Alheer va-Chanak's forehead crinkled in disgust as a fresh sneeze threatened. He wiggled on his command pedestal, fighting the involuntary reflex, and heard the high-pitched buzz of his co-pilot's amusement—buried in the explosive eruption of the despised sneeze.

"Kreegor seize all colds!" va-Chanak grunted, mopping his broad breathing slits with a tissue. Roghar's laughter buzzed in his ear as he lost the last vestige of control, and va-Chanak swiveled his sensory cluster to bend a stern gaze upon him. "All very well for you, you unhatched grub!" he snarled. "You'd probably think it was hilarious if it happened inside a vac suit!"

"Certainly not," Roghar managed to return with a semblance of decent self-control. "Of course, I did warn you not to spend so long soaking just before a departure."

Va-Chanak suppressed an ignoble desire to throttle his co-pilot. The fact that Roghar was absolutely right only made the temptation stronger, but these four- and five-month missions could be pure torment for the amphibious Mersakah. And, he grumbled to himself, especially for a fully-active sire like himself. Four thousand years of civilization was a frail shield against the spawning urges of all pre-history, but where was he to find a compliant school of dams in an asteroid extraction operation? Nowhere, that was bloody well where, and if he chose to spend a few extra day parts soaking in the habitat's swamp sections, that should have been his own affair.

And would have been, he thought gloomily, if he hadn't brought this damned cold with him. Ah, well! It would wear itself out, and a few more tours would give him a credit balance fit to attract the finest dam. Not to mention the glamour which clung to spacefarers in groundlings' eyes, and—

An alarm squealed, and Alheer va-Chanak's sensory cluster snapped back to his instruments. All three eyes irised wide in disbelief as the impossible readings registered.

"Kreegor take it, look at that!" Roghar gasped beside him, but va-Chanak was already stabbing at the communications console.

More of the immense ships—ninety dihar long if they were a har—appeared out of nowhere, materializing like fen fey from the nothingness of space. Scores of them—hundreds!

Roghar babbled away about first-contacts and alien life forms beside him, but even as he gabbled, the co-pilot was spinning the extractor ship and aligning the main engines to kill velocity for rendezvous. Va-Chanak left him to it, and his own mind burned with conflicting impulses. Disbelief. Awe. Wonder and delight that the Mersakah were not alone. Horror that it had been left to him to play ambassador to the future which had suddenly arrived. Concern lest their visitors misinterpret his fumbling efforts. Visions of immortality—and how the dams would react to this—!

He was still punching up his communications gear when the closest Achuultani starship blew his vessel out of existence.

The shattered wreckage tumbled away, and the Achuultani settled into their formation. Normal-space drives woke, and the mammoth cylinders swept in-system, arrowing towards the planet of Mers at twenty-eight percent of light-speed while their missile sections prepped their weapons.

CHAPTER FOUR

The endless, twenty-meter-wide column of lightning fascinated him. It wasn't really lightning, but that was how Vlad Chernikov thought of it, though the center of any Terran lightning bolt would be a dead zone beside its titanic density. The force field which channeled it also silenced it and muted its terrible brilliance, but Vlad had received his implants. His sensors felt it, like a tide race of fire, even through the field, and it awed him.

He turned away, folding his hands behind him as he crossed the huge chamber at Dahak's heart. Only Command One and Two were as well protected, for this was the source of Dahak's magic. The starship boasted three hundred and twelve fusion power plants, but though he could move and fight upon the wings of their power, he required more than that to outspeed light itself.

This howling chain of power was that more. It was Dahak's core tap, a tremendous, immaterial funnel that reached deep into hyper space, connecting the ship to a dimension of vastly higher energy states. It dragged that limitless power in, focused and refined it, and directed it into the megaton mass of his Enchanach Drive.

And with it, the drive worked its sorcery and created the perfectly-opposed, converging gravity masses which forced Dahak out of normal space in a series of instantaneous transpositions. It took a measurable length of time to build those masses between transpositions, but that interval was perceptible only to one such as Dahak. A tiny, imperfect flaw the time stream of the cosmos never noticed.

Which was as well. Should Dahak dwell in normal space any longer than that, catastrophe would be the lot of any star system he crossed. As those fields converged upon his hull, he became ever so briefly more massive than the most massive star. Which was why ships of his ilk did not use supralight speed within a system, for the initial activation and final deactivation of the Enchanach Drive took much longer, a time measured in microseconds, not femtoseconds. Anu had induced a drive failure to divert the starship from its original mission for "emergency repairs," and a tiny error in Dahak's crippled return to sublight speeds explained the irregularity of Pluto's orbit which had puzzled Terran astronomers for so long. Had it occurred deep enough in Sol's gravity well, the star might well have gone nova.

Chernikov plugged his neural feed back into the engineering subsection of Dahak's computer net, and the computers answered him with a joyousness he was still getting used to. It was odd how alive, how aware, those electronic brains seemed, and Baltan, his ex-mutineer assistant, insisted they had been far less so before the mutiny.

Chernikov believed him, and he believed he understood the happiness which suffused the computer net. Dahak had a crew once more—understrength, perhaps, by Imperial standards, but a crew—and that was as it should be. Not just because he had been lonely, but because he needed them to provide that critical element in any warship: redundancy. It was dangerous for so powerful a unit to be utterly dependent upon its central computer, especially when battle damage might cut Comp Cent off from essential components of its tremendous hull.

So it was good that men had returned to Dahak at last. Especially now, when the very survival of their species depended upon him.

"Attention on deck," Dahak intoned as Colin entered the conference room, and he winced almost imperceptibly as his command team rose with punctilious formality. He smoothed his expression and crossed impassively to the head of the crystalline conference table, making yet another mental note to have a heart-to-diode talk with the computer.

Dozens of faces looked back at him from around the table, but at least he'd gotten used to facing so many eyes. Dahak was technically a single ship, but one with a full-strength crew a quarter-million strong, a normal sublight parasite strength of two hundred warships, and the firepower to shatter planets. His commander might be called a captain, yet for all intents and purposes he was an admiral, charged with the direction of more destructiveness than Terra's humanity had ever dreamed was possible, and the size of Colin's staff reflected that.

There were a lot of "Fleet Captains" on it, though Dahak's new protocol demanded that they be addressed in Colin's presence either as "Commander" or simply by the department they headed, since he was the only "Senior Fleet Captain" and there could be but one captain aboard a warship. The Imperium had used any officer's full rank and branch, which Colin and his Terra-born found too cumbersome, but Dahak had obstinately resisted Colin's suggestion that he might be called "Commodore" to ease the problem.