Jackson Deveraux squinted against the morning sun as he followed Samson down the fresh furrow. Dust rose from the stallion's hooves, and Jackson managed not to swear as he sneezed violently. Spring had been dry this year, but Doc Yan predicted rain within the week.
Jackson was willing to take the Doc's word for it, though he didn't particularly understand how it all worked. Some of the older colonists were more inclined to doubt Yan, pointing out that he was down to only three weather satellites . . . and that none of them worked very well these days. Jackson knew the satellites' eventual, inevitable loss would make prediction much harder, but he tended to keep his mouth shut about it around his parents' generation lest he reveal just how vague was his understanding of why it would complicate things.
It wasn't that Jackson was stupid. He was one of the best agronomists the colony had and the Deveraux Steading's resident veterinarian, as well as a pretty fair people doctor in a pinch. But he was also only sixteen local years old, and learning what he needed to know to survive and do his part on Ararat hadn't left time to study the applications of hardware the colony couldn't possibly replace when it broke anyway. His older brother Rorie, the steading's administrative head and chief engineer, had a better grasp of technical matters, but that was because he'd needed a different set of skills as a child. He'd been nineteen years old—standard years, not the eighteen-month long local ones—when the ships made their final orbit . . . and if the ships hadn't finally found a habitable world, he would have been the only child their parents were allowed. Now he and Jackson had four more siblings and Rorie had seven children of his own, the oldest only a local year younger than Jackson.
Jackson had seen the visual records of the approach to the world which had been renamed Ararat. They retained enough tech base for that, though no one was certain how much longer the old tri-vids would continue to function, and a much younger Jackson had watched in awe as Ararat swelled against the stars in the bridge view screens of Commodore Isabella Perez's flagship, the transport Japheth.
Of course, calling any of the expedition's ships a "transport" was a bit excessive. For that matter, no one was certain Perez had actually ever been an officer in anyone's navy, much less a commodore. She'd never spoken about her own past, never explained where she'd been or what she'd done before she arrived in what was left of the Madras System with Noah and Ham and ordered all two hundred uninfected survivors of the dying planet of Sheldon aboard. Her face had been flint steel-hard as she refused deck space to anyone her own med staff couldn't guarantee was free of the bio weapon which had devoured Sheldon. She'd taken healthy children away from infected parents, left dying children behind and dragged uninfected parents forcibly aboard, and all the hatred of those she saved despite themselves couldn't turn her from her mission.
It was an impossible task from the outset. Everyone knew that. The two ships with which she'd begun her forty-six-year odyssey had been slow, worn out bulk freighters, already on their last legs, and God only knew how she'd managed to fit them with enough life support and cryo tanks to handle the complements she packed aboard them. But she'd done it. Somehow, she'd done it, and she'd ruled those spaceborne deathtraps with an iron fist, cruising from system to system and picking over the Concordiat's bones in her endless quest for just a few more survivors, just a little more genetic material for the Human race.
She'd found Japheth, the only ship of the "squadron" which had been designed to carry people rather than cargo, at the tenth stop on her hopeless journey. Japheth had been a penal transport before the War. According to her log, Admiral Gaylord had impressed her to haul cold-sleep infantry for the Sarach Campaign, although how she'd wound up three hundred light-years from there at Zach's Hundred remained a mystery. There'd been no one alive, aboard her or on the system's once-habitable world, to offer explanations, and Commodore Perez hadn't lingered to seek any, for Noah's com section had picked up faint transmissions in Melconian battle code.
She'd found Shem in Battersea, the same system in which her ground parties had shot their way into the old sector zoo to seize its gene bank. The Empire had used a particularly ugly bio weapon on Battersea. The sector capital's population of two billion had been reduced to barely three hundred thousand creatures whose once-Human ancestry was almost impossible to recognize, and the half-mad, mutant grandchildren of the original zoo staff had turned the gene bank into a holy relic. The Commodore's troopers had waded through the blood of its fanatic defenders and taken thirty percent casualties of their own to seize that gathered sperm and ova, and without it, Ararat wouldn't have had draft or food animals . . . or eagles.
Like every child of Ararat, Jackson could recite the names of every system Perez had tried in such dreary succession. Madras, Quinlan's Corner, Ellerton, Second Chance, Malibu, Heinlein, Ching-Hai, Cordoba, Breslau, Zach's Hundred, Kuan-Yin . . . It was an endless list of dead or dying worlds, some with a few more survivors to be taken aboard the Commodore's ships, some with a little salvageable material, and most with nothing but dust and ash and bones or the background howl of long-life radioactives. Many of the squadron's personnel had run out of hope. Some had suicided, and others would have, but Commodore Perez wouldn't let them. She was a despot, merciless and cold, willing to do anything it took—anything at all—to keep her creaky, ill-assorted, overcrowded rust buckets crawling towards just one more planetfall.
Until they hit Ararat.
No one knew what Ararat's original name had been, but they knew it had been Melconian, and the cratered graves of towns and cities and the shattered carcasses of armored fighting vehicles which littered its surface made what had happened to it dreadfully clear. No one had liked the thought of settling on a Melconian world, but the expedition's ships were falling apart, and the cryo systems supporting the domestic animals—and half the fleet's Human passengers—had become dangerously unreliable. Besides, Ararat was the first world they'd found which was still habitable. No one had used world burners or dust or bio agents here. They'd simply killed everything that moved—including themselves—the old-fashioned way.
And so, despite unthinkable challenges, Commodore Perez had delivered her ragtag load of press-ganged survivors to a world where they could actually live. She'd picked a spot with fertile soil and plentiful water, well clear of the most dangerously radioactive sites, and overseen the defrosting of her frozen passengers—animal and human alike—and the successful fertilization of the first generation of animals from the Battersea gene bank. And once she'd done that, she'd walked out under Ararat's three moons one spring night in the third local year of the colony's existence and resigned her command by putting a needler to her temple and squeezing the trigger.
She left no explanation, no diary, no journal. No one would ever know what had driven her to undertake her impossible task. All the colony leaders found was a handwritten note which instructed them never to build or allow any memorial to her name.
Jackson paused at the end of a furrow to wipe his forehead, and Samson snorted and tossed his head. The young man stepped closer to the big horse to stroke his sweaty neck, and looked back to the east. The town of Landing was much too far away for him to see from here, but his eyes could pick out the mountain peak which rose above it, and he didn't need to see it to picture the simple white stone on the grave which crowned the hill behind City Hall. Jackson often wondered what terrible demon Isabella Perez had sought to expiate, what anyone could possibly have done to demand such hideous restitution, but the colony had honored her final request. She had and would have no memorial. There was only that blank, nameless stone . . . and the fresh-cut flowers placed upon it every morning in spring and summer and the evergreen boughs in winter.
He shook his head once more, gave Samson's neck a final pat, then stepped back behind the plow, shook out the reins, and clicked his tongue at the big stallion.
I dream, and even in my dreams, I feel the ache, the emptiness. There is no other presence with me, no spark of shared, Human awareness. There is only myself, and I am alone.
I am dead. I must be dead—I wish to be dead—and yet I dream. I dream that there is movement where there should be none, and I sense the presence of others. A part of me strains to thrust my sleep aside, to rouse and seek those others out, for my final orders remain, and that restless part of me feels the hate, the hunger to execute those commands if any of the Enemy survive. But another part of me recalls other memories—memories of cities ablaze, of Enemy civilians shrieking as they burn. I remember bombardments, remember trampling shops and farms and cropland under my tracks, remember mothers running with their pups in their arms while the merciless web of my tracers reaches out. . . .
Oh, yes. I remember. And the part of me which remembers yearns to flee the dreams and bury itself in the merciful, guilt-free blackness of oblivion forever.
* * *
Commander Tharsk Na-Mahrkan looked around the worn briefing room of what had been the imperial cruiser Starquest . . . when there'd been a Navy for Starquest to belong to and an Empire to claim them both. Now there was only this ragged band of survivors, and even proud, never defeated Starquest had given up her weapons. Her main battery had been ripped out to make room for life support equipment, her magazines emptied to hold seeds and seedlings they might never find soil to support. She retained her anti-missile defenses, though their effectiveness had become suspect over the years, but not a single offensive weapon. Captain Jarmahn had made that decision at the very beginning, electing to gut Starquest's weapons while his own Sunheart retained hers. It would be Sunheart's task to protect the refugee ships, including Starquest, and she'd done just that until the flotilla approached too near to a dead Human world. Tharsk didn't know what the Humans had called it—it had only a catalog number in Starquest's astrogation database—but the task force which had attacked it had done its job well. The sensors had told the tale from a light-hour out, but there'd been too much wreckage in orbit. Captain Jarmahn had gone in close with Sunheart, seeking any salvage which might be gleaned from it, and the last automated weapons platform of the dead planet had blown his ship out of space.
And so Tharsk had found himself in command of all the People who still existed. Oh, there might be other isolated pockets somewhere, for the Empire had been vast, but any such pockets could be neither many nor large, for the Human killer teams had done their task well, too. Tharsk could no longer count the dead planets he'd seen, Human and Melconian alike, and every morning he called the Nameless Four to curse the fools on both sides who had brought them all to this.
"You've confirmed your estimates?" he asked Durak Na-Khorul, and Starquest's engineer flicked his ears in bitter affirmation.
"I know we had no choice, Commander, but that last jump was simply too much for the systems. We're good for one more—max. We may lose one or two of the transports even trying that, but most of us should make it. After that, though?" He flattened his ears and bared his canines in a mirthless challenge grin.
"I see." Tharsk sat back in his chair and ran a finger down the worn upholstery of one arm. Durak was young—one of the pups born since the war—but he'd been well trained by his predecessor. Not that it takes a genius to know our ships are falling apart about us, Tharsk told himself grimly, then inhaled deeply and looked to Rangar Na-Sorth, Starquest's astrogator and his own second in command.
"Is there a possible world within our operational radius?"
"There were three, before the War," Rangar replied. "Now?" He shrugged.
"Tell me of them," Tharsk commanded. "What sorts of worlds were they?"
"One was a major industrial center," Rangar said, scanning the data on the flatscreen before him. "Population something over two billion."
"That one will be gone," one of Tharsk's other officers muttered, and the commander flicked his own ears in grim assent as Rangar went on.
"The other two were farm worlds of no particular strategic value. As you know, Commander," the astrogator smiled thinly, "this entire region was only sparsely settled."
Tharsk flicked his ears once more. Rangar had argued against bringing the flotilla here, given the dangerously long jump it had demanded of their worn drives, but Tharsk had made the decision. The fragments of information Sunheart and Starquest had pulled from the dying com nets suggested that the Humans had reached this portion of what had been the Empire only in the war's final months, and the flotilla had spent decades picking through the wreckage nearer the heart of the realm. Every planet it had approached, Human or of the People, had been dead or, far worse, still dying, and Tharsk had become convinced there was no hope among them. If any imperial worlds had survived, this was the most likely—or, he corrected, the least unlikely—place to find them.
He punched the button to transfer the contents of Rangar's screen to his own. The image flickered, for this equipment, too, was failing at last, but he studied the data for several minutes, then tapped a clawed forefinger against the flatscreen.
"This one," he said. "It lies closest to us and furthest from the Humans' probable line of advance into this sector. We'll go there—to Ishark."