"Commander, your caution is admirable but misplaced. While we have continued to suppress your implants, particularly your com link, that act is in your interest as well as our own. You can have no more desire than we to provide Anu's missiles with a targeting beacon! We realize, however, that it is we who must convince you our motives are benign, and the only way I can see to do that is to tell you who we are and why we want so desperately to help rather than hinder you."
"Indeed?" Colin permitted himself a question at last and let his eyes slip sideways to Jiltanith. Horus made a wry face.
"Is any decision ever totally unanimous, Commander? We may be mutineers or something else entirely, but we are also a community in which even those who disagree with the majority abide by the decisions of our Council. Is that not true, 'Tanni?" he asked the angry-eyed young woman gently.
"Aye, 'tis true enow," she said shortly, biting off each word as if it cost her physical pain, and her very reluctance was almost reassuring. A lie would have come more easily.
"All right," Colin said finally. "I won't make any promises, but go ahead and explain your position to me."
"Thank you," Horus said. He propped a hip against the console before which Isis Tudor sat and crossed his arms.
"First, Commander, a confession. I supported the mutiny with all my heart, and I fought hard to make it a success. Most of the Imperials in this control room would admit the same. But—" his eyes met Colin's unflinchingly "—we were used, Commander MacIntyre."
Colin returned his gaze silently, and Horus shrugged.
"I know. It was our own fault, and we've been forced to accept that. We attempted to desert 'in the face of the enemy,' as your own code of military justice would phrase it, and we recognize our guilt. Indeed, that's the reason none of us wear the uniform to which we were once entitled. Yet there's another side to us, Commander, for once we recognized how horribly wrong we'd been, we also attempted to make amends. And not all of us were mutineers."
He paused and looked back at Jiltanith, whose face was harder and colder than ever. It was a fortress, her hatred a portcullis grinding down, and her bitter eyes ignored Horus to look straight into Colin's face.
"Jiltanith was no mutineer, Commander," Horus said softly.
"No?" Colin surprised himself by how gently his question came out. Jiltanith's obvious youth beside the other, aged Imperials had already set her apart. Somehow, without knowing exactly why, he'd felt her otherness.
"No," Horus said in the same soft voice. " 'Tanni was six Terran years old, Commander. Why should a child be held accountable for our acts?"
Colin nodded slowly, committing himself to nothing, yet that, at least, he understood. To be sentenced to eternal exile or death for a crime you had never committed would be enough to wake hatred in anyone.
"But Dahak's business is with all of us, I suppose," Horus continued quietly, "and my fellows and I accept that. We've grown old, Commander. Our lives are largely spent. It is only for 'Tanni and the other innocents we would plead. And, perhaps, for some of our comrades to the south."
"That's very eloquent, Horus," Colin said, tone carefully neutral, "but—"
"But we must work our passage, is that it?" Horus interrupted, and Colin nodded slowly. "Why, so we think, as well.
"When Anu organized his mutiny, Commander, Commander (BioSciences) Inanna picked the most suitable psych profiles for recruitment. Even the Imperium had its malleable elements, and she and Anu chose well. Some were merely frightened of death; others were dissatisfied and saw a chance for promotion and power; still others were simply bored and saw a chance for adventure. But what very few of them knew was that Anu's inner circle had motives quite different from their own.
"Anu's professed goal was to seize the ship and flee the Achuultani, but the plain truth of the matter was that he, like many of the crew, no longer believed in the Achuultani." Colin sat a bit straighter, eager to hear another perspective—even one which might prove self-serving—on the mutiny, but he let his face show doubt.
"Oh, the records were there," Horus agreed, "but the Imperium was old, Commander. We were regimented, disciplined, prepared for battle at the drop of a hat—or that, at least, was the idea. Yet we'd waited too long for the enemy. We were no longer attack dogs straining at the leash. We'd become creatures of habit, and many of us believed deep in our souls that we were regimented and controlled and trained for a purpose that no longer existed.
"Even those of us who'd seen proof of the Achuultani's existence—dead planets, gutted star systems, the wreckage of ancient battle fleets—had never seen the Achuultani, and our people were not so very different from your own. Anything beyond your own life experience wasn't quite 'real' to us. After seven thousand years in which there were no new incursions, after five thousand years of preparation for an attack that never came, after three thousand years of sending out probes that found no sign of the enemy, it was hard to believe there still was an enemy. We'd mounted guard too long, and perhaps we simply grew bored." Horus shrugged. "But the fact remains that only a minority of us truly believed in the Achuultani, and many of those were terrified.
"So Anu's chosen pretext was shrewd. It appealed to the frightened, gave an excuse to the disaffected, and offered the bored the challenge of a new world to conquer, one beyond the stultifying reach of the Imperium. Yet it was only a pretext, for Anu himself sought escape from neither the Achuultani nor from boredom. He wanted Dahak for himself, and he had no intention of marooning the loyalists upon Earth."
Colin knew he was leaning forward and suspected his face was giving away entirely too much, yet there was nothing he could do about it. This was a subtly different story from the one Dahak had given him, but it made sense.
And perhaps the difference wasn't so strange. The data in Dahak's memory was all the reality there was for the old starship—before it found itself operating completely on its own, at least. He'd noticed that the computer never used a personal pronoun to denote itself or its actions or responses prior to or immediately following the mutiny, and he thought he knew why. "Comp Cent" had been intended purely as a data and systems management tool to be used only under direct human supervision; Dahak's present, fully-developed self-awareness was a product of fifty-one millennia of continuous, unsupervised operation. And if that awareness had evolved after the mutiny, why should the computer question its basic data? To the records, unlike the merely human personnel who had crewed the vast ship, the Achuultani's existence was axiomatic and incontestable, and so it had become for Dahak. Why should he doubt that it was equally so for humanity? Particularly if that had been Anu's "official" reason? Of course it made sense... and Dahak himself was aware of his own lack of imagination, of empathy for the human condition.
"I believe," Horus's heavy voice recaptured Colin's attention, "that Anu is mad. I believe he was mad even then, but I may be wrong. Yet he truly believed that, backed by Dahak's power, he could overthrow the Imperium itself.
"I can't believe he could have succeeded, however disaffected portions of the population might have become, but what mattered was that he believed he had some sort of divine mission to conquer the Imperium, and the seizure of the ship was but the first step in that endeavor.
"Yet he had to move carefully, so he lied to us. He intended all along to massacre anyone who refused to join him, but because he knew many of his adherents would balk at that he pretended differently. He even yielded to our insistence that the hypercom spares be loaded aboard the transports we believed would carry the marooned loyalists to Earth so that, in time, they might build a hypercom and call for help. And he promised us a surgical operation, Commander. His carefully prepared teams would seize the critical control nodes, cut Comp Cent from the net, and present Senior Fleet Captain Druaga with a fait accompli.