Colin blinked. Personal demesne? An Emperor whose personal fiefdoms could raise that kind of firepower? The thought sent a shiver down his spine. He sagged back, trembling, and a warm arm crept about him and tightened.
“All right.” He shook his head and inhaled deeply, drawing strength from Jiltanith’s presence. “Why is the Guard Flotilla inactive?”
“Power exhaustion and uncontrolled shutdown, Sire.”
“Assess probability of successful reactivation.”
“One hundred percent,” Mother said emotionlessly, and a jolt of excitement crashed through him. But slowly, he told himself. Slowly.
“Assume resources of one hundred seven thousand Battle Fleet personnel, one Utu-class planetoid, and current active and inactive automated support available in the Bia System,” he said carefully, “and compute probable time required to reactivate the Imperial Guard Flotilla to full combat readiness.”
“Impossible to reactivate to full combat readiness,” Mother replied. “Specified personnel inadequate for crews.”
“Then compute time to reactivate to limited combat readiness.”
“Computing, Sire,” Mother responded, and fell silent for a disturbingly long period. Almost a full minute passed before she spoke again. “Computation complete. Probable time required: four-point-three-nine months. Margin of error twenty-point-seven percent owing to large numbers of imponderables.”
Colin closed his eyes and felt Jiltanith tremble against him. Four months—five-and-a-half outside. It would be close, but they could do it. By all that was holy, they could do it!
“There,” Tamman said quietly as a green circle bloomed on Dahak’s visual display, ringing a tiny, gleaming dot. The dot grew as Dahak approached, and additional dots appeared, spreading out in a loose necklace of worldlets.
“I see them,” Colin replied, still luxuriating in his return to Command One and a world he understood. “Big bastards, aren’t they, Dahak?”
“I compute that the largest out-mass Dahak by over twenty-five percent. I am not prepared to speculate upon the legitimacy of their parentage.”
Colin chuckled. Dahak had been much more willing to engage in informality since his return from Fleet Central, as if he recognized Colin’s shock at suddenly finding himself an emperor. Or perhaps the computer was simply glad to have him back. Dahak was a worrier where friends were concerned.
He watched the planetoids grow. If Vlad was right about the Empire’s technology, those ships would be monsters in action—and monsters were exactly what they needed.
“Captain, look here.” Ellen Gregory, Sarah Meir’s Assistant Astrogator, placed a sighting circle of her own on the display, picking out a single starship. “What do you make of that, sir?”
Colin looked, then looked again. The stupendous sphere floating in space was only roughly similar to the only Imperial planetoid he’d ever seen, but one thing was utterly familiar. A vast, three-headed dragon spread its wings across the gleaming hull.
“Well looky there,” he murmured. “Dahak, what d’you make of that?”
According to the data Fleet Central downloaded to my data base,” Dahak replied, “that is His Imperial Majesty’s Planetoid Dahak, Hull Number Seven-Three-Six-Four-Four-Eight-Niner-Two-Five.”
“Another Dahak?”
“It is a proud name in Battle Fleet.” Dahak sounded a bit miffed. “Rather like the many ships named Enterprise in your own United States Navy. According to the data, this is the twenty-third ship to bear the name.”
“It is, huh? Well, which one are you?”
“This unit is the eleventh of the name.”
“I see. Well, in order to avoid confusion, we’ll just refer to this young whippersnapper as Dahak Two, if that’s all right with you, Dahak.”
“Noted,” Dahak said calmly, and continued to close on the silently waiting, millennia-dead hulls they intended to resurrect.
“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.