“They mount quite capable defenses of their own, Captain,” Dahak observed, and Colin felt them through his feed. ECM systems lured Dahak’s fire wide and on-board maneuvering systems sent the red dots into wild gyrations, and they were faster than the counter-missiles chasing them.

“Where are they coming from, Dahak?”

“Scanners have detected twenty-four identical structures orbiting Kano-III,” Dahak replied as his close-range energy defenses opened fire and killed another dozen missiles. At least twenty were still coming. “I have detected launches from only four of them.”

Only four? Colin puzzled over that as the last dozen missiles broke past Dahak’s active defenses. He found himself gripping his couch’s armrests; there was nothing else he could do.

Dahak’s display blanked in the instant of detonation, shielding his bridge crews’ optic nerves from the fury unleashed upon him. Anti-matter warheads, their yields measured in thousands of megatons, gouged at his final defenses, but Dahak was built to face things like that, and plasma clouds blew past him, divided by his shield as by the prow of a ship. Yet mixed with the anti-matter explosions were the true shipkillers of the Imperium: gravitonic warheads.

The ancient starship lurched. For all its unimaginable mass, despite the unthinkable power of its drive, it lurched like a broken-masted galleon, and Colin’s stomach heaved despite the internal gravity field. His mind refused to contemplate the terrible fury which could produce that effect as gravitonic shield components screamed in protest, but they, too, had been engineered to meet this test. Somehow they held.

The display flashed back on, spalled by fading clouds of gas and heat, and a damage signal pulsed in Colin’s neural feed. A schematic of Dahak’s hull appeared above his console, its frontal hemisphere marred by two wedge-shaped glares of red over a kilometer deep.

“Minor damage in quadrants Alpha-One and Three,” Dahak reported. “No casualties. Capability not impaired. Second salvo entering interdiction range. Third enemy salvo detected.”

More counter-missiles flashed out, and Colin reached a decision.

“Tactical, take out the actively attacking installations!”

“Acknowledged,” Tamman said, and the display bloomed with amber sighting circles. Each enclosed a single missile platform, too tiny with distance for even Dahak to display visually, and Colin swallowed. Unlike their attackers, Tamman was using hyper missiles.

“Missiles away,” Dahak said. And then, almost without pause, “Targets destroyed.”

Bright, savage pinpricks blossomed in the amber circles, but the two salvos already fired were still coming. Yet Dahak had gained a great deal of data from the first attack, and he was a very fast thinker. Battle Comp was using his predicted target responses well, concentrating his counter-missiles to thwart them, alert now for their speed and the tricks of defensive ECM, killing the incoming missiles with inexorable precision. Energy weapons added their efforts as the range dropped, killing still more. Only three of the second salvo got through, and they were all anti-matter warheads. The final missile of the last salvo died ten light-seconds short of the shield.

Colin sagged in his couch.

“Dahak? Any more?” he asked hoarsely.

“Negative, sir. I detect active targeting systems aboard seven remaining installations, but no additional missiles have been launched.”

“Any communication attempts?”

“Negative, Captain. Nor have they responded to my hails.”

“Damn.”

Colin’s brain began to work again, but it made no sense. Why refuse all contact and attack on sight? For that matter, how had Dahak gotten so deep in-system before being detected? And if attack they must, why use only a sixth of their defensive bases? The four Tamman had destroyed had certainly gone all out, but if they meant to mount a defense at all, why hold anything back? Especially now, when Dahak had riposted so savagely?

“Well,” he said finally, very softly, “let’s find out what that was all about. Sarah, take us in at half speed. Tamman, hold us on Red One.”

Acknowledgments flowed back to him, and Dahak started cautiously forward once more at twenty-eight percent of light speed. Colin watched the display for a moment, then made himself lean back.

“Dahak, give me an all-hands channel.”

“All-hands channel open, sir.”

“All right, people,” Colin said to every ear aboard the massive ship, “that was closer than we’d like, but we seem to’ve come through intact. If anyone’s interested in exactly what happened—” he paused and smiled; to his surprise, it felt almost natural “—you can get the details from Dahak later. But for your immediate information, no one’s shooting at us just now, so we’re going on in for a closer look. They’re not talking to us, either, so it doesn’t look like they’re too friendly, but we’ll know more shortly. Hang loose.”

He started to order Dahak to close the channel, then stopped.

“Oh, one more thing. Well done, all of you. You did us proud. Out.

“Close channel, Dahak.”

“Acknowledged, Captain. Channel closed.”

“Thank you,” Colin said softly, and his tone referred to far more than communications channels and the starship’s courtesy. “Thank you very much.”

The holo of what had once been a pleasant, blue-white world called Keerah hung in Command One’s visual display like a leprous, ocher curse. Once-green continents were wind and water-carved ruins, grooved like a harridan’s face and pocked with occasional sprawls where the works of Man had been founded upon solid bedrock and so still stood, sentinels to a vanished population.

Colin stared at it, heartsick as even Defram had not left him. He’d hoped so hard. The missiles which had greeted them had seemed to confirm that hope, and so he had almost welcomed them even as they sought to kill him. But dead Keerah mocked him.

He turned away, shifting his attention to the orbiting ring of orbital forts. Only seven remained even partially operational, and the nearest loomed in Dahak’s display, gleaming dully in the funeral watch light of Kano. The clumsy-looking base was over eight kilometers in diameter, and a shiver ran down Colin’s spine as he looked at it.

Even now, its targeting systems were locked on Dahak, its age-crippled computers sending firing signals to its weapons. He shuddered as he pictured the ancient launchers swinging through their firing sequences again and again, dry-firing because their magazines were empty. It was bad enough to know the long-abandoned war machine was trying to kill him; it was worse to wonder how many other vessels must have died under its fire to exhaust its ammunition.

And if Dahak and Hector were right, most of those vessels had been killed not for attacking Keerah, but for trying to escape it.

“Probe One is reporting, Captain.” Dahak’s mellow voice wrenched Colin away from his frightening, empty thoughts to more immediate matters.

“Very well. What’s their status?”

“External scans completed, sir. Fleet Captain (Engineering) Chernikov requests permission to board.”

Colin turned to the holo image beside his console. “Recommendations?”

“My first recommendation is to get Vlad out of there,” Cohanna said flatly. “I’d rather not risk our Chief Engineer on the miserable excuse for an opinion I can give you.”

“I tend to agree, but I made the mistake of asking for volunteers.”

“In that case,” Cohanna leaned back behind her desk in sickbay, a thousand kilometers from Command One, and rubbed her forehead, “we might as well let them board.”

“Are you sure about that?”