Heirs of Empire

“Good point,” Tamman agreed, “and I wish I could answer it, but I can’t. It’s like they’ve got some kind of technological blind spot.”

“Yeah, but then they go and put their biggest city right on top of where we figure the defensive HQ has to be.” Sean shook his head in disgust. “It’s right in the middle of their largest land mass, and there’s not a river within fifty kilometers. With the transportation systems we’ve seen, that’s a hell of an unlikely place for a city to grow up naturally. Look at the canal system they’ve built. There’s over two hundred klicks of it, all to move stuff into the city. There has to be some reason for its location, and I can only think of one magnet. Except, of course, that that particular magnet doesn’t make any sense on a planet that doesn’t know about technology!”

“Well,” Sandy sighed, “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

“Guess so.” Sean’s calm tone fooled none of his friends. Then he gri

The sublight battleship Israel split atmosphere in a long, shallow descent that wrapped her in a shroud of fire. Her crew rode their couches, feeling their ship quiver with the fury of her descent as her bow plating began to glow. Heat sensors soared as the thick battle steel armor burned cherry-red, then yellow, then white. The terrible glow crept back along her hull, the air blazed before her as she battered a column of superheated atmosphere out of her path, and Sean MacIntyre monitored his instruments and tried to stay calm.

The maneuvering computers waited patiently to engage their carefully written program and stop them dead in the bellow of the drive’s fury. It was going to be a rough ride, but so far everything was nominal, and they’d already picked out an alpine valley hiding place fifteen hundred kilometers from the planet’s largest city. It was going to be fine, he told himself for the thousandth time, and gri

High Priest Vroxhan stood on his balcony and watched the night sky burn. His servants had summoned him almost hysterically, and he’d charged out in only his under-robe to see the terrible strand of fire with his own eyes. Now he did see it, and it touched him with ice.

Shooting stars he had seen before, and wondered why the work of God’s Hands should abandon the glorious firmament for the surface of the world to which the demons’ treachery had banished man, but never had he seen one so huge. No one had, and he watched it blaze above The Temple like the very Finger of God and trembled.

Could it be—?

No! God’s Wrath had slain the demons, and he suppressed the blasphemous thought quickly. But not quickly enough. He’d thought it, and if he had, how much more might the ignorant of his flock think the same thing?

He inhaled sharply as the beautiful, terrifying light vanished beyond the western peaks. Would it land? If so, where? Far beyond the borders of Aris—probably even beyond those of Malagor. In Cherist, then? Or Showmah?

He shook himself and turned away, hurrying back into the warmth of his apartments from the chill spring night. It couldn’t be the demons, he told himself firmly, and if not they, then it must, indeed, be God’s handiwork, as all the world was. He nodded with fresh assurance. No doubt God had sent it as a sign and reminder of His deliverance, and he must see the truth was spread before the less faith-filled panicked.

He closed the balcony door and beckoned to a servant. His messages must be ready for the semaphore tower by first light.

Chapter Seventeen

Colin MacIntyre paused outside the larger state dining room to watch three harassed humans and a dozen robots sorting the countless bags of old-fashioned mail into paper breastworks. No one noticed him in the doorway, and as he resumed his journey towards the balcony, he made a note to divert still more human staff to reading the letters while he tried to sort out his own feelings.

Those bags, and the hundreds which had preceded them in the past few days, proved that whatever outrages the Sword of God might wreak and however well-hidden their true enemy might be, his subjects cared. Those letters weren’t just formal, official nothings from heads of state. They came from people all over the Fifth Imperium, expressing their joy—and relief—that their Empress was pregnant.

Yet his own joy, as ’Ta

The decision to have them hadn’t been easy. It was fraught with grief, a guilty sense of betraying Sean and Harriet in some indefinable way, and fear of fresh loss. His and ’Ta

That wasn’t something Lieutenant Commander MacIntyre, USN, had ever worried about, and it hadn’t entered his or ’Ta

And perhaps, he mused, as he stepped out onto the balcony and saw his wife dozing in the summer sunlight, that was good. If their hands had been forced, the decision had still proved there was a future … and that they had the courage to love again after love had hurt them so cruelly.

He smiled and crossed to Jiltanith, bending over her under Bia’s drowsy warmth, and kissed her gently.

“I’m afraid you’re right, Dahak.” Ninhursag scratched her nose and nodded. “We’ve put every senior officer under a microscope—hell, we’re down to lieutenants—and the only bad apples we’ve found are deceased, so it looks like we’ve closed off Mister X’s penetration there.”

“I must confess I had anticipated neither that his penetration might be so limited,” Dahak replied, “nor that he would dispose of his minions so summarily.”

“Ummmm.” Ninhursag leaned back and crossed her legs as she contemplated their findings. Dahak was an enormous asset for any security officer. The computer might not yet have developed the ability to “play a hunch,” but he’d achieved total penetration of Bia’s datanets, and he was a devastatingly thorough and acute analyst. He and Ninhursag had started with a top-down threat analysis of every officer outside Colin’s i