The Armageddon Inheritance

“Crag Cat is hyper-capable,” Chernikov said, “but her core tap governors are too badly damaged for Enchanach Drive. I would like to dispatch her, Moir, Sigam, and Hly direct to Birhat for repairs. The remainder of the Flotilla is damaged to greater or lesser extent—aside from Heka, that is—but those four are by far the most severely injured.”

“Okay. Captain Singleterry can take them out to Bia. I’m sure Mother and Marshal Tsien will be ready to take care of them by now, and our ‘colonists’ will want to talk firsthand to someone who was here. I think we’ll send Hector and Sevrid back to Sol with our prisoners, too.”

“Aye, and ’twould be well to send Cohanna with them, Colin. Their injured will require our finest aid, and ’tis needful ’Hanna and Isis confer with Father to discover how best we may approach their ‘programming.’ ”

“Good idea,” Colin agreed, “and one that takes care of the most immediate chores. Vlad, are you to a point where you can turn over to Baltan?”

“I am,” Chernikov replied, holographic eyes abruptly glowing.

“Thought you might be,” Colin murmured. “You and Dahak can get started exploring then.” He grinned suddenly. “Think of it as a distraction, Dahak. Sort of like reading magazines in the dentist’s office.”

“I will attempt to, although, were I human, I would not permit my teeth to require reconstructive attention,” Dahak agreed primly.

Vladimir Chernikov reclined in the pilot’s couch of his cutter, propped his heels on his console, and hummed. It had been nice of Tamman to let him hitch a ride deeper into the battle zone aboard Royal Birhat, saving him hours of sublight flight time. Especially since Tamman regarded his technique for wreck-hunting as unscientific, to say the least.

Which it was; but Chernikov didn’t exactly regard his present duty as work, and he always had been a hunt-and-peck tourist.

At the moment, he was well into what had been the Achuultani rear before Jiltanith’s attack. Chernikov was convinced anything worth finding would be in this area. That was his official reasoning. Privately, he knew, he wanted to look here because he would be the first. All of Hector’s prisoners had come from ships which had been crippled by gravitonic warheads; the irradiation of anti-matter explosions and the Empire’s energy weapons left few survivors, and this had been the site of pointblank combat. Few of these ships had been killed by missiles, much less gravitonic warheads, which meant that the area hadn’t had much priority for Sevrid’s attention.

He stopped humming and lowered his feet, looking more closely at the display. There was something odd about that wreck. Its forward half had been smashed away—by energy fire, judging from what was left—but why did it … ?

He stiffened. No wonder it seemed odd! The wreck’s lines were identical to the others he had seen, but the broken stump that remained was barely half a ship—and half again bigger than the others had been to begin with!

He urged the cutter closer. There had to be a reason this thing was so big, and he dared not believe the most logical one. He ghosted still closer, floodlights sweeping the slowly tumbling hull, and jagged, runic characters showed themselves. Dahak had tutored Chernikov carefully in the Achuultani alphabet and language in preparation for explorations exactly like this, and now his lips moved as he pronounced the throat-straining phonetics. They sounded like the prelude to a dog fight, and the translation was no more soothing.

Deathdealer. Now there was a name for a ship.

Fabricator’s destroyer-sized workboat streaked towards Deathdealer, and Chernikov smiled as his cutter’s small com screen lit with Geran’s face. Dahak’s erstwhile Maintenance chief had become Fabricator’s third officer, and Baltan’s willingness to let him go at a moment like this indicated how much excitement his find had engendered.

“Greetings, Geran,” Chernikov said. “What do you think of her?”

“She’s a big mother. What d’you think—sixty kilometers?”

“A bit over sixty-four, by my measurement,” Chernikov agreed.

“Maker. Well, if she’s laid out like Vindicator was, her backup data storage will be somewhere in the after third of the ship.”

“I agree,” Chernikov said, but he frowned slightly, and Geran’s eyebrows rose.

“What is it, Vlad?”

“I have been inspecting the wreckage visually while I awaited you. Examine that energy turret—there, the one the explosion blew open.”

Geran glanced at the turret while Chernikov held a powerful spotlight on it. For a moment, his face was merely interested, then it tightened. “Breaker! What is that?”

“It appears to be a rather crude gravitonic disrupter.”

“That’s crazy!”

“Why?” Chernikov asked softly. “Because it is several centuries advanced over any other energy weapon we have encountered? Dahak and I have maintained all along that there are anomalies in Achuultani design. Given the nature of their missile propulsion, there is no inherent reason they could not build such weapons.”

“But why here and nowhere else?” Geran demanded.

“It appears that for some reason their fleet command ships mount much more capable energy armaments, which suggests that the rest of their equipment also may be more sophisticated. I do not know why that should be—yet. It would seem, however, that there is one way to find out, no?”

“Yes!” Geran agreed emphatically. “But that thing’s hotter than the hinges of hell. Do you have a rad suit over there?”

“Of course.”

“Then with all due respect, sir, get your ass into it and let’s go take a look.”

“An excellent suggestion, Fleet Captain Geran. I will join you within five minutes.”

“I don’t believe it,” Geran said flatly. “Look at this, Vlad!”

“Interesting, I agree,” Chernikov murmured.

They floated in what had been Deathdealer’s main engineering section. Emergency lighting had been run from the workboat, and robotic henchmen prowled about, dismantling various devices. The corpses of the original engineering crew had been webbed down in a corner.

“Damn it, those are molycircs!”

“We had already determined that they employed such circuitry in their computers.”

“Yeah, but not in Engineering. And this thing’s calibrated to ninety-six lights. That means this ship was twice as fast as Vindicator.”

“True. Even more interestingly, she was twice as fast—in n-space, as well—as her own consorts. Clearly a more capable vessel in all respects.”

“Captain Chernikov?” A new voice spoke over the com.

“Yes, Assad?”

“We’ve found their backup data storage, sir. At least, it’s where the backup should be, but …”

“But what?”

“Sir, this thing’s eight or nine times the size of Vindicator’s primary computer, and there’s something that looks like a regular backup sitting right next to it. Seems like an awful lot of data storage.”

“Indeed it does,” Chernikov said softly. “Don’t touch it, Assad. Clear your crew out of there right now.”

“Sir? Uh, yessir! We’re on our way now.”