" 'Tis more like to thrice that," Jiltanith said sourly, gathering up her cards and not bothering to watch his fingers with her father's intensity.
"Ante up," he said, and chips clicked as father and daughter slid them out. If they'd really been playing for money, he'd be a billionaire, even without the ill-gotten wealth Horus had demanded he write off after he realized Colin had been cheating shamelessly. He grinned, and Jiltanith snorted without her old bitterness as she saw it.
She still wasn't really comfortable with him, but at least she was pretending, and he was grateful to Hector. The colonel had torn long, bloody strips off both of them when he saw the scan record of what they'd gone into, but his heart hadn't seemed fully in it, and Colin had seen the glint in his eye when Jiltanith called him "Colin" during their debriefing. He himself had feared she would retreat into her old, cold hostility once the rush of euphoria passed, but though she'd stepped back a bit and he knew she still resented him, she was fighting it, as if she recognized (intellectually, at least) that it wasn't his fault he was what he'd become. Her presence at the card table was proof of that.
He wished there had been a less traumatic way to effect that change, but he hoped the colonel was pleased with the way it had worked out. The military arguments for assigning them to the same flight crew had been strong, but it had taken courage—well, gall—to put them forward.
"I'll take two," Horus announced, and Colin flipped the small, pasteboard rectangles across to him.
" 'Tanni?" He raised a polite eyebrow, and she pouted.
"Nay, this hand liketh me well enow."
"Hm." He studied his own cards thoughtfully, then took one. "Bets?"
"I'll go a hundred," Horus said, and Jiltanith followed suit.
"See you and raise five hundred," Colin said grandly, and Horus glared.
"Not this time, you young hellion!" he growled. "I'll see your raise and raise you a hundred!"
"Father, art moonstruck," Jiltanith said, tossing in her own hand. "Whyfor must thou throw good money after bad?"
"That's no way to talk to your father, 'Tanni." Horus sounded pained, and Colin hid another smile.
"See you and raise another five," he murmured, and Horus glared at him.
"Damn it, I watched you deal! You can't possibly—" The old Imperial shoved more chips forward. "Call," he said grimly. "Let's see you beat this!"
He faced his cards—four jacks and an ace—and glowered at Colin.
"Horus, Horus!" Colin sighed. He shook his head sadly and laid out his own hand card by card, starting with the two of clubs and ending with the six.
"No!" Horus stared at the table in shock. "A straight flush?!"
" 'Twas foredoomed, Father," Jiltanith sighed, a twinkle dancing in her own eyes. "Certes, 'tis strange that one so wise as thou should be so hot to make thyself so poor."
"Oh, shut up!" Horus said, trying not to smile himself. He gathered up the cards and glared at Colin. "This time I'll deal."
"Damn them! Breaker take them to hell!"
The being who had once been Fleet Captain (Engineering) Anu leapt to his feet and slammed his fist down so hard the table's heavy top cracked. He stared at the spiderweb fractures for a moment, then snatched it up and hurled it against the battle-steel bulkhead with all his strength. The impact was a harsh, discordant clangor and the table sprang back, its thick Imperial plastic bent and buckled. He glared at it, chest heaving with his fury, then kicked the wreckage back into the bulkhead. He did it several more times, then whirled, fists clenched at his sides.
"And you, Ganhar! Some 'intelligence analyst' you turned out to be! What the hell do you have to say for yourself?!"
Ganhar felt sweat on his forehead but carefully did not wipe it away as he fastened his eyes on the center of Anu's chest. He dared not not look at him, but it could be almost as dangerous to meet his gaze at a moment like this. Ganhar had assisted Kirinal in running Anu's external operations for over a century, but the newly promoted operations head had never seen Anu quite this furious, and he silently cursed Kirinal for getting herself killed. If she'd still been alive, he could have switched his leader's wrath to her.
"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-oriented military establishments worked against them.