It opened at his approach, and he stepped through it into a yawning, brightly-lit void over a thousand kilometers deep. He’d braced himself for it, yet he knew he appeared less calm than he would have liked—and felt even less calm than he managed to look as he plunged downward at an instantly attained velocity of just over twenty thousand kilometers per hour.
Dahak had stepped his transit shafts’ speed down out of deference to his captain and Terra-born crew, though Colin knew the computer truly didn’t comprehend why they felt such terror. It was bad enough aboard the starship’s sublight parasites, yet the biggest of those warships massed scarcely eighty thousand tons. In something that tiny, there was barely time to feel afraid before the journey was over, but even at this speed it would take almost ten minutes to cross Dahak’s titanic hull, and the lack of any subjective sense of movement made it almost worse.
Yet the captain’s quarters were scarcely a hundred kilometers from Command One—a mere nothing aboard Dahak—and the entire journey took only eighteen seconds. Which was no more than seventeen seconds too long, Colin reflected as he came to a sudden halt. He stepped shakily into a carpeted corridor, glad none of his crew were present to note the slight give in his knees as he approached Command One’s massive hatch.
The three-headed dragon of Dahak’s bas relief crest looked back from it. Its eyes transfixed him for a moment across the starburst cradled in its raised forepaws, fierce with the fidelity which had outlasted millennia, and then the hatch—fifteen centimeters of Imperial battle steel thick—slid open, and another dozen hatches opened and closed in succession as he passed through them to Command One’s vast, dim sphere.
The command consoles seemed to float in interstellar space, surrounded by the breath-taking perfection of Dahak’s holographic projections. The nearest stars moved visibly, but the artificiality of the projection was all too apparent if one thought about it. Dahak was tearing through space under maximum Enchanach Drive; at seven hundred and twenty times light-speed, direct observation of the cosmos would have been distorted, to say the very least.
“The Captain is on the bridge,” Dahak intoned, and Colin winced. He was going to have to do something about this mania Dahak had developed for protecting his commander’s precious dignity!
The half-dozen members of Colin’s skeleton bridge watch, Imperials all, began to stand, but he waved them back and crossed to the captain’s console. Trackless stars drifted beneath his boots, and Fleet Commander Tamman, his Tactical officer and third in command, rose from the couch before it.
“Captain,” he said as formally as Dahak, and Colin gave up for the moment.
“I have the con, Commander.” He slipped into the vacated couch, and it squirmed under him as it adjusted to the contours of his body. There was no need for Tamman to give him a status report; his own neural feed to the console was already doing that.
He watched the tactical officer retire to his own station with a small, fond smile. Tamman was Jiltanith’s contemporary, one of the fourteen Imperial “children” from Nergal’s crew to survive the desperate assault on Anu’s enclave. All of them had joined Colin in Dahak, and he was damned thankful they had. Unlike his Terra-born, they could tie directly into their computers and run them the way the Imperium had intended, providing a small, reliable core of enhanced officers to ride herd on the hundred pardoned mutineers who formed the nub of his current crew. In time, Dahak would enhance and educate his Terra-born to the same standard, but with a complement of over a hundred thousand, it was going to take even his facilities a while to finish the task.
Colin MacIntyre reclined in his comfortable command couch, and his small smile faded as he watched the stars sweep towards him and the sleek, deadly shapes of Achuultani starships floated behind his eyes once more. The report from the sensor array replayed itself again and again, like some endless recording loop, and it filled him with dread. He’d known they were coming; now he’d “seen” them for himself. They were real, now, and so was the horrific task he and his people faced.
Dahak was more than twenty-seven light-years from Earth, but the nearest Imperial Fleet base had been over two-hundred light-years from Sol when Dahak arrived to orbit Earth. The Imperium proper lay far beyond that, yet despite the distances and the threat sweeping steadily towards his home world, they’d had no choice but to come, for only the Imperium might offer the aid they desperately needed to save that home world from those oncoming starships.
But Dahak had been unable to communicate with the Imperium for over fifty thousand years. What if there no longer was an Imperium?
It was a grim question they seldom discussed, one Colin tried hard not to ask even of himself, yet it beat in his brain incessantly, for Dahak had repaired his hypercom once the spares he needed had been reclaimed from the mutineers’ Antarctic enclave. He’d been calling for help from the moment those repairs were made—indeed, he was calling even now.
And, like the sensor arrays, he had received no reply at all.
Chapter Two
Lieutenant Governor Horus, late captain of the mutinous sublight battleship Nergal and current viceroy of Earth, muttered a heartfelt curse as he sucked his wounded thumb.
He lowered his hand and regarded the wreckage sourly. He’d worked with Terran equipment for centuries, and he knew how fragile it was. Unfortunately, Imperial technology was becoming available again, and he’d forgotten the intercom on his desk was Terran-made.
His office door opened, and General Gerald Hatcher, head of the Chiefs of Staff of Planet Earth (assuming they ever got the organization set up), poked his head in and eyed the splintered intercom panel.
“If you want to attract my attention, Governor, it’s simpler to buzz me than to use sirens.”
“Sirens?”
“Well, that’s what I thought I heard when my intercom screamed. Did that panel do something, or were you just pissed off?”
“Terran humans,” Horus said feelingly, “are pretty damned smart-mouthed, aren’t they?”
“One of our more endearing traits.” Hatcher smiled at Jiltanith’s father and sat down. “I take it you did want to see me?”
“Yes.” Horus waved a stack of printout. “You’ve seen these?”
“What are—?” Horus stopped waving, and Hatcher craned his neck to read the header. He nodded. “Yep. What about them?”
“According to these, the military amalgamation is a month behind schedule, that’s what,” Horus began, then paused and studied Hatcher’s expression. “Why don’t you look surprised or embarrassed or something, General?”
“Because we’re ahead of where I expected to be,” Hatcher said, and Horus sat back with a resigned sigh as he saw the twinkle in his eye. Gerald Hatcher, he sometimes thought, had adapted entirely too well to the presence of extra-terrestrials on his world.
“I suppose,” the general continued unabashedly, “that I should’ve told you we’ve deliberately set a schedule no one could make. That way we’ve got an excuse to scream at people, however well they’re doing.” He shrugged. “It’s not nice, but when a four or five-star general screams at you, you usually discover a few gears you weren’t using. Wonderful thing, screaming.”
“I see.” Horus regarded him with a measuring eye. “You’re right—you should’ve told me. Unless you’re planning on screaming at me?”
“Perish the thought,” Hatcher murmured.