CHAPTER ONE

It was raining in the captain's quarters.

More precisely, it was raining in the three-acre atrium inside the captain's quarters. Senior Fleet Captain Colin MacIntyre, self-proclaimed Governor of Earth and latest commanding officer of the Imperial planetoid Dahak, sat on his balcony and soaked his feet in his hot-tub, but Fleet Captain Jiltanith, his tall, slender executive officer, had chosen to soak her entire person. Her neatly-folded, midnight-blue uniform lay to one side as she leaned back, and her long sable mane floated about her shoulders.

Black-bottomed holographic thunderheads crowded overhead, distant thunder rumbled, and lightning flickered on the "horizon," yet Colin's gaze was remote as he watched rain bounce off the balcony's shimmering force field roof. His attention was elsewhere, focused on the data being relayed through his neural feeds by his ship's central command computer.

His face was hard as the report played itself out behind his eyes, from the moment the Achuultani starships emerged from hyper to the instant of the sensor array's self-immolation. It ended, and he shook himself and looked down at Jiltanith for her reaction. Her mouth was tight, her ebon eyes cold, and for just a moment he saw not a lovely woman but the lethal killing machine which was his executive officer at war.

"That's it, then, Dahak?" he asked.

"It is certainly the end of the transmission, sir," a deep, mellow voice replied from the empty air. Thunder growled again behind the words in grimly appropriate counterpoint, and the voice continued calmly. "This unit was in the tertiary scanner phalanx, located approximately one hundred ten light-years to galactic east of Sol. There are no more between it and Earth."

"Crap," Colin muttered, then sighed. Life had been so much simpler as a NASA command pilot. "Well, at least we got some new data from it."

"Aye," Jiltanith agreed, "yet to what end, my Colin? 'Tis little enow, when all's said, yet not even that little may we send home, sin Earth hath no hypercom."

"I suppose we could turn back and deliver it in person," Colin thought aloud. "We're only two weeks out. . . ."

"Nay," Jiltanith disagreed. "Should we turn about 'twill set us back full six weeks, for we must needs give up the time we've but now spent, as well."

"Fleet Captain Jiltanith is correct, Captain," Dahak seconded, "and while these data are undoubtedly useful, they offer no fundamental insights necessary to Earth's defense."

"Huh!" Colin tugged at his nose, then sighed. "I guess you're right. It'd be different if they'd actually attacked and given us a peek at their hardware, but as it is—" He shrugged. "I wish to hell they had, though. God knows we could use some idea of what they're armed with!"

"True," Dahak agreed. "Yet the readings the sensor array did obtain indicate no major advances in the Achuultani's general technology, which suggests their weaponry also has not advanced significantly."

"I almost wish there were signs of advances," Colin fretted. "I just can't accept that they haven't got something new after sixty thousand years!"

"It is, indeed, abnormal by human standards, sir, but entirely consistent with surviving evidence from previous incursions."

"Aye," Jiltanith agreed, sliding deeper into the hot water with a frown, "yet still 'tis scarce credible, Dahak. How may any race spend such time 'pon war and killing and bring no new weapons to their task?"

"Unknown," the computer replied so calmly Colin grimaced. Despite Dahak's self-awareness, he had yet to develop a human-sized imagination.

"Okay, so what do we know?"

"The data included in the transmission confirm reports from the arrays previously destroyed. In addition, while no tactical information was obtained, sensor readings indicate that the Achuultani's maximum attainable sublight velocity is scarcely half as great as that of this vessel, which suggests at least one major tactical advantage for our own units, regardless of comparative weaponry. Further, we have reconfirmed their relatively low speed in hyper, as well. At their present rate of advance, they will reach Sol in two-point-three years, as originally projected."

"True, but I'm not too happy about the way they came in. Do we know if they tried to examine any of the other sensor arrays?"

"Negative, Captain. A hypercom of the power mounted by these arrays has a maximum omni-directional range of less than three hundred light-years. The reports of all previously destroyed sensor arrays were relayed via the tertiary phalanx arrays and consisted solely of confirmation that they had been destroyed by Achuultani vessels. This is the first direct transmission we have received and contains far more observational data."

"Yeah." Colin pondered a moment. "But it doesn't match very well with what little we know about their operational patterns, now does it?"

"It does not, sir. According to the records, normal Achuultani tactics should have been to destroy the array immediately upon detection."

"That's what I mean. We were dead lucky any of the arrays were still around to tell us they're coming, but I can't help thinking the Imperium was a bit too clever in the way it set these things up. Sucking them in close for better readings is all very well, but these guys were after information of their own. What if they change tactics or speed up on us because they figure someone's waiting for them?"

"Methinks thy concern may be over great," Jiltanith said after a moment. "Certes, they needs must know some power did place sentinels to ward its borders, yet what knowledge else have they gained? How shall they guess where those borders truly lie or when their ships may cross them? Given so little, still must they search each star they pass."

Colin tugged on his nose some more, then nodded a bit unhappily. It made sense, and there wasn't anything he could do about it even if Jiltanith were wrong, but it was his job to worry. Not that he'd asked for it.

"I guess you're right," he sighed. "Thanks for the report, Dahak."

"You are welcome, Captain," the starship said, and Colin shook himself, then grinned at Jiltanith.

"Looking forward to sickbay, 'Tanni?" He put an edge of malicious humor into his voice as an anodyne against their worries.

"Hast an uncommon low sense of humor, Colin," she said darkly, accepting the change of subject with a smile of her own. "So long as I do recall have I awaited this day—yea, and seldom with true hope mine eyes might see it. Yet now 'tis close upon me, and if truth be known, there lies some shadow of fear within my heart. 'Tis most unmeet in thee so to tease me over it."

"I know," he admitted wickedly, "but it's too much fun to stop."

She snorted and shook a dripping fist at him, yet there was empathy as well as laughter in his green eyes. Jiltanith had been a child, her muscles and skeleton too immature for the full bioenhancement Battle Fleet's personnel enjoyed, when the mutiny organized by Fleet Captain (Engineering) Anu marooned Dahak in Earth orbit and the starship's crew on Earth. The millennia-long struggle her father had led against Anu had kept her from receiving it since, for the medical facilities aboard the sublight parasite battleship Nergal had been unable to provide it. Jiltanith had received the neural computer feeds, sensory boosters, and regenerative treatments before the mutiny, but those were the easy parts, and Colin was fresh enough from his own enhancement to understand her anxieties perfectly . . . and tease her to ease them.

"Bawcock, thou'lt crow too loud one day."

"Nope. I'm the captain, and rank—"

"—hath its privileges," she broke in, shaking her head ominously. "That phrase shall haunt thee."

"I don't doubt it." He smiled down at her, tempted to shuck off his own uniform and join her . . . if he hadn't been a bit afraid of where it might lead. Not that he had any objection to where it could lead, but there was plenty of time (assuming they lived beyond the next two years), and that was one complication neither of them needed right now.

"Well, gotta get back to the office," he said instead. "And you, Madam XO, should get back to your own quarters and catch some sleep. Trust me—Dahak's idea of a slow convalescence from enhancement isn't exactly the same as yours or mine."

"Of thine, mayhap," she said sweetly.

"I'll remember that when you start moaning for sympathy." He drew his toes from the tub and activated a small portion of his own biotechnics. The water floated off his feet on the skin of a repellent force field, and he shook the drops away and pulled on his socks and gleaming boots.

"Seriously, 'Tanni, get some rest. You'll need it."

"In truth, I doubt thee not," she sighed, wiggling in the hot-tub, "yet still doth this seem heaven's foretaste. I'll tarry yet a while, methinks."

"Go ahead," he said with another smile, and stepped off the edge of the balcony onto a waiting presser. It floated him gently to the atrium floor, and his implant force fields were an invisible umbrella as he splashed through the rain to the door/hatch on the far side of his private park.

It opened at his approach, and he stepped through it into a yawning, brightly-lit void over a thousand kilometers deep. He'd braced himself for it, yet he knew he appeared less calm than he would have liked—and felt even less calm than he managed to look as he plunged downward at an instantly attained velocity of just over twenty thousand kilometers per hour.

Dahak had stepped his transit shafts' speed down out of deference to his captain and Terra-born crew, though Colin knew the computer truly didn't comprehend why they felt such terror. It was bad enough aboard the starship's sublight parasites, yet the biggest of those warships massed scarcely eighty thousand tons. In something that tiny, there was barely time to feel afraid before the journey was over, but even at this speed it would take almost ten minutes to cross Dahak's titanic hull, and the lack of any subjective sense of movement made it almost worse.

Yet the captain's quarters were scarcely a hundred kilometers from Command One—a mere nothing aboard Dahak—and the entire journey took only eighteen seconds. Which was no more than seventeen seconds too long, Colin reflected as he came to a sudden halt. He stepped shakily into a carpeted corridor, glad none of his crew were present to note the slight give in his knees as he approached Command One's massive hatch.

The three-headed dragon of Dahak's bas relief crest looked back from it. Its eyes transfixed him for a moment across the starburst cradled in its raised forepaws, fierce with the fidelity which had outlasted millennia, and then the hatch—fifteen centimeters of Imperial battle steel thick—slid open, and another dozen hatches opened and closed in succession as he passed through them to Command One's vast, dim sphere.

The command consoles seemed to float in interstellar space, surrounded by the breath-taking perfection of Dahak's holographic projections. The nearest stars moved visibly, but the artificiality of the projection was all too apparent if one thought about it. Dahak was tearing through space under maximum Enchanach Drive; at seven hundred and twenty times light-speed, direct observation of the cosmos would have been distorted, to say the very least.

"The Captain is on the bridge," Dahak intoned, and Colin winced. He was going to have to do something about this mania Dahak had developed for protecting his commander's precious dignity!

The half-dozen members of Colin's skeleton bridge watch, Imperials all, began to stand, but he waved them back and crossed to the captain's console. Trackless stars drifted beneath his boots, and Fleet Commander Tamman, his Tactical officer and third in command, rose from the couch before it.

"Captain," he said as formally as Dahak, and Colin gave up for the moment.

"I have the con, Commander." He slipped into the vacated couch, and it squirmed under him as it adjusted to the contours of his body. There was no need for Tamman to give him a status report; his own neural feed to the console was already doing that.

He watched the tactical officer retire to his own station with a small, fond smile. Tamman was Jiltanith's contemporary, one of the fourteen Imperial "children" from Nergal's crew to survive the desperate assault on Anu's enclave. All of them had joined Colin in Dahak, and he was damned thankful they had. Unlike his Terra-born, they could tie directly into their computers and run them the way the Imperium had intended, providing a small, reliable core of enhanced officers to ride herd on the hundred pardoned mutineers who formed the nub of his current crew. In time, Dahak would enhance and educate his Terra-born to the same standard, but with a complement of over a hundred thousand, it was going to take even his facilities a while to finish the task.

Colin MacIntyre reclined in his comfortable command couch, and his small smile faded as he watched the stars sweep towards him and the sleek, deadly shapes of Achuultani starships floated behind his eyes once more. The report from the sensor array replayed itself again and again, like some endless recording loop, and it filled him with dread. He'd known they were coming; now he'd "seen" them for himself. They were real, now, and so was the horrific task he and his people faced.

Dahak was more than twenty-seven light-years from Earth, but the nearest Imperial Fleet base had been over two-hundred light-years from Sol when Dahak arrived to orbit Earth. The Imperium proper lay far beyond that, yet despite the distances and the threat sweeping steadily towards his home world, they'd had no choice but to come, for only the Imperium might offer the aid they desperately needed to save that home world from those oncoming starships.

But Dahak had been unable to communicate with the Imperium for over fifty thousand years. What if there no longer was an Imperium?

It was a grim question they seldom discussed, one Colin tried hard not to ask even of himself, yet it beat in his brain incessantly, for Dahak had repaired his hypercom once the spares he needed had been reclaimed from the mutineers' Antarctic enclave. He'd been calling for help from the moment those repairs were made—indeed, he was calling even now.

And, like the sensor arrays, he had received no reply at all.