“Methinks it little matters what thou sayst, Tamman,” Jiltanith’s mournful observation drew Colin back to the present as she opened another bottle of beer. “Our Colin departeth not from his fell intent to poison one and all with his noxious smokes and fumes.”

“Listen, all of you,” Colin retorted, propping his fists on his hips, “I’m captain of this tub, and we’ll fix food my way!”

“Didst’a hear thy captain speak of thee, Dahak, my tub?” Jiltanith caroled, and Colin shook a fist at her.

“I believe the proper response is ’Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,’ ” a mellow voice replied, and Colin groaned.

“What idiot encouraged him to learn cliches?”

“Nay, Colin, acquit us all. ’Tis simply that we discouraged him not.”

“Well you should have.”

“Stop complaining and let the man cook.” Vlad Chernikov lay flat on his back in the shade of a young oak. Now he propped one eye open. “If you do not care for his cuisine, you need not eat it, Tamman.”

“Fat chance!” Colin snorted, and stole Jiltanith’s beer.

He swallowed, enjoying the “sun” on his shoulders, and decided ’Tanni had been right to talk him into the party. The anniversary of the fall of Anu’s enclave deserved to be celebrated as a reminder of some of the “impossible” things they’d already accomplished, even if uncertainty over what waited at Birhat continued to gnaw at everyone. Or possibly because it did.

He looked out over the happy, laughing knots of his off-watch crewmen. Some of them, anyway. There was a null-grav basketball tournament underway on Deck 2460, and General Treshnikov had organized a “Top Gun” contest on the simulator deck for the non-fighter pilots of the crew. Then there was the regatta out on the thirty-kilometer-wide park deck’s lake.

He glanced around the shaded picnic tables. Cohanna and Ninhursag sat at one, annihilating one another in a game of Imperial battle chess with a bloodthirsty disregard for losses that would turn a line officer gray, and Caitrin O’Rourke and Geran had embarked on a drinking contest—in which Caitrin’s Aussie ancestry appeared to be a decided advantage—at another. General von Grau and General Tsukuba were wagering on the outcome of the volley ball tournament, and Hector wore a dreamy look as he and Dahak pursued a discussion, complete with neural-feed visual aids, of Hannibal’s Italian tactics. Sarah Meir sat with him, listening in and reaching down occasionally to scratch the ears of Hector’s huge half-lab, half-rottweiler bitch Tinker Bell as she drowsed at her master’s feet.

Colin returned Jiltanith’s beer, and his smile grew warmer as her eyes gleamed at him. Yes, she’d been right—just as she’d been right to insist they make their own “surprise” announcement at the close of the festivities. And thank God he’d been firm with Dahak! He didn’t know how she would have reacted to Jiltanith-Colfranmac, but he knew how he would have felt over Colinfrancismacintyre-Jil!

“Supralight shutdown in ten minutes,” Dahak announced into the fiery tension of Command One’s starlit dimness, and Colin smiled tightly at Jiltanith’s holo image, trying to wish she were not far away in Command Two.

He inhaled deeply and concentrated on the reports and commands flowing through his neural feed. Not even the Terra-born among Dahak’s well-drilled crew needed to think through their commands these days. Which might be just as well. There had been no hails or challenges, but they’d been thoroughly scanned by someone (or something) while still a full day short of Birhat.

Colin would have felt immeasurably better to know what had been on the other end of those scanners … and how whatever it was meant to react. One thing they’d learned at Kano: the Fourth Empire’s weaponry had been, quite simply, better than Dahak’s best. Vlad and Dahak had done all they could to upgrade their defenses, but if an active Fleet Central was feeling belligerent, they might very well die in the next few hours.

“Sublight in three minutes.”

“Stand by, Tactical,” Colin said softly.

“Standing by, Captain.”

The last minutes raced even as they trickled agonizingly slowly. Then Colin felt the start of supralight shutdown in his implants, and suddenly the stars were still.

“Core tap shutdown,” Dahak reported, and then, almost instantly, “Detection at ten light-minutes. Detection at thirty light-minutes. Detection at five light-hours.”

“Display system,” Colin snapped, and the sun Bia, Birhat’s G0 primary, still twelve light-hours away, was suddenly ringed with a system schematic.

“God’s Teeth!”

Jiltanith’s whisper summed up Colin’s sentiments admirably. Even at this range, the display was crowded, and more and more light codes sprang into view with mechanical precision as Sarah took them in at half the speed of light. Dahak’s scanners reached ahead, adding contact after contact, until the display gleamed with a thick, incredible dusting of symbols.

“Any response to our presence, Dahak?”

“None beyond detection, sir. I have received no challenges, nor has anyone yet responded to my hails.”

Colin nodded. It was a disappointment, for he’d felt a spurt of hope when he saw all those light codes, but it was a relief, as well. At least no one was shooting at them.

“What the hell are all those things?” he demanded.

“Unknown, sir. Passive scanners detect very few active power sources, and even with fold-space scanners, the range remains very long for active systems, but I would estimate that many of them are weapon systems. In fact—”

The computer paused suddenly, and Colin quirked an eyebrow. It was unusual, to say the least, for Dahak to break off in the middle of a sentence.

“Sir,” the computer said after a moment, “I have determined the function of certain installations.”

An arc of light codes blinked green. They formed a ring forty light-minutes from Bia—no, not a ring. As he watched, new codes, each indicating an installation much smaller than the giants in the original ring, began to appear, precisely distanced from the circle, curving away from Dahak as if to embrace the entire inner system. And there—there were two more rings of larger symbols, perpendicular to the first but offset by thirty degrees. There were thousands—millions—of the things! And more were still appearing as they came into scanner range, reaching out about Bia in a sphere.

“Well? What are they?”

“They appear, sir,” Dahak said, “to be shield generators.”

“They’re what?” Colin blurted, and he felt Vlad Chernikov’s shock echoing through the engineering sub-net.

“Shield generators,” Dahak repeated, “which, if activated, would enclose the entire inner system. The larger stations are approximately ten times as massive as the smaller ones and appear to be the primary generators.”

Colin fought a sense of incredulity. Nobody could build a shield with that much surface area! Yet if Dahak said they were shield generators, shield generators they were … but the scope of such a project!

“Whatever else it was, the Empire was no piker,” he muttered.

“As thou sayst,” Jiltanith agreed. “Yet methinks—”

“Status change,” Dahak said suddenly, and a bright-red ring circled a massive installation in distant orbit about Birhat itself. “Core tap activation detected.”

“Maker!” Tamman muttered, for the power source which had waked to sudden life was many times as powerful as Dahak’s own.

“New detection at nine-point-eight light-hours. I have a challenge.”

“Nature?” Colin snapped.

“Query for identification only, sir, but it carries a Fleet Central imperative. It is repeating.”

“Respond.”

“Acknowledged.” There was another brief silence, and then Dahak spoke again, sounding—for once—a bit puzzled. “Sir, the challenge has terminated.”