And, of course, they had the resources of exactly one battleship. One battleship against seven—not to mention the heavy cruisers, the fixed ground weapons, and Anu’s powerful shield. From a practical viewpoint, he might as well have been alone if it came to confronting the southerners openly.

But there were a few good points. For one, the northerners’ intelligence system had been in operation for millennia, and an extended network of Terra-born contacts like Sandy supported their guerrilla-like campaign. They’d even managed to establish clandestine contact with two of Anu’s “loyal” henchmen. It would be foolhardy to trust those communications too much, and they were handled with extraordinary care to avoid any traps, but they explained how the northerners knew so much about events in the southern enclave.

He opened his eyes and stood. His thoughts were racing in ever narrowing circles, and he felt as if they were about to implode. He needed to spend some more time talking to Horus in hopes some inspiration might break itself loose.

God knew they needed one.

He looked for Horus, but the chief northerner wasn’t aboard. Colin was acutely uneasy whenever Horus—or any of the Imperials—left the protection of Nergal’s stealth systems, but the northerners seemed to take it in stride. Of course, they’d had quite a while longer to accustom themselves to such risks.

And it was inevitable that they run them, for they couldn’t possibly gather their full numbers aboard the battleship. Many of the Terra-born had gone to ground when Cal’s family was killed, but others went on about their everyday lives with a courage that humbled Colin, and that meant the Imperials had to leave Nergal occasionally, for only they could operate the battleship’s stealthed auxiliaries. It was dangerous to use them, even flying nape-of-the-earth courses fit to terrify a hardened rotor-jockey, but they had too few security coms to tie their network together without them. Colin wished Horus would leave such risks to others, but he’d come to understand the old man too well to suggest it.

For all that, he bit his tongue against a groan of resignation when he entered the command bridge and found not Horus but his daughters.

Jiltanith stood as he entered, bristling with the instant hostility his presence always evoked, but Isis managed a smile of greeting. Colin glanced covertly at Jiltanith’s lovely face and considered the virtues of a discreet retreat, yet that would be unwise in the long run. So he seated himself deliberately in the captain’s chair and met her hot eyes levelly.

“Good afternoon, ladies. I was looking for your father.”

“Shalt not find him here,” Jiltanith said pointedly. He ignored the hint, and she glared at him. If she’d truly been the cat she resembled, she would be lashing her tail and flexing her claws, he thought.

“ ’Tanni,” Isis said quietly, but Jiltanith gave an angry little headshake and stalked out. Isis watched her go and sighed.

“That girl!” she said resignedly, then smiled wryly at Colin. “I’m afraid she’s taking it badly, Commander.”

“Please,” he smiled himself, a bit sadly, “after all that’s happened, I wish you’d call me Colin.”

“Of course. Colin.”

“I … haven’t had a chance to tell you how sorry I am.” She raised a hand, but he shook his head. “No. It’s kind of you, and I don’t want to hurt you by talking about it, but I need to say it.” Her hand fell to her lap, folding about its fellow, and she lowered her eyes to her thin fingers.

“Cal was my friend,” he said softly, “and I rushed in, flashing around Imperial technology like some new toy, and got his entire family killed. I know I couldn’t have known what I was doing, but that doesn’t change the facts. He’s dead, and I’m responsible.”

“If you want to put it that way,” Isis said gently, “but he and Frances knew the risks. If that sounds callous it isn’t meant to, but it’s true. I raised him after his parents died, and I loved him, just as I loved my granddaughter-in-law and my great-granddaughters, but we always knew it could happen. Just as Andy knew when he married me.” She looked up with a misty smile, her lined face creased with memories, and Colin swallowed.

“There’s something I don’t quite understand,” he said after a moment. “How could your father produce the work he produced as Horace Hidachi and still take the risk of having children? And why did he do it at all?”

“Have a child or produce the work?” Isis asked with a chuckle, and Colin felt some of their shared sorrow fall from his shoulders.

“Both,” he said.

“It was a risk,” she concluded, “but the fact that ‘Hidachi’ was Oriental helped cover his appearance—we’ve always found that useful, though the emergence of the Asian Alliance has complicated things lately—and he chose his time and place carefully. Clemson University is a fine school, one of the top four tech schools in the country, but that’s a fairly recent development. It wasn’t exactly on the frontiers of physics at the time, and he published in the most obscure journal he could find. And there were some deliberate errors in his work, you know. All that, plus the fact that he never went further than pure theory, was intended to convince any of Anu’s people who noticed it that he was a Terran who didn’t even realize the significance of his own work.

“As for having me,” she smiled more naturally, “that was an accident. Mom was his eighth wife—’Tanni’s mother died during the mutiny—and, frankly, she thought she was too old to conceive and got a bit careless. When they found out she was pregnant, it scared them, but they never considered an abortion, for which I can only be grateful.” She grinned, and her eyes sparkled for the first time Colin could remember.

“But it was a problem. As a rule, none of our Imperials interact openly with the Terran community, and on the rare occasions when they do, they appear and disappear without a trace. They almost always act solo, as well, which meant he and Mom had already stepped totally out of character. That very fact was a form of protection for them, and they decided to add me to it and hope for the best. And it helped that Mom was Terra-born, blonde, and a little, bitty thing. She and I both looked very little like Imperials.”

Colin nodded. No one in his right mind would offer his family up for massacre; hence the presence of a family was a strong indication that “Horace Hidachi” was not an Imperial at all. It made a dangerous sort of sense, but he shivered at the thought, and wished he might have had the chance to meet the quite extraordinary “little, bitty” woman who had been Isis’s mother.

“Still,” Isis went on sadly, “we knew they’d keep an eye on ‘Hidachi’s’ family. That’s why I went into medicine and Michael was a stockbroker. We both stayed as far away from physics as we could, but Cal was too much like his great-granddad. He was determined to play an active part.”

“I still don’t understand why, though. Why risk so much to plant a theory the mutin—” Colin broke off and flushed, and Isis gave a soft, musical laugh.

“Sorry,” he said after a moment. “I meant, why risk so much to plant a theory that Anu’s bunch already knew?”

“Why, Colin!” Isis rolled her eyes almost roguishly. “Here you sit, precisely because that theory was made available to the space program. If the southerners hadn’t followed up, we would’ve had to push it ourselves, sooner or later, because we needed for your survey instruments to be developed. Of course, Dad and Mom were pretty confident ’Anu’s bunch,’ as you put it, would pursue it once they noticed it—the ‘Hidachi Theory of Gravitonics’ is the foundation of the Imperial sublight and Enchanach Drives, after all—but we couldn’t be certain. One reason we wanted them to believe a ‘degenerate’ had set the stage for it was to be sure they produced the hardware rather than opposing its development, because the entire point was to do exactly what we did: provoke a reaction from Dahak, one way or the other.”