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                                  Chapter Ten

   Colin swam fearfully up out of his nightmares, trying to understand what
   had happened. Something was wrong with his senses, and he moaned softly,
   frightened by the deadness, the absence, where he should have felt the
   whisper and wash of ambient energy.

   He opened his eyes and blinked, automatically damping the brilliant light
   glaring down over him. He made out a ceiling beyond it-an unfamiliar roof
   of an all-too-familiar, bronze-colored alloy-and his muscles tightened.

   It had been no dream. Sean was dead. And Cal . . . his family . . . and
   Sandy. . . .

   Memory wrung a harsh, inarticulate sound of grief from him, and he closed
   his eyes again. Then he gathered himself and tried to sit up, but his body
   refused to obey and his eyes popped open once more. He tried again,
   harder, and his muscles strained, but it was like trying to lift the
   Earth. Something pressed down upon him, and he clenched his teeth as he
   recognized the presser. And a suppression field, as well, which explained
   his dead sensory implants.

   A small sound touched his ear, and he wrenched his head around, barely
   able to move even that much under the presser.

   Three grim-faced people looked back at him. The one standing in the center
   was a man, gray-haired, his seamed face puckered by a smooth, long-healed
   scar from just under his right eye down under the neck of his tattered old
   Clemson University sweatshirt. His leathery skin was the olive-brown of
   the Fourth Imperium, and Colin recognized the signs from Dahak's
   briefings; this man was old. Very old. He must be well into his sixth
   century, but if he was old, he was also massively thewed, and his
   olive-black eyes were alert.

   A woman sat in a chair to his left. She, too, was old, but with the
   shorter span of the Terra-born, her still-thick hair almost painfully
   white under the brilliant light. Her lined, grief-drawn face was lighter
   than the man's, but there was a hint of the same slant to her swollen
   eyes, and Colin swallowed in painful recognition. He'd never met Isis
   Tudor, but she looked too much like her murdered grandson to be anyone
   else.

   The third watcher shared the old man's complexion, but her cold, set face
   was unlined. She was tall for an Imperial, rivaling Colin's own
   hundred-eighty-eight centimeters, and slender, almost delicate. And she
   was beautiful, with an almond-eyed, cat-like loveliness that was subtly
   alien and yet perfect. A thick mane of hair rippled down her spine, so
   black it was almost blue-green, gathered at the nape of her neck in a
   jeweled clasp before it fanned out below, and she wore tailored slacks and
   a cashmere sweater. The gemmed dagger at her belt struck an incongruous
   note, but not a humorous one. Her slender fingers curled too hungrily
   about its hilt, and her dark eyes were filled with hate.

   He stared silently back at them, then turned his face deliberately away.

   The silence stretched out, and then the old man cleared his throat.

   "What shall we do with you, Commander MacIntyre?" he asked in soft,
   perfect English, and Colin turned back to him almost against his will. The
   spokesman smiled a twisted smile and slipped one arm around the old woman.
   "We know what you are-in part-" he continued, "but not in full. And-" his
   soft voice turned suddenly harsher "-we know what you've cost us already."

   "Spend not thy words upon him," the young woman said coldly.

   "Hush, Jiltanith," the old man said. "It's not his fault."

   "Is't not? Yet Calvin doth lie dead, and his wife and daughters with him.
   And 'tis this man hath encompassed that!"

   "No." Isis Tudor's soft voice was grief-harrowed, but she shook her head
   slowly. "He was Cal's friend, 'Tanni. He didn't know what he was doing."

   "Which changeth naught," Jiltanith said bitterly.

   "Isis is right, 'Tanni," the old man said sadly. "He couldn't have known
   they were looking for Cal. Besides," the old eyes were wise and
   compassionate despite their own bitterness, "he lost his own brother, as
   well . . . and avenged Cal and the girls."

   He walked towards the table on which Colin lay and locked a challenging
   gaze with him, and Colin knew it was there between them. He'd warned Sean
   the relay might be detected, and it had. His mistake had killed Cal and
   Frances, Harriet and Anna, Sean and Sandy. He knew it, and the same
   knowledge filled the old man's eyes, yet his captor clasped his hands
   behind him and stopped a meter away, eloquently unthreatening.

   "What use vengeance?" Jiltanith demanded, her lovely, hating face cold.
   "Will't breathe life back into them? Nay! Slay him and ha' done, I say!"

   "No, 'Tanni," the man said more firmly. "We need him, and he needs us."

   "I say thee nay, Father!" Jiltanith spat furiously. "I'll ha' none of him!
   Nay, nor any part in't!"

   "It's not for you to say, 'Tanni." The man sounded stern. "It's up to the
   Council-and I am head of the Council."

   "Father," Jiltanith's voice was all the more deadly for its softness, "if
   thou makest this man thine ally, thou art a fool. E'en now hath he cost
   thee dear. Take heed, lest the price grow higher still."

   "We have no choice," her father said. His sad, wise eyes held Colin's.
   "Commander, if you will give me your parole, I'll switch off the presser."

   "No," Colin said coldly.

   "Commander, we're not what you think. Or perhaps we are, in a way, but you
   need us, and we need you. I'm not asking you to surrender, only to listen.
   That's all we ask. Afterwards, if you wish, we will release you."

   Colin heard Jiltanith's bitter, in-drawn hiss, but his eyes bored into the
   old man's. Something unspeakably old and weary looked back at him-old yet
   vital with purpose. Despite himself, he was tempted to believe him.

   "And just who the hell are you?" he grated at last.

   "Me, Commander?" The old man smiled wryly. "Missile Specialist First
   Horus, late of Imperial Battle Fleet. Very late, I fear. And also-" his
   smile vanished, and his eyes were incredibly sad once more "-Horace
   Hidachi."

   Colin's eyelids twitched, and the old man nodded.

   "Yes, Commander. Cal was my great-grandson. And because of that, I think
   you owe me at least the courtesy of listening, don't you?"

   Colin stared at him for a long, silent second and then, jerky against the
   pressure of the presser, he nodded.

                                     * * *

   Colin shrugged to settle more comfortably the borrowed uniform which had
   replaced his blood-stained clothing and studied his surroundings as Horus
   and Isis Tudor led him down the passageway. A portable suppression field
   still cut off his sensors, and he was a bit surprised by how incomplete
   that made him feel. He'd become accustomed to his new senses, accepting
   the electromagnetic and gravitonic spectrums as an extension of sight and
   sense and smell. Now they were gone, taken away by the small hand unit a
   stiff-spined Jiltanith trained upon him as she followed him down the
   corridor.

   They met a few others, though traffic was sparse. Those they passed wore
   casual Terran clothing, and most were obviously Terra-born. The almond
   eyes and olive skins of Imperials were scattered thinly among them, and he
   wondered how so many Terra-born could be admitted to the secret without
   its leaking.

   But even without his implants, he could see-and feel-the oldness about
   him.

   Dahak was even older than his current surroundings, but the huge starship
   didn't feel old. Ancient, yes, but not old. Not worn with the passing of
   years. For fifty millennia, there had been no feet upon Dahak's decks, no
   living presence to mark its passing in casual scrapes and bumps and scars.

   But feet had left their mark here. The central portion of the tough
   synthetic decksole had been worn away, and even the bare alloy beneath
   showed wear. It would take more than feet to grind away Imperial battle
   steel, but it was polished smooth, burnished to a high gloss. And the
   bulkheads were the same, showing signs of repairs to lighting fixtures and
   ventilation ducts in the slightly irregular surface of patches placed by
   merely human hands rather than the flawlessly precise maintenance units
   that tended Dahak.

   It made no sense. Dahak had said the mutineers spent most of their time in
   stasis, yet despite the sparse traffic, he suspected there were hundreds
   of people moving about him. And this feeling of age, this timeworn
   weariness that could impregnate even battle steel, was wrong. Anu had
   taken a complete tech base to Earth; he should have plenty of service
   mechs for the proper upkeep of his vessels.

   Which fitted together with everything else. The murder of Cal's family.
   Sandy's cryptic remarks. There was a pattern here, one he could not quite
   grasp yet whose parts were all internally consistent. But-

   His thoughts broke off as Horus and Isis slowed suddenly before a closed
   hatch. A three-headed dragon had once adorned those doors, but it had been
   planed away, leaving the alloy smooth and unblemished, and he filed that
   away with the fact that he and he alone wore Fleet uniform.

   The hatch opened, and he stepped through it at Horus's gesture.

   The control room was a far more cramped version of Dahak's command deck,
   but there had been changes. A bank of old, flat-screen Terran television
   monitors covered one bulkhead, and peculiar, bastardized hybrids of
   Imperial theory and Terran components had been added to the panels. There
   were standard Terran computer touchpads at consoles already fitted for
   direct neural feeds, but most incongruous of all, perhaps, were the
   archaic Terran-style headsets racked by each console. His eyebrows rose as
   he saw them, and Horus smiled.

   "We need the keyboards . . . and the phones, Commander," he said wryly.
   "Most of our people have to enter commands manually and pass orders by
   voice."

   Colin regarded the old man thoughtfully, then nodded noncommittally and
   turned his attention to the thirty-odd people sitting at the various
   consoles or standing beside them. The few Imperials among them were a
   decided minority, and most of those, unlike Jiltanith, seemed almost as
   ancient as Horus.

   "Commander," Horus said formally, "permit me to introduce the Command
   Council of the sublight battleship Nergal, late-like some of her crew, at
   least-of Battle Fleet."

   Colin frowned. The Nergal had been one of Anu's ships, but it was becoming
   painfully clear that whatever these people were, they weren't friends of
   Anu. Not any longer, at any rate. His mind raced as he tried to weigh the
   fragments of information he had, searching for an advantage he could wring
   from them.

   "I see," was all he said, and Horus actually chuckled.

   "I imagine you play a mean game of poker, Commander," he said dryly, and
   waved Colin to one of the only two empty couches. It was the assistant
   gunnery officer's, Colin noted, but the panel before it was inactive.

   "I try," he said, cocking his head to invite Horus to continue.

   "I see you don't intend to make this easy. Well, I don't suppose I blame
   you." Jiltanith made a soft, contemptuous sound of disagreement, and Horus
   frowned at her. She subsided, but Colin had the distinct impression she
   would have preferred pointing something considerably more lethal than a
   portable suppresser at him.

   "All right," Horus said more briskly, turning to seat Isis courteously in
   the unoccupied captain's chair, "that's fair. Let's start at the
   beginning.

   "First, Commander, we won't ask you to divulge any information unless you
   choose to do so. Nonetheless, certain things are rather self-evident.

   "First, Dahak is, in fact, operational. Second, there is a reason the ship
   has failed either to squelch the mutiny or to go elsewhere seeking
   assistance. Third, the ship has taken a hand at last, hence your presence
   here with the first bridge officer implant package this planet has seen in
   fifty thousand years. Fourth, and most obviously of all, if you'll forgive
   me, the information upon which you have formulated your plans has proven
   inaccurate. Or perhaps it would be better to say incomplete."

   He paused, but Colin allowed his face to show no more than polite
   interest. Horus sighed again.

   "Commander, your caution is admirable but misplaced. While we have
   continued to suppress your implants, particularly your com link, that act
   is in your interest as well as our own. You can have no more desire than
   we to provide Anu's missiles with a targeting beacon! We realize, however,
   that it is we who must convince you our motives are benign, and the only
   way I can see to do that is to tell you who we are and why we want so
   desperately to help rather than hinder you."

   "Indeed?" Colin permitted himself a question at last and let his eyes slip
   sideways to Jiltanith. Horus made a wry face.

   "Is any decision ever totally unanimous, Commander? We may be mutineers or
   something else entirely, but we are also a community in which even those
   who disagree with the majority abide by the decisions of our Council. Is
   that not true, 'Tanni?" he asked the angry-eyed young woman gently.

   "Aye, 'tis true enow," she said shortly, biting off each word as if it
   cost her physical pain, and her very reluctance was almost reassuring. A
   lie would have come more easily.

   "All right," Colin said finally. "I won't make any promises, but go ahead
   and explain your position to me."

   "Thank you," Horus said. He propped a hip against the console before which
   Isis Tudor sat and crossed his arms.

   "First, Commander, a confession. I supported the mutiny with all my heart,
   and I fought hard to make it a success. Most of the Imperials in this
   control room would admit the same. But-" his eyes met Colin's
   unflinchingly "-we were used, Commander MacIntyre."

   Colin returned his gaze silently, and Horus shrugged.

   "I know. It was our own fault, and we've been forced to accept that. We
   attempted to desert 'in the face of the enemy,' as your own code of
   military justice would phrase it, and we recognize our guilt. Indeed,
   that's the reason none of us wear the uniform to which we were once
   entitled. Yet there's another side to us, Commander, for once we
   recognized how horribly wrong we'd been, we also attempted to make amends.
   And not all of us were mutineers."

   He paused and looked back at Jiltanith, whose face was harder and colder
   than ever. It was a fortress, her hatred a portcullis grinding down, and
   her bitter eyes ignored Horus to look straight into Colin's face.

   "Jiltanith was no mutineer, Commander," Horus said softly.

   "No?" Colin surprised himself by how gently his question came out.
   Jiltanith's obvious youth beside the other, aged Imperials had already set
   her apart. Somehow, without knowing exactly why, he'd felt her otherness.

   "No," Horus said in the same soft voice. " 'Tanni was six Terran years
   old, Commander. Why should a child be held accountable for our acts?"

   Colin nodded slowly, committing himself to nothing, yet that, at least, he
   understood. To be sentenced to eternal exile or death for a crime you had
   never committed would be enough to wake hatred in anyone.

   "But Dahak's business is with all of us, I suppose," Horus continued
   quietly, "and my fellows and I accept that. We've grown old, Commander.
   Our lives are largely spent. It is only for 'Tanni and the other innocents
   we would plead. And, perhaps, for some of our comrades to the south."

   "That's very eloquent, Horus," Colin said, tone carefully neutral, "but-"

   "But we must work our passage, is that it?" Horus interrupted, and Colin
   nodded slowly. "Why, so we think, as well.

   "When Anu organized his mutiny, Commander, Commander (BioSciences) Inanna
   picked the most suitable psych profiles for recruitment. Even the Imperium
   had its malleable elements, and she and Anu chose well. Some were merely
   frightened of death; others were dissatisfied and saw a chance for
   promotion and power; still others were simply bored and saw a chance for
   adventure. But what very few of them knew was that Anu's inner circle had
   motives quite different from their own.

   "Anu's professed goal was to seize the ship and flee the Achuultani, but
   the plain truth of the matter was that he, like many of the crew, no
   longer believed in the Achuultani." Colin sat a bit straighter, eager to
   hear another perspective-even one which might prove self-serving-on the
   mutiny, but he let his face show doubt.

   "Oh, the records were there," Horus agreed, "but the Imperium was old,
   Commander. We were regimented, disciplined, prepared for battle at the
   drop of a hat-or that, at least, was the idea. Yet we'd waited too long
   for the enemy. We were no longer attack dogs straining at the leash. We'd
   become creatures of habit, and many of us believed deep in our souls that
   we were regimented and controlled and trained for a purpose that no longer
   existed.

   "Even those of us who'd seen proof of the Achuultani's existence-dead
   planets, gutted star systems, the wreckage of ancient battle fleets-had
   never seen the Achuultani, and our people were not so very different from
   your own. Anything beyond your own life experience wasn't quite 'real' to
   us. After seven thousand years in which there were no new incursions,
   after five thousand years of preparation for an attack that never came,
   after three thousand years of sending out probes that found no sign of the
   enemy, it was hard to believe there still was an enemy. We'd mounted guard
   too long, and perhaps we simply grew bored." Horus shrugged. "But the fact
   remains that only a minority of us truly believed in the Achuultani, and
   many of those were terrified.

   "So Anu's chosen pretext was shrewd. It appealed to the frightened, gave
   an excuse to the disaffected, and offered the bored the challenge of a new
   world to conquer, one beyond the stultifying reach of the Imperium. Yet it
   was only a pretext, for Anu himself sought escape from neither the
   Achuultani nor from boredom. He wanted Dahak for himself, and he had no
   intention of marooning the loyalists upon Earth."

   Colin knew he was leaning forward and suspected his face was giving away
   entirely too much, yet there was nothing he could do about it. This was a
   subtly different story from the one Dahak had given him, but it made
   sense.

   And perhaps the difference wasn't so strange. The data in Dahak's memory
   was all the reality there was for the old starship-before it found itself
   operating completely on its own, at least. He'd noticed that the computer
   never used a personal pronoun to denote itself or its actions or responses
   prior to or immediately following the mutiny, and he thought he knew why.
   "Comp Cent" had been intended purely as a data and systems management tool
   to be used only under direct human supervision; Dahak's present,
   fully-developed self-awareness was a product of fifty-one millennia of
   continuous, unsupervised operation. And if that awareness had evolved
   after the mutiny, why should the computer question its basic data? To the
   records, unlike the merely human personnel who had crewed the vast ship,
   the Achuultani's existence was axiomatic and incontestable, and so it had
   become for Dahak. Why should he doubt that it was equally so for humanity?
   Particularly if that had been Anu's "official" reason? Of course it made
   sense . . . and Dahak himself was aware of his own lack of imagination, of
   empathy for the human condition.

   "I believe," Horus's heavy voice recaptured Colin's attention, "that Anu
   is mad. I believe he was mad even then, but I may be wrong. Yet he truly
   believed that, backed by Dahak's power, he could overthrow the Imperium
   itself.

   "I can't believe he could have succeeded, however disaffected portions of
   the population might have become, but what mattered was that he believed
   he had some sort of divine mission to conquer the Imperium, and the
   seizure of the ship was but the first step in that endeavor.

   "Yet he had to move carefully, so he lied to us. He intended all along to
   massacre anyone who refused to join him, but because he knew many of his
   adherents would balk at that he pretended differently. He even yielded to
   our insistence that the hypercom spares be loaded aboard the transports we
   believed would carry the marooned loyalists to Earth so that, in time,
   they might build a hypercom and call for help. And he promised us a
   surgical operation, Commander. His carefully prepared teams would seize
   the critical control nodes, cut Comp Cent from the net, and present Senior
   Fleet Captain Druaga with a fait accompli.

   "And we believed him," Horus almost whispered. "May the Maker forgive us,
   we believed him, though if we'd bothered to think even for a moment, we
   would have known better. With so little of the core crew-no more than
   seven thousand at best-with us, his 'surgical operation' was an
   impossibility. When he stockpiled combat armor and weapons and had his
   people in Logistics sabotage as much other armor as they possibly could,
   we should have realized. But we didn't. Not until the fighting broke out
   and the blood began to flow. Not until it was far too late to change
   sides."

   Horus fell silent, and Colin stared at him, willing him to continue yet
   aware the other must pause and gather himself. Intellectually, he knew it
   could all be a self-serving lie; instinctively, he knew it was the truth,
   at least as Horus believed it.

   "The final moments aboard Dahak were a nightmare, Commander," the old man
   said finally. "Red Two, Internal, had been set. Lifeboats were ejecting.
   We were falling back to Bay Ninety-One, running for our lives, afraid we
   wouldn't make it, sickened by the bloodshed. But once we'd left Dahak
   astern, we were faced with what we'd done. More than that, we knew-or some
   of us did, at least-what Anu truly was. And so this ship, Nergal, deserted
   Anu."

   Horus smiled wryly as Colin blinked in surprise.

   "Yes, Commander, we were double mutineers. We ran for it-just this one
   ship, with barely two hundred souls aboard-and somehow, in the confusion,
   we escaped Anu's scanners and hid from him.

   "Our plan, such as it was, was simplicity itself. We knew Anu had prepared
   a contingency plan that was supposed to give him control of the ship no
   matter what happened, though we had no idea what it was. We speculated
   that it concerned the ship's power, since he was Chief Engineer, but all
   that really mattered was that he would eventually win his prize and
   depart. Remember that we still half-believed his promise to leave any
   loyalists marooned behind him, Commander. And because we did, we planned
   to emerge from hiding after he left and do what we could for the survivors
   in an effort to atone for our crime and-I will admit it frankly-as the
   only thing we could think of that might win us some clemency when the
   Imperium found us at last.

   "But, of course, it didn't work out that way," he said quietly, "for Anu's
   plan failed. Somehow, Dahak remained at least partially operational,
   destroying every parasite sent towards it. And it never went away, either.
   It hung above him, like your own Sword of Damocles, inviolate, taunting
   him.

   "If he hadn't been mad before, Commander, he went mad then. He sent most
   of his followers into stasis-to wait out Dahak's final 'inevitable'
   collapse-while only his immediate henchmen, who knew what he'd truly
   planned all along, remained awake. And once he had total control, he
   showed his true colors.

   "Tell me, Commander MacIntyre, have you ever wondered what happened to all
   Dahak's other bridge officers? Or how beings such as ourselves-such as you
   now are-with lifespans measured in centuries and strength and endurance
   far beyond that of Terra-born humans, could decivilize so utterly? It took
   your kind barely five hundred years to move from matchlocks and pikes to
   the atom bomb. From crude sailing ships to outer space. Doesn't it seem
   strange that almost a quarter million Imperial survivors should lose all
   technology?"

   "I've . . . wondered," Colin admitted. He had, and not even Dahak had been
   able to tell him. All the computer knew was that when he became functional
   once more, the surviving loyalists had reverted to a subsistence-level
   hunter-gatherer technology and showed no particular desire to advance
   further.

   "The answer is simple, Commander. Anu hunted them down. He tracked the
   surviving bridge officers by their implant signatures and butchered them
   to finish off any surviving chain of command. And for revenge, of course.
   And whenever a cluster of survivors tried to rebuild their technology, he
   wiped them out. He quartered this planet, Commander MacIntyre, seeking out
   the lifeboats with operational power plants and blowing them apart, making
   certain he alone monopolized technology, that no possible threat to him
   remained. The survivors soon learned primitivism was the only way they
   could survive."

   "But your tech base survived," Colin said coldly, and Horus winced.

   "True," he said heavily, "but look about you, Commander. How much tech
   base do we truly have? A single carefully-hidden battleship. We lack the
   infrastructure to build anything more, and if we'd attempted to build that
   infrastructure, Anu would have found us as he found the loyalists who made
   the same attempt. We might have given a good account of ourselves, but
   with only one ship against seven of the same class, plus escorts, we would
   have achieved nothing beyond an heroic death."

   He held out one hand, palm upward in an eloquent gesture of helplessness,
   and Colin felt an unwilling sympathy for the man, much as he had for Dahak
   when he first heard the starship's story. Unlike Dahak, these people had
   built their own purgatory brick by brick, but that made it no less a
   purgatory.

   "So what did you do?" he asked finally.

   "We hid, Commander," Horus admitted. "Our own plans had gone hopelessly
   wrong, for Anu couldn't leave. So we activated Nergal's stealth systems
   and hid, biding our time, and we, too, went into stasis."

   Of course they'd hidden, Colin thought, and that explained why Dahak had
   never suspected there might be more than a single faction of mutineers.
   Anu must have been mad with the need to find and destroy them, for they
   and they alone had posed a threat to him. And if they'd hidden so well he
   couldn't find them with Imperial instrumentation, then how could Dahak,
   who didn't even know to look for them, find them with the same
   instrumentation?

   "We hid," Horus continued, "but we set our own monitors to watch for any
   activity on Anu's part. We dared not challenge his enclave's defenses with
   our single ship. I am-was-a missile specialist, Commander, and I know. Not
   even Dahak could crack his main shield without a saturation bombardment.
   We didn't have the firepower, and his automatics would have blown us out
   of existence before his stasis generators could even spin down to wake
   him."

   "And so you just sat here," Colin said flatly, but his tone said he knew
   better. There were too many Terra-born in this compartment.

   "No, Commander," Horus said, and his voice accepted the knowledge behind
   Colin's statement. "We've tried to fight him, over the millennia, but
   there was little we could do. It was obvious the threat of an evolving
   indigenous technology would be enough to spark Anu's intervention, and so
   our computers were set to wake us when local civilizations appeared. We
   interacted with the early civilizations of your Fertile Crescent-" he
   grinned wryly as Colin suddenly connected his own name with the Egyptian
   pantheon "-in an effort to temper their advance, but Anu was watching, as
   well. Several of our people were killed when he suddenly reappeared, and
   it was he who shaped the Sumerian and Babylonian cultures. It was he who
   led the Hsia Dynasty in the destruction of the neolithic cultural centers
   of China, and we who lent the Shang Dynasty clandestine aid to rebuild,
   and that was only one of the battles we fought.

   "Yet we had to work secretly, hiding from him, effecting tiny changes,
   hoping for the best. Worse, there were but two hundred of us, and Anu had
   thousands. We couldn't rotate our personnel as he could-at least, that was
   what we thought he was doing-and we grew old far, far more quickly than
   he. But worst of all, Commander, was the attitude Anu's followers
   developed. They call your people 'degenerates,' did you know that?"

   Colin nodded, remembering Girru's words in a chamber of horror that had
   once been a friend's study.

   "They're wrong," Horus said harshly. "They're the degenerates. Anu's
   madness has infected them all. His people are twisted, poisoned by their
   power. Perhaps they've played the roles of gods too long, for they've come
   to believe they are gods, and Earth's people are toys to be manipulated
   and enjoyed. It was horrible enough for the first four thousand years of
   interaction, but it's grown worse since. Where once they feared the rise
   of a technology that might threaten them, now they crave one that will let
   them escape the prison of this planet . . . and they couldn't care less
   how much suffering they inflict along the way. Indeed, they see that
   suffering as a spectacle, a gladiatorial slaughter to entertain them and
   while away the years.

   "Let's be honest with one another, Commander MacIntyre. Humans, whether
   Imperials or born of your planet, are humans. There are good and bad among
   all of us, as our very presence here proves, and Earth's people would have
   inflicted sufficient suffering on themselves without Anu, but he and his
   have made it far, far worse. They've toppled civilizations by provoking
   and encouraging barbarian invasions-from the Hittites to the Hsia, the
   Achaeans, the Huns, the Vikings, and the Mongols-but even worse, in some
   ways, is what they've done since abandoning that policy. They helped fuel
   the Hundred Years' War, and the Thirty Years' War, and Europe's ruthless
   imperialism, both for enjoyment and to create power blocs that could pave
   the way for the scientific and industrial revolutions. And when progress
   wasn't rapid enough to suit them, they provoked the First World War, and
   the Second, and the Cold War.

   "We've done what we could to mitigate their excesses, but our best efforts
   have been paltry. They haven't dared come into the open for fear that
   Dahak might remain sufficiently operational to strike at them-and,
   perhaps, because the sheer number of people on this planet frightens
   them-but they could always act more openly than we.

   "Yet we've never given up, Commander MacIntyre!" The old man's voice was
   suddenly harsh, glittering with a strange fire, and Colin swallowed. That
   suddenly fiery tone was almost fanatical, and he shook free of Horus's
   story, making himself step back and wondering if perhaps his captors
   hadn't gone more than a bit mad themselves.

   "No. We've never given up," Horus said more softly. "And if you'll let us,
   we'll prove that to you."

   "How?" Colin's flat voice refused to offer any hope. Try though he might,
   it was hard to doubt Horus's sincerity. Yet it was his duty to doubt it.
   It was his responsibility-his, and his alone-to doubt everyone, question
   everything. Because if he made a mistake-another mistake, he thought
   bitterly-then all of Dahak's lonely wait would be in vain and the
   Achuultani would take them all.

   "We'll help you against Anu," Horus said, his voice equally flat, his eyes
   level. "And afterward, we will surrender ourselves to the Imperium."

   "Nay!" Jiltanith still pointed the suppresser at Colin, but her free hand
   rose like a claw, and her dark, vital face was fierce. "Now I say thee
   nay! Hast given too freely for this world, Father! Thou and all thy
   fellows!"

   "Hush, 'Tanni," Horus said softly. He clasped the shoulders of the young
   woman-his daughter, which, Colin suddenly realized, made her Isis Tudor's
   older sister-and shook her very gently. "It's our decision. It's not even
   a matter for the Council, and you know it."

   Jiltanith's tight face was furious with objection, and Horus sighed and
   gathered her close, staring into Colin's face over her shoulder.

   "We ask only one thing in return, Commander," he said softly.

   "What?" Colin asked quietly.

   "Immunity-pardon, if you will-for those like 'Tanni." The girl stiffened
   in his arms, trying to thrust him away, but he held her easily with one
   arm. The other hand rose, covering her lips to still her furious protests.

   "They were children, Commander, with no part in our crime, and many of
   them have died trying to undo it. Can even the Imperium punish them for
   that?"

   The proud old face was pleading, the dark, ancient eyes almost desperate,
   and Colin recognized the justice of the plea.

   "If-and I say if-you can convince me of your sincerity and ability to
   help," he said slowly, "I'll do my best. I can't promise any more than
   that."

   "I know," Horus said. "But you will try?"

   "I will," Colin replied levelly.

   The old man regarded him a moment longer, then took the suppresser gently
   from Jiltanith. She fought him a moment, surrendering the device with
   manifest reluctance, and Horus hugged her gently. His eyes were
   understanding and sad, but a small smile played around his lips as he
   looked down at it.

   "In that case," he said, "we'll just have to convince you. Please meet us
   half-way by not transmitting to Dahak, at least until we've finished
   talking."

   And he switched off the suppresser.

   For just an instant Colin sat absolutely motionless. The other Imperials
   on the command bridge were suddenly bright presences, glowing with their
   own implants, and he felt his computer feeds come on line. Nergal's
   computers were far brighter than those of the cutter that had returned him
   to Earth, and they recognized a bridge officer when they met one. After
   fifty millennia, they had someone to report to properly, and the surge of
   their data cores tingled in his brain like alien fire, feeding him
   information and begging for orders.

   Colin's eyes met Horus's as he recognized the risk the old man had just
   taken, for no new security codes had been buried in Nergal's electronic
   brain. From the instant Colin's feeds tapped into those computers, they
   were his. He, not Horus, controlled the ancient battleship, external
   weapons and internal security systems alike.

   But trust was a two-edged sword.

   "I suppose that, as head of your council, you're also captain of this
   ship?" he said calmly, and the old man nodded.

   "Then sit down, Captain, and tell me how we're going to beat Anu."

   Horus nodded once more, sharply, and sat beside Isis. Colin never glanced
   away from his new ally's face, but he didn't have to; he could feel the
   gathered council's tension draining away about him.

    

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                                                                       Framed