David Weber - Empire from the Ashes

"Acknowledged," he said in his frostiest tones, but Colin knew that was the easy part. He smiled crookedly at Jiltanith, glad they were alone, and gave it his best shot.

"'Tanni, I don't want to argue with my XO, either."

"Dost'a not, indeed?" she flared. "Then contend with thy wife, lackwit! Scarce one thin day in this system, and already thou wouldst risk thy life?! What maggot hath devoured thy brain entire?! Or mayhap 'tis vanity speaks, for most assuredly 'tis not wisdom!"

"It isn't vanity, and you know it. We simply don't have time to waste."

" Time , thou sayst?!" she spat like an angry cat. "Dost'a think my wits addled as thine own? Howsoe'er thou dost proceed, yet will we never return to Terra ere the Achuultani scouts! And if that be so, then where's the need o' witless haste? Four months easily, mayhap five, may we spend here and still out-speed the true incursion back to Earth—and well thou knowest!"

"All right," he said, and her eyes narrowed at his unexpected agreement, "but assume you're right and we start poking around. What happens when we do something Fleet Central doesn't like, 'Tanni? Until we know what it might object to, we can't know what might get everyone aboard this ship killed. So until we establish communications with it, we can't do anything else , either!"

Jiltanith's fingers flexed like the cat she so resembled, but she drew a breath and made herself consider his argument.

"Aye, there's summat in that," she admitted, manifestly against her will. "Yet still 'tis true we have spent but little time upon the task. Must thou so soon essay this madness?"

"I'm afraid so," he sighed. "If this is Fleet Central, it's either Ali Baba's Cave or Pandora's Box, and we have to find out which. Assuming any of Battle Fleet's still operational—and the way this thing powered itself up is the first sign something may be—we don't know how long it'll take to assemble it. We need every minute we can buy, 'Tanni."

She turned away, pacing, arms folded beneath her breasts, shoulders tight with a fear Colin knew was not for herself. He longed to tell her he understood, but he knew better than to... and that she knew already.

She turned back to him at last, eyes shadowed, and he knew he'd won.

"Aye," she sighed, hugging him tightly and pressing her face into his shoulder. "My heart doth rail against it, yet my mind—my cursed mind—concedeth. But, oh, my dearest dear, would I might forbid thee this!"

"I know," he whispered into the sweet-smelling silk of her hair.

Colin felt like an ant beneath an impending foot. Fleet Central's armored flank seemed to trap him, ready to crush him between itself and the blue-white sphere of Birhat, and he hoped Cohanna wasn't monitoring his bio read-outs.

He nudged his cutter to a stop. A green and yellow beacon marked a small hatch, but though his head ached from concentrating on his implants, he felt no response. He timed the beacon's sequence carefully.

"Dahak, I have a point-seven-five-second visual flash, green-amber-amber-green-amber, on a Class Seven hatch."

"Assuming Fleet conventions have not changed, Captain, that should indicate an active access point for small craft."

"I know." Colin swallowed, wishing his mouth weren't quite so dry. "Unfortunately, my implants can't pick up a thing."

Colin felt a sudden, almost audible click deep in his skull and blinked at a brief surge of vertigo as a not quite familiar tingle pulsed in his feed.

"I've got something. Still not clear, but—" The tingle suddenly turned sharp and familiar. "That's it!"

"Acknowledged, Captain," Dahak said. "The translation programs devised for Omega Three did not perfectly meet our requirements, but I believe my new modifications to your implant software should suffice. I caution you again, however, that additional, inherently unforeseeable difficulties may await."

"Understood." Colin edged closer, insinuating his thoughts cautiously into the hatch computers, and something answered. It was an ID challenge, but it tasted... odd.

He keyed his personal implant code with exquisite care, and for an instant just long enough to feel relieved disappointment, nothing happened. Then the hatch slid open, and he dried his palms on his uniform trousers.

"Well, people," he murmured, "door's open. Wish me luck."

"So do we all," Jiltanith told him softly. "Take care, my love."

The next half-hour was among the most nerve-wracking in Colin's life. His basic implant codes had sufficed to open the hatch, but that only roused the internal security systems.

There was a strangeness to their challenges, a dogged, mechanical persistence he'd never encountered from Dahak, but they were thorough. At every turn, it seemed, there were demands for identification on ever deeper security levels. He found himself responding with bridge officer codes he hadn't known he knew and realized that the computers were digging deep into his challenge-response conditioning. No wonder Druaga had felt confident Anu could never override his own final orders to Dahak! Colin had never guessed just how many security codes Dahak had buried in his own implants and subconscious.

But he reached the central transit shaft at last, and felt both relief and a different tension as he plugged into the traffic sub-net and requested transport to Fleet Central's Command Alpha. He half-expected yet another challenge, but the routing computers sent back a ready signal, and he stepped out into the shaft.

One thing about the terror of the unknown, he thought wryly as the shaft took him and hurled him inward: it neatly displaced such mundane fears as being mashed to paste by the transit shaft's gravitonics!

The shaft deposited him outside Command Alpha in a brightly-lit chamber big enough for an assault shuttle. The command deck hatch bore no unit ensign, as if Fleet Central was above such things. There was only the emblem of the Fourth Empire: the Imperium's starburst surmounted by an intricate diadem.

Colin looked about, natural senses and implants busy, and paled as he detected the security systems guarding this gleaming portal. Heavy grav guns in artfully hidden housings were backed up by the weapons Vlad had dubbed warp guns, and their targeting systems were centered on him. He tried to straighten his hunched shoulders and approached the huge hatch with a steady tread.

Almost to his surprise, it licked aside, and more silent hatches—twice as many as guarded Dahak 's Command One—opened as he walked down the brightly lit tunnel, fighting a sense of entrapment. And then, at last, he stepped out into the very heart and brain of Battle Fleet, and the last hatch closed behind him.

It wasn't as impressive as Command One, was his first thought—but only his first. It lacked the gorgeous, perfect holo projections of Dahak 's bridge, but the softly bright chamber was far, far larger. Dedicated hypercom consoles circled its walls, labeled with names he knew in flowing Imperial script, names which had been only half-believed-in legends in his implant education from Dahak. Systems and sectors, famous Fleet bases and proud formations—the names vanished into unreadable distance, and Quadrant Command nets extended out across the floor, the ranked couches and consoles too numerous to count, driving home the inconceivable vastness of the Empire.

It made him feel very, very insignificant.

Yet he was here... and those couches were empty. He had come eight hundred light-years to reach this enormous room, come from a planet teeming with humanity to this silence no voice had broken in forty-five millennia, and all this might and power of empire were but the work of Man.

He crossed the shining deck, bootheels ringing on jeweled mosaics, and ghosts hovered in the corners, watchful and measuring. He wondered what they made of him.