Empire from the Ashes

by David Weber

  "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 running around like that?"

  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?"

  "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 grinned. "And whatever the reason, Mom and Dad are going to be mighty glad to hear we've found another planet that's not only habitable but stuffed full of people as well!"

  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 grinned mirthlessly at his own insistence.

  * * *

  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-fille
d 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 'Tanni's, was bittersweet. Over two years had passed, but the aching void remained. Perhaps the new children (for the doctors had already confirmed it would be twins once more) would fill that emptiness. He hoped so. But he also hoped he and 'Tanni could resist the need to make them fill it. Sean and Harriet had been special. No one could replace them, and their new children deserved the right to be special in their own ways, not compared, however lovingly, to ghosts.

  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 'Tanni's enhancement would give them centuries of fertility, and the temptation to wait was great. Yet they faced the dilemma of all dynasts: the succession must be secured.

  That wasn't something Lieutenant Commander MacIntyre, USN, had ever worried about, and it hadn't entered his or 'Tanni's head when Sean and Harriet were conceived, for it had seemed preposterous that the monarchical government of a long-dead empire might be maintained. But as Tsien Tao-ling had pointed out twenty years past, it was loyalty to the Crown—to Colin MacIntyre's person—which held humanity together despite its legacy of rivalries, and many years must pass before that primal source of loyalty could be buttressed by others. Colin had been amazed that someone who had been the commander-in-chief of the last Communist power on Earth could make that statement, but Tao-ling had been right. And because he had, Colin and Jiltanith had no option but to think in dynastic terms.

  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 inner circle, then used Dahak's access to every database in Bia to test their analyses. Where necessary, ONI agents had added on-the-ground investigation to Dahak's efforts, usually without even realizing what they were doing or why. By now, the computer could tell Admiral MacMahan where every Fleet and Marine officer in the Bia System had been at any given minute in the last fifteen years. Of course, he didn't have anything like that degree of penetration in the Sol System. Not even the hypercom was capable of real-timing data at that range, and Earth's datanets were still far more decentralized than Birhat's. But even with those limitations, his access to the military's every order and report had allowed him to clear most of Sol's senior officers, as well.

  "Apparently Mister X takes the adage about dead men telling no tales to heart," Ninhursag observed now.

  "True. Yet eliminating his agents, however much it may contribute to his security, also deprives him of their future services. That would seem somewhat premature of him—unless he has acquired all the access his plans, whatever they may be, require."

  "Yeah." Ninhursag frowned at that unpalatable thought. "Of course, he may have been a bit too smart for his own good. We know about him now, and knowing he doesn't have a military conduit frees us up a lot."

  "Yet by the same token, it deprives us of potential access into his own network. We have exhausted all leads available to us, Ninhursag."

  "Yeah," she sighed again. "Damn. How I wish I knew what he was after! Just sitting here waiting for him to take another shot doesn't appeal to me at all. He's got too good a track record."

  "Agreed." Dahak paused, then spoke rather carefully, even for him. "It has occurred to me, however, that our concentration on the military, while logical, may have had the unfortunate consequence of narrowing our vision."

  "How so?"

  "We have proceeded on the assumption that he himself was of or closely connected to the military, or that the military was in some wise essential to his objectives. If such is not, indeed, the case, may we not have devoted insufficient attention to other areas of vulnerability?"

  "That's an endemic security concern, Dahak. We have to start someplace where we can establish a 'clear zone,' and we've got one now—physically, as well as in an investigative sense. We can be fairly confident the entire Bia System is clear, now, so we can assume Colin and 'Tanni are safe from direct physical attack, and knowing the military is clear—now—gives us the resources to mount a counteroffensive of our own. But if Mister X is a civilian—even one in government service somewhere—our chance of finding him's a lot lower."

  Dahak made a soft electronic sound of agreement. Entry level positions for civilian politicians and bureaucrats were subject to less intensive background scrutinies, and civilian careers seldom included the periodic security checks military men and women took for granted. When it came to civilians, he and Ninhursag lacked anything remotely approaching Battle Fleet's central databases, and their ability to vet suspects was enormously reduced.

  "Even worse," the admiral said after a moment, "Mister X knows what he's after, and that gives him the initiative. Until we figure out what he wants, we can't even predict what he's likely to do. Every security chief in history's worried about what he may have overlooked."

  "Granted. I only raise the point because I feel it is important that we maintain our guard against all contingencies to the best of our ability."

  "Point taken. And that's precisely why I see more reason than ever to keep this on a need-to-know basis. Especially since we don't know who in the civil service might have been suborned. Or who's vulnerable in the same way Vincente Cruz was."

  "A wise precaution. But may this not create problems when your ONI agents begin operations on Earth? They will inevitably be seen as interlopers, and the decision not to inform even the highest levels of the civilian security forces as to why their presence is necessary will exacerbate that perception. Indeed, it may even lead to a certain degree of institutional obstructionism in what humans call 'turf wars.' "

  "If there are any turf wars, I guarantee they'll be short. Ultimate responsibility for the Imperium's security rests right here, in my office. ONI's the senior service, and if anybody thinks different, I'll just have to show him the error of his ways, won't I?"

  Admiral MacMahan's smile was cold. Which suited Dahak very well indeed.

  * * *

  Lawrence Jefferso
n's pleasant expression masked a most unpleasant mood as he and Horus walked together to the Shepard Center mat-trans. Alert bodyguards watched over the Governor, and knowing his own actions had made them inevitable was irritating. Yet he'd had no choice. He'd known having Gus van Gelder killed would almost have to shake the Imperium's leadership into a fundamental reassessment of its security needs, but it had been essential to unmask Gus' mole. And, having done so, the only man who knew he'd had access to those briefing notes had to be removed, as well.

  He rather regretted the deaths of Erika, Hans, and Jochaim van Gelder. Gus, of course, would have had to go eventually, but it had offended Jefferson's innate tidiness to eliminate him so messily. On the other hand, his early removal had worked out far better than Jefferson had dared plan for. A successful conspirator didn't base long-term strategy on a gift from the gods which made him the person charged with catching himself, but that didn't make him ungrateful when it was given. And if Horus' security was better now, it still wasn't impenetrable... particularly against his own security chief.

  No, Jefferson's true unhappiness had less to do with defenses which couldn't, in the end, really matter than with the news from Birhat. The last thing he needed was for the imperial family to produce another heir! He'd already been forced to dispose of one pair, and now he might have to do the whole job over again—especially since Jiltanith had already announced her intention to visit her father on Earth for the birth. Which, he thought disgustedly, was precisely the sort of thing she would do just when he needed her and Colin in the same, neat crosshairs on Birhat.

  Of course, he reminded himself as he and Horus stepped up onto the mat-trans platform, pregnancy wasn't something whose timing even Imperial bioscience could predict with absolute accuracy. But if the doctors were right, Jiltanith would not give birth, after all, for she—and her unborn children—would die two weeks before she did.