Heirs of Empire

She breathed a bit harder as he cataloged her wounds but nodded for him to continue, and his eyes approved her courage.

“Your implants sealed the blood loss from the wounds to your shoulder and lung. There was considerable damage to the lung, but those injuries are healing satisfactorily. The head wound resulted in intracranial bleeding and tissue damage”—she tensed, but he continued calmly— “yet I see no sign of motor skill damage, though there may be some permanent memory loss. Your vision problem, however, stems not from tissue damage but from damage to your implant hardware. Fragments of bone were driven into the brain and also forward, piercing the eye socket. The injuries to the eye structures are responding to therapy, and the optic nerve was untouched, but an implant, unlike the body, ca

“It’s only in the hardware?” Relief washed through her at his nod, but then she frowned. “Why not just shut it down through the overrides?”

“The damage is too extensive for me to access it. Short of removing it entirely—a task for a fully qualified neurosurgeon which I would hesitate to attempt and which would, at best, leave you effectively blind until we can obtain proper medical assistance, anyway—I can do nothing with it.”

“Well, you’re going to have to do something. I know you’ve got the lights way down in here, but I can’t even keep it open!”

“I know. Yet, as you point out, as long as no light reaches it you experience no discomfort. Rather than risk damaging your presently unscathed optic nerve, I would prefer simply to cover it.”

“An eye patch?” Despite herself, her lips twitched at the absurdity of such an archaic approach. Sandy actually chuckled.

“Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum!” she murmured. Harriet gave her a one-eyed glare, but she only gri

“Indeed.” Brashan gave Sandy a moderately severe glance, then looked back down at Harriet. “Given the unimpaired enhancement of your left eye, you should be able to adjust once the distraction is suppressed.”

“An eye patch.” Harriet sighed. “God, I hope you get holos of this, Sandy. I know you’ll just die if you miss the opportunity!”

“Damn straight,” Sandy said, and smoothed hair from Harry’s forehead.

“But you must report it, Father!” Tibold Rarikson stared at the priest in disbelief, yet Stomald’s smile was serene.

“Tibold, I will report it, but not yet.” The Guard captain started to protest, but Stomald shushed him with a gesture. “I will,” he repeated, “but only when I’m certain precisely what I’m to report.”

“What you’re to report?” Tibold’s eyes bugged, but he gripped his i

“Indeed?” Stomald smiled and took a turn around the room, feeling the other’s eyes on his back. If there was one man with whom he wished to share his wondering joy, Tibold was that man. Hard-bitten warrior that he was, he was a kindly man whose sense of pity not even war could quench. And despite his Guard rank and the traditional Malagoran resentment of outside control, he stood almost as high in Cragsend’s estimation as Stomald himself. But for all his desire, how did Stomald bring the other to see what he himself now saw so clearly?

He drew a deep breath and turned back to the Guardsman.

“My friend,” he said gently, “I want you to listen to me carefully. A great thing has happened here in our tiny town—a greater thing than you may believe possible. I know you’re afraid, and I know why, but there are some points about the ‘demons’ you should consider. For example …”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Sean tried not to hover as Harriet walked unaided to the astrogator’s couch. She was still shaky, and her missing memories refused to return, yet she had to smile at his expression. Tamman sat beside her and slipped an arm about her, and she leaned against him, wishing she knew how to thank them for her life.

But, of course, there was no need.

“Well!” Sean flopped into his couch with customary inelegance. “Looks like your body-and-fender shop does good work, Brashan.”

“True,” the Narhani replied with one of his clogged-drain chuckles. “And while I regret my inability to repair your implant, Harry, I must say your patch gives you a certain—” He paused, seeking the proper word.

“Raffishness?” Sean suggested, his smile almost back to normal.

“Thank you, kind sir.” Harriet stroked the black patch and gri

“Who?” Brashan’s crest perked, but she only shook her head.

“Look her up in the computer, Twinkle Hooves.”

“I shall. You humans have such interesting historical figures,” he said, and her laughter lifted the last shadow from Sean’s heart.

“I’m really glad to see you up again, Harry, and I’m sorry you can’t remember what happened. The rest of us’ll put together a combined implant download later, but for now let’s turn our attention to what we got out of it. Aside, of course, from the reincarnation of Captain Bo

His wave gave Sandy the floor, and she stood.

“Speaking for myself, Harry, I’m delighted you’re back. Tam’s been doing his best, but he’ll never make an analyst.” Tamman made a pained sound, and Harriet poked him in the ribs.

“However,” Sandy went on with a grin, “our ham-handed Marine and I have recovered a fair amount from our purloined computer, and our original hypothesis was correct. It was a journal. This man’s.”

Sean gazed at the image in the command deck display, mentally turning the hair white and the skin to parchment, and recognized the lonely, mummified body from the tower bedroom.

“This is—or was—an engineer named Kahtar. Much of his journal’s unrecoverable, and he didn’t mention the planet’s name in the portions we’ve been able to read, so we still don’t know what it was called originally. But I’ve been able to piece together what happened.”

She looked around, satisfied by the hush about her. Even Tamman knew only fragments of what she was about to say, and she wondered if the others would react as she had … and if they’d have the same nightmares.

“Apparently,” she began, “the planetary governor closed down the mat-trans at the first hypercom warning, then began immediate construction of a quarantine system under the direction of his chief engineer. Who,” she added wryly, “was obviously a real whiz.

“Things weren’t too bad at the start. There was some panic, and a few disturbances from people afraid they hadn’t gotten quarantined soon enough, but nothing they couldn’t handle … at first.” She paused, and her eyes darkened.

“They might have made it, if they’d just shut down their hypercom. Their defenses destroyed over a dozen incoming refugee ships, but I think they could have lived even with that … if the hypercom hadn’t still been up.

“It was like a com link to Hell.” Her voice was quiet. “It was such a slow, agonizing process. Other worlds thought they were safe, too, but they weren’t, and, one by one, the plague killed them all. It took years—years of desperate, dwindling messages from infected planets while their entire universe died.”

Icy silence hovered on the command deck, and she blinked misty eyes.

“It … got to them. Not at once. But when the last hypercom went silent, when there was no one else left—no one at all—the horror was too much. The whole planet went mad.”