"I can't do that. He's right."
"Call him off, or I'll have Mother do it for you!"
"You can try," Hatcher said grimly, "but only the hardware listens to her. Or are you saying that if Hector drags you aboard a ship with a million civilian evacuees you'll have Mother order its comp cent not to leave orbit?"
Colin's furious eyes locked with those of Hatcher's image, but the admiral refused to look away. A moment of terrible tension hovered in the conference room, and then Colin's shoulders slumped.
"All right," he grated, and his voice was thick with hatred. Hatred that was all the worse because he knew his friends were right. "All right, goddamn it! But I'll go aboard Dahak, not another ship."
"Good!" MacMahan snapped, then sighed and looked away. "Colin, I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry. But I can't let you stay. I just can't."
"I know, Hector." It was Colin's turn to turn away, and his voice was heavy and old, no longer hot. "I know," he repeated quietly.
Brigadier Alex Jourdain sealed his Security tunic and looked around his comfortable apartment. He'd lived well for the last ten years; now the orders he'd just received were likely to take it all away, and more, yet he was in far too deep to back out, and if they pulled it off after all—
He drew a deep breath, checked his grav gun, and headed for the transit shaft.
" 'Tanni, I—" Horus cut himself off as Jiltanith, still in her nightgown, turned from the window and he saw her tears. His face twisted, and he closed his mouth and started to leave, but she held out a hand.
"Nay, Father," she said softly. He turned back to her, then reached out to take her hand, and she smiled and pulled him closer. "Poor Father," she whispered. "How many ways the world hath wounded thee. Forgive my anger."
"There's nothing to forgive," he whispered back, and pressed his cheek to her shining hair. "Oh, 'Tanni! If I could undo my life, make it all different—"
"Then would we be gods, Father, and none of us the people life hath made us. In all I have ever known of thee, thou hast done the best that man might do. 'Twas ever thy fate to fight upon thy knees, yet never didst thou yield. Not to Anu, nor to the Achuultani, nor to Hell itself. How many, thinkest thou, might say as much?"
"But I built my Hell myself," he said quietly. "Brick by brick, and I dragged you into it with me." He closed his eyes and held her tight. "Do... do you remember the last thing you ever said to me in Universal, 'Tanni?"
She stiffened in his arms, but she didn't pull away, and after a moment, she shook her head.
"Father, I recall so little of those days." She pressed her face harder into his shoulder. " 'Tis like some dark, horrible dream, one that e'en now haunteth my sleep on unquiet nights, yet when waking—"
"Hush. Hush," he whispered, and pressed his lips into her hair. "I don't want to hurt you. Maker knows I've done too much of that. But I want you to understand, 'Tanni." He drew a deep breath. "The last thing you ever said was 'Why didn't you come, Poppa? Why didn't you love us?' " Her shoulders shook under his hands, and his own voice was unsteady. " 'Tanni, I always loved you, and your mother, but you were right to hate me." She tried to protest, but he shook his head. "No, listen to me, please. Let me say it." She drew a deep, shuddering breath and nodded, and he closed his eyes.
" 'Tanni, I talked your mother into supporting Anu. I didn't realize what a monster he was—then—but I was the one who convinced her. Everything that happened to you—to her—was my fault. It was, and I know it, and I've always known it, and, O Maker, I would sell my very soul never to have done it. But I could never undo it, never find the magic to make it as if it had never happened. A father is supposed to protect his children, to keep them safe, and that—" his voice broke, but he made himself go on "—that was why I put you back into stasis. Because I knew I'd failed. Because I'd proven I couldn't keep you safe any other way. Because... I was afraid."
"Father, Father! Dost'a think I knew that not?" She shook her head.
"But I never told you," he said softly. "I cost us both so much, and I never had the courage to tell you I knew what I'd done and ask you to forgive me."
Colin paced the conference room like a caged animal, fists pounding together before him while he awaited his own cutter, and his brain raced. The evacuation Adrienne and Hatcher had planned but never been able to rehearse was going more smoothly than he would have believed possible, but all of them knew they weren't going to get everyone out. Unless they could deactivate the bomb, millions of people would die, yet how in God's name did you deactivate something you couldn't approach with as much as a scanpack, much less the weapons to—
He stopped suddenly, then slammed himself down in his chair and opened his neural feed to Dahak wide.
"Give me everything on the Mark Ninety," he said sharply.
The door chime sounded, and Horus turned from Jiltanith to answer it.
"Yes?"
"Your Grace, it's Captain Chin," an urgent voice said. "Sir, I think you'd better come out here. I just tried to com the mat-trans center, and the links are all down."
"That's impossible," Horus said reasonably. "Did you call Maintenance?"
"I tried to, Your Grace. No luck. And then I tried my fold-com." The captain drew a deep breath. "Your Grace, it didn't work either."
"What?" Horus opened the door and stared at the Marine.
"It didn't work, Sir, and I've never seen anything like it. There's no obvious jamming, the coms just don't work, and it'd take a full-scale warp suppressor within four or five hundred meters to lock a Fleet com out of hyper-space." The captain faced Horus squarely. "Your Grace, with all due respect, we'd better get Her Majesty the hell out of here. Right now."
"You know, it might just work," Vlad Chernikov murmured.
"Or set the thing the hell off!" Hector MacMahan objected.
"A possibility," Dahak agreed, "yet the likelihood is small, assuming the force of the explosion were sufficient. What Colin suggests is, admittedly, a brute force solution, yet it has a certain conceptual elegance."
"Let me get this straight," MacMahan said. "We can't get near the thing, but you people want to pile explosives on top of it and set them off? Are you out of your frigging minds?"
"The operative point, General," Dahak said, "is that a Mark Ninety is programmed to recognize Imperial threats."
"So?"
"So we don't use Imperial technology," Colin said. "We use old-fashioned, pre-Imperial, Terran-made HE. A Mark Ninety would no more recognize those as a threat than it would a flint hand-ax."
"HE from where?" MacMahan demanded. "There isn't any on Birhat. For that matter, I doubt there's any on Terra after this long!"
"You are incorrect, General," Dahak said calmly. "Marshal Tsien has the materials we require."
"I do?" Tsien sounded surprised.
"You do, Sir. If you will check your records, you will discover that your ordnance disposal section has seventy-one pre-Siege, megaton-range nuclear warheads confiscated by Imperial authorities in Syria four years ago."
"I—" Tsien paused, and then his holo-image nodded. "As usual, you are correct, Dahak. I had forgotten." He looked at MacMahan. "Lawrence's Security personnel stumbled across them, Hector. We believe they were cached by the previous regime before you disarmed it on Colin's orders before the Siege. Apparently, even the individuals who hid them away had forgotten about them, and they were badly decayed—they used a tritium booster, and it had broken down. They were sent here for disposal, but we never got around to it."