Heirs of Empire

intimate fusion with their cybernetic henchmen, united through their neural feeds.

Continuous self-diagnostic programs scrutinized every aspect of those computers’ operations, alert for any malfunction while Imperial Terra’s crewmen stood their watches and monitored their displays, and those displays told them all was well as their ship tore through hyper. But all was not well, for none of Imperial Terra’s crew knew about the Alpha Priority commands a programmer now dead with his entire family had inserted into their ship’s computer, and so none of them knew Comp Cent had become a traitor.

* * *

Sandy MacMahan crossed the cool, cavernous bay to the gleaming flank of the sublight battleship Israel. Number six personnel hatch stood open, and she trotted up the ramp, wondering where Fleet Commander Jury was.

She poked her head in through the hatch and blinked in surprise.

“Sean? What’re you doing here?”

“Me? What’re you doing here? I got a memo from Commander Jury to report for an unscheduled training exercise.”

“So did I.” Sandy frowned. “Dragged me out of the sack, too.”

“Too bad, considering how much you need your beauty sleep.”

“At least beauty sleep does me some good, Beak Schnoz,” she shot back, and Sean grinned and rubbed his nose, acknowledging her hit. “But speaking of Commander Jury, where is she?”

“Dunno. Let’s check the command deck.”

Sandy nodded, and they stepped into the transit shaft. The gravitonic system whisked them away … and the hatch closed silently behind them.

The midshipmen stepped out of the shaft onto the command deck and into a fresh surprise. Harriet, Tamman, and Brashan were already there, and they looked just as puzzled as Sandy and Sean felt. There was a moment of confused questions and counter-questions, and then Sean held up his hands.

“Whoa! Hold on. Look, Sandy and I both got nabbed by Commander Jury for some extra hands-on parasite training time. What’re you guys doing here?”

“The same thing,” Harriet said. “And I don’t understand it. I just finished a two-hour session in the simulator last watch.”

“Yeah,” Tamman said, “and if we’re here, where’s Commander Jury?”

“Maybe we’d better ask her.” Sean flipped his neural feed into Imperial Terra’s internal com net … and his eyes widened as the system kicked him right back out. That had never happened before.

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. Procedure frowned on using fold-space coms aboard ship, but something decidedly strange was going on, so he activated his implant com. Or, rather, he tried to activate it.

“Shit!” He glanced up and saw the others looking at him. “I can’t get into the com net—and something’s blanketing my fold-space com!”

Sandy stared at him in astonishment, and then her face went blank as she tried to contact Jury. Nothing happened, and a tiny flame of uncertainty kindled in her eyes. It wasn’t fear—not yet—but it was closer to that than Sean liked to see from Sandy.

“I can’t get in, either.”

“I don’t like this,” Tamman muttered. Harriet nodded agreement, and Brashan stood and headed for the transit shaft.

“I think we’d better find out what’s going on, and—”

“Three-minute warning,” a calm, female voice interrupted the Narhani. “Parasite launch in three minutes. Assume launch stations.”

Sean whirled to the command console. Launch stations? You couldn’t launch a parasite in hyper-space without destroying parasite and mother ship alike—any moron knew that!—but the boards were blinking to life, and his jaw clenched as the launch clock began to count down.

“Oh, my God!” Harriet whispered, but Sean was already hammering at the console through his neural feed, and his dark face went white as the computer refused to let him in.

“Computer! Emergency voice override! Abort launch sequence!”

Nothing happened, and Brashan’s voice was taut behind him.

“The transit shaft has been closed down, Sean.”

“Jesus Christ!” With the shaft down, it would take over five minutes to reach the nearest hatch.

“Two-minute warning,” the computer remarked. “Parasite launch in two minutes. Assume launch stations.”

“What do we do, Sean?” Tamman asked harshly, and Sean scrubbed his hands over his face. Then he shook himself.

“Man your stations! Try to get into the system and shut the damned thing down, or this crazy computer’ll kill us all!”

* * *

Commander Yu had been on watch for two hours. As most watches in hyper-space, they’d been deadly dull hours, and her attention was on the slowly shifting light sculptures, so it took her a few seconds to note the peculiar readings from Launch Bay Forty-One.

But then they began to register, and she straightened in her couch, eyes widening. The bay was entering launch cycle!

Commander Yu was an experienced officer. She paled as she realized what breaching the drive field in hyper would do to her ship, yet she didn’t panic. Instead, she threw an instant abort command into Comp Cent’s net and the computer acknowledged, but the bay went right on cycling!

She snapped her feed into a standby system and tried to override manually. The launch count went steadily on, and her face was bloodless as she began punching alarm circuits … and nothing at all happened!

Time was running out fast, and she did the only thing left. She ordered a complete, emergency computer shut down.

Comp Cent ignored her, and then it was too late.

* * *

Imperial Terra dropped out of hyper. There was no warning. She shouldn’t have been able to do it. A ship in hyper stayed in hyper until it reached its programmed coordinates, and Terra hadn’t reached the coordinates Commander Yu had given her. But she had reached the ones she’d selected under the overriding authority of her Alpha Priority commands.

She reappeared in normal space, over a light-year from the nearest star, and the battleship Israel screamed out of her bay under full emergency power. Her drive field shredded centimeter-thick battle steel bulkheads and splintered hatches the size of an aircraft carrier’s flight deck. She massed over a hundred and twenty thousand tons, and Imperial Terra’s alarms screamed as she reamed the access shaft into tangled ruin.

Sean MacIntyre gasped in fear, pressed back into his couch by a cold-start, full-power launch. The battleship was moving at twenty percent of light-speed when she erupted from the air-spewing wound of her bay, and her speed was still climbing!

He stared at the holo display as it sprang to life, too confused and terrified to grasp what was happening.