The Armageddon Inheritance

suffered at Chinese hands over the centuries. We can no more undo the past than your own people could, but we can offer you an equal share in building the future, assuming this planet has one to build. And that, Marshal Tsien, is the crux: if we do not join together, there will be no future for any of us.”

“So. Yet you have said nothing of how this … body will be organized. Nine members. They are to hold co- equal authority, at least in theory?” Hatcher nodded, and the marshal rubbed his chin, the gesture oddly delicate in so large a man. “That seems overly large, Comrade General. Could it be that you intend to—I believe the term is ‘pad’—it to present the appearance of equality while holding the true power in your own hands?”

“It could be, but it isn’t. Lieutenant Governor Horus has a far more extensive military background than any of us and will act as his own minister of defense. The function of this body will be to serve as his advisors and assistants. Each of us will have specific duties and operational responsibilities—there will be more than enough of those to go around, I assure you—and the position of Chief of Staff will rotate.”

“I see.” Tsien laid his hands on his briefcase and studied his knuckles, then looked back up. “How much freedom will I have in making my nominations?”

“Complete freedom.” Hatcher very carefully kept his hope out of his voice. “The Lieutenant Governor alone will decide upon their acceptability. If any of your nominees are rejected, you’ll be free to make fresh nominations until candidates mutually acceptable to the Asian Alliance and the Lieutenant Governor are selected. It is my understanding that his sole criterion will be those officers’ willingness to work as part of his own command team, and that he will evaluate that willingness on the basis of their affirmation of loyalty under an Imperial lie detector.” He saw a spark of anger in Tsien’s eyes and went on unhurriedly. “I may add that all of us will be required to demonstrate our own loyalty in precisely the same fashion and in the presence of all of our fellows, including yourself and your nominees.”

The anger in Tsien’s hooded gaze faded, and he nodded slowly.

“Very well, General Hatcher, I am empowered to accept your offer, and I will do so. I caution you that I do not agree without reservations, and that it will be difficult to convince many of my own officers to accept my decision. It goes against the grain to surrender all we have fought for, whether it is to Western powers or to powers from beyond the stars, yet you are at least partly correct. The world we have known has ended. We will join your efforts to save this planet and build anew. Not without doubts and not without suspicion—you would not believe otherwise, unless you were fools—but because we must. Yet remember this: more than half this world’s population is Asian, gentlemen.”

“We understand, Marshal,” Hatcher said softly.

“I believe you do, Comrade General,” Tsien said with the first, faint ghost of a smile. “I believe you do.”

Life Councilor Geb brushed stone dust from his thick, white hair as yet another explosive charge bellowed behind him. It was a futile gesture. The air was thin, but the damnable dust made it seem a lot thicker, and his scalp was coated in fresh grit almost before he lowered his hand.

He watched another of the sublight parasites Dahak had left for Earth’s defense—the destroyer Ardat, he thought—hover above the seething dust, her eight- thousand-ton hull dwarfed by the gaping hole which would, when finished, contain control systems, magazines, shield generators, and all the other complex support systems. Her tractors plucked up multi-ton slabs of a mountain’s bones, and then the ship lifted away into the west, bearing yet another load of refuse to a watery grave in the Pacific. Even before Ardat was out of sight, the Terra-born work crews swarmed over the newly-exposed surface of the excavation in their breath masks, drills screaming as they prepared the next series of charges.

Geb viewed the activity with mixed pride and distaste. This absolutely flat surface of raw stone had once been the top of Ecuador’s Mount Chimborazo, but that was before its selection to house Planetary Defense Center Escorpion had sealed the mountain’s fate. The sublight battleships Shirhan and Escal arrived two days later, and while Escal hovered over the towering peak, Shirhan activated her main energy batteries and slabbed off the top three hundred meters of earth and stone. Escal caught the megaton chunks of wreckage in her tractors while Shirhan worked, lifting them for her pressers to toss out of the way into the ocean. It had taken the two battleships a total of twenty-three minutes to produce a level stone mesa just under six thousand meters high, and then they’d departed to mutilate the next mountain on their list.

The construction crews had moved in in their wake, and they had labored mightily ever since. Imperial technology had held the ecological effects of their labors to a minimum impossible for purely Terran resources, but Geb had seen Chimborazo before his henchmen arrived. The esthetic desecration of their labors revolted him; what they had accomplished produced his pride.

PDC Escorpion, one of forty-six such bases going up across the surface of the planet, each a project gargantuan enough to daunt the Pharaohs, and each with a completion deadline of exactly eighteen months. It was an impossible task … and they were doing it anyway.

He stepped aside as the whine of a gravitonic drive approached from one side. The stocky, olive-brown Imperial at the power bore’s controls nodded to him, but despite his rank, he was only one more rubber-necker in her way, and he backed further as she positioned her tremendous machine carefully, checking the coordinates in her inertial guidance systems against the engineers’ plat of the base to be. An eye-searing dazzle flickered as she powered up the cutting head and brought it to bear.

The power bore floated a rock-steady half-meter off the ground, and Geb’s implants tingled with the torrent of focused energy. A hot wind billowed back from the rapidly sinking shaft, blowing a thick, plume of powdered rock to join the choking pall hanging over the site, and he stepped still further back. Another thunderous explosion burst in on him, and he shook his head, marveling at the demonic energy loosed upon this hapless mountain. Every safety regulation in the book—Imperial and Terran alike—had been relaxed to the brink of insanity, and the furious labor went on day and night, rain and sun, twenty-four hours a day. It might stop for a hurricane; nothing less would be permitted to interfere.

It was bad enough for his Imperials, he thought, watching the dust-caked woman concentrate, but at least they had their biotechnics to support them. The Terra-born did not, and their primitive equipment required far more of pure muscle to begin with. But Horus had less than five thousand Imperials; barely three thousand of them could be released to construction projects, and the PDCs were only one of the clamorous needs Geb and his assistants had to meet somehow. With enhanced personnel and their machinery spread so thin, he had no choice but to call upon the primitive substitutes Earth could provide. At least he could lift in equipment, materials, and fuel on tractors as needed.

A one-man grav scooter grounded beside him. Tegran, the senior Imperial on the Escorpion site, climbed off it to slog through the blowing dust to Geb’s side and pushed up his goggles to watch the power bore at work.

Tegran was much younger, biologically, at least, than Geb, but his face was gaunt, and he’d lost weight since coming out of stasis. Geb wasn’t surprised. Tegran had never personally offended against the people of Earth, but like most of the Imperials freed from Anu’s stasis facilities, he was driving himself until he dropped to wash away the stigma of his past.

The cutting head died, and the power bore operator backed away from the vertical shaft. A Terra-born, Imperial-equipped survey team scurried forward, instruments probing and measuring, and its leader lifted a hand, thumb raised in approval. The dust-covered woman responded with the same gesture and moved away, heading for the next site, and Horus turned to Tegran.

“Nice,” he said. “I make that a bit under twenty minutes to drill a hundred-fifty-meter shaft. Not bad at all.”

“Um,” Tegran said. He walked over to the edge of the fifty meter-wide hole which would one day house a hyper missile launcher and stood peering down at its glassy walls. “It’s better, but I can squeeze another four or five percent efficiency out of the bores if I tweak the software a bit more.”

“Wait a minute, Tegran—you’ve already cut the margins mighty close!”

“You worry too much, Geb.” Tegran grinned tightly. “There’s a hefty safety factor built into the components. If I drop the designed lifetime to, say, three years instead of twenty, I can goose the equipment