“Captain, look here.” Ellen Gregory, Sarah Meir’s Assistant Astrogator, placed a sighting circle of her own on the display, picking out a single starship. “What do you make of that, sir?”

Colin looked, then looked again. The stupendous sphere floating in space was only roughly similar to the only Imperial planetoid he’d ever seen, but one thing was utterly familiar. A vast, three-headed dragon spread its wings across the gleaming hull.

“Well looky there,” he murmured. “Dahak, what d’you make of that?”

According to the data Fleet Central downloaded to my data base,” Dahak replied, “that is His Imperial Majesty’s Planetoid Dahak, Hull Number Seven-Three-Six-Four-Four-Eight-Niner-Two-Five.”

“Another Dahak?”

“It is a proud name in Battle Fleet.” Dahak sounded a bit miffed. “Rather like the many ships named Enterprise in your own United States Navy. According to the data, this is the twenty-third ship to bear the name.”

“It is, huh? Well, which one are you?”

“This unit is the eleventh of the name.”

“I see. Well, in order to avoid confusion, we’ll just refer to this young whippersnapper as Dahak Two, if that’s all right with you, Dahak.”

“Noted,” Dahak said calmly, and continued to close on the silently waiting, millennia-dead hulls they intended to resurrect.

“By the Maker, I’ve got it!”

Colin jumped half out of his couch as Cohanna’s holo image materialized on Command One. The biosciences officer looked terrible, her hair awry and her uniform wrinkled, but her eyes were bright with triumph.

“Try penicillin,” he advised sourly, and she looked blank, then grinned.

“Sorry, sir. I meant I’ve figured out what happened on Birhat—why it’s got that incredible bio-system. I found it in Mother’s data base.”

“Oh?” Colin sat straighter, his eyes more intent. “Give!”

“It’s simple, really. The zoos—the Imperial Family’s zoos.”

“Zoos?” It was Colin’s turn to look blank.

“Yes. You see, the Imperial Family had an immense zoological garden. Over thirty different planets’ flora and fauna in sealed, self-sufficient planetary habitats. Apparently, they lasted out the plague. I’d guess the automated systems responsible for restraining plant growth failed first in one of them, and the thing cracked. Once it did, its inhabitants could get out, and the same vegetation attacked the exterior of other surviving habitats. Over the years, still more oxy-nitrogen habitats were opened up and started spreading to reclaim the planet. That’s why we’ve got such a screwy damned ecology. We’re looking at the survivors of a dozen different planetary bio-spheres after forty-five thousand years of natural selection!”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Colin mused. “Good work, Cohanna. I’m impressed you could keep concentrating on that kind of problem at a time like this.”

“Time like this?”

“While we’re making our final approach to the Imperial Guard,” Colin said, raising his eyebrows, and Cohanna wrinkled her nose.

“What’s an Imperial Guard?”

Vlad Chernikov shuddered as he and Baltan floated down the lifeless, lightless transit shaft. This, he thought, is what Dahak would have become if Anu had succeeded all those years ago.

It was depressing in more ways than one. Actually seeing this desolation gnawed away at the confidence that anything could be done about it, and even if he succeeded in rejecting the counsel of despair, he could see it would be a horrific task. Dead power rooms, exhausted fuel mass, control rooms and circuit runs which had never been properly stasissed when the ship died. There was even meteor damage, for the collision shields had died with everything else. One of the planetoids might well be beyond repair, judging by the huge hole punched into its south pole.

Still, he reminded himself, everyone had his or her own problems. Caitrin O’Rourke was practically in tears over the hydroponic farms, and Geran was furious to find so much perfectly good equipment left out of stasis. But Tamman was probably the most afflicted of all, for the magazines had been left without stasis, as well, and the containment fields on every anti-matter weapon had failed. At least the warhead fail-safes had worked as designed and rotated them into hyper as the fields went down, but huge chunks of magazine bulkheads had gone with them. Of course, if they hadn’t worked…

He shuddered again, concentrating on the grav sled he and Baltan rode. It was far slower than an operable transit shaft, but they dared not use even its full speed. They were no transit computer to whip around unexpected bends in the system!

He craned his neck, reading the lettering above a hatch. Gamma-One-One-Nine-One-One. According to Dahak’s downloaded schematics, they were getting close to Engineering.

So they were. He tapped Baltan’s shoulder and pointed, and the commander nodded inside the force bubble of his helmet. The sled angled for the side of the shaft and nudged against the hatch—which, of course, stayed firmly shut.

Chernikov smothered a curse, then grinned as he recalled Colin’s account of his “coronation.” The Captain—Emperor!—had exhausted the entire crew’s allocation of profanity for at least a month, by Chernikov’s estimate. He chuckled at the thought and climbed off the sled, dragging a cable from its power plant behind him and muttering Slavic maledictions. No power meant no artificial gravity, which—unfortunately—did not mean no gravity. A planetoid generated an impressive grav field all its own, and turned bulkheads into decks and decks into bulkheads when the power failed.

He found the emergency power receptacle and plugged in, and the hatch slid open. He waved, and Baltan ghosted the sled inside, angling its powerful lamps to pick out the emergency lighting system.

Chernikov did some more cable-dragging and, after propitiating Murphy with a few curses, brought it alive. Light bathed Central Engineering, and the two engineers began to explore.

The long-dead core tap drew them like a magnet, and Chernikov felt a tingle of awe as his eyes and implants traced circuit runs and control systems. This thing was at least five times as powerful as Dahak’s, and he wouldn’t have believed it could be without seeing it. But what in the galaxy could they have needed that much power for? Even allowing for the more powerful energy armament and shield, there had to be some other reason—

His thoughts died as his implants followed a massive power shunt which shouldn’t have been there. He clambered over a control panel which had become the floor, slightly vertiginous as he tried to orient himself, then gasped.

“Baltan! Look at this!”

“I know,” his assistant said softly, approaching from the far side. “I’ve been following the control runs.”

“Can you believe this?”

“Does it matter? And it would certainly explain all the power demand.”

“True.” Chernikov moved a few more yards, examining his find carefully, then shook his head. “I must tell the Captain about this.”

He keyed his com implant, and Colin answered a moment later, sounding a bit harassed—not surprisingly, considering that every other search party must be finding marvels of its own to report.

“Captain, I am in Mairsuk’s Central Engineering, and you would not believe what I am looking at.”

“Try me,” Colin said wearily. “I’m learning to believe nineteen impossible things before breakfast every day.”

“Very well, here is number twenty. This ship has both Enchanach and hyper capability.”

There was a pregnant pause.

“What,” Colin finally asked very carefully, “did you say?”

“I said, sir, that we have here both an Enchanach and a hyper drive, engineered down to a size that fits both into a single hull. I am not yet positive, but I would judge that the combined mass of both units is less than that of Dahak’s Enchanach Drive, alone.”