Heirs of Empire

crew examined her every system. Before they did anything else, they were going to be certain—or as close as was humanly (or Narhanily) possible—no more booby traps awaited them. But once they were certain they still had to decide what to do, and the display’s glittering stars offered few options.

He looked up as Tamman and Brashan entered the command deck. Tamman still looked drawn and pinched, but Brashan seemed almost calm. Which, Sean reflected, might owe something to the famed Narhani lack of imagination. Personally, he’d always thought of it more as pragmatism. Narhani were more concerned with the nuts and bolts of a problem than with its implications, and he was glad of it. Brashan’s levelheadedness was exactly what they all needed just now, for, to use the current Academy phrase, they were up to their eyebrows in shit.

Tamman perched on the assistant tactical officer’s couch beside Sandy while Brashan keyed a reconfiguration command into the exec’s couch. It twitched for a moment, then reformed itself into a Narhani-style pad, and he folded onto it just as Sandy shook her head and roused. She sat up with a wan smile that still held a ghost of her familiar humor, and Sean grinned back wryly. Then he cleared his throat.

“All right. I know our system checks are still a long way from finished, but I think it’s time to compare notes.”

Their nodded agreement was a relief. He was senior to all of them, yet his authority, while real and legal, rested solely on their class standings. He stood first in their Academy class, but less than five points separated him from Tamman, their most “junior” officer, and there was a bare quarter-point between him and Sandy. Which was due solely to his higher scores in Tactics and Phys-Ed, for she’d waxed him in Math and Physics.

“Okay. Harry and I have done our best to figure out where we are, but we can’t be as precise about it as we’d like. Or, rather, we know where we are; we just don’t have any idea what the neighborhood looks like. Harry?” He passed the discussion to her, and she propped a hip against the astrogator’s console.

“First of all, we’re nowhere near where we’re supposed to be. Israel’s astro data is limited—normally, sublight units don’t much need interstellar data—but we’ve got the old basic Fourth Empire cartography downloads. Working from them and allowing for forty-odd thousand years of stellar motion, we’re just about smack in the middle of the Tarik Sector.”

“The Tarik Sector?” Tamman sounded dubious, and Sean didn’t blame him.

“Exactly.” Harriet’s voice was calmer than Sean knew she was. “Whatever happened took Terra off her programmed course by something like plus seventy-two degrees declination and fifty degrees left ascension from Urahan, then brought her out of hyper three days early on top of it. At the moment, we’re five-point-four-six-seven light-centuries from Birhat, as near as Sean and I can figure it, on a bearing no one could possibly have predicted.”

Sean watched the implications sink home. It didn’t make much real difference—they’d known from the start that their battleship was a hopelessly tiny needle in a galactic haystack—but now they also knew no one had even the faintest idea where to start looking for them. Harriet gave them a few moments to consider it, then went on even more dispassionately.

“Unfortunately, Israel’s database was loaded for the Idan Sector, where we were supposed to be going. We’ve figured out where we are relative to Bia, but we don’t have any data on the Tarik Sector, so we don’t have the least idea what it contained forty thousand years ago, much less today. No Survey people have penetrated this far, and they probably won’t for at least fifty years or so. All of which means we’re not in real good shape for making informed guesses about where we ought to go next.”

She paused again, then returned the floor to Sean with a small nod.

“Thanks, Harry.” He looked at the others and shrugged. “As Harry says, we don’t have much guidance about possible destinations, but then, we don’t have much choice, either.” He flipped his neural feed into the display computers, and a red sighting ring circled a bright star.

“That,” he said, “is an F5 star at about one-point-three light-years. We don’t know which one it is, so we don’t know if it had any habitable planets even before the bio-weapon hit, but the next nearest candidate for a life- bearing world is this G6—” a second sighting ring blossomed “—over eleven light-years away. It’s going to take us a while to reach either of them at our best sustained sublight speed, but it’d take something like nine hundred years to get back to Bia—assuming Israel’s systems would hold up for a voyage that long. On the other hand, we can get to the F5 in just under two-point-two years. At point-six cee, we’ll have a tau of about point-eight, so the subjective time will be about twenty-one months. That’s a long time, and we’ve only got two stasis pods, so we’ll have to put up with each other awake the whole way, but I don’t see that we have any other option. Comments?”

“I have one, Sean,” Brashan said after a moment, and Sean nodded for him to go on. “It’s more of an observation, really. It occurs to me that, given such a long voyage time, it may be a fortunate thing we Narhani still think of ourselves as having only one sex.”

The other three stared at Brashan, but Sean astonished himself with a chuckle. After a moment the others began to grin, too, though Harriet was a little pink. Sean coughed into his fist, smothering the last of his chuckles, and regarded the Narhani sternly.

“Contrary to what you poor, benighted aliens may believe, Brashan, not all humans are helpless slaves to their hormones.”

“Indeed?” Brashan cocked his head and looked down his long snout at him, raising his crest in an expression of polite disbelief. “I would never dispute your veracity, Sean, but I must say my personal observation of human mating behavior invalidates your basic premise. And while we Narhani are quite different from humans, it seems to me that a disinterested perspective is less prone to self-deception. As you know, my people have given this matter of sex a great deal of thought in the last few years, and—”

“All right, Brashan Brashieel-nahr!” Sandy hurled a boot at the centauroid. Sean hadn’t seen her take it off, but a six-fingered hand darted up and caught it in mid-flight, and Brashan made the bubbling noise that always reminded Sean of a clogged drain trying—vainly—to clear itself.

The laughing Narhani returned Sandy’s boot without rising, inclining his saurian-looking head in a gallant bow, and Sean shook his head. Like most Narhani clone-children, Brashan had spent so much time with humans his elders found his sense of humor quite incomprehensible, but he was also a far shrewder student of human psychology than he cared to pretend. He understood humans needed to laugh in order not to weep. And, Sean thought with heightened respect, perhaps he also understood how his teasing could help set his human friends at ease with a topic which was certainly going to rear its head.

“If we can turn to a less prurient subject?” he said loudly. The others turned back towards him, and their faces, he was pleased to see, were much more relaxed.

“Thank you. Now, Harry and I have already plotted our course, but before we head out I want to know we can rely on our systems.” Heads nodded more soberly, and he turned to Tamman. “How does Engineering look, Tam?”

“Brash and I haven’t quite finished our inspection, but as far as we’ve been everything looks a hundred percent. The power plant’s nominal, anyway, and the catcher field shows a green board. Once we get up above about point-three cee we’ll be sucking in more hydrogen than we’re burning. And the drive looks fine, despite that crash launch.”

“Environmental?”

“First thing we checked. No problems with the plant, but we may have one with rations.” Sean raised an eyebrow, and Tamman shrugged. “There were only five Narhani in Terra’s entire complement, Sean. I haven’t had a chance to run a Logistics inventory yet, but we could be low on supplementals.”

“Uh.” Sean tugged at an earlobe and frowned. Narhani body chemistry incorporated a level of heavy metals lethal to humans; Brashan could eat anything his friends could, but he couldn’t metabolize all of it, nor would it provide everything he needed.

“Don’t worry,” Sandy said. Sean looked at her and saw the absent expression of someone plugged into her computers. “Logistics shows a heap of Narhani supplementals. In fact, we’ve got six or seven times our normal food supplies in all categories, and the hydroponic section’s way overstocked. Which—” her eyes refocused and she