"What?" Hatcher asked curiously.

"The fact that they may just be right."

The Traffic Police flyer screamed through the Washington State night at Mach twelve. That was pushing the envelope in atmosphere, even for a gravitonic drive, but this one looked bad, and the tense-faced pilot concentrated on his flying while his partner drove his scan systems at max.

An update came in from Flight Control Central, and the electronics officer cursed as he scanned it. Jesus! An entire family—five people, three of them kids! Accidents were rare with Imperial technology, but when they happened they tended to happen with finality, and he prayed this one was an exception.

He turned back to his sensors as the crash site came into range and leaned forward, as if he could force them to tell him what he wanted to see.

He couldn't, and he slumped back in his couch.

"Might as well slow down, Jacques," he said sadly.

The pilot looked sideways at him, and he shook his head.

"All we've got is a crater. A big one. Looks like they must've gone in at better than Mach five... and I don't see any personnel transponders."

"Merde," Sergeant Jacques DuMont said softly, and the screaming flyer slowed its headlong pace.

Underway holo displays had always fascinated Sean, especially because he knew how little they resembled what a human eye would actually have seen.

Under the latest generation Enchanach drive, for example, a ship covered distance at eight hundred and fifty times light-speed, yet it didn't really "move" at all. It simply flashed out of existence here and reappeared over there. The drive built its actual gravity masses in less than a femtosecond, but the entire cycle took almost a full trillionth of a second in normal space between transpositions. That interval was imperceptible, and there was no Doppler effect to distort vision, since during those tiny periods of time the ship was effectively motionless, but any human eye would have found it impossible to sort out the visual stimuli as its point of observation shifted by two hundred and fifty-four million kilometers every second.

So the computers generated an artificial image, a sort of tachyon's-eye view of the universe. The glorious display enfolded the bridge in a three-hundred-sixty-degree panorama whose nearer stars moved visibly and gave humanity the comforting illusion of moving through a comprehensible universe.

The imaging computers confronted different parameters at sublight speeds. The Fifth Imperium's gravitonic drive had a maximum sublight velocity of a smidgen over seventy percent of light-speed (missiles could top .8 c before their drives lost phase lock and Bad Things happened) and countered mass and inertia. That conferred essentially unlimited maneuverability and allowed maximum velocity to be attained very quickly—not instantly; a vessel's mass determined the efficiency curves of its drive—without turning a crew into anchovy paste. But unlike a ship under Enchanach drive, sublight ships did move relative to the universe, and so had to worry about things like relativity. Time dilation became an important factor aboard them, and so did the Doppler effect. To the unaided eye, stars ahead tended to vanish off the upper end of the visible spectrum, while those astern red-shifted off its bottom.

Sean found the phenomenon eerily beautiful, and he'd loved the moments when his instructors had allowed him to switch the computer imaging out of the display to enjoy the "starbow" on training flights. Unfortunately, it wasn't very useful, so the computers and FTL fold-space scanners normally were called upon once more to produce an artificially "real" view.

Then there was hyper-space. Imperial Terra, like all Battle Fleet planetoids, had three distinct drive systems: sublight, Enchanach, and hyper, and her top speed in hyper was over thirty-two hundred times that of light. Yet "hyper-space" was more a convenient label for something no human could envision than an accurate description, for it consisted of many "bands"—actually a whole series of entirely different spaces—whose seething tides of energy were lethal to any object outside a drive field. Even with Imperial technology, human eyes found h-space's gray, crawling nothingness... disturbing. Vertigo was almost instantaneous; longer exposure led to more serious consequences, up to and including madness. Ships in normal space could detect the hyper traces of ships in hyper; ships in hyper were blind. They could "see" neither into normal space nor through hyper-space, and so their displays were blank.

Or, more precisely, they showed other things. Aboard Imperial Terra, Captain McNeal preferred holo projections of his native Galway coast, but the actual choice depended on who had the watch. Commander Yu, for example, liked soothing, abstract light sculptures, while Captain Susulov, the exec, had a weakness for Jerusalem street scenes. The only constant was the holographic numerals suspended above the astrogator's station: a scarlet countdown showing the time remaining to emergence at the ship's programmed coordinates.

Now Sean sat at Commander Yu's side, watching the sun set over Galway Bay while Captain McNeal waited for his ship to emerge from hyper in the Urahan System, twelve days—and over a hundred light-years—from Bia.

Imperial Terra dropped back into humanity's universe sixty-three light-minutes from the F3 star Urahan. The Urahan System had never been a Fleet base, but a survey ship had found a surprising number of planetoids orbiting in its outer reaches... for reasons which became grimly clear once the survey crew managed to reactivate the first derelict's computers.

No one had ever lived on any of Urahan's planets, so starships contaminated by the bio-weapon could do no harm there. As ship after ship became infected and their people began to sicken, their officers had taken them to Urahan or some other unpopulated system and placed them in parking orbit.

And then they'd died.

Galway Bay vanished. Scores of planetoids appeared, drifting against the stars, gleaming dimly in the reflected light of Urahan, and Sean shivered as he watched six of Terra's parasites move across the display, carrying forty thousand people towards the transports and repair ships of the Ministry of Reconstruction keeping station on those dead hulls.

All his life, Sean MacIntyre had known what had overwhelmed the Fourth Empire. He'd seen the ships brought back to Bia and read about the disaster, studied it, written papers on it for the Academy. He knew about the bio-weapon... but now he understood something he'd never quite grasped.

Those dead ships were real, and each had once been crewed by two hundred thousand people who'd worn the uniform he now wore. Real people who'd died because they'd tried to assist planets teeming with billions of other real people. And when they knew they, too, were infected, they'd come here to die rather than seek help for themselves and endanger still others.

The bio-weapon itself had died at last, but through all the dusty millennia, those ships had remained, waiting. And now, at last, humanity had returned to reclaim them and weigh itself against the criminal folly which had killed their crews... and the courage with which they'd died.

He watched the display, measuring himself against those long-dead crews, and a part of him that was very young hoped Captain McNeal would hyper out for Thegran soon.

Fleet Commander Yu Lin had been to Urahan before, and she'd watched her snotty as they dropped out of hyper. It would never do to admit it, but she rather liked Mid/4 MacIntyre. Crown Prince or no, he was hardworking, conscientious, and unfailingly polite, yet she'd wondered how such a cheerful extrovert would react to Urahan's death fleet.