"That's good news, but where does it leave us on Stepmother?"
"I fear that will require considerably longer, Colin," Dahak replied.
" 'Considerably' is probably optimistic," Hatcher sighed. "We're still stubbing our toes on the finer points of Empire computer hardware, even with Dahak's help, and Mother's the most complex computer the Empire ever built. Duplicating her's going to be a bitch—not to mention the time requirement to build a five-thousand-kilometer hull to put said duplicate inside!"
Colin didn't like that, but he understood. The Empire had built Mother (officially known as Fleet Central Computer Central) using force-field circuitry that made even molycircs look big and clumsy, yet the computer was still over three hundred kilometers in diameter. It was also housed in the most powerful fortress ever constructed by Man, for it did more than simply run Battle Fleet. Mother was the conservator of the Empire, as well—indeed, it was she who'd crowned Colin and provided the ships to smash the Achuultani. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) she was carefully designed, as all late-Empire computers, to preclude self-awareness, which meant she would disgorge her unimaginable treasure trove of data only when tickled with the right specific question.
But Colin spent a lot of time worrying over what might happen to Battle Fleet if something happened to Mother, and he intended to provide Earth with defenses every bit as powerful as Birhat's... including a duplicate of Mother. If everything went well, Stepmother (as Hatcher had insisted on christening the proposed installation) would never come fully on-line, but if Mother was destroyed, Stepmother would take over automatically, providing unbroken command and control for Battle Fleet and the Imperium.
"What kind of time estimate do you have?"
"Speaking very, very roughly, and assuming we get a firm grip on the computer technology so we don't have to keep pestering Dahak with questions, we may be able to start on the hull in six years or so. Once we get that far, we can probably finish the job up in another five."
"Damn. Oh, well. We won't be hearing from the Achuultani for another four or five centuries, minimum, but I want that project completed ASAP, Ger."
"Understood," Hatcher said. "In the meantime, though, we ought to be able to put the first new planetoids on-line considerably sooner. Their computers're a lot smaller and simpler-minded, without any of Mother's wonder-what-the-hell's-in-'em files, and the other hardware's no big problem, even allowing for the new systems' test programs."
"Okay." Colin turned to Tsien. "Want to add anything, Tao-ling?"
"I fear Gerald has stolen much of my thunder," Tsien began, and Hatcher grinned. Technically, everything that wasn't mobile belonged to Tsien—from fortifications and shipyards to R&D to Fleet training—but with so much priority assigned to rounding up and crewing Hatcher's planetoids there was a lot of overlap in their current spheres of authority.
"As he and Dahak have related, most of the Bia System has now been fully restored to function. With barely four hundred million people in the system, our personnel are spread even more thinly than Gerald's, but we are coping and the situation is improving. Baltan and Geran, with much assistance from Dahak, are doing excellent work with Research and Development, although 'research' will continue, for the foreseeable future, to be little more than following up on the Empire's final projects. They are, however, turning up several interesting new items among those projects. In particular, the Empire had begun development of a new generation of gravitonic warheads."
"Oh?" Colin quirked an eyebrow. "This is the first I've heard of it."
"Me, too," Hatcher put in. "What kind of warheads, Tao-ling?"
"We only discovered the data two days ago," Tsien half-apologized, "but what we have seen so far suggests a weapon several magnitudes more powerful than any previously built."
"Maker!" Horus straightened in his own couch, eyes half-fascinated and half-appalled. Fifty-one thousand years ago, he'd been a missile specialist of the Fourth Imperium, and the fearsome efficiency of the weapons the Empire had produced had shaken him badly when he first confronted them.
"Indeed," Tsien said dryly. "I am not yet certain, but I suspect this warhead might be able to duplicate your feat at Zeta Trianguli, Colin."
Several people swallowed audibly at that, including Colin. He'd used the FTL Enchanach drive, which employed massive gravity fields—essentially converging black holes—to literally squeeze a ship out of "real" space in a series of instantaneous transitions, as a weapon at the Second Battle of Zeta Trianguli Australis. An Enchanach ship's dwell time in normal space was very, very brief, and even when it came "close" (in interstellar terms), a ship moving at roughly nine hundred times light-speed didn't spend long enough in the vicinity of any star to do it harm. But the drive's initial activation and final deactivation took a considerably longer time, and Colin had used that to induce a nova which destroyed over a million Achuultani starships.
Yet he'd needed a half-dozen planetoids to do the trick, and the thought of reproducing it with a single warhead was terrifying.
"Are you serious?" he demanded.
"I am. The warhead's total power is far lower than the aggregate you produced, but it is also much more focused. Our most conservative estimate indicates a weapon which would be capable of destroying any planet and everything within three or four hundred thousand kilometers of it."
"Jesu!" Jiltanith's voice was soft, and she squeezed the hilt of her fifteenth-century dagger. "Such power misliketh me, Colin. 'Twould be most terrible if such a weapon should by mischance smite one of our own worlds!"
"You got that right," Colin muttered with a shudder. He still had nightmares over Zeta Trianguli, and if the accidental detonation of a gravitonic warhead was virtually impossible, the Empire had thought the same thing about the accidental release of its bio-weapons.
"Hold off on building the thing, Tao-ling," he said. "Do whatever you want with the research—hell, we may need it against the Achuultani master computer!—but don't produce any hardware without checking with me."
"Of course, Your Majesty."
"Any other surprises for us?"
"Not of such magnitude. Dahak and I will prepare a full report for you by the end of the week, if you wish."
"I wish." Colin turned his eyes to Hector MacMahan. "Any problems with the Corps, Hector?"
"Very few. We're making out better than Gerald in terms of manpower, but then, our target force level's lower. Some of our senior officers are having trouble adjusting to the capabilities of Imperial equipment—most of them are still drawn from the pre-Siege militaries—and we've had a few training snafus as a result. Amanda's correcting most of that at Fort Hawter, and the new generation coming up doesn't have anything to unlearn in the first place. I don't see anything worth worrying about."
"Fine," Colin said. If Hector MacMahan didn't see anything worth worrying about, then there was nothing, and he turned his attention to Horus. "How're we doing on Earth, Horus?"
"I wish I could tell you the situation's altered, Colin, but it hasn't. You can't make these kinds of changes without a lot of disruption. Conversion to the new currency's gone more smoothly than we had any right to expect, but we've completely trashed the pre-Siege economy. The new one's still pretty amorphous, and a lot of people who're getting burned are highly pissed."