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  “Anyway,” Hatcher went on more briskly, “we’re coming along nicely on the other projects, as well. Adrienne will graduate her first Academy class in a few months, and I’m entirely satisfied with the results, but she and Tao-ling are still fiddling with fine-tuning the curriculum.

  “On the hardware side, things are looking good here in Bia, thanks to Tao-ling. He had to put virtually all the surviving yard facilities back on-line to get the shield operational—” Hatcher and the star marshal exchanged wry smiles at that; reactivating the enormous shield generators which surrounded Birhat’s primary, Bia, in an inviolate sphere eighty light-minutes across had been a horrendous task “—so we’ve got plenty of overhaul capacity. In fact, we’re ready to start design work on our new construction.”

  “Really?” Colin’s tone was pleased.

  “Indeed,” Dahak answered for the admiral. “It will be approximately three-point-five standard years—” (the Fifth Imperium ran on Terran time, not Birhatan) “—before capacity for actual construction can be diverted from reactivation programs, but Admiral Baltan and I have begun preliminary studies on the new designs. We are combining several concepts ‘borrowed’ from the Achuultani with others from the Empire’s Bureau of Ships, and I believe we will attain substantial increases in the capabilities of our new units.”

  “That’s good news, but where does it leave us on Stepmother?”

  “I fear that will require considerably longer, Colin,” Dahak replied.

  ” ‘Considerably’ is probably optimistic,” Hatcher sighed. “We’re still stubbing our toes on the finer points of Empire computer hardware, even with Dahak’s help, and Mother’s the most complex computer the Empire ever built. Duplicating her’s going to be a bitch—not to mention the time requirement to build a five-thousand-kilometer hull to put said duplicate inside!”

  Colin didn’t like that, but he understood. The Empire had built Mother (officially known as Fleet Central Computer Central) using force-field circuitry that made even molycircs look big and clumsy, yet the computer was still over three hundred kilometers in diameter. It was also housed in the most powerful fortress ever constructed by Man, for it did more than simply run Battle Fleet. Mother was the conservator of the Empire, as well—indeed, it was she who’d crowned Colin and provided the ships to smash the Achuultani. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) she was carefully designed, as all late-Empire computers, to preclude self-awareness, which meant she would disgorge her unimaginable treasure trove of data only when tickled with the right specific question.

  But Colin spent a lot of time worrying over what might happen to Battle Fleet if something happened to Mother, and he intended to provide Earth with defenses every bit as powerful as Birhat’s … including a duplicate of Mother. If everything went well, Stepmother (as Hatcher had insisted on christening the proposed installation) would never come fully on-line, but if Mother was destroyed, Stepmother would take over automatically, providing unbroken command and control for Battle Fleet and the Imperium.

  “What kind of time estimate do you have?”

  “Speaking very, very roughly, and assuming we get a firm grip on the computer technology so we don’t have to keep pestering Dahak with questions, we may be able to start on the hull in six years or so. Once we get that far, we can probably finish the job up in another five.”

  “Damn. Oh, well. We won’t be hearing from the Achuultani for another four or five centuries, minimum, but I want that project completed ASAP, Ger.”

  “Understood,” Hatcher said. “In the meantime, though, we ought to be able to put the first new planetoids on-line considerably sooner. Their computers’re a lot smaller and simpler-minded, without any of Mother’s wonder-what-the-hell’s-in-’em files, and the other hardware’s no big problem, even allowing for the new systems’ test programs.”

  “Okay.” Colin turned to Tsien. “Want to add anything, Tao-ling?”

  “I fear Gerald has stolen much of my thunder,” Tsien began, and Hatcher grinned. Technically, everything that wasn’t mobile belonged to Tsien—from fortifications and shipyards to R&D to Fleet training—but with so much priority assigned to rounding up and crewing Hatcher’s planetoids there was a lot of overlap in their current spheres of authority.

  “As he and Dahak have related, most of the Bia System has now been fully restored to function. With barely four hundred million people in the system, our personnel are spread even more thinly than Gerald’s, but we are coping and the situation is improving. Baltan and Geran, with much assistance from Dahak, are doing excellent work with Research and Development, although ‘research’ will continue, for the foreseeable future, to be little more than following up on the Empire’s final projects. They are, however, turning up several interesting new items among those projects. In particular, the Empire had begun development of a new generation of gravitonic warheads.”

  “Oh?” Colin quirked an eyebrow. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Me, too,” Hatcher put in. “What kind of warheads, Tao-ling?”

  “We only discovered the data two days ago,” Tsien half-apologized, “but what we have seen so far suggests a weapon several magnitudes more powerful than any previously built.”

  “Maker!” Horus straightened in his own couch, eyes half-fascinated and half-appalled. Fifty-one thousand years ago, he’d been a missile specialist of the Fourth Imperium, and the fearsome efficiency of the weapons the Empire had produced had shaken him badly when he first confronted them.

  “Indeed,” Tsien said dryly. “I am not yet certain, but I suspect this warhead might be able to duplicate your feat at Zeta Trianguli, Colin.”

  Several people swallowed audibly at that, including Colin. He’d used the FTL Enchanach drive, which employed massive gravity fields—essentially converging black holes—to literally squeeze a ship out of “real” space in a series of instantaneous transitions, as a weapon at the Second Battle of Zeta Trianguli Australis. An Enchanach ship’s dwell time in normal space was very, very brief, and even when it came “close” (in interstellar terms), a ship moving at roughly nine hundred times light-speed didn’t spend long enough in the vicinity of any star to do it harm. But the drive’s initial activation and final deactivation took a considerably longer time, and Colin had used that to induce a nova which destroyed over a million Achuultani starships.

  Yet he’d needed a half-dozen planetoids to do the trick, and the thought of reproducing it with a single warhead was terrifying.

  “Are you serious?” he demanded.

  “I am. The warhead’s total power is far lower than the aggregate you produced, but it is also much more focused. Our most conservative estimate indicates a weapon which would be capable of destroying any planet and everything within three or four hundred thousand kilometers of it.”

  “Jesu!” Jiltanith’s voice was soft, and she squeezed the hilt of her fifteenth-century dagger. “Such power misliketh me, Colin. ’Twould be most terrible if such a weapon should by mischance smite one of our own worlds!”

  “You got that right,” Colin muttered with a shudder. He still had nightmares over Zeta Trianguli, and if the accidental detonation of a gravitonic warhead was virtually impossible, the Empire had thought the same thing about the accidental release of its bio-weapons.

  “Hold off on building the thing, Tao-ling,” he said. “Do whatever you want with the research—hell, we may need it against the Achuultani master computer!—but don’t produce any hardware without checking with me.”

  “Of course, Your Majesty.”

  “Any other surprises for us?”

  “Not of such magnitude. Dahak and I will prepare a full report for you by the end of the week, if you wish.”

  “I wish.” Colin turned his eyes to Hector MacMahan. “Any problems with the Corps, Hector?”

  “Very few. We’re making out better than Gerald in terms of manpower, but then, our target force level’s lower. Some of our senior officers are having trouble
adjusting to the capabilities of Imperial equipment—most of them are still drawn from the pre-Siege militaries—and we’ve had a few training snafus as a result. Amanda’s correcting most of that at Fort Hawter, and the new generation coming up doesn’t have anything to unlearn in the first place. I don’t see anything worth worrying about.”

  “Fine,” Colin said. If Hector MacMahan didn’t see anything worth worrying about, then there was nothing, and he turned his attention to Horus. “How’re we doing on Earth, Horus?”

  “I wish I could tell you the situation’s altered, Colin, but it hasn’t. You can’t make these kinds of changes without a lot of disruption. Conversion to the new currency’s gone more smoothly than we had any right to expect, but we’ve completely trashed the pre-Siege economy. The new one’s still pretty amorphous, and a lot of people who’re getting burned are highly pissed.”

  The old man leaned back and folded his arms across his chest.

  “Actually, people at both ends of the spectrum are hurting right now. The subsistence-level economies are making out better than ever before—at least starvation’s no longer a problem, and we’ve made decent medical care universally available—but virtually every skilled trade’s become obsolete, and that’s hitting the Third World hardest. The First World never imagined anything like Imperial technology before the Siege, and even there, retraining programs are mind-boggling, but at least it had a high-tech mind-set.

  “Worse, it’s going to take at least another decade to make modern technology fully available, given how much of our total effort the military programs are sucking up. We’re still relying on a lot of pre-Imperial industry for bread-and-butter production, and the people running it feel discriminated against. They see themselves as stuck in dead-end jobs, and the fact that civilian bio-enhancement and modern medicine will give them two or three centuries to move up to something better hasn’t really sunk in yet.

  “Bio-enhancement bottlenecks don’t help much, either. As usual, Isis is doing far better than I expected, but again, the folks in the Third World are getting squeezed worst. We’ve had to prioritize things somehow, and they simply have more people and less technical background. Some of them still think biotechnics are magic!”

  “I’m glad I had someone else to dump your job on,” Colin said with heartfelt sincerity. “Is there anything else we can give you?”

  “Not really.” Horus sighed. “We’re running as hard and as fast as we can already, and there simply isn’t any more capacity to devote to it. I imagine we’ll make out, and at least I’ve got some high-powered help on the Planetary Council. We learned a lot getting ready for the Siege, and we’ve managed to avoid several nasty mistakes because we did.”

  “Would it help to relieve you of responsibility for Birhat?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid. Most of the people here are tied directly into Gerald’s and Tao-ling’s operations, so I’m only providing support for their dependents. Of course—” Horus flashed a sudden grin “—I’m sure my lieutenant governor thinks I spend too much time off Earth anyway!”

  “I imagine he does.” Colin chuckled. “But then my lieutenant governor probably felt the same way.”

  “Indeed he did!” Horus laughed. “Actually, Lawrence has been a gift from the Maker,” he added more seriously. “He’s taken a tremendous amount of day-to-day duties off my back, and he and Isis make a mighty efficient team on the enhancement side.”

  “Then I’m glad you’ve got him.” Colin knew Lawrence Jefferson less well than he would have liked, but what he knew impressed him. Under the Great Charter, imperial planetary governors were appointed by the Emperor, but a lieutenant governor was appointed by his immediate superior with the advice and consent of his Planetary Council. After so many centuries as an inhabitant (if not precisely a citizen) of the North American continent, Horus had chosen to turn that advice and consent function into an election, soliciting nominations from his Councilors, and Jefferson was the result. A US senator when Colin raided Anu’s enclave, he’d done yeoman work throughout the Siege, then resigned midway through his third senatorial term to assume his new post, where he’d soon made his mark as a man of charm, wit, and ability.

  Now Colin turned to Ninhursag. “Anything new from ONI, ’Hursag?”

  “Not really.” Like Horus and Jiltanith, the stocky, pleasantly plain woman had come to Earth aboard Dahak. Like Horus (but unlike Jiltanith, who’d been a child at the time), she’d joined Fleet Captain Anu’s mutiny, only to discover to her horror that it was but the first step in Dahak’s Chief Engineer’s plan to topple the Imperium itself. But whereas Horus had deserted Anu and launched a millennia-long guerrilla war against him, Ninhursag had been stuck in stasis in Anu’s Antarctic enclave. When she was finally awakened, she’d managed to contact the guerrillas and provide the information which had made the final, desperate attack on the enclave possible. Now, as a Battle Fleet admiral, she ran Naval Intelligence and enjoyed describing herself as Colin’s “SIC,” or “Spook In Chief.” Colin was fond of telling her her self-created acronym was entirely apt.

  “We’ve still got problems,” she continued, “because Horus is right. When you stand an entire world on its head, you generate a lot of resentment. On the other hand, Earth took half a billion casualties from the Achuultani, and everybody knows who saved the rest of them. Almost all of them are willing to give you and ’Tanni the benefit of the doubt on anything you do or we do in your names. Gus and I are keeping an eye on the discontented elements, but most of them disliked one another enough before the Siege to make any kind of cooperation difficult. Even if they didn’t, they can’t do much to buck the kind of devotion the rest of the human race feels for you.”

  Colin no longer blushed when people said things like that, and he nodded thoughtfully. Gustav van Gelder was Horus’ Minister of Security, and while Ninhursag understood the possibilities of Imperial technology far better than he, Gus had taught her a lot about how people worked.

  “To be perfectly honest,” Ninhursag continued, “I’d be a bit happier if I could find something serious to worry about.”

  “How’s that?” Colin asked.

  “I guess I’m like Horus, worrying about what’s going to bite me next. We’re moving so fast I can’t even identify all the players, much less what they might be up to, and even the best security measures could be leaking like a sieve. For instance, I’ve spent hours with Dahak and a whole team of my brightest boys and girls, and we still can’t figure a way to ID Anu’s surviving Terra-born allies.”

  “Are you saying we didn’t get them all?!” Colin jerked upright, and Jiltanith tensed at his side. Ninhursag looked surprised at their reactions.

  “Didn’t you tell him, Dahak?” she asked.

  “I regret,” the mellow voice sounded unwontedly uncomfortable, “that I did not. Or, rather, I did not do so explicitly.”

  “And what the hell does that mean?” Colin demanded.

  “I mean, Colin, that I included the data in one of your implant downloads but failed to draw your attention specifically to them.”

  Colin frowned and keyed the mental sequence that opened the index of his implant knowledge. The problem with implant education was that it simply stored data; until someone used that information, he might not even know he had it. Now the report Dahak referred to sprang into his forebrain, and he bit off a curse.

  “Dahak,” he began plaintively, “I’ve told you—”

  “You have.” The computer hesitated a moment, then went on. “As you know, my equivalent of the human qualities of ‘intuition’ and ‘imagination’ remain limited. I have grasped—intellectually, I suppose you would say—that human brains lack my own search and retrieval capabilities, but I occasionally overlook their limitations. I shall not forget again.”

  The computer actually sounded embarrassed, and Colin shrugged.

  “Forget it. It’s more my fault than yours. You certainly had a right to expect me to at least read your report.”
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  “Perhaps. It is nonetheless incumbent upon me to provide you with the data you require. It thus follows that I should inquire to be certain that you do, in fact, realize that you have them.”

  “Don’t get your diodes in an uproar.” Colin turned back to Ninhursag as Dahak made the sound he used for a chuckle. “Okay, I’ve got it now, but I don’t see anything about how we missed them … if we did.”

  “The how’s fairly easy, actually. Anu and his crowd spent thousands of years manipulating Earth’s population, and they had a tremendous number of contacts, including batches of people with no idea who they were working for. We got most of their bigwigs when you stormed his enclave, but Anu couldn’t possibly have squeezed all of them into it. We managed to identify most of the important bit players from his captured records, but a lot of small fry have to’ve been missed.

  “Those people don’t worry me. They know what’ll happen if they draw attention to themselves, and I expect most have decided to become very loyal subjects of the Imperium. But what does worry me a bit is that Kirinal seems to have been running at least two top secret cells no one else knew about. When you and ’Tanni killed her in the Cuernavaca strike, not even Anu and Ganhar knew who those people were, so they never got taken into the enclave before the final attack.”

  “My God, ’Hursag!” Hatcher sounded appalled. “You mean we’ve still got top echelon people who worked for Anu running around loose?”

  “No more than a dozen at the outside,” Ninhursag replied, “and, like the small fry, they’re not going to draw attention to themselves. I’m not suggesting we forget about them, Gerald, but consider the mess they’re in. They lost their patron when Colin killed Anu, and as Horus and I have been saying, we’ve turned Earth’s whole society upside-down, so they’ve probably lost a lot of the influence they may’ve had in the old power structure. Even those who haven’t been left out in the cold have only their own resources to work with, and there’s no way they’re going to do anything that might draw attention to their past associations with Anu.”