"I believe the girls are correct, Sean," Brashan said. "I confess your plan seems less reckless than I assumed, but they're still right, and there's no need to charge in precipitously."
"Tam? You agree with them?"
"Yes," Tamman said positively, and Sean shrugged.
"All right, I can be big about these things. What say we plan our insertion to set us down over the curve of the planet from the site?"
High Priest Vroxhan sat in his gilded throne and surveyed the worshipers with studied calm, trying to assess their mood.
Mother Church had been shaken to her foundations, but by God's blessing the Trial had been upon them and then past so quickly few outside the Inner Circle had known a thing about it till it was over. The word had spread on talmahk wings after that, and the people were abuzz with the story—which, he was certain, had grown more terrible with each telling—but they'd managed to suppress all mention of the Voice's unknown words and his own desperate improvisation. Vroxhan wasn't certain that was necessary, but he was certain it would be far wiser for the Inner Circle to sort it out themselves before they risked the faith of others by revealing all the facts.
Yet however unorthodox events might have been, the outcome was clear: the Trial had come, and the demons had been smitten as the Writ promised. Thousands of years of faith had been vindicated, and that was what this solemn festival of thanksgiving and the priestly conclave to follow were all about.
The last human soul entered the packed courtyard of the Sanctum, and he raised one hand in blessing from his throne as the choir sang the majestic opening notes of the Gloria.
The last four hours had been frustrating.
Israel had crept in at the paltry velocity of .2 c, wrapped in the stealth field that turned her into a black nothingness. Her passive systems had peered ahead, poised on a hair-trigger to warn of any active detection systems, but she'd been blind to anything but fairly powerful energy sources, and curiosity was killing her crew.
Harriet had, indeed, localized the power source to within fifty kilometers, which was ample for warheads of the power they carried, but Sean longed to examine the planet directly. Unfortunately, Israel's optical systems, pitiful compared to active fold-space scanners at the best of times, were degraded by the stealth field which protected her. They could have used the drive to impart a higher initial velocity and coasted the whole way without a stealth field, but they could neither have maneuvered nor slowed for atmospheric insertion without going into stealth. Sean had no idea how the defenses would react to an "asteroid" that popped in and out of detectability, and he didn't want to find out; he was taking a big enough chance by coming this close before he dropped stealth in the first place. More importantly, he wanted to be able to turn and creep away if he saw any sign of changing power levels on the orbital bases. It was always possible the defenses might pick up something without being able to localize Israel and shoot, and if he'd come in any faster the drive settings needed to kill the ship's velocity might have burned through the stealth field and given them a target.
But they were coming up on the two-light-minute mark, and he lay tense in his command couch as their speed fell still further. Tamman and Brashan coordinated their departments carefully, reducing drive power and velocity in tandem, and Sean grunted his satisfaction as the drive died at last. Right on the mark, he noted: exactly 20,000 KPS. The internal gravity was still up, but Israel no longer had any emission signature at all.
"Good, guys," he murmured, then glanced at Sandy. "Take the stealth field down."
"Coming down now," she replied tautly, and Sean watched through a cross feed as she powered down their cloak of invisibility with the same exquisite care Tamman had taken.
The entire crew held its collective breath as Harriet consulted her passive systems very, very carefully. Then she relaxed.
"Looks good, Sean." Her voice was hushed, as if she feared the defenses might hear. "The platform stasis fields're steady as a rock."
Her crewmates' breath hissed out, and Sandy looked up with a grin.
"We're heeeere," she crooned, and the others laughed out loud.
"Of course we are." Sean grinned back at her, elated by his ploy's success. "But we're just a great big rock." He glanced smugly at Tamman. "Looks like the defenses are programmed to kill only ships, and without emissions, we ain't a ship."
"I hate it when he's right," Sandy told the others. "Fortunately, it doesn't happen often."
That was good for another chuckle, and the last of the hovering tension faded as Sean waved a fist in her direction. Then he sat up briskly.
"All right. Bring up the optics and see what we can see, Harry."
"Bringing them up now," his sister said, and the blue and white sphere of the planet swelled, displacing the starfield from the display as she engaged the forward optical head. They were almost thirty-six million kilometers away, but surface features leapt into startling clarity.
Sean stared eagerly at seas and rivers, the rumpled lines of mountain ranges, green swathes of forest. Theirs were the first human (or Narhani) eyes to behold that planet in forty-five thousand years, and it was lovely beyond belief. None of them had dared hope to see this living, breathing beauty at the end of their weary voyage, but incredible as it seemed, the planet lived. Here in the midst of the Fourth Empire's self-wrought devastation, it lived.
His eyes devoured it, and then he stiffened.
"Hey! What the—?"
"Look! Look!"
"My God, there's—!"
"Jesus, is that—?!"
An incredulous babble filled the command deck as all of them saw it at once. Harriet didn't need any instructions; she was already zooming in on the impossible sight. The holo of the planet vanished, replaced by a full-power closeup of one tiny part of its surface, and the confusion of voices died as they stared at the seaport city in silence.
"There's no question, is there?" Sean murmured.
"Damn." Tamman shook his head. "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. Hell, I'm still not sure I am seeing it!"
"You're seeing it," Sandy told him quietly. "And maybe it's a good thing we didn't just zap the control center after all."
"No question," Tamman agreed, and Israel's crew shared a shudder at the thought of what they might have unleashed against a populated world.
"But I don't understand it," Brashan mused. "Life, yes—there's life on Birhat, so it has to be theoretically possible. But people? Humans?" His crest waved in perplexity and a double-thumbed hand rubbed his long snout.
"There's only one answer," Sean said. "This time quarantine worked."
"It seems impossible," Harriet sighed. "Wonderful, but impossible."
"You got that right." Sean frowned at the large, fortified town they were currently watching. "But this only raises more questions, doesn't it? Like what happened to their tech base? Their defenses are still operable, and the HQ is down there, so how come they're all running around like that?"
He waved at the image, where animal-drawn plows turned soil in a patchwork of fields. The small, low buildings looked well-enough made, but they were built of wood and stone, and many were roofed in thatch. Yet the eroded stumps of an ancient city of the Fourth Empire lay barely thirty kilometers from the town's crenulated walls.
"It doesn't make much sense, does it?" Sandy replied.
"You can say that again. How in hell can someone decivilize in the midst of that much technology? Just from the ruins we've already plotted, this planet had millions of people. You'd think poking around in the wreckage, let alone having at least one still operating high-tech enclave in their midst, would get the current population started on science. But even if it hasn't, where did the original techies go?"