“There were no indications they planned anything like this, Chief,” he said, hoping his voice sounded more level than it felt. He started to add that Anu himself had seen and approved all of his intelligence estimates, but prudence stopped him. Anu had become steadily less stable over the years. Reminding him of his own fallibility just now was strongly contra-indicated.

“ ‘No indications’!” Anu mimicked in a savage falsetto. He growled something else under his breath, then inhaled sharply. His rage appeared to vanish as suddenly as it had come, and he picked up his chair and sat calmly. When he spoke again, his voice was almost normal.

“All right. You fucked up, but maybe it wasn’t entirely your fault,” he said, and Ganhar felt himself sag internally in relief.

“But they’ve hurt us,” the chief mutineer continued, harshness creeping back into his voice. “I’ll admit it—I didn’t think they’d have the guts for something like this, either. And it’s paid off for them, Breaker take them!”

All eyes turned to the holo map hovering above the space the table had occupied, dotted with glaring red symbols that had once been green.

“Cuernavaca, Fenyang, and Gerlochovko in one night!” Anu snorted. “The equipment doesn’t matter all that much, but they’ve blown the guts out of your degenerates—and we’ve lost eighty more Imperials. Eighty! That makes more than ten percent of us in the last month!”

His subordinates sat silent. They could do the math equally well, and the casualties appalled them. Their enemies hadn’t done that much damage to them in five millennia, and the fact that their own over-confidence had made it possible only made it worse. They’d known their foes were aging, that time was on their side. It had never occurred to them that the enemy might have the sheer nerve to take the offensive after all these years.

Even worse was the way they’d been attacked. The open use of Imperial weapons had been a shattering blow to their confidence, and it could well have led to disaster. None of the degenerates seemed to know what had happened, but they knew it was something they couldn’t explain. The southerners’ penetration of the major governments, especially in the Asian Alliance, had been sufficient to head off any precipitate military action against purely Terrestrial foes, but their control was much weaker in the West, and their enemies’ obvious willingness to run such risks was sobering.

But not, Ganhar thought privately, as sobering as another possibility. Perhaps their enemies had had reason to be confident of their own ability to control the situation? It was possible, for if the southerners had their hooks deep into the civilian agencies, Nergal’s people had outdistanced them among the West’s soldiers.

The first reports had produced plenty of demands for action or, at the very least, priority investigations into whatever had happened, but their own tools among the civilians had managed to quash any “overly hasty action,” though there had been some fiery scenes. Yet now a curtain of silence had descended over the Western militaries, and Ganhar found that silence ominous.

He bit his lip, longing for better sources within military intelligence, but they were a clannish bunch. And, much as he hated to admit it, the northerners’ willingness to accept degenerates as equals had marked advantages. They’d spent centuries setting up their networks, often recruiting from or even before birth. Ganhar and Kirinal, on the other hand, had concentrated on recruiting adults, preferring to work on individuals whose weaknesses were readily apparent. That had its own advantages, like the ability to target people on their way up, but the increasing high-tech tendency towards small, professional, career—or iented military establishments worked against them.

The military’s background investigation procedures were at least as rigorous as those of their civilian counterparts, and the steady incidence of leaks from civilian agencies had led to an even stronger preference for career officers for truly sensitive posts. Worse, Ganhar knew the northerners had firm links with the traditional military families, though pinning any of them down was the Breaker’s own work. And that meant their military contacts were damned well born in position, with sponsors who were ready to favor their own and doubly suspicious of everyone else.

Ganhar, on the other hand, had no choice but to corrupt officers already in place, which risked counter-penetration, or fabricate fictitious backgrounds (always risky, even against such primitives, much less degenerates aided by Imperial input), which was why it had seemed so sensible to concentrate on their civilian masters, instead.

He hoped that policy wasn’t about to boomerang on them.

“Well, Ganhar?” Anu’s abrasive voice broke in on his thoughts. “Why do you think they’ve come out into the open? Assuming you have an opinion.”

While Ganhar hesitated, seeking a survivable response, another voice answered.

“It may be,” Commander Inanna said carefully, “that they’re desperate.”

“Explain,” Anu said curtly, and she shrugged.

“They’re getting old,” she said softly. “They used Imperial fighters, and they can’t have many Imperials left. Maybe they’re in even worse shape than we’d thought. Maybe it’s a last-ditch effort to cripple us while they can still use Imperial technology at all.”

“Hmph!” Anu frowned down at the clenched hands in his lap. “Maybe you’re right,” he said finally, “but it doesn’t change the fact that they’ve taken out three quarters of our major bases. Maker only knows what they’ll do next!”

“What can they do, Chief?” It was Jantu, the enclave’s chief security officer. “The only other big target was Nanga Parbat, and we’ve already shut down there. Sure, they hurt us, but those were the only targets they could hit with Imperial weapons. And—” he added with a glance at Ganhar “—if we’d put them closer to major population centers, they couldn’t even have hit them.”

Ganhar ground his teeth. Jantu was a bully and a sadist, more at home silencing dissidence by crushing dissidents than thinking, yet he had his own brand of cunning. He liked to propose sweeping, simplistic solutions to other people’s problems. If they were rejected, he could always say he’d warned everyone they were going about it wrongly. If they were adopted and succeeded, he took the credit, if they failed, he could always blame someone else for poor execution. Like his long-standing argument in favor of using cities to cover their bases against attack, claiming that their enemies’ softness for the degenerates would protect them. It would also make it vastly harder to hide them, but Jantu wouldn’t have been the one who had to try.

“It might not have mattered.” Inanna disliked Jantu quite as much as Ganhar did, and her eyes—black now, not brown—were hard. “They risked panicking the degenerates into starting a war. For all we know, they might’ve hit us if our bases had been buried under New York or Moscow.”

“I doubt that,” Jantu said, showing his teeth in what might—charitably—be called a smile. “In all—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Anu interrupted coldly. “What matters is that it’s happened. What’s your best estimate of their next move, Ganhar?”

“I … don’t know.” Ganhar picked his words carefully. “I’m not happy about how quiet the degenerates’ militaries have been. That may or may not indicate something, but I don’t have anything definite to base projections on. I’m sorry, Chief, but that’s all I can say.”

He braced himself against a fresh burst of rage, yet it was wiser to be honest than to let a mistake come home to roost. But there was no blast of fury, only a slow nod.

“That’s what I thought,” Anu grunted. “All right. We’ve already got most of our Imperials—what’s left of them!—under cover. We’ll sit tight a bit longer on our degenerates and less reliable Imperials. Jantu’s right about one thing; there aren’t any more of our concentrations for them to hit. Let’s see what the bastards do next before we bring anyone else down here.”