Heirs of Empire

by David Weber

  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.

  The Planetary Duke of Terra grinned as he and his lieutenant governor entered the conference room. Hector MacMahan—still grim, but no longer an ice-encased stranger—had brought Tinker Bell, and Brashieel had brought his own Narkhana, one of her genetically altered pups.

  Horus watched Narkhana collapse as Tinker Bell leapt upon him and wrestled him to the floor. He rolled on the rug, thrusting back at her with all four feet while their happy growls mingled. For a dog well into her third decade, Tinker Bell was remarkably spry, thanks to her own limited biotechnics, yet she had no conception of the tremendous strength Narkhana was reining in to let her win, nor of just how far her son's intellect surpassed her own. Even if she'd been able to conceptualize such things, she would never have known, for her children would never tell her, and there was something both hilarious and poignant in watching them revert to utter doggishness in her presence.

  Hector looked up and saw the late arrivals, and a whistle brought Tinker Bell instantly to his side. She flopped down at his feet, panting cheerfully as she prepared to put up with another of the incomprehensible human things her person did. Horus raised a sardonic eyebrow at his grandson, and Hector looked back with a bland innocence he'd forgotten how to assume for far too many months. For all her boisterousness, Tinker Bell was well behaved when Hector chose to remind her to be.

  "Horus, Lawrence. Glad you could make it," Colin said, standing to shake hands. Horus squeezed back, then opened his arms to his daughter's embrace and slid into the chair beside Jefferson's.

  "Now that you're here," Colin went on, "let me introduce someone very special. Horus, you've already met, but it's been a while since you've seen her. Gentlemen, this is Eve."

  Horus inclined his head to the slender being on the pad beside Brashieel's. She was much more delicate than Brashieel, and several centimeters shorter, but her crest was magnificent. Brashieel's, like that of all male Narhani, was the same gray-green as the rest of his hide; Eve's was half again as large, proportionally, and shot with glorious color. Now that crest fanned in a graceful expression that conveyed greeting and thanks for his courtesy with an edge of embarrassment at the fuss being made over her, and it was hard for him to remember she wasn't quite seven years old.

  Jefferson bowed in turn, and Brashieel preened with pride beside her. The Narhani were a hierarchical race, and there'd never been much doubt the first Narhani female would become the bride of the first Narhani nest lord, but it was clear that more than duty and mutual expectation flourished between these two. Horus was glad for them—and not just because Eve represented the culmination of his dead daughter's greatest project.

  "We've got several things on today's agenda," Colin announced, "but first things first. Horus, 'Tanni and I want you to make sure the Earth-side news channels are ready for our broadcast."

  "In truth." Jiltanith's smile was almost as lovely as of old. Not quite, but it was getting there, and the knowledge that she was to be a mother again showed. " 'Twas kindness greater than e'er any mother, be she sovereign lady or no, might expect of so many to wish her unborn babes so well, Father. 'Twill heal our souls to tell them all how greatly their letters have helped to heal our hearts."

  "That," Horus said, "will be my very great pleasure."

  "Thank you," Colin said warmly, then grinned. "I know the Council's got to talk about all those little niggling things like taxes, budgets, and engineering projects, but first there's something really important. Eve?"

  "Of course, Your Majesty." Eve's vocoder had been set to produce a female human voice, and Horus felt a familiar stinging sensation in his eyes when he heard it. At Eve's own request, the voice was Isis Tudor's. It was her way of honoring her human "mother's" memory, and he'd once been afraid it would hurt to hear it. But there was no pain. Only pride.

  The adolescent Narhani woman reached into her belt pouch and withdrew a half-dozen holo plates. She laid one before her with a slender, six-fingered hand, adjusting it with nervous precision, then looked up at the humans seated around the table.

  "As you know," she said with a formality at odds with her youth, "the Nest of Narhan plans to commemorate the Siege of Earth with a gift to our human friends. We do this for many reasons, including our nest's desire to express sorrow for the deaths we caused and thanks for all humanity has given us when we might have expected only destruction. Memorials, such as your own Memorial at Shepard Center, are important to us, as well, and it is our hope that this will be the beginning of an Imperial Memorial. One in which our nest shares and which will be completed when the Nest of Aku'Ultan has also been freed."

  She paused, obviously relieved to have completed her formal statement without errors, and Brashieel's crest rose even higher in pride.

  "Our gift," she said more naturally, "is now finished."

  She pressed a button, and a soft gasp went up as a light sculpture appeared above the plate. It wasn't in the abstract style human artists were currently enamored of; it was representational, a reproduction of another sculpture worked in finest marble . . . and it was magnificent.

  A rearing Narhani rose high on his rear hooves to fight the bonds which held him captive. The cruel, galling collar about his neck drew blood as he pitted his frenzied strength against its massive chain, and the humans who looked upon him knew Narhani expressions well enough to read the despair in his eyes and flattened crest, but his teeth were bared in snarling defiance. He was without hope yet unconquered, and the anguish of his captivity wrenched at them.

  Yet he was not alone. Broken chains flailed from his wrists, the exquisitely detailed links shorn by some sharp edge, and a human knelt beside him, torso naked but clothed from the waist down in the uniform of the Imperial Marines. His face was drawn with fatigue, but his eyes were as fierce as the prisoner's, and he held a chisel in one hand, its honed sharpness hard against the iron ring which held the Narhani pent, while the other raised a hammer high to bring it smashing down.

  The detail was superb, the anatomy perfect, the two species' very different expressions captured with haunting fidelity. Sweat beaded the human's bare skin, and each drop of Narhani blood was so real the viewer held his breath, watching for it to fall. They were trapped forever in the stone—human and Narhani, fleshed in marble by a master's hand—and for all their alienness, they were one.

  "My God," Colin whispered into the silence. "It's . . . it's— I don't have the words, Brashieel. I just . . ." His voice trailed off, and Brashieel lowered his own crest.

  "What you see in it is only truth, Colin," he said softly. "My people are not so gifted with words as yours; we put our truths in other things. But while this lasts—" he gestured at the light-born statue before them "—we of the Nest of Narhan will never forget what humans have given us. We came against you thinking you nest-killers, but you taught us who the true nest-killer is and, when you might have slain us, gave us life. You gave us more than life." His hand stoked Eve's crest gently. "But most of all, you gave us truth, and so we return that truth to you. To all your people, but especially to you, for you are our nest lord now."

  "I—" Colin blushed as he had not in years, then looked up and me
t Brashieel's eyes squarely. "Thank you. I will never receive anything more beautiful . . . or that I will treasure more."

  "Then we are content, High Nest Lord."

  Lawrence Jefferson gazed raptly at the statue through the buzz of admiration which followed, and not even his reverence was completely feigned. He cleared his throat when the first rush of conversation slowed.

  "Brashieel, may I—" He paused, then shrugged slightly. "I hesitate to ask it, but may I have a holo of this for a place of honor in my office?"

  "Of course. We have brought several copies for our friends, although we hope they will not be made public before the formal gifting."

  "May I display it if I promise to hide it from any newsies?"

  "We would be honored."

  The Lieutenant Governor of Earth was almost as carefully protected as her Governor. Whenever he was in residence, security troops, unobtrusive but alert, prowled the grounds of the Kentucky estate the Jeffersons had owned for generations. But none of those protectors knew of the secret measures which let him elude their guardianship at need.

  Lawrence Jefferson stepped from the concealed tunnel exit eight kilometers from his home. Once it had served the Underground Railroad, but it had been refurbished and extended in more recent years when Senator Jefferson had been recruited by Anu's chief operations officer. Not even Kirinal's most trusted subordinates had known of its existence, but Jefferson had labored upon it under her direction, incorporating certain unobtrusive elements of Imperial technology to make it undetectable. At the time, those measures had been aimed at Horus and the scanners of the hidden battleship Nergal, yet they'd proved equally efficacious against those of a planetoid named Dahak.

  A flyer waited in a carefully dilapidated old barn, and Jefferson climbed aboard and set the holo plate almost lovingly on the empty seat beside him. He'd managed to obtain copies of the preliminary study, but he'd never expected to receive the exact image of the finished sculpture, and his smile was unpleasant as he activated the drive and, even for him, highly illegal stealth field and lifted quietly into the night.

  It wasn't a long trip, though reason told him he shouldn't be making it, but he wanted to make this delivery in person, and the risk was slight. Yet even had it been greater, he would have made this flight himself. There were times when the elaborate deception of his life palled upon him, when he wanted—needed—to be about his work himself. He built his strategies like a chess master, but there was a gambler within him, as well, one who sometimes felt the need to throw the dice from his own hand.

  He landed outside a shed-like structure and keyed a complicated admittance code through his neural feed. There was a moment of hesitation, and then its door slid open. Imperial machinery stood silent in the bright overhead lights as he walked to stand beside the heroically scaled sculpture that machinery had wrought in exact duplicate of the sketches he'd provided.

  A stoop-shouldered man turned to greet him. His artist's eye told him he had never seen his employer's undisguised face, and he was glad, for he believed that made him safe. He didn't know he, too, would be eliminated anyway when his task was done. Lawrence Jefferson took no chances.

  "Good evening," the stoop-shouldered man said. "No one told me you were coming in person, sir."

  "I know. But I've brought you a gift." Jefferson set the holo plate on a work table and pressed the button.

  "Magnificent," the man breathed. He looked back and forth between the sculpture and his own handiwork. "I see a few details will need changing. I must say, sir, that this is even more spectacular than the sketches indicated."

  "I quite agree," Jefferson said sincerely. "Will there be any schedule problems?"

  "No, no. It's only a matter of arranging the input and then letting the sculpting unit do its job."

  "Excellent. In that case, I'd like you to go ahead and input it now; I need to take this with me when I leave."

  "Of course. If you'll excuse me?"

  The stoop-shouldered man bent over his equipment, and Jefferson stood back, hands folded behind him while he admired the work his doomed henchman had already produced. It looked just like real marble, and so it should, given how much it was costing.

  Perfect, he thought. It was perfect. And no one who looked at it would ever guess the secret it concealed, for the gravitonic warhead and its arming circuits were quite, quite invisible.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Israel's captain was in a grumpy mood.

  It wasn't anyone's fault, but Israel's crew were bright, competent, confident . . . and young. And, as bright, confident people are wont to do, they'd underestimated their task—which made their lack of progress enormously irritating. Still, Sean told himself with determined cheer, for people who'd found out they were approaching a populated world only in the last half hour of their flight they weren't doing all that badly. And Sandy had said she and Harry had some good news for a change.

  He lay back in the captain's couch, studying the image from one of the stealthed remotes. They'd decided to rely on old-fashioned, line-of-sight radio, something an Imperial scan system probably wouldn't even think to look for, rather than more readily detected fold coms to operate their remotes. That limited their operating radius, but it gave them enough reach for a fair sampling, and Sean watched a kneeling row of villagers weed their way across a field of some sort of tuber and wondered how whatever they were tending tasted.

  He glanced up as Tamman arrived, completing their gathering, then turned his gaze to Sandy. She and Harriet relied heavily on Brashan's hard-headed pragmatism to shoot down their wilder hypotheses and upon Tamman to build and maintain their surveillance systems, but the major burden of analysis was theirs, and Sean was delighted to leave them to it.

  "Okay, Sandy," he said now. "You've got the floor."

  She rubbed the tip of her nose for a moment, then cleared her throat.

  "Let's start with the good news: we finally have a language program of sorts." Sean sat up straighter, and she smiled. "As I say, that's the good news. The bad news is that without a proper philologist, we've had to fall back on a 'trial and error' approach, with predictably crude results.

  "It helps that they're literate and use movable type, but it would've helped more if the old alphabet had survived. Out of forty-one characters, we've found three that might be derived from Universal; the rest look like somebody tried to transcribe Old Norse into cuneiform. Working at night, we've managed to scan several printed books through our remotes, but they didn't do us much good until about six weeks ago when Harry found this."

  The display changed to a recorded view looking down from some high vantage point on a circle of children. A bearded man in a robe of blue and gold stood at its center, holding up a picture of one of the native's odd, bipedal saddle beasts to point at a line of jagged-edged characters beneath it.

  "This," Sandy resumed after a moment, "is a class in one of those temples of theirs. Apparently the Church believes in universal literacy, and Tam built a teeny-tiny remote for Harry to land on top of a beam so we could eavesdrop. It was maddening for the first month or so, but we set up a value substitution program in the linguistics section of Israel's comp cent, and things started coming together early last week."

  Sean nodded, glad something had finally worked as he'd hoped it might. English was the common tongue of the Imperium and seemed likely to remain so. Its flexibility, concision, and adaptability were certainly vastly preferable to Universal! Age had ossified the language of the Fourth Imperium and Empire, and, given the availability of younger, more versatile Terran languages, the Fifth Imperium had no particular desire to speak it.

  Yet all Fourth Empire computers spoke only Universal, at least until they could be reprogrammed. Worse, in some cases—like Mother's hardwired constitutional functions—they couldn't be reprogrammed, so all Battle Fleet personnel had to speak Universal whether they wanted to or not.

  Cohanna's Bio-Sciences Ministry had met that need with a dedicated implant
, and with the enormous "piggy-back" storage molycircs made possible, Battle Fleet had decided to give its personnel all major Terran languages. That made sense in view of their diversity—and also meant each of Israel's crewmen had a built-in "translating" software package. True, none of the languages in their implants' memories were quite this foreign, but if Israel's computers could cobble up a local dictionary . . .

  "As I say, it's still patchy, but we ought to be able to make a stab at understanding what someone says. It's going to be another matter if we try to talk back, though. So far Harry and I have identified seven distinct dialects and what may be one minor language, and there's no way we could mingle with the locals without a lot more work."

  "How much more?" Tamman asked.

  "I can't say, Tam—not for certain—but I'd estimate another month of input. At the moment, we can read about forty percent of the printed material we collect, and the percentage is expanding, but that's a far cry from understanding the spoken language, much less conversing coherently. And we need more than simple coherency, unless we want to scare the natives to death."

  "Umph." Sean frowned at the frozen image of the teacher. He'd hoped for better, but even while he'd hoped, he'd known it was unreasonable.

  "In the meantime, one of our 'borrowed' books—an atlas—has given us a running start on figuring out the geopolitics of the planet, which, by the way, the natives call 'Pardal.' We can't find the name in any of Israel's admittedly limited records, so I suspect it's locally evolved.

  "As near as we can tell, this is what Pardal currently looks like." The display changed to a map of Pardal's five continents and numerous island chains. The biggest inhabited continent reminded Sean of an old-fashioned, air-foil aircraft, flying northeast towards the polar ice cap with a second, smaller land mass providing its tail assembly. "We made enough photomaps on the way in to know the atlas maps aren't perfectly scaled, and we still can't read all of its commentary, but it appears Pardal is split into hundreds of feudal territories." Scarlet boundary lines flashed as she spoke. "At the moment, we're located just inside the eastern border of this one, which is called, as nearly as I can translate it, the Kingdom of Cherist.