It was fortunate Horus had been able to meet him in the computers. Some vocalization was necessary to set data in context, but the old mutineer had led him unerringly through the data banks, and his memory went back, replaying that first afternoon as if it were today…

“All right,” Colin sighed finally, rubbing his temples wearily. “I don’t know about you folks, but I need a break before my brain fries.”

Horus nodded understandingly; Jiltanith only sniffed, and Colin suppressed an urge to snap at her.

“I’ve got to say, this Anu is an even nastier bastard than I expected,” he went on, his voice hardening with the change of subject. “I’d wondered how he could ride herd on all his faithful followers, but I never expected this.”

“I know,” Horus looked down at the backs of his powerful, age-spotted hands. “But it makes sense, in a gruesome sort of way. After all, unlike us, he does have an intact medical capability.”

“But to use it like that,” Colin said, and his shudder was not at all affected, for “gruesome” was a terribly pale word for what Anu had done. Dahak hadn’t suggested such things were possible, but Colin supposed he should have known they were.

Anu’s problem had been two-fold. First, how did he and his inner circle—no more than eight hundred strong—control five thousand Imperials who would, for the most part, be as horrified as Horus to learn the truth about their leader? And, secondly, how could even fully-enhanced Imperials oversee the manipulation of an entire planet without withering away from old age before they could create the technology they needed to escape it?

The medical science of the Imperium had provided a psychopathically elegant solution to both problems at once. The “unreliable” elements were simply never reawakened, and while stasis also allowed the mutineer leaders to sleep away centuries at need, Anu and his senior lieutenants had been awake a long time. By now, Horus calculated, Anu was on his tenth replacement body.

Imperial science had mastered the techniques of cloning to provide surgical transplants before the advent of reliable regeneration, but that had been so long ago cloning was almost a lost art. Only the most comprehensive medical centers retained the capability for certain carefully-delimited, individually-licensed experimental programs, and the use even of clones for this purpose was punishable by death for all concerned. Yet heinous as that would have been in the eyes of the Imperium’s intricate, iron-bound code of bioscience morality, what Anu had actually done was worse. When old age overtook him, he simply selected a candidate from among the mutineers in stasis and had its brain removed for his own to displace. As long as his supply of bodies held out, he was effectively immortal.

The same was true of his lieutenants, but while only Imperial bodies were good enough for Anu and Inanna and their most trusted henchmen, others—like Anshar—were forced to make do with Terra-born bodies. There was a greater danger of tissue rejection in that, but there were compensations. The range of choices was vast, and Inanna’s medical technology, though limited compared to Dahak’s, was quite capable of basic enhancement of Terra-born bodies.

Colin returned to the present with a shudder. Even now, thinking about it sent a physical shiver down his spine. It horrified him almost as much as the approaching Achuultani horrified Horus. Desperation had blazed in the old Imperial’s eyes when he learned the enemy he’d never quite believed in was actually coming, but Colin had been given months to adjust to that. This was different. The victims’ tragedy was one he could grasp, not a galactic one, and that made it something he could relate to … and hate.

And perhaps, as Horus had suggested, it also helped to explain why Anu continued to operate so clandestinely. His followers had gone trustingly into stasis and were unable to resist his depredations, but there were simply too many Terrans to be readily controlled, and Colin doubted Earth’s humanity would react calmly to the knowledge that high-tech vampires were harvesting them.

Yet Anu’s ghastly perversions only emphasized the huge difference between his capabilities and those of his northern opponents. Nergal was a warship. Thirty percent of her impressive tonnage was committed to propulsion and power, ten percent to command and control systems, another ten percent to defensive systems, and forty percent to armor, offensive weaponry, and magazine space. That left only ten percent to accommodate her three-hundred-man crew and its life support, which meant even living space was cramped.

That mattered little under normal circumstances, for she was designed for short-term deployments—certainly no more than a few months at a time. She didn’t even have a proper stasis installation; her people had been forced to cobble one up, and their success was a far-from-minor miracle. But because her intended deployments were so short, Nergal’s sickbay was limited. Anu and his butchers could select Terra-born bodies and convert them to their own use; the northerners couldn’t even offer implants to their own Terra-born descendants.

Yet they’d had no choice but to have those descendants, for without them they would have failed long ago from sheer lack of numbers.

It had been a bitter decision, though Horus had tried to hide his pain from Colin. Horus had lived over five centuries and Isis less than one, yet his daughter was old and frail while he remained strong. Colin could have consulted the record to learn how many other children Horus had loved as he all too obviously loved Isis yet seen wither and die, but he hadn’t. That unimaginable sorrow was Horus’s alone, and he would not intrude upon it.

Yet it was possible the situation was even worse for the ones like Jiltanith, whose bodies were neither Imperial nor Terran. Jiltanith had received the neural boosters, computer and sensory implants, and regeneration treatments, but her muscles and bones and organs had been too immature for enhancement before the mutiny. Which might go a long way towards explaining her bitter resentment. He, a Terra-born human who had grown to adulthood in blissful ignorance of the battle being waged upon his planet, had received the full treatment. She hadn’t. And unless the people she loved surrendered to the Imperium’s justice, she never could have it.

Colin knew there was more to her hate than that, though he had yet to discover its full range, but understanding that much helped him cope with her bitterness.

Unfortunately, there was little he could do about it, nor did he know how the legal situation would be resolved—assuming, of course, that they won. Somehow, he’d never considered the possibility of children among the mutineers, and Dahak had never mentioned them to him.

That was a bad sign, and not one he was prepared to share with his allies. To Dahak, anyone who had accompanied Anu in his flight to Earth was a mutineer. That fundamental assumption infused everything the computer had ever said, and no distinction had ever been drawn between child and adult, but Colin had meant what he promised. If the northerners helped him against Anu, he would do what he could for their children. And, though he hadn’t promised it, for them … if he ever got the chance to try.

He leaned further back and crossed his ankles. If there were only more time! Time for Anu’s present furious search to die down, for him to return to Dahak, to act on the information he’d received and plan anew. That was what Horus had hoped for, but the Achuultani were coming. Whatever they meant to do, they must do it soon, and the sober truth was that the odds were hopeless.

The northerners undoubtedly had the edge in sheer numbers, at least over the southerners Anu would trust out of stasis, but only sixty-seven of their people were full Imperials, and all of them were old. Another eighteen were like Jiltanith, capable of getting full performance out of Imperial equipment, but utterly outclassed in any one-to-one confrontation. The three thousand-odd Terra-born members of Nergal’s “crew” would be at a hopeless disadvantage with their pathetic touchpads and telephones if they had to fight people who could link their minds directly into their weapons. They couldn’t even manage combat armor, for they lacked the implants to activate the internal circuitry.