“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.

Colin leaned back and propped his heels on his desk. The quarters the mutineers (if that was still the proper word) had assigned him were another attempt to prove their sincerity, for this was the captain’s cabin, fitted with neural relays to the old battleship’s computers. He could not keep them from retaking Nergal, but, like the millennia-dead Druaga, he could insure that they would recapture only a hulk.

Which, Colin thought, was shrewd of Horus, whether he was truly sincere or not.

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, wishing desperately that he could contact Dahak, yet he dared not. He knew where he was now—buried five kilometers under the Canadian Rockies near Churchill Peak—but the recent clash had roused Anu’s vengeful search for Nergal to renewed heights, and if the southerners should detect Colin’s com link, their missiles would arrive before even Dahak could do anything to stop them.

The same applied to any effort to reach Dahak physically. He was lucky he hadn’t been spotted on the way in, despite his cutter’s stealth systems; now that the marooned Imperials’ long, hidden conflict had heated back up, there was no way anything of Imperial manufacture could head out of the planetary atmosphere without being spotted and killed.

It was maddening. He’d acquired a support team just as determined to destroy Anu as he was, yet it was pathetically weak compared to its enemies and there was no way to inform Dahak it even existed! Worse, Anshar’s energy gun had reduced the suppresser to wreckage, and Nergal’s repair facilities were barely sufficient to run diagnostics on what remained, much less fix it.

Colin was deeply impressed by what the northerners had achieved over the centuries, but very little of what he’d found in Nergal’s memory had been good, aside from the confirmation that Horus had told him the truth about what had happened after he and his fellows boarded Nergal.

The old battleship’s memory was long overdue for purging, for Nergal’s builders had designed her core programming to insure that accurate combat reports came back to her mothership. No one could alter that data in any way until Nergal’s master computer dumped a complete copy into Dahak’s data base.

For fifty thousand years, the faithful, moronic genius had carefully logged everything as it happened, and while molecular memories could store an awesome amount of data, there was so much in Nergal’s that just finding it was frustratingly slow. Yet that crowded memory gave him a record that was accurate, unalterable, and readily—if not quickly—available.

There was, of course, far too much data for any human mind to assimilate, but he could skim the high points, and it had been hard to maintain his nonexpression as he did. If anything, Horus had understated the war he and his fellows had fought. Direct clashes were infrequent, but there had been only two hundred and three adult northerners at the start, and age, as well as casualties, had winnowed their ranks. Fewer than seventy of them remained.

He and Horus had lingered, conferring with one another and the computers through their feeds while the rest of the Council went on about their duties. Only Horus’s daughters had stayed.

Iris had interjected only an occasional word as she tried to follow their half-spoken, half-silent conversation, but Jiltanith had been a silent, sullen presence in their link. She’d neither offered nor asked anything, but her cold, bitter loathing for all he was had appalled Colin.

He’d never realized emotions could color the link, perhaps because his only previous use of it had been with Dahak, without the side-band elements involved when human met human through an electronic intermediary. Or perhaps it was simply that her bitter emotions were so strong. He’d wondered why Horus didn’t ask her to withdraw, but then, he had many questions about Jiltanith and her place in the small, strange community he’d never suspected might exist.