David Weber - Empire from the Ashes

It did.

Sean sat beside the park deck lake, skimming stones across the water. A bio-enhanced arm could send them for incredible distances, and he watched the skittering splashes vanish into the mist while his implants' low-powered force field shielded him from the falling rain.

Feet crunched on wet gravel behind him, and he read the implant codes without looking.

"Hi, guys," he said. "How d'you like Commander Godard's weather?"

He stood and turned to grin at his friends. This was the first time they'd all been off watch at once since leaving Urahan, and Terra 's logistics officer had decided the park decks needed a good rain. Fleet Commander Godard was a nice guy, and Sean didn't think he'd done it on purpose.

"I like it." Brashan trotted down to the lake and waded out belly-deep into the water. Unlike his human friends, he was in uniform, but Narhani uniform consisted solely of a harness to support his belt pouches and display his insignia, and Sean felt a familiar spurt of envy. Brashan had to spend more time polishing his leather and brightwork, but he'd never had to worry about getting a spot out of his dress trousers in his life.

"It reminds me of spring on Narhan," Brashan added, folding down into the water until only his shoulders showed and extending the fan of his cranial frill in bliss. "Of course, the air's still too thin, but the weather's nice."

"You would think so." Tamman kicked off his deck shoes and perched on the outer hull of a trimaran, dangling his feet in the water. "For myself, I'd prefer a bit less drizzle."

"You and me both," Sean agreed, though he wasn't sure that was entirely true. The humidity emphasized the smell of life and greenery, and he had his sensory boosters on high to enjoy the earthy perfume.

"Still want to go sailing?" Sandy asked.

"Maybe." Sean skimmed another stone into the mist. "I checked the weather schedule. This is supposed to clear up in about an hour."

"Well I'd rather wait until it does," Harriet said.

"Yeah." Sean selected another stone. "I suppose we could go up to Gym Deck Seven while we wait."

"No way." Tamman shook his head. "I poked my head in on the way down, and Lieutenant Williams is running another 'voluntary participation' unarmed combat session up there."

"Yuck." Sean threw his rock with a grimace. His human friends and he had played and worked out with Dahak's training remotes since they could walk. They were about the only members of the crew who were both junior to Williams and able to give him a run for his money, but he kept producing sneaky (and bruising) moves they hadn't seen yet whenever they got him in trouble.

"Double yuck," Sandy agreed. She was nimble and blindingly fast, even for an enhanced human, but her small size was a distinct disadvantage on the training mat.

"Oh, well," Harriet sighed, heading for the trimaran and beginning to unlace the sail covers, and Sean laughed as he climbed aboard to help her.

Deep in Imperial Terra 's heart Comp Cent silently oversaw her every function, monitoring, adjusting, reporting back to its human masters.

Terra was somewhat larger than an Asgerd -class planetoid, but she carried far fewer people, mostly because her sublight parasites, while larger and more powerful than their predecessors, had been designed around smaller crews. Horus' old Nergal had required three hundred crewmen, and even the Fourth Empire's sublight battleships had needed crews of over a hundred. With their Dahak-designed computers, Imperial Terra 's were designed for core crews of only thirty, and even that was more of a social than a combat requirement.

Yet Terra 's personnel still numbered over eighty thousand. Each of them was superbly trained, ready for any emergency, but all of those eighty thousand people depended upon what their computers told them and relied upon Comp Cent to do what it was told. From the engineers tending the roaring energy whirlpool of her core tap to the logistics staff managing her park decks and life support, they worked in an intimate fusion with their cybernetic henchmen, united through their neural feeds.

Continuous self-diagnostic programs scrutinized every aspect of those computers' operations, alert for any malfunction while Imperial Terra 's crewmen stood their watches and monitored their displays, and those displays told them all was well as their ship tore through hyper. But all was not well, for none of Imperial Terra 's crew knew about the Alpha Priority commands a programmer now dead with his entire family had inserted into their ship's computer, and so none of them knew Comp Cent had become a traitor.

Sandy MacMahan crossed the cool, cavernous bay to the gleaming flank of the sublight battleship Israel . Number six personnel hatch stood open, and she trotted up the ramp, wondering where Fleet Commander Jury was.

She poked her head in through the hatch and blinked in surprise.

"Sean? What're you doing here?"

"Me? What're you doing here? I got a memo from Commander Jury to report for an unscheduled training exercise."

"So did I." Sandy frowned. "Dragged me out of the sack, too."

"Too bad, considering how much you need your beauty sleep."

"At least beauty sleep does me some good, Beak Schnoz," she shot back, and Sean grinned and rubbed his nose, acknowledging her hit. "But speaking of Commander Jury, where is she?"

"Dunno. Let's check the command deck."

Sandy nodded, and they stepped into the transit shaft. The gravitonic system whisked them away... and the hatch closed silently behind them.

The midshipmen stepped out of the shaft onto the command deck and into a fresh surprise. Harriet, Tamman, and Brashan were already there, and they looked just as puzzled as Sandy and Sean felt. There was a moment of confused questions and counter-questions, and then Sean held up his hands.

"Whoa! Hold on. Look, Sandy and I both got nabbed by Commander Jury for some extra hands-on parasite training time. What're you guys doing here?"

"The same thing," Harriet said. "And I don't understand it. I just finished a two-hour session in the simulator last watch."

"Yeah," Tamman said, "and if we're here, where's Commander Jury?"

"Maybe we'd better ask her." Sean flipped his neural feed into Imperial Terra 's internal com net... and his eyes widened as the system kicked him right back out. That had never happened before.

He thought for a moment, then shrugged. Procedure frowned on using fold-space coms aboard ship, but something decidedly strange was going on, so he activated his implant com. Or, rather, he tried to activate it.

"Shit!" He glanced up and saw the others looking at him. "I can't get into the com net—and something's blanketing my fold-space com!"

Sandy stared at him in astonishment, and then her face went blank as she tried to contact Jury. Nothing happened, and a tiny flame of uncertainty kindled in her eyes. It wasn't fear—not yet—but it was closer to that than Sean liked to see from Sandy.

"I can't get in, either."

"I don't like this," Tamman muttered. Harriet nodded agreement, and Brashan stood and headed for the transit shaft.

"I think we'd better find out what's going on, and—"

"Three-minute warning," a calm, female voice interrupted the Narhani. "Parasite launch in three minutes. Assume launch stations."

Sean whirled to the command console. Launch stations? You couldn't launch a parasite in hyper-space without destroying parasite and mother ship alike—any moron knew that!—but the boards were blinking to life, and his jaw clenched as the launch clock began to count down.