by David Weber
“Herdan the Twenty-Fourth?” Colin repeated.
“The title would seem significant,” Dahak agreed, “suggesting as it does an extremely long period of personal rule. In addition, the date of his accession appears to confirm our dating of the Defram disaster.”
“Agreed,” Colin said. “But you don’t have any more data?”
“Not of a political or societal nature, Captain. It may be that Omega Three will disgorge additional information, assuming I can locate the proper portion of its data core and that the relevant entries have not decayed beyond recovery. I would not place the probability as very high. Omega Three and its companions were constructed in great haste by local authorities, not by Battle Fleet. Beyond the programming essential for their design function, their data bases appear to be singularly uninformed.”
Despite his shock, Colin grinned at the computer’s sour tone.
“All right,” he said after a moment. “What can you tell us about the effects of this bio-weapon and the reason the fortifications were built?”
“The data are not rich, Captain, but they do contain the essentials. The bio-weapon appears to have been designed to mount a broad-spectrum attack upon a wide range of life forms. If the rumors recorded by Governor Yirthana are correct, it was, in fact, intended to destroy any life form. In mammals, it functioned as a neuro-toxin, rendering the chemical compounds of the nervous system inert so that the organism died.”
“But that wouldn’t kill trees and grasses,” Cohanna objected.
“That is true, Commander. Unfortunately, the designers of this weapon appear to have been extremely ingenious. Obviously we do not have a specimen of the weapon itself, but I have retrieved very limited data from Governor Yirthana’s own bio-staff. It would appear that the designers had hit upon a simple observation: all known forms of life depend upon chemical reactions. Those reactions may vary from life form to life form, but their presence is a constant. This weapon was designed to invade and neutralize the critical chemical functions of any host.”
“Impossible,” Cohanna said flatly, then flushed.
“By the standards of my own data base, you are correct, ma’am. Nonetheless, Keerah is devoid of life. Empirical evidence thus suggests that it was, indeed, possible to the Fourth Empire.”
“Agreed,” the Biosciences head muttered.
“Governor Yirthana’s bio-staff hypothesized that the weapon had been designed to modify itself at a very high rate of speed, attacking the chemical structures of its victims in turn until a lethal combination was reached. An elegant theoretical solution, although, I suspect, actually producing the weapon would be far from simple.”
“Simple! I’m still having trouble believing it was possible!”
“As for Omega Three and its companions,” Dahak continued, “they were intended to enforce a strict quarantine of Keerah. Governor Yirthana obviously was aware of the contamination of her planet and took steps to prevent its spread. There is also a reference I do not yet fully understand to something called a mat-trans system, which she ordered disabled.”
” ‘Mat-trans’?” Colin asked.
“Yes, sir. As I say, I do not presently fully understand the reference, but it would appear that this mat-trans was a device for the movement of personnel over interstellar distances without recourse to starships.”
“What?!” Colin jerked bolt upright in his chair.
“Current information suggests a system limited to loads of only a few tons but capable of transmitting them hundreds—possibly even several thousands—of light-years almost instantaneously, Captain. Apparently this system had become the preferred mode for personal travel. The energy cost appears to have been high, however, which presumably explains the low upper mass limit. Starships remained in use for bulk cargoes, and the Fleet and certain government agencies retained courier vessels for transportation of highly-classified data.”
“Jesus!” Colin muttered. Then his eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you mention that before?”
“You did not ask, Captain. Nor was I aware of it. Please recall that I am continuing to query Omega Three’s memory even as we speak.”
“All right, all right. But matter transmission? Teleportation?” Colin looked at Chernikov. “Is that possible?”
“As Dahak would say, empirical data suggests it is, but if you are asking how, I have no idea. Dahak’s data base contains some journal articles about focused hyper fields linked with fold-space technology, but the research had achieved nothing as of the mutiny. Beyond that—?” He shrugged again.
“Maker!” Cohanna’s soft voice drew all eyes back to her. She was deathly pale. “If they could—” She broke off, staring down at her hands and thinking furiously as she conferred with Dahak through her neural feed. Her expression changed slowly to one of utter horror, and when her attention returned to her fellows, her eyes glistened with sorrow.
“That’s it.” Her voice was dull. “That’s how they did it to themselves.”
“Explain,” Colin said gently.
“I wondered … I wondered how it could go this far.” She gave herself a little shake. “You see, Hector’s right—only maniacs would deliberately dust whole planets with a weapon like this. But it wasn’t that way at all.”
They looked at her, most blankly, but a glimmer of understanding tightened Jiltanith’s mouth. She nodded almost imperceptibly, and Cohanna’s eyes swiveled to her face.
“Exactly,” the biosciences officer said grimly. “The Imperium could have delivered it only via starships. They’d’ve been forced to transport the bug—the agent, whatever you want to call it—from system to system, intentionally. Some of that could have happened accidentally, but the Imperium was huge. By the time a significant portion of its planets were infected, the contaminating vector would have been recognized. If it wasn’t a deliberate military operation, quarantine should have contained the damage.
“But the Empire wasn’t like that. They had this damned ‘mat-trans’ thing. Assuming an incubation period of any length, all they needed was a single source of contamination—just one—they didn’t know about. By the time they realized what was happening, it could’ve spread throughout the entire Imperium, and just stopping starships wouldn’t do a damned thing to slow it down!”
Colin stared at her as her logic sank home. With something like the “mat-trans” Dahak had described, the Imperium’s worlds would no longer have been weeks or months of travel apart. They would have become a tightly-integrated, inter-connecting unit. Time and distance, the greatest barriers to holding an interstellar civilization together, would no longer apply. What a triumph of technology! And what a deadly, deadly triumph it had proven.
“Then I was wrong,” MacMahan murmured. “They could wipe themselves out.”
“Could and did.” Ninhursag’s clenched fist struck the table gently, for an Imperial, and her voice was thick with anguish. “Not even on purpose—by accident. By accident, Breaker curse them!”
“Wait.” Colin raised a hand for silence. “Assume you’re right, Cohanna. Do you really think every planet would have been contaminated?”
“Probably not, but the vast majority certainly could have been. From the limited information Dahak and I have on this monster of theirs—and remember all our data is third or fourth-hand speculation, by way of Governor Yirthana—the incubation time was quite lengthy. Moreover, Yirthana’s information indicates it was capable of surviving very long periods, possibly several centuries, in viable condition even without hosts.
“That suggests a strategic rather than a tactical weapon. The long incubation period was supposed to bury it and give it time to spread before it manifested itself. That it in fact did so is also suggested by the fact that Yirthana had time to build her bases before it wiped out Keerah. Its long-term lethality would mean no one dared contact any infected planet for a very, very long period. Ideal, if the object was to cripple an interstellar enemy.
“But look what that means. Thank
s to the incubation period, there probably wasn’t any way to know it was loose until people started dying. Which means the central, most heavily-visited planets would’ve been the first to go.
“People being people, the public reaction was—must have been—panic. And a panicked person’s first response is to flee.” Cohanna shrugged. “The result might well have been an explosion of contamination.
“On the other hand, they had the hypercom. Warnings could be spread at supralight speeds without using their mat-trans, and presumably some planets must have been able to go into quarantine before they were affected. That’s where the ‘dwell time’ comes in. They couldn’t know how long they had to stay quarantined. No one would dare risk contact with any other planet as long as the smallest possibility of contamination by something like this existed.”
She paused, and Colin nodded.
“So they would have abandoned space,” he said.
“I can’t be certain, but it seems probable. Even if any of their planets did survive, their ‘Empire’ still could have self-destructed out of all too reasonable fear. Which means—” she met Colin’s eyes squarely “—that in all probability, there’s no Imperium for us to contact.”
Vladimir Chernikov bent over the work bench, studying the disassembled rifle-like weapon. His enhanced eyes were set for microscopic vision, and he manipulated his exquisitely sensitive instruments with care. The back of his mind knew he was trying to lose himself and escape the numbing depression which had settled over Dahak’s crew, but his fascination was genuine. The engineer in his soul rejoiced at the beauty of the work before him. Now if he could only figure out what it did.
There was the capacitor, and a real brute it was, despite its tininess. Eight or nine times a regular energy gun’s charge. And these were rheostats. One obviously regulated the power of whatever the thing emitted, but what did the second … ?
Hmmmmm. Fascinating. There’s no sign of a standard disrupter head in here. But then—aha! What do we have here?
He bent closer, bending sensor implants as well as vision upon it, then froze. He looked a moment longer, then raised his head and gestured to Baltan.
“Take a look at this,” he said quietly. His assistant bent over and followed Chernikov’s indicating test probe to the component in question, then pursed his lips in a silent whistle.
“A hyper generator,” he said. “It has to be. But the size of the thing.”
“Precisely.” Chernikov wiped his spotless fingers on a handkerchief, drying their sudden clamminess. “Dahak,” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“What do you make of this?”
“A moment,” the computer said. There was a brief period of silence, then the mellow voice spoke again. “Fleet Commander (Engineering) Baltan is correct, sir. It is a hyper generator. I have never encountered one of such small size or advanced design, but the basic function is evident. Please note, however, that the generator cavity’s walls are composed of a substance unknown to me, and that they extend the full length of the barrel.”
“Explanations?”
“It would appear to be a shielding housing around the generator, sir—one impervious to warp radiation. Fascinating. Such a material would have obvious applications in such devices as atmospheric hyper missile launchers.”
“True. But am I right in assuming the muzzle end of the housing is open?”
“You are, sir. In essence, this appears to be a highly-advanced adaptation of the warp grenade. When activated, this weapon would project a focused field—in effect, a beam—of multi-dimensional translation which would project its target into hyper space.”
“And leave it there,” Chernikov said flatly.
“Of course,” Dahak agreed. “A most ingenious weapon.”
“Ingenious,” Chernikov repeated with a shudder.
“Correct. Yet I perceive certain limitations. The hyper-suppression fields already developed to counteract warp grenades would also counteract this device’s effect, at least within the area of such a field. I cannot be certain without field-testing the weapon, but I suspect that it might be fired out of or across such a suppression field. Much would depend upon the nature of the focusing force fields. But observe the small devices on both sides of the barrel. They appear to be extremely compact Ranhar generators. If so, they presumably create a tube of force to extend the generator housing and contain the hyper field, thus controlling its area of effect and also tending, quite possibly, to offset the effect of a suppression field.”
“Maker, and I always hated warp grenades,” Baltan said fervently.
“I, too,” Chernikov said. He straightened from the bench slowly, looking at the next innocent-seeming device he’d abstracted from Omega Three once Cohanna had decided her painstaking search confirmed the original suggestion of the functional hydroponic farms. There was no trace of anything which could possibly be the bio-weapon aboard the battle station, and Chernikov had gathered up every specimen of technology he could find. He’d been looking forward to taking all of them apart.
Now he was almost afraid to.
Chapter Nine
Colin MacIntyre sat in Conference One once more. He’d grown to hate this room, he thought, bending his gaze upon the tabletop. Hate it.
Silence fell as the last person found a seat, and he looked up.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “for the past month I’ve resisted all arguments to move on because I believe Keerah represents a microcosm of what probably happened to the entire Imperium. I now believe we’ve learned all we can here. But—” he drew out the slight pause behind the word “—that still leaves the question of what we do next. Before turning to that, however, I would like to review our findings, beginning with our Chief Engineer.”
He sat back and nodded to Chernikov, who cleared his throat quietly, as if organizing his thoughts, then began.
“We have examined many artifacts recovered from Omega Three. On the basis of what we have discovered to date, I have reached a few conclusions about the technical base of the Imperium—that is to say, the Empire.
“They had, as we would have expected, made major advances, yet not so many as we might have anticipated. Please bear in mind that I am speaking only of non-biological technology; neither Cohanna nor I is in a position to say what they had achieved in the life sciences. The weapon which destroyed them certainly appears to evidence a very high level of bio-engineering.
“With that reservation, our initial estimate, that their technology was essentially a vastly refined version of our own, seems to have been correct. With the probable exception of their mat-trans—on which, I regret to say, we have been unable as yet to obtain data—we have encountered nothing Engineering and Dahak could not puzzle out. This is not to say they had not advanced to a point far beyond our current reach, but the underlying principles of their advances are readily apparent to us. In effect, they appear to have reached a plateau of fully mature technology and, I believe, may very well have been on the brink of fundamental breakthroughs into a new order of achievement, but they had not yet made them.
“In general, their progress may be thought of as coupling miniaturization with vast increases in power. A warship of Dahak’s mass, for example, built with the technology we have so far encountered—which, I ask you to bear in mind, represents an essentially civilian attempt to create a military unit—would possess something on the order of twenty times his combat capability.”
He paused for emphasis, and there were signs of awe on more than one face.
“Yet certain countervailing design philosophies and trends, particularly in the areas of computer science and cybernetics, also have become apparent to us. Specifically, the hardware of their computer systems is extremely advanced compared to our own; their software is not. Assuming that Omega Three is a representative sample of their computer technology, their computers had an even lower degree of self-awareness than that of Comp Cent prior to the mutiny. The data storage capacity o
f Omega Three’s Comp Cent, whose mass is approximately thirty percent that of Dahak’s central memory core, exceeded his capacity, including all subordinate systems, by a factor of fifty. The ability of Omega Three, on the other hand, despite a computational speed many times higher than his, did not approach even that of Comp Cent prior to the mutiny.
“Clearly, this indicates a deliberate degradation of performance to meet some philosophical constraint. My best guess—and I stress that it is only a guess—is that it results from the period of civil warfare which apparently converted the Imperium into the Empire. Fleet computers would have resisted firing on other Fleet units, and while this could have been compensated for by altering their Alpha Priority core programming, the combatants may have balked at allowing semi-aware computers to decide whether or not to fire on other humans. This is only a hypothesis, but it is certainly one possibility.
“In addition, we have confirmed one other important point. While Omega Three’s computers did use energy-state technology, they also incorporated non-energy backups, which appears to reflect standard Imperial military practice. This means a deactivated Fleet computer would not experience a complete core loss as did the civilian units discovered at Defram. If powered up once more, thus restoring its energy-state circuitry, it should remain fully functional.
“Further, even civilian installations which have been continuously powered could remain completely operational. Omega Three’s capabilities, for example, suffered not because it relied upon energy-state components, but because it was left unattended for so long that solid-state components failed. Had the battle station’s computers possessed adequate self-repair capability and spares, Omega Three would be fully functional today.”
He paused, as if rechecking his thoughts, then glanced at Colin.
“That concludes my report, sir. Detailed information is in the data base for anyone who cares to peruse it.”
“Thank you.” Colin pursed his lips for a moment, inviting questions, but there were none. They were waiting for the other shoe, he thought dourly.
