"By the Maker, I've got it!"
Colin jumped half out of his couch as Cohanna's holo image materialized on Command One. The biosciences officer looked terrible, her hair awry and her uniform wrinkled, but her eyes were bright with triumph.
"Try penicillin," he advised sourly, and she looked blank, then grinned.
"Sorry, sir. I meant I've figured out what happened on Birhat—why it's got that incredible bio-system. I found it in Mother's data base."
"Oh?" Colin sat straighter, his eyes more intent. "Give!"
"It's simple, really. The zoos—the Imperial Family's zoos."
"Zoos?" It was Colin's turn to look blank.
"Yes. You see, the Imperial Family had an immense zoological garden. Over thirty different planets' flora and fauna in sealed, self-sufficient planetary habitats. Apparently, they lasted out the plague. I'd guess the automated systems responsible for restraining plant growth failed first in one of them, and the thing cracked. Once it did, its inhabitants could get out, and the same vegetation attacked the exterior of other surviving habitats. Over the years, still more oxy-nitrogen habitats were opened up and started spreading to reclaim the planet. That's why we've got such a screwy damned ecology. We're looking at the survivors of a dozen different planetary bio-spheres after forty-five thousand years of natural selection!"
"Well I'll be damned," Colin mused. "Good work, Cohanna. I'm impressed you could keep concentrating on that kind of problem at a time like this."
"Time like this?"
"While we're making our final approach to the Imperial Guard," Colin said, raising his eyebrows, and Cohanna wrinkled her nose.
"What's an Imperial Guard?"
Vlad Chernikov shuddered as he and Baltan floated down the lifeless, lightless transit shaft. This, he thought, is what Dahak would have become if Anu had succeeded all those years ago.
It was depressing in more ways than one. Actually seeing this desolation gnawed away at the confidence that anything could be done about it, and even if he succeeded in rejecting the counsel of despair, he could see it would be a horrific task. Dead power rooms, exhausted fuel mass, control rooms and circuit runs which had never been properly stasissed when the ship died. There was even meteor damage, for the collision shields had died with everything else. One of the planetoids might well be beyond repair, judging by the huge hole punched into its south pole.
Still, he reminded himself, everyone had his or her own problems. Caitrin O'Rourke was practically in tears over the hydroponic farms, and Geran was furious to find so much perfectly good equipment left out of stasis. But Tamman was probably the most afflicted of all, for the magazines had been left without stasis, as well, and the containment fields on every anti-matter weapon had failed. At least the warhead fail-safes had worked as designed and rotated them into hyper as the fields went down, but huge chunks of magazine bulkheads had gone with them. Of course, if they hadn't worked...
He shuddered again, concentrating on the grav sled he and Baltan rode. It was far slower than an operable transit shaft, but they dared not use even its full speed. They were no transit computer to whip around unexpected bends in the system!
He craned his neck, reading the lettering above a hatch. Gamma-One-One-Nine-One-One. According to Dahak's downloaded schematics, they were getting close to Engineering.
So they were. He tapped Baltan's shoulder and pointed, and the commander nodded inside the force bubble of his helmet. The sled angled for the side of the shaft and nudged against the hatch—which, of course, stayed firmly shut.
Chernikov smothered a curse, then grinned as he recalled Colin's account of his "coronation." The Captain—Emperor!—had exhausted the entire crew's allocation of profanity for at least a month, by Chernikov's estimate. He chuckled at the thought and climbed off the sled, dragging a cable from its power plant behind him and muttering Slavic maledictions. No power meant no artificial gravity, which—unfortunately—did not mean no gravity. A planetoid generated an impressive grav field all its own, and turned bulkheads into decks and decks into bulkheads when the power failed.
He found the emergency power receptacle and plugged in, and the hatch slid open. He waved, and Baltan ghosted the sled inside, angling its powerful lamps to pick out the emergency lighting system.
Chernikov did some more cable-dragging and, after propitiating Murphy with a few curses, brought it alive. Light bathed Central Engineering, and the two engineers began to explore.
The long-dead core tap drew them like a magnet, and Chernikov felt a tingle of awe as his eyes and implants traced circuit runs and control systems. This thing was at least five times as powerful as Dahak's, and he wouldn't have believed it could be without seeing it. But what in the galaxy could they have needed that much power for? Even allowing for the more powerful energy armament and shield, there had to be some other reason—
His thoughts died as his implants followed a massive power shunt which shouldn't have been there. He clambered over a control panel which had become the floor, slightly vertiginous as he tried to orient himself, then gasped.
"Baltan! Look at this!"
"I know," his assistant said softly, approaching from the far side. "I've been following the control runs."
"Can you believe this?"
"Does it matter? And it would certainly explain all the power demand."
"True." Chernikov moved a few more yards, examining his find carefully, then shook his head. "I must tell the Captain about this."
He keyed his com implant, and Colin answered a moment later, sounding a bit harassed—not surprisingly, considering that every other search party must be finding marvels of its own to report.
"Captain, I am in Mairsuk's Central Engineering, and you would not believe what I am looking at."
"Try me," Colin said wearily. "I'm learning to believe nineteen impossible things before breakfast every day."
"Very well, here is number twenty. This ship has both Enchanach and hyper capability."
There was a pregnant pause.
"What," Colin finally asked very carefully, "did you say?"
"I said, sir, that we have here both an Enchanach and a hyper drive, engineered down to a size that fits both into a single hull. I am not yet positive, but I would judge that the combined mass of both units is less than that of Dahak's Enchanach Drive, alone."
"Great day in the morning," Colin muttered. Then, "All right. Take a good look, then get back over here. We're having an all-departments meeting in four hours to discuss plans for reactivation.
"Understood," Chernikov said, and broke the connection. He and Baltan exchanged eloquent shrugs and bent back to the study of their prize.
"... can't be specific until we've got the computers back up and run a complete inventory," Geran said, "but about ten percent of all spares required controlled condition storage. Without that—" He shrugged.
Most of Colin's department heads were present in the flesh, but a sizable force from the recon group was prowling around other installations, and Hector MacMahan and Ninhursag attended via holo image from the battleship Osir's command deck. Now all eyes, physical and holographic alike, swiveled to Colin.
"All right." He spoke quietly, leaning his forearms on the crystalline tabletop to return their gazes. "Bottom line. Mother's time estimate is based on sixteen-hour shifts for every man and woman after we put at least one automated repair yard back on line. According to the reports from Hector's people, we can probably do that, but I expect to find ourselves pushing closer to twenty-hour shifts by the time we're done. We could increase the odds and decrease the workload by concentrating on a dozen or so units. I'm sure that's going to occur to a lot of people in the next few weeks. However—" his eyes circled their faces "—we aren't going to do it that way. We need as many of these ships as we can get, and, ladies and gentlemen, I mean to have every single one of them."