The Armageddon Inheritance fe-2

by David Weber

  “I am not yet prepared to provide translations or interpretations, but this project is continuing.” Colin nodded. Dahak meant the majority of his capability was devoted to it even as he spoke. “I anticipate at least partial success within the next several days.”

  “Good,” Colin said. “We need that data to plan our next move.”

  “Acknowledged,” Dahak said calmly.

  “What else do you have for us?”

  “Principally observational data, Sire. Our technical teams and my own remotes have completed their initial survey of the wreckage. I am now prepared to present a brief general summary of our findings. Shall I proceed?”

  “Please do.”

  “The present data contain anomalies. Specifically, certain aspects of Aku’Ultan technology do not logically correspond to others. For example, they appear to possess only a very rudimentary appreciation of gravitonics and their ships do not employ gravitonic sublight drives, yet their sublight missiles employ a highly sophisticated gravitonic drive which is, in fact, superior to that of the Imperium though inferior to that of the Empire.”

  “Could they have picked that up from someone else?” MacMahan asked.

  “The possibility exists. Yet having done so, why have they not applied it to their starships? Their relatively slow speed, even in hyper space, is a severe tactical handicap, and, logically, they should recognize the potentials of their own missile propulsion, yet they have not taken advantage of them.

  “Nor is this the only anomaly. The computers aboard this starship are primitive in the extreme, but little advanced over those of Earth, yet the components of which they are built are very nearly on a par with my own, though far inferior to the Empire’s energy-state systems. Again, their hyper technology is highly sophisticated, yet there is no sign of beamed hyper fields, nor even of warp warheads or grenades. This is the more surprising in view of their extremely primitive, energy-intensive beam weapons. Their range is short, their effect limited, and their projectors both clumsy and massive, but little advanced from those of pre-Imperium Terra.”

  “Any explanation for these anomalies?” Colin asked after a moment.

  “I have none, Sire. It would appear that the Aku’Ultan have chosen, for reasons best known to themselves, to build extremely inefficient warships by the standards of their own evident technical capabilities. Why a warrior race should do such a thing surpasses my present understanding.”

  “Yours and mine both,” Colin murmured, drumming on the conference table edge. Then he shook his head.

  “Thank you, Dahak. Keep on this for us, please.”

  “I shall, Sire.”

  “In that case,” Colin turned to Isis and Cohanna, “what can you tell us about how these beasties are put together, Ladies?”

  “I’ll let Captain Cohanna begin, if I may,” Isis said. “She’s supervised most of the autopsies.”

  “All right. Cohanna?”

  “Well,” Dahak’s surgeon said, “Councilor Tudor’s seen more of our live specimen, but we’ve both learned a fair bit from the dead ones.

  “To summarize, the Achuultani are definitely warm-blooded, despite their saurian appearance, though their biochemistry incorporates an appalling level of metals by human standards. A fraction of it would kill any of us; their bones are virtually a crystalline alloy; their amino acids are incredible; and they use a sort of protein-analogue metal salt as an oxygen-carrier. I haven’t even been able to identify some of the elements in it yet, but it works. In fact, it’s a bit more efficient than hemoglobin, and it’s also what gives their blood that bright-orange color. Their chromosome structure is fascinating, but I’ll need several months before I can tell you much more than that about it.

  “Now,” she drew a deep breath, “none of that is too terribly surprising, given that we’re dealing with an utterly alien species, but a few other points strike me as definitely weird.

  “First, they have at least two sexes, but we’ve seen only males. It is, of course, possible that their culture doesn’t believe in exposing females to combat, but an incursion’s personnel spend decades of subjective time on operations. It seems a bit unlikely, to me, at any rate, that any race could be so immune to the biological drives as to remain celibate for periods like that. In addition, unless their psychology is entirely beyond our understanding, I would think that being cut off from all procreation would produce the same apathy it produces in human societies.

  “Second, there appears to be an appalling lack of variation. I’ve yet to unravel their basic gene structure, but we’ve been carrying out tissue studies on the cadavers recovered from the wreck. By the standards of any species known to Terran or Imperial bioscience, they exhibit a statistically improbable—extremely improbable—homogeneity. Were it not for the very careful labeling we’ve done, I would be tempted to conclude that all of our tissue samples come from no more than a few score individuals. I have no explanation for how this might have come about.

  “Third, and perhaps most puzzling, is the relative primitivism of their gross physiognomy. To the best of our knowledge, this same race has conducted offensive sweeps of our arm of the galaxy for over seventy million years, yet they do not exhibit the attributes one might expect such a long period of high-tech civilization to produce. They’re large, extremely strong, and well-suited to a relatively primitive environment. One would expect a species which had enjoyed technology for so long to have decreased in size, at the very least, and, perhaps, to have lost much of its tolerance for extreme environmental conditions. These creatures have done neither.”

  “Is that really relevant?” Amesbury asked. “Humanity hasn’t exactly developed the attributes you describe, either here or in Imperial history.”

  “The cases aren’t parallel, Sir Frederick. The Terran branch of the race is but recently removed from its own primitive period, and all of human history, from its beginnings on Mycos to the present, represents only a tiny fraction of the life experience of the Achuultani. Further, the Achuultani’s destruction of the Third Imperium eliminated all human-populated planets other than Birhat—a rather draconian reduction in the gene pool.”

  “Point taken,” Amesbury said, and Cohanna gestured to Isis.

  “Just as Cohanna has noted anomalies in Achuultani physiology,” the white-haired physician began, “I have observed anomalies in behavioral patterns. Obviously, our prisoner—his name is ‘Brashieel,’ as nearly as we can pronounce it—is a prisoner and so cannot be considered truly representative of his race. His behavior, however, is, by any human standard, bizarre.

  “He appears resigned, yet not passive. In general, his behavior is docile, which could be assumed, genuine, or merely a response to our own biotechnics. Certainly he’s deduced that even our medical technicians are several times as strong as he is, though he may not realize this is due to artificial enhancement. He is not, however, apathetic. He’s alert, interested, and curious. We are unable to communicate with him as yet, but he appears to be actively assisting our efforts in this direction. I submit that for a soldier embarked upon a genocidal campaign to exhibit neither resistance to, nor even, so nearly as we can determine, hostility towards the species he recently attempted to annihilate isn’t exactly typical of a human response.”

  “Um.” Colin tugged on his nose. “How are his injuries responding?”

  “We can’t use quick-heal or regeneration on such an unknown physiology, but he appears to be recovering nicely. His bones are knitting a bit faster than a human’s would; tissue repairs seem to be taking rather longer.”

  “All right,” Colin said, “what do we have? A technology with gaping holes, a species which seems evolutionarily retarded, and a prisoner whose responses defy our logical expectations. Does anyone have any suggestions which could account for all those things?”

  He looked around expectantly, but the only response was silence.

  “Well,” he sighed after a moment, “let’s adjourn for now. Unless something breaks
in the meantime, we’ll convene again Wednesday at fourteen hundred hours. Will that be convenient for all of you?”

  Heads nodded, and he rose.

  “I’ll see you all then,” he said. He wanted to get home to Dahak anyway. The twins were teething, and ’Tanni wasn’t exactly the most placid mommy in human history.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Brashieel, who had been a servant of thunders, curled in his new nest place and pondered. It had never occurred to him—nor to anyone else, so far as he knew—to consider the possibility of capture. Protectors did not capture nest-killers; they slew them. So, he had always assumed, did nest-killers deal with Protectors, yet these had not.

  He had attempted to fight to the death, but he had failed, and, strangely, he no longer wished to die. No one had ever told him he must; had they simply failed, as he, to consider that he might not? Yet he felt a vague suspicion a true thinker in honor would have ended slaying yet another nest-killer.

  Only Brashieel wished to live. He needed to consider the new things happening to and about him. These strange bipeds had destroyed Lord Chirdan’s force with scarcely five twelves of ships. Admittedly, they were huge, yet it had taken but five twelves, when Lord Chirdan had been within day-twelfths of destroying this world. That was power. Such nest-killers could purge the galaxy of the Aku’Ultan, and the thought filled him with terror.

  But why had they waited so long? He had seen this world’s nest-killers now, and they were the same species as those who crewed those stupendous ships. Whether they were also the nest-killers who had built those sensor arrays he did not know. It seemed likely, yet if it were so those arrays must have told them long ago that the Great Visit was upon them, so why conceal their capability until this world had suffered such losses? And why had they not killed him? Because they sought information from him? That was possible, though it would not have occurred to a Protector. Which might, Brashieel admitted grudgingly, be yet another way in which his captors out-classed the Nest. But stranger even than that, they did not mistreat him. They were impossibly strong for such small beings. He had thought it was but the nest-killer’s powered armor which had made him a fledgling in his hands … until he saw a slight, slender one with long hair lift one of their elevated sleeping pads and carry it away to clear his nest place. That was sobering proof of what they might have done to him had they chosen to.

  Instead, they had tended his wounds, fed him food from Vindicator’s wreck, provided air which was pleasant to breathe, not thin like their own—all that, when they should have struck him down. Was he not a nest-killer to their Protectors? Had he and his nestmates not come within a segment of destroying their very world? Were they so stupid they did not realize that they were—must be, forever—enemies to the death?

  Or was it simply that they did not fear him? Beside those monster ships, the greatest ships of the Nest were fledglings with toy bows of mowap wood. Were they so powerful, so confident, that they did not fear the nest-killers of another people, another place?

  That was the most terrifying thought of all, one which reeked of treason to the Nest, for there was—must always be—the fear, the Great Fear which only courage and the Way could quench. Yet if that was not so for these nest-killers, if they did not fear on sight, then was it possible they might not be nest-killers?

  Brashieel curled in his new nest place, eyes closed, and whimpered in his sleep, wondering in his dreams which was truly the greater nightmare: to fear the nest-killers, or to fear that they did not fear him.

  Colin and Jiltanith rose to welcome Earth’s senior officers and their new starship captains. There were but fourteen captains. If they took every trained, bio-enhanced man and woman Earth’s defenses could spare, they could have provided minimal crews for seventeen of the Imperial Guard’s warships; they had chosen to crew only fifteen, fourteen Asgerds and one Vespa.

  The Empire had gone in for more specialized designs than the Imperium, and the Asgerds were closest in concept to Dahak, well-rounded and equipped to fight at all ranges, while the Trosans were optimized for close combat with heavy beam armaments and the Vespas were optimized for planetary assaults. But the reason for manning only fifteen warships was simple; the other personnel would crew the three Enchanach-class transports, each vast as Dahak himself, for Operation Dunkirk.

  In hyper, the round-trip to Bia would take barely six months, and each stupendous ship could squeeze in upward of ten million people. With luck, they had time to return for a second load even if the Imperial Guard failed to halt the Achuultani, which meant they could evacuate over sixty million humans to the almost impregnable defenses of the old Imperial capital and the housing Mother’s remotes were already building to receive them. General Chiang was selecting those refugees now; they were Colin’s insurance policy.

  The Achuultani’s best speed, even in hyper, seemed to be just under fifty times light-speed. At absolute minimum, they would take seventeen years to reach Bia. Seventeen years in which Mother and Tsien Tao-ling could activate defensive systems, collect and build additional warships, and man them. If the Achuultani ever reached Bia, they would not enjoy the visit.

  Colin looked down the table at Tsien. The marshal was as impassive as ever, but Colin had seen the hurt in his eyes when he lost the coin toss to Hatcher. Yet, in a way, Colin was pleased it was Tsien who was going. He hadn’t learned to know the huge man well, but he liked what he knew. Tsien was a man of iron, and Colin trusted him with his life. With far more than his life, for his children would be returning to Birhat.

  Without ’Tanni. She was the commander of Dahak Two, the reserve flagship, and that was as far from Colin as she was going. Because she loved him, yes, but also because he would be going to meet the Achuultani, and the killer in her could not resist that battle.

  Had their roles been reversed, Colin thought he might have made himself go out of a sense of duty, but ’Tanni couldn’t. He might have tried ordering her to … if he hadn’t understood and loved her.

  The last officer—Senior Fleet Captain Lady Adrienne Robbins, Baroness Nergal, Companion of the Golden Nova and CO of the planetoid Emperor Herdan—found her place, and Colin glanced around the conference room, satisfied that this was the best Earth could boast, committed to her final defense. Then he stood and rapped gently on the table, and the quiet side conversations ended.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Dahak has broken into the Achuultani data base. We finally know what we’re up against, and it isn’t good. In fact, it may be bad enough to make Operation Dunkirk a necessity, not just an insurance policy.”

  Horus watched Colin as he spoke. His son-in-law looked grim, but far from defeated. He remembered the Colin MacIntyre he’d first met, a homely, sandy-haired young man who’d strayed into an unthinkably ancient war, determined to do what he must, yet terrified that he was unequal to his task.

  That homely young man was gone. By whatever chain of luck or destiny history moved, he had met his moment. Preposterous as it seemed, he had become in truth what accident had made him: Colin I, Emperor and Warlord of Humanity—Mankind’s champion in this dark hour. If they survived, Horus mused, Herdan the Great would have a worthy rival as the greatest emperor in human history.

  “—not going to count ourselves out yet, though,” Colin was saying, and Horus shook himself back into the moment. “We’ve got better intelligence than anyone’s ever had on an incursion, and I intend to use it. Before I tell you what I hope to accomplish, however, it’s only fair that you know what we’re really up against. ’Tanni?” He nodded to his wife and sat as she stood.

  “My Lords and Ladies,” she said quietly, “we face a foe greater than any who have come before us. ’Twould seem the Achuultani do call this arm of our galaxy common ‘the Demon Sector’ for that they have suffered so in their voyages hither. So have they mustered up a strength full double any e’er dispatched in times gone by, and this force we face with scarce four score ships.

  “Our Dahak hath beagled out their nu
mbers. As thou dost know, Achuultani calculations rest upon the base-twelve system, and ’tis a great twelve cubed—near to three million, as we would say—of warships which come upon us.”

  There was a sound. Not a gasp, but a deep-drawn breath. Most of the faces around the table tightened, but no one spoke.

  “Yet that telleth but a part,” Jiltanith went on evenly. “The scouts which did war ’pon Terra these months past were but light units. Those which come behind are vaster far, the least near twice the size of those which have been vanquished here. We scarce could smite them all did our every missile speed straightway to its mark, and so, in sober fact, we durst not meet them all in open battle.”

  Officers exchanged stunned glances, and Colin didn’t blame them. His own first reaction would have done his reputation for coolness no good at all.

  “Yet I counsel not despair!” Jiltanith’s clear voice cut through the almost-fear. “Nay, good My Lords and Ladies, our Warlord hath a plan most shrewd which still may tumble them to dust. Yet now will I ask our General MacMahan to speak that thou mayst know thine enemies.”

  She sat, and Horus applauded silently. Colin’s human officers spoke, not Dahak. Everyone here knew how much they relied upon Dahak, yet he could see them drawing a subtle strength from hearing their own kind brief them. It wasn’t that they distrusted Dahak—how could they, when their very survival to this point resulted only from the ancient starship’s fidelity?—but they needed to hear a human voice expressing confidence. A human who was merely mortal, like themselves, and so could understand what he or she asked of them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Hector MacMahan said, “Fleet Captain Ninhursag and I have spent several days examining the data with Dahak. Ninhursag’s also spent time with our prisoner and, with Dahak’s offices as translator, she’s been able to communicate with him after a fashion. Oddly enough, from our perspective, though he hasn’t volunteered data, he’s made no attempt to lie or mislead us.