Amanda Tsien feared nothing that lived, but she was also an orphan. She'd been only nine years old when she learned a harsh universe's cruelest weapon could be love... and she'd relearned that lesson when Tamman, her first husband, died at Zeta Trianguli Australis. Colin and Jiltanith had watched helplessly as she hid herself in her duties, sealing herself into an armored shell and investing all the emotion she dared risk in Tamman's son. She'd become an automaton, and there'd been nothing even an emperor could do about it, but Tsien Tao-ling had changed that.
Many of the marshal's personnel feared him. That was wise of them, yet something in Amanda had called out to him, despite her defenses, and the man the newsies called "the Juggernaut" had approached her so gently she hadn't even realized he was doing it until it was too late. Until he'd been inside her armor, holding out his hand to offer her the heart few people believed he had... and she'd taken it.
She was thirty years younger than he, which mattered not at all among the bio-enhanced. After all, Colin was over forty years younger than Jiltanith, and she looked younger than he. Of course, chronologically she was well over fifty-one thousand years old, but that didn't count; she'd spent all but eighty-odd of those years in stasis.
"How're Hsu-li and Collete?" he asked Amanda, and she chuckled.
"Fine. Hsu-li was a bit ticked we didn't bring him along, but I convinced him he should stay to help take care of his sister."
Colin shook his head. "That wouldn't have worked with Sean and Harry."
"That's what you get for having twins," Amanda said smugly, then bent a sly glance on Jiltanith. "Or for not having a few more kids."
"Nay, acquit me, Amanda." Jiltanith smiled. "I know not how thou findest time for all thy duties and thy babes, but 'twill be some years more—mayhap decades—ere I again essay that challenge. And it ill beseemeth thee so to twit thine Empress when all the world doth know thee for a mother o' the best, while I—" She shrugged wryly, and her friends laughed.
Horus was about to say something more when the inner hatch slid open to admit a trim, athletic man in Battle Fleet blue.
"Hi, Gerald," Colin greeted the new arrival, and Admiral of the Fleet Gerald Hatcher, Chief of Naval Operations, bowed with a flourish.
"Good evening, Your Majesty," he said so unctuously his liege lord shook a fist at him. Admiral Hatcher had spent thirty years as a soldier of the United States, not a sailor, but BattleFleet's CNO was the Imperium's senior officer. That made it a logical duty for the man who'd served as humanity's chief of staff during Earth's defense against the Achuultani, yet not even that authority could quash Hatcher's cheerful irreverence.
He waved to Ninhursag, shook hands with Hector, Tsien, and Horus, then planted an enthusiastic kiss on Amanda's cafe-au-lait cheek. He bent gracefully over Jiltanith's hand, but the Empress tugged shrewdly on the neat beard he'd grown since the Siege of Earth and kissed his mouth before he could recover.
"Thou'rt a shameless fellow, Gerald Hatcher," she told him severely, "and mayhap that shall teach thee what fate awaiteth when thou leavest thy wife behind!"
"Oh?" He grinned. "Is that a threat or a promise, Your Majesty?"
"Off with his head!" Colin murmured, and the admiral laughed.
"Actually, she's visiting her sister on Earth. They're picking out baby clothes."
"My God, is everybody hatching new youngsters?"
"Nay, my Colin, 'tis only everyone else," Jiltanith said.
"True," Hatcher agreed. "And this time it's going to be a boy. I'm perfectly happy with the girls, myself, but Sharon's delighted."
"Congratulations," Colin told him, then waved at an empty couch. "But now that you're here, let's get down to business."
"Suits me. I've got a conference scheduled aboard Mother in a few hours, and I'd like to grab a nap first."
"Okay." Colin sat a bit straighter and his lazy amusement faded. "As I indicated when I invited you all, I want to talk to you informally before next week's Council meeting. We're coming up on the tenth anniversary of my 'coronation,' and the Assembly of Nobles wants to throw a big shindig to celebrate. That may be a good idea, but it means this year's State of the Realm speech is going to be pretty important, so I want a feel from the 'inner circle' before I get started writing it."
His guests hid smiles. The Fourth Empire had never required regular formal reports from its emperors, but Colin had incorporated the State of the Realm message into the Fifth Imperium's law, and the self-inflicted annual duty was an ordeal he dreaded. It was also why he'd invited his friends to Dahak's command deck. Unlike too many others, they could be relied upon to tell him what they thought rather than what they thought he wanted them to think.
"Let's begin with you, Gerald."
"Okay." Hatcher rubbed his beard gently. "You can start off with a piece of good news. Geb dropped off his last report just before he and Vlad headed out to Cheshir, and they should have the Cheshir Fleet base back on-line within three months. They've turned up nine more Asgerds, too. They'll need a few more months to reactivate them, and we're stretched for personnel—as usual—but we'll make do, and that'll bring us up to a hundred and twelve planetoids." He paused. "Unless we have another Sherkan."
Colin frowned at his suddenly bitter tone but let it pass. All the diagnostics had said the planetoid Sherkan was safe to operate without extensive overhaul—but it had been Hatcher's expedition that found her, and he'd been the one who'd had to tell Vladimir Chernikov.
So far, Survey Command had discovered exactly two once-populated planets of the Fourth Empire which retained any life at all—Birhat, the old imperial capital, and Chamhar—and no humans had survived on either. But much of the Empire's military hardware had survived, including many of its vast fleet of enormous starships, and they needed all of those they could get. Humanity had stopped the Achuultani's last incursion—barely—but defeating them on their own ground was going to be something else again.
Unfortunately, restoring a derelict four thousand kilometers in diameter to service after forty-five millennia was a daunting task, which was why Hatcher had been so pleased by Sherkan's excellent condition. But the tests had missed a tiny flaw in her core tap, and its governors had blown the instant her engineer brought it on-line to suck in the energy for supralight movement. The resultant explosion could have destroyed a continent, and six thousand human beings had died in it, including Fleet Admiral Vassily Chernikov and his wife, Valentina.
"Anyway," Hatcher went on more briskly, "we're coming along nicely on the other projects, as well. Adrienne will graduate her first Academy class in a few months, and I'm entirely satisfied with the results, but she and Tao-ling are still fiddling with fine-tuning the curriculum.
"On the hardware side, things are looking good here in Bia, thanks to Tao-ling. He had to put virtually all the surviving yard facilities back on-line to get the shield operational—" Hatcher and the star marshal exchanged wry smiles at that; reactivating the enormous shield generators which surrounded Birhat's primary, Bia, in an inviolate sphere eighty light-minutes across had been a horrendous task "—so we've got plenty of overhaul capacity. In fact, we're ready to start design work on our new construction."
"Really?" Colin's tone was pleased.
"Indeed," Dahak answered for the admiral. "It will be approximately three-point-five standard years—" (the Fifth Imperium ran on Terran time, not Birhatan) "—before capacity for actual construction can be diverted from reactivation programs, but Admiral Baltan and I have begun preliminary studies on the new designs. We are combining several concepts 'borrowed' from the Achuultani with others from the Empire's Bureau of Ships, and I believe we will attain substantial increases in the capabilities of our new units."