Heirs of Empire Read online

  Heirs Of Empire

  David Weber

  CONTENT

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter One

  Sean MacIntyre skittered out of the transit shaft and adjusted his hearing as he dashed down the passage. 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.

  He covered the last hundred meters, slid to a halt, and pressed his back against the bulkhead. The wide, silent passage vanished into a gleaming dot in either direction, and he raked a hand through sweaty black hair as his enhanced ears picked the pulsing sounds of environmental equipment and the soft hum of the now-distant transit shaft from the slowing thunder of his pulse. He'd been chasing them for over an hour, and he'd half-expected to be ambushed by now. He certainly would have tried it, he thought, and sniffed disdainfully.

  He drew his holstered pistol and turned to the hatch. It slid open—quietly to unenhanced ears, but thunderous to his—and bright sunlight spilled out.

  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.

  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—

  Motion flickered, and he froze, vision zooming in on whatever had attracted it. He smiled as he saw a flash of long, black hair duck back behind an oak, but he didn't scoot out after her. Now that he'd found Harry, there was no way she could sneak away from her tree without his seeing her, and he swept his eyes back and forth, searching for her ally. She'd be part of the ambush, too, so she had to be pretty close. In fact, she should be . . .

  A hand-sized patch of blue caught his eye, just visible between two laurels. Unlike Harry, it was patiently and absolutely still, but he had them both now, and he grinned and began a slow, stealthy move to his left. A few more meters and—

  Zaaaaaaaaaaa-ting!

  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!"

  He managed not to use any more of his forbidden vocabulary when the eight-year-old ninja began an impromptu war dance, but it was hard, especially when his twin threw herself into the dance with her half-pint ally. Bad enough to lose to girls, but to be ambushed by Sandy MacMahan was insupportable. She was two years younger than he, this was the first time she'd even been allowed to play, and she'd killed him with her first shot!

  "Your elation at Sean's death is scarcely becoming, Sandra." The deep, mellow voice coming from empty air surprised none of them. They'd known Dahak all their lives, and the self-aware computer's starship body was one of their favorite playgrounds.

  "Who cares?" Sandy demanded gleefully. "I got him! Zap!" She pointed her pistol at Sean and collapsed with a wail of laughter at his expression.

  "Luck!" he shot back, holstering his own pistol with dignity he knew was threadbare. "You were just lucky, Sandy!"

  "That is incorrect, Sean," Dahak observed with the dispassionate fairness Sean hated when it was on someone else's side. " 'Luck' implies the fortuitous working of chance, and Sandra's decision to conceal herself in the lake—which, I observed, you did not check once—was an ingenious maneuver. And as she has cogently if unkindly observed, she 'got' you."

  "So there!" Sandy stuck out her tongue, and Sean turned away with an injured air. It didn't get any better when Harriet grinned at him.

  "I told you Sandy was old enough, didn't I?" she demanded.

  He longed to disagree—violently—but he was an honest boy, and so he nodded begrudgingly, and tried to hide his shudder as a vision of the future unrolled before him. Sandy was Harry's best friend, despite her youth, and now the little creep was going to be underfoot everywhere. He'd managed to fend that off for over a year by claiming she was too little. Until today. She was already two course units ahead of him in calculus, and now this!

  The universe, Sean Horus MacIntyre concluded grumpily, wasn't exactly running over with justice.

  Amanda Tsien and her husband stepped out of the transit shaft outside Dahak's command deck. Her son, Tamman, followed them down the passage, but he was almost squirming in impatience, and Amanda glanced up at her towering husband with a twinkle. Most described Tsien Tao-ling's face as grim, but a smile flickered as he watched Tamman. The boy might not be "his" in any biological sense, yet that didn't mean he wasn't Tamman's father, and he nodded when Amanda quirked an eyebrow.

  "All right, Tamman," she said. "You can go."

  "Thanks, Mom!" He turned in his tracks with the curiously catlike awkwardness of his age and dashed back towards the transit shaft. "Where's Sean, Dahak?" he demanded as he ran.

  "He is on Park Deck Nine, Tamman," a mellow voice responded.

  "Thanks! See you later, Mom, Dad!" Tamman ran sideways for a moment to wave, then dove into the shaft with a whoop.

  "You'd think they hadn't seen each other in months," Amanda sighed.

  "I do not believe children live on the same time scale as adults," Tsien observed in his deep, soft voice as she tucked a hand throug
h his elbow.

  "You can say that again!"

  They turned the final bend to confront the command deck hatch. Dahak's crest coiled across the bronze-gold battle steel: a three-headed dragon, poised for flight, clawed forefeet raised to cradle the emblem of the Fifth Imperium. 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.

  "Hello, Dahak," Amanda said as they walked forward and other hatches parted before them.

  "Good evening, Amanda. Welcome aboard, Star Marshal."

  "Thank you," Tsien replied. "Have the others arrived?"

  "Admiral Hatcher is en route, but the MacMahans and Duke Horus have already joined Their Majesties."

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

  "Oh, really?" Amanda glanced up at him again. "I suppose you've already learned that?"

  "Perhaps not," he agreed with another small smile, and she snorted as a final hatch admitted them to the dim vastness of Dahak's Command One.

  A sphere of stars engulfed them. The diamond-hard pinheads burned in the ebon depths of space, dominated by the cloud-banded green-and-blue sphere of the planet Birhat, and Amanda shivered. Not from cold, but with the icy breeze that always seemed to whisper down her spine whenever she stepped into the perfection of the holographic display.

  "Hi, Amanda. Tao-ling." His Imperial Majesty Colin I, Grand Duke of Birhat, Prince of Bia, Sol, Chamhar, and Narhan, Warlord and Prince Protector of the Realm, Defender of the Five Thousand Suns, Champion of Humanity, and, by the Maker's Grace, Emperor of Mankind, swiveled his couch to show them his homely, beak-nosed face and grinned. "I see Tamman peeled off early."

  "When last seen, he was headed for the park deck," Tsien agreed.

  "Well, he's in for a surprise." Colin chuckled. "Harry and Dahak finally bullied Sean into letting Sandy try her hand at laser tag."

  "Oh, my!" Amanda laughed. "I'll bet that was an experience!"

  "Aye." Empress Jiltanith, slender as a sword and as beautiful as Colin was homely, rose to embrace Amanda. "Belike he'll crow less loud anent her youth henceforth. His pride hath been humbled—for the nonce, at least."

  "He'll get over it," Hector MacMahan remarked. The Imperial Marine Corps' commandant leaned on the gunnery officer's console while his wife occupied the couch before it. Like Amanda, he wore Marine black and silver, but Ninhursag MacMahan wore Battle Fleet's midnight-blue and gold, and she smiled.

  "Not if Sandy has anything to say about it. One of these days that girl's going to make an excellent spook."

  "You should know," Colin said, and Ninhursag managed a seated bow in his direction. "In the meantime, I—"

  "Excuse me, Colin," Dahak murmured, "but Admiral Hatcher's cutter has docked."

  "Good. Looks like we can get this show on the road pretty soon."

  "I hope so," Horus said. The stocky, white-haired Planetary Duke of Terra shook his head. "Every time I poke my nose out of my office, something's waiting to crawl out of the 'in' basket and bite me when I get back!"

  Colin nodded at his father-in-law in agreement, but he was watching the Tsiens. Tao-ling seated Amanda with an attentiveness so focused it was almost unconscious . . . and one that might seem odd to those who knew only Star Marshal Tsien's reputation or knew General Amanda Tsien only as the tough-as-nails commandant of Fort Hawter, the Imperial Marines' advanced training base on Birhat. Colin, on the other hand, understood it perfectly, and he was profoundly grateful to see it.

  Amanda Tsien feared nothing that lived, but she was also an orphan. She'd been only nine years old when she learned a harsh universe's cruelest weapon could be love . . . and she'd relearned that lesson when Tamman, her first husband, died at Zeta Trianguli Australis. Colin and Jiltanith had watched helplessly as she hid herself in her duties, sealing herself into an armored shell and investing all the emotion she dared risk in Tamman's son. She'd become an automaton, and there'd been nothing even an emperor could do about it, but Tsien Tao-ling had changed that.

  Many of the marshal's personnel feared him. That was wise of them, yet something in Amanda had called out to him, despite her defenses, and the man the newsies called "the Juggernaut" had approached her so gently she hadn't even realized he was doing it until it was too late. Until he'd been inside her armor, holding out his hand to offer her the heart few people believed he had . . . and she'd taken it.

  She was thirty years younger than he, which mattered not at all among the bio-enhanced. After all, Colin was over forty years younger than Jiltanith, and she looked younger than he. Of course, chronologically she was well over fifty-one thousand years old, but that didn't count; she'd spent all but eighty-odd of those years in stasis.

  "How're Hsu-li and Collete?" he asked Amanda, and she chuckled.

  "Fine. Hsu-li was a bit ticked we didn't bring him along, but I convinced him he should stay to help take care of his sister."

  Colin shook his head. "That wouldn't have worked with Sean and Harry."

  "That's what you get for having twins," Amanda said smugly, then bent a sly glance on Jiltanith. "Or for not having a few more kids."

  "Nay, acquit me, Amanda." Jiltanith smiled. "I know not how thou findest time for all thy duties and thy babes, but 'twill be some years more—mayhap decades—ere I again essay that challenge. And it ill beseemeth thee so to twit thine Empress when all the world doth know thee for a mother o' the best, while I—" She shrugged wryly, and her friends laughed.

  Horus was about to say something more when the inner hatch slid open to admit a trim, athletic man in Battle Fleet blue.

  "Hi, Gerald," Colin greeted the new arrival, and Admiral of the Fleet Gerald Hatcher, Chief of Naval Operations, bowed with a flourish.

  "Good evening, Your Majesty," he said so unctuously his liege lord shook a fist at him. Admiral Hatcher had spent thirty years as a soldier of the United States, not a sailor, but BattleFleet's CNO was the Imperium's senior officer. That made it a logical duty for the man who'd served as humanity's chief of staff during Earth's defense against the Achuultani, yet not even that authority could quash Hatcher's cheerful irreverence.

  He waved to Ninhursag, shook hands with Hector, Tsien, and Horus, then planted an enthusiastic kiss on Amanda's cafe-au-lait cheek. He bent gracefully over Jiltanith's hand, but the Empress tugged shrewdly on the neat beard he'd grown since the Siege of Earth and kissed his mouth before he could recover.

  "Thou'rt a shameless fellow, Gerald Hatcher," she told him severely, "and mayhap that shall teach thee what fate awaiteth when thou leavest thy wife behind!"

  "Oh?" He grinned. "Is that a threat or a promise, Your Majesty?"

  "Off with his head!" Colin murmured, and the admiral laughed.

  "Actually, she's visiting her sister on Earth. They're picking out baby clothes."

  "My God, is everybody hatching new youngsters?"

  "Nay, my Colin, 'tis only everyone else," Jiltanith said.

  "True," Hatcher agreed. "And this time it's going to be a boy. I'm perfectly happy with the girls, myself, but Sharon's delighted."

  "Congratulations," Colin told him, then waved at an empty couch. "But now that you're here, let's get down to business."

  "Suits me. I've got a conference scheduled aboard Mother in a few hours, and I'd like to grab a nap first."

  "Okay." Colin sat a bit straighter and his lazy amusement faded. "As I indicated when I invited you all, I want to talk to you informally before next week's Council meeting. We're coming up on the tenth anniversary of my 'coronation,' and the Assembly of Nobles wants to throw a big shindig to celebrate. That may be a good idea, but it means this year's State of the Realm speech is going to be pretty important, so I want a feel from the 'inner circle' before I get started writing it."

  His g
uests 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.

  "Let's begin with you, Gerald."

  "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."

  Colin frowned at his suddenly bitter tone but let it pass. All the diagnostics had said the planetoid Sherkan was safe to operate without extensive overhaul—but it had been Hatcher's expedition that found her, and he'd been the one who'd had to tell Vladimir Chernikov.

  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.

  Unfortunately, restoring a derelict four thousand kilometers in diameter to service after forty-five millennia was a daunting task, which was why Hatcher had been so pleased by Sherkan's excellent condition. But the tests had missed a tiny flaw in her core tap, and its governors had blown the instant her engineer brought it on-line to suck in the energy for supralight movement. The resultant explosion could have destroyed a continent, and six thousand human beings had died in it, including Fleet Admiral Vassily Chernikov and his wife, Valentina.