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?”