“Am I ever glad to see you!” he whispered against the side of her neck.

“And I thee.” She turned her head to kiss his ear. “Greatly did I fear for thee, yet such timorousness ill beseemed one who knoweth thee so well. Hast more lives than any cat, my sweet, yet ’twould please me the better if thou wouldst spend them less freely!”

“Goddamn right,” he said fervently, drawing back to kiss her mouth. “Next time, I listen to you, by God!”

“So thou sayst … now,” she laughed, tugging on his prominent ears with both hands.

A sudden thought woke a mischievous smile as he tucked an arm around her waist to escort her back to the dais, and he raised his voice.

“Mother, say hello to my wife.”

“Hello, Your Imperial Majesty,” Mother said obediently, and Jiltanith stopped dead.

“What foolishness is this?” she demanded.

“Get used to it, honey,” Colin said, squeezing her again. “For whatever it’s worth, your shiftless husband’s brought home the bacon this time.” He grinned wryly. “In spades!”

Several hours later, a far less chipper Colin groaned and scrubbed his face with his hands. Jiltanith and he sat side-by-side on Fleet Central’s command couch while Mother reported Battle Fleet’s status, running down every fleet and sub-unit in numerical order. So far, she’d provided reports on just under two thousand fleets, task forces, and battle squadrons.

And, so far, nothing she’d had to report was good.

“Hold report, Mother,” he said, breaking into the computer’s flow.

“Holding, Sire,” Mother agreed, and Colin laughed hollowly. “Emperor”—that was a laugh. And “Warlord” was even funnier. He was a commander without a fleet! Or, more precisely, with a fleet that was useless to him.

The Empire had been too busy dying for an orderly shutdown. Herdan XXIV had lived long enough to activate Fleet Central’s emergency subroutines, placing Mother on powered-down standby to guard Birhat until relief might someday arrive, but most of Battle Fleet hadn’t been even that lucky. A few score supralight vessels had simply disappeared from Fleet Central’s records, which probably indicated that their crews had elected to flee in an effort to outrun the bio-weapon, but most of Battle Fleet’s units had been contaminated in their efforts to save civilians in the weapon’s path. The result had been both predictable and grisly, and, unlike Dahak, their computers hadn’t been smart enough to do anything about it when they found themselves without crews. Except for a handful whose core taps had been active when their last crewmen died, they’d simply returned to the nearest Fleet base and remained on station until their fusion plants exhausted their on-board mass, then drifted without life or power.

Unfortunately, none seemed to have returned to Bia itself—which made sense, given that Birhat, the first victim of the bio-weapon, had been quarantined at the very start of the Empire’s death agony. Less than a dozen active units had responded to Mother’s all-ships hypercom rally signal, and the nearest was upwards of eight hundred light-years away; Earth would be dead long before Colin could return if he waited for them them to reach Birhat.

There was a bitter irony in the fact that Birhat’s defenses remained almost fully operational. Bia’s mammoth shield, backed by Perimeter Security’s prodigious firepower, could have held anything anyone could throw at them. But everyone who needed defending was on Earth.

“Mother,” he said finally, “let’s try something different. Instead of reporting in sequence, list all mobile forces in order of proximity to Birhat.”

“Acknowledged. Listing Bia System deployments. Birhat Near-Orbit Watch Squadron: twelve heavy cruisers. Bia Deep-System Patrol Squadron: ten heavy cruisers, forty-one destroyers, nine frigates, sixty-two corvettes. Imperial Guard Flotilla: fifty-two Asgerd-class planetoids, sixteen—”

“What? Stop!” Colin shouted.

“Acknowledged,” Mother said calmly.

“What the fuck is the Imperial Guard Flotilla?!”

“Imperial Guard Flotilla,” Mother replied. “The Warlord’s personal command. Strength: fifty-two Asgerd-class planetoids and attached parasites, sixteen Trosan-class planetoids and attached parasites, and ten Vespa-class assault planetoids and attached planetary assault craft. Current location: parking orbit thirty-eight light-minutes from Bia. Status: inactive.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” Colin stared at Jiltanith. Her face was as shocked as his own, and they turned as one to glare accusingly at the console.

“Why,” Colin asked in a dangerously calm voice, “didn’t you mention them earlier?”

“Sire, you had not asked about them,” Mother said.

“I certainly did! I asked for a complete listing of Battle Fleet units!” Mother was silent, and he growled a curse at all computers which could not recognize the need to respond without specific cues. “Didn’t I?” he snarled.

“You did, Sire.”

“Then why didn’t you report them?”

“I did, Sire.”

“But you didn’t report this Imperial Guard Flotilla—” Flotilla! Jesus, it was a fleet! “—did you? Why not?”

“Sire, the Imperial Guard is not part of Battle Fleet. The Imperial Guard is raised and manned solely from the Emperor’s personal demesne.”

Colin blinked. Personal demesne? An Emperor whose personal fiefdoms could raise that kind of firepower? The thought sent a shiver down his spine. He sagged back, trembling, and a warm arm crept about him and tightened.

“All right.” He shook his head and inhaled deeply, drawing strength from Jiltanith’s presence. “Why is the Guard Flotilla inactive?”

“Power exhaustion and uncontrolled shutdown, Sire.”

“Assess probability of successful reactivation.”

“One hundred percent,” Mother said emotionlessly, and a jolt of excitement crashed through him. But slowly, he told himself. Slowly.

“Assume resources of one hundred seven thousand Battle Fleet personnel, one Utu-class planetoid, and current active and inactive automated support available in the Bia System,” he said carefully, “and compute probable time required to reactivate the Imperial Guard Flotilla to full combat readiness.”

“Impossible to reactivate to full combat readiness,” Mother replied. “Specified personnel inadequate for crews.”

“Then compute time to reactivate to limited combat readiness.”

“Computing, Sire,” Mother responded, and fell silent for a disturbingly long period. Almost a full minute passed before she spoke again. “Computation complete. Probable time required: four-point-three-nine months. Margin of error twenty-point-seven percent owing to large numbers of imponderables.”

Colin closed his eyes and felt Jiltanith tremble against him. Four months—five-and-a-half outside. It would be close, but they could do it. By all that was holy, they could do it!

“There,” Tamman said quietly as a green circle bloomed on Dahak’s visual display, ringing a tiny, gleaming dot. The dot grew as Dahak approached, and additional dots appeared, spreading out in a loose necklace of worldlets.

“I see them,” Colin replied, still luxuriating in his return to Command One and a world he understood. “Big bastards, aren’t they, Dahak?”

“I compute that the largest out-mass Dahak by over twenty-five percent. I am not prepared to speculate upon the legitimacy of their parentage.”

Colin chuckled. Dahak had been much more willing to engage in informality since his return from Fleet Central, as if he recognized Colin’s shock at suddenly finding himself an emperor. Or perhaps the computer was simply glad to have him back. Dahak was a worrier where friends were concerned.

He watched the planetoids grow. If Vlad was right about the Empire’s technology, those ships would be monsters in action—and monsters were exactly what they needed.