Into the Light

by David Weber

  “And did they manage to fix everything?” Dvorak sounded far calmer than he suspected he should have, undoubtedly because of the tranquilizers.

  “No,” she said simply. “All your motor skills, all of your cognitive abilities—they should be fine. But you’re going to have some significant memory loss.”

  “Oh.” He considered that and managed a smile. “Do I get to pick the mistakes I forget?”

  “’Fraid not.” Her lips twitched and she pressed her cheek more firmly against his palm. “The good news is that most of it’s going to be concentrated in fairly recent memories, and you always were a compulsive damned diarist. So even a lot of what you don’t remember firsthand will still be available to you. And we’ve got a lot of tridee imagery and audio you can access directly through the neural educator. But you’re going to have some holes, whatever we do, Dad.”

  “Hey,” he reached up with his other hand to brush tears from her eye with his thumb, “long as I remember you, your mom, Malachi, and Maighread, I’m fine.” He smiled and patted her other cheek. “Trust me, Baby. As long as I remember you, I’m fine.”

  * * *

  DAVE DVORAK STEPPED carefully through the hatch, only too conscious of the stiffness where the nanites were still repairing his shattered spine. It was going to be a while before—

  “Attention on deck!” Admiral Francesca Swenson snapped, and he froze, eyes widening, as every man and woman in the flag briefing room rose. They snapped to attention, facing him, and he swallowed hard as he stepped fully into the compartment and crossed to the end of the enormous table.

  “Please sit,” he said, but they only looked back at him until he lowered himself into his own chair. Then there was a rustle and a stir as they followed suit.

  “Thank you for the courtesy,” he said and smiled. “I’m afraid you must’ve mistaken me for somebody important, but I do appreciate it.”

  “Not as much as we all appreciate seeing you back on your feet, Mister Secretary. We’ve missed you,” Swenson said simply, and Dvorak felt his face heat. Fortunately—

  “And some of us appreciate seeing your lazy butt up again even more than others of us do,” Brigadier Robert Wilson said. “Especially those of us who were contemplating the possibility of going home to tell a certain vicious-tempered little redhead that we’d mislaid you somewhere.”

  “You always have such a gift for placing solemn events in context,” Dvorak told him with a grateful smile.

  “True, too true,” Wilson acknowledged with great modesty, and a ripple of laughter ran around the briefing room.

  Dvorak chuckled, as well, but then his expression sobered.

  “I’ve been bringing myself back up to speed as quickly as my kindly physicians—” he turned to smile over his shoulder at Doctor Morgana Dvorak, who’d followed him through the hatch “—would allow. I know we lost a lot of people.” His smile vanished and he shook his head. “And I know that if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.”

  Swenson started to protest, but Dvorak’s raised hand stopped her.

  “I’m not going to hammer myself with guilt, Francesca. I’m just saying that I was in charge. We all missed seeing this coming, but I had access to all the data any of you did. I didn’t see it either, and all the final decisions leading up to it were mine. I still think they were sound, given what we knew when they were made, but they were my decisions, not yours. So nobody else in this compartment had better be blaming themselves for what happened. I know it hit all of you hard. It’s probably fresher for me than for any of you, and it’s going to take me time to come to terms with what happened, especially to Trish and Jane. But I’m the one who made the decisions leading up to it, so whatever else it may have been, it wasn’t your fault. Is that clear?”

  No one actively objected, although he saw disagreement in more than one set of eyes. Especially a set of stubborn blue eyes belonging to a Space Marine brigadier.

  “Having said that,” he continued after a moment, “I’m a little curious as to why my kindly physicians—and my no doubt loyal and supportive subordinates—have seen fit to … redact some of the records I’ve been perusing.”

  “Oh, give us a break!” Rob Wilson growled. “You’ve been out of sick bay for exactly seventeen hours. Don’t you think you might give yourself—oh, I don’t know; an entire twenty-four hours, maybe—to get fully up to speed?”

  “Probably,” Dvorak agreed with a faint smile. “But you know how I’ve always been one of those irritating people who like to read the last page of the book first?” He cocked his head, regarding his brother-in-law quizzically. “That’s why I noticed that the last page of this book—” he tapped the spot on his temples where the NET fitted “—seems to be missing. So who’s going to tell me what happened after my ever-eloquent son quoted Clint Eastwood to a ruling head of state?”

  “With all due respect, Mister Ambassador,” Admiral Swenson said with a lurking smile of her own, “it was a very appropriate quotation at the moment. And it did have the desired effect. Mostly.”

  “What do you mean ‘mostly,’ and why does your use of that particular word fill me with foreboding?” Dvorak asked. “Do we still have a problem with the Qwernians?”

  He looked around the briefing room, eyebrows arched. From what he’d already learned and the expressions about him, the situation was obviously under control. But no one—aside from his brother-in-law—seemed especially eager to meet his gaze. He thought about that for a moment, then looked at the brother-in-law in question.

  “Rob?”

  “Oh, no,” Wilson told him, shaking his head. “No problems at all with the Qwernians now.”

  “Oh? That sounds remarkably … neat and orderly, given what I do remember about Myrcal and Qwernians in general.”

  “Well, Myrcal’s not with us anymore.” Wilson’s eyes turned very dark for a moment. “It seems ou wasn’t very happy when ou ended up in solitary confinement in a cell under the Palace. So ou managed to hang ouself.”

  “Really?” Dvorak’s eyes narrowed and his tone sharpened. “Did ou really kill ouself, Rob? Or was ou helped along by Juzhyr?”

  “I’m sure Juzhyr would’ve been delighted to off oum, but I’m afraid Juzhyr doesn’t get to make any more calls,” Wilson said.

  “What?” Dvorak straightened in his chair and looked around at his senior subordinates. “I realize what ou did—or allowed Myrcal to do for oum—amounts to an act of war, but we can’t just go around unilaterally deposing ruling heads of state! Not if we expect anyone else to ever trust us, anyway! Maybe if the Sarthians set up a tribunal like Nuremberg or The Hague and convict oum, but until then we can’t just—”

  “On the contrary, we can,” Abu Bakr said, speaking up for the first time. Dvorak looked at him, and Abu Bakr shrugged. “Sarthian custom’s not quite like ‘Earthian’ custom, Dave. You know that.”

  “And?”

  “And in this case it’s the fault of—what did you call him? Your ‘ever-eloquent son,’ I believe?”

  “Malachi? Malachi took it upon himself to depose a head of state?”

  “Well, yes and no. It was … sort of an accident,” Wilson said.

  “An accident?” Dvorak repeated carefully. “How the hell do you depose a head of state by accident?! I mean, even for Malachi that’s—” He broke off and shook his head. “Look, just tell me what’s going on with the Qwernians!”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Wilson said. “You see, there aren’t any more Qwernians.”

  “What?!” Dvorak stared at him in shock.

  “Oh, we didn’t kill them all or anything like that!” Wilson reassured him. “It’s just that they aren’t Qwernians anymore.”

  “Well, then what the hell are they?” Dvorak demanded.

  “That’s where Sarthian custom comes in,” Abu Bakr said. “You see, Malachi defeated Juzhyr. Well, not all by himself; he did have a little help. But under Sarthian—and especially Qwernian, or what used to be Qwernian—c
ustom, the individual who takes a clan ruler’s surrender is considered to have personally defeated that clan ruler in combat.”

  “And?” Dvorak looked at his friend in considerable trepidation.

  “And he took that surrender as your deputy. In fact, he specifically identified himself as your son when he did.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means Clan Qwern ceased to exist, and along with it the Qwernian Empire.” Dvorak gaped at him, and Abu Bakr smiled. “It’s now Clan Dvorak and the Dvorakian Empire. Good luck convincing your new subjects how it’s supposed to work; Allah knows I’ve already tried without a lot of success! I’m sure someone as eloquent as you will manage it … eventually. But for right now, it means that if you want to sign any alliances in your Empire’s name, Clan Ruler Dave, it’d be completely legal!”

  EPILOGUE

  YEAR 41 OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE

  DREADNOUGHT TRGOVIȘTE,

  SHONG SYSTEM,

  241.5 LY FROM EARTH

  We’ve finished massaging the data from the first drone sweep,” Stephen Buchevsky said as the dreadnought slid stealthily towards the distant star they’d come so far to reach. “The second flight is still forty-three minutes from rendezvous.”

  “Excellent, my Stephen,” Vlad Drakulya said from the command chair at the center of the bridge, green eyes narrow as he gazed at the brilliant pinprick in the center of the main display.

  At the moment, that star was approximately nineteen hundred astronomical units from Târgoviște as she accelerated towards it at the maximum sixty gravities her inertial compensator could sustain. She’d been in normal-space for just under two days, and her current velocity was up to 0.34c—just over 101,000 KPS. At her current acceleration it would take her another three days to attain the eighty percent of light-speed her particle screening could sustain, at which point she would be far less stealthy than she was at this moment. But by then their plan called for an open approach, showing Târgoviște’s original Shongair transponder. Assuming they carried all the way through to Shongaru, the Shong System’s sole earthlike planet, the entire voyage—including over five and a half days of ballistic flight at 0.8c—would require another thirteen days. After their seemingly endless flight just to get here, those last thirteen days loomed before Buchevsky like thirteen centuries. If they had it to do, he wanted to get it done and be finished with it forever.

  The main reason they’d made their n-space transition so far out was to allow plenty of time for their far speedier recon drones to probe the inner system before they made their presence known. They had only a single ship, and while she was thoroughly capable of sterilizing any planet, she was still only one ship. If they got all the way into missile range unchallenged, she could deal with any force close to the planet before it could clear for action, but all of their data was eighty Earth years out of date. It behooved them to see what might have changed in that near-century before they planned their actual attack run. And Vlad Drakulya intended for that planning to be as thorough as possible.

  Buchevsky glanced at Vlad from his own chair at the tactical officer’s station. The hand which actually launched those missiles would be his, and he wondered how he was going to feel about that in the unending days of a vampire’s life. He didn’t expect to like it very much, but at least he’d gotten Vlad to back off his plan for outright genocide. It probably wouldn’t do much good for the other Shongair colonies, and Buchevsky fully understood why those other ships would unflinchingly do exactly what they’d set out to do. But there was more humanity left inside Vlad Drakulya than Vlad himself had thought before Buchevsky appealed to it. And because there was, he was prepared to settle for “only” blasting the Shongairi back into the Stone Age.

  Buchevsky wished he could have convinced Vlad to accept a still less draconian outcome, but history hadn’t called him Son of the Dragon for nothing. And as he’d pointed out, green eyes colder than the vacuum beyond Târgoviște’s hull, he intended to leave at least a third of them alive after the systematic bombardment that would destroy every trace of planetary industry.

  “And that, my Stephen,” he’d said in a distant, icy tone, “is far better than they intended to do to us. Indeed, in many ways, it is far more lenient than what they actually did do to us before we stopped them. I will leave a third of them alive, not the quarter of the human race we saved from them.”

  Buchevsky couldn’t argue with that, and a hard and bitter part of him hadn’t even wanted to. More to the point, whatever he’d wanted, that was the best he was going to get.

  “No sign of any major changes from the first flight’s take,” he said now, bringing up a detailed schematic of the inner system. “They’ve got a bigger presence on Shong V than they did when Thikair left, but it’s not as much bigger as a bunch of humans would have managed in the same time span. And their industrial base doesn’t seem to have grown at all.”

  “No reason it should,” Calvin Meyers said. Buchevsky glanced at the sandy-haired, compact ex–gunnery sergeant from the Appalachian coalfields, and Meyers shrugged. “One thing’s pretty damn clear from their own records, Top. If it ain’t broke, none of these Hegemony bastards waste any time fixing it. They figure what they’ve got’s good enough, so why screw around with it?”

  “True, Calvin.” Vlad nodded. “They are most unlike humans in that respect, are they not?” His smile was unpleasant. “I find myself wondering what Governor Howell has accomplished during our voyage.”

  “Don’t know,” Buchevsky said. “Don’t think the Hegemony’s going to like it very much, though.”

  “I imagine not,” Vlad agreed. “In fact—”

  “Madre de Dios!” Francisco Lopez gasped. The only other survivor of Buchevsky’s original group of Americans aboard Târgoviște, he’d shown a marked affinity for the dreadnought’s sensor suite, which made him the logical choice to run it. Now Buchevsky’s head snapped around as Lopez started pounding commands into his console.

  “Unknown vessel at seven light-seconds!” he barked. “Closing from aft and high. Overtake velocity six thousand KPS. Acceleration—”

  He stopped and swallowed hard, then looked at Vlad.

  “Vlad, whatever it is, it’s pulling over a hundred gravities,” he said flatly. “And it’s got a weird signature.”

  “What do you mean, ‘weird,’ Francisco?” Vlad asked in a preposterously calm tone. If Lopez’ numbers were right, then whatever-the-hell-it-was was going to overtake them in less than six minutes … and Târgoviște needed twenty minutes to bring up her phase generator.

  “It’s got no bow wave,” Lopez said, answering Vlad’s question, and Buchevsky frowned. At thirty-six percent of light speed, the stranger’s particle shields should have radiated at least some energy. At that velocity, a one-microgram particle would release 5,800 megajoules—the next best thing to the energy in 1.4 tons of TNT—when it hit its shields.

  “That’s … odd,” he said out loud, changing his mind at the last moment and avoiding dirty words like “impossible.”

  “Indeed, my Stephen,” Vlad said dryly. “Arm your weapons, please.”

  “Weapons hot,” Buchevsky confirmed, depressing the key which released the safety interlocks. “Tracking.”

  “The after array has an image,” Lopez said.

  “Show it to us,” Vlad commanded.

  “Coming up now,” Lopez replied, and the display which had shown the system primary suddenly displayed a very different image.

  Hegemony optical systems were remarkably good. The after array had the resolution of a twelve-meter reflecting telescope, and seven light-seconds were nothing to it. Even better, there was enough vertical separation for a decent look at their pursuer, and Buchevsky swallowed hard as the display obediently superimposed a scale to give them the stranger’s dimensions.

  Târgoviște was over five kilometers long and her war hull was a kilometer in diameter. The stranger was almost twenty-five kilometers long and four kilometers in
diameter, and there was no sign of anything remotely like a spin section. It was an enormous, silvery spindle, preposterously long for its width even with that enormous beam, with some sort of bulbous housing at what had to be its prow. There was something very peculiar about that housing, too, though he couldn’t put his finger on precisely what it was. Something about the light—

  “Do not fire,” Vlad said, then smiled thinly as Buchevsky looked a question at him. “First,” he said, “I believe discretion might be in order, given our visitors’ size and the capabilities they have already shown us. And, second, I doubt that it is the Shongairi. I have no idea what it may be instead, but I cannot conceive of the Puppies having achieved such a radical improvement in their technology in a mere eighty years. Indeed—”

  “Com laser,” Ioan Draghicescu, one of Vlad’s pre-invasion Romanians, announced from the communications section. “It’s—”

  He paused, then spoke very carefully.

  “It’s a communications request … in English.”

  English? Buchevsky felt his eyebrows trying to climb to the top of his skull. English? That was—

  “‘Odd,’ I believe you said, my Stephen?” Vlad observed with an even thinner smile, then nodded to Draghicescu. “Put it up,” he said.

  “Coming up now,” Draghicescu said, and Stephen Buchevsky suddenly felt as if he were still a breather who’d just been punched squarely between the eyes.

  “Hello, Vlad,” Dave Dvorak said from the display. “We need to talk.”

  PLANET SARTH

  Sarth is the sole habitable planet of the 61 Cygni binary system. 61 Cygni is approximately 10.4 light-years from Earth and a distant binary whose two components orbit their common barycenter in 659 years with a mean separation of 84 AU. 61 Cygni A is a K5v star and 61 Cygni B is a K7v star. A is the more stable of the two; B has significant short-term flares on about an 11.7-year periodicity. Both exhibit flare activity, but the chromosphere of B is 25 percent more than for 61 Cygni A.