He couldn’t know if Dahak’s presence was required to stand off the Achuultani scouts, but he hoped desperately that it was not, for he, Colin MacIntyre, had elected to chase a tattered hope rather than defend his home world. If he’d guessed wrong about Horus’s progress, he had also doomed that home world—a world which it had become increasingly obvious might well be the only planet of humanity which still existed—whatever he found at Birhat.
And the fact that logic compelled him to Birhat meant nothing against his fear that he had guessed wrong. Against his ignorance of Horus’s progress. His agonizing suspicion that if Fleet Central still existed, it might be another Omega Three, senile and crippled with age … the paralyzing terror of bearing responsibility for the death of his own species.
He would not—could not—share that responsibility with another soul. It was his alone, and as he stepped into the transit shaft, Senior Fleet Captain Colin MacIntyre tasted the full, terrible burden of his authority at last.
The moss was soft and slightly damp as he lay on his back, staring up at the projected sky. He was coming to understand why the Imperium had provided its captains with this greenery and freshness. He could have found true spaciousness on one of the park decks, where breezes whipped across square kilometers of “open” land, but this was his. This small, private corner of creation belonged to him, offering its soothing aliveness and quiet bird-song when the weight of responsibility crushed down upon him.
He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, extending his enhanced senses. The splash of the fountains caressed him, and a gentle breeze stroked his skin, yet the sensations only eased his pain; they did not banish it.
He hadn’t noted the time when he stretched out upon the moss, and so he had no idea how long he’d been there when his neural feed tingled.
Someone was at the hatch, and he was tempted to deny access, for his awareness of what he’d done was too fresh and aching. But that thought frightened him suddenly. It would be so easy to withdraw into a tortured, hermit-like existence, and it was over six months to Birhat. A man alone could go mad too easily in that much time.
He opened the hatch, and his visitor stepped inside. She came around the end of a thicket of azaleas and laurel, and he opened his eyes slowly.
“Art troubled, my Colin,” she said softly.
He started to explain, but then he saw it in her eyes. She knew. One, at least, of his officers knew exactly why he’d refused to discuss his decision.
“May I sit with thee?” she asked gently, and he nodded.
She crossed the carpet of moss with the poised, cat-like grace which was always so much a part of her, straight and slim in her midnight-blue uniform, tall for an Imperial, yet delicate, her gleaming black hair held back by the same jeweled clasp she’d worn the day they met. The day when he’d seen the hate in her eyes. The hate for what he’d done, for the clumsy, cocksure fumbling which had cost the lives of a grandnephew and great-nieces she loved, but even more for what he was. For the threat of punishment he posed to her mutineer-father. For the fullness of his enhancement while she had but bits and pieces. And for the fact that he, who had never known of Dahak’s existence, never suspected her own people’s lonely, hopeless fight against Anu, had inherited command of the starship from which she had been exiled for a crime others had committed.
There was a killer in Jiltanith. He’d seen it then, known it from the first. The mutiny had cost her her mother and the freedom of the stars, and the endless stealth of her people’s shadowy battle on Earth had been slivered glass in her throat, for she was a fighter, a warrior who believed in open battle. Those long, agonizing years had left dark, still places within her. Far more than he could ever hope to be, she was capable of death and destruction, incapable of asking or offering quarter.
But there was no hate in her eyes now. They were soft and gentle under the atrium’s sun, their black depths jewel-like and still. Colin had grown accustomed to the appearance of the full Imperials, yet in this moment the subtle alienness of her beauty smote him like a fist. She had been born before his first Terran ancestor crawled into a cave to hide from the weather, yet she was young. Twice his age and more, yet they were both but children against the lifespan of their enhanced bodies. Her youthfulness lay upon her, made still more precious and perfect by the endless years behind her, and his eyes burned.
This, he thought. This girl-woman who had known and suffered so much more than he, was what this all was about. She was the symbol of humankind, the avatar of all its frailties and the iron core of all its strength, and he wanted to reach out and touch her. But she was the mythic warrior-maid, the emblem, and the weight of his decision was upon him. He was unclean.
“Oh, my Colin,” she whispered, looking deep into his own weary, tormented eyes, “what hast thou taken upon thyself?”
He clenched his hands at his sides, gripping the moss, and refused to answer, but a sob wrenched at the base of his throat.
She came closer slowly, carefully, like a hunter approaching some wild, snared thing, and sank to her knees beside him. One delicate hand, slender and fine-boned, deceiving the eye into forgetting its power, touched his shoulder.
“Once,” she said, “in a life I scarce recall, I envied thee. Yea, envied and hated thee, for thou hadst received all unasked for the one treasure in all the universe I hungered most to hold. I would have slain thee, could I but have taken that treasure from thee. Didst thou know that?”
He nodded jerkily, and she smiled.
“Yet knowing, thou didst name me thy successor in command, for thine eyes saw more clear than mine own. ’Twas chance, mayhap, sent thee to Dahak’s bridge, yet well hast thou proven thy right to stand upon it. And never more than thou hast done this day.”
Her hand stroked gently from his shoulder to his chest, covering the slow, strong beating of his bioenhanced heart, and he trembled like a frightened child. But her fingers moved, gentling his strange terror.
“Yet thou art not battle steel, my Colin,” she said softly. “Art flesh and blood for all thy biotechnics, whate’er thy duty may demand of thee.”
She bent slowly, laying her head atop her hand, and the fine texture of her hair brushed his cheek, its silken caress almost agony to his enhanced senses. Tears brimmed in the corners of his eyes, and part of him cursed his weakness while another blessed her for proving it to him. The sob he had fought broke free, and she made a soft, soothing sound.
“Yea, art flesh and blood, though captain to us all. Forget that not, for thou art not Dahak, and thy humanity is thy curse, the sword by which thou canst be wounded.” She raised her head, and his blurred eyes saw the tears in her own. One moss-stained hand rose, stroking her raven’s-wing hair, and she smiled.
“Yet wounds may be healed, my Colin, and I am likewise flesh, likewise blood,” she murmured. She bent over him, and her mouth tasted of the salt of their mingled tears. His other hand rose, drawing her down beside him on the moss, and he rose on an elbow as she smiled up at him.
“Thou wert my salvation,” she whispered, caressing his unruly sandy hair. “Now let me be thine, for I am thine and thou art mine. Forget it never, my dearest dear, for ’tis true now and ever shall be.”
And she drew him down to kiss her once again.
The computer named Dahak closed down the sensors in the captain’s quarters with profound but slightly wistful gratitude. He had made great strides in understanding these short-lived, infuriatingly illogical, occasionally inept, endlessly inventive, and stubbornly dauntless descendants of his long-dead builders. More than any other of his kind, he had learned to understand human emotions, for he had learned to share many of them. Respect. Friendship. Hope. Even, in his own way, love. He knew his presence would embarrass Colin and Jiltanith if it occurred to them to check for it, and while he did not fully understand the reason, they were his friends, and so he left them.