Heirs of Empire

“Finished, Horus?”

The Planetary Duke of Terra looked up and grimaced as Lawrence Jefferson stepped into his office.

“No,” he said sourly, dropping a data chip into his security drawer, “but I’m as close as I’ll be for the next decade, so we might as well go. It’s not every day my grandchildren have a twelfth birthday, and that’s more important than this.”

Jefferson laughed as Horus stood and sent his desk computer a command to lock the drawer, and an answering smile flickered on the old man’s lips. He glanced at Jefferson’s briefcase.

“I see you’re not leaving your work home.”

“I’m not going to the party. Besides, this isn’t ‘my’ work—it’s Admiral MacMahan’s copy of Gus’ report on that anti-Narhani demonstration.”

“Oh.” Horus sounded as disgusted as he felt. “You know, I’ve learned to handle prejudice. We all suffer from that, to some extent, but this anti-Narhani thing is plain, old-fashioned bigotry.”

“True, but then the difference between prejudice and bigotry is usually stupidity. The answer’s education. The Narhani are on our side; we just have to prove that to these idiots.”

“Somehow I doubt they’d appreciate your terminology, Lawrence.”

“I call them as I see them.” Jefferson grinned. “Besides, you’re the only person here. If it leaks, I’ll know who to come after.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.” Horus finished shutting down his computer through his neural feed as they strolled out of the office, and two armed Marine guards snapped to attention. Their presence was a formality, but Hector MacMahan’s Marines took their responsibilities seriously. Besides, Horus was their Commandant’s great-great- great-etc.-grandfather.

The two men took the old-fashioned elevator to the ground floor. White Tower at NASA’s old Shepard Center had been Horus’ HQ throughout the Siege, and he’d resisted all pressure to relocate from Colorado on the basis that the fact that Shepard Center had never been anyone’s capital would help defuse nationalist jealousies. Besides, he liked the climate.

They crossed the plaza to the mat-trans terminal, and Jefferson was grateful for his bio-enhancement as his breath steamed. He wasn’t in the military, so he lacked the full enhancement that gave Horus ten times the strength of an unenhanced human, but what he had sufficed to deal with little things like sub-freezing temperatures. Which was handy, since Earth hadn’t yet fully emerged from the mini-ice age produced by the Siege’s bombardment.

They chatted idly during the walk, enjoying the moment of privacy, but Jefferson was still a bit bemused by the absence of bodyguards. He’d grown to adulthood on a planet where terrorism was the chosen form of “protest” by have-not nations, and the report in his briefcase was proof his home world frothed with resentment as it strained to make a nine- or ten-millennium leap in technology. Yet for all that, violence directed at Earth’s Governor was virtually unthinkable. Horus had not only led Earth’s people through the carnage of the Siege, he was also the father of their beloved Empress, and only a particularly stupid maniac would attack him to make a statement.

Not, Jefferson reflected, that history didn’t abound with stupid maniacs.

They entered the mat-trans facility, and Jefferson felt himself tense. It didn’t look like much—merely a railed platform twenty meters on a side—but knowing what it could do turned that brightly lit dais into something that made the primitive tree-dweller within the Lieutenant Governor gibber.

His stride slowed, and Horus grinned at him.

“Don’t take it so hard. And don’t think you’re the only one it scares!”

Jefferson managed a nod as they stepped onto the platform and the bio-scanners Colin MacIntyre had ordered incorporated into every mat-trans station considered them at length. The mat-trans had been the Fourth Empire’s executioner, the vector by which the rogue bio-weapon infected worlds hundreds of light-years apart, and he had no intention of allowing that particular bit of history to repeat itself.

But the scanners cleared them, and Jefferson clutched his briefcase in a sweaty hand, trying very hard to appear nonchalant, as heavy capacitors whined. The mat-trans’ power requirements were astronomical, even by Imperial standards, and it took almost twenty seconds to reach peak load. Then a light flashed … and Horus and Lawrence Jefferson stepped down from another platform on the planet Birhat, eight hundred light-years from Earth.

The thing that made it so damned scary, Jefferson thought as he left the mat-trans receiver gratefully behind, was that you didn’t feel a thing. Nothing. It just wasn’t natural … and wasn’t that a fine thing for a man stuffed full of sensors and neural boosters to be thinking?

“Hi, Granddad.” Jefferson looked up as General MacMahan held out his hand to Horus then turned to shake his own. “Colin asked me to meet you. He’s tied up with something over at the Palace.”

“Tied up with what?” Horus asked.

“I’m not sure, but he sounded a bit harassed. I think—” Hector grinned impishly “—it’s got something to do with Cohanna.”

“Oh, Maker! What’s she been up to now?”

“Don’t know. Come on, I’ve got transport waiting.”

“Damn it, ’Hanna!” Colin paced back and forth before the utilitarian desk from which he ran the Imperium, tugging on his nose in a gesture his subordinates knew only too well. “I’ve told you and told you you can’t just go chasing off after any wild hare that takes your fancy!”

“But, Colin—” Cohanna began.

“Don’t ‘But, Colin’ me! Did I or did I not tell you to check your next genetic experiment with me before you started on it?”

“Well, of course you did. And I did clear it with you,” Baroness Cohanna, Imperial Minister of Bio-Sciences added virtuously.

“You what?” Colin wheeled on her in disbelief.

“I said I cleared it with you. I sat right here in this office with Brashieel and told you what I was going to do.”

“You—!” Colin turned to the saurian-looking, long-snouted, quarter-horse-sized centauroid resting comfortably on his folded legs in the middle of the rug, who returned his gaze with mild, double-lidded eyes. “Brashieel, do you remember her saying anything about this?”

“Yes,” Brashieel replied calmly through the small black box mounted on one strap of his body harness. His vocal apparatus was poorly suited to human speech, but he’d learned to use his neural feed-driven vocoder’s deep bass to express emotion as well as words.

Colin drew a deep breath, then perched on his desk and folded his arms. Brashieel seldom made mistakes, and Cohanna’s triumphant expression made Colin unhappily certain she had mentioned it. Or something about it.

“All right,” he sighed, “what, exactly, did she say?”

Brashieel closed his inner eyelids in concentration, and Colin waited patiently. The alien’s mere presence was enough to give some members of humanity screaming fits, which Colin understood even if he rejected their attitude. To be sure, Brashieel was an Achuultani. Worse, he was the sole survivor of the fleet which had come within hours of destroying the planet Earth. He was also, however, the being who’d emerged as the natural leader of the prisoners of war Colin had captured after defeating the incursion, and most of those prisoners—not all, but most—were even more committed to the ultimate defeat of the rest of the Achuultani than humanity was.

For seventy-eight million years, the people of the Nest of Aku’Ultan had quartered the galaxy, destroying every sentient species they encountered. Of all their potential victims, only humanity had survived—not just once, but three times, earning it the Achuultani appellation of “the Demon Nest-Killers”—but Brashieel and his fellows knew something the rest of their race did not. They knew their entire species was enslaved by a self-aware computer which used their unending murder of races who meant them no ill to sustain the “state of war” its programming required to maintain its tyranny.

Not all humans were ready to accept their sincerity, which was why Colin had turned the planet Narhan over to those who had applied for Imperial citizenship. Narhan had avoided the bio-weapon for a simple reason; no