Heirs of Empire

The last four hours had been frustrating.

Israel had crept in at the paltry velocity of .2 c, wrapped in the stealth field that turned her into a black nothingness. Her passive systems had peered ahead, poised on a hair-trigger to warn of any active detection systems, but she’d been blind to anything but fairly powerful energy sources, and curiosity was killing her crew.

Harriet had, indeed, localized the power source to within fifty kilometers, which was ample for warheads of the power they carried, but Sean longed to examine the planet directly. Unfortunately, Israel’s optical systems, pitiful compared to active fold-space sca

But they were coming up on the two-light-minute mark, and he lay tense in his command couch as their speed fell still further. Tamman and Brashan coordinated their departments carefully, reducing drive power and velocity in tandem, and Sean grunted his satisfaction as the drive died at last. Right on the mark, he noted: exactly 20,000 KPS. The internal gravity was still up, but Israel no longer had any emission signature at all.

“Good, guys,” he murmured, then glanced at Sandy. “Take the stealth field down.”

“Coming down now,” she replied tautly, and Sean watched through a cross feed as she powered down their cloak of invisibility with the same exquisite care Tamman had taken.

The entire crew held its collective breath as Harriet consulted her passive systems very, very carefully. Then she relaxed.

“Looks good, Sean.” Her voice was hushed, as if she feared the defenses might hear. “The platform stasis fields’re steady as a rock.”

Her crewmates’ breath hissed out, and Sandy looked up with a grin.

“We’re heeeere,” she crooned, and the others laughed out loud.

“Of course we are.” Sean gri

“I hate it when he’s right,” Sandy told the others. “Fortunately, it doesn’t happen often.”

That was good for another chuckle, and the last of the hovering tension faded as Sean waved a fist in her direction. Then he sat up briskly.

“All right. Bring up the optics and see what we can see, Harry.”

“Bringing them up now,” his sister said, and the blue and white sphere of the planet swelled, displacing the starfield from the display as she engaged the forward optical head. They were almost thirty-six million kilometers away, but surface features leapt into startling clarity.

Sean stared eagerly at seas and rivers, the rumpled lines of mountain ranges, green swathes of forest. Theirs were the first human (or Narhani) eyes to behold that planet in forty-five thousand years, and it was lovely beyond belief. None of them had dared hope to see this living, breathing beauty at the end of their weary voyage, but incredible as it seemed, the planet lived. Here in the midst of the Fourth Empire’s self-wrought devastation, it lived.

His eyes devoured it, and then he stiffened.

“Hey! What the—?”

“Look! Look!”

“My God, there’s—!”

“Jesus, is that—?!”

An incredulous babble filled the command deck as all of them saw it at once. Harriet didn’t need any instructions; she was already zooming in on the impossible sight. The holo of the planet vanished, replaced by a full-power closeup of one tiny part of its surface, and the confusion of voices died as they stared at the seaport city in silence.

“There’s no question, is there?” Sean murmured.

“Damn.” Tamman shook his head. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. Hell, I’m still not sure I am seeing it!”

“You’re seeing it,” Sandy told him quietly. “And maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t just zap the control center after all.”

“No question,” Tamman agreed, and Israel’s crew shared a shudder at the thought of what they might have unleashed against a populated world.

“But I don’t understand it,” Brashan mused. “Life, yes—there’s life on Birhat, so it has to be theoretically possible. But people? Humans?” His crest waved in perplexity and a double-thumbed hand rubbed his long snout.

“There’s only one answer,” Sean said. “This time quarantine worked.”

“It seems impossible,” Harriet sighed. “Wonderful, but impossible.”

“You got that right.” Sean frowned at the large, fortified town they were currently watching. “But this only raises more questions, doesn’t it? Like what happened to their tech base? Their defenses are still operable, and the HQ is down there, so how come they’re all ru

He waved at the image, where animal-drawn plows turned soil in a patchwork of fields. The small, low buildings looked well-enough made, but they were built of wood and stone, and many were roofed in thatch. Yet the eroded stumps of an ancient city of the Fourth Empire lay barely thirty kilometers from the town’s crenulated walls.

“It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” Sandy replied.

“You can say that again. How in hell can someone decivilize in the midst of that much technology? Just from the ruins we’ve already plotted, this planet had millions of people. You’d think poking around in the wreckage, let alone having at least one still operating high-tech enclave in their midst, would get the current population started on science. But even if it hasn’t, where did the original techies go?”

“Some kind of home-grown plague?” Tamman suggested.

“Unlikely.” Brashan shook his head in the human expression of negation. “Their medical science should have been able to handle anything short of the bio-weapon itself.”

“How about a war?” Sandy offered. “It’s been a long time, guys. They could have bombed themselves out.”

“I suppose so, but then why aren’t more of those towers flattened?” Sean objected. “Imperial warheads shouldn’t have left anything.”

“Not necessarily.” Harriet watched the display, toying with a lock of her hair. “Oh, you’re right about gravitonics, but suppose they used small nukes or dusted each other? Or whipped up their own bio-weapons?”

“I suppose that’s possible, but it still doesn’t explain why they never rebuilt. Maybe they lost their original tech base—I can’t see how, with that ground station still up, but let’s concede the possibility. But we’re still looking at a city-building culture spread over at least two continents. It looks to me like they’ve got about as many people as a pre-tech agrarian economy can support—more than I would have expected, in fact; their agriculture must be more efficient than it looks. But given that kind of population base, why haven’t they developed their own indigenous technology?”