"Don't you just wish you could get your hands on my fanny, you lech!"
"Don't worry, Tam," Sean said darkly. "I'll be happy to deputize. As soon—" he added "—as a certain oversized polo pony gets out of my way!"
"Oooh, protect me, Brashan!" Harriet cried, and the Narhani laughed and stood aside, blocking off the cockpit as the hatch opened. The girls scampered out, and Galahad's litter-mate Gawain followed, raised muzzle already scenting the rich jungle air.
"Traitor!" Sean kicked his friend—which hurt his toe far more than his target. Brashan was only ten Terran years old, six years younger than Sean, but he was already sufficiently mature for full enhancement. The augmentation biotechnics provided was proportional to a being's natural strength and toughness, and the heavy-grav Narhani were very, very tough by human standards.
"Nonsense. Simply a more mature individual striving to protect you from your own impetuosity," Brashan returned, and trotted down the ramp.
"Yeah, sure," Sean snorted as he and Tamman followed.
It was noon, local time, and Bia blazed directly overhead. Birhat lay almost a light-minute further from its G0 primary than Earth lay from Sol, but they were almost exactly on the equator, and the air was hot and still. The high, shrill piping of Birhat's equivalent of birds drifted down, and a bat-winged pseudodactyl drifted high overhead.
Sean and Tamman paused to check their grav rifles. Without full enhancement, neither could handle a full-sized energy gun, but their present weapons were little heavier than Terran sporting rifles. The twenty-round magazines held three-millimeter darts of superdense chemical explosive, and the rifles fired them with a velocity of over five thousand meters per second. Which meant they had enough punch to take out a pre-Imperial tank... or the larger denizens of Birhat's ecosystem.
"Looks good here." Sean's crispness was far removed from his earlier playfulness, and Tamman nodded to confirm his own weapon's readiness. Then they turned towards the others, and Sean made a face. Sandy was already perched in her favorite spot astride Brashan's powerful back.
He supposed it made sense, even if she did look insufferably smug, for something had gone astray in Sandra MacMahan's genes. Neither of her parents were midgets, yet she barely topped a hundred and forty centimeters. If she hadn't had Hector MacMahan's eyes and Ninhursag's cheekbones, Sean would have suspected she was a changeling from his mother's bedtime stories. Of course, she wasn't quite fifteen, but Harriet had shot up to almost one-eighty by the time she was that age.
Not, he thought darkly, that Sandy let her small size slow her down. She was so far out ahead scholastically it wasn't funny, but the thing he really hated was that whenever they got into an argument she was invariably right. Like that molycirc problem. He'd been positive the failure was in the basic matrix, but, nooooo. She'd insisted a power surge had bridged the alpha block, and damned if she hadn't been right... again. It was maddening.
At least he had a good sixty centimeters on her, he thought moodily.
He and Tamman caught up with the others, and he tapped the grav pistol at Harriet's side pointedly. She made a face but drew it and checked its readiness. Sandy—of course—had already checked hers.
"Which way, Sean?" Brashan asked, and Sean paused to orient his built-in inertial guidance system to the observations he'd made on the way in.
"About five klicks at oh-two-twenty," he announced.
"Couldn't you set down any closer?" Harriet demanded, and he shrugged.
"Sure. But we're talking about tyranotops. You really want one of them stepping on the flyer? It might get sort of broken around the edges."
"True," she admitted, and drew her bush knife as they approached the towering creepers and ferns fringing the clearing.
As always, she and Sean took point, followed by Tamman, while a wide-ranging Gawain burrowed through the undergrowth and Brashan covered the rear. Sean was well aware Brashan was the real reason his mother and father raised no demur to the twins' excursions. Even a tyranotops—that fearsome creature which resembled nothing so much as a mating of a Terran triceratops and tyrannosaurus—would find a fully enhanced Narhani a handful, and Brashan carried a heavy energy gun, as well. As baby-sitters went, Narhani took some beating, which suited Sean and his friends just fine. Birhat was ever so much more interesting than Earth, and Brashan meant they could roam it at will.
Odd birds and beasts fluttered and rumbled in the underbrush, starting up in occasional panic as Gawain flushed them, and many of them were species no one else had yet seen. That was one of the things they loved about Birhat. The old Imperial capital had reverted to its second childhood after the bio-weapon hit, for the toxin hadn't been able to reach the sealed, protected ecosystems of the Imperial family's extraplanetary zoos. By the time failing environmental equipment finally released the inhabitants of over a dozen different oxy-nitrogen planets, the weapon itself had died, and forty-odd thousand years of subsequent natural selection had produced a biosystem that was a naturalist's opium dream.
For all intents and purposes, Birhat was a virgin planet, and it was all theirs. Well, theirs and three-quarters of a billion other people's, but that left lots of empty space, since most of the Bia System's steadily growing population was concentrated in and around the new capital or out in the system's enormous spaceborne industrial complexes, working like demons to resurrect the Empire. And, of course, at the moment they were in the middle of the Sean Andrew MacIntyre Continental Nature Preserve the Crown had established to honor Sean's uncle, who'd died fighting Anu's mutineers.
Not that they'd have such freedom much longer. Sean had been vested with the first official sign of his status as Heir last year when he was presented to Mother, for under the Great Charter Mother passed on the acceptability of the Heir's intellect and psych-profile. He'd been accepted, and the subliminal challenge-response patterns and implant codes which identified him as Heir had been implanted, but it had been the scariest moment of his life—and a clear sign that adulthood was coming closer.
There were signs for his friends, as well. All of them were headed for Battle Fleet—they'd known that for years—but they were getting close to meeting the Academy's entry requirements. Another year, possibly two, Sean estimated, until their free time evaporated.
But for now the day was young, the pride of tyranotops they'd come to see awaited them, and he intended to enjoy himself to the full.
A cool breeze flowed over the balcony, for it was summer in Birhat's northern hemisphere, and Colin had switched off the force fields which walled the balcony against the elements at need.
The city of Phoenix lay before him in the night, the serpentine curve of the River Nikkan sparkling far below, and Tsien Tao-ling's engineering crews had done well by Birhat's settlers. Phoenix was the product of a gravitonic civilization, and its towers soared even above the mighty near-sequoias about them, but the Palace was the tallest spire of all. Perhaps some thought that was to reflect its inhabitants' rank, but the real reason was practicality. True, the imperial family had luxurious personal quarters, but that was almost a side effect of the Imperium's administrative needs. Even a structure as vast as the Palace was badly overcrowded by functionaries and bureaucrats, though the new Annex going up next door would help... for a while.
He sighed and slid an arm about Jiltanith, and silken hair brushed his cheek as she leaned against him. He kissed the top of her head, then swept his telescopic eyes over the city, enjoying the jeweled interplay of lights and the magical wash of shifting moonlight. The complex pattern never ceased to delight him, for he'd grown up with but a single moon.
He raised his gaze to the heavens, and the stars were hard to see. The gleaming disk of Mother's fortress hull hung almost directly overhead, and over fifty huge planetoids dotted the night sky beyond her. They were much farther out (the comings and goings of that many "moons" would play merry hell with Birhat's tides), but the sunlight reflected from their hulls gilded the Fifth Imperium's capital in bronze and ebony. And on the farside of the planet from Mother—indeed, just about directly over the spot where his children were even now observing their tyranotops—hung another vast sphere named Dahak.