The Armageddon Inheritance Read online

  But these demons could, and even through that tornado of death, they struck back. His nestlings melted like sand in a pounding rain, molten and shattered, blown apart, crumpled by those terrible warheads Sorkar had described. Yet even such as they-

  There!

  Colin flinched as HIMP Sekr blew apart. He didn't know how many missiles that staggering wreck had absorbed, but finally there had been too many. Her core tap let go, and a halo of pure energy gyred through the carnage.

  Trel followed Sekr into death, then Hilik and Imperial Bia, but nothing could stop them from reaching beam range now. Yet they were such terribly vulnerable targets, unable to evade, unable to bob and weave. If Dahak allowed them to wander, relativistic effects would fray his control. That was their great weakness: they couldn't maneuver if they wanted to.

  Now!

  * * *

  Hothan groaned as the beams Sorkar's observers had reported raked out and their targets exploded like sulq in a candle flame. He had killed almost a twelve of them, but the others crunched into his formation, and his ships were too slow to flee. They could not even scatter as the battering ram of nest-killers clove through them. Their own feeble energy weapons came into play-some of them, aboard ships which lived an instant longer than their brothers-and they were useless. Only missiles could hurt these demons, and now they were so close his thunder was killing his own nestlings!

  Yet he had no choice, and he clung to his duty pad, refusing to weep as his ships blazed like chaff in the Furnace.

  Battle Comp suddenly clamored for his attention, and he dropped an eye to the computers' panel.

  "Weapons free!"

  Jiltanith's voice sounded over Colin's fold-space link, quivering with the vibration lashing through Dahak's hull, and fifteen more ships suddenly joined the fray. They didn't leave stealth, nor did they close to energy range, but their missiles lanced out, striking deep into the Achuultani formation.

  Lady Adrienne Robbins snarled like a hungry tiger and moved her ship slowly closer, a craftsman of death wreaking slaughter, as fresh suns glared deep in the enemy's force.

  The manned ships of the Imperial Guard closed, firing desperately to cover their charging sisters as Dahak surged into the heart of his enemies.

  Colin had to back out of the maelstrom. His mind could no longer endure the furious tempo of Dahak's perceptions and commands. From here on, he was a passenger on a charge into Hell.

  Deep, glowing wounds pocked Dahak's flanks. Clouds of atmosphere and vaporized steel trailed the mighty planetoid, and the rear of the sphere thinned dangerously as more and more ships moved forward to replace losses. God, these Achuultani had guts! They weren't even trying to run. They stood and fought, dying, seeking to ram, and they were killing his ships. Fifteen were gone, another ten savagely wounded, but the others drove on, carving a river of fire deeper into the Achuultani.

  Somewhere ahead of them were the command ships. The enemy's brain. The organizing force which bound them together.

  Hothan blinked in consternation. Battle Comp was never wrong, but surely that could not be correct?! Drones? Unmanned ships? Preposterous!

  But the data codes blinked, no longer informing but commanding. Somewhere inside that sphere of enemies was a single ship, its emission signature different from all the others, from which the directions flowed. How Battle Comp had deduced that from the stutter of incomprehensible alien com signals Hothan could not imagine, but if it was true-

  * * *

  Dahak staggered, and Command One's lights flickered.

  Colin went white as damage reports suddenly flooded his neural feed. The enemy had shifted his targeting pattern. He was no longer firing at the frontal arc of their formation; his missiles were bursting inside the globe! All of his missiles!

  Their formation had become a sphere of fire, and Dahak writhed at its core. The Achuultani couldn't see him, couldn't count on direct hits, but with so many missiles in such a relatively small area, not all could miss. Prominences of plasma gouged at his hull, stabbing deeper and deeper into his battle steel body, but he held his course. He couldn't dodge. He could only attack or flee, and too many enemies remained to flee.

  Jiltanith gasped. How had the Achuultani guessed?!

  But they had guessed. Their new attack patterns showed it. They raked the inner globe with fire, and Dahak could not evade it. But their rear ranks were thinning... and their command ship was somewhere among them....

  Dahak Two abandoned stealth and plunged into the space-annihilating gravity well of her Enchanach Drive-the gravity well lethal even to her sisters if they chanced too close as she dropped sublight. Not even Imperial computers could control the exact point at which Enchanach ships went sublight or guarantee they wouldn't kill one another when they did. All of Jiltanith's captains instantly recognized the insane risk she ran....

  They charged on her heels.

  Colin gritted his teeth. They weren't going to make it.

  Then his eyes flew wide. No! They couldn't! They mustn't!

  But it was too late. His people swept in at many times the speed of light, riding an impossible line between life and mutual destruction in an effort to save him. He dared not distract them now... and there was no time.

  A whiplash of fresh shock slammed through Great Lord of Order Hothan. Where had they come from? What were they?!

  Fifteen ravening spheres of gravitonic fury erupted amid his ships. Two blossomed too near to one another, ripping themselves apart, but they took a high twelve of his ships with them. And then the gravity storm ended, and a twelve of fresh enemies were upon him. Upon him? They were within him! They appeared like monsters of wizardry, deep in the heart of his nestlings, and their beams began to kill.

  Twelve thousand humans died as Ashar and Trelma destroyed themselves, and another six thousand as massed fire tore Thrym apart, but the Achuultani had given all they had and more for their Nest.

  They had stood Dahak's remorseless charge, endured the megadeaths he had inflicted upon them, but this was too much. They couldn't flee into hyper, but these new monsters had dashed in at supralight speeds-and they were fresh, fresh and unwounded, enraged titans within their flotillas, laying waste battle squadrons with a single flick of their terrible beams.

  One such beam lashed out, and Deathdealer's forward half exploded.

  Too many links in the chain had snapped. There were no great lords, no Battle Comp. Lesser lords did their best, but without coordination flotillas fought as flotillas, squadrons as squadrons. Their fine-meshed killing machine became knots of uncoordinated resistance, and the planetoids of the Empire swept through them like Death incarnate.

  Adrienne Robbins hurled Emperor Herdan into the rear of those still attacking Dahak's crumbling globe. Royal Birhat rode one flank and Dahak Two the other, crashing through the fraying Achuultani formation like boulders, killing as they came, and the Achuultani fled.

  They fled at their highest sublight speed, seeking the edges of Operation Laocoon's gravity net. And as they fled, they fell out of mutual support range. The ancient starships of the Imperial Guard, crewed and deadly-individuals, not a single battering ram-slashed through them, bobbing and weaving impossibly, each equal to them all when they fought alone.

  Colin sagged in his couch, soaked in sweat, as Dahak Two broke into his battered globe. The display came back up, and he bit his lip at the molten craters blown deep into Jiltanith's command. Then her holo-image appeared before him, eyes fiery with battle in a strained face.

  "Idiot! How could you take a chance like that?!"

  " 'Twas my decision, not thine!"

  "When I get my hands on you-!

  "Then will I yield unto thee, sin thou hast hands to seize me!" she shot back, her strained expression easing as the fact of his survival penetrated.

  "Thanks to you, you lunatic," Colin said more softly, swallowing a lump.

  "Nay, my love, thanks to us all. 'Tis victory, Colin! They flee before our fire, and they die. Thou
'st broken them, my Colin! Some few thousand may escape-no more!"

  "I know, 'Tanni," he sighed. "I know." He tried not to think about the cost-not yet-and drew a breath. "Tell them to cripple as many as they can without destroying them," he said. "And get Hector and Sevrid up here."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  "Give us four months, and we will have restored your Enchanach Drive, Dahak." Vlad Chernikov's stupendous repair ship nuzzled alongside Dahak, and the ancient warship's hull flickered under constellations of robotic welders while his holo-image sat in Command One with Colin and Jiltanith's image.

  "Your engineers are highly efficient, sir," Dahak's mellow voice said.

  Colin's eyes drifted to the glaring crimson swatches carved deep into the ten-meter spherical holo schematic of his ship and he shivered. Blast doors sealed those jagged rents, but some extended inward for over five hundred kilometers. At that, the schematic looked better than an actual external view. Dahak was torn and tattered. Half his proud dragon had been seared away, and the radiation count in the outer four hundred kilometers of his hull was fit to burn out an Imperial detector. Half his transit shafts ended in shredded wreckage, and half of those which remained were without power.

  It was a miracle he'd survived at all, but he would have to be almost completely rebuilt. His sublight drive was down to sixty percent efficiency, and two wrecked Enchanach node generators made supralight movement impossible. Seventy percent of his weapons were rubble, and even his core tap had been damaged beyond safe operation. Colin knew Dahak could not feel pain, and he was glad; he'd felt agony enough for them both when he'd seen his wounds.

  Nor were those wounds all they'd suffered. Ashar, Trelma, and Thrym were gone, and eighteen thousand people with them. Crag Cat was almost as badly damaged as Dahak, with another two thousand dead. Hector and Sevrid had lost another six hundred boarding wrecked Achuultani starships, and of their fifty-three unmanned ships, thirty-seven had been destroyed and three more battered into wrecks. Their surviving effective fleet consisted of Dahak, eleven manned Asgerd-class planetoids-all damaged to a greater or lesser extent-Sevrid, and thirteen unmanned ships, one of which was miraculously untouched.

  But brooding on their own losses did no good, and the fact remained: they'd won. Barely two thousand Achuultani ships had escaped, and Hector had secured over seven thousand prisoners from the wreckage of their fleet.

  "Dahak's right, Vlad," he said. "You people are working miracles. Just get him supralight-capable, and we'll go home, by God!"

  "I point out once more," Dahak said, "that you need not await completion of my repairs for that. There will be more than enough for you to do on Earth without wasting time out here."

  "'Wasting' hell! We couldn't've done it without you, and we're not going anywhere until you can come with us."

  "Aye," Jiltanith said. "'Tis thy victory more even than ours. No celebration can be without that thou'rt there to share."

  "You are most kind, and I must confess that I am grateful. I have learned what 'loneliness' is... and it is not a pleasant thing."

  "Worry not, my Dahak," Jiltanith said softly. "Never shalt thou know loneliness again. Whilst humans live, they'll not forget thy deeds nor cease to love thee."

  Dahak fell uncharacteristically silent, and Colin smiled at his wife, wishing she were physically present so he could hug her.

  "Well! That's settled. How about the rest of us, Vlad?"

  "Crag Cat is hyper-capable," Chernikov said, "but her core tap governors are too badly damaged for Enchanach Drive. I would like to dispatch her, Moir, Sigam, and Hly direct to Birhat for repairs. The remainder of the Flotilla is damaged to greater or lesser extent-aside from Heka, that is-but those four are by far the most severely injured."

  "Okay. Captain Singleterry can take them out to Bia. I'm sure Mother and Marshal Tsien will be ready to take care of them by now, and our 'colonists' will want to talk firsthand to someone who was here. I think we'll send Hector and Sevrid back to Sol with our prisoners, too."

  "Aye, and 'twould be well to send Cohanna with them, Colin. Their injured will require our finest aid, and 'tis needful 'Hanna and Isis confer with Father to discover how best we may approach their 'programming.' "

  "Good idea," Colin agreed, "and one that takes care of the most immediate chores. Vlad, are you to a point where you can turn over to Baltan?"

  "I am," Chernikov replied, holographic eyes abruptly glowing.

  "Thought you might be," Colin murmured. "You and Dahak can get started exploring then." He grinned suddenly. "Think of it as a distraction, Dahak. Sort of like reading magazines in the dentist's office."

  "I will attempt to, although, were I human, I would not permit my teeth to require reconstructive attention," Dahak agreed primly.

  Vladimir Chernikov reclined in the pilot's couch of his cutter, propped his heels on his console, and hummed. It had been nice of Tamman to let him hitch a ride deeper into the battle zone aboard Royal Birhat, saving him hours of sublight flight time. Especially since Tamman regarded his technique for wreck-hunting as unscientific, to say the least.

  Which it was; but Chernikov didn't exactly regard his present duty as work, and he always had been a hunt-and-peck tourist.

  At the moment, he was well into what had been the Achuultani rear before Jiltanith's attack. Chernikov was convinced anything worth finding would be in this area. That was his official reasoning. Privately, he knew, he wanted to look here because he would be the first. All of Hector's prisoners had come from ships which had been crippled by gravitonic warheads; the irradiation of anti-matter explosions and the Empire's energy weapons left few survivors, and this had been the site of pointblank combat. Few of these ships had been killed by missiles, much less gravitonic warheads, which meant that the area hadn't had much priority for Sevrid's attention.

  He stopped humming and lowered his feet, looking more closely at the display. There was something odd about that wreck. Its forward half had been smashed away-by energy fire, judging from what was left-but why did it... ?

  He stiffened. No wonder it seemed odd! The wreck's lines were identical to the others he had seen, but the broken stump that remained was barely half a ship-and half again bigger than the others had been to begin with!

  He urged the cutter closer. There had to be a reason this thing was so big, and he dared not believe the most logical one. He ghosted still closer, floodlights sweeping the slowly tumbling hull, and jagged, runic characters showed themselves. Dahak had tutored Chernikov carefully in the Achuultani alphabet and language in preparation for explorations exactly like this, and now his lips moved as he pronounced the throat-straining phonetics. They sounded like the prelude to a dog fight, and the translation was no more soothing.

  Deathdealer. Now there was a name for a ship.

  Fabricator's destroyer-sized workboat streaked towards Deathdealer, and Chernikov smiled as his cutter's small com screen lit with Geran's face. Dahak's erstwhile Maintenance chief had become Fabricator's third officer, and Baltan's willingness to let him go at a moment like this indicated how much excitement his find had engendered.

  "Greetings, Geran," Chernikov said. "What do you think of her?"

  "She's a big mother. What d'you think-sixty kilometers?"

  "A bit over sixty-four, by my measurement," Chernikov agreed.

  "Maker. Well, if she's laid out like Vindicator was, her backup data storage will be somewhere in the after third of the ship."

  "I agree," Chernikov said, but he frowned slightly, and Geran's eyebrows rose.

  "What is it, Vlad?"

  "I have been inspecting the wreckage visually while I awaited you. Examine that energy turret-there, the one the explosion blew open."

  Geran glanced at the turret while Chernikov held a powerful spotlight on it. For a moment, his face was merely interested, then it tightened. "Breaker! What is that?"

  "It appears to be a rather crude gravitonic disrupter."

  "That's crazy!"
/>   "Why?" Chernikov asked softly. "Because it is several centuries advanced over any other energy weapon we have encountered? Dahak and I have maintained all along that there are anomalies in Achuultani design. Given the nature of their missile propulsion, there is no inherent reason they could not build such weapons."

  "But why here and nowhere else?" Geran demanded.

  "It appears that for some reason their fleet command ships mount much more capable energy armaments, which suggests that the rest of their equipment also may be more sophisticated. I do not know why that should be-yet. It would seem, however, that there is one way to find out, no?"

  "Yes!" Geran agreed emphatically. "But that thing's hotter than the hinges of hell. Do you have a rad suit over there?"

  "Of course."