Heirs of Empire

“Like that, do you?” he said, working his scratching fingertips into Galahad’s “armpits,” and the big dog sighed.

“Of course,” his vocoder replied. “It is a pity we do not have hands. I would enjoy doing this for the others.”

“But not as much as you’d enjoy having them do it for you, huh?” Colin challenged, and Galahad sneezed explosively and rolled upright.

“Perhaps not,” he agreed, and Colin snorted. None of the dogs ever lied. That seemed to be a human talent they couldn’t (or didn’t want to) master, but they were getting pretty darn good at equivocating.

“I think humans are a bad influence on you. You’re getting spoiled.”

“No. It is only that we are honest about things we enjoy.”

“Yeah, sure.” Colin reached under Galahad’s massive chest and stroked more gently. The standing dog’s chin rested companionably on his shoulder, and he glanced over at the corner where Galahad’s sister Gwynevere sat very upright, watching Jiltanith move her queen. Gwynevere cocked her head, ears pricking as she considered the move. She was the only one of the dogs to develop a taste for chess—it was a bit too cerebral for the others—and by human standards she wasn’t all that good. Galahad and Gawain were killers at Scrabble, and he’d been horrified to discover Horus had taught all of them to play poker (though none of them—except, perhaps, Gaheris—could bluff worth a damn), but Gwynevere was determined to master chess. And, to be fair about it, she was improving steadily.

The really fu

“Excuse me, Colin,” Dahak’s voice said, “but Ninhursag has just arrived at the Palace.”

“She’s here now?” Colin looked up, and Jiltanith met his eyes with matching surprise. It was very late in Birhat’s twenty-eight-hour day.

“Indeed. And she appears quite agitated.”

” ’Hursag is agitated?” Colin shook his head and scrambled to his feet. “Tell her to come on down to the library.”

“She is already on her way. In fact—”

The library door burst open. Admiral MacMahan came through it like a thunder squall, and Colin rocked back on his heels—literally. Ninhursag was only middling tall, and the mood he usually associated with her was one of deliberate consideration, but tonight she was a titan wrapped in vicious, killing rage.

“ ’Hursag?” he said tentatively as she came to a halt just inside the door. Every movement was rigidly over-controlled, as if each of them took every ounce of will she had, and she chopped a nod.

“Colin. Jiltanith.” Her voice was harsh, each word bitten off with utter precision. “Sit down, both of you. I have something to tell you.”

Colin looked at Jiltanith, wondering what could have transformed Ninhursag so, but ’Ta

“I’m sorry to burst in on you, but I just turned up something … interesting. Or, rather, I just confirmed something interesting.”

She inhaled again, sharply, and gave herself a tiny shake.

“I’ve been slacking off at ONI for months,” she continued in a flat voice. “You know that, Colin, though you haven’t said anything. I’m sorry. You know why I have. But I’m getting myself back together, and yesterday I started through a stack of reports that’ve been accumulating since, well—” She broke off with another shrug, and Colin nodded. Jiltanith held out a hand to him, and he took it as Ninhursag cleared her throat.

“Yes. Anyway, most of them were fairly routine. Gus and Commodore Sung have handled the hot stuff as it came in. But one of them—an accidental death report—caught my attention. It was the date, I think. It happened two days after Imperial Terra hypered out for Urahan, and it covered an entire family.” Fresh pain tightened her lips, but she went harshly on.

“They were civilians, and it was a traffic accident, so I wondered why ONI had it, until I looked more closely,” Ninhursag went on in that flat voice. “The husband was Vincente Cruz. He wasn’t military, strictly speaking, but—” she paused, and her eyes were cold “—he worked for BuShips.”

Colin felt Jiltanith’s hand twitch in his and stiffened. It was no more than a vague stirring of suspicion, but the bitterness in Ninhursag’s eyes turned something cold and wary deep inside him.

“I don’t know why that stuck in my mind, but it did, and when I looked more closely I found a couple of things that seemed … out of kilter.

“The Cruzes lived on Birhat, since he worked for BuShips, but they were killed on Earth. I checked and found out they usually vacationed in North America, but Cruz had returned from there less than three months before, so I wondered why they’d gone back so soon. Then I found out his wife and family had stayed there—visiting friends—and he’d gone back to collect them.

“Again, I don’t know why that bothered me, but it did. So I did some more checking. Cruz’s two older children were enrolled for education here on Birhat, and I discovered that he hadn’t warned the education people they’d be staying on Earth. He notified them only after he got back, but two years ago, when he left them to visit family in Mexico, he’d notified their teachers over a month before they left. He was concerned with making certain they didn’t lose any ground shifting back and forth between the two school systems.

“That seemed odd, so I checked the hypercom and mat-trans logs. In the ten weeks they stayed on Earth, he neither sent to them nor received from them a single hypercom message. Nor did he use the mat-trans to visit them in person. There was no communication between them at all for ten weeks … and he and his wife had a ten-month-old baby.”

Colin’s eyes began to burn with a green fire that matched the fury in Ninhursag’s bitter brown stare, and the admiral nodded slowly.

“The accident report looks completely aboveboard, if a bit freakish. It was a high-speed event—a ridge-line collision at almost Mach six—and the flight recorder was totaled, but the altimeter was recovered, and analysis indicated it was under-reading by about two hundred meters. That was enough to put it into the ridge, but when I did a little discreet checking, no one seemed to know who Cruz’s family had been visiting. I did a computer search of Earth’s credit transactions—as a BuShips employee, he and his wife both held Fleet cards—and I couldn’t find a single transaction for Elena Cruz on Earth.

“I can’t prove it wasn’t an ‘accident,’ but there are too many coincidences. Especially—” Ninhursag’s hands went back behind her, clenched about one another, and her voice was very, very quiet “—when Vincente Cruz was assistant project chief for Imperial Terra’s cybernetics.”

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Colin whispered, and she nodded coldly.

“I haven’t checked his work logs yet—that comes next—but I’m already certain what I’m going to find,” she said, and this time Colin understood her murderous fury perfectly.