Heirs of Empire

“Aye,” she whispered, and looked at Hatcher. “Forgive me, dear Gerald.” She held out a trembling hand, and the admiral took it. “Well I know thy grief, sweet friend. ’Tis ill done to heap mine own upon it.”

” ’Ta

“Nay, Gerald. ’Tis no more fault o’ thine than mine. And Colin hath the right. Our dearest friends do need our aid … e’en as we need theirs.” She managed a soft, sad smile and stood. “Let us go to them.”

A chair squeaked as the man in it finished the report and turned to look out his office window. The Imperium was in mourning, and even the most fiery malcontents were muted by the shock and sorrow of a race. Every flag of humankind flew at half-mast, but there was no sorrow in his heart. The heirs were gone, and the children of the imperial family’s closest friends had gone with them. Grief and loss would weaken them, make them less vigilant, blunt their perceptions and reactions, and that was good.

He rose and walked to the window, hands folded behind him, looking down on the crowds below, then rested his eyes upon the spire of the Cenotaph. The names on the memorial were endless, and once he’d hated every one of them, for they named the people who’d toppled his patron. But he hated them no longer, for in toppling Anu they’d cleared his path to power, and his palms tingled as he waited to reach out and grasp it.

He pursed his lips, pondering his preparations. The gravitonic warhead was almost ready, and so was his plan for delivering it when the time was right. He’d been more worried about that than he’d cared to admit to Francine, but not anymore. It wouldn’t be easy, but with his foreknowledge and the holos of the artist’s sketches he could fabricate his duplicate in plenty of time. And, of course, it would never do to deliver it too soon, anyway. He needed Stepmother closer to operational, for it was essential to reduce delay to an absolute minimum if his coup was to succeed.

And it would succeed. He was like a spider, he thought, weaving his webs at the very heart of empire, u

He smiled again—a thin, triumphant smile. With a little luck, the heirs’ deaths might even drive a wedge between the imperial family and Dahak, for it was Dahak who’d designed Imperial Terra, supervised her construction, and suggested sending them out aboard her. With Cruz and his family dead, no one would ever know what had really happened, and the grieving parents would be more than human if some secret part of them didn’t blame Dahak for their loss.

The time would come. Not this year, perhaps, but soon, and then Colin and Jiltanith MacIntyre would die, as well, in one deadly stroke which would decapitate the Imperium … and there would be nothing anyone could do about it. Nothing at all.

He smothered a soft laugh, savoring the victory to come and the exquisite irony which would make him Colin’s legal successor. He, the Terra-born “degenerate” Kirinal and Anu had despised even while they groomed him as their tool, would achieve what Anu had only dreamed of: utter and complete dominion. And it would all be legal!

A soft sound warned him, and he turned, banishing his smile and replacing it with soft, sad sympathy as Horus walked into his office. The old man’s shoulders slumped, and his eyes were haunted, but like his daughter and son-in-law, he was making himself go on. Making himself discharge his duties, never guessing how futile it all truly was.

“Sorry to bother you,” Horus said, “but I wondered if you’d finished that report on the Calcutta bio-enhancement center?”

“Yes, I have.” He crossed to his desk and handed over the datachip folio from the blotter.

“Thanks.” Horus took it and started back to his office, then stopped and turned as a throat cleared itself behind him.

“I just … Well, I just wanted to say I’m sorry, Horus. If there’s anything I can do—anything at all—please let me know.”

“I will.” Horus managed a sad smile of his own. “It helps just to know friends care,” he said softly.

“I’m glad. Because we do care, Horus,” Lawrence Jefferson said gently. “More, perhaps, than you’ll ever know.”

Chapter Ten

“I don’t think we’re going to nail it down any closer, Harry,” Sean sighed from the captain’s couch. He rubbed his forehead in a futile effort to relieve the subliminal ache of hours of concentration on his neural feeds, then rose and stretched hugely.

“I’m afraid you’re right.” His sister sat up in the astrogator’s couch and twisted a lock of sable hair around a fingertip.

Sandy lay like a dead woman in the tactical officer’s couch, but Sean was used to her utter concentration on the task in hand. Besides, he could see her breathing. He flipped his feed into her net, nudging her gently, and felt her acknowledgment. She began to disengage from her painstaking computer diagnostics, and he fired another message off to Tamman and Brashan, summoning them from their examination of Engineering for a conference.

He clasped his hands behind him and watched the display while Harriet rose and worked through a few tension-relieving stretches. Israel drifted in interstellar space, drive down while her tiny crew examined her every system. Before they did anything else, they were going to be certain—or as close as was humanly (or Narhanily) possible—no more booby traps awaited them. But once they were certain they still had to decide what to do, and the display’s glittering stars offered few options.

He looked up as Tamman and Brashan entered the command deck. Tamman still looked drawn and pinched, but Brashan seemed almost calm. Which, Sean reflected, might owe something to the famed Narhani lack of imagination. Personally, he’d always thought of it more as pragmatism. Narhani were more concerned with the nuts and bolts of a problem than with its implications, and he was glad of it. Brashan’s levelheadedness was exactly what they all needed just now, for, to use the current Academy phrase, they were up to their eyebrows in shit.

Tamman perched on the assistant tactical officer’s couch beside Sandy while Brashan keyed a reconfiguration command into the exec’s couch. It twitched for a moment, then reformed itself into a Narhani-style pad, and he folded onto it just as Sandy shook her head and roused. She sat up with a wan smile that still held a ghost of her familiar humor, and Sean gri

“All right. I know our system checks are still a long way from finished, but I think it’s time to compare notes.”

Their nodded agreement was a relief. He was senior to all of them, yet his authority, while real and legal, rested solely on their class standings. He stood first in their Academy class, but less than five points separated him from Tamman, their most “junior” officer, and there was a bare quarter-point between him and Sandy. Which was due solely to his higher scores in Tactics and Phys-Ed, for she’d waxed him in Math and Physics.

“Okay. Harry and I have done our best to figure out where we are, but we can’t be as precise about it as we’d like. Or, rather, we know where we are; we just don’t have any idea what the neighborhood looks like. Harry?” He passed the discussion to her, and she propped a hip against the astrogator’s console.

“First of all, we’re nowhere near where we’re supposed to be. Israel’s astro data is limited—normally, sublight units don’t much need interstellar data—but we’ve got the old basic Fourth Empire cartography downloads. Working from them and allowing for forty-odd thousand years of stellar motion, we’re just about smack in the middle of the Tarik Sector.”