CHAPTER TWENTY

"Hyper wake coming in from Sol, ma'am."

Adrienne Robbins, Lady Nergal (and it still felt weird to be a noble of an empire which had died forty-five thousand years ago), nodded and watched Herdan's holographic projection. The F5 star Terran astronomers knew as Zeta Trianguli Australis was a diamond chip five light-years astern, and the blood-red hyper trace indicator flashed almost on a line with it.

Adrienne's stupendous command floated with three other starships, yet alone and lonely. The four of them were deployed to cover almost a cubic light-year of space, and Tamman's Royal Birhat was already moving to intercept. Well, that was all right; she'd killed enough Achuultani at the Siege of Earth.

"Captain, we've got a very faint wake coming in from the east, too," her plotting officer said, and Lady Adrienne frowned. That had to be the Achuultani vanguard, and it was way ahead of schedule.

"Emergence times?"

"Bogey One will emerge into n-space in approximately seven hours twelve minutes, ma'am; make it oh-two-twenty zulu," Fleet Commander Oliver Weinstein said. "Bogey Two's a real monster to show up at this range at all. We've got a good hundred hours before they emerge, maybe as much as five days. I'll be able to refine that in a couple of hours."

"Do that, Ollie," she said, relaxing again. The vanguard wasn't as far ahead of schedule as she'd feared, just a bigger, more visible target than anticipated.

Adrienne sighed. It had been easier to command Nergal. The battleship's computers had been no smarter than Herdan's, but they'd had nowhere near as much to do. If she'd needed to, she could be anywhere in the net through her neural feed, but Herdan was just too damned big. Even with six thousand crewmen aboard, less than five percent of her duty stations were manned. They could get by—barely—with that kind of stretch, but it was a bitch and a half. If only this ship were half as smart—hell, even a tenth as smart!—as Dahak. But they had only one Dahak, and he couldn't be committed to this job.

"Herdan," she said aloud.

"Yes, Captain?" a soft soprano replied, and Adrienne's mouth curled in a reflexive smile. It was silly for a ship named for the Empire's greatest emperor to sound like a teenaged girl, but apparently the fashion in the late Empire had been to give computers female voices, and hang the gender.

"Assume Bogey Two has scanners fifty percent more efficient than those of the scouts which attacked Earth and will emerge into n-space twelve hours from now. Compute probability Bogey Two will be able to detect detonation of Mark-Seventy gravitonic warheads at spatial and temporal loci of Bogey One's projected emergence into n-space."

"Computing." There was a brief pause. "Probability approaches zero."

"How closely?"

"Probability is one times ten to the minus thirty-second," Herdan responded. "Plus or minus two percent."

"Well, that's pretty close to zero at that, I guess," Adrienne murmured.

"Comment not understood."

"Ignore last comment," Adrienne replied, suppressing a sigh. It wasn't Herdan's fault she was an idiot, but after talking to Dahak—

"Acknowledged," Herdan said, and Lady Adrienne pressed her lips firmly together.

"Scout emergence into n-space in fourteen minutes, sir."

"Thank you, Janet," Senior Fleet Captain Tamman said, wishing he could share his tension with Amanda, and wasn't that a silly thought when he'd taken such pains to insure that he couldn't? Well, he admitted, "pains" was the wrong word, but he'd only gotten away with it because he'd found out about Colin's compulsory personnel orders assigning all pregnant Fleet personnel to the Operation Dunkirk crews a good month before Amanda had.

He thought she would forgive him someday, but he'd almost lost her once in La Paz, and then a rifle slug went right through her visor aboard Vindicator. It was only the Maker's own grace it hadn't shattered, and she'd used up most of her helmet sealant and all of her luck. He was taking no chances this time.

"Emergence in five minutes," Janet Santino said politely, and Tamman shook his head. Woolgathering, by the Maker!

"Come to Red One," he said, and his command staff settled into even more intimate communion with their consoles. His own eyes focused dreamily on the red circle delineating their target's locus of emergence, barely twenty light-seconds from their present position, while his brain concentrated on his neural feed, "seeing" directly through Birhat's superb scanners.

That courier had done a bang-up job of timing its jump, given the crudity of its computers, to hit this close to an exact rendezvous with the vanguard.

"Emergence in one minute," Santini said.

"Alpha Battery," Tamman said gently, "you are authorized to fire the moment you have a firm track."

"Emergence in thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five. Now!"

The red circle suddenly held a tiny red dot. There was a brief, eternal heartbeat of tension, and then the missiles fired.

They were sublight in order to home, but only barely so. They flashed across the display, and the dot vanished without fuss or bother, twenty kilometers of starship ripped apart by gravitonic warheads it had probably never even seen coming.

"Target," Birhat's velvety contralto purred, "destroyed."

"Thank you, Darling," someone murmured. "I hope it was good for you, too."

"Well, that's the first hurdle," Colin said as he digested Tamman's brief hypercom transmission.

"As thou sayst," Jiltanith agreed.

Colin nodded and looked around, admiring Dahak Two's spacious command deck and awesome instrumentation, and knew he would trade it all in a heartbeat for Dahak's outmoded bridge. Not that Two wasn't a fantastic fighting machine; she just wasn't Dahak. But Dahak couldn't fly this mission, and Colin refused to send his people to fight without him. Assuming anyone survived the next few months, that might be something he'd have to get used to. For now, it wasn't.

At the moment, Two was tearing through space at better than eight hundred times light-speed. Herdan was closest to the vanguard's projected emergence, and the ships which had spread out to cover the courier's probable emergence points hurried toward her. They could have made the trip in a fraction of the time in hyper, but then the vanguard might have seen them coming.

It was all right, he told himself again. Those Achuultani clunkers were so slow all twelve of the ships he'd committed to the operation would be in position long before they emerged.

"Approaching supralight shutdown, Captain," a female voice said.

"My thanks, Two," Jiltanith replied, and that was another strange thing. Colin might be an emperor and a warlord; he was also a passenger. Two could not be in better hands, but it felt odd to be riding someone else's command after all this time, even 'Tanni's.

He turned his attention to the display, and the bright green dots of his other ships blinked as Two went sublight and the stars suddenly slowed. There came Tor, the last of them, closing up nicely. Good.

"All units in position, Sire," Jiltanith said formally. "Stealth fields active."

"Thank you, Captain," Colin said with equal formality. "Now we wait."

Great Lord of Order Sorkar hated rendezvous stops, especially in the Demon Sector. Battle Comp assured him there was no real danger, and Nest Lord knew Battle Comp was always right, but there were too many horror stories about this sector. Sorkar was not supposed to know them—great lords were above the gossip of lower nestlings—but unlike most of his fellows, Sorkar had won his lordship the hard way, and he had not forgotten his origins as thoroughly as, perhaps, he ought to have.

Still, this visit had been almost boring, despite those odd reports of long-abandoned sensor arrays. Sorkar had longed for a little action more than once, for the urge to hunt was strong within any great lord, but Protectors were a commodity to be preserved for the service of the Nest, and he was too shrewd a commander to regret the tedium. Mostly.

He split his attention between his panel and the chronometers as they clicked over the last segment, and a corner of his brain double-checked the override between Battle Comp and his own panel. Battle Comp seldom took a hand directly, but it was comforting to know it could.

There! Emergence.

He watched his instruments approvingly. It was impossible to coordinate the translation between hyper space and n-space perfectly for so many units, but the time spread looked more than merely satisfactory, and the spacing was exemplary. His Protectors had learned their duties well over the—

"Alarm! Alarm! Incoming fire! Incoming fire!" a voice yelped, and Great Lord Sorkar jerked half-upright. They were light-years from the nearest star—who could be firing on them here?

But someone was, and he watched in horror as missiles of the greater thunder and something else, something beyond belief, shredded his proud starships like blazing tinder.

Nest-killers! The Demon Nest-Killers of the Demon Sector! But how? He'd studied all the previous great visits to this sector. Never—never!—had nest-killers struck until one or more of their worlds had been cleansed! Had those mysterious sensor arrays alerted them after all? But even if they had, how could they have known to find the rendezvous? It was impossible!

Yet the missiles continued to bore in, sublight and hyper alike, and his scanners could not even see the attackers! What wizardry—?

A raucous buzzer cut through his thoughts, and his eyes flashed to Battle Comp's panel. Data codes danced as the mighty computers took over his fleet, and Great Lord Sorkar was a passenger as his ships deployed. They spread apart, thinning the nest-killers' target even as they groped blindly to find their enemy. It was a good plan, he thought, but it was costing them. Tarhish, how it was costing them! But if there truly was a nest-killer force out there, if this was not, indeed, the night-demons of frightened legend, then they would find them. Terrible as his losses were, they were as nothing against his entire force, and when Battle Comp found a tar—

A target source appeared on his panel. Another blinked into sight, and another, as his nestlings spent their lives merely to find them, and Nest Lord, they were close! Some sort of cloaking technology. The thought was an icicle in his brain, for it was far better than anything the Nest had, but he had targets at last. He moved to order his nestlings to open fire, but Battle Comp had acted first. He heard his own voice, calm and dispassionate, already passing the command.

"Burn, baby! Burn!" someone whooped.

"Silence! Clear the net!" Adrienne Robbins cracked, and the exultant voice vanished. Not that she could blame whoever it had been, for their opening salvos had been twice as effective as projected. Unfortunately, that was because they were three times as close as planned. The hyper drives aboard these larger ships were slightly different from those the scouts had mounted, and their calculations had been off. By only a tiny amount, perhaps, but minute computational errors had major consequences on this scale.

They were going to burn through the stealth field a hell of a lot quicker than anyone had expected. She knew she had more experience against the Achuultani than anyone else, and perhaps her earlier losses had affected her nerve, but, damn it, those buggers were inside their own sublight and hyper missile range! Herdan's defenses were incomparably better than Nergal's, and her shield covered twenty times the hyper bands, but her sheer size meant it extended even further from the hull than Nergal's had, and there were going to be a lot of missiles headed her way very soon.

"Stand by missile defense; stand by ECM!" she snapped, and then, Dear Jesus, here it came.

Great Lord Sorkar spit an incredulous curse. A twelve of them! A single twelve had already slain a greater twelve and more of his ships, and their defenses were as incredible as their firepower. Targeting screens blossomed with false images, sucking his sublight weapons off target. Jammers hashed the scan channels. Titanic shields shrugged the greater thunder contemptuously aside. And still his ships died and died and died... .

Yet nothing could stop the twelves of twelves of twelves of missiles his ships were hurling, and he bared his teeth as the first hyper missile slashed through a nest-killer shield. There! That should show them that—

He blinked, and his blood was ice. What sort of monster could absorb a direct hit from the greater thunder and not even notice it?

Alarms screamed as a ten-thousand-megaton warhead exploded almost on top of Royal Birhat. The huge ship quivered as the furious plasma cloud carved an incandescent chasm twenty kilometers into her armored hull. Air exploded from the dreadful wound, blast doors slammed... and Birhat went right on fighting.

"Moderate damage to Quadrant Theta-Two," the sexy contralto said calmly. "Four fatalities. Point zero-four-two percent combat impairment."

Colin winced as the flashing yellow band of combat damage encircled Birhat. He'd lost track of the kills they'd scored, but he'd fucked up. They were too frigging close!

"All ships, open the range," he snapped, and the Imperial Guard darted suddenly astern at sixty-five percent of light-speed.

Tarhish, they were fast! Sorkar had never seen anything but a missile move that quickly in n-space. They fell back out of range of his sublight weapons, retreating toward the edge of his hyper missile envelope, but their own weapons seemed totally unaffected, and he had never seen such accurate targeting. Indeed, he had never seen anyone do anything these nest-killers were doing to him, but that did not make them night-demons. It only meant his Protectors faced a test worse than he had ever imagined, and they were Protectors.

And, he thought under the surface of his battle orders, perhaps it was not as bad as it might have been. These nest-killers had known where to meet his ships, and not even those arrays could have told them that, so they must have already destroyed one scout force—probably Furtag's, given the timing—and followed its couriers hither. Yet if they could muster but a single twelve of ships, however powerful, against him, then the ships under his command were more than enough to feed them to the Furnace. Even at this extreme range, he had an incalculable advantage in launchers. Not so good as theirs, perhaps, but more than enough to make up any disadvantage.

"Colin, they press us sore," Jiltanith said, and Colin nodded sharply. The plan had been to empty their magazines into the Achuultani, but the shit was too deep for that. Birhat had taken only one hit, but Two had taken three and Tor had taken five. Five of those monster warheads!

These ships were tough beyond belief, but any toughness had its limits. He winced as yet another massive salvo exploded against Two's shield and the big ship plowed through the plasma like a drunken windjammer. It was only a matter of time until—

"Tor reports shield failure," Two's Comp Cent announced. "Attempting to withdraw into hyper." Colin's eyes darted to Tor's cursor, and the flashing yellow circle was banded in crimson. He stared at it in horror, willing the ship's hyper drive to take her out of it, as missile after missile went home—

"Withdrawal unsuccessful," Two said emotionlessly, and Colin's face went bone-white as Tor's dot vanished forever.

"Execute Bug Out," he grated.

"Acknowledged," Jiltanith said coolly.

The nest-killers vanished.

Sorkar stared in disbelief at the reports of his hyper scanners. Almost a greater twelve times light-speed? How was it possible?

But what mattered was that it was possible. And that his scanner crews had noted the charging hyper fields in time to get good readings on them. He knew where they would emerge—at that bright star less than a quarter-twelve of light-years ahead of his fleet.

It could not be their homeworld, not so coincidentally close to the rendezvous, but whatever it was, Sorkar knew what to do if they were stupid enough to tie themselves to its defense, too deep in its gravity well to escape into hyper. He could wade into their fire, take his losses, and crush them by sheer numbers, for he had already proven they could be destroyed.

He did not like to think how many hits it had taken to kill that single nest-killer, but they had killed it. And his own losses were scarcely three greater twelves, grievous but hardly fatal.

He plugged into Battle Comp, but he already knew what his orders would be.