The Armageddon Inheritance

I would like to grant Admiral Hawter’s request to deploy our existing units for operational training and war games in the trans-asteroidal area. It will give the crews valuable experience with their weapons, and, more importantly, I believe, give our command personnel greater confidence in themselves.”

“I agree entirely,” Horus said firmly. “And it’ll also let us use some of the larger asteroids for target practice—which means the Achuultani won’t be able to use them for target practice on us! Proceed with it immediately, by all means, Marshal Tsien. Vassily, I’ll take your recommendations to the Council. Unless someone there can give me an overpowering counter-argument, they’ll be approved within forty-eight hours. Is that good enough?”

“Eminently, Governor.”

“Good. In that case, gentlemen, let’s get into our suits. I want to see ODC Two firsthand.”

* * *

The Achuultani scouts gathered their strength once more, merging into a single huge formation about their flagship. A brilliant F5 star lay barely five light-years distant, but it held no interest for them. Their instruments probed and peered, listening for the electromagnetic voices they had come so far to find. The universe was vast. Not even such accomplished killers as they could sweep it of all life, and so worlds such as T’Yir were safe unless the scouts literally stumbled across them.

But other worlds were not, and the sensor crews caught the faint signals they had sought. Directional antennae turned and quested, and the scouts reoriented themselves. A small, G2 star called to them, and they went to silence it forever.

Chapter Eleven

“Barbarian!” Tamman shook his head mournfully as he took a fresh glass of lemonade from his wife and buried his sorrows in its depths.

“And why might that be, you effete, over-civilized, not to say decadent, epicure?” Colin demanded.

“That ought to be obvious. Mesquite charcoal? How … how Texan!”

Colin stuck out his tongue, and meat juices hissed as he turned steaks. A fragrant cloud of smoke rose on the heat shimmer of the grill, pushed out over the lake by the park deck’s cool breezes, and the volley ball tournament was in full cry. He glanced up in time to see Colonel Tama Matsuo, Tamman’s grandson, launch a vicious spike. One of the German team’s forwards tried to get under it, but not even an enhanced human could have returned that shot.

“Banzai!” the Sendai Division’s team screamed, and the Germans muttered darkly. Jiltanith applauded, and Matsuo bowed to her, then prepared to serve. His hand struck the ball like a hammer, and Colin winced as it bulleted across the net.

“Now, Tamman, don’t be so harsh,” his critic’s wife chimed in. “After all, Colin’s doing the best he knows how.”

“Oh, thank you, kind lady! Thank you! Just remember—your wonderful husband is the one who courted bad luck by broiling tai in miso last week.”

Recon Captain Amanda Givens laughed, her cafe-au-lait face wreathed in a lovely smile, and Tamman pulled her down beside him to kiss her ear.

“Nonsense,” he said airily. “Just doing my bit to root out superstition. Anyway, I was out of salt.”

Amanda snuggled closer to him, and Colin grinned. Dahak’s sickbay had regenerated the leg she’d lost in the La Paz raid in time for her wedding, and the sheer joy she and Tamman took in one another warmed Colin’s heart, even though their marriage had caused a few unanticipated problems.

Dahak had always seemed a bit pettish over the Terran insistence that one name wasn’t good enough. He’d accepted it—grumpily—but only until he got to attend the first wedding on his decks in fifty thousand years. In some ways, he’d seemed even more delighted than the happy couple, and he’d hardly been able to wait for Colin to log the event officially.

That was when the trouble started, for Imperial conventions designating marital status sounded ridiculous applied to Terran names, and Dahak had persisted in trying to make them work. Colin usually wound up giving in when Dahak felt moved to true intransigence—talking the computer out of something was akin to parting the Red Sea, only harder—but he’d refused pointblank to let Dahakinflict a name like Amandacollettegivens-Tam on a friend. The thought of hearing that every time Dahak spoke to or of Amanda had been too much, and if Tamman had originally insisted (when he finally stopped laughing) that it was a lovely name which fell trippingly from the tongue, his tune quickly changed when he found out what Dahak intended to call him. Tamman-Amcolgiv was shorter; that was about all you could say for it.

“Methinks it little matters what thou sayst, Tamman,” Jiltanith’s mournful observation drew Colin back to the present as she opened another bottle of beer. “Our Colin departeth not from his fell intent to poison one and all with his noxious smokes and fumes.”

“Listen, all of you,” Colin retorted, propping his fists on his hips, “I’m captain of this tub, and we’ll fix food my way!”

“Didst’a hear thy captain speak of thee, Dahak, my tub?” Jiltanith caroled, and Colin shook a fist at her.

“I believe the proper response is ’Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,’ ” a mellow voice replied, and Colin groaned.

“What idiot encouraged him to learn cliches?”

“Nay, Colin, acquit us all. ’Tis simply that we discouraged him not.”

“Well you should have.”

“Stop complaining and let the man cook.” Vlad Chernikov lay flat on his back in the shade of a young oak. Now he propped one eye open. “If you do not care for his cuisine, you need not eat it, Tamman.”

“Fat chance!” Colin snorted, and stole Jiltanith’s beer.

He swallowed, enjoying the “sun” on his shoulders, and decided ’Tanni had been right to talk him into the party. The anniversary of the fall of Anu’s enclave deserved to be celebrated as a reminder of some of the “impossible” things they’d already accomplished, even if uncertainty over what waited at Birhat continued to gnaw at everyone. Or possibly because it did.

He looked out over the happy, laughing knots of his off-watch crewmen. Some of them, anyway. There was a null-grav basketball tournament underway on Deck 2460, and General Treshnikov had organized a “Top Gun” contest on the simulator deck for the non-fighter pilots of the crew. Then there was the regatta out on the thirty- kilometer-wide park deck’s lake.

He glanced around the shaded picnic tables. Cohanna and Ninhursag sat at one, annihilating one another in a game of Imperial battle chess with a bloodthirsty disregard for losses that would turn a line officer gray, and Caitrin O’Rourke and Geran had embarked on a drinking contest—in which Caitrin’s Aussie ancestry appeared to be a decided advantage—at another. General von Grau and General Tsukuba were wagering on the outcome of the volley ball tournament, and Hector wore a dreamy look as he and Dahak pursued a discussion, complete with neural-feed visual aids, of Hannibal’s Italian tactics. Sarah Meir sat with him, listening in and reaching down occasionally to scratch the ears of Hector’s huge half-lab, half-rottweiler bitch Tinker Bell as she drowsed at her master’s feet.

Colin returned Jiltanith’s beer, and his smile grew warmer as her eyes gleamed at him. Yes, she’d been