Heirs of Empire

She stiffened in his arms, but she didn’t pull away, and after a moment, she shook her head.

“Father, I recall so little of those days.” She pressed her face harder into his shoulder. ” ’Tis like some dark, horrible dream, one that e’en now haunteth my sleep on unquiet nights, yet when waking—”

“Hush. Hush,” he whispered, and pressed his lips into her hair. “I don’t want to hurt you. Maker knows I’ve done too much of that. But I want you to understand, ’Ta

” ’Ta

“Father, Father! Dost’a think I knew that not?” She shook her head.

“But I never told you,” he said softly. “I cost us both so much, and I never had the courage to tell you I knew what I’d done and ask you to forgive me.”

Colin paced the conference room like a caged animal, fists pounding together before him while he awaited his own cutter, and his brain raced. The evacuation Adrie

He stopped suddenly, then slammed himself down in his chair and opened his neural feed to Dahak wide.

“Give me everything on the Mark Ninety,” he said sharply.

The door chime sounded, and Horus turned from Jiltanith to answer it.

“Yes?”

“Your Grace, it’s Captain Chin,” an urgent voice said. “Sir, I think you’d better come out here. I just tried to com the mat-trans center, and the links are all down.”

“That’s impossible,” Horus said reasonably. “Did you call Maintenance?”

“I tried to, Your Grace. No luck. And then I tried my fold-com.” The captain drew a deep breath. “Your Grace, it didn’t work either.”

“What?” Horus opened the door and stared at the Marine.

“It didn’t work, Sir, and I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no obvious jamming, the coms just don’t work, and it’d take a full-scale warp suppressor within four or five hundred meters to lock a Fleet com out of hyper-space.” The captain faced Horus squarely. “Your Grace, with all due respect, we’d better get Her Majesty the hell out of here. Right now.”

“You know, it might just work,” Vlad Chernikov murmured.

“Or set the thing the hell off!” Hector MacMahan objected.

“A possibility,” Dahak agreed, “yet the likelihood is small, assuming the force of the explosion were sufficient. What Colin suggests is, admittedly, a brute force solution, yet it has a certain conceptual elegance.”

“Let me get this straight,” MacMahan said. “We can’t get near the thing, but you people want to pile explosives on top of it and set them off? Are you out of your frigging minds?“

“The operative point, General,” Dahak said, “is that a Mark Ninety is programmed to recognize Imperial threats.”

“So?”

“So we don’t use Imperial technology,” Colin said. “We use old-fashioned, pre-Imperial, Terran-made HE. A Mark Ninety would no more recognize those as a threat than it would a flint hand-ax.”

“HE from where?” MacMahan demanded. “There isn’t any on Birhat. For that matter, I doubt there’s any on Terra after this long!”

“You are incorrect, General,” Dahak said calmly. “Marshal Tsien has the materials we require.”

“I do?” Tsien sounded surprised.

“You do, Sir. If you will check your records, you will discover that your ordnance disposal section has seventy-one pre-Siege, megaton-range nuclear warheads confiscated by Imperial authorities in Syria four years ago.”

“I—” Tsien paused, and then his holo-image nodded. “As usual, you are correct, Dahak. I had forgotten.” He looked at MacMahan. “Lawrence’s Security perso

“You want to use nukes?” MacMahan yelped.

“No,” Dahak said calmly, “but these are Terran warheads, which rely on shaped chemical charges to initiate criticality, and each of them contains several kilograms of the compound Octol.”

“And how do you get the explosives into position?” MacMahan asked more normally.

“Somebody walks in, sets them, fuses them, and walks back out again,” Colin said. MacMahan raised an eyebrow, and Colin shrugged. “It should work, as long as he doesn’t have any active Imperial hardware on him.”

“Background radioactivity?” Hatcher asked. “If this stuff’s been squirreled away inside a nuclear warhead for twenty-odd years, it’s bound to have picked up some contamination.”

“Not sufficient to cross a Mark Ninety’s threshold,” Dahak replied.

“You’re certain?” Hatcher pressed, then waved a hand. “Forget that. You never make unqualified statements if you aren’t certain, do you?”

“Such habits imply a certain imprecision of thought,” Dahak observed, and despite the tension, Colin smiled, then sobered.

“I think we have to try it. It’s a risk, but it’s the smallest one I can come up with, and you may be right about a timer, Hector. We don’t have time to come up with an ideal, no-risk solution.”

“Agreed. How long to strip out the explosives and get them down here, Dahak?”

“I have already initiated the process, General. I estimate that they could be delivered to the Palace within twenty minutes in their present state, but I would prefer to reshape them into a proper configuration for maximum destructive effect, which will require an additional hour.”

“Eighty minutes?” MacMahan rubbed his chin, then nodded. “All right, Colin, I’ll vote for it.”

“Gerald? Tao-ling?” Both officers nodded, and Colin glanced at Chernikov.

“I, too,” the Russian said. “In fact, I would prefer to place the charge myself.”

“I don’t know, Vlad—” Colin began, but MacMahan interrupted crisply.

“If you were thinking about doing it yourself, you can just rethink. Whatever happens down here, you, personally, are going to be aboard Dahak and outside the lethal zone when we set it off. And if you know anybody better equipped for the job than Vlad, I don’t.” Colin opened his mouth, but MacMahan fixed him with a challenging eye and he closed it again.