The Armageddon Inheritance

risk she ran…

They charged on her heels.

Colin gritted his teeth. They weren’t going to make it.

Then his eyes flew wide. No! They couldn’t! They mustn’t!

But it was too late. His people swept in at many times the speed of light, riding an impossible line between life and mutual destruction in an effort to save him. He dared not distract them now … and there was no time.

A whiplash of fresh shock slammed through Great Lord of Order Hothan. Where had they come from? What were they?!

Fifteen ravening spheres of gravitonic fury erupted amid his ships. Two blossomed too near to one another, ripping themselves apart, but they took a high twelve of his ships with them. And then the gravity storm ended, and a twelve of fresh enemies were upon him. Upon him? They were within him! They appeared like monsters of wizardry, deep in the heart of his nestlings, and their beams began to kill.

Twelve thousand humans died as Ashar and Trelma destroyed themselves, and another six thousand as massed fire tore Thrym apart, but the Achuultani had given all they had and more for their Nest.

They had stood Dahak’s remorseless charge, endured the megadeaths he had inflicted upon them, but this was too much. They couldn’t flee into hyper, but these new monsters had dashed in at supralight speeds—and they were fresh, fresh and unwounded, enraged titans within their flotillas, laying waste battle squadrons with a single flick of their terrible beams.

One such beam lashed out, and Deathdealer’s forward half exploded.

Too many links in the chain had snapped. There were no great lords, no Battle Comp. Lesser lords did their best, but without coordination flotillas fought as flotillas, squadrons as squadrons. Their fine-meshed killing machine became knots of uncoordinated resistance, and the planetoids of the Empire swept through them like Death incarnate.

Adrienne Robbins hurled Emperor Herdan into the rear of those still attacking Dahak’s crumbling globe. Royal Birhat rode one flank and Dahak Two the other, crashing through the fraying Achuultani formation like boulders, killing as they came, and the Achuultani fled.

They fled at their highest sublight speed, seeking the edges of Operation Laocoon’s gravity net. And as they fled, they fell out of mutual support range. The ancient starships of the Imperial Guard, crewed and deadly— individuals, not a single battering ram—slashed through them, bobbing and weaving impossibly, each equal to them all when they fought alone.

Colin sagged in his couch, soaked in sweat, as Dahak Two broke into his battered globe. The display came back up, and he bit his lip at the molten craters blown deep into Jiltanith’s command. Then her holo-image appeared before him, eyes fiery with battle in a strained face.

“Idiot! How could you take a chance like that?!”

” ’Twas my decision, not thine!”

“When I get my hands on you—!

“Then will I yield unto thee, sin thou hast hands to seize me!” she shot back, her strained expression easing as the fact of his survival penetrated.

“Thanks to you, you lunatic,” Colin said more softly, swallowing a lump.

“Nay, my love, thanks to us all. ’Tis victory, Colin! They flee before our fire, and they die. Thou’st broken them, my Colin! Some few thousand may escape—no more!”

“I know, ’Tanni,” he sighed. “I know.” He tried not to think about the cost—not yet—and drew a breath. “Tell them to cripple as many as they can without destroying them,” he said. “And get Hector and Sevrid up here.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Give us four months, and we will have restored your Enchanach Drive, Dahak.” Vlad Chernikov’s stupendous repair ship nuzzled alongside Dahak, and the ancient warship’s hull flickered under constellations of robotic welders while his holo-image sat in Command One with Colin and Jiltanith’s image.

“Your engineers are highly efficient, sir,” Dahak’s mellow voice said.

Colin’s eyes drifted to the glaring crimson swatches carved deep into the ten-meter spherical holo schematic of his ship and he shivered. Blast doors sealed those jagged rents, but some extended inward for over five hundred kilometers. At that, the schematic looked better than an actual external view. Dahak was torn and tattered. Half his proud dragon had been seared away, and the radiation count in the outer four hundred kilometers of his hull was fit to burn out an Imperial detector. Half his transit shafts ended in shredded wreckage, and half of those which remained were without power.

It was a miracle he’d survived at all, but he would have to be almost completely rebuilt. His sublight drive was down to sixty percent efficiency, and two wrecked Enchanach node generators made supralight movement impossible. Seventy percent of his weapons were rubble, and even his core tap had been damaged beyond safe operation. Colin knew Dahak could not feel pain, and he was glad; he’d felt agony enough for them both when he’d seen his wounds.

Nor were those wounds all they’d suffered. Ashar, Trelma, and Thrym were gone, and eighteen thousand people with them. Crag Cat was almost as badly damaged as Dahak, with another two thousand dead. Hector and Sevrid had lost another six hundred boarding wrecked Achuultani starships, and of their fifty-three unmanned ships, thirty-seven had been destroyed and three more battered into wrecks. Their surviving effective fleet consisted of Dahak, eleven manned Asgerd-class planetoids—all damaged to a greater or lesser extent— Sevrid, and thirteen unmanned ships, one of which was miraculously untouched.

But brooding on their own losses did no good, and the fact remained: they’d won. Barely two thousand Achuultani ships had escaped, and Hector had secured over seven thousand prisoners from the wreckage of their fleet.

“Dahak’s right, Vlad,” he said. “You people are working miracles. Just get him supralight-capable, and we’ll go home, by God!”

“I point out once more,” Dahak said, “that you need not await completion of my repairs for that. There will be more than enough for you to do on Earth without wasting time out here.”

“’Wasting’ hell! We couldn’t’ve done it without you, and we’re not going anywhere until you can come with us.”

“Aye,” Jiltanith said. “’Tis thy victory more even than ours. No celebration can be without that thou’rt there to share.”

“You are most kind, and I must confess that I am grateful. I have learned what ‘loneliness’ is … and it is not a pleasant thing.”

“Worry not, my Dahak,” Jiltanith said softly. “Never shalt thou know loneliness again. Whilst humans live, they’ll not forget thy deeds nor cease to love thee.”

Dahak fell uncharacteristically silent, and Colin smiled at his wife, wishing she were physically present so he could hug her.

“Well! That’s settled. How about the rest of us, Vlad?”