“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.