"I imagine he does." Colin chuckled. "But then my lieutenant governor probably felt the same way."
"Indeed he did!" Horus laughed. "Actually, Lawrence has been a gift from the Maker," he added more seriously. "He's taken a tremendous amount of day-to-day duties off my back, and he and Isis make a mighty efficient team on the enhancement side."
"Then I'm glad you've got him." Colin knew Lawrence Jefferson less well than he would have liked, but what he knew impressed him. Under the Great Charter, imperial planetary governors were appointed by the Emperor, but a lieutenant governor was appointed by his immediate superior with the advice and consent of his Planetary Council. After so many centuries as an inhabitant (if not precisely a citizen) of the North American continent, Horus had chosen to turn that advice and consent function into an election, soliciting nominations from his Councilors, and Jefferson was the result. A US senator when Colin raided Anu's enclave, he'd done yeoman work throughout the Siege, then resigned midway through his third senatorial term to assume his new post, where he'd soon made his mark as a man of charm, wit, and ability.
Now Colin turned to Ninhursag. "Anything new from ONI, 'Hursag?"
"Not really." Like Horus and Jiltanith, the stocky, pleasantly plain woman had come to Earth aboard Dahak. Like Horus (but unlike Jiltanith, who'd been a child at the time), she'd joined Fleet Captain Anu's mutiny, only to discover to her horror that it was but the first step in Dahak's Chief Engineer's plan to topple the Imperium itself. But whereas Horus had deserted Anu and launched a millennia-long guerrilla war against him, Ninhursag had been stuck in stasis in Anu's Antarctic enclave. When she was finally awakened, she'd managed to contact the guerrillas and provide the information which had made the final, desperate attack on the enclave possible. Now, as a Battle Fleet admiral, she ran Naval Intelligence and enjoyed describing herself as Colin's "SIC," or "Spook In Chief." Colin was fond of telling her her self-created acronym was entirely apt.
"We've still got problems," she continued, "because Horus is right. When you stand an entire world on its head, you generate a lot of resentment. On the other hand, Earth took half a billion casualties from the Achuultani, and everybody knows who saved the rest of them. Almost all of them are willing to give you and 'Tanni the benefit of the doubt on anything you do or we do in your names. Gus and I are keeping an eye on the discontented elements, but most of them disliked one another enough before the Siege to make any kind of cooperation difficult. Even if they didn't, they can't do much to buck the kind of devotion the rest of the human race feels for you."
Colin no longer blushed when people said things like that, and he nodded thoughtfully. Gustav van Gelder was Horus' Minister of Security, and while Ninhursag understood the possibilities of Imperial technology far better than he, Gus had taught her a lot about how people worked.
"To be perfectly honest," Ninhursag continued, "I'd be a bit happier if I could find something serious to worry about."
"How's that?" Colin asked.
"I guess I'm like Horus, worrying about what's going to bite me next. We're moving so fast I can't even identify all the players, much less what they might be up to, and even the best security measures could be leaking like a sieve. For instance, I've spent hours with Dahak and a whole team of my brightest boys and girls, and we still can't figure a way to ID Anu's surviving Terra-born allies."
"Are you saying we didn't get them all?!" Colin jerked upright, and Jiltanith tensed at his side. Ninhursag looked surprised at their reactions.
"Didn't you tell him, Dahak?" she asked.
"I regret," the mellow voice sounded unwontedly uncomfortable, "that I did not. Or, rather, I did not do so explicitly."
"And what the hell does that mean?" Colin demanded.
"I mean, Colin, that I included the data in one of your implant downloads but failed to draw your attention specifically to them."
Colin frowned and keyed the mental sequence that opened the index of his implant knowledge. The problem with implant education was that it simply stored data; until someone used that information, he might not even know he had it. Now the report Dahak referred to sprang into his forebrain, and he bit off a curse.
"Dahak," he began plaintively, "I've told you—"
"You have." The computer hesitated a moment, then went on. "As you know, my equivalent of the human qualities of 'intuition' and 'imagination' remain limited. I have grasped—intellectually, I suppose you would say—that human brains lack my own search and retrieval capabilities, but I occasionally overlook their limitations. I shall not forget again."
The computer actually sounded embarrassed, and Colin shrugged.
"Forget it. It's more my fault than yours. You certainly had a right to expect me to at least read your report."
"Perhaps. It is nonetheless incumbent upon me to provide you with the data you require. It thus follows that I should inquire to be certain that you do, in fact, realize that you have them."
"Don't get your diodes in an uproar." Colin turned back to Ninhursag as Dahak made the sound he used for a chuckle. "Okay, I've got it now, but I don't see anything about how we missed them... if we did."
"The how's fairly easy, actually. Anu and his crowd spent thousands of years manipulating Earth's population, and they had a tremendous number of contacts, including batches of people with no idea who they were working for. We got most of their bigwigs when you stormed his enclave, but Anu couldn't possibly have squeezed all of them into it. We managed to identify most of the important bit players from his captured records, but a lot of small fry have to've been missed.
"Those people don't worry me. They know what'll happen if they draw attention to themselves, and I expect most have decided to become very loyal subjects of the Imperium. But what does worry me a bit is that Kirinal seems to have been running at least two top secret cells no one else knew about. When you and 'Tanni killed her in the Cuernavaca strike, not even Anu and Ganhar knew who those people were, so they never got taken into the enclave before the final attack."
"My God, 'Hursag!" Hatcher sounded appalled. "You mean we've still got top echelon people who worked for Anu running around loose?"
"No more than a dozen at the outside," Ninhursag replied, "and, like the small fry, they're not going to draw attention to themselves. I'm not suggesting we forget about them, Gerald, but consider the mess they're in. They lost their patron when Colin killed Anu, and as Horus and I have been saying, we've turned Earth's whole society upside-down, so they've probably lost a lot of the influence they may've had in the old power structure. Even those who haven't been left out in the cold have only their own resources to work with, and there's no way they're going to do anything that might draw attention to their past associations with Anu."
"Admiral MacMahan is correct, Admiral Hatcher," Dahak said. "I do not mean to imply that they will never be a menace again—indeed, the fact that they knowingly served Anu indicates not only criminality on their part but ambition and ability, as well—yet they no longer possess a support structure. Deprived of Anu's monopoly on Imperial technology, they become simply one more criminal element. While it would be folly to assume they are incapable of building a new support structure or to abandon our search for them, they represent no greater inherent threat than any other group of unscrupulous individuals. Moreover, it should be noted that they were organized on a cell basis, which suggests members of any one cell would know only other members of that cell. Concerted action by any large number of them is therefore improbable."