The Armageddon Inheritance

with a surface hotter than molten lead, was close enough to Hell.

The Cinder was worse, for Zeta Trianguli was brighter than Sol—much brighter. But The Cinder had been chosen very carefully. There were other worlds in the system, including a rather nice, if cool, third planet fifteen light-minutes further out. Zeta Trianguli was old for its class, and III had even developed a local flora that was vaguely carboniferous, but Colin was just as happy it had only the most primitive of animal life.

He folded his hands behind him, watching the display, glancing ever and again at the scarlet hyper trace blinking steadily just inside the forty-light-minute orbital shell of Zeta Trianguli-IV.

Fleet Commodore the Empress Jiltanith sat on her command deck and touched the gemmed dagger at her belt. She’d owned that weapon since the Wars of the Roses, and its familiar hilt had soothed her often over the years, but it helped little today. She knew it made excellent sense for her to be where she was, and that, too, was little help.

She wanted to rise and pace, but it would do no good to display her fear, and there were still many hours to go. Indeed, she ought to be in her quarters—her lonely, empty quarters—resting, but here she could at least see Dahak’s light code and know how Colin fared.

An even dozen Trosan-class planetoids with their heavy energy batteries floated in the inner system with Dahak, and two Vespa-class assault planetoids orbited The Cinder, tending the heavy armored units doing absolutely nothing worthwhile on its fiery surface … except generating a massive energy signature not even a blind man could have missed.

Jiltanith’s eyes moved from the three-dimensional schematic of the Zeta Trianguli System to the emptiness about her own ship. The fourteen surviving crewed units of the Imperial Guard floated more than six light-hours from the furnace of the star, and Vlad Chernikov’s titanic repair ship Fabricator had labored mightily upon them. Much of the damage had been too severe to be fully healed— Two, for example, still bore two wounds over sixty kilometers deep—but all were combat ready. Ready, yet carefully stealthed, hidden from every prying scanner, accompanied by sixty loyal, lifeless ships.

Jiltanith did not like to consider why they were not with Dahak, but the reasoning was brutally simple. If Operation Mousetrap failed, the crewed ships would return to Terra to hold as long as they might and evacuate as many additional Terra-born as possible to Birhat when they could hold no more, but the unmanned planetoids would be sent directly to Birhat and Marshal Tsien.

There would be no point retaining them, for they were useless in close combat without Dahak’s control, and Dahak—and Colin—would be dead.

Great Lord Sorkar’s crest flexed thoughtfully as his portion of the Great Visit neared normal-space once more. This star was suspiciously young to have evolved nest-killers of its own, which reinforced his belief that it could be but a forward base. That was bad, since it gave no hint what star these demons might call home. Unless one of them was obliging enough to flee into hyper and head directly thence, which he doubted any ships as fast as they would do, he could not even guess where their true home world lay.

Except, of course, that it almost certainly had been Lord Furtag’s scouts which had roused these nest- killers to fury. They must have followed a courier to find Sorkar, and only a courier from Furtag’s force could have reached this rendezvous so soon. And that gave Sorkar a volume of space in which at least one of their important worlds must lie. That might be enough. If it was not, it was at least a start. And this star system was another.

Those monster ships’ sheer size impressed him deeply, yet anything that large must take many years to build, so each he slew would hurt the nest-killers badly. He only hoped those who had already clashed with his nestlings would be foolish enough to stand and fight here.

A soft musical tone sounded, and he made himself relax, hoping that Battle Comp noticed his tranquillity. The queasy shudder of hyper translation ran through his flagship, and Defender dropped into phase with reality once more.

“Achuultani units are emerging from hyper,” Dahak’s mellow voice said.

Colin nodded as the dots of Achuultani ships gleamed in the display. He looked around the empty bridge, wishing for just a moment that he’d let the others stay. But if this worked, he and Dahak could pull it off alone; if it failed, those eight thousand-odd people would be utterly invaluable to ’Tanni and Gerald Hatcher. Besides, this was fitting, somehow. He and Dahak, together and alone once more.

“Keep an eye on ’em,” he said. “Let me know if they do anything sneaky.”

“I shall.” Dahak was silent for a moment, then continued. “I have continued my study of energy-state computer technology, Colin.”

“Oh?” If Dahak wanted to distract him, that was fine with Colin.

“Yes. I believe I have isolated the fundamental differences between the energy-state ‘software’ of the Empire and my own. They were rather more subtle than I originally anticipated, but I now feel confident of my ability to reprogram at will.”

“Hey, that’s great! You mean you could tinker them into waking up?”

“I did not say that, Colin. I can reprogram them; I still have not determined what within my own programming supports my self-aware state. Without that datum, I cannot recreate that state in another. Nor have I yet discovered a certain technique for simply replicating my current programming in their radically different circuitry.”

“Yeah.” Colin frowned. “But even if you could, you’d have problems, wouldn’t you? They’re hardwired for loyalty to Mother—wouldn’t that put a crimp into your replication?”

“Not,” Dahak said rather surprisingly, “in the case of the Guard. Its units were not part of Battle Fleet and do not contain Battle Fleet loyalty imperatives. I suppose—” the computer sounded gently ironic “—Mother and the Assembly of Nobles calculated that the remaining nine hundred ninety-eight thousand seven hundred and twelve planetoids of Battle Fleet would suffice to deal with them in the event an Emperor proved intractable.”

“Guess they might, at that.”

“The absence of those constraints, however, makes the replication of my core programming at least a possibility, although not a very high one. While I have made progress, I compute that the probability of success would be no more than eight percent. The probability that an unsuccessful attempt would incapacitate the recipient computer, however, approaches unity.”

“Um.” Colin tugged on his nose. “Not so good. The last thing we need is to addle one of the others just now.”

“My own thought exactly. I thought, however, that you might appreciate a progress report.”

“You mean,” Colin snorted, “that you thought I was about to get the willies and you’d better distract me from ’em!”

“That is substantially what I said.” Dahak made the soft sound he used for a chuckle. “In my own tactful fashion, of course.”

“Tactful, shmactful,” Colin grinned. “Thanks, I—”

He broke off as the glittering hordes of Achuultani light codes suddenly vanished only to blink back moments later, much closer in-system.

“They are advancing,” Dahak said calmly. “A trio of detached ships, however, appear to be micro-jumping to positions on the system periphery.”

“Observers, damn it. Well, no one can count on their enemies being idiots.”

“True, though that will be of limited utility if we are able to repeat our earlier success and destroy them before they rendezvous with the main body.”

“Yeah, but we can’t be sure of doing that. It’s a lot shorter jump this time, and they can cut their arrival a hell of a lot closer. Tell ’Tanni to lay off. Last thing we need to do is to try sneaking up on ’em and alert them to the fact that there’s more of us around.”

“Acknowledged,” Dahak replied. “Two has acknowledged,” he added a moment