Chapter Eight

Senior Fleet Captain Algys McNeal sat on his command deck and watched his bridge officers with one eye and the hologram beside him with the other. Physically, Admiral Hatcher was several hundred thousand kilometers away, but fold-space coms let them maintain their conversation without interruptions. Not that Captain McNeal felt overly grateful. Commanding Battle Fleet's most powerful warship on her maiden cruise was quite enough to worry about; having both heirs to the Crown aboard made it worse, and he did not need the CNO sitting here flapping his jaws while Imperial Terra prepared to get under way!

"  . . . then take a good look around Thegran," Hatcher was saying.

"Yes, Sir," McNeal replied while he watched Midshipman His Imperial Highness Sean MacIntyre running final checks at Astrogation. The Prince had obviously hoped for assignment to Battle Comp, but he was already a competent tactician. He'd learn far more as an assistant astrogator, and so far, McNeal was cautiously pleased with Midshipman MacIntyre's cheerfulness in the face of his disappointment.

"And bring back some green cheese from Triam IV," Hatcher continued.

"Yes, Sir," McNeal said automatically, then twitched and jerked both eyes to his superior's face. Hatcher grinned, and McNeal returned it wryly.

"Sorry, Sir. I guess I was a bit distracted."

"Don't apologize, Algys. I should know better than to crowd you at a time like this." The admiral shrugged. "Guess I'm a bit excited about your new ship, too. And frustrated at being stuck here in Bia."

"I understand, Sir. And you're not really crowding me."

"The hell I'm not!" Hatcher snorted. "Good luck, Captain."

"Thank you, Sir." McNeal tried to hide his relief, but Hatcher's eyes twinkled as he flipped a casual salute. Then he vanished, and McNeal's astrogator roused from her neural feeds to look up at him.

"Ship ready to proceed, Sir," she said crisply.

"Very good, Commander. Take us out of here."

"Aye, aye, Sir," Commander Yu replied.

Birhat's emerald and sapphire gem began to shrink in the display as they headed out at a conservative thirty percent of light-speed, and Imperial Terra's officers were too busy to note a brief fold-space transmission. It came from the planetoid Dahak, and it wasn't addressed to any of them, anyway. Instead it whispered to Terra's central computer for just an instant, then terminated as unobtrusively as it had begun.

"Well, they're off," Hatcher's hologram told Colin. "They'll drop off a dozen passage crews at Urahan, then move out to probe the Thegran System."

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.

"Damn, Gerald. I wish I was going with them."

"They'll be fine. And they've got to try their wings sometime."

"Oh, that's not my problem," Colin said with a crooked grin. "I'm not worried—I'm envious. To be that young, just starting out, knowing the entire galaxy is your own private oyster. . . ."

"Yeah. I remember how I felt when Jennifer made her middy cruise. She was cute as a puppy—and she'd have killed me on the spot if I'd said so!"

Colin laughed. Hatcher's older daughter was attached to Geb's Reconstruction Ministry, with three system surveys already under her belt, and she was about due for promotion to lieutenant senior grade.

"I guess all the good ones start out confident they can beat anything the universe throws at them," he said. "But you know what scares me most?"

"What?" Hatcher asked curiously.

"The fact that they may just be right."

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.

An update came in from Flight Control Central, and the electronics officer cursed as he scanned it. Jesus! An entire family—five people, three of them kids! Accidents were rare with Imperial technology, but when they happened they tended to happen with finality, and he prayed this one was an exception.

He turned back to his sensors as the crash site came into range and leaned forward, as if he could force them to tell him what he wanted to see.

He couldn't, and he slumped back in his couch.

"Might as well slow down, Jacques," he said sadly.

The pilot looked sideways at him, and he shook his head.

"All we've got is a crater. A big one. Looks like they must've gone in at better than Mach five . . . and I don't see any personnel transponders."

"Merde," Sergeant Jacques DuMont said softly, and the screaming flyer slowed its headlong pace.

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.

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.

Sean found the phenomenon eerily beautiful, and he'd loved the moments when his instructors had allowed him to switch the computer imaging out of the display to enjoy the "starbow" on training flights. Unfortunately, it wasn't very useful, so the computers and FTL fold-space scanners normally were called upon once more to produce an artificially "real" view.

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.

 

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.

All his life, Sean MacIntyre had known what had overwhelmed the Fourth Empire. He'd seen the ships brought back to Bia and read about the disaster, studied it, written papers on it for the Academy. He knew about the bio-weapon . . . but now he understood something he'd never quite grasped.

Those dead ships were real, and each had once been crewed by two hundred thousand people who'd worn the uniform he now wore. Real people who'd died because they'd tried to assist planets teeming with billions of other real people. And when they knew they, too, were infected, they'd come here to die rather than seek help for themselves and endanger still others.

The bio-weapon itself had died at last, but through all the dusty millennia, those ships had remained, waiting. And now, at last, humanity had returned to reclaim them and weigh itself against the criminal folly which had killed their crews . . . and the courage with which they'd died.

He watched the display, measuring himself against those long-dead crews, and a part of him that was very young hoped Captain McNeal would hyper out for Thegran soon.

Fleet Commander Yu Lin had been to Urahan before, and she'd watched her snotty as they dropped out of hyper. It would never do to admit it, but she rather liked Mid/4 MacIntyre. Crown Prince or no, he was hardworking, conscientious, and unfailingly polite, yet she'd wondered how such a cheerful extrovert would react to Urahan's death fleet.

Now she filed the ghosts in his eyes away beside the other mental notes she was making for his evaluation. It was interesting, she thought.

He seemed to feel exactly the way she did.

Imperial Terra considered her options as the coordinates for her next hyper jump were entered.

Although her Comp Cent wasn't self-aware, it came closer than those of older Battle Fleet units. Terra was actually a good bit brighter than Dahak had been when he first arrived in Earth orbit, yet trying to reconcile the two sets of Alpha Priority commands no one knew she had was a problem.

Normally, she would have asked for guidance, but Alpha commands took absolute precedence, and her directive to seek human assistance didn't carry Alpha Priority. There'd never seemed any reason why it should, but one of Vincente Cruz's commands prohibited any discussion of his other orders with her bridge officers, which meant Comp Cent was faced with devising a course of action which would satisfy both sets of commands all on its own.

It did.

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.

Feet crunched on wet gravel behind him, and he read the implant codes without looking.

"Hi, guys," he said. "How d'you like Commander Godard's weather?"

He stood and turned to grin at his friends. This was the first time they'd all been off watch at once since leaving Urahan, and Terra's logistics officer had decided the park decks needed a good rain. Fleet Commander Godard was a nice guy, and Sean didn't think he'd done it on purpose.

"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.

"It reminds me of spring on Narhan," Brashan added, folding down into the water until only his shoulders showed and extending the fan of his cranial frill in bliss. "Of course, the air's still too thin, but the weather's nice."

"You would think so." Tamman kicked off his deck shoes and perched on the outer hull of a trimaran, dangling his feet in the water. "For myself, I'd prefer a bit less drizzle."

"You and me both," Sean agreed, though he wasn't sure that was entirely true. The humidity emphasized the smell of life and greenery, and he had his sensory boosters on high to enjoy the earthy perfume.

"Still want to go sailing?" Sandy asked.

"Maybe." Sean skimmed another stone into the mist. "I checked the weather schedule. This is supposed to clear up in about an hour."

"Well I'd rather wait until it does," Harriet said.

"Yeah." Sean selected another stone. "I suppose we could go up to Gym Deck Seven while we wait."

"No way." Tamman shook his head. "I poked my head in on the way down, and Lieutenant Williams is running another 'voluntary participation' unarmed combat session up there."

"Yuck." Sean threw his rock with a grimace. His human friends and he had played and worked out with Dahak's training remotes since they could walk. They were about the only members of the crew who were both junior to Williams and able to give him a run for his money, but he kept producing sneaky (and bruising) moves they hadn't seen yet whenever they got him in trouble.

"Double yuck," Sandy agreed. She was nimble and blindingly fast, even for an enhanced human, but her small size was a distinct disadvantage on the training mat.

"Oh, well," Harriet sighed, heading for the trimaran and beginning to unlace the sail covers, and Sean laughed as he climbed aboard to help her.

Deep in Imperial Terra's heart Comp Cent silently oversaw her every function, monitoring, adjusting, reporting back to its human masters.

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.

Sandy MacMahan crossed the cool, cavernous bay to the gleaming flank of the sublight battleship Israel. Number six personnel hatch stood open, and she trotted up the ramp, wondering where Fleet Commander Jury was.

She poked her head in through the hatch and blinked in surprise.

"Sean? What're you doing here?"

"Me? What're you doing here? I got a memo from Commander Jury to report for an unscheduled training exercise."

"So did I." Sandy frowned. "Dragged me out of the sack, too."

"Too bad, considering how much you need your beauty sleep."

"At least beauty sleep does me some good, Beak Schnoz," she shot back, and Sean grinned and rubbed his nose, acknowledging her hit. "But speaking of Commander Jury, where is she?"

"Dunno. Let's check the command deck."

Sandy nodded, and they stepped into the transit shaft. The gravitonic system whisked them away . . . and the hatch closed silently behind them.

The midshipmen stepped out of the shaft onto the command deck and into a fresh surprise. Harriet, Tamman, and Brashan were already there, and they looked just as puzzled as Sandy and Sean felt. There was a moment of confused questions and counter-questions, and then Sean held up his hands.

"Whoa! Hold on. Look, Sandy and I both got nabbed by Commander Jury for some extra hands-on parasite training time. What're you guys doing here?"

"The same thing," Harriet said. "And I don't understand it. I just finished a two-hour session in the simulator last watch."

"Yeah," Tamman said, "and if we're here, where's Commander Jury?"

"Maybe we'd better ask her." Sean flipped his neural feed into Imperial Terra's internal com net . . . and his eyes widened as the system kicked him right back out. That had never happened before.

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. Procedure frowned on using fold-space coms aboard ship, but something decidedly strange was going on, so he activated his implant com. Or, rather, he tried to activate it.

"Shit!" He glanced up and saw the others looking at him. "I can't get into the com net—and something's blanketing my fold-space com!"

Sandy stared at him in astonishment, and then her face went blank as she tried to contact Jury. Nothing happened, and a tiny flame of uncertainty kindled in her eyes. It wasn't fear—not yet—but it was closer to that than Sean liked to see from Sandy.

"I can't get in, either."

"I don't like this," Tamman muttered. Harriet nodded agreement, and Brashan stood and headed for the transit shaft.

"I think we'd better find out what's going on, and—"

"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.

"Oh, my God!" Harriet whispered, but Sean was already hammering at the console through his neural feed, and his dark face went white as the computer refused to let him in.

"Computer! Emergency voice override! Abort launch sequence!"

Nothing happened, and Brashan's voice was taut behind him.

"The transit shaft has been closed down, Sean."

"Jesus Christ!" With the shaft down, it would take over five minutes to reach the nearest hatch.

"Two-minute warning," the computer remarked. "Parasite launch in two minutes. Assume launch stations."

"What do we do, Sean?" Tamman asked harshly, and Sean scrubbed his hands over his face. Then he shook himself.

"Man your stations! Try to get into the system and shut the damned thing down, or this crazy computer'll kill us all!"

Commander Yu had been on watch for two hours. As most watches in hyper-space, they'd been deadly dull hours, and her attention was on the slowly shifting light sculptures, so it took her a few seconds to note the peculiar readings from Launch Bay Forty-One.

But then they began to register, and she straightened in her couch, eyes widening. The bay was entering launch cycle!

Commander Yu was an experienced officer. She paled as she realized what breaching the drive field in hyper would do to her ship, yet she didn't panic. Instead, she threw an instant abort command into Comp Cent's net and the computer acknowledged, but the bay went right on cycling!

She snapped her feed into a standby system and tried to override manually. The launch count went steadily on, and her face was bloodless as she began punching alarm circuits . . . and nothing at all happened!

Time was running out fast, and she did the only thing left. She ordered a complete, emergency computer shut down.

Comp Cent ignored her, and then it was too late.

Imperial Terra dropped out of hyper. There was no warning. She shouldn't have been able to do it. A ship in hyper stayed in hyper until it reached its programmed coordinates, and Terra hadn't reached the coordinates Commander Yu had given her. But she had reached the ones she'd selected under the overriding authority of her Alpha Priority commands.

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!

He stared at the holo display as it sprang to life, too confused and terrified to grasp what was happening. He should be dead, and he wasn't. The display should show only the gray swirls of hyper-space; it was spangled with diamond-chip suns in the velvet immensity of n-space, and Imperial Terra was a rapidly dwindling dot astern.

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.