The Armageddon Inheritance

“Methinks it little matters what thou sayst, Tamman,” Jiltanith’s mournful observation drew Colin back to the present as she opened another bottle of beer. “Our Colin departeth not from his fell intent to poison one and all with his noxious smokes and fumes.”

“Listen, all of you,” Colin retorted, propping his fists on his hips, “I’m captain of this tub, and we’ll fix food my way!”

“Didst’a hear thy captain speak of thee, Dahak, my tub?” Jiltanith caroled, and Colin shook a fist at her.

“I believe the proper response is ’Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,’ ” a mellow voice replied, and Colin groaned.

“What idiot encouraged him to learn cliches?”

“Nay, Colin, acquit us all. ’Tis simply that we discouraged him not.”

“Well you should have.”

“Stop complaining and let the man cook.” Vlad Chernikov lay flat on his back in the shade of a young oak. Now he propped one eye open. “If you do not care for his cuisine, you need not eat it, Tamman.”

“Fat chance!” Colin snorted, and stole Jiltanith’s beer.

He swallowed, enjoying the “sun” on his shoulders, and decided ’Ta

He looked out over the happy, laughing knots of his off-watch crewmen. Some of them, anyway. There was a null-grav basketball tournament underway on Deck 2460, and General Treshnikov had organized a “Top Gun” contest on the simulator deck for the non-fighter pilots of the crew. Then there was the regatta out on the thirty-kilometer-wide park deck’s lake.

He glanced around the shaded picnic tables. Coha

Colin returned Jiltanith’s beer, and his smile grew warmer as her eyes gleamed at him. Yes, she’d been right—just as she’d been right to insist they make their own “surprise” a

“Supralight shutdown in ten minutes,” Dahak a

He inhaled deeply and concentrated on the reports and commands flowing through his neural feed. Not even the Terra-born among Dahak’s well-drilled crew needed to think through their commands these days. Which might be just as well. There had been no hails or challenges, but they’d been thoroughly sca

Colin would have felt immeasurably better to know what had been on the other end of those sca

“Sublight in three minutes.”

“Stand by, Tactical,” Colin said softly.

“Standing by, Captain.”

The last minutes raced even as they trickled agonizingly slowly. Then Colin felt the start of supralight shutdown in his implants, and suddenly the stars were still.

“Core tap shutdown,” Dahak reported, and then, almost instantly, “Detection at ten light-minutes. Detection at thirty light-minutes. Detection at five light-hours.”

“Display system,” Colin snapped, and the sun Bia, Birhat’s G0 primary, still twelve light-hours away, was suddenly ringed with a system schematic.

“God’s Teeth!”

Jiltanith’s whisper summed up Colin’s sentiments admirably. Even at this range, the display was crowded, and more and more light codes sprang into view with mechanical precision as Sarah took them in at half the speed of light. Dahak’s sca

“Any response to our presence, Dahak?”

“None beyond detection, sir. I have received no challenges, nor has anyone yet responded to my hails.”

Colin nodded. It was a disappointment, for he’d felt a spurt of hope when he saw all those light codes, but it was a relief, as well. At least no one was shooting at them.

“What the hell are all those things?” he demanded.

“Unknown, sir. Passive sca

The computer paused suddenly, and Colin quirked an eyebrow. It was unusual, to say the least, for Dahak to break off in the middle of a sentence.

“Sir,” the computer said after a moment, “I have determined the function of certain installations.”

An arc of light codes blinked green. They formed a ring forty light-minutes from Bia—no, not a ring. As he watched, new codes, each indicating an installation much smaller than the giants in the original ring, began to appear, precisely distanced from the circle, curving away from Dahak as if to embrace the entire i

“Well? What are they?”

“They appear, sir,” Dahak said, “to be shield generators.”

“They’re what?” Colin blurted, and he felt Vlad Chernikov’s shock echoing through the engineering sub-net.

“Shield generators,” Dahak repeated, “which, if activated, would enclose the entire i

Colin fought a sense of incredulity. Nobody could build a shield with that much surface area! Yet if Dahak said they were shield generators, shield generators they were … but the scope of such a project!

“Whatever else it was, the Empire was no piker,” he muttered.

“As thou sayst,” Jiltanith agreed. “Yet methinks—”

“Status change,” Dahak said suddenly, and a bright-red ring circled a massive installation in distant orbit about Birhat itself. “Core tap activation detected.”

“Maker!” Tamman muttered, for the power source which had waked to sudden life was many times as powerful as Dahak’s own.

“New detection at nine-point-eight light-hours. I have a challenge.”

“Nature?” Colin snapped.

“Query for identification only, sir, but it carries a Fleet Central imperative. It is repeating.”

“Respond.”

“Acknowledged.” There was another brief silence, and then Dahak spoke again, sounding—for once—a bit puzzled. “Sir, the challenge has terminated.”