The Armageddon Inheritance

Great Lord Hothan sent his fleet fanning out in search of its killers and gritted his teeth at how his own actions paralleled Sorkar’s. It should not be so. He should have planned and prepared better. Yet how could one prepare for this sort of thing? How did one fight ghosts one could not even see?

Great twelves of his questing nestlings died, and still their enemy was hidden! Only the fleeting wisps of his missiles’ incoming hyper wakes even suggested his bearing, and Hothan’s lead scouts were already at their own hyper missile range from Deathdealer. How far out could the nest-killers be?!

Colin watched the Achuultani flow towards him, re-orienting to drive deliberately into the zone of maximum destruction, trying to deduce his bearing from the furrows of death his missiles plowed through them. It was horrible to see such courage and know the beings who possessed it were bent upon the murder of his entire race.

But they had a long way to come, and Dahak was a sniper, picking them off by scores and hundreds. If only Colin had more missiles, he could have backed away indefinitely, faster than they could pursue, flaying them with fire from beyond their own maximum range. But he didn’t have enough missiles to stop a million enemies, and if he had, they would only have fled into hyper. If he would destroy them, he must scatter them. Their weapons were deadly enough, but short-ranged and individually weak compared to his own; it was coordinated, massed fire which made them lethal, so he must split them up—scatter them for ’Tanni to harry to destruction. And for that he must get into energy weapon range and blow the heart and brain out of their formation with weapons not limited by the capacity of his magazines.

“Advance,” he said coldly, and a phalanx of battle steel moons moved forward, plowing the wake of its missiles.

At last! Almost all of his nestlings had emerged from hyper, and it was time to forget pride, time to flee. His formations were rent and over-extended, and too many of his command ships were among the dead. He needed time to sort things out and reorganize in light of these demonic weapons.

“They will complete emergence in twenty-seven seconds,” Dahak announced.

“Execute Laocoon,” Colin replied.

“Executing.”

The colliers ringing the minefield engaged their Enchanach Drives. No human rode their command decks, but none was needed for this simple task. They flashed through their preprogrammed maneuvers in an intricate supralight mazurka, exchanging positions so quickly and adroitly that, in effect, one of them was constantly in each cardinal point of a circle twenty light-minutes across.

They danced their dance, harming no one … and wove a garrote of gravity about the Achuultani’s throat. They were invisible stars, forging a forty-light-minute sphere in which there was no hyper threshold.

Great Lord Hothan stared at his instruments. No one could lock an entire fleet out of hyper space!

But someone could, and his plan to hyper out was smashed at a blow. He did not know how it had been done, but his Protectors had become penned qwelloq awaiting slaughter.

He shook aside panic, if not his fear. So. He could not flee, and the incoming salvos were arriving at ever shorter intervals. That meant only one thing: the nest-killers had him trapped and they were closing for the kill.

But he who entered the sweep of a qwelloq’s tusks could die upon them.

“Hast done it, my Colin,” Jiltanith whispered. “They cannot flee!”

A susurration of inarticulate delight answered her whisper, but, like her, her bridge crew did not look away from Two’s display. The mines must have been twice as effective as projected, for barely three-quarters of a million Achuultani ships had emerged. That augured well, but now Dahak was closing with the enemy. Soon there would be deaths they would mourn, not cheer.

* * *

Hothan was a Great Lord, and his orders came crisp and sure.

Greater twelves of his ships had died, but higher twelves remained, and the enemy was coming to him, so he need not continue the useless expansion of his formation to seek him. A tendril continued to lick out in the direction of the incoming fire, its end a comet of flame as the ships which made it died, but the rest of his formation gathered itself.

He was proud of his Protectors. They must be as frightened as he, but they obeyed quickly. Holes remained, weak links in the chain of order where too many command ships had been slain, but they obeyed.

And there were the nest-killers!

He swallowed a spurt of primal terror as he saw their relayed images. As vast as Sorkar had described them, and more numerous. Four twelves, at least, sweeping towards him behind the glare of their thunder, huge as moons, driving lances of the Furnace’s Fire deep into his fleet. But they had not yet reached its vitals, and their own tremendous speed brought them into his reach.

He allocated targets, coordinated his attack patterns, and his nestlings crowded forward, placing themselves between Deathdealer and the foe. He wanted to order them aside, but his deputy lord had never emerged. He and Deathdealer must live if the fleet was to have a chance.

A musical tone sounded, and he frowned. A courier message? From where?

Then it dawned. Sorkar had tried to warn him, but the courier had arrived late. Now a high-speed transmission squealed into Battle Comp, and the powerful computers digested it quickly. The nest-killers were still closing when the data suddenly coalesced, flashing onto Hothan’s own panel, and he paled as he saw the record of those terrible energy weapons and the greater horror of a sun’s death. Saw it and understood.

They had taken him in a snare as hellish as the trap which had taken his nestmate; now they were coming to kill his fleet as they had Sorkar’s. There could not be many of them, or more would have formed the titanic hammer rushing towards him, but his nestlings were new-creched fledglings against them.

Not for a moment did he think they had suicided to destroy Sorkar. The trap they had forged to chain him told him that much. They would enter his formation, raking him with those demonic beams, killing until their own losses mounted. Then they would flee.

Death held no horror for a Protector, but there was horror in death on such a scale. Not his own, but his fleet’s. The death of the Great Visit itself. Even if he survived this attack, his losses would be terrible, and why should this be the final attack? Sorkar had faced a single twelve; he faced four twelves—Nest Lord only knew how many of these terrible ships might gather with time!

But if his fleet must die, it would not die alone. The nest-killers were within his reach, and the order to fire went out.

Jiltanith paled as the Achuultani fired at last. A bowl of fire—the glare of anti-matter explosions and their searing waves of plasma—boiled back along the flanks of Colin’s charging sphere. And hidden within it, more deadly far than the uncountable sublight missiles, were the hyper missiles. Weapons impossible to intercept that flooded the hyper bands, seeking always to pop the planetoids’ shields and strike home against their armored flanks.

She lay rigid in her couch, cursing her helplessness, watching the man she loved drive into that hideous incandescence … and did nothing.