Heirs of Empire

and thought about what he’d done. He made himself stand back and look at the logic of it, and now that he had time to think, maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea. It had worked, hadn’t it? But, Jesus, the risk he’d taken!

Maybe, he told himself silently, Aunt Adrienne’s homilies on overly audacious tactics contained a kernel of truth after all.

Chapter Sixteen

Stardrift glittered overhead, and a smaller, fiercer star crawled along the battle steel beneath his feet as the robotic welder lit a hellish balefire in Sean MacIntyre’s eyes while Israel drifted in sepulchral gloom almost a light-hour from the system primary.

His wounded ship lay hidden in an asteroid’s ink-black lee while he coaxed the welder through his neural feed. Other robotic henchmen had already cut away the jagged edges of the breach, rebuilt sheared frame members, and tacked down replacement plates of battle steel. Now the massive welding unit crept along, fusing the plates in place. Under other circumstances, damage control could have been left to such a routine task unsupervised, but one of Israel’s hits had taken out a third of her Engineering peripherals. Until Tamman and Brashan finished putting them back on-line—if they finished—the damage control sub-net remained far from reliable.

“How’s it coming?”

He turned his head in the force field globe of his “helmet” as Sandy walked down the curve of the hull towards him.

“Not too bad.”

Fatigue harshened his voice, and she studied him as she came closer. A massive, broken pylon towered behind him, shattered by the hit that had demolished the heavily armored drive node it had supported. He stood between stygian blackness and the welder’s fire, half his suited body lost in shadow, the other glowing demon- bright, and his face was drawn. It was his turn to wake from nightmares these nights, but he met her eyes squarely.

“You’re doing better than I expected,” she said after a moment.

“Yeah. We’ll have this breach finished by the end of the watch.”

“The end of which watch, dummy?” she teased gently. “You’re supposed to be in the sack right now.”

“Really?” He sounded genuinely surprised, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at his tired, bemused expression as he checked the time.

“I’ll be damned. Is that why you came out here? To get me?”

“Yep. A MacMahan always gets her man—and in this instance, my man better get his ass inside before he goes to sleep on his big, flat feet.”

“I do believe,” he stretched, “you have a point, Midshipwoman MacMahan. But what about junior?” He waved at the welder.

“It’s only got fifty meters to go, Sean. You can trust it that far on its internal programming. And if you come along and let her tuck you in, Aunt Sandy promises she’ll come back out and check on it in about an hour. Deal?”

“Deal,” he sighed. The two of them turned away, disappearing over the rise of the battleship’s flank, and the lonely star of the welder crawled on behind them, blazing like a lost soul in the depths of endless night.

* * *

Even Brashan looked drawn, and the humans were downright haggard, but three weeks of exhausting labor had repaired everything they could repair.

“Okay, people,” Sean called the meeting to order. “It doesn’t seem to me that going on to our next stop is a real good idea. Anybody disagree?”

Wry, weary grins and headshakes answered him. The G6 star of their second-choice destination was twelve and a half light-years away from their present position. At barely half the speed of light—the best Israel could sustain with a primary drive node shot away—the voyage would take seventy-five months, even if it would be “only” five and a half years long for them.

“Good. I’d hate to make a trip that long and then not find anything at the other end. Especially since we know there’s an active shipyard here.”

“Cogently put,” Brashan agreed with one of his curled-lip grins. “Of course, there remains the small problem of gaining control of that shipyard.”

“True,” Sean lay back in his couch and stared up into the display, “but maybe that’s not as tough as it looks. For instance, we know the power for the platform stasis fields is beamed up from that ground source, so that’s probably the HQ site. If so, taking it over should give us control of the platforms, too. Failing that, taking it out should shut them down, right?”

“I agree that seems a logical conclusion, but how do you intend to penetrate its orbital defenses to get at it?”

“Sleight of hand, Brashan. We’ll fool the suckers.”

“Oh, dear. This sounds like something I’m not going to like.”

Sean smiled and the others chuckled as Brashan fanned his crest in a Narhani expression of abject misery.

“It won’t be that bad—I hope.” Sean turned to Sandy and his sister. “Did your analysis reach the same conclusion I did?”

“Pretty much,” Sandy said after a glance at Harriet. “We agree they detected us on passive, at least. We didn’t pick up any active systems till their launcher fire control came up.”

“And their tactics?”

“That’s a lot more speculative, Sean, and one point still worries us,” Harriet replied. “Your theory sounds logical, but it’s only a theory.”

“I know, but look at it. Much as it pains me to admit it, that much firepower should have swatted us like a fly, however brilliant my tactics were. Whatever runs those defenses was slow, Harry. Slow and clumsy.”

“Okay, but how do you explain its defensive tactics? Slow’s one thing, but it let us take out thirty-six platforms before the others even began to defend themselves.”

“So it’s slow, clumsy, and dumb,” Tamman said with a shrug.

“You’re missing the point, Tam.” Sandy came to Harriet’s aid. “Properly designed automated defenses shouldn’t have let us take any of them out unopposed, but anything dumb enough to let us zap any of them that way should have let us take them all out. Besides, how many other intact quarantine systems have we seen? None. That means this thing’s original programming wasn’t just good enough to control its weapons—it’s run enough deep-space industry to keep the whole system functional for forty-five thousand years, as well.”

She paused to let that sink in, and Tamman nodded. Harriet’s stealthed sensor remotes, operating from a circumspect forty light-minutes, had given them proof of that. The Radona-class yard was no longer on standby; it was rebuilding the weapon platforms Sandy had destroyed.

“Another thing,” she continued. “Those platforms’ passive defenses are mighty efficient by Empire standards, and that razzle-dazzle trick by the ground source is pretty cute, too. It’s not standard military hardware, but it works. Maybe its designer was a civilian, but if so he was a sneaky one—not exactly the sort to give anything away to an enemy. And if a sharp cookie like whoever set this all up built in defensive systems at all, why arrange things so they didn’t come on-line until after our third salvo?”

“So what do you think happened?” Tamman countered.

“We don’t know; that’s what worries us. It’s almost like there was something else in the command loop— something that really was slow, clumsy, and stupid. If there is, it probably saved our lives this time, but it may also surprise us, especially if we make any wrong assumptions.”

“Fair enough,” Sean said. “But given how long it waited to bring its weapons on-line, whatever it is must be