They chatted idly during the walk, enjoying the moment of privacy, but Jefferson was still a bit bemused by the absence of bodyguards. He'd grown to adulthood on a planet where terrorism was the chosen form of "protest" by have-not nations, and the report in his briefcase was proof his home world frothed with resentment as it strained to make a nine- or ten-millennium leap in technology. Yet for all that, violence directed at Earth's Governor was virtually unthinkable. Horus had not only led Earth's people through the carnage of the Siege, he was also the father of their beloved Empress, and only a particularly stupid maniac would attack him to make a statement.
Not, Jefferson reflected, that history didn't abound with stupid maniacs.
They entered the mat-trans facility, and Jefferson felt himself tense. It didn't look like much—merely a railed platform twenty meters on a side—but knowing what it could do turned that brightly lit dais into something that made the primitive tree-dweller within the Lieutenant Governor gibber.
His stride slowed, and Horus grinned at him.
"Don't take it so hard. And don't think you're the only one it scares!"
Jefferson managed a nod as they stepped onto the platform and the bio-scanners Colin MacIntyre had ordered incorporated into every mat-trans station considered them at length. The mat-trans had been the Fourth Empire's executioner, the vector by which the rogue bio-weapon infected worlds hundreds of light-years apart, and he had no intention of allowing that particular bit of history to repeat itself.
But the scanners cleared them, and Jefferson clutched his briefcase in a sweaty hand, trying very hard to appear nonchalant, as heavy capacitors whined. The mat-trans' power requirements were astronomical, even by Imperial standards, and it took almost twenty seconds to reach peak load. Then a light flashed... and Horus and Lawrence Jefferson stepped down from another platform on the planet Birhat, eight hundred light-years from Earth.
The thing that made it so damned scary, Jefferson thought as he left the mat-trans receiver gratefully behind, was that you didn't feel a thing. Nothing. It just wasn't natural... and wasn't that a fine thing for a man stuffed full of sensors and neural boosters to be thinking?
"Hi, Granddad." Jefferson looked up as General MacMahan held out his hand to Horus then turned to shake his own. "Colin asked me to meet you. He's tied up with something over at the Palace."
"Tied up with what?" Horus asked.
"I'm not sure, but he sounded a bit harassed. I think—" Hector grinned impishly "—it's got something to do with Cohanna."
"Oh, Maker! What's she been up to now?"
"Don't know. Come on, I've got transport waiting."
"Damn it, 'Hanna!" Colin paced back and forth before the utilitarian desk from which he ran the Imperium, tugging on his nose in a gesture his subordinates knew only too well. "I've told you and told you you can't just go chasing off after any wild hare that takes your fancy!"
"But, Colin—" Cohanna began.
"Don't 'But, Colin' me! Did I or did I not tell you to check your next genetic experiment with me before you started on it?"
"Well, of course you did. And I did clear it with you," Baroness Cohanna, Imperial Minister of Bio-Sciences added virtuously.
"You what?" Colin wheeled on her in disbelief.
"I said I cleared it with you. I sat right here in this office with Brashieel and told you what I was going to do."
"You—!" Colin turned to the saurian-looking, long-snouted, quarter-horse-sized centauroid resting comfortably on his folded legs in the middle of the rug, who returned his gaze with mild, double-lidded eyes. "Brashieel, do you remember her saying anything about this?"
"Yes," Brashieel replied calmly through the small black box mounted on one strap of his body harness. His vocal apparatus was poorly suited to human speech, but he'd learned to use his neural feed-driven vocoder's deep bass to express emotion as well as words.
Colin drew a deep breath, then perched on his desk and folded his arms. Brashieel seldom made mistakes, and Cohanna's triumphant expression made Colin unhappily certain she had mentioned it. Or something about it.
"All right," he sighed, "what, exactly, did she say?"
Brashieel closed his inner eyelids in concentration, and Colin waited patiently. The alien's mere presence was enough to give some members of humanity screaming fits, which Colin understood even if he rejected their attitude. To be sure, Brashieel was an Achuultani. Worse, he was the sole survivor of the fleet which had come within hours of destroying the planet Earth. He was also, however, the being who'd emerged as the natural leader of the prisoners of war Colin had captured after defeating the incursion, and most of those prisoners—not all, but most—were even more committed to the ultimate defeat of the rest of the Achuultani than humanity was.
For seventy-eight million years, the people of the Nest of Aku'Ultan had quartered the galaxy, destroying every sentient species they encountered. Of all their potential victims, only humanity had survived—not just once, but three times, earning it the Achuultani appellation of "the Demon Nest-Killers"—but Brashieel and his fellows knew something the rest of their race did not. They knew their entire species was enslaved by a self-aware computer which used their unending murder of races who meant them no ill to sustain the "state of war" its programming required to maintain its tyranny.
Not all humans were ready to accept their sincerity, which was why Colin had turned the planet Narhan over to those who had applied for Imperial citizenship. Narhan had avoided the bio-weapon for a simple reason; no one had lived on it, since its 2.67 gravity field produced a sea-level atmosphere lethal to unenhanced humans. Its air was a bit dense even for Achuultani lungs, and it was inconveniently placed—it was far enough from Birhat that travelers by mat-trans had to stage through Earth to reach the capital planet—but its settlers had fallen under the spell of its rugged beauty as they set about carving out their new Nest of Narhan as loyal subjects of their human overlord on a world beyond the reach of hysterical xenophobes.
"Cohanna had reported on progress with the genetic engineering to recreate Narhani females," Brashieel said at last. The rogue computer had eliminated all sexual reproduction by eliminating all Achuultani females. Every Achuultani was male, either a clone or an embryo fertilized in vitro. "Thereafter, she turned to discussion of her suggestion to increase our life spans to something approaching those of humans."
Colin nodded. Achuultani—Narhani, he corrected himself—were bigger and far stronger than humans. They also matured much more rapidly, but their normal span was little more than fifty years. Bio-enhancement, which all adult Narhani who'd taken the oath of loyalty had received as quickly as Cohanna got a grip on their alien physiology, stretched that to almost three hundred years, but that remained much shorter than for enhanced humans.
Extending Narhani lives was a challenge, but unlike humans, Narhani had no prejudice against bioengineering. They regarded it as a fact of life, given their own origins and the cloned children Jiltanith's Terra-born sister Isis had managed to produce over the last few years, and the possibility of recreating females of their species simply strengthened that attitude.
"We discussed the practical aspects," Brashieel continued, "and I mentioned Tinker Bell."
"I know you did, but surely I never okayed this."
"I regret that I must disagree," Brashieel said, and Colin frowned.