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"People being people, the public reaction was—must have been—panic. And a panicked person's first response is to flee." Coha
"On the other hand, they had the hypercom. Warnings could be spread at supralight speeds without using their mat-trans, and presumably some planets must have been able to go into quarantine before they were affected. That's where the 'dwell time' comes in. They couldn't know how long they had to stay quarantined. No one would dare risk contact with any other planet as long as the smallest possibility of contamination by something like this existed."
She paused, and Colin nodded.
"So they would have abandoned space," he said.
"I can't be certain, but it seems probable. Even if any of their planets did survive, their 'Empire' still could have self-destructed out of all too reasonable fear. Which means—" she met Colin's eyes squarely "—that in all probability, there's no Imperium for us to contact."
Vladimir Chernikov bent over the work bench, studying the disassembled rifle-like weapon. His enhanced eyes were set for microscopic vision, and he manipulated his exquisitely sensitive instruments with care. The back of his mind knew he was trying to lose himself and escape the numbing depression which had settled over Dahak's crew, but his fascination was genuine. The engineer in his soul rejoiced at the beauty of the work before him. Now if he could only figure out what it did.
There was the capacitor, and a real brute it was, despite its tininess. Eight or nine times a regular energy gun's charge. And these were rheostats. One obviously regulated the power of whatever the thing emitted, but what did the second... ?
Hmmmmm. Fascinating. There's no sign of a standard disrupter head in here. But then—aha! What do we have here?
He bent closer, bending sensor implants as well as vision upon it, then froze. He looked a moment longer, then raised his head and gestured to Baltan.
"Take a look at this," he said quietly. His assistant bent over and followed Chernikov's indicating test probe to the component in question, then pursed his lips in a silent whistle.
"A hyper generator," he said. "It has to be. But the size of the thing."
"Precisely." Chernikov wiped his spotless fingers on a handkerchief, drying their sudden clamminess. "Dahak," he said.
"Yes, sir?"
"What do you make of this?"
"A moment," the computer said. There was a brief period of silence, then the mellow voice spoke again. "Fleet Commander (Engineering) Baltan is correct, sir. It is a hyper generator. I have never encountered one of such small size or advanced design, but the basic function is evident. Please note, however, that the generator cavity's walls are composed of a substance unknown to me, and that they extend the full length of the barrel."
"Explanations?"
"It would appear to be a shielding housing around the generator, sir—one impervious to warp radiation. Fascinating. Such a material would have obvious applications in such devices as atmospheric hyper missile launchers."
"True. But am I right in assuming the muzzle end of the housing is open?"
"You are, sir. In essence, this appears to be a highly-advanced adaptation of the warp grenade. When activated, this weapon would project a focused field—in effect, a beam—of multi-dimensional translation which would project its target into hyper space."
"And leave it there," Chernikov said flatly.
"Of course," Dahak agreed. "A most ingenious weapon."
"Ingenious," Chernikov repeated with a shudder.
"Correct. Yet I perceive certain limitations. The hyper-suppression fields already developed to counteract warp grenades would also counteract this device's effect, at least within the area of such a field. I ca
"Maker, and I always hated warp grenades," Baltan said fervently.
"I, too," Chernikov said. He straightened from the bench slowly, looking at the next i
Now he was almost afraid to.
CHAPTER NINE
Colin MacIntyre sat in Conference One once more. He'd grown to hate this room, he thought, bending his gaze upon the tabletop. Hate it.
Silence fell as the last person found a seat, and he looked up.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "for the past month I've resisted all arguments to move on because I believe Keerah represents a microcosm of what probably happened to the entire Imperium. I now believe we've learned all we can here. But—" he drew out the slight pause behind the word "—that still leaves the question of what we do next. Before turning to that, however, I would like to review our findings, begi
He sat back and nodded to Chernikov, who cleared his throat quietly, as if organizing his thoughts, then began.
"We have examined many artifacts recovered from Omega Three. On the basis of what we have discovered to date, I have reached a few conclusions about the technical base of the Imperium—that is to say, the Empire.
"They had, as we would have expected, made major advances, yet not so many as we might have anticipated. Please bear in mind that I am speaking only of non-biological technology; neither Coha
"With that reservation, our initial estimate, that their technology was essentially a vastly refined version of our own, seems to have been correct. With the probable exception of their mat-trans—on which, I regret to say, we have been unable as yet to obtain data—we have encountered nothing Engineering and Dahak could not puzzle out. This is not to say they had not advanced to a point far beyond our current reach, but the underlying principles of their advances are readily apparent to us. In effect, they appear to have reached a plateau of fully mature technology and, I believe, may very well have been on the brink of fundamental breakthroughs into a new order of achievement, but they had not yet made them.
"In general, their progress may be thought of as coupling miniaturization with vast increases in power. A warship of Dahak's mass, for example, built with the technology we have so far encountered—which, I ask you to bear in mind, represents an essentially civilian attempt to create a military unit—would possess something on the order of twenty times his combat capability."
He paused for emphasis, and there were signs of awe on more than one face.
"Yet certain countervailing design philosophies and trends, particularly in the areas of computer science and cybernetics, also have become apparent to us. Specifically, the hardware of their computer systems is extremely advanced compared to our own; their software is not. Assuming that Omega Three is a representative sample of their computer technology, their computers had an even lower degree of self-awareness than that of Comp Cent prior to the mutiny. The data storage capacity of Omega Three's Comp Cent, whose mass is approximately thirty percent that of Dahak's central memory core, exceeded his capacity, including all subordinate systems, by a factor of fifty. The ability of Omega Three, on the other hand, despite a computational speed many times higher than his, did not approach even that of Comp Cent prior to the mutiny.