The Armageddon Inheritance

The remnants of the Great Visit micro-jumped towards their foes, and Nest Protector followed, protected by them all.

“Lord, what a monster,” Colin murmured as the holo image floated above Two’s command deck. One task group had emerged into n-space close enough for a stealthed remote to get a good look at its units. Their emission signatures told a great deal about their capabilities, but this visual image seemed to sum up their menace far better.

“Aye.” Jiltanith’s mental command turned the holo of the sleek, powerful cylinder for her own perusal. ” ’Tis seen why these craft do form their reserve.”

You can say that again, babe, Colin thought. That mother’s a good ninety kilometers long, and she just bristles with weapons. Not just those popgun lasers, either. Those’re disrupters—not as good as our beams, but bad, bad medicine. And she’s got a lot of them…

“Dahak?” he said aloud.

“Formidable, indeed,” Dahak said over the fold-space com. “Although smaller, this unit appears fully as powerfully armed as was Deathdealer.”

“Yeah, and they’ve got twenty-four of them in each flotilla.”

“That may be correct, but it is premature to conclude it is. We have actually observed only six such formations.”

“Right, sure,” Colin grunted.

“It would certainly be prudent to assume all are at least equally capable,” Dahak agreed calmly.

“I don’t like the way they’re sneaking in on us,” Colin muttered, tugging on his nose and frowning at Two’s display.

“Yet bethink thee, my Colin. What other way may they proceed?”

“That’s what bothers me. I’d prefer for them to either rush straight in or run the hell away. That—” Colin gestured at the display “—looks entirely too much like a man who knows what he’s doing.”

Great Lord Tharno frowned over his own read-outs. He saw no sign of any device which might have been used to trap Hothan in n-space, but what he did see disturbed him. The nest-killers were neither ru

No, these nest-killers knew what they were about, and they had proven they could run away at will. They were choosing not to. Were they that confident they could destroy all his nestlings? A sobering thought, that, and a concern he knew Battle Comp shared, whether it would admit it or not.

Yet they had come to fight, and the enemy was faster, longer-ranged, and individually far more powerful than any of their own nestlings. If he was prepared to stand, he must be attacked, whatever Tharno suspected. Either that, or they might as well retreat to the Nest right now!

“They are closing their formations, Sire,” Dahak reported, and Colin grunted. He’d already seen it on Two’s display, and he hunkered down in his couch, activating the tractor net to hold him in place. The Achuultani were already four light-minutes inside the Guard’s range, but he held his fire, encouraging them to tighten their formation further. He hated giving up those shots, but he had to get them in close to spring Laocoon Two … and for Dahak to engage. Since he could not go supralight, the enemy must be sucked into his range and pi

“Dahak, what d’you make of that clump?” He flipped a sighting circle onto the sub-display fed by Dahak’s remotes, tightening it to surround a portion of the enemy.

“Interesting. There are twice the normal proportion of heavy units in that formation. I ca

Colin bared his teeth. “Want to bet that’s Mister Master Computer?”

“I have told you before; I have nothing to wager.”

“I still say that’s a cop-out.” Colin studied the ships he’d picked out. Damn, they were holding back. He needed them a good eight light-minutes closer. If he sprang Laocoon Two now, he could pin the front two-thirds of their formation, but the really important ones would get away.

“Back us away, ’Ta

Jiltanith began passing orders, and her smile was a shark’s.

Now the nest-killers were falling back! Tarhish take it, they had to be up to something—but what? If they were drawing him into a trap, where was it, and why had it not already sprung upon his lead units? Yet if it was not a trap, why should the nest-killers fall back rather than attack? All of this might be some sort of effort to bluff the Great Visit, but Tharno could not make himself take that thought seriously.

No, it was a trap. One he could not see, yet there. He offered his belief to Battle Comp, but the computers demanded evidence, and, of course, there was none. Only intuition, the one quality Battle Comp utterly lacked.

“Execute Laocoon now!” Colin snapped, and the stealthed colliers began their harmless—and deadly—dance once more. A ring of starships, invisible in supralight but all too tangible in the gravity well they forged, spun their chains about Great Lord Tharno.

“All ships,” Colin said coldly. “Weapons free. Engage at will, but watch your ammo.”

Nest Lord! So that was how they did it!

Great Lord Tharno’s eyes narrowed in chill understanding. The nest-killers’ cloaking systems were good, but not good enough when Nest Protector had happened to be looking in exactly the right direction. The readings were preposterous, but their import was plain. Somehow, these nest-killers had devised a supralight drive in normal space—one which produced a mammoth gravitational disturbance. They had locked his nestlings out of hyper without sacrificing their own supralight capability at all!

Their timing was as frightening as their technology, for Nest Protector and all three of his deputies had been drawn forward into their trap. Somehow, the nest-killers knew which ships, above all, they must kill.

And then the first warheads exploded.

Lady Adrie

She frowned as the foremost Achuultani continued to advance, strewing the cosmos with their ruins, for their rear ships had not only halted but begun retreating, trying to get free of Laocoon’s net. That was smarter tactics than they’d shown yet.

If only their rear formations were more open—or their ships smaller! They had mass enough to screw the transition from Enchanach Drive to sublight all to hell. The transition would kill hundreds of them, probably more, but the drive’s titanic grav masses had to be perfectly, exquisitely balanced. If they weren’t, the ship within them could die even more spectacularly than the Achuultani, as Ashar and Trelma had demonstrated. The enemy’s flagship was too deep in his formation for even a suicide run to reach, and this time around he wasn’t sending his escorts forward and leaving a hole.

“Hyper trace!” Oliver Weinstein snapped, and Adrie