"Some kind of home-grown plague?" Tamman suggested.

"Unlikely." Brashan shook his head in the human expression of negation. "Their medical science should have been able to handle anything short of the bio-weapon itself."

"How about a war?" Sandy offered. "It's been a long time, guys. They could have bombed themselves out."

"I suppose so, but then why aren't more of those towers flattened?" Sean objected. "Imperial warheads shouldn't have left anything."

"Not necessarily." Harriet watched the display, toying with a lock of her hair. "Oh, you're right about gravitonics, but suppose they used small nukes or dusted each other? Or whipped up their own bio-weapons?"

"I suppose that's possible, but it still doesn't explain why they never rebuilt. Maybe they lost their original tech base—I can't see how, with that ground station still up, but let's concede the possibility. But we're still looking at a city-building culture spread over at least two continents. It looks to me like they've got about as many people as a pre-tech agrarian economy can support—more than I would have expected, in fact; their agriculture must be more efficient than it looks. But given that kind of population base, why haven't they developed their own indigenous technology?"

"Good point," Tamman agreed, "and I wish I could answer it, but I can't. It's like they've got some kind of technological blind spot."

"Yeah, but then they go and put their biggest city right on top of where we figure the defensive HQ has to be." Sean shook his head in disgust. "It's right in the middle of their largest land mass, and there's not a river within fifty kilometers. With the transportation systems we've seen, that's a hell of an unlikely place for a city to grow up naturally. Look at the canal system they've built. There's over two hundred klicks of it, all to move stuff into the city. There has to be some reason for its location, and I can only think of one magnet. Except, of course, that that particular magnet doesn't make any sense on a planet that doesn't know about technology!"

"Well," Sandy sighed, "I guess there's only one way to find out."

"Guess so." Sean's calm tone fooled none of his friends. Then he grinned. "And whatever the reason, Mom and Dad are going to be mighty glad to hear we've found another planet that's not only habitable but stuffed full of people as well!"

The sublight battleship Israel split atmosphere in a long, shallow descent that wrapped her in a shroud of fire. Her crew rode their couches, feeling their ship quiver with the fury of her descent as her bow plating began to glow. Heat sensors soared as the thick battle steel armor burned cherry-red, then yellow, then white. The terrible glow crept back along her hull, the air blazed before her as she battered a column of superheated atmosphere out of her path, and Sean MacIntyre monitored his instruments and tried to stay calm.

The maneuvering computers waited patiently to engage their carefully written program and stop them dead in the bellow of the drive's fury. It was going to be a rough ride, but so far everything was nominal, and they'd already picked out an alpine valley hiding place fifteen hundred kilometers from the planet's largest city. It was going to be fine, he told himself for the thousandth time, and grinned mirthlessly at his own insistence.

High Priest Vroxhan stood on his balcony and watched the night sky burn. His servants had summoned him almost hysterically, and he'd charged out in only his under-robe to see the terrible strand of fire with his own eyes. Now he did see it, and it touched him with ice.

Shooting stars he had seen before, and wondered why the work of God's Hands should abandon the glorious firmament for the surface of the world to which the demons' treachery had banished man, but never had he seen one so huge. No one had, and he watched it blaze above The Temple like the very Finger of God and trembled.

Could it be—?

No! God's Wrath had slain the demons, and he suppressed the blasphemous thought quickly. But not quickly enough. He'd thought it, and if he had, how much more might the ignorant of his flock think the same thing?

He inhaled sharply as the beautiful, terrifying light vanished beyond the western peaks. Would it land? If so, where? Far beyond the borders of Aris—probably even beyond those of Malagor. In Cherist, then? Or Showmah?

He shook himself and turned away, hurrying back into the warmth of his apartments from the chill spring night. It couldn't be the demons, he told himself firmly, and if not they, then it must, indeed, be God's handiwork, as all the world was. He nodded with fresh assurance. No doubt God had sent it as a sign and reminder of His deliverance, and he must see the truth was spread before the less faith-filled panicked.

He closed the balcony door and beckoned to a servant. His messages must be ready for the semaphore tower by first light.

Chapter Seventeen

Colin MacIntyre paused outside the larger state dining room to watch three harassed humans and a dozen robots sorting the countless bags of old-fashioned mail into paper breastworks. No one noticed him in the doorway, and as he resumed his journey towards the balcony, he made a note to divert still more human staff to reading the letters while he tried to sort out his own feelings.

Those bags, and the hundreds which had preceded them in the past few days, proved that whatever outrages the Sword of God might wreak and however well-hidden their true enemy might be, his subjects cared. Those letters weren't just formal, official nothings from heads of state. They came from people all over the Fifth Imperium, expressing their joy—and relief—that their Empress was pregnant.

Yet his own joy, as 'Tanni's, was bittersweet. Over two years had passed, but the aching void remained. Perhaps the new children (for the doctors had already confirmed it would be twins once more) would fill that emptiness. He hoped so. But he also hoped he and 'Tanni could resist the need to make them fill it. Sean and Harriet had been special. No one could replace them, and their new children deserved the right to be special in their own ways, not compared, however lovingly, to ghosts.

The decision to have them hadn't been easy. It was fraught with grief, a guilty sense of betraying Sean and Harriet in some indefinable way, and fear of fresh loss. His and 'Tanni's enhancement would give them centuries of fertility, and the temptation to wait was great. Yet they faced the dilemma of all dynasts: the succession must be secured.

That wasn't something Lieutenant Commander MacIntyre, USN, had ever worried about, and it hadn't entered his or 'Tanni's head when Sean and Harriet were conceived, for it had seemed preposterous that the monarchical government of a long-dead empire might be maintained. But as Tsien Tao-ling had pointed out twenty years past, it was loyalty to the Crown—to Colin MacIntyre's person—which held humanity together despite its legacy of rivalries, and many years must pass before that primal source of loyalty could be buttressed by others. Colin had been amazed that someone who had been the commander-in-chief of the last Communist power on Earth could make that statement, but Tao-ling had been right. And because he had, Colin and Jiltanith had no option but to think in dynastic terms.

And perhaps, he mused, as he stepped out onto the balcony and saw his wife dozing in the summer sunlight, that was good. If their hands had been forced, the decision had still proved there was a future... and that they had the courage to love again after love had hurt them so cruelly.