“The fools,” Cohanna whispered. “Oh, the fools! Why would they build something like this? It violates every medical ethic the Imperium ever had!”

“I fear my data sample is too small to answer that, yet I have discovered a most interesting point. It was not the Fourth Imperium which devised this weapon but an entity called the Fourth Empire.”

For just a moment, Colin failed to grasp the significance. Dahak had used Imperial Universal, and in Universal, the differentiation was only slightly greater than in English. “Imperium” was umsuvah, with the emphasis on the last syllable; “Empire” was umsuvaht, with the emphasis upon the second.

“What?” Cohanna blinked in consternation.

“Precisely. I have not yet established the full significance of the altered terminology, yet it suggests many possibilities. In particular, the Imperial Senate appears to have been superseded in authority by an emperor— specifically, by Emperor Herdan XXIV as of Year Thirteen-One-Seven-Five.”

“Herdan the Twenty-Fourth?” Colin repeated.

“The title would seem significant,” Dahak agreed, “suggesting as it does an extremely long period of personal rule. In addition, the date of his accession appears to confirm our dating of the Defram disaster.”

“Agreed,” Colin said. “But you don’t have any more data?”

“Not of a political or societal nature, Captain. It may be that Omega Three will disgorge additional information, assuming I can locate the proper portion of its data core and that the relevant entries have not decayed beyond recovery. I would not place the probability as very high. Omega Three and its companions were constructed in great haste by local authorities, not by Battle Fleet. Beyond the programming essential for their design function, their data bases appear to be singularly uninformed.”

Despite his shock, Colin grinned at the computer’s sour tone.

“All right,” he said after a moment. “What can you tell us about the effects of this bio-weapon and the reason the fortifications were built?”

“The data are not rich, Captain, but they do contain the essentials. The bio-weapon appears to have been designed to mount a broad-spectrum attack upon a wide range of life forms. If the rumors recorded by Governor Yirthana are correct, it was, in fact, intended to destroy any life form. In mammals, it functioned as a neuro-toxin, rendering the chemical compounds of the nervous system inert so that the organism died.”

“But that wouldn’t kill trees and grasses,” Cohanna objected.

“That is true, Commander. Unfortunately, the designers of this weapon appear to have been extremely ingenious. Obviously we do not have a specimen of the weapon itself, but I have retrieved very limited data from Governor Yirthana’s own bio-staff. It would appear that the designers had hit upon a simple observation: all known forms of life depend upon chemical reactions. Those reactions may vary from life form to life form, but their presence is a constant. This weapon was designed to invade and neutralize the critical chemical functions of any host.”

“Impossible,” Cohanna said flatly, then flushed.

“By the standards of my own data base, you are correct, ma’am. Nonetheless, Keerah is devoid of life. Empirical evidence thus suggests that it was, indeed, possible to the Fourth Empire.”

“Agreed,” the Biosciences head muttered.

“Governor Yirthana’s bio-staff hypothesized that the weapon had been designed to modify itself at a very high rate of speed, attacking the chemical structures of its victims in turn until a lethal combination was reached. An elegant theoretical solution, although, I suspect, actually producing the weapon would be far from simple.”

“Simple! I’m still having trouble believing it was possible!”

“As for Omega Three and its companions,” Dahak continued, “they were intended to enforce a strict quarantine of Keerah. Governor Yirthana obviously was aware of the contamination of her planet and took steps to prevent its spread. There is also a reference I do not yet fully understand to something called a mat-trans system, which she ordered disabled.”

” ‘Mat-trans’?” Colin asked.

“Yes, sir. As I say, I do not presently fully understand the reference, but it would appear that this mat-trans was a device for the movement of personnel over interstellar distances without recourse to starships.”

“What?!” Colin jerked bolt upright in his chair.

“Current information suggests a system limited to loads of only a few tons but capable of transmitting them hundreds—possibly even several thousands—of light-years almost instantaneously, Captain. Apparently this system had become the preferred mode for personal travel. The energy cost appears to have been high, however, which presumably explains the low upper mass limit. Starships remained in use for bulk cargoes, and the Fleet and certain government agencies retained courier vessels for transportation of highly-classified data.”

“Jesus!” Colin muttered. Then his eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you mention that before?”

“You did not ask, Captain. Nor was I aware of it. Please recall that I am continuing to query Omega Three’s memory even as we speak.”

“All right, all right. But matter transmission? Teleportation?” Colin looked at Chernikov. “Is that possible?”

“As Dahak would say, empirical data suggests it is, but if you are asking how, I have no idea. Dahak’s data base contains some journal articles about focused hyper fields linked with fold-space technology, but the research had achieved nothing as of the mutiny. Beyond that—?” He shrugged again.

“Maker!” Cohanna’s soft voice drew all eyes back to her. She was deathly pale. “If they could—” She broke off, staring down at her hands and thinking furiously as she conferred with Dahak through her neural feed. Her expression changed slowly to one of utter horror, and when her attention returned to her fellows, her eyes glistened with sorrow.

“That’s it.” Her voice was dull. “That’s how they did it to themselves.”

“Explain,” Colin said gently.

“I wondered … I wondered how it could go this far.” She gave herself a little shake. “You see, Hector’s right—only maniacs would deliberately dust whole planets with a weapon like this. But it wasn’t that way at all.”

They looked at her, most blankly, but a glimmer of understanding tightened Jiltanith’s mouth. She nodded almost imperceptibly, and Cohanna’s eyes swiveled to her face.

“Exactly,” the biosciences officer said grimly. “The Imperium could have delivered it only via starships. They’d’ve been forced to transport the bug—the agent, whatever you want to call it—from system to system, intentionally. Some of that could have happened accidentally, but the Imperium was huge. By the time a significant portion of its planets were infected, the contaminating vector would have been recognized. If it wasn’t a deliberate military operation, quarantine should have contained the damage.

“But the Empire wasn’t like that. They had this damned ‘mat-trans’ thing. Assuming an incubation period of any length, all they needed was a single source of contamination—just one—they didn’t know about. By the time they realized what was happening, it could’ve spread throughout the entire Imperium, and just stopping starships wouldn’t do a damned thing to slow it down!”

Colin stared at her as her logic sank home. With something like the “mat-trans” Dahak had described, the Imperium’s worlds would no longer have been weeks or months of travel apart. They would have become a tightly-integrated, inter-connecting unit. Time and distance, the greatest barriers to holding an interstellar civilization together, would no longer apply. What a triumph of technology! And what a deadly, deadly triumph it had proven.