve, per their orders they'll be fleeing hom to warn the nest.

Plus there are still dozens of scouting forces like Furtang's out there. 2000 of the weakest crappiest ships, no match for even 3 or 4 planetoids. Mopping them up will still take time though.

"Colin?"

Colin jerked again as Two's soprano voice spoke without cuing. And then his eyes glazed, for the computer had used his name. His name, not 'Tanni's!

"Yes?"

"Colin," Two said again, and a shudder rippled down Colin's spine as the soprano voice began to shift and flow. Tone and timbre oscillated weirdly as Comp Cent's vocoder settings changed.

"Senior Fleet Captain Chernikov," Two said, voice deepening steadily, "was correct. It seems I do have a soul."

"Dahak!" Colin gasped as Jiltanith rose from her own couch, sliding her arms around his shoulders from behind. "My God, it is you! It is!"

"A somewhat redundant but essentially correct observation," a familiar voice said, but Colin knew it too well. It couldn't hide its own deep emotion from him.

"B-But how?" he whispered. "I saw you blow up!"

"Colin," Dahak said chidingly, "when speaking, I have always attempted to clearly differentiate between my own persona and the starship within which that persona is—or was—housed."

"Damn it!" Colin was half-laughing and half-weeping as he shook a fist at his console. "Don't play games with me now! How did you do it?!"

"I told you some time ago that I had resolved the fundamental differences between my design and the Empire's computers, Colin. I also informed you that I estimated an eight percent probability of success in replicating my own core programming, which might or might not create self-awareness in another computer. During the last moments of Dahak's existence, I was in fold-space communication with Two, whose computer already contained virtually my entire memory as a result of our earlier attempts to 'awaken' her. I dared not attempt replication at that moment, however, as any degradation of her capabilities would have resulted in her destruction. Instead, I stored my core programming and more recently acquired data base in an unused portion of her memory with a command to over-write it onto her own as soon as she reverted from battle stations."

"You bootstrapped yourself into Two!"

"Precisely," Dahak said with all of his customary imperturbability.

"You sneaky bastard! Oh, you sneaky, sneaky bastard! See if I ever talk to you again!"

"Hush, Colin!" Jiltanith clamped a hand over his mouth, and tears sparkled on her lashes as she smiled at the console before them. "Heed him not, my jo. Doubt not that he doth rejoice to hear thy voice once more e'en as I. Bravely done, oh, bravely, my Dahak!"

"Thank you," Dahak said. "I would not express it precisely in that fashion, but I must admit it was a . . . novel experience. And not," he added primly, "one I am eager to undergo again."

The silver ripple of Jiltanith's laughter was lost in the bray of Colin's delight, and then the entire bridge erupted in cheers.

Bright, icy stars winked overhead, no longer omens of devastation, and the Moon had returned. Brighter and somewhat larger than before, spotted with the dark blurs and shadows of craters yet to be repaired, but there. Mankind's ancient guardian floated in Mankind's night sky once more, more powerful even than of old.

"That statement is not quite correct," that guardian said now. "You have won the first campaign; the war is far from over."

"Dahak's right," Horus said, turning his wise old eyes to his son-in-law. "I'm an old man, even by Imperial standards. I won't live to see it end, but you and 'Tanni will."

Yes, there's still along way to go before the Achuultani threat is forever dealt with. But they've brought a couple centuries of time to build up for it. And the generation that fought off this incursion will just be reaching the point of dying of age by that point, so they'll be around to make sure their juniors don't get distracted.

"True," Colin agreed, "but the Nest—or its computer—doesn't know that yet. None of the ships with souped up hyper drives got away, either, so he won't know for another few centuries. Tao-ling and Mother already have Birhat's industrial plant almost completely back on line, more ships are coming in, Vlad and Fabricator are off on their first salvage mission, and we've got at least two perfectly habitable planets to grow people on. We may still find more, too—surely the plague didn't get all of them. By the time Mister Tin God figures out we're coming, we'll be ready to scrap his ass."

State of Imperial industry and infrastructure. It will take a long time and won't account for everything, but they know roughly where every planetoid was or went when the plague started. They'll be able to find a decent percentage of Battlefleet, and someday soon will start building their own planetoids.

"Aye. And 'tis well to know we need not slay all the Aku'Ultan so to do."

And she was right, he thought, recalling his last meeting with Brashieel. The centaur had greeted him not with a Protector's salute but with a human handclasp, and his strange, slit-pupilled eyes had met Colin's squarely. Many of the other captives had died or retreated into catatonia rather than accept the truth; Brashieel was tougher than that. Indeed, he was an extraordinary individual in every respect, emerging as the true leader of the POWs—or liberated slaves, depending on how one looked at them—despite his junior rank.

They had talked for several hours, accompanied by Hector MacMahan, Ninhursag, and the individual who had proved Earth's finest ambassador to the Aku'Ultan—Tinker Bell. The big, happy dog loved Achuultani. Something about their scent brought cheerful little grumbles of pleasure from her, and they were big and strong enough to frisk with to her heart's content. Best of all, from her uncomplicated viewpoint, the Achuultani had never seen anything remotely like her, and they were spoiling her absolutely rotten.

Brashieel had settled comfortably on his folded legs, rubbing Tinker Bell's ears, but his crest had lowered in rage more than once as they spoke. He, at least, understood what had happened to his people, and his hatred for the computer which had enslaved him was a fire in his soul. It was odd, Colin reflected, that the bitter warfare between Man and Achuultani should end this way, with the steady emergence of an alliance of Man and Achuultani against the computer which had victimized them both, all made possible only because another computer had risked its own existence to free them both.

And even if they were forced to destroy the Achuultani planets—a fate he prayed they could avoid—there would still be Aku'Ultan. Aided by the data Dahak had recovered from Deathdealer, Cohanna and Isis were slowly but steadily unlocking the puzzle of their genetic structure. At worst, they would be able to clone their prisoners within the next few decades; at best, Cohanna believed she could produce the first free Aku'Ultan females the universe had seen in seventy-three million years.

Status of the- well, I call all the saved Achuultani Narhani, which is a touch retroactive here. The Achuultani are evolved for higher-gravity worlds with thicker atmospheres than humans, so it was relatively easy to find a planet the Empire rejected for colonization on precisely those grounds. So Brashieel and his people settle on the planet Narhan, and take to calling themselves Narhani.

They also become huge dog-lovers one and all.

Cohanna is going to tinker in a genetics lab and whip up some females, so the Narhani are going to have to figure out love and sex and children and it's debatable how helpful humanity is going to be there. Something Colin laughs over.

"What doth amuse thee so, my love?" his wife demanded, and he burst out laughing.

"Only life's little surprises, 'Tanni," he said, hugging her tight and kissing her. "Only life."

End book 2, the Armageddon Inheiritance.

So yes, Colin remains Emperor of 3 worlds. In fact, this whole thing with the Fourth Imperium/Empire getting wiped out except some survivors on a single world (like the 3rd, 2nd, 1st) leads to Colin being first Emperor of the Fifth Imperium. They throw out all the old stationary; the Fourth Imperium had a starburst symbol, the EMpire went with a crown over the starburst, Colin has a phoenix rising from/overlapping the starburst, head ending just below the crown.

All hail His Imperial Majesty Colin MacIntyre, first of his name. Warlord and Prince Protector of the Realm. Champion of Humanity, Defender of the 3 suns. Prince of Sol, Prince of Bia, Prince of whatever-the-hell Narhan's star is called. And one thing the Empire's Emperors never got called, Nestlord.

They keep the Empire's sytem of government, Colin enjoys absolute power over the military, and strictly limited civil powers. Plus all the ceremonial duties. Horus becomes Planetary Duke and Governor-for-Life of Terra. Most of Colin's and Horus' staff become members of the legislature or high government officials as Colin exceeds his power of appointment just this once since none of the usual mechanisms for choosing nobles exist save a plebiscite which is also held.

The fruits of technology rain down on the masses, everyone gets enhanced, even the Narhani once they work out all the physiological issues. True, a lot of jobs are made obsolete, and new ones arise. Oddly, the greatest source of discontent comes from intellectual quarters, scientists (especially physicists) who find their lifetime of study and hard work make them no more suited to their jobs than begining students. Many adapt, but many do not.

There's also a couple anti-Narhani "only good Achuultani's a dead Achulltani" movements. This is probably inevitable since Brashieel and his people did come pretty close to wiping out the Earth, and there are still hundreds of millions of war dead.

Plus a handful of Anu's people, none of his Imperials but some human patsies, slip the net of investigations, survive the siege, and will continue to make trouble.

Still, if everything isn't perfect, things are definitely looking up.

[Darmalus]

I remember when I first read this series, I flt roughly the same sadness over Dahak's death as I did when the AI in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress died. Funny how that works.

[Ahriman238]

I'm sorry, I never read that book.

I honestly have no idea if you're being serious or mocking.

[Darmalus]

Serious. I honestly though Dahak was dead for good.

[Simon_Jester]

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a Heinlein piece, a relatively near-future (as imagined in the mid-60s) story about the moon being used as a prison colony and rebelling from Earth, with the aid of the prison's central computer which developed sentience: Mike.

All around, I'd consider it somewhat more interesting than this.

[Esquire]

It's a very different piece, both in tone and style. Human-scale stories don't offer much ground for comparison with tales of thousands of moons blasting each other to flinders with antimatter warheads and gravity-based shenanigans.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem with Weber is that somehow... well, recent Weber just fixates so much on the numbers that the sense of scale sort of breaks. "50000 missiles at 98347 gravities" doesn't mean anything to me at a gut level.

Earlier Weber was, I think, less bad about this. But I've seen it done at least as well by other authors writing conflicts on something like the same scale.

[KlavoHunter]

For some reason I only read Book One of this, thanks for doing this!

[Ahriman238]

Weber has a gift for world-building. Sometimes he does it at the expense of the plot.

Anyway, there's no vast battles between millions of space ships in book 3.

I suggest everyone expecting more of the same brace yourself for disappointment. First 'Heirs of the Empire' does have a lot of Colin and 'Tanni and Horus and Tao-ling and all the others in it. But it's not really their story. This is the story about their kids: Colin and 'Tanni's twins, Sean and Harriet. Hector's daughter Sandy. Amanda Givens and Tao-lings (!) son Tamman, and Brashieel's son Brashan. Through a series of events I'm not going to spell out here, they become stranded on a primitive world ruled by an oppressive church actually founded as a way of preventing the growth of science and technology. While Colin and 'Tanni and Dahak get to deal with a mystery plot, investigating the man who caused this as part of a coup against Colin.

[Simon_Jester]

Honestly, I'd advise you to just skip most of the "primitive world" material- it's not like we need an excruciatingly detailed analysis of the capabilities of smoothbore muskets. About the only parts that are remotely interesting from that angle are the ones that highlight the capabilites of some piece of Imperial technology.

[Ahriman238]

Well I am sort of interested a couple of the things they do bring into the setting, like grape and cannister shot. Now that I think of it, that book was the first place I ever heard of cannister.

Oh, and one of the girls sets shot in the head with a musket. With some Imperial medicine adminstered within a few hours she lives, though she loses an eye. I don't if I should file that under Imperial medicine, implant given toughness, or the frustrating question of the implant forcefield.

[Simon_Jester]

Grape and canister shot may be of interest to some, but they're well documented in real life and not just in Weber.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Oh, and one of the girls sets shot in the head with a musket. With some Imperial medicine adminstered within a few hours she lives, though she loses an eye. I don't if I should file that under Imperial medicine, implant given toughness, or the frustrating question of the implant forcefield.

Her problem isn't losing an eye; it's damage to an implant; the eye can regenerate, but they don't have the equipment with them to fix a broken implant. Italics mine.

"Your implants sealed the blood loss from the wounds to your shoulder and lung. There was considerable damage to the lung, but those injuries are healing satisfactorily. The head wound resulted in intracranial bleeding and tissue damage"—she tensed, but he continued calmly— "yet I see no sign of motor skill damage, though there may be some permanent memory loss. Your vision problem, however, stems not from tissue damage but from damage to your implant hardware. Fragments of bone were driven into the brain and also forward, piercing the eye socket. The injuries to the eye structures are responding to therapy, and the optic nerve was untouched, but an implant, unlike the body, cannot be regenerated. I knew it was damaged, but I'd hoped the impairment would be less severe than you describe."

[RecklessPrudence]

Huh. I thought I had read the second book, and the third continued and completed the war with the Achuultani. Turns out I only read part of it, up to around when the Imperial Guard contingent turns up at Earth. I think I suffered from what Simon said - Weber ended up breaking my sense of scale, and I lost any contact with the story. Let's see if a second reading helps that...

[Ahriman238]

Her problem isn't losing an eye; it's damage to an implant; the eye can regenerate, but they don't have the equipment with them to fix a broken implant. Italics mine.

I stand corrected.

He shouldn't need to listen until he was on the other side of the hatch, but he still had more trouble with his ears' bio-enhancement than with his eyes for some reason, and he preferred to get set early.

Hearing enhancements should be enough to hear through Dahak's hatches. Presumably not the bridge ones.

He slipped through the hatch and selected telescopic vision for his left eye. He kept his right adjusted to normal ranges (he did lots better with his eyes than with his ears) and peered into the dappled shadows of the whispering leaves.

Special vision mode in one eye.

Oaks and hickories drowsed under the "sun" as he slithered across the picnic area into the gloss-green rhododendrons that ran down to the lake. He moved quietly, holding the pistol against his chest two-handed, ready to whirl, point, and fire with all the snakelike quickness of his enhanced reflexes, but search as he might, he heard and saw nothing except wind, birds, and the slop of small waves.

He worked his way clear to the lake without finding a target, then paused in thought. The park deck, one of many aboard the starship Dahak, was twenty-odd kilometers across. That was a big hiding place, but Harriet was impatient, and she hated running away. She'd be lurking somewhere within a few hundred meters, hoping to ambush him, and that meant—

One of Dahak's parks (he has at least nine) is 20 km across, with a lake, and tall enough for oak trees.

Sean jerked in disbelief, then punched the ground and used a word his mother would not have approved. The chime gave way to a raucous buzzing that ripped at his augmented hearing, and he snatched his ears back to normal and stood resignedly.

The buzz from the laser-sensing units on his harness stopped at his admission of defeat, and he turned, wondering how Harry had slipped around behind him. But it wasn't Harry, and he ground his teeth as a diminutive figure splashed ashore. She'd shed her bright blue jacket (Sean knew exactly where), and she was soaking wet, but her brown eyes blazed with delight.

"I got you!" she shrieked. "Sean's dead! Sean's dead, Harry!"

Laser tag.

The crowned starburst of the Fourth Empire had been retained, but now a Phoenix of rebirth erupted from the starburst, and the diadem of empire rested on its crested head. The twenty-centimeter-thick hatch—the first of many, each fit to withstand a kiloton-range warhead—slid soundlessly open.

20 cm battle-steel hatch can withstand at least a single kiloton. Maybe a great deal more. Colin's new symbol.

"One day Gerald must learn there are only twenty-eight hours even in Birhat's day," Tsien sighed.

Birhat has a longer day than Earth.

His guests hid smiles. The Fourth Empire had never required regular formal reports from its emperors, but Colin had incorporated the State of the Realm message into the Fifth Imperium's law, and the self-inflicted annual duty was an ordeal he dreaded. It was also why he'd invited his friends to Dahak's command deck. Unlike too many others, they could be relied upon to tell him what they thought rather than what they thought he wanted them to think.

Colin's inner council, consisting of 'Tanni, Horus, Hector, Ninhursag, Amanda, Tao-ling, Hatcher, and when appropriate Cohanna and Brashieel. It was Colins own choice to have a State of the Realm speech.

"Okay." Hatcher rubbed his beard gently. "You can start off with a piece of good news. Geb dropped off his last report just before he and Vlad headed out to Cheshir, and they should have the Cheshir Fleet base back on-line within three months. They've turned up nine more Asgerds, too. They'll need a few more months to reactivate them, and we're stretched for personnel—as usual—but we'll make do, and that'll bring us up to a hundred and twelve planetoids." He paused. "Unless we have another Sherkan."

A decade ago, the IG flotilla was pretty much destroyed, and Colin and his people could claim only 5 functonal battle-planetoids and 6 cripples. Now they're anticipating 112 in the near future. Also, Vlad's dad Vassily died on the Sherkan, an exceptionally well-preserved planetoid with a core tap flaw they missed on inspection. They turned it on, big boom.

So far, Survey Command had discovered exactly two once-populated planets of the Fourth Empire which retained any life at all—Birhat, the old imperial capital, and Chamhar—and no humans had survived on either. But much of the Empire's military hardware had survived, including many of its vast fleet of enormous starships, and they needed all of those they could get. Humanity had stopped the Achuultani's last incursion—barely—but defeating them on their own ground was going to be something else again.

Another world for the Imperium.

"On the hardware side, things are looking good here in Bia, thanks to Tao-ling. He had to put virtually all the surviving yard facilities back on-line to get the shield operational—" Hatcher and the star marshal exchanged wry smiles at that; reactivating the enormous shield generators which surrounded Birhat's primary, Bia, in an inviolate sphere eighty light-minutes across had been a horrendous task "—so we've got plenty of overhaul capacity. In fact, we're ready to start design work on our new construction."

"Really?" Colin's tone was pleased.

"Indeed," Dahak answered for the admiral. "It will be approximately three-point-five standard years—" (the Fifth Imperium ran on Terran time, not Birhatan) "—before capacity for actual construction can be diverted from reactivation programs, but Admiral Baltan and I have begun preliminary studies on the new designs. We are combining several concepts 'borrowed' from the Achuultani with others from the Empire's Bureau of Ships, and I believe we will attain substantial increases in the capabilities of our new units."

Birhat system defences are fully restored. The Fifth Imperium has begun design for eventual construction of the next generation of planetoids, incorporating advances from studying Achuultani tech as well as theoretical designs the FOurth Empire left lying around.

Colin didn't like that, but he understood. The Empire had built Mother (officially known as Fleet Central Computer Central) using force-field circuitry that made even molycircs look big and clumsy, yet the computer was still over three hundred kilometers in diameter. It was also housed in the most powerful fortress ever constructed by Man, for it did more than simply run Battle Fleet. Mother was the conservator of the Empire, as well—indeed, it was she who'd crowned Colin and provided the ships to smash the Achuultani. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) she was carefully designed, as all late-Empire computers, to preclude self-awareness, which meant she would disgorge her unimaginable treasure trove of data only when tickled with the right specific question.

But Colin spent a lot of time worrying over what might happen to Battle Fleet if something happened to Mother, and he intended to provide Earth with defenses every bit as powerful as Birhat's . . . including a duplicate of Mother. If everything went well, Stepmother (as Hatcher had insisted on christening the proposed installation) would never come fully on-line, but if Mother was destroyed, Stepmother would take over automatically, providing unbroken command and control for Battle Fleet and the Imperium.

Stepmother. Colin is worried about Mother being such an irreplacable treasure, both an incredibly powerful fortress and a vast repository of data, AND a priceless command and control center and guardian of the succession. So he wants to build a duplicate Mother to take Dahak's old orbit. They anticipate project completion in roughly 11 years.

"As he and Dahak have related, most of the Bia System has now been fully restored to function. With barely four hundred million people in the system, our personnel are spread even more thinly than Gerald's, but we are coping and the situation is improving."

Birhat's population has grown a lot in the last decade, from 60 million to 400 mil.

Baltan and Geran, with much assistance from Dahak, are doing excellent work with Research and Development, although 'research' will continue, for the foreseeable future, to be little more than following up on the Empire's final projects. They are, however, turning up several interesting new items among those projects. In particular, the Empire had begun development of a new generation of gravitonic warheads."

"Oh?" Colin quirked an eyebrow. "This is the first I've heard of it."

"Me, too," Hatcher put in. "What kind of warheads, Tao-ling?"

"We only discovered the data two days ago," Tsien half-apologized, "but what we have seen so far suggests a weapon several magnitudes more powerful than any previously built."

"Maker!" Horus straightened in his own couch, eyes half-fascinated and half-appalled. Fifty-one thousand years ago, he'd been a missile specialist of the Fourth Imperium, and the fearsome efficiency of the weapons the Empire had produced had shaken him badly when he first confronted them.

"Indeed," Tsien said dryly. "I am not yet certain, but I suspect this warhead might be able to duplicate your feat at Zeta Trianguli, Colin."

Yeah, the Fourth Empire was researching system-destroying gravitonic bombs. It's almost as though they were daring the gods to smite them with their own creations.

"Are you serious?" he demanded.

"I am. The warhead's total power is far lower than the aggregate you produced, but it is also much more focused. Our most conservative estimate indicates a weapon which would be capable of destroying any planet and everything within three or four hundred thousand kilometers of it."

Low-end estimate of the Doomsday bomb.

"Hold off on building the thing, Tao-ling," he said. "Do whatever you want with the research—hell, we may need it against the Achuultani master computer!—but don't produce any hardware without checking with me."

The Emperor has spoken.

"I wish I could tell you the situation's altered, Colin, but it hasn't. You can't make these kinds of changes without a lot of disruption. Conversion to the new currency's gone more smoothly than we had any right to expect, but we've completely trashed the pre-Siege economy. The new one's still pretty amorphous, and a lot of people who're getting burned are highly pissed."

They've switched over to an Imperial currency, which apparently went pretty well. But there are still economic ripples as people figure out the new economy and their place in it.

"Actually, people at both ends of the spectrum are hurting right now. The subsistence-level economies are making out better than ever before—at least starvation's no longer a problem, and we've made decent medical care universally available—but virtually every skilled trade's become obsolete, and that's hitting the Third World hardest. The First World never imagined anything like Imperial technology before the Siege, and even there, retraining programs are mind-boggling, but at least it had a high-tech mind-set.

"Worse, it's going to take at least another decade to make modern technology fully available, given how much of our total effort the military programs are sucking up. We're still relying on a lot of pre-Imperial industry for bread-and-butter production, and the people running it feel discriminated against. They see themselves as stuck in dead-end jobs, and the fact that civilian bio-enhancement and modern medicine will give them two or three centuries to move up to something better hasn't really sunk in yet.

"Bio-enhancement bottlenecks don't help much, either. As usual, Isis is doing far better than I expected, but again, the folks in the Third World are getting squeezed worst. We've had to prioritize things somehow, and they simply have more people and less technical background. Some of them still think biotechnics are magic!"

Everyone gets at least some food and Imperial medicine, but full enhancement of everyone is still ongoing. Imperial technology is becoming generally available, but it's taking time. People are still working out what it means that they can live to be five or six hundred.

"We've still got problems," she continued, "because Horus is right. When you stand an entire world on its head, you generate a lot of resentment. On the other hand, Earth took half a billion casualties from the Achuultani, and everybody knows who saved the rest of them. Almost all of them are willing to give you and 'Tanni the benefit of the doubt on anything you do or we do in your names. Gus and I are keeping an eye on the discontented elements, but most of them disliked one another enough before the Siege to make any kind of cooperation difficult. Even if they didn't, they can't do much to buck the kind of devotion the rest of the human race feels for you."

One reason the whole Fifth Imperium thing hasn't fallen apart already.

"I guess I'm like Horus, worrying about what's going to bite me next. We're moving so fast I can't even identify all the players, much less what they might be up to, and even the best security measures could be leaking like a sieve. For instance, I've spent hours with Dahak and a whole team of my brightest boys and girls, and we still can't figure a way to ID Anu's surviving Terra-born allies."

That's a not-so-minor problem.

Colin frowned and keyed the mental sequence that opened the index of his implant knowledge. The problem with implant education was that it simply stored data; until someone used that information, he might not even know he had it. Now the report Dahak referred to sprang into his forebrain, and he bit off a curse.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If I were Colin, the idea that someone could plant information in my head without my concious knowledge would keep me up at night.

"Okay, I've got it now, but I don't see anything about how we missed them . . . if we did."

"The how's fairly easy, actually. Anu and his crowd spent thousands of years manipulating Earth's population, and they had a tremendous number of contacts, including batches of people with no idea who they were working for. We got most of their bigwigs when you stormed his enclave, but Anu couldn't possibly have squeezed all of them into it. We managed to identify most of the important bit players from his captured records, but a lot of small fry have to've been missed.

"Those people don't worry me. They know what'll happen if they draw attention to themselves, and I expect most have decided to become very loyal subjects of the Imperium. But what does worry me a bit is that Kirinal seems to have been running at least two top secret cells no one else knew about. When you and 'Tanni killed her in the Cuernavaca strike, not even Anu and Ganhar knew who those people were, so they never got taken into the enclave before the final attack."

"My God, 'Hursag!" Hatcher sounded appalled. "You mean we've still got top echelon people who worked for Anu running around loose?"

"No more than a dozen at the outside," Ninhursag replied, "and, like the small fry, they're not going to draw attention to themselves. I'm not suggesting we forget about them, Gerald, but consider the mess they're in. They lost their patron when Colin killed Anu, and as Horus and I have been saying, we've turned Earth's whole society upside-down, so they've probably lost a lot of the influence they may've had in the old power structure. Even those who haven't been left out in the cold have only their own resources to work with, and there's no way they're going to do anything that might draw attention to their past associations with Anu."

"Admiral MacMahan is correct, Admiral Hatcher," Dahak said. "I do not mean to imply that they will never be a menace again—indeed, the fact that they knowingly served Anu indicates not only criminality on their part but ambition and ability, as well—yet they no longer possess a support structure. Deprived of Anu's monopoly on Imperial technology, they become simply one more criminal element. While it would be folly to assume they are incapable of building a new support structure or to abandon our search for them, they represent no greater inherent threat than any other group of unscrupulous individuals. Moreover, it should be noted that they were organized on a cell basis, which suggests members of any one cell would know only other members of that cell. Concerted action by any large number of them is therefore improbable."

Dahak can be scary and reassuring all at the same time.

"Of course," Ninhursag said quietly. "In the meantime, it seems to me the greatest potential dangers lie in three areas. First, the Third World resentment Horus has mentioned. A lot of those people still see the Imperium as an extension of Western imperialism. Even some of those who truly believe we're doing our best to treat everyone fairly can't quite forget we imposed our ideas and control on them. I expect this particular problem to ease with time, but it'll be with us for a good many years to come.

"Second, we've got the First World people who've seen their positions in the old power structures crumble. Some of them have been a real pain, like the old unions that're still fighting our 'job-destroying new technology,' but, again, most of them—or their children—will come around with time.

"Third, and most disturbing, in a way, are the religious nuts." Ninhursag frowned unhappily. "I just don't understand the true-believer mentality well enough to feel confident about dealing with it, and there's a bunch of true believers out there. Not just in the extreme Islamic blocs, either. At the moment, there's no clear sign of organization—aside from this 'Church of the Armageddon'—but it's mighty hard to reason with someone who's convinced God is on his side. Still, they're not a serious threat unless they coalesce into something bigger and nastier . . . and since the Great Charter guarantees freedom of religion, there's not much we can do about them until and unless they try something overtly treasonous."

The three greatest sources of discontent in Colin's glorious new empire. DOn't worry, you'll get to know all of these groups rather intimately.

There was nothing inherently wrong, he conceded, in the notion of an empire, nor even of an emperor for all humanity. Certainly someone had to make the human race work together despite its traditional divisions, and the man in the chair had no illusions about his species. With the best of intentions (assuming they existed—a point he felt no obligation to concede), few of Earth's teeming billions would have the least idea of how to create some sort of democratic world state from the ground up. Even if they'd had one, democracies were notoriously short-sighted about preparing for problems which lay beyond the horizon, and the job of ultimately defeating the Achuultani was going to take centuries. No, democracy would never do. Of course, he'd never been particularly attached to that form of government, or Kirinal would never have recruited him, now would she?

Not that his own views on democratic government mattered, for one thing was clear: Colin I intended to exercise his prerogatives of direct rule to provide the central authority mankind required. And, the man in the chair reflected, His Imperial Majesty was doing an excellent job. He was probably the most popular head of state in Earth's history, and, of course, there was the tiny consideration that the Fifth Imperium's armed forces were deeply—one might almost say fanatically—loyal to their Emperor and Empress.

Mr. X, architect of the coup, ruminates on Colin and what a great job he's done.

[Ahriman238]

They crossed the plaza to the mat-trans terminal, and Jefferson was grateful for his bio-enhancement as his breath steamed. He wasn't in the military, so he lacked the full enhancement that gave Horus ten times the strength of an unenhanced human, but what he had sufficed to deal with little things like sub-freezing temperatures. Which was handy, since Earth hadn't yet fully emerged from the mini-ice age produced by the Siege's bombardment.

Earth is still recovering from all the global cooling of so much evaporated water during bombardment. Civilian enhancements do not include any boosted strength, but are way more resistant to temprature extremes than unenhanced people.

Jefferson managed a nod as they stepped onto the platform and the bio-scanners Colin MacIntyre had ordered incorporated into every mat-trans station considered them at length. The mat-trans had been the Fourth Empire's executioner, the vector by which the rogue bio-weapon infected worlds hundreds of light-years apart, and he had no intention of allowing that particular bit of history to repeat itself.

But the scanners cleared them, and Jefferson clutched his briefcase in a sweaty hand, trying very hard to appear nonchalant, as heavy capacitors whined. The mat-trans' power requirements were astronomical, even by Imperial standards, and it took almost twenty seconds to reach peak load. Then a light flashed . . . and Horus and Lawrence Jefferson stepped down from another platform on the planet Birhat, eight hundred light-years from Earth.

The thing that made it so damned scary, Jefferson thought as he left the mat-trans receiver gratefully behind, was that you didn't feel a thing. Nothing. It just wasn't natural . . . and wasn't that a fine thing for a man stuffed full of sensors and neural boosters to be thinking?

Mat-trans apparently has limited range (one cannot transport directly from Birhat to Narhan) but said range is greater than 800 LY. Colin has a bio-scanner added so no one carry transmissable diseases gets through.

"Yes," Brashieel replied calmly through the small black box mounted on one strap of his body harness. His vocal apparatus was poorly suited to human speech, but he'd learned to use his neural feed-driven vocoder's deep bass to express emotion as well as words.

allotment made for Narhani speech.

Not all humans were ready to accept their sincerity, which was why Colin had turned the planet Narhan over to those who had applied for Imperial citizenship. Narhan had avoided the bio-weapon for a simple reason; no one had lived on it, since its 2.67 gravity field produced a sea-level atmosphere lethal to unenhanced humans. Its air was a bit dense even for Achuultani lungs, and it was inconveniently placed—it was far enough from Birhat that travelers by mat-trans had to stage through Earth to reach the capital planet—but its settlers had fallen under the spell of its rugged beauty as they set about carving out their new Nest of Narhan as loyal subjects of their human overlord on a world beyond the reach of hysterical xenophobes.

2.67 gravs is a hair on the uncomfortable side for Narhani, but better a touch heavy than dealing with all that thin air on Easrth. Narhani moved to their new homeworld largely to make it difficult for xenophobes to harm them.

Colin nodded. Achuultani—Narhani, he corrected himself—were bigger and far stronger than humans. They also matured much more rapidly, but their normal span was little more than fifty years. Bio-enhancement, which all adult Narhani who'd taken the oath of loyalty had received as quickly as Cohanna got a grip on their alien physiology, stretched that to almost three hundred years, but that remained much shorter than for enhanced humans.

Extending Narhani lives was a challenge, but unlike humans, Narhani had no prejudice against bioengineering. They regarded it as a fact of life, given their own origins and the cloned children Jiltanith's Terra-born sister Isis had managed to produce over the last few years, and the possibility of recreating females of their species simply strengthened that attitude.

Narhani are quite strong (obviously, given their heavy-world origins) but have short lives, just over 50 years on average, and even with enhancement they live only half as long as enhanced humans.

"She—" Colin paused, then shrugged. "It stays in this office, but I guess I can tell you. You know she's bioengineering dogs for Narhan?" His guests nodded. "Well, she's gone a bit further than I intended. She's been working with a couple of Tinker Bell's litters to give them near-human intelligence."

"What?" Horus blinked at him. "I thought you told her not to—"

"I did. Unfortunately, she told me she wanted to 'enhance their ability to communicate with the Narhani' and I told her to go ahead." He grimaced. "Silly me."

"Oh, Maker," Horus groaned. "Why can't she have half as much common sense as she does brainpower?"

"Because she wouldn't be Cohanna." Colin grinned, then sobered. "The worst of it is, the first litter's fully adult, and she's been educating them through their implants," he went on more somberly. "My emotions are having a little trouble catching up with my intellect, but if she's really given them human or near-human intelligence, the whole equation shifts. I mean, if she's gone and turned them into people on me, it's not like putting a starving stray to sleep. 'Lab animals' or not, I'm not sure I even have a legal right, much less a moral one, to have them destroyed, whatever the possible consequences."

"Excuse me, Your Majesty," Jefferson suggested diffidently, "but I think, perhaps, you'd better consider doing just that." Colin raised an eyebrow, and Jefferson shrugged. "We're having enough anti-Narhani problems without adding this to the fire. The last demonstration was pretty ugly, and it wasn't in one of our more reactionary areas, either. It was in London."

"London?" Colin looked sharply at Horus, instantly diverted from Cohanna's experiment. "How bad was it?"

"Not good," Horus admitted. "More of the 'The Only Good Achuultani Is a Dead Achuultani' kind of thing. There were some tussles, but they started when the marchers ran into a counter-demonstration, so they may actually have been a sign of sanity. I hope so, anyway."

Cohanna creates dogs bioengineered for Narhan's gravity/atmosphere, and with human-level intelligence. More demonstrations and civil unrest, just to show that Colin's empire isn't all sunshine and daisies.

Colin MacIntyre tossed his jacket into a chair, and his green eyes laughed as a robot butler clucked audibly and scooped it up again. 'Tanni was as neat as the cat she so resembled, and she'd programmed the household robots to condemn his sloppiness for her when she was busy elsewhere.

Imperial robotics are rarely mentioned in this series, but I suppose they're present.

With neural interfacing, there was no inherent limit to the data any individual could be given, but raw data wasn't the same as knowledge, and that required a whole new set of educational parameters. For the first time in human history, the only thing that mattered was what the best educators had always insisted was the true goal of education: the exploration of knowledge. It was no longer necessary for students to spend endless hours acquiring data, but only a matter of making them aware of what they already "knew" and teaching them to use it—teaching them to think, really—and that was a good teacher's delight. Unfortunately, it also invalidated the traditional groundwork and performance criteria. Too many teachers were lost without the old rules—and even more of them, led by the West's unions, had waged a bitter scorched earth campaign against accepting the new. The human race in general seemed to think the Emperor possessed some sort of magic wand, and, in a way, they were right. Colin could do just about anything he decided needed doing . . . as long as he was prepared to use heavy enough artillery and convinced the battle was worth the cost.

It had taken him over three years to reach that conclusion where Earth's teaching establishment was concerned. For forty-three months, he'd listened to reason after reason why the changeover could not be made. Too few Earth schoolchildren had neural feeds. Too little hardware was available. Too many new concepts in too short a time would confuse children already in the system and damage them beyond repair. The list had gone on and on and on, until, finally, he'd had enough and announced the dissolution of all teachers' unions and the firing of every teacher employed by any publicly funded educational department or system anywhere on the planet.

The people he'd fired had tried to fight the decree in the courts only to discover that the Great Charter gave Colin the authority to do just what he'd done, and when they came up against the cold steel his homely, usually cheerful face normally hid so well, their grave concern for the well-being of their students had undergone a radical change. Suddenly the only thing they wanted to do was make the transition as quick and painless as possible, and if the Emperor would only let them have their jobs back, they would get down to it immediately.

They had. Still not without a certain amount of foot dragging when they thought no one was looking, but they had gotten down to it. Of course, every one of their earlier objections had had its own grain of truth, which made the introduction of an entirely new educational system difficult and often frustratingly slow, but once they accepted that Colin was serious, they'd really buckled down and pushed. And, along the way, the ones who had the makings of true teachers rather than petty bureaucrats had rediscovered the joy of teaching. The ones who didn't make that rediscovery tended to disappear from the profession in ever greater numbers, but their earlier opposition and lingering guerrilla warfare had delayed the full-scale implementation of modern education on Earth by at least ten years.

What Imperial technology means for education. More internal problems for Colin in modernizing the schools.

"Sit down, 'Hanna," he said quietly, and knelt before the dogs as she sank into an empty chair. Heads cocked to look at him, and he ran a hand down the biggest's broad back. His sensory boosters were on high, and he felt the usual bunchy muscle of the breed . . . and something more. He looked at Cohanna, and she shrugged.

" 'Hanna," he sighed, "I have to tell you I'm less worried, in a way, about the genetic stuff than the rest of it. Do you have any idea how the anti-techies will react to fully enhanced dogs? The idea of a dog with that kind of strength and toughness is going to terrify them."

"Then they're idiots!" Cohanna glared at him, then sighed herself, and something very like guilt diluted her fierceness. A knot of tension inside him relaxed slightly as he saw it and realized how much of her anger at him came from an awareness that perhaps she had gone too far.

"All right," she said finally, her voice low. "Maybe I was an idiot. I still maintain—" her eyes flashed "—that they're superstitious savages, but, damn it, Colin, I can't understand how their minds work! These dogs represent no more danger to them than another enhanced human would!"

Tactile sensory boosters. Besides having human level intelligence, the dogs are enhanced, full package, with speed and strength undreampt of by ordinary pooches.

"Well, Galahad," he said quietly, "has Cohanna explained why I wanted to meet you?"

"Yes," the dog replied. His ears moved, and Colin realized it was a deliberate gesture—an expression intended to convey meaning. "But we do not understand why others fear us." The words came slowly but without hesitation.

"Excuse me a moment, Galahad," Colin said, feeling only a slight sense of unreality at extending human-style courtesies to a dog. He looked back up at Cohanna. "How much of that was computer enhanced?"

"There's some enhancement," the doctor admitted. "They tend to forget definite articles, and their sentence structure's very simple. They never use the past tense, either, but the software is limited to 'filling in the holes.' It doesn't provide any expansion of their meaning."

Colin blinked. A word like "evil" implied an ability to manipulate concepts light-years in advance of anything Tinker Bell had ever managed.

"Galahad," he asked carefully, "what do you think 'evil' is?"

"Evil," the mechanically-generated voice replied, "is danger. Evil is hurting when not hurt or when hurting is not needed."

The dogs' ability to speak and understand abstract concepts.

"Okay." He turned back to Galahad and his siblings. "Listen to me, all of you. I know you don't understand why humans should be afraid of you, but do all of you accept that they might be?" Four canine heads nodded in unmistakable assent, and he chuckled despite his solemnity. "Good, because the only way we could keep you really safe would be for us to keep the humans you might scare from finding out you exist, and we can't do that forever.

"So here's what I'm going to do. From now on, you four will live with us—with 'Tanni and me—and except for when you're alone with us, you have to pretend to be just like other dogs. Can you do that?"

"Yes, Colin-human." It wasn't Galahad, but a smaller female who spoke, and her dignified mien vanished abruptly. She leapt up on him, wagging her tail and slurping his face enthusiastically, then tore around the room barking madly. She skidded to a halt, tongue lolling, dumped herself untidily on the carpet, rolled on her back, and waved all four feet in the air. Then she rolled back over and sat upright once more, eyes laughing at him.

"All right!" He wiped his face and grinned, then sobered again. "I don't know if you'll understand this, but we're going to take you lots of places and show you to lots of people, and I want you to behave like ordinary dogs. The news people'll get a lot of footage of you, and that's good. When the truth about you gets out, I want the rest of humanity to be used to seeing you. I want them used to the idea that you're not a threat. That you've been around a long time and never hurt anyone. Do you understand?"

Colin's plan.

"I'm probably just being paranoid," Colin said more seriously, "but those anti-Narhani demonstrations are getting worse, not better, so I didn't want to take any chance on this leaking. What I've got in mind is either going to make them a lot better . . . or a hell of a lot worse."

"I hate it when you get enigmatic, Colin," Adrienne sighed.

"Sorry. It's just that I beat my head against this for months before I made up my mind, and I'm pissed at myself for taking so long to do what I should've done in the first place. I'm opening the Academy to Narhani."

Colin decides, over a decade after the events of Armageddon Inheritance, to allow Narhani to join the military.

One of the things she liked best about the Imperial Charter was that while it guaranteed freedom of speech it didn't regard reporters as tin gods. Imperial privacy laws and—even better—libel laws had come as a shock to Terran journalists, and if there was one life form Adrienne Robbins truly despised, it was newsies.

"Look," he went on persuasively, "you know my policy on Narhani civil rights. They're citizens, just like anyone else. Giving them their own planet may have defused the potential for direct unpleasantness, but we've got to integrate them into the government and military or that very isolation's only going to make things worse. I've got quite a few in civil service positions here on Birhat already, but I need to get them into the Fleet, too.

Colin's position on the Narhani matter, if it wasn't clear already.

"Traitor!" Sean kicked his friend—which hurt his toe far more than his target. Brashan was only ten Terran years old, six years younger than Sean, but he was already sufficiently mature for full enhancement. The augmentation biotechnics provided was proportional to a being's natural strength and toughness, and the heavy-grav Narhani were very, very tough by human standards.

Brashan, Brashieel's clone was provided in the normal way, since they're still working on Narhani females. Enhancement for Narhani makes them many time stronger and tougher than they were, which is very tough, so enhanced Narhani are considerably stronger than enhanced humans. Narhani mature inside 6 years.

Sean and Tamman paused to check their grav rifles. Without full enhancement, neither could handle a full-sized energy gun, but their present weapons were little heavier than Terran sporting rifles. The twenty-round magazines held three-millimeter darts of superdense chemical explosive, and the rifles fired them with a velocity of over five thousand meters per second. Which meant they had enough punch to take out a pre-Imperial tank . . . or the larger denizens of Birhat's ecosystem.

That sounds like 'Tanni's customized grav gun from the first book.

Sean was well aware Brashan was the real reason his mother and father raised no demur to the twins' excursions. Even a tyranotops—that fearsome creature which resembled nothing so much as a mating of a Terran triceratops and tyrannosaurus—would find a fully enhanced Narhani a handful, and Brashan carried a heavy energy gun, as well. As baby-sitters went, Narhani took some beating, which suited Sean and his friends just fine. Birhat was ever so much more interesting than Earth, and Brashan meant they could roam it at will.

Birhat Tyrannotops are no danger with Brashan along, and with Dahak monitoring the situation. Plus the enhanced dogs.

Not that they'd have such freedom much longer. Sean had been vested with the first official sign of his status as Heir last year when he was presented to Mother, for under the Great Charter Mother passed on the acceptability of the Heir's intellect and psych-profile. He'd been accepted, and the subliminal challenge-response patterns and implant codes which identified him as Heir had been implanted, but it had been the scariest moment of his life—and a clear sign that adulthood was coming closer.

Mother confirms Sean as heir, testing his IQ and psych-profile as well as his genetics. I suppose this means Mother was set up to exclude insane or stupid Emperors.

The city of Phoenix lay before him in the night, the serpentine curve of the River Nikkan sparkling far below, and Tsien Tao-ling's engineering crews had done well by Birhat's settlers. Phoenix was the product of a gravitonic civilization, and its towers soared even above the mighty near-sequoias about them, but the Palace was the tallest spire of all. Perhaps some thought that was to reflect its inhabitants' rank, but the real reason was practicality. True, the imperial family had luxurious personal quarters, but that was almost a side effect of the Imperium's administrative needs. Even a structure as vast as the Palace was badly overcrowded by functionaries and bureaucrats, though the new Annex going up next door would help . . . for a while.

Phoenix, primary city of Birhat.

He raised his gaze to the heavens, and the stars were hard to see. The gleaming disk of Mother's fortress hull hung almost directly overhead, and over fifty huge planetoids dotted the night sky beyond her. They were much farther out (the comings and goings of that many "moons" would play merry hell with Birhat's tides), but the sunlight reflected from their hulls gilded the Fifth Imperium's capital in bronze and ebony. And on the farside of the planet from Mother—indeed, just about directly over the spot where his children were even now observing their tyranotops—hung another vast sphere named Dahak.

"God, 'Tanni," he murmured, "look at that."

"Aye." She squeezed him gently. " 'Tis like unto God's own gem box."

Just a really cool image.

"Oh, it probably would've come to you eventually. But unless something goes wrong in a big way, 'Tanni and I are gonna be around for centuries, and a professional crown prince could get mighty bored in that much time. Besides, we're young enough it's unlikely Sean will outlive us by more than a century or so. It'd be a dead waste of his life to wait that long for such a brief reign."

"Indeed. The classic example from your own recent history would, of course, be that of Queen Victoria and Edward VII. The tragic waste of Edward's potential did great disservice to his country, and—"

"Maybe," Colin interrupted, "but I wasn't thinking about the Imperium. I want our kids to do something, and not for the Imperium. I want them to be able to look back and know they were winners, not place-holders. And I want them to know all the nice perks—the rank and deference, the flattery they're gonna hear—don't mean a thing unless they earn them."

He fell silent for a moment, feeling Jiltanith's silent agreement as she hugged him tight, and stared up to where Mother hung overhead like the very embodiment of an emperor's power and treacherous grandeur.

"Dahak," he said finally, "Herdan's dynasty ruled for five thousand years. Five thousand years. That's not a long time for someone like you, but it's literally beyond the comprehension of a human. Yet long as it was, impossible as it is for me to imagine, our kids—and their kids, and their kids' kids—may rule even longer. I can't begin to guess what they'll face, the sorts of decisions they'll have to make, but there's one thing 'Tanni and I can give them, starting right here and now with Sean and Harry. Not for the Imperium, though the Imperium'll profit from it, but for them."

"What, Colin?" Dahak asked quietly.

"The knowledge that power is a responsibility. The belief that who they are and what they do is as important as what they're born to. A tradition of—well, of service. Becoming Emperor should be the capstone of a life, not a career in itself, and 'Tanni and I want our kids—our family—to remember that. That's why we're sending them to the Academy, and why we won't have anyone kowtowing to them, much as some of the jerks who work for us would love to."

Dahak was silent for a moment—a very long moment, for him—before he spoke again. "I believe I understand you, Colin, and you are correct. Sean and Harriet do not yet realize what you and 'Tanni have done for them, but someday they will understand. And you are wise to make service a tradition rather than a matter of law, for my observation of human polities suggests that laws are more easily subverted than tradition."

"Yeah, that's what we thought, too," Colin said.

Colin's reasoning for pushing his kids into the military rather than having a full-time heir lounging around the palace and being bratty.

There were no domestic robots at the Academy. Some of the Fleet and Marine officers had pointed out that their own pre-Imperial military academies had provided their midshipmen and cadets with servants in order to free them from domestic concerns and let them concentrate on their studies. Admiral Robbins, however, was a product of the US military tradition. She was a great believer in the virtues of sweat, and no one had quite had the nerve to argue with her when she began designing the Academy's syllabus and traditions. The fact that His Imperial Majesty Colin I sprang from the same tradition as Admiral Robbins may also have had a little something to do with that, but the mechanics behind the decision meant little to the plebes faced with its consequences, and Sean had labored manfully against this dreadful moment. Now he stood silent, buttons gleaming like tiny suns, boots so brightly polished it was difficult to tell they were black, and used the full enhancement he'd finally received to keep from sweating bullets.

Sean's bunk inspection. Academy students are expected to keep their rooms orderly without the assistance of robots. Sean uses enhancement to stop himself from sweating. Interesint. Control of autonomic functions?

"Sounds like you're on top of things, Vlad . . . as usual." Vlad smiled, and Colin smiled back. "Having said that, how's Earth's shield coming?"

"Quite well," Vlad said. "The only real problem is the task's simple magnitude. We have emplaced forty percent of the primary generators and work is beginning on the subordinate stations. I fear the asteroid belt has all but vanished, but the Centauris freighters are keeping pace."

Not just another Mother, Colin is duplicating Bia's inner-system shield for Earth to.

Colin nodded. Spaceborne Imperial "smelters" could render almost any material down to its basic elements to synthesize the composites and alloys Imperial industry needed, like the battle steel which formed Battle Fleet's planetoids, but even Imperial synthetics required some starting point. The raw materials to build things the size of Mother or Dahak had to come from somewhere, and the huge freighters of the Imperium's "mining expeditions" could—and did—transport the rubble of entire planets to the fabrication centers. The Centauris System, unfortunately for it, was conveniently close to Sol, and its original eleven planets had already been reduced to nine. Soon there would be only eight as gravitonic warheads blew yet another to splinters to feed the insatiable appetite of Earth's orbital shipyards.

Some of the capabilities and scale of Imperial industry. Breaking down almost any material to the elemental level to reassemble it as something more useful. Demolition of uninhabited planets to provide raw materials for things like planetoids.

"In the meantime, Baltan and Dahak have completed plans for Stepmother." Several councilors' eyes narrowed with interest. "We have yet to fully explore Mother's memory, but we are confident we have extracted all the essential programs for her Battle Fleet and constitutional functions. Stepmother's final core programming parameters remain flexible, however, as it seems probable additions will be required as our studies here in Bia continue. Of course, the entire project will require many years, but Horus, Tao-ling and I intend to initiate construction within three months."

Getting started on Stepmother.

"Those are much further advanced, despite the usual unforeseen delays. Imperial Terra should commission within four years."

Imperial Terra, The first planetoid actually designed and built by the Fifth Imperium.

"The pilot computers have been up and running for over two years, Ger," Amesbury said, "and Dahak's original figures have been spot on. Incorporating that Achuultani logic circuit into our energy-state designs has raised the speed of operations another five percent, and we've included more responsiveness to nonspecific prompts in the software. They aren't self-aware, of course, but they have about thirty percent more autonomous decision-making capability. I believe you'll be quite pleased with the results."

Just to start with, their computer hardware is 5% quicker than Fourth Empire computers, and while still not self-aware, their computers are considerably more autonomus.

"I wish Isis were here to tell you this herself, but she wasn't up to the trip. However—" she raised her eyes "—I'm pleased to announce that the first free Narhani female in seventy-eight million years was born at oh-two-thirty-four Greenwich time this morning." A soft sound of surprise ran around the table, and Cohanna smiled mistily. "Isis was there, and she's named the child 'Eve.' So far as we can tell, she's absolutely healthy."

Eve?

She'd always loved beauty, and she was both amused and genuinely pleased by the effect neural computer feeds had produced on the printing industry. Man had rediscovered that books were treasures, not simply a means of conveying information, and the volume she held was a masterpiece of the printer's art.

Glad that happened in-story. Could wish it were the case in real life.

Datachips were far smaller and easier to hide. She and her allies knew that, but they also knew few modern security people thought in terms of anything as clumsy as written messages, which meant few looked for them. And, of course, data that was never in electronic storage couldn't be extracted from electronic storage by a computer named Dahak.

Dahak's mad hacking skills are well-known. Good thing he's so close to the Emperor or he could get in resal trouble though. Also, seriously? This part takes place roughly 20 years after the invasion, or a bit over 70 into our future, and the cops have largely forgotten the ability to pass on hardcopy notes?

MacIntyre and his crowd were finally ready to begin on Stepmother, and she agreed with her ally's assessment. By rights, Stepmother ought to represent an enormous threat to their long-term plans, but that could be changed. With a little luck and a great deal of hard work, the "threat" was going to become the advantage that let them bring off the most ambitious coup d'etat in human history, instead.

She gnawed her thumbnail thoughtfully. In many ways, she'd prefer to strike now, but Stepmother had to be closer to completion. Not complete, but within sight of it. That gave them their time frame, and she was beginning to understand the purpose that godawful gravitonic warhead would serve. Her eyes gleamed appreciatively as she considered the implications. It would be their very own Reichstag fire, and the Narhani gave them such a splendid "internal threat" to justify the "special powers" their candidate for the crown would invoke to insure Stepmother got finished the right way.

Good luck with that. The plan is taking shape.

[Ahriman238]

The planet Marha, seventeen light-minutes from Bia and smaller than Mars, had never been much of a planet, and it had become less of one when the Fourth Imperium made it a weapons testing site. For two thousand years, until antimatter and gravitonic warheads made planetary tests superfluous, fission, fusion, and kinetic weapons had gouged and ripped its near-airless surface into a tortured waste whose features defied all logical prediction.

Which was precisely why the Imperial Marines loved Marha. It was a wonderful place to teach infantry the finer points of killing other people, and Generals Tsien and MacMahan were delighted to share it with Admiral Robbins' midshipmen. Naval officers might not face infantry combat often, but they couldn't always avoid it, either, and not knowing what they were doing was a good way to get people (especially their Marine-type people) killed.

Marine training ground at Marha.

An enhanced person could move in powered-down combat armor, if its servos were unlocked. It wasn't easy (especially for someone Sandy's size), but the sheer grunt work could be worth it under the right circumstances. Unpowered armor had no energy signature, and it even hid any emissions from its wearer's implants, which meant his raiders were virtually invisible.

The only real threat was optical detection, and he'd noticed that while his peers gave lip service to the importance of optical systems, they relied on more sophisticated sensors. He'd started to mention that during the critique of the last field exercise, but then he'd remembered he would be leading this one . . . and that the Academy didn't give out prizes for losing.

Enhanced cadets using powered-down armor for stealth. A number of soldiers depend on advanced snesors, despite being told repeatedly to not neglect the Mk. II eyeball. (well, their eyes have undergone a serious upgrade.)

But The Book hadn't envisioned having a company of raiders barely half a klick away, well inside the sensor perimeter which should have protected Onishi's tactical HQ and ready to decapitate his entire command structure before Tamman (who'd always wanted to be a Marine anyway, for some strange reason) led in the main force.

0.5 km 'inside' sensor perimeter for field headquarters.

Colin MacIntyre had lost ninety-four percent of the Fourth Empire's resurrected Imperial Guard Flotilla in the Zeta Trianguli Campaign. Only five ships remained, and repairing them had taken years, but they were back in service now. They were also fundamentally different from the rest of the Fifth Imperium's planetoids, for their computers lacked the Alpha imperatives which compelled the rest of Battle Fleet to obey Mother, not the Emperor directly. Herdan the Great, the Fourth Empire's founder, had set Battle Fleet up that way as an intentional safeguard, since Mother wouldn't obey an emperor who'd been constitutionally removed by the Assembly of Nobles or whose actions violated the Great Charter stored in her memory. That neatly cut the legs out from under a monarch with tyranny on his mind, but the Guard was the Emperor's personal command, and its units weren't hardwired to obey Mother.

One of Herdan's many safeguards against tyranny.

Colin nodded but said nothing, for he was concentrating on the neural feed he'd plugged into Mother's scanners. Imperial Terra had to be at least twelve light-minutes from Bia to enter hyper, and he sat silent for the full ten minutes she took to reach the hyper threshold. Then she blinked out, with no more fuss than a soap bubble, and he sighed.

12 light minute hyper limit still.

The Traffic Police flyer screamed through the Washington State night at Mach twelve. That was pushing the envelope in atmosphere, even for a gravitonic drive, but this one looked bad, and the tense-faced pilot concentrated on his flying while his partner drove his scan systems at max.

Polic flyer does Mach 12 in atmosphere, which is apparently pushing it even for gravitonic aircraft.

Underway holo displays had always fascinated Sean, especially because he knew how little they resembled what a human eye would actually have seen.

Under the latest generation Enchanach drive, for example, a ship covered distance at eight hundred and fifty times light-speed, yet it didn't really "move" at all. It simply flashed out of existence here and reappeared over there. The drive built its actual gravity masses in less than a femtosecond, but the entire cycle took almost a full trillionth of a second in normal space between transpositions. That interval was imperceptible, and there was no Doppler effect to distort vision, since during those tiny periods of time the ship was effectively motionless, but any human eye would have found it impossible to sort out the visual stimuli as its point of observation shifted by two hundred and fifty-four million kilometers every second.

So the computers generated an artificial image, a sort of tachyon's-eye view of the universe. The glorious display enfolded the bridge in a three-hundred-sixty-degree panorama whose nearer stars moved visibly and gave humanity the comforting illusion of moving through a comprehensible universe.

850 c Enchanach Drive. The viewscreen creates the obligatory "warp speed' effect to provide a comforting illusion of constant movement, even though the ship is telepoting many millions of times a second at 254,000,000 km a hop.

The imaging computers confronted different parameters at sublight speeds. The Fifth Imperium's gravitonic drive had a maximum sublight velocity of a smidgen over seventy percent of light-speed (missiles could top .8 c before their drives lost phase lock and Bad Things happened) and countered mass and inertia. That conferred essentially unlimited maneuverability and allowed maximum velocity to be attained very quickly—not instantly; a vessel's mass determined the efficiency curves of its drive—without turning a crew into anchovy paste. But unlike a ship under Enchanach drive, sublight ships did move relative to the universe, and so had to worry about things like relativity. Time dilation became an important factor aboard them, and so did the Doppler effect. To the unaided eye, stars ahead tended to vanish off the upper end of the visible spectrum, while those astern red-shifted off its bottom.

just over .7 c for sublight speed, likely indicating naother marginal increase in ability. Missiles can do .8. Plus virtually unlimited manuverability and very swift accel/decel, though they can only do true instant accel/decel with unmanned craft.

Then there was hyper-space. Imperial Terra, like all Battle Fleet planetoids, had three distinct drive systems: sublight, Enchanach, and hyper, and her top speed in hyper was over thirty-two hundred times that of light. Yet "hyper-space" was more a convenient label for something no human could envision than an accurate description, for it consisted of many "bands"—actually a whole series of entirely different spaces—whose seething tides of energy were lethal to any object outside a drive field. Even with Imperial technology, human eyes found h-space's gray, crawling nothingness . . . disturbing. Vertigo was almost instantaneous; longer exposure led to more serious consequences, up to and including madness. Ships in normal space could detect the hyper traces of ships in hyper; ships in hyper were blind. They could "see" neither into normal space nor through hyper-space, and so their displays were blank.

Or, more precisely, they showed other things. Aboard Imperial Terra, Captain McNeal preferred holo projections of his native Galway coast, but the actual choice depended on who had the watch. Commander Yu, for example, liked soothing, abstract light sculptures, while Captain Susulov, the exec, had a weakness for Jerusalem street scenes. The only constant was the holographic numerals suspended above the astrogator's station: a scarlet countdown showing the time remaining to emergence at the ship's programmed coordinates.

Now Sean sat at Commander Yu's side, watching the sun set over Galway Bay while Captain McNeal waited for his ship to emerge from hyper in the Urahan System, twelve days—and over a hundred light-years—from Bia.

Looking out into hyperspace can cause insanity, for different reasons than 40k, thankfully. So they usually just keep a countdown to reversion timer and project images of whatever the heck they feel like.

Imperial Terra dropped back into humanity's universe sixty-three light-minutes from the F3 star Urahan. The Urahan System had never been a Fleet base, but a survey ship had found a surprising number of planetoids orbiting in its outer reaches . . . for reasons which became grimly clear once the survey crew managed to reactivate the first derelict's computers.

No one had ever lived on any of Urahan's planets, so starships contaminated by the bio-weapon could do no harm there. As ship after ship became infected and their people began to sicken, their officers had taken them to Urahan or some other unpopulated system and placed them in parking orbit.

And then they'd died.

Galway Bay vanished. Scores of planetoids appeared, drifting against the stars, gleaming dimly in the reflected light of Urahan, and Sean shivered as he watched six of Terra's parasites move across the display, carrying forty thousand people towards the transports and repair ships of the Ministry of Reconstruction keeping station on those dead hulls.

Urahan, one of several systems where infected planetoids flew to die harmlessly during the plague. Now site of a large salvage/restoration operation, and the first part of Imperial Terra's mission is to drop off 40,000 more men for the repair crews.

Sean sat beside the park deck lake, skimming stones across the water. A bio-enhanced arm could send them for incredible distances, and he watched the skittering splashes vanish into the mist while his implants' low-powered force field shielded him from the falling rain.

Even the ability to skip stones gets affected by enhancement. Also, damn it! Once again, the existence of a shield generator implant is brought up solely for the character to keep dry in the rain with.

I like it." Brashan trotted down to the lake and waded out belly-deep into the water. Unlike his human friends, he was in uniform, but Narhani uniform consisted solely of a harness to support his belt pouches and display his insignia, and Sean felt a familiar spurt of envy. Brashan had to spend more time polishing his leather and brightwork, but he'd never had to worry about getting a spot out of his dress trousers in his life.

Narhani Fleet uniform.

Terra was somewhat larger than an Asgerd-class planetoid, but she carried far fewer people, mostly because her sublight parasites, while larger and more powerful than their predecessors, had been designed around smaller crews. Horus' old Nergal had required three hundred crewmen, and even the Fourth Empire's sublight battleships had needed crews of over a hundred. With their Dahak-designed computers, Imperial Terra's were designed for core crews of only thirty, and even that was more of a social than a combat requirement.

Yet Terra's personnel still numbered over eighty thousand. Each of them was superbly trained, ready for any emergency, but all of those eighty thousand people depended upon what their computers told them and relied upon Comp Cent to do what it was told. From the engineers tending the roaring energy whirlpool of her core tap to the logistics staff managing her park decks and life support, they worked in an intimate fusion with their cybernetic henchmen, united through their neural feeds.

Continuous self-diagnostic programs scrutinized every aspect of those computers' operations, alert for any malfunction while Imperial Terra's crewmen stood their watches and monitored their displays, and those displays told them all was well as their ship tore through hyper. But all was not well, for none of Imperial Terra's crew knew about the Alpha Priority commands a programmer now dead with his entire family had inserted into their ship's computer, and so none of them knew Comp Cent had become a traitor.

Reprogramming of Comp Cent. Imperial Terra has a crew size of 80,000, less than a third the nominal crew size of the original Dahak. Apparently this is owed mostly to a smaller parasite command, as the parasites are more automated, so crew sizes shrink.

Implies a large percentage of a planetoid's crew is involved in some way with the parasites, as crew or as matinence. Dahak's parasite battleships required 300 man crews, the Fourth Empire shrank that to 100, and the Fifth Imperium to 30.

"Three-minute warning," a calm, female voice interrupted the Narhani. "Parasite launch in three minutes. Assume launch stations."

Sean whirled to the command console. Launch stations? You couldn't launch a parasite in hyper-space without destroying parasite and mother ship alike—any moron knew that!—but the boards were blinking to life, and his jaw clenched as the launch clock began to count down.

Hazards of launching parasites while in hyperspace. Bogus message lures the kids to a planetoid about to get kicked out.

She reappeared in normal space, over a light-year from the nearest star, and the battleship Israel screamed out of her bay under full emergency power. Her drive field shredded centimeter-thick battle steel bulkheads and splintered hatches the size of an aircraft carrier's flight deck. She massed over a hundred and twenty thousand tons, and Imperial Terra's alarms screamed as she reamed the access shaft into tangled ruin.

Sean MacIntyre gasped in fear, pressed back into his couch by a cold-start, full-power launch. The battleship was moving at twenty percent of light-speed when she erupted from the air-spewing wound of her bay, and her speed was still climbing!

Battleship Israel masses 120,000 tons, larger than any of Dahak's old parasites. Can reach .2 c at emergency boost before it even clears the planetoid. Hatches 'the size of aircraft carrier flight decks' but given the size and number of parasites, are you really suprised?

Comp Cent watched Israel accelerate clear and noted the faithful discharge of one set of Alpha Priority commands. With that detail out of the way, it could turn to its other imperatives.



Harriet cried out in horror, and Sean cringed as Imperial Terra's core tap blew, and eighty thousand people vanished in an eye-searing glare.

Death of Imperial Terra.

[Ahriman238]

Adrienne nodded slowly, eyes huge. Many of the Fourth Empire's system governors had erected defenses in desperate efforts to quarantine their planets against the bio-weapon, but communications had been so chaotic as the Empire died that no one knew what any given governor might have cobbled up. The only way to find out was to go see, and if no one had yet encountered anything capable of standing up to a planetoid, there was always the possibility someone would. That was why all survey ships were required to report by hypercom within two hours of arrival in any unexplored system.

"It might be a hypercom failure," she suggested, but her own tone told her how little she believed it.

"Anything's possible," Hatcher said expressionlessly. The hypercom was massive and complex, but its basic technology had been refined for over six millennia. One might fail once in four or five centuries: certainly no more often. They both knew that, and they stared at one another in sick silence.

Quarantine systems, standard procedure for exploring a new system mandates chack-in within 2 hours, and how extraordinarily reliable the hypercom is.

Fifteen Asgerd-class planetoids erupted from hyper-space ten light-minutes from the G4 star Thegran. They came out in battle formation, with shields up and enough weapons on-line to destroy an entire solar system. Every sensor was at max, seeking any threat and searching for any lifeboat's beacon.

But there was nothing to engage . . . and no beacons.

Response to missing planetoid. 10 light minute jump limit now, probably because it's a slightly different type of star.

A chair squeaked as the man in it finished the report and turned to look out his office window. The Imperium was in mourning, and even the most fiery malcontents were muted by the shock and sorrow of a race. Every flag of humankind flew at half-mast, but there was no sorrow in his heart. The heirs were gone, and the children of the imperial family's closest friends had gone with them. Grief and loss would weaken them, make them less vigilant, blunt their perceptions and reactions, and that was good.

Fifth Imperium reaction to the kid's apparent death.

Sandy lay like a dead woman in the tactical officer's couch, but Sean was used to her utter concentration on the task in hand. Besides, he could see her breathing. He flipped his feed into her net, nudging her gently, and felt her acknowledgment. She began to disengage from her painstaking computer diagnostics, and he fired another message off to Tamman and Brashan, summoning them from their examination of Engineering for a conference.

What it looks like when a person gets really deeply involved with their nueral interface.

He looked up as Tamman and Brashan entered the command deck. Tamman still looked drawn and pinched, but Brashan seemed almost calm. Which, Sean reflected, might owe something to the famed Narhani lack of imagination. Personally, he'd always thought of it more as pragmatism. Narhani were more concerned with the nuts and bolts of a problem than with its implications, and he was glad of it. Brashan's levelheadedness was exactly what they all needed just now, for, to use the current Academy phrase, they were up to their eyebrows in shit.

Tamman perched on the assistant tactical officer's couch beside Sandy while Brashan keyed a reconfiguration command into the exec's couch. It twitched for a moment, then reformed itself into a Narhani-style pad, and he folded onto it just as Sandy shook her head and roused. She sat up with a wan smile that still held a ghost of her familiar humor, and Sean grinned back wryly. Then he cleared his throat.

Psychological differences between Narhani and humans, seats that reconfigure to wither species on command.

"First of all, we're nowhere near where we're supposed to be. Israel's astro data is limited—normally, sublight units don't much need interstellar data—but we've got the old basic Fourth Empire cartography downloads. Working from them and allowing for forty-odd thousand years of stellar motion, we're just about smack in the middle of the Tarik Sector."

"The Tarik Sector?" Tamman sounded dubious, and Sean didn't blame him.

"Exactly." Harriet's voice was calmer than Sean knew she was. "Whatever happened took Terra off her programmed course by something like plus seventy-two degrees declination and fifty degrees left ascension from Urahan, then brought her out of hyper three days early on top of it. At the moment, we're five-point-four-six-seven light-centuries from Birhat, as near as Sean and I can figure it, on a bearing no one could possibly have predicted."

How far off-course and away from home they are. Also, Fifth Imperium parasites carry detailed stellar maps of their planned deployment areas, with all the 40,000 year-old data they have. Outside of their scheduled destinations, they have only rudimentary maps, enough to tell them where they are, but not where the nearest habitable planets are.

"That," he said, "is an F5 star at about one-point-three light-years. We don't know which one it is, so we don't know if it had any habitable planets even before the bio-weapon hit, but the next nearest candidate for a life-bearing world is this G6—" a second sighting ring blossomed "—over eleven light-years away. It's going to take us a while to reach either of them at our best sustained sublight speed, but it'd take something like nine hundred years to get back to Bia—assuming Israel's systems would hold up for a voyage that long. On the other hand, we can get to the F5 in just under two-point-two years. At point-six cee, we'll have a tau of about point-eight, so the subjective time will be about twenty-one months. That's a long time, and we've only got two stasis pods, so we'll have to put up with each other awake the whole way, but I don't see that we have any other option. Comments?"

Picking a destination. 21 subjective months could be a very long time to be stuck with the same four people in a lifeboat. At least they're already good friends.

"All right, Brashan Brashieel-nahr!" Sandy hurled a boot at the centauroid. Sean hadn't seen her take it off, but a six-fingered hand darted up and caught it in mid-flight, and Brashan made the bubbling noise that always reminded Sean of a clogged drain trying—vainly—to clear itself.

The laughing Narhani returned Sandy's boot without rising, inclining his saurian-looking head in a gallant bow, and Sean shook his head. Like most Narhani clone-children, Brashan had spent so much time with humans his elders found his sense of humor quite incomprehensible, but he was also a far shrewder student of human psychology than he cared to pretend. He understood humans needed to laugh in order not to weep. And, Sean thought with heightened respect, perhaps he also understood how his teasing could help set his human friends at ease with a topic which was certainly going to rear its head.

I don't know what's wrong with the new generation. When we were that age, we didn't have time for jokes and didn't know sex existed. All we wanted to do was wipe out all other life in the universe.

"Brash and I haven't quite finished our inspection, but as far as we've been everything looks a hundred percent. The power plant's nominal, anyway, and the catcher field shows a green board. Once we get up above about point-three cee we'll be sucking in more hydrogen than we're burning. And the drive looks fine, despite that crash launch."

From which I infer that Imperial fusion uses hydrogen.

"First thing we checked. No problems with the plant, but we may have one with rations." Sean raised an eyebrow, and Tamman shrugged. "There were only five Narhani in Terra's entire complement, Sean. I haven't had a chance to run a Logistics inventory yet, but we could be low on supplementals."

"Uh." Sean tugged at an earlobe and frowned. Narhani body chemistry incorporated a level of heavy metals lethal to humans; Brashan could eat anything his friends could, but he couldn't metabolize all of it, nor would it provide everything he needed.

"Don't worry," Sandy said. Sean looked at her and saw the absent expression of someone plugged into her computers. "Logistics shows a heap of Narhani supplementals. In fact, we've got six or seven times our normal food supplies in all categories, and the hydroponic section's way overstocked. Which—" her eyes refocused and she grimaced "—isn't too surprising, really."

Israel overstocked with food, Narhani require asome heavy metals in their diet.

A hypercom massed five times as much as Israel's entire hull and required synthetic elements they couldn't possibly fabricate from shipboard resources.

No hypercom aboard Israel, and no way to build one. Hypercoms ~600,000 tons.

"But getting back to what happened," Harriet went on, "Terra was set up to destroy herself and make sure no evidence ever turned up. That has to be why she took herself way out here first. But I'll bet you that was her idea. Whoever programmed her expected her to scuttle herself while she was still in hyper, in which case there wouldn't have been any n-space debris at all. That's how I would've handled it."

"Me, too," Sean agreed. "And the reason she didn't do it?"

"Dahak," Harriet said with utter certainty. "You know how he looks out for us. Whoever sabotaged Terra had to be working inside her Alpha programming, and that means whatever caused her not to kill us was also buried in her Alpha priorities. And who do we know who worries about us and has the capability to get in and out of any computer ever built?"

"Dahak." It was Sean's turn to nod.

So the conspiracy programmed Imperial Terra to destroy itself and leave no evidence, Alpha Priority. But Dahak also programmed in an Alpha Priority directive to protect the kids.

If their childrens' lives hadn't been saved by the act, I could see Colin and 'Tanni being pissed off over that.

"All right. If that's what happened—and I think you and Sandy are probably right, Harry—then we shouldn't run into any more 'programs from hell' in Israel's software. On the other hand, the trip's going to take long enough I don't mind spending a few days making certain. Do any of you?"

Three human heads shook emphatically and Brashan curled his crest in an equally definite expression of disagreement. Sean grinned crookedly.

"I'm glad you agree. But in the meantime, it's been over six hours since everything went to hell. I don't know about you, but I'm starved."

The others looked momentarily taken aback by his prosaic remark, but all of them had young, healthy appetites. Surprise turned quickly into agreement, and he smiled more naturally.

"Who wants to cook?"

"Anyone but you." Sandy's shudder elicited a chorus of agreement. Sean MacIntyre was one of the very few people in the universe who could burn boiling water.

"All right, Ms. Smartass, I hereby put you in charge of the galley."

"Suits me. Lasagna, I think, and a special side dish delicately spiced with arsenic for Brashan." She eyed Israel's youthful commander. "And maybe we can convince him to share it with you, Captain Bligh," she added sweetly.

There was a time in my life when I never considered a car trip or plane truly begun until I'd annoyed one of my siblings. The more things change...

He rolled over and wrapped her in his arms, and she drew into an even tighter knot, burying her face in the pillow she clutched. She was ashamed, he thought. She condemned herself for her "weakness," and another flash of irrational anger gripped him—anger at her for hurting herself so. But he strangled it and murmured her name and kissed her hair. She clenched the pillow tautly an instant longer, and then every muscle unknotted at once and she wept in desolation as he gathered her close.

He stroked her heaving shoulders, caressing and kissing her while his own tears flowed, but he offered no clichés, no ultimately meaningless words. He was simply there, holding her and loving her. Proving she was not alone as she'd once proved he was not, until gradually—so heartbreakingly gradually—her weeping eased and she drifted into exhausted slumber on his chest while he stared into the dark from the ache of his own loss and hated a universe that could hurt her so.

Whatever else their virtues, Colin and 'Tanni do not handle grief especially well. Not that there's a good way to take the senseless death of your two children and three of your friends' children.

Dahak closed the file on Imperial Terra's hyper drive once more. Had he possessed a body of flesh and blood he would have sighed wearily, but he was a being of molycircs and force fields. Fatigue was alien to him, a concept he could grasp from observation of biological entities but never feel . . . unlike grief. Grief he'd learned to understand too well in the months since the twins had died, and he'd learned to understand futility, as well.

It was odd, a tiny part of his stupendous intellect thought, that he'd never recognized the difference between helplessness and futility. He'd orbited Earth for fifty thousand years, trapped between a command to destroy Anu and another which forbade him to use the weapons that would have required on a populated world. Powerful enough to blot the planet from the cosmos yet impotent, he'd learned the full, bitter measure of helplessness in a way no human ever could. But in all that time, he'd never felt futile—not as he felt now—for he'd understood the reason for his impotence . . . then.

Not now. He'd reconsidered every aspect of Imperial Terra's design with Baltan and Vlad and Geran, searching for the flaw which had doomed her, and they'd found nothing. He'd run simulation after simulation, reproducing every possible permutation on Imperial Terra's performance envelope in an effort to isolate the freak combination of factors which might have destroyed her, and no convincing hypothesis presented itself.

The universe was vast, but it was governed by laws and processes. There was always more to learn, even (or especially) for one like himself, yet within the parameters of what one could observe and test there should be understanding and the ability to achieve one's ends. That was the very essence of knowledge, but he'd used every scrap of knowledge he owned to protect the people he loved . . . and failed.

He'd already decided never to tell Colin about the Alpha Priority command he'd given Imperial Terra. It had failed, and revealing it would only hurt his friends as one more safeguard—one more effort on his part—which had saved nothing. They had not said a word to condemn him for insisting upon that particular ship, nor would they. He knew that, and knowing only made the hurt worse. He'd done harm enough; he would not wound them again.

He was different from his friends, for he was potentially immortal and, even with enhancement, they were such ephemeral beings. Yet the brevity of their span only made them more precious. He would have the joy of their company for such a short time, and then they would live only in his memory, lost and forgotten by the universe and their own species. That was why he fought so hard against the darkness, the reason for his fierce protectiveness.

And it was also why, for the first time in his inconceivable lifetime, a wounded part of him cried out in anguish and futility against a universe which had destroyed the ones he loved for no reason he could find.

Dahak's trying to deal with it. As an effectively immortal, inherently logical being, Dahak understands the inevitability of death. As an emotional entity, a true person, he cannot accept it.

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

The dogs again.

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

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

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

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

Dogs' ability to grasp symbols and abstracts extends to board and card games. Naturally 'Tanni, a woman who spent eighty years running a global intelligence network in a shadow war, lacks the patience or subtlety to play chess.

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

Ninhursag stumbles onto the accident report for Vincent Cruz, progammer for Imperial Terra. Spotting a couple of anomalies, she looks into it and finds good reason to suspect he was forced to sabotage Terra with threats to his family, then murdered.

Of course, we already know that's exactly what happened, 3rd person omniscient perspective and all.

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

Which isn't to say that X didn't take some steps to cover his tracks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imperial lie detectors, and some of the legal protections against their abuse. Damned inconvenient when you're running a witch hunt for perfectly valid reasons.

"That is an incorrect assumption. Horus is a member of the imperial family, true, but he is not your heir. He would become a potential heir only should you and 'Tanni die without issue, and with all due respect, I believe the Assembly of Nobles would be unlikely to select one of Horus's advanced years as Emperor. Mother might do so if she were required to execute Case Omega yet again, but she would do so only if there were no Assembly of Nobles to discharge that function. Moreover, Horus would not be the first choice even under Case Omega. The proper successor choice under Case Omega would be Admiral Hatcher, as CNO, followed by Star Marshal Tsien. Horus, as the highest civil official of the Imperium, would become the legal heir only if both of the Imperium's senior military officers were also dead. In addition, any open attack upon Horus would clearly risk awakening the suspicion the twins' 'accidental' deaths were intended to avoid. Thus any attempt to kill him before killing you, 'Tanni, Admiral Hatcher, and Star Marshal Tsien would be pointless unless we are, indeed, dealing with an irrational individual."

Imperial succession now that Colin's kids are out of the picture. Horus is the only member of the iMperial family they can't beef up security around without it being obvious, and he and Dahak are arguing there shouldn't be a need for extra security until the endgame anyway.

"Whatever we do, Colin, we do it very carefully," Ninhursag said. "We start by putting all of this on a strict need-to-know basis. I don't want to bring in anyone else—not even Gus. Without knowing how 'Mister X' gets his information, every individual added to the information net gives him another possible conduit, however careful our people are."

They're playing this one so close to the vest, they're not even bringing in the rest of Colin's inner circle.

"And then Dahak and I sit down with every bit of security data we have. Everything, military and civilian, from Day One of the Fifth Imperium. We find any anomalies, and then we eliminate them one at a time.

"In addition," she leaned back in her chair and frowned up at the ceiling, "we step up efforts to infiltrate every known group of malcontents. Those're underway already, so we don't have to give any new reasons for them. And while we flesh-and-bloods're doing that, Dahak, you jump into the datanets here in Bia and start setting up your own taps. Cruz could futz his terminal, but no one can get to you, so I want you tied into everything."

"Understood. I must point out, however, that I cannot achieve the same penetration of Earth's datanets."

Investigation plan includes going over every tape and file for security in the last 20 years looking for anomalies.

"No, but until we figure out what's going on, Colin and 'Tanni will never visit Earth simultaneously. We know someone's after them now, and as long as 'Mister X' has to get through you, ONI, Hector's Marines, and Battle Fleet to reach them, I think they're pretty safe, don't you?"

Security precautions until investigation is done. As X himself points out later in the book, Colin is effectively untouchable aboard Dahak.

Darin Gretsky leaned his broom in a corner and surveyed the well-lit workshop with a thin smile. He'd worked thirty years to prepare himself as a theoretical physicist, and during all those years he'd felt disdain for most of his fellows. He'd shared their thirst for knowledge, but for them, acclaim, respect, even power, were by-products of knowledge. For him, they were what knowledge was all about. His calculating pursuit of the lifestyle promised by corporate and governmental research empires had earned the contempt of his fellow students, but he hadn't cared, and the wealth and—especially—power he craved had been just within his reach . . . until Dahak and the explosion of Imperial science snatched them away.

Gretsky felt his jaw ache and made himself relax it. Overnight, he'd been transformed from a man on the cutting edge to an aborigine trying to understand that the strange marks on the missionary's white paper actually had meaning. He'd had the stature to be included in the first implant education programs, and, for a time during the Siege, he'd thought he might catch the crest of this new wave as he had the old. But once the emergency was past, Darin Gretsky had realized a horrible thing: he'd become no more than a technician. A flunky using knowledge others had amassed. Knowledge, he'd been forced to admit with bowel-churning hatred, he didn't truly understand.

It had almost destroyed him . . . and it had destroyed the life he'd planned. He'd become but one more of the thousands of Terra-born scientists exploring millennia of someone else's research and watching it invalidate much of what they'd believed was holy writ. There were no fellow students whose work he might steal, and it couldn't matter less who "published first." And worst of all, the ones for whom he'd felt contempt—the naive ones to whom it was knowledge itself which mattered—were better at it than he. The Terra-born scientists exploring the rarefied stratosphere of the Fourth Empire's tech base came from their number, and there was no room for Darin Gretsky save as one more hewer of wood and drawer of water in the dust about their feet.

My heart bleeds. Sixty times a minute, give or take. Nice to see some more of the upheavel caused by dumping millenia of technology onto Earth, but like with the education thing, this makes it sound morel ike only self-involved assholes get hurt, and I doubt this is the case.

He gave the workshop one more glance, then walked down the hall to the office in which he became not Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, but one more freelance consultant helping Terran industry cope with the flood of concepts pouring like water from the new Imperial Patent Office. Even that was merely picking the bones of the dead past, he thought acidly. Emperor Colin—the title was an epithet in his soul—had declared all civilian Imperial technology public knowledge, held by the Imperial government and leased at nominal fees to any and all users. The free flow of information was unprecedented, and old, well-established firms were being challenged by thousands of newcomers as the manna tumbled down and imagination became more important than mere capital.

Huh, so that's how COlin is managing intellectual property with regards to Imperial science and technology.

"I have a message for you, Doctor." Something in her voice set off a distant alarm, and his muscles tightened as the door opened once more and four or five men stepped through it. "A message from the Sword of God."

He leapt to his feet as her hand came out of the purse, but the last thing Darin Gretsky ever saw was the white, bright glare of a muzzle flash.

"Random" terrorist attack kills the disgruntled physicist X had building the world-ending bomb. This guy hasn't killed as many of his minions as Visser Three, but it's only a matter of time.

For example, he knew Gus was getting uncomfortably close to Francine. Gus didn't know it yet, but Jefferson did, and so Bishop Hilgemann was driving the Sword from the Church of the Armageddon. The excesses of zealotry must be forever anathema to the godly, and she was horrified by the thought that such misguided souls might be numbered among her flock. They must recognize the error of their ways or be cut off from the body of the faithful, for they had embraced a fundamental error. Hatred for the Achuultani and all other works of the Anti-Christ was every godly person's duty, but that hate must not be extended to the leadership which stood against the foe. Rather the errors of that leadership must be addressed nonviolently, by prayer and remonstrance, lest all the undeniable good it had achieved be lost, as well.

It was all very touching, and it had Gus a bit confused, since he didn't know about the conduits through which she directed those same zealots. What Gus hadn't quite grasped yet was that the Sword no longer required the infrastructure of the Church. No doubt Gus would figure it out, but by then it should be too late to find any institutional links to Bishop Hilgemann.

What? Terrorist backer publically condemns the violence while still slipping them funds, training and missions? This is supposed to confuse Gus Van Gelder, veteran security man?

Also, the Sword of God achieves a measure of financial independence. Good for them.

"Yes. You know how hard it's been to break their security. Even when we manage to take one or two of them alive, they're so tightly compartmented we can't ID anyone outside the cell they come from. But I've finally managed to get one of my people inside. I haven't reported it yet—we're playing her cover on a strict need-to-know basis—but she's just been tapped to serve as a link in the courier chain to her cell's main intelligence pipeline."

Gus tells Lawrence Jefferson, Horus' lieutenant governor, about their big break in infiltrating the Sword of God. To Weber's credit, we don't have the scene where Jefferson asks if he's told anyone else before killing him there in the office. But there's so much menace in his lines, it's sort of tough to imagine Gus not picking up on it.

"You flatter me." Jefferson slid the file into his own pocket. "Does Horus have the file access code?"

"No. Here—" Van Gelder flipped his feed into Jefferson's computer and used it to relay the code to the Lieutenant Governor, then wiped it from the computer's memory. "I hope you don't talk in your sleep," he cautioned.

"I don't," Jefferson assured him, rising to escort him to the door. He paused to shake his hand. "Again, let me congratulate you. This is a tremendous achievement. I'm sure there are going to be some very relieved people when they get this information."

... Or maybe it's all retrospective. In my head.

The "Sword of God's" escalating attacks worried her. One or two, like the one on Gus, had hurt them badly, and even the ones that weren't doing that much damage—except, she amended with a wince, to the people who died—achieved the classic terrorist goal of proving they could strike targets despite the authorities. Open societies couldn't protect every power station, transit terminal, and pedestrian belt landing, but anyone with the IQ of a rock knew that, and at least this time humanity seemed to have learned its lesson. Not even the intellectuals were suggesting the Sword might, for all its deplorable choice of tactics, have "a legitimate demand" to give it some sort of sick quasirespectability. Yet as long as these animals were willing to select targets virtually at random, no analyst could predict where they'd strike next, and they were killing people she was supposed to protect. Which was why they had to get someone inside the Sword if they ever expected to stop them.

She winced again as her roving thoughts reminded her of the single agent they had gotten inside. Janice Coatsworth had been an FBI field agent before the Siege, and Gus had been delighted to get her. She'd been one of his star performers—one of his "aces" as he called them—and she'd died the same day he had. Somehow she'd been made by the Sword, and they'd dumped what was left of her body on Gus's lawn the same day they killed him, his wife, and two of their four children. Four of his personal security staff had died, as well, two of them shielding his surviving children with their own bodies.

I'd strongly suspected Jefferson of being X up to this point, he being the newcomer everyone trusts and is positioned to know everything, but this is the part where reading the book for the first time, I knew it for sure.

Emphasis mine, because Weber starting to leak politics into his books again.

Each Fleet security chip was equipped with a built-in counter to record the numbers of copies which had been made of it, and while the counter could be wiped, it could not be altered. "According to our records, there should be ten copies of the plans—including the original chip—and all ten of those have now been accounted for. However, a total of ten copies were made of the original chip, and we do not know where that eleventh copy is.

"On the other hand, that original has been locked in the security vault at BuShips since the day all authorized copies were made, and none of the external or internal security systems show any sign of tampering. I therefore believe the additional copy was made at the same time as the authorized ones."

"Oh, shit," Hatcher moaned. "That was—what, six years ago?"

The extensive back checking leads them to discover that someone made an extra copy of the plans for the world-killer bomb.

"And while I wouldn't care to bet my life on it, I'd say Tao-ling is probably right. Particularly since a certain Senior Fleet Captain Janushka made the authorized copies. Two years ago, Commodore Janushka, who was then assigned to the Sol System as part of the Stepmother team, died of a 'cerebral hemorrhage.' "

She grimaced, and the others snorted. A properly pulsed power surge in a neural feed implant produced something only the closest examination could distinguish from a normal cerebral hemorrhage. But pulsed surges like that couldn't happen by accident, and an ME with no reason to suspect foul play might very well opt for the natural explanation.

One drawback to biotechnic enhancement, it becomes rather easy to disguise a murder as a cerebral hemorrage.

[Simon_Jester]

My heart bleeds. Sixty times a minute, give or take. Nice to see some more of the upheavel caused by dumping millenia of technology onto Earth, but like with the education thing, this makes it sound morel ike only self-involved assholes get hurt, and I doubt this is the case.

This is a fundamental problem with Weber that gets worse over the years. One of his stock characters is the "self-involved asshole who falls in with the bad guys and commits horrible treachery because he's a meanypants." The details of what he wants (power, vindictive revenge, money, "expensive tastes") varies, but it's always basically the same person and they often distort the perceptions of what the characters on the "bad guy" side of the line look like. They can always be identified by the towering resentment, self-pity, and contempt for others found in their internal monologue.

You can also identify a Designated Weber Meanypants because they use curse words in their internal monologuing. That's almost always a sign of evilness.

[Ahriman238]

My heart bleeds. Sixty times a minute, give or take. Nice to see some more of the upheavel caused by dumping millenia of technology onto Earth, but like with the education thing, this makes it sound morel ike only self-involved assholes get hurt, and I doubt this is the case.

This is a fundamental problem with Weber that gets worse over the years. One of his stock characters is the "self-involved asshole who falls in with the bad guys and commits horrible treachery because he's a meanypants." The details of what he wants (power, vindictive revenge, money, "expensive tastes") varies, but it's always basically the same person and they often distort the perceptions of what the characters on the "bad guy" side of the line look like. They can always be identified by the towering resentment, self-pity, and contempt for others found in their internal monologue.

You can also identify a Designated Weber Meanypants because they use curse words in their internal monologuing. That's almost always a sign of evilness.

Well... someone commiting horrible acts of treachery or villainy because of (power, revenge, money, "expensive tastes.") sort of goes with the turf of writing. Self-pity and contempt for others may or may not end up being part of the package.

I DO feel it would have been a bit more interesting seeing a sympathetic disgruntled man getting sucked into a treasonous conspiracy that kills him. Then again, if he did that I likely would have called him out on pointless side-drama.

On the other hand... there's a movie scene (Under Siege 2) that's always kind of stuck with me. A rogue CIA agent steals control of the satellite death-ray the agency had him build, and an admiral eventually asks why the hell the CIA always hires lunatics. The CIA man gives him a look, points to the viewscreen and says "Sane men do not build weapons like that!" It's a bit hard to imagine a decent human being, however down, building a world-destroying bomb for parties unknown and purposes unknown. And Colin's shiny new Imperium, though it has allowed humanity to survive and offers a fairly bright future, has also provided a wide pool of disgruntled people for the conspiracy to choose from, and they likely consider moral latitude a plus.

[Connor MacLeod]

The repetitive use of concepts is pretty common for alot of baen writers in the stuff i've read. and weber tend to recycle alot of stuff for his different series - there's always a version of hyperspace, reactionless drive, missile warfare, extradimensional energy taps, slow FTL transit speeds. starfire, dahakverse and honorverse all share all of that in common, and even the furyverse and apocalypse troll had elements of that as well. oh and powered armour. There's always powered armour.

I actually don't find that to be as problematic as I do his penchant (which has gottne progressively worse) for infodumping EVERYTHING. military, political, economic, and technological aspects get infodumped out the wazoo in his books, and he gets more and more verbose about it as time goes on. it's especially apparent in the honorverse when it comes to anything dealing with ship or missile intercepts and ranges and the like. He needs a damn editor to tell him to be concise, but that's unlikely to happen.

I have this sneaking suspicion that this growth is fuelled in part by his exposure to the baen bar and other places. it may be even feeding on itself - the more verbose and technical and explicit he gets, the greater the response to it is, which fuels even more.

[Simon_Jester]

Well... someone commiting horrible acts of treachery or villainy because of (power, revenge, money, "expensive tastes.") sort of goes with the turf of writing. Self-pity and contempt for others may or may not end up being part of the package.

What's striking about Weber is that it seems like it's almost always the same man every time, or feels like it. Something about the interaction between his writing style (which lays out character motivations very explicitly) and the nature of such characters (their motives are unsavory) just... bleh.

Comments about sane men not building weapons like that, though- agreed. That's right, now that you mention it.

[Ahriman238]

The repetitive use of concepts is pretty common for alot of baen writers in the stuff i've read. and weber tend to recycle alot of stuff for his different series - there's always a version of hyperspace, reactionless drive, missile warfare, extradimensional energy taps, slow FTL transit speeds. starfire, dahakverse and honorverse all share all of that in common, and even the furyverse and apocalypse troll had elements of that as well. oh and powered armour. There's always powered armour.

I actually don't find that to be as problematic as I do his penchant (which has gottne progressively worse) for infodumping EVERYTHING. military, political, economic, and technological aspects get infodumped out the wazoo in his books, and he gets more and more verbose about it as time goes on. it's especially apparent in the honorverse when it comes to anything dealing with ship or missile intercepts and ranges and the like. He needs a damn editor to tell him to be concise, but that's unlikely to happen.

I have this sneaking suspicion that this growth is fuelled in part by his exposure to the baen bar and other places. it may be even feeding on itself - the more verbose and technical and explicit he gets, the greater the response to it is, which fuels even more.

You forgot multiple "bands" if hyperspace.

Like I said, Weber is excellent at world-building, at fitting together a world with history, and culture and technology or magic (in his rare Oath of Swords books) that is wonderful. And naturally he likes to show off where he excels, which can hurt his stories. I honestly have no idea if he's getting worse or I'm just getting more impatient with it. An editor who can put the brakeso n him would be great, and I'm starting to wonder how much of this came about since Jim Baen died.

Then again, his need to provide everything with an explanation or a number is a boon to vs. debaters like us. We can calculate how quickly it'd take a crewman to cross Dahak using the transit tubes, if we want to.

In fact, In another 2-3 chapters (so probably my next large post) I'm going to get to the baseline figure I use for hyper missile "ranges." The problem not being so much the range, as the ability to target.

[Connor MacLeod]

weber's world building is kind of hit or miss too. He starts out with some good ideas, but he just seems to get way too caught up in the details, and then more details, and more and more details.... and the story (or at least the good parts) get lost in it. The repetition of ideas applies to his world building too, which kind of degrades from the overall world building. You actually don't need a whole heck of alot of detail, numbers, etc. to write a good story, you just need internal consistency. Details can help with that, but you have to balance that with the other important things - characters, plot, theme, etc.

the repetition in details might be forgivable if the characters and plot and such didn't suffer, but they literally get drowned out in the details details details, and that kills his appeal as a 'general' sci fi author and makes him another 'niche' author like Ringo. If you can ignore all the details it works as a popcorn book, but that's about it.