The Armageddon Inheritance

  "A point, sir."

  "Yes?"

  "Assuming Dahak is right that Fleet units are a more likely source of information, perhaps we should concentrate on Fleet bases and ignore civilian systems for the moment."

  "My own thought exactly," Colin agreed.

  "Yet 'twould be but prudent to essay a few systems more ere we leave this space entire," Jiltanith mused. "Methinks there doth lie another world scarce fifteen light-years hence. 'Twas not a Fleet base, yet was it not a richly peopled world, Dahak?"

  "Correct, ma'am," Dahak replied. "The Kano System lies fourteen-point-six-six-one light-years from Defram, very nearly on a direct heading to Birhat. The last census data in my records indicates a system population of some nine-point-eight-three billion."

  Colin thought. At maximum speed, the trip to Kano would require little more than a week....

  "All right, 'Tanni," he agreed. "But if we don't find anything there, we're in the same boat. Assuming we don't get answers at Kano, I'm beginning to think we may have to move on to Fleet Central at Birhat itself."

  He understood the ripple of shock that ran through his officers. Birhat lay almost eight hundred light-years from Sol. If they ventured that far, even Dahak's speed could not possibly return them to Earth before the Achuultani scouts had arrived.

  Oh, yes, he understood. Quite possibly, Dahak alone could stop the Achuultani scouts, particularly if backed by whatever Earth had produced. But if Colin continued to Birhat, Dahak wouldn't be available to try... and the decision was his to make. His alone.

  "I recognize the risks," he said softly, "but our options are closing in, and time's too short to scurry around from star to star. Unless we find a definite answer at Kano, it may run out on us entirely. If we're going to Birhat at all, we can't afford to deviate or we'll never get back before the main incursion arrives. If we make a straight run for it from Kano, we should have some months to look around Fleet Central and still beat the real incursion home. Even assuming a worst-case scenario, assuming the entire Imperium is like Defram, we may at least find out what happened and where-if anywhere-a functional portion of the Imperium remains. I'm not definitely committing us to Birhat; I'm only saying we may not have another choice."

  He fell silent, letting them examine his logic for flaws, almost praying they would find some, but instead they nodded one by one.

  "All right. Dahak, have Sarah set course for Kano immediately. We'll go take a look before we commit to anything else."

  "Yes, Captain."

  "I think that's everything," Colin said heavily, and rose. "If any of you need me, I'll be on the bridge."

  He walked out. This time Dahak did not call the others to attention, as if he sensed his captain's mood... but they rose anyway.

  "Detection at twelve light-minutes," Dahak announced, and Colin's eyes widened with sudden hope. The F5 star called Kano blazed in Dahak's display, the planet Kano-III a penny-bright dot, and they'd been detected. Detected! There was a high-tech presence in the system!

  But Dahak's next words cut his elation short.

  "Hostile launch," the computer said calmly. "Multiple hostile launches. Sublight missiles closing at point-seven-eight light-speed."

  Missiles?

  "Tactical, Red One!" Colin snapped, and Tamman's acknowledgment flowed back through his neural feed. The tractor web snapped alive, sealing him in his couch, and Dahak's mighty weapons came on line as raucous audio and implant alarms summoned his crew to battle.

  "No offensive action!" Colin ordered harshly.

  "Acknowledged." Tamman's toneless voice was that of a man intimately wedded to his computers. Dahak's shield snapped up, anti-missile defenses came alive, and Colin fell silent as others fought his ship.

  Sarah Meir was part of Tamman's tactical net, and she took Dahak instantly to maximum sublight speed. Evasive action began, and the starfield swooped crazily about them. Crimson dots appeared in the holographic display, flashing towards Dahak like a shoal of sharks, tracking despite his attempts to evade.

  His jammers filled space and fold-space alike with interference, and blue dots flashed out from the center of the display, each a five-hundred-ton decoy mimicking Dahak's electronic and gravitonic signature. More than half the red dots wavered, swinging to track the decoys or simply lost in the jamming, but at least fifty continued straight for them.

  They were moving at almost eighty percent of light-speed, but so great was the range they seemed to crawl. And why were they moving sublight at all? Why weren't they hyper missiles? Why-

  "Second salvo launch detected," Dahak announced, and Colin cursed.

  Active defenses engaged the attackers. Hyper missiles were useless, for they could not home on evading targets, so sublight counter-missiles raced to meet them, blossoming in megaton bursts as proximity fuses activated. Eye-searing flashes pocked the holographic display, and red dots began to die.

  "They mount quite capable defenses of their own, Captain," Dahak observed, and Colin felt them through his feed. ECM systems lured Dahak's fire wide and on-board maneuvering systems sent the red dots into wild gyrations, and they were faster than the counter-missiles chasing them.

  "Where are they coming from, Dahak?"

  "Scanners have detected twenty-four identical structures orbiting Kano-III," Dahak replied as his close-range energy defenses opened fire and killed another dozen missiles. At least twenty were still coming. "I have detected launches from only four of them."

  Only four? Colin puzzled over that as the last dozen missiles broke past Dahak's active defenses. He found himself gripping his couch's armrests; there was nothing else he could do.

  Dahak's display blanked in the instant of detonation, shielding his bridge crews' optic nerves from the fury unleashed upon him. Anti-matter warheads, their yields measured in thousands of megatons, gouged at his final defenses, but Dahak was built to face things like that, and plasma clouds blew past him, divided by his shield as by the prow of a ship. Yet mixed with the anti-matter explosions were the true shipkillers of the Imperium: gravitonic warheads.

  The ancient starship lurched. For all its unimaginable mass, despite the unthinkable power of its drive, it lurched like a broken-masted galleon, and Colin's stomach heaved despite the internal gravity field. His mind refused to contemplate the terrible fury which could produce that effect as gravitonic shield components screamed in protest, but they, too, had been engineered to meet this test. Somehow they held.

  The display flashed back on, spalled by fading clouds of gas and heat, and a damage signal pulsed in Colin's neural feed. A schematic of Dahak's hull appeared above his console, its frontal hemisphere marred by two wedge-shaped glares of red over a kilometer deep.

  "Minor damage in quadrants Alpha-One and Three," Dahak reported. "No casualties. Capability not impaired. Second salvo entering interdiction range. Third enemy salvo detected."

  More counter-missiles flashed out, and Colin reached a decision.

  "Tactical, take out the actively attacking installations!"

  "Acknowledged," Tamman said, and the display bloomed with amber sighting circles. Each enclosed a single missile platform, too tiny with distance for even Dahak to display visually, and Colin swallowed. Unlike their attackers, Tamman was using hyper missiles.

  "Missiles away," Dahak said. And then, almost without pause, "Targets destroyed."

  Bright, savage pinpricks blossomed in the amber circles, but the two salvos already fired were still coming. Yet Dahak had gained a great deal of data from the first attack, and he was a very fast thinker. Battle Comp was using his predicted target responses well, concentrating his counter-missiles to thwart them, alert now for their speed and the tricks of defensive ECM, killing the incoming missiles with inexorable precision. Energy weapons added their efforts as the range dropped, killing still more. Only three of the second salvo got through, and they were all anti-matter warheads. The final missile of the last salvo died ten light-seconds short of the shield.

&
nbsp; Colin sagged in his couch.

  "Dahak? Any more?" he asked hoarsely.

  "Negative, sir. I detect active targeting systems aboard seven remaining installations, but no additional missiles have been launched."

  "Any communication attempts?"

  "Negative, Captain. Nor have they responded to my hails."

  "Damn."

  Colin's brain began to work again, but it made no sense. Why refuse all contact and attack on sight? For that matter, how had Dahak gotten so deep in-system before being detected? And if attack they must, why use only a sixth of their defensive bases? The four Tamman had destroyed had certainly gone all out, but if they meant to mount a defense at all, why hold anything back? Especially now, when Dahak had riposted so savagely?

  "Well," he said finally, very softly, "let's find out what that was all about. Sarah, take us in at half speed. Tamman, hold us on Red One."

  Acknowledgments flowed back to him, and Dahak started cautiously forward once more at twenty-eight percent of light speed. Colin watched the display for a moment, then made himself lean back.

  "Dahak, give me an all-hands channel."

  "All-hands channel open, sir."

  "All right, people," Colin said to every ear aboard the massive ship, "that was closer than we'd like, but we seem to've come through intact. If anyone's interested in exactly what happened-" he paused and smiled; to his surprise, it felt almost natural "-you can get the details from Dahak later. But for your immediate information, no one's shooting at us just now, so we're going on in for a closer look. They're not talking to us, either, so it doesn't look like they're too friendly, but we'll know more shortly. Hang loose."

  He started to order Dahak to close the channel, then stopped.

  "Oh, one more thing. Well done, all of you. You did us proud. Out.

  "Close channel, Dahak."

  "Acknowledged, Captain. Channel closed."

  "Thank you," Colin said softly, and his tone referred to far more than communications channels and the starship's courtesy. "Thank you very much."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The holo of what had once been a pleasant, blue-white world called Keerah hung in Command One's visual display like a leprous, ocher curse. Once-green continents were wind and water-carved ruins, grooved like a harridan's face and pocked with occasional sprawls where the works of Man had been founded upon solid bedrock and so still stood, sentinels to a vanished population.

  Colin stared at it, heartsick as even Defram had not left him. He'd hoped so hard. The missiles which had greeted them had seemed to confirm that hope, and so he had almost welcomed them even as they sought to kill him. But dead Keerah mocked him.

  He turned away, shifting his attention to the orbiting ring of orbital forts. Only seven remained even partially operational, and the nearest loomed in Dahak's display, gleaming dully in the funeral watch light of Kano. The clumsy-looking base was over eight kilometers in diameter, and a shiver ran down Colin's spine as he looked at it.

  Even now, its targeting systems were locked on Dahak, its age-crippled computers sending firing signals to its weapons. He shuddered as he pictured the ancient launchers swinging through their firing sequences again and again, dry-firing because their magazines were empty. It was bad enough to know the long-abandoned war machine was trying to kill him; it was worse to wonder how many other vessels must have died under its fire to exhaust its ammunition.

  And if Dahak and Hector were right, most of those vessels had been killed not for attacking Keerah, but for trying to escape it.

  "Probe One is reporting, Captain." Dahak's mellow voice wrenched Colin away from his frightening, empty thoughts to more immediate matters.

  "Very well. What's their status?"

  "External scans completed, sir. Fleet Captain (Engineering) Chernikov requests permission to board."

  Colin turned to the holo image beside his console. "Recommendations?"

  "My first recommendation is to get Vlad out of there," Cohanna said flatly. "I'd rather not risk our Chief Engineer on the miserable excuse for an opinion I can give you."

  "I tend to agree, but I made the mistake of asking for volunteers."

  "In that case," Cohanna leaned back behind her desk in sickbay, a thousand kilometers from Command One, and rubbed her forehead, "we might as well let them board."

  "Are you sure about that?"

  "Of course I'm not!" she snapped, and Colin's hand rose in quick apology.

  "Sorry, 'Hanna. What I really wanted was a run-down on your reasoning."

  "It hasn't changed." Her almost normal tone was an unstated acceptance of his apology. "The other bases are as dead as Keerah, but there are at least two live hydroponics farms aboard that hulk-how I don't know, after all this time-and there may be more; we can't tell from exterior bio-scans even at this range. But that thing's entire atmosphere must've circulated through both of them a couple of million times by now and the plants are still alive. It's possible they represent a mutant strain that happened to be immune to whatever killed everything on Keerah, but I doubt it. Whatever the agent was, it doesn't seem to have missed anything down there, so I think it's unlikely it ever contaminated the battle station." She shrugged.

  "I know that's a mouthful of qualifiers, but it's all I can tell you."

  "But there's no other sign of life," Colin said quietly.

  "None." Cohanna's holographic face was grim. "There couldn't be, unless they were in stasis. Genetic drift would've seen to that long ago on something as small as that."

  "All right," Colin said after a moment. "Thank you." He looked down at his hands an instant longer, then nodded to himself.

  "Dahak, give me a direct link to Vlad."

  "Link open, Captain."

  "Vlad?"

  "Yes, Captain?" There was no holo image-Chernikov's bare-bones utility boat had strictly limited com facilities-but his calm voice was right beside Colin's ear.

  "I'm going to let you take a closer look, Vlad, but watch your ass. One man goes in first-and not you, Mister. Full bio-protection and total decon before he comes back aboard, too."

  "With all respect, Captain, I think-"

  "I know what you think," Colin said harshly. "The answer is no."

  "Very well." Chernikov sounded resigned, and Colin sympathized. He would vastly have preferred to take the risk himself, but he was Dahak's captain. He couldn't gamble with the chain of command... and neither could Vlad.

  Vlad Chernikov looked at the engineer he had selected for the task. Jehru Chandra had come many light-years to risk his life, but he looked eager as he double-checked the seals on his suit. Not cheerful or unafraid, but eager.

  "Be cautious in there, Jehru."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Keep your suit scanners open. We will relay to Dahak."

  "I understand, sir." Chernikov grinned wryly at Chandra's manifestly patient reply. Did he really sound that nervous?

  "On your way, then," he said, and the engineer stepped into the airlock.

  As per Cohanna's insistence, there was no contact between Chernikov's workboat and the battle station, but Chernikov studied the looming hull yet again as Chandra floated across the kilometer-wide gap on his suit propulsors. This ancient structure was thousands of years younger than Dahak, but the warship had been hidden under eighty kilometers of solid rock for most of its vast lifespan. The battle station had not. The once bright battle steel was dulled by the film of dust which had collected on its age-sick surface and pitted by micro-meteor impacts, and its condition made Chernikov chillingly aware of its age as Dahak's shining perfection never had.

  Chandra touched down neatly beside a small personnel lock, and his implants probed at the controls.

  "Hmmmmm...." The tension in his voice was smoothed by concentration. "Dahak was right, Commander. I've got live computers here, but damned if I recognize the machine language. Whups! Wait a minute, I've got something-"

  His voice broke off for an agonizing moment, then came back wi
th a most unexpected sound: a chuckle.

  "I'll be damned, sir. The thing recognized my effort to access and brought in some kind of translating software. The hatch's opening now."

  He stepped through it and it closed once more.

  "Pressure in the lock," he reported, his fold-space com working as well through battle steel as through vacuum. "On the low side-'bout point-six-nine atmospheres. My sensors read breathable."

  "Forget it right now, Jehru."

  "Never even considered it, sir. Honest. Okay, inner lock opening now." There was a brief pause. "I'm in. Inner hatch closed. The main lighting's out, but about half the emergency lights're up."