The Armageddon Inheritance

“Yet I counsel not despair!” Jiltanith’s clear voice cut through the almost-fear. “Nay, good My Lords and Ladies, our Warlord hath a plan most shrewd which still may tumble them to dust. Yet now will I ask our General MacMahan to speak that thou mayst know thine enemies.”

She sat, and Horus applauded silently. Colin’s human officers spoke, not Dahak. Everyone here knew how much they relied upon Dahak, yet he could see them drawing a subtle strength from hearing their own kind brief them. It wasn’t that they distrusted Dahak—how could they, when their very survival to this point resulted only from the ancient starship’s fidelity?—but they needed to hear a human voice expressing confidence. A human who was merely mortal, like themselves, and so could understand what he or she asked of them.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Hector MacMahan said, “Fleet Captain Ninhursag and I have spent several days examining the data with Dahak. Ninhursag’s also spent time with our prisoner and, with Dahak’s offices as translator, she’s been able to communicate with him after a fashion. Oddly enough, from our perspective, though he hasn’t volunteered data, he’s made no attempt to lie or mislead us.

“We’ve learned a great deal as a result, and, though there are still huge holes in our knowledge, I’ll attempt to summarize our findings. Please bear with me if I seem to wander a bit afield. I assure you, it’s pertinent.

“The Achuultani, or the People of the Nest of Aku’Ultan, are—exclusively, so far as we can determine—a warrior race. Judging from some of Brashieel’s counter-questions, they know absolutely nothing about any other sentient race. They’ve spent millions of years hunting them down and destroying them, yet they’ve learned nothing—literally nothing—about any of them. It’s almost as if they fear communicating might somehow corrupt their great purpose. And that purpose is neither less nor more than the defense of the Nest of Aku’Ultan.”

A few eyebrows rose, and Hector shook his head.

“I found it hard to believe at first myself, but that’s precisely how they see it, because at some point in their past they encountered another race, one their records call ‘the Great Nest-Killers.’ How they met, why war broke out, what weapons were used, even where the war was fought, we do not know. What we do know is that there were once many ‘nests.’ These might be thought of as clans or tribes, but they consisted of millions and even billions of Achuultani. Of all those nests, only the Aku’Ultan survived, and only because they fled. From what we’ve learned, we’re inclined to believe they fled to an entirely different galaxy—our own—to find safety.

“After their flight, the Achuultani organized to defend themselves against pursuit, just as the Imperium organized to fight the Achuultani themselves. And just as the Imperium sent out probes searching for the Achuultani, the Achuultani searched for the Great Nest-Killers. Like our ancestors, they never found their enemy. Unlike our ancestors, they did find other sentient life forms. And because they regarded all other life forms as threats to their very existence, they destroyed them.”

He paused, and there was a deep silence.

“That’s what we’re up against: a race which offers no quarter because it knows it will receive none. I don’t say it’s a situation which can never be changed, but clearly it’s one we cannot hope will change in time to save us.

“On another level, there are things about the Aku’Ultan we don’t pretend to understand.

“First, there are no female Achuultani.” Several people looked at him in open disbelief, and he shrugged. “It sounds bizarre, but so far as we can tell, there isn’t even a feminine gender in their language, which is all the more baffling in light of the fact that our prisoner is a fully functional male. Not a hermaphrodite, but a male. Fleet Captain Cohanna suggests this may indicate they reproduce by artificial means, which might explain why we see so little variation among them and, perhaps, their apparent lack of evolutionary change. It does not explain why any race, especially one as driven to survive as this one, should make the extraordinary decision to abandon all possibility of natural procreation. We asked Brashieel about this and got a totally baffled response. He simply didn’t understand the question. It hadn’t even occurred to him that we have two sexes, and he has no idea at all what that means to our psychology or our civilization.

“Second, the Nest is an extremely rigid, caste-oriented society dominated by the High Lords of the Nest and headed by the Nest Lord, the highest of the high, absolute ruler of all Achuultani. Exactly how High Lords and Nest Lords are chosen was none of Brashieel’s business. As nearly as we can tell, he was never even curious. It was simply the way things were.

“Third, the Aku’Ultan inhabit relatively few worlds; most of them are always away aboard the fleets of their ‘Great Visits,’ sweeping the galaxy for ‘nest-killers’ and destroying them. The few planets they inhabit seem to be much further away than the Imperium ever suspected, which is probably why they were never found, and the Achuultani appear to be migratory, abandoning star systems as they deplete them to construct their warships. We don’t know exactly where they are; that information wasn’t in Vindicator’s computers or, if it was, was destroyed before we took them. From what we’ve been able to determine, however, they appear to be moving to the galactic east. This would mean they’re constantly moving away from us, which may also help to explain the irregular frequency of their incursions in our direction.

“Fourth, the Nest’s social and military actions follow patterns which, as far as we can tell, have never altered in their racial memory. Frankly, this is the most hopeful point we’ve discovered. We now know how their ‘great visits’ work and how to derail the process for quite some time.”

“We do?” Gerald Hatcher scratched his nose thoughtfully. “And just how do we do that, Hector?”

“We stop this incursion,” MacMahan said simply. There was a mutter of uneasy laughter, and he smiled very slightly. “No, I mean it.

“The Achuultani possess no means of interstellar FTL communication other than by ship. How they could’ve been around this long and not developed one is beyond me, but they haven’t, which means that once a ‘great visit’ is launched, they don’t expect to hear anything from it until it gets back.”

“That’s good news, anyway,” Hatcher agreed.

“Yes, it is. Especially in light of some of their other limitations. Their best n-space speed is twenty-eight percent of light-speed, and they use only the lower, slower hyper bands—again, we don’t understand why, but let’s be grateful—which limits their best supralight speed to forty-eight lights; seven percent of what Dahak can turn out, six percent of what the Guard can turn out under Enchanach Drive, and two percent of what it can turn out in hyper. That means they take a long time to complete an incursion. Of course, unlike Enchanach Drive, there’s a time dilation effect in hyper, and the lower your band, the greater the dilation, which means their voyages take a lot less time subjectively, but Brashieel’s ship had already come something like fourteen thousand light-years to reach Sol. So if the incursion sent a courier home tomorrow, he’d take just under three centuries to get there. Which means, ladies and gentlemen, that if we stop them, we’ve got almost six hundred years before a new ‘great visit’ can get back here. And that we know where to go looking for them in the meantime.”

A soft growl came from the assembled officers as they visualized what they could do with five or six centuries to work with.

“I’m glad to hear that, Hector,” Hatcher said carefully, “but it leaves us with the little matter of three million or so ships coming at us right now.”

“True,” Colin said, waving MacMahan back down. “But we’ve learned a little—less than we’d like, but a little—about their strategic doctrine.

“First, we have a bit more time than we’d thought. The incursion is divided into three major groups: two main formations and a host of sub-formations of scouts which do most of the killing. The larger formations are mainly to back up the scout forces, each of which operates on a different axis of advance. Aside from the one which already hit us, they’re unlikely to hit anything but dead planets as far as we’re concerned, and a half-dozen crewed Asgerds could deal with any of them. If we can stop the main incursion, we’ll have plenty of time to hunt them down and pick them off.

“The real bad news is coming at us in two parts. The first—what I think of as the ‘vanguard’—is about one and a quarter million ships, advancing fairly slowly from rendezvous to rendezvous in n-space to permit scouts to send back couriers to report. We may assume one’s already been dispatched from Sol, but it can’t pass its message until the vanguard drops out of hyper at the rendezvous, thirty-six Achuultani light-years from Sol. Given the difference in length between our years and theirs, that’s about forty-six-point-eight of our light-years. The vanguard