Heirs of Empire

“You’re an idiot, Sean MacIntyre, but I love you anyway.”

“Uf course you do, Fraulein! You cannot help yourzelf!”

“Oh, you creep!” Her caressing hand darted to his nose and twisted, and he yelped in anguish and grabbed her wrists, pinning her down—not without difficulty. He was sixty centimeters taller, but she wiggled like a lithe, naked eel until a final shrewd twist toppled him from the bed. He sat up on the synthetic decksole, then stood, rubbing his posterior with an aggrieved air while she laughed at him, the last of her nightmare banished.

“Jeez, you play rough! I’m gonna take my marbles and go home.”

“Now there’s an empty threat! You can’t even find your marbles.”

“Hmph!” He took a step towards the bed, and her fingers curved into talons. Her eyes glinted, and he stopped dead. “Uh, truce?” he suggested.

“No way. I demand complete and unconditional surrender.”

“But it’s my bed, too,” he said plaintively.

“Possession is nine points of the law. Give?”

“What’ll you do with me if I do?”

“Something horrible and disgustingly debauched.”

“Well, in that case—!” He hopped onto the bed and raised his hands.

* * *

Brashan looked up from the executive officer’s station and waved without disconnecting his feed from the console as the others stepped through the command deck hatch. With Engineering slaved to the bridge, one person could stand watch under normal conditions, though it would have taken at least four of them to fight the ship effectively.

Sean dropped into the captain’s couch. Harriet and Tamman took the astrogator’s and engineer’s stations, and Sandy flopped down at Tactical. She looked into the display at the star burning ever larger before them, and the others’ eyes followed hers.

Their weary voyage was drawing to an end. Or, at least, to a possible end. They didn’t talk a great deal about what they’d do if it turned out that blazing star had no reclaimable hardware, but so far they’d detected no habitable world which might have provided it.

Sean glanced at the others from the corner of an eye. In many ways, they’d made out far better than he’d hoped. It helped that they were all friends, but being trapped so long in so small a universe with anyone made for problems. There’d been the occasional disagreement—even the odd furious argument—but Harriet’s basic good sense, with a powerful assist from Brashan, had held them together. Solitude didn’t really bother Narhani much, and Brashan had spent enough time with humans—especially these humans—to understand their more mercurial moods. He’d poured several barrels of oil on various troubled waters in the past twenty months, and, Sean thought, it helped that he still regarded sex primarily as a subject for intellectual curiosity.

His attention moved to Tamman and Harriet. Despite Israel’s size, she was intended for deployment from her mother ship or a planet, not interstellar voyaging, but at least she was designed for a nominal crew of thirty. That gave them enough room to find privacy, and the humans had fallen into couples without much fuss or bother. For him and Sandy, he knew, the pairing would be permanent even if—when!—they got home, but he didn’t think it was for Harry and Tamman. Neither of them seemed particularly inclined to settle down, though they obviously enjoyed one another’s company … greatly.

He grinned and inserted his own feed into the captain’s console for a systems update. As usual, Israel was functioning perfectly. She really was an incredible piece of engineering, and he’d had an unusual amount of time to learn to appreciate her design and capabilities. They’d spent endless hours running tactical exercises, as much for a way to keep occupied as anything else, and he’d discovered a few things he’d never imagined she could do.

Still, it was Sandy who’d unearthed the real treasure in Israel’s computers. Her original captain had been a movie freak—not for HD or even pre-Imperial tri-vid, but for old-fashioned, flat-image movies, the kind they’d put on film. There were hundreds of them in the ship’s memory, and Sandy had tinkered up an imaging program to convert them to holo via the command bridge display. They’d worked their way through the entire library, and some of them had been surprisingly good. Sean’s personal favorite was The Quest for the Holy Grail by someone called Monty Python, but the ones they’d gotten the most laughs out of were the old science fiction flicks. Brashan was especially fascinated by something called Forbidden Planet, but they’d all become addicted. By now, their normal conversation was heavily laced with bits of dialogue none of their Academy friends would even begin to have understood.

He withdrew from the console, maintaining only a tenuous link as he tucked his hands behind his head and crossed his ankles.

“Behold the noble captain, bending his full attention upon his duties!” Sandy remarked. He stuck out his tongue, then looked at Harriet.

“Looks like our original position estimates were on the money, Harry. I make it about another two and a half days.”

“Just about,” she agreed, an edge of anticipation sharpening her voice. “Anything more on system bodies, Brash?”

“Indeed,” the Narhani said calmly. “The range is still well beyond active scanner range, but passive instrumentation continues to pick up additional details. In particular—” he gave his friends a curled-lip Narhani grin “—I have detected a third planet on this side of the star.”

Something in his tone brought Sean up on an elbow. The others were staring at him just as hard, and Brashan nodded.

“It would appear,” he said, “to have a mean orbital radius of approximately seventeen light-minutes—well within the liquid water zone.”

“Hey, that’s great!” Sean exclaimed. “That ups the odds a bunch. If there used to be people here, we may find something we can use after all!”

“So we may.” Brashan’s voice was elaborately calm, even for him; so calm Sean looked at him in quick suspicion. “In fact,” the Narhani went on, “spectroscopic analysis confirms an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, as well.”

Sean’s jaw dropped. The bio-weapon had killed everything on any planet it touched, and when all life died, a planet soon ceased to be habitable, for it was the presence of life which created the conditions that allowed life to exist. Birhat was life-bearing only because the zoo habitats had cracked before her atmosphere had time to degrade completely, and Chamhar had survived only because no one had lived there, anyway. Earth, never having been claimed by the Fourth Empire, was a special case.

But if this planet had breathable air, then perhaps it hadn’t been hit by the bio-weapon at all! And if they could get word of their find home again, humanity had yet a third world onto which it might expand anew.

Then his spirits plunged. If the planet hadn’t been contaminated, it probably hadn’t had any people, either. Which, in turn, meant no chance at all of finding Imperial hardware they could use to cobble up a hypercom.

“Well,” he said more slowly, “that is interesting. Anything else?”

“No, but we are still almost sixty-two light-hours from the star,” Brashan pointed out. “With Israel’s instrumentation, we can detect nothing smaller than a planetoid at much above ten light-hours unless it has an active emissions signature.”

“In which case,” Sean murmured, “we might begin seeing something in the next eighty hours. Assuming, of course, that there’s anything to see.”

* * *

The talmahk were returning early this spring.

High Priest Vroxhan stood by the window, listening to the Inner Circle with half an ear while he watched jeweled wings flash high above the Sanctum. One gleaming flock broke away to dart towards the time-worn stumps of the Old One’s dwellings, and he wondered yet again why such lovely creatures should haunt places so wrapped in