Chapter Sixteen

Stardrift glittered overhead, and a smaller, fiercer star crawled along the battle steel beneath his feet as the robotic welder lit a hellish balefire in Sean MacIntyre's eyes while Israel drifted in sepulchral gloom almost a light-hour from the system primary.

His wounded ship lay hidden in an asteroid's ink-black lee while he coaxed the welder through his neural feed. Other robotic henchmen had already cut away the jagged edges of the breach, rebuilt sheared frame members, and tacked down replacement plates of battle steel. Now the massive welding unit crept along, fusing the plates in place. Under other circumstances, damage control could have been left to such a routine task unsupervised, but one of Israel's hits had taken out a third of her Engineering peripherals. Until Tamman and Brashan finished putting them back on-line—if they finished—the damage control sub-net remained far from reliable.

"How's it coming?"

He turned his head in the force field globe of his "helmet" as Sandy walked down the curve of the hull towards him.

"Not too bad."

Fatigue harshened his voice, and she studied him as she came closer. A massive, broken pylon towered behind him, shattered by the hit that had demolished the heavily armored drive node it had supported. He stood between stygian blackness and the welder's fire, half his suited body lost in shadow, the other glowing demon-bright, and his face was drawn. It was his turn to wake from nightmares these nights, but he met her eyes squarely.

"You're doing better than I expected," she said after a moment.

"Yeah. We'll have this breach finished by the end of the watch."

"The end of which watch, dummy?" she teased gently. "You're supposed to be in the sack right now."

"Really?" He sounded genuinely surprised, and she didn't know whether to laugh or cry at his tired, bemused expression as he checked the time.

"I'll be damned. Is that why you came out here? To get me?"

"Yep. A MacMahan always gets her man—and in this instance, my man better get his ass inside before he goes to sleep on his big, flat feet."

"I do believe," he stretched, "you have a point, Midshipwoman MacMahan. But what about junior?" He waved at the welder.

"It's only got fifty meters to go, Sean. You can trust it that far on its internal programming. And if you come along and let her tuck you in, Aunt Sandy promises she'll come back out and check on it in about an hour. Deal?"

"Deal," he sighed. The two of them turned away, disappearing over the rise of the battleship's flank, and the lonely star of the welder crawled on behind them, blazing like a lost soul in the depths of endless night.

Even Brashan looked drawn, and the humans were downright haggard, but three weeks of exhausting labor had repaired everything they could repair.

"Okay, people," Sean called the meeting to order. "It doesn't seem to me that going on to our next stop is a real good idea. Anybody disagree?"

Wry, weary grins and headshakes answered him. The G6 star of their second-choice destination was twelve and a half light-years away from their present position. At barely half the speed of light—the best Israel could sustain with a primary drive node shot away—the voyage would take seventy-five months, even if it would be "only" five and a half years long for them.

"Good. I'd hate to make a trip that long and then not find anything at the other end. Especially since we know there's an active shipyard here."

"Cogently put," Brashan agreed with one of his curled-lip grins. "Of course, there remains the small problem of gaining control of that shipyard."

"True," Sean lay back in his couch and stared up into the display, "but maybe that's not as tough as it looks. For instance, we know the power for the platform stasis fields is beamed up from that ground source, so that's probably the HQ site. If so, taking it over should give us control of the platforms, too. Failing that, taking it out should shut them down, right?"

"I agree that seems a logical conclusion, but how do you intend to penetrate its orbital defenses to get at it?"

"Sleight of hand, Brashan. We'll fool the suckers."

"Oh, dear. This sounds like something I'm not going to like."

Sean smiled and the others chuckled as Brashan fanned his crest in a Narhani expression of abject misery.

"It won't be that bad—I hope." Sean turned to Sandy and his sister. "Did your analysis reach the same conclusion I did?"

"Pretty much," Sandy said after a glance at Harriet. "We agree they detected us on passive, at least. We didn't pick up any active systems till their launcher fire control came up."

"And their tactics?"

"That's a lot more speculative, Sean, and one point still worries us," Harriet replied. "Your theory sounds logical, but it's only a theory."

"I know, but look at it. Much as it pains me to admit it, that much firepower should have swatted us like a fly, however brilliant my tactics were. Whatever runs those defenses was slow, Harry. Slow and clumsy."

"Okay, but how do you explain its defensive tactics? Slow's one thing, but it let us take out thirty-six platforms before the others even began to defend themselves."

"So it's slow, clumsy, and dumb," Tamman said with a shrug.

"You're missing the point, Tam." Sandy came to Harriet's aid. "Properly designed automated defenses shouldn't have let us take any of them out unopposed, but anything dumb enough to let us zap any of them that way should have let us take them all out. Besides, how many other intact quarantine systems have we seen? None. That means this thing's original programming wasn't just good enough to control its weapons—it's run enough deep-space industry to keep the whole system functional for forty-five thousand years, as well."

She paused to let that sink in, and Tamman nodded. Harriet's stealthed sensor remotes, operating from a circumspect forty light-minutes, had given them proof of that. The Radona-class yard was no longer on standby; it was rebuilding the weapon platforms Sandy had destroyed.

"Another thing," she continued. "Those platforms' passive defenses are mighty efficient by Empire standards, and that razzle-dazzle trick by the ground source is pretty cute, too. It's not standard military hardware, but it works. Maybe its designer was a civilian, but if so he was a sneaky one—not exactly the sort to give anything away to an enemy. And if a sharp cookie like whoever set this all up built in defensive systems at all, why arrange things so they didn't come on-line until after our third salvo?"

"So what do you think happened?" Tamman countered.

"We don't know; that's what worries us. It's almost like there was something else in the command loop—something that really was slow, clumsy, and stupid. If there is, it probably saved our lives this time, but it may also surprise us, especially if we make any wrong assumptions."

"Fair enough," Sean said. "But given how long it waited to bring its weapons on-line, whatever it is must be pretty myopic, right?"

"There we have to agree with you," Harriet replied wryly. "But it's what you're planning on after we arrive that scares us, not the approach."

"Whoa! Hold on." Tamman straightened in the engineer's couch. "What approach? You been holding out on me and Brashan, Captain, Sir?"

"Not really. It's only that you both've been so buried in Engineering you missed the discussion."

"Well we're not buried now, so why don't you just fill us in?"

"It's not complicated. We came in fat and happy last time, radiating as much energy as a small star; this time we'll be a meteorite."

"I knew I wouldn't like it," Brashan sighed, and Sean grinned.

"You're just sore you didn't think of it first. Look, it let us get within twenty-eight light-minutes before it even began bringing its systems on-line, right?" Tamman and Brashan nodded. "Okay, why'd it do that? Why didn't it start bringing them up as soon as we entered missile range? After all, it couldn't know we wouldn't shoot as soon as we had the range."

"You're saying it didn't pick us up until then," Brashan said.

"Exactly. And that gives us a rough idea how far out its passive sensors were able to detect us. Sandy and Harry ran a computer model assuming it had picked us up at forty light-minutes—a half hour of flight time before it powered up. Even at that, the model says our stealth field should hide the drive to within a light-minute if we hold its power well down. That means we can sneak in close before we shut down everything and turn into a meteor."

"Seems to me you've still got a little problem there." Tamman sounded doubtful. "First of all, if I'd designed the system, it wouldn't let a rock Israel's size hit the planet in the first place. I'd've set it to blow the sucker apart way short of atmosphere. Second, we can't land, or even maneuver into orbit, without the drive, and we'll be way inside a light-minute by that point. It's going to spot us as a ship at that range, stealth field or no."

"Oh, no it won't." Sean smiled his best Cheshire Cat smile. "In answer to your first point, you should have made time to read that paper I wrote for Commander Keltwyn last semester. Our survey teams have looked at the wreckage of over forty planetary defense systems by now, and every single one of them required human authorization to engage anything without an active emissions signature. Remember, over half these things were set up by civilians, not the Fleet, and the central computers were a hell of a lot stupider than Dahak. The designers wanted to be damned sure their systems didn't accidentally kill anything they didn't want killed, and none of the system's we've so far examined would have engaged a meteor, however big, without specific authorization."

"So? The whole point is that we will have an active signature when we bring the drive up."

"Sure, but not where it can see us long enough to matter. We come in under power to two light-minutes, then reduce to about twenty thousand KPS, cut the drive, and coast clear to the planet."

"Jesus Christ!" Tamman yelped. "You're going to hit atmosphere in a battleship at twenty thousand kilometers per second?"

"Why not? I've modeled it, and the hull should stand it now that we've got the holes patched. We come in at a slant, take advantage of atmospheric braking down to about twenty thousand meters, then pop the drive."

"You're out of your teeny-tiny mind!"

"What's the matter, think the drive can't hack it?"

"Sean, even with one node shot out, my drive can take us from zip to point-six cee in eleven seconds. Sure, if we program the maneuver right and leave it all on auto we've got the oomph to land in one piece. But we're gonna be one hell of a high-speed event when we hit air, and the drive'll create an awful visible energy pulse when you kill that kind of velocity that quick. There's no way—no way!—a stealth field will hide either of those!"

"Ah, but by the time the drive kicks in, we'll be inside atmosphere. I doubt whoever set this up programmed it to kill air-breathing targets!"

"Um." Tamman looked suddenly thoughtful, but Brashan regarded his captain dubiously.

"Isn't that a rather risky assumption—particularly if, as Harry and Sandy argue, there's an unpredictable element to the control system?"

"Not really." Harriet sounded a bit as if she were agreeing with Sean despite herself. "This is a quarantine system. It's probably programmed to wax people trying to escape after the bio-weapon hit as well as anyone coming from outside, but Sean's right. Every one we've seen before has required human authorization to engage anything that wasn't obviously a spacecraft. It shouldn't care a thing about meteors, and it's almost certainly not set to shoot before a target leaves atmosphere. Even if it is, you're forgetting reaction time. It'll take at least two minutes just to spin down the stasis fields on its platforms. There won't be enough time for it to see us and activate its weapons between the time the drive cuts in and we cut power, go back into stealth, and land."

"I suppose that's true enough. But what do we do once we're down?"

"That's where Sandy and I part company with our fearless leader. He wants to put down on top of the power source and take it over. Which sounds good, unless it's got on-site defenses. We won't be able to tell ahead of time—we can't use active sensors without warning it we're coming—but if it does have site-defense weapons, they may be permanently live. If they are, they'll get us before we can even go active and sort out the situation."

"We could just waste the whole site from space," Tamman suggested. "Coming in that slow, Harry should have plenty of time to localize it on passive. We could pop off a homing sublight missile from a few light-seconds out. And, as you say, even if it spotted the launch, it wouldn't have time to react before the bad news got there."

"We could, and it's something to bear in mind," Sean agreed, "but I'd rather take the place over intact. We can't use active scanners from stealth, but we can carry out visual observations once we come out of stealth. That's a huge power plant, and there must be some reason the automatics kept it running after everybody died. Let's take a peek and see if it's something we can generate any additional support from before we zap it. I'd rather not kill any golden egg-laying geese if I can help it."

"A point," Tamman conceded. "Definitely a point."

"Which brings us back to Sandy's and my objection," Harriet pointed out. "If we don't want to take the place out from space, then we shouldn't be landing on top of it, either. Not when we don't know whether the site's armed or what that 'something else' in the command loop is."

"I believe the girls are correct, Sean," Brashan said. "I confess your plan seems less reckless than I assumed, but they're still right, and there's no need to charge in precipitously."

"Tam? You agree with them?"

"Yes," Tamman said positively, and Sean shrugged.

"All right, I can be big about these things. What say we plan our insertion to set us down over the curve of the planet from the site?"

High Priest Vroxhan sat in his gilded throne and surveyed the worshipers with studied calm, trying to assess their mood.

Mother Church had been shaken to her foundations, but by God's blessing the Trial had been upon them and then past so quickly few outside the Inner Circle had known a thing about it till it was over. The word had spread on talmahk wings after that, and the people were abuzz with the story—which, he was certain, had grown more terrible with each telling—but they'd managed to suppress all mention of the Voice's unknown words and his own desperate improvisation. Vroxhan wasn't certain that was necessary, but he was certain it would be far wiser for the Inner Circle to sort it out themselves before they risked the faith of others by revealing all the facts.

Yet however unorthodox events might have been, the outcome was clear: the Trial had come, and the demons had been smitten as the Writ promised. Thousands of years of faith had been vindicated, and that was what this solemn festival of thanksgiving and the priestly conclave to follow were all about.

The last human soul entered the packed courtyard of the Sanctum, and he raised one hand in blessing from his throne as the choir sang the majestic opening notes of the Gloria.

The last four hours had been frustrating.

Israel had crept in at the paltry velocity of .2 c, wrapped in the stealth field that turned her into a black nothingness. Her passive systems had peered ahead, poised on a hair-trigger to warn of any active detection systems, but she'd been blind to anything but fairly powerful energy sources, and curiosity was killing her crew.

Harriet had, indeed, localized the power source to within fifty kilometers, which was ample for warheads of the power they carried, but Sean longed to examine the planet directly. Unfortunately, Israel's optical systems, pitiful compared to active fold-space scanners at the best of times, were degraded by the stealth field which protected her. They could have used the drive to impart a higher initial velocity and coasted the whole way without a stealth field, but they could neither have maneuvered nor slowed for atmospheric insertion without going into stealth. Sean had no idea how the defenses would react to an "asteroid" that popped in and out of detectability, and he didn't want to find out; he was taking a big enough chance by coming this close before he dropped stealth in the first place. More importantly, he wanted to be able to turn and creep away if he saw any sign of changing power levels on the orbital bases. It was always possible the defenses might pick up something without being able to localize Israel and shoot, and if he'd come in any faster the drive settings needed to kill the ship's velocity might have burned through the stealth field and given them a target.

But they were coming up on the two-light-minute mark, and he lay tense in his command couch as their speed fell still further. Tamman and Brashan coordinated their departments carefully, reducing drive power and velocity in tandem, and Sean grunted his satisfaction as the drive died at last. Right on the mark, he noted: exactly 20,000 KPS. The internal gravity was still up, but Israel no longer had any emission signature at all.

"Good, guys," he murmured, then glanced at Sandy. "Take the stealth field down."

"Coming down now," she replied tautly, and Sean watched through a cross feed as she powered down their cloak of invisibility with the same exquisite care Tamman had taken.

The entire crew held its collective breath as Harriet consulted her passive systems very, very carefully. Then she relaxed.

"Looks good, Sean." Her voice was hushed, as if she feared the defenses might hear. "The platform stasis fields're steady as a rock."

Her crewmates' breath hissed out, and Sandy looked up with a grin.

"We're heeeere," she crooned, and the others laughed out loud.

"Of course we are." Sean grinned back at her, elated by his ploy's success. "But we're just a great big rock." He glanced smugly at Tamman. "Looks like the defenses are programmed to kill only ships, and without emissions, we ain't a ship."

"I hate it when he's right," Sandy told the others. "Fortunately, it doesn't happen often."

That was good for another chuckle, and the last of the hovering tension faded as Sean waved a fist in her direction. Then he sat up briskly.

"All right. Bring up the optics and see what we can see, Harry."

"Bringing them up now," his sister said, and the blue and white sphere of the planet swelled, displacing the starfield from the display as she engaged the forward optical head. They were almost thirty-six million kilometers away, but surface features leapt into startling clarity.

Sean stared eagerly at seas and rivers, the rumpled lines of mountain ranges, green swathes of forest. Theirs were the first human (or Narhani) eyes to behold that planet in forty-five thousand years, and it was lovely beyond belief. None of them had dared hope to see this living, breathing beauty at the end of their weary voyage, but incredible as it seemed, the planet lived. Here in the midst of the Fourth Empire's self-wrought devastation, it lived.

His eyes devoured it, and then he stiffened.

"Hey! What the—?"

"Look! Look!"

"My God, there's—!"

"Jesus, is that—?!"

An incredulous babble filled the command deck as all of them saw it at once. Harriet didn't need any instructions; she was already zooming in on the impossible sight. The holo of the planet vanished, replaced by a full-power closeup of one tiny part of its surface, and the confusion of voices died as they stared at the seaport city in silence.

"There's no question, is there?" Sean murmured.

"Damn." Tamman shook his head. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. Hell, I'm still not sure I am seeing it!"

"You're seeing it," Sandy told him quietly. "And maybe it's a good thing we didn't just zap the control center after all."

"No question," Tamman agreed, and Israel's crew shared a shudder at the thought of what they might have unleashed against a populated world.

"But I don't understand it," Brashan mused. "Life, yes—there's life on Birhat, so it has to be theoretically possible. But people? Humans?" His crest waved in perplexity and a double-thumbed hand rubbed his long snout.

"There's only one answer," Sean said. "This time quarantine worked."

"It seems impossible," Harriet sighed. "Wonderful, but impossible."

"You got that right." Sean frowned at the large, fortified town they were currently watching. "But this only raises more questions, doesn't it? Like what happened to their tech base? Their defenses are still operable, and the HQ is down there, so how come they're all running around like that?"

He waved at the image, where animal-drawn plows turned soil in a patchwork of fields. The small, low buildings looked well-enough made, but they were built of wood and stone, and many were roofed in thatch. Yet the eroded stumps of an ancient city of the Fourth Empire lay barely thirty kilometers from the town's crenulated walls.

"It doesn't make much sense, does it?" Sandy replied.

"You can say that again. How in hell can someone decivilize in the midst of that much technology? Just from the ruins we've already plotted, this planet had millions of people. You'd think poking around in the wreckage, let alone having at least one still operating high-tech enclave in their midst, would get the current population started on science. But even if it hasn't, where did the original techies go?"

"Some kind of home-grown plague?" Tamman suggested.

"Unlikely." Brashan shook his head in the human expression of negation. "Their medical science should have been able to handle anything short of the bio-weapon itself."

"How about a war?" Sandy offered. "It's been a long time, guys. They could have bombed themselves out."

"I suppose so, but then why aren't more of those towers flattened?" Sean objected. "Imperial warheads shouldn't have left anything."

"Not necessarily." Harriet watched the display, toying with a lock of her hair. "Oh, you're right about gravitonics, but suppose they used small nukes or dusted each other? Or whipped up their own bio-weapons?"

"I suppose that's possible, but it still doesn't explain why they never rebuilt. Maybe they lost their original tech base—I can't see how, with that ground station still up, but let's concede the possibility. But we're still looking at a city-building culture spread over at least two continents. It looks to me like they've got about as many people as a pre-tech agrarian economy can support—more than I would have expected, in fact; their agriculture must be more efficient than it looks. But given that kind of population base, why haven't they developed their own indigenous technology?"

"Good point," Tamman agreed, "and I wish I could answer it, but I can't. It's like they've got some kind of technological blind spot."

"Yeah, but then they go and put their biggest city right on top of where we figure the defensive HQ has to be." Sean shook his head in disgust. "It's right in the middle of their largest land mass, and there's not a river within fifty kilometers. With the transportation systems we've seen, that's a hell of an unlikely place for a city to grow up naturally. Look at the canal system they've built. There's over two hundred klicks of it, all to move stuff into the city. There has to be some reason for its location, and I can only think of one magnet. Except, of course, that that particular magnet doesn't make any sense on a planet that doesn't know about technology!"

"Well," Sandy sighed, "I guess there's only one way to find out."

"Guess so." Sean's calm tone fooled none of his friends. Then he grinned. "And whatever the reason, Mom and Dad are going to be mighty glad to hear we've found another planet that's not only habitable but stuffed full of people as well!"

 

The sublight battleship Israel split atmosphere in a long, shallow descent that wrapped her in a shroud of fire. Her crew rode their couches, feeling their ship quiver with the fury of her descent as her bow plating began to glow. Heat sensors soared as the thick battle steel armor burned cherry-red, then yellow, then white. The terrible glow crept back along her hull, the air blazed before her as she battered a column of superheated atmosphere out of her path, and Sean MacIntyre monitored his instruments and tried to stay calm.

The maneuvering computers waited patiently to engage their carefully written program and stop them dead in the bellow of the drive's fury. It was going to be a rough ride, but so far everything was nominal, and they'd already picked out an alpine valley hiding place fifteen hundred kilometers from the planet's largest city. It was going to be fine, he told himself for the thousandth time, and grinned mirthlessly at his own insistence.

High Priest Vroxhan stood on his balcony and watched the night sky burn. His servants had summoned him almost hysterically, and he'd charged out in only his under-robe to see the terrible strand of fire with his own eyes. Now he did see it, and it touched him with ice.

Shooting stars he had seen before, and wondered why the work of God's Hands should abandon the glorious firmament for the surface of the world to which the demons' treachery had banished man, but never had he seen one so huge. No one had, and he watched it blaze above The Temple like the very Finger of God and trembled.

Could it be—?

No! God's Wrath had slain the demons, and he suppressed the blasphemous thought quickly. But not quickly enough. He'd thought it, and if he had, how much more might the ignorant of his flock think the same thing?

He inhaled sharply as the beautiful, terrifying light vanished beyond the western peaks. Would it land? If so, where? Far beyond the borders of Aris—probably even beyond those of Malagor. In Cherist, then? Or Showmah?

He shook himself and turned away, hurrying back into the warmth of his apartments from the chill spring night. It couldn't be the demons, he told himself firmly, and if not they, then it must, indeed, be God's handiwork, as all the world was. He nodded with fresh assurance. No doubt God had sent it as a sign and reminder of His deliverance, and he must see the truth was spread before the less faith-filled panicked.

He closed the balcony door and beckoned to a servant. His messages must be ready for the semaphore tower by first light.