Yet he’d needed a half-dozen planetoids to do the trick, and the thought of reproducing it with a single warhead was terrifying.

“Are you serious?” he demanded.

“I am. The warhead’s total power is far lower than the aggregate you produced, but it is also much more focused. Our most conservative estimate indicates a weapon which would be capable of destroying any planet and everything within three or four hundred thousand kilometers of it.”

“Jesu!” Jiltanith’s voice was soft, and she squeezed the hilt of her fifteenth-century dagger. “Such power misliketh me, Colin. ’Twould be most terrible if such a weapon should by mischance smite one of our own worlds!”

“You got that right,” Colin muttered with a shudder. He still had nightmares over Zeta Trianguli, and if the accidental detonation of a gravitonic warhead was virtually impossible, the Empire had thought the same thing about the accidental release of its bio-weapons.

“Hold off on building the thing, Tao-ling,” he said. “Do whatever you want with the research—hell, we may need it against the Achuultani master computer!—but don’t produce any hardware without checking with me.”

“Of course, Your Majesty.”

“Any other surprises for us?”

“Not of such magnitude. Dahak and I will prepare a full report for you by the end of the week, if you wish.”

“I wish.” Colin turned his eyes to Hector MacMahan. “Any problems with the Corps, Hector?”

“Very few. We’re making out better than Gerald in terms of manpower, but then, our target force level’s lower. Some of our senior officers are having trouble adjusting to the capabilities of Imperial equipment—most of them are still drawn from the pre-Siege militaries—and we’ve had a few training snafus as a result. Amanda’s correcting most of that at Fort Hawter, and the new generation coming up doesn’t have anything to unlearn in the first place. I don’t see anything worth worrying about.”

“Fine,” Colin said. If Hector MacMahan didn’t see anything worth worrying about, then there was nothing, and he turned his attention to Horus. “How’re we doing on Earth, Horus?”

“I wish I could tell you the situation’s altered, Colin, but it hasn’t. You can’t make these kinds of changes without a lot of disruption. Conversion to the new currency’s gone more smoothly than we had any right to expect, but we’ve completely trashed the pre-Siege economy. The new one’s still pretty amorphous, and a lot of people who’re getting burned are highly pissed.”

The old man leaned back and folded his arms across his chest.

“Actually, people at both ends of the spectrum are hurting right now. The subsistence-level economies are making out better than ever before—at least starvation’s no longer a problem, and we’ve made decent medical care universally available—but virtually every skilled trade’s become obsolete, and that’s hitting the Third World hardest. The First World never imagined anything like Imperial technology before the Siege, and even there, retraining programs are mind-boggling, but at least it had a high-tech mind-set.

“Worse, it’s going to take at least another decade to make modern technology fully available, given how much of our total effort the military programs are sucking up. We’re still relying on a lot of pre-Imperial industry for bread-and-butter production, and the people running it feel discriminated against. They see themselves as stuck in dead-end jobs, and the fact that civilian bio-enhancement and modern medicine will give them two or three centuries to move up to something better hasn’t really sunk in yet.

“Bio-enhancement bottlenecks don’t help much, either. As usual, Isis is doing far better than I expected, but again, the folks in the Third World are getting squeezed worst. We’ve had to prioritize things somehow, and they simply have more people and less technical background. Some of them still think biotechnics are magic!”

“I’m glad I had someone else to dump your job on,” Colin said with heartfelt sincerity. “Is there anything else we can give you?”

“Not really.” Horus sighed. “We’re running as hard and as fast as we can already, and there simply isn’t any more capacity to devote to it. I imagine we’ll make out, and at least I’ve got some high-powered help on the Planetary Council. We learned a lot getting ready for the Siege, and we’ve managed to avoid several nasty mistakes because we did.”

“Would it help to relieve you of responsibility for Birhat?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. Most of the people here are tied directly into Gerald’s and Tao-ling’s operations, so I’m only providing support for their dependents. Of course—” Horus flashed a sudden grin “—I’m sure my lieutenant governor thinks I spend too much time off Earth anyway!”

“I imagine he does.” Colin chuckled. “But then my lieutenant governor probably felt the same way.”

“Indeed he did!” Horus laughed. “Actually, Lawrence has been a gift from the Maker,” he added more seriously. “He’s taken a tremendous amount of day-to-day duties off my back, and he and Isis make a mighty efficient team on the enhancement side.”

“Then I’m glad you’ve got him.” Colin knew Lawrence Jefferson less well than he would have liked, but what he knew impressed him. Under the Great Charter, imperial planetary governors were appointed by the Emperor, but a lieutenant governor was appointed by his immediate superior with the advice and consent of his Planetary Council. After so many centuries as an inhabitant (if not precisely a citizen) of the North American continent, Horus had chosen to turn that advice and consent function into an election, soliciting nominations from his Councilors, and Jefferson was the result. A US senator when Colin raided Anu’s enclave, he’d done yeoman work throughout the Siege, then resigned midway through his third senatorial term to assume his new post, where he’d soon made his mark as a man of charm, wit, and ability.

Now Colin turned to Ninhursag. “Anything new from ONI, ’Hursag?”

“Not really.” Like Horus and Jiltanith, the stocky, pleasantly plain woman had come to Earth aboard Dahak. Like Horus (but unlike Jiltanith, who’d been a child at the time), she’d joined Fleet Captain Anu’s mutiny, only to discover to her horror that it was but the first step in Dahak’s Chief Engineer’s plan to topple the Imperium itself. But whereas Horus had deserted Anu and launched a millennia-long guerrilla war against him, Ninhursag had been stuck in stasis in Anu’s Antarctic enclave. When she was finally awakened, she’d managed to contact the guerrillas and provide the information which had made the final, desperate attack on the enclave possible. Now, as a Battle Fleet admiral, she ran Naval Intelligence and enjoyed describing herself as Colin’s “SIC,” or “Spook In Chief.” Colin was fond of telling her her self-created acronym was entirely apt.

“We’ve still got problems,” she continued, “because Horus is right. When you stand an entire world on its head, you generate a lot of resentment. On the other hand, Earth took half a billion casualties from the Achuultani, and everybody knows who saved the rest of them. Almost all of them are willing to give you and ’Tanni the benefit of the doubt on anything you do or we do in your names. Gus and I are keeping an eye on the discontented elements, but most of them disliked one another enough before the Siege to make any kind of cooperation difficult. Even if they didn’t, they can’t do much to buck the kind of devotion the rest of the human race feels for you.”

Colin no longer blushed when people said things like that, and he nodded thoughtfully. Gustav van Gelder was Horus’ Minister of Security, and while Ninhursag understood the possibilities of Imperial technology far better than he, Gus had taught her a lot about how people worked.