" 'Hursag?" he said tentatively as she came to a halt just inside the door. Every movement was rigidly over-controlled, as if each of them took every ounce of will she had, and she chopped a nod.

"Colin. Jiltanith." Her voice was harsh, each word bitten off with utter precision. "Sit down, both of you. I have something to tell you."

Colin looked at Jiltanith, wondering what could have transformed Ninhursag so, but 'Tanni met his eyes with a shrug of ignorance and a slight gesture at the chairs before the hearth. They settled into them, listening to the crackle of burning logs as Galahad and his siblings ranged themselves to either side, and every eye, human and canine alike, watched Ninhursag grip her hands behind her and make herself take a quick, wordless turn about the room. When she turned to face them, her face was calmer, but it was a surface calm, built solely from professionalism and self-discipline.

"I'm sorry to burst in on you, but I just turned up something... interesting. Or, rather, I just confirmed something interesting."

She inhaled again, sharply, and gave herself a tiny shake.

"I've been slacking off at ONI for months," she continued in a flat voice. "You know that, Colin, though you haven't said anything. I'm sorry. You know why I have. But I'm getting myself back together, and yesterday I started through a stack of reports that've been accumulating since, well—" She broke off with another shrug, and Colin nodded. Jiltanith held out a hand to him, and he took it as Ninhursag cleared her throat.

"Yes. Anyway, most of them were fairly routine. Gus and Commodore Sung have handled the hot stuff as it came in. But one of them—an accidental death report—caught my attention. It was the date, I think. It happened two days after Imperial Terra hypered out for Urahan, and it covered an entire family." Fresh pain tightened her lips, but she went harshly on.

"They were civilians, and it was a traffic accident, so I wondered why ONI had it, until I looked more closely," Ninhursag went on in that flat voice. "The husband was Vincente Cruz. He wasn't military, strictly speaking, but—" she paused, and her eyes were cold "—he worked for BuShips."

Colin felt Jiltanith's hand twitch in his and stiffened. It was no more than a vague stirring of suspicion, but the bitterness in Ninhursag's eyes turned something cold and wary deep inside him.

"I don't know why that stuck in my mind, but it did, and when I looked more closely I found a couple of things that seemed... out of kilter.

"The Cruzes lived on Birhat, since he worked for BuShips, but they were killed on Earth. I checked and found out they usually vacationed in North America, but Cruz had returned from there less than three months before, so I wondered why they'd gone back so soon. Then I found out his wife and family had stayed there—visiting friends—and he'd gone back to collect them.

"Again, I don't know why that bothered me, but it did. So I did some more checking. Cruz's two older children were enrolled for education here on Birhat, and I discovered that he hadn't warned the education people they'd be staying on Earth. He notified them only after he got back, but two years ago, when he left them to visit family in Mexico, he'd notified their teachers over a month before they left. He was concerned with making certain they didn't lose any ground shifting back and forth between the two school systems.

"That seemed odd, so I checked the hypercom and mat-trans logs. In the ten weeks they stayed on Earth, he neither sent to them nor received from them a single hypercom message. Nor did he use the mat-trans to visit them in person. There was no communication between them at all for ten weeks... and he and his wife had a ten-month-old baby."

Colin's eyes began to burn with a green fire that matched the fury in Ninhursag's bitter brown stare, and the admiral nodded slowly.

"The accident report looks completely aboveboard, if a bit freakish. It was a high-speed event—a ridge-line collision at almost Mach six—and the flight recorder was totaled, but the altimeter was recovered, and analysis indicated it was under-reading by about two hundred meters. That was enough to put it into the ridge, but when I did a little discreet checking, no one seemed to know who Cruz's family had been visiting. I did a computer search of Earth's credit transactions—as a BuShips employee, he and his wife both held Fleet cards—and I couldn't find a single transaction for Elena Cruz on Earth.

"I can't prove it wasn't an 'accident,' but there are too many coincidences. Especially—" Ninhursag's hands went back behind her, clenched about one another, and her voice was very, very quiet "—when Vincente Cruz was assistant project chief for Imperial Terra's cybernetics."

"Son-of-a-bitch!" Colin whispered, and she nodded coldly.

"I haven't checked his work logs yet—that comes next—but I'm already certain what I'm going to find," she said, and this time Colin understood her murderous fury perfectly.

Chapter Twelve

The mood around the conference table was very different this time.

" ... so there's a fifteen-minute hole in his work log," Ninhursag said, "smack in the middle of his work on Terra's core software. Unfortunately, there are eight other holes, from just under a minute to almost an hour long, in the same log, and we've found an intermittent defect in his terminal that looks completely normal." Her curled lip showed what she thought of that.

"But why?" Horus asked softly. "I don't question your conclusions, 'Hursag, but in the Maker's name, why?"

"We can't prove 'why' until we know 'who,' " Ninhursag's voice was harsh, "but I see only two motives. Destroy Imperial Terra, one, because of what she was—our most powerful warship—or, two, because of who was aboard."

"Sean and Harry," Colin grated, and Ninhursag nodded.

"Whoever set this up went to tremendous lengths—and ran tremendous risks. What else could his objective have been?"

"Sweet Jesu," Jiltanith whispered. "Full eighty thousand people and the children of our dearest friends to kill my babes?" Her face was drawn, but more than despair burned in her black eyes, and her knuckles were white about the hilt of the dagger she always wore.

"Bastards!" Hector MacMahan's stylus snapped in his hand. He looked down at the broken pieces and slowly and carefully crushed each of them between enhanced fingertips.

"Agreed," Colin's voice was ice, "but the other kids may have been targets as well. Look how it's affected all of us. 'Hursag blames herself for 'slacking off,' but have any of us done better? And whoever the son-of-a-bitch is, he damned well knew what it would do to us!"

"I must agree," Tsien said. Amanda nodded beside him, eyes smoking, and he touched her hand where it lay upon the table. "Yet I am also certain 'Hursag's other deduction is equally correct. Whoever did this must have a powerful organization and penetration at the highest levels. Without such an organization he could not have acted; without such penetration he could have known neither which ship to attack nor whom to use for that attack."

"Agreed," Gerald Hatcher sounded even grimmer. "They had to pick someone with access who was also vulnerable. Anybody this ruthless might have popped one of his own people to cut the chain of evidence, but why kill an entire family? No, they knew exactly which poor bastard to pick, held his family hostage to make him play, then killed them all to cover their tracks."

"There's another pointer." Adrienne Robbins' voice was cold; Algys McNeal had been her friend, and twenty more of her midshipmen had been aboard Imperial Terra. "Cruz didn't pop a single security flag. He must have known how small a chance he had of getting them back alive, but he went for it without telling anyone. He never even tried to get help, so maybe he knew they had enough penetration to know if he'd talked to any of 'Hursag's people."