“Then I was wrong,” MacMahan murmured. “They could wipe themselves out.”

“Could and did.” Ninhursag’s clenched fist struck the table gently, for an Imperial, and her voice was thick with anguish. “Not even on purpose—by accident. By accident, Breaker curse them!”

“Wait.” Colin raised a hand for silence. “Assume you’re right, Cohanna. Do you really think every planet would have been contaminated?”

“Probably not, but the vast majority certainly could have been. From the limited information Dahak and I have on this monster of theirs—and remember all our data is third or fourth-hand speculation, by way of Governor Yirthana—the incubation time was quite lengthy. Moreover, Yirthana’s information indicates it was capable of surviving very long periods, possibly several centuries, in viable condition even without hosts.

“That suggests a strategic rather than a tactical weapon. The long incubation period was supposed to bury it and give it time to spread before it manifested itself. That it in fact did so is also suggested by the fact that Yirthana had time to build her bases before it wiped out Keerah. Its long-term lethality would mean no one dared contact any infected planet for a very, very long period. Ideal, if the object was to cripple an interstellar enemy.

“But look what that means. Thanks to the incubation period, there probably wasn’t any way to know it was loose until people started dying. Which means the central, most heavily-visited planets would’ve been the first to go.

“People being people, the public reaction was—must have been—panic. And a panicked person’s first response is to flee.” Cohanna shrugged. “The result might well have been an explosion of contamination.

“On the other hand, they had the hypercom. Warnings could be spread at supralight speeds without using their mat-trans, and presumably some planets must have been able to go into quarantine before they were affected. That’s where the ‘dwell time’ comes in. They couldn’t know how long they had to stay quarantined. No one would dare risk contact with any other planet as long as the smallest possibility of contamination by something like this existed.”

She paused, and Colin nodded.

“So they would have abandoned space,” he said.

“I can’t be certain, but it seems probable. Even if any of their planets did survive, their ‘Empire’ still could have self-destructed out of all too reasonable fear. Which means—” she met Colin’s eyes squarely “—that in all probability, there’s no Imperium for us to contact.”

Vladimir Chernikov bent over the work bench, studying the disassembled rifle-like weapon. His enhanced eyes were set for microscopic vision, and he manipulated his exquisitely sensitive instruments with care. The back of his mind knew he was trying to lose himself and escape the numbing depression which had settled over Dahak’s crew, but his fascination was genuine. The engineer in his soul rejoiced at the beauty of the work before him. Now if he could only figure out what it did.

There was the capacitor, and a real brute it was, despite its tininess. Eight or nine times a regular energy gun’s charge. And these were rheostats. One obviously regulated the power of whatever the thing emitted, but what did the second … ?

Hmmmmm. Fascinating. There’s no sign of a standard disrupter head in here. But then—aha! What do we have here?

He bent closer, bending sensor implants as well as vision upon it, then froze. He looked a moment longer, then raised his head and gestured to Baltan.

“Take a look at this,” he said quietly. His assistant bent over and followed Chernikov’s indicating test probe to the component in question, then pursed his lips in a silent whistle.

“A hyper generator,” he said. “It has to be. But the size of the thing.”

“Precisely.” Chernikov wiped his spotless fingers on a handkerchief, drying their sudden clamminess. “Dahak,” he said.

“Yes, sir?”

“What do you make of this?”

“A moment,” the computer said. There was a brief period of silence, then the mellow voice spoke again. “Fleet Commander (Engineering) Baltan is correct, sir. It is a hyper generator. I have never encountered one of such small size or advanced design, but the basic function is evident. Please note, however, that the generator cavity’s walls are composed of a substance unknown to me, and that they extend the full length of the barrel.”

“Explanations?”

“It would appear to be a shielding housing around the generator, sir—one impervious to warp radiation. Fascinating. Such a material would have obvious applications in such devices as atmospheric hyper missile launchers.”

“True. But am I right in assuming the muzzle end of the housing is open?”

“You are, sir. In essence, this appears to be a highly-advanced adaptation of the warp grenade. When activated, this weapon would project a focused field—in effect, a beam—of multi-dimensional translation which would project its target into hyper space.”

“And leave it there,” Chernikov said flatly.

“Of course,” Dahak agreed. “A most ingenious weapon.”

“Ingenious,” Chernikov repeated with a shudder.

“Correct. Yet I perceive certain limitations. The hyper-suppression fields already developed to counteract warp grenades would also counteract this device’s effect, at least within the area of such a field. I cannot be certain without field-testing the weapon, but I suspect that it might be fired out of or across such a suppression field. Much would depend upon the nature of the focusing force fields. But observe the small devices on both sides of the barrel. They appear to be extremely compact Ranhar generators. If so, they presumably create a tube of force to extend the generator housing and contain the hyper field, thus controlling its area of effect and also tending, quite possibly, to offset the effect of a suppression field.”

“Maker, and I always hated warp grenades,” Baltan said fervently.

“I, too,” Chernikov said. He straightened from the bench slowly, looking at the next innocent-seeming device he’d abstracted from Omega Three once Cohanna had decided her painstaking search confirmed the original suggestion of the functional hydroponic farms. There was no trace of anything which could possibly be the bio-weapon aboard the battle station, and Chernikov had gathered up every specimen of technology he could find. He’d been looking forward to taking all of them apart.

Now he was almost afraid to.

Colin MacIntyre sat in Conference One once more. He’d grown to hate this room, he thought, bending his gaze upon the tabletop. Hate it.

Silence fell as the last person found a seat, and he looked up.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “for the past month I’ve resisted all arguments to move on because I believe Keerah represents a microcosm of what probably happened to the entire Imperium. I now believe we’ve learned all we can here. But—” he drew out the slight pause behind the word “—that still leaves the question of what we do next. Before turning to that, however, I would like to review our findings, beginning with our Chief Engineer.”

He sat back and nodded to Chernikov, who cleared his throat quietly, as if organizing his thoughts, then began.

“We have examined many artifacts recovered from Omega Three. On the basis of what we have discovered to date, I have reached a few conclusions about the technical base of the Imperium—that is to say, the Empire.

“They had, as we would have expected, made major advances, yet not so many as we might have anticipated. Please bear in mind that I am speaking only of non-biological technology; neither Cohanna nor I is in a position to say what they had achieved in the life sciences. The weapon which destroyed them certainly appears to evidence a very high level of bio-engineering.