Mutineer's Moon fe-1, page 17
part #1 of Fifth Empire Series
“Aye, so we shall.” Yet Jiltanith’s course never deviated, and he felt her mental touch poised to ram the drive’s power level through the red line.
“They’ll burn through a good twenty seconds before I get a targeting setup,” he said absently.
“Nay, ’twill be no more than ten seconds ere thy weapons range,” she demurred.
“Hah! Now you’re an EW specialist, too, huh?” Then he shrugged. “Screw it. Full bore right down the middle, Jiltanith. Go for the weapons first.”
“As thou sayst, Captain,” Jiltanith purred, and the fighter shrieked upward like a homesick meteor.
For just a second, acceleration drove Colin back into his couch, but then the drive field peaked, the G forces vanished, and he felt the shockwave of alarm sweep through the southerners’ enclave. The automatic air-defense systems were already reaching for them, but his own systems had come alive a moment sooner; by the time the weapons started hunting the fighter, its defensive programs were already filling the night sky with false images. Decoys streaked away, singing their siren songs, and jammers hashed the scan channels with the fold-space equivalent of white noise.
The ground stations’ scanners were more powerful and their electronic brains were bigger and smarter than his small onboard computers, but they’d started at a disadvantage. They had to sort the situation out before they could find a target, and it was a race between them and their human controllers and Colin and the speeding fighter’s targeting systems.
There was no time to think, no room for anything but concentration, yet kaleidoscope images flared at the edges of his brain. The brighter strobes of panic when one ground station seemed to have found them. The impossible, wrenching maneuver with which Jiltanith threw it off. The relief when they slipped away before it could establish a lock. His own racing excitement. The determination and intensity that filled his pilot. His own savage blaze of satisfaction as his launch solution suddenly came magically together.
His first salvo leapt away. Hyper-capable missiles were out of the question in atmosphere; they would take too much air into hyper with them, wrecking his mass-power calculations and bringing them back into normal space God alone knew where, but mass missiles were another matter. Their over-powered gravitonic drives slammed them forward, accelerating instantly to sixty percent of light speed, crowding the edge of phase lock. Counter-missile defenses did their best, but the mass missiles’ speed and the short range meant tracking time was too limited even for Imperial systems, and Colin heard Jiltanith’s panther howl of triumph as his strike went home.
Fireballs blew into the night. Mass missiles carried no warheads, for they needed none. They were energy states, not projectiles, hyper-velocity robotic meteorites, shrieking down on precise trajectories to seek out the ground weapons that menaced their masters.
The small shield generators protecting the southerners’ weapons were still spinning up when Colin’s missiles arrived, but it wouldn’t have mattered if they’d already been at full power. In fifty-one millennia, the notherners had never risked escalating their struggle to the point of using Imperial weaponry so brazenly, and the southerners had assumed they never would. Their defensive measures were aimed at Terrestrial weapons or the relatively innocuous Imperial ones the northerners had used in the past, and they were fatally inadequate.
Jiltanith snapped the fighter around as the Jovian holocaust spewed skyward behind them. A bowl of fire glared against the night-struck Mexican hills, and Colin’s computers were already evaluating the first strike. Weak as they were, the base’s shields had absorbed a tremendous amount of energy before they failed—enough to keep the missiles from turning the entire estate into one, vast crater—and one heavy energy gun emplacement had escaped destruction. It raved defiance at them, and Jiltanith accepted the challenge as she came back like the angel of death, driving into its teeth.
The radiant heat of the first missile strike, added to the frantic efforts of the fighter’s ECM, denied the targeting scanners lock, and the guns were on pre-programmed blind fire, raking the volume of space that ought to contain the fighter. But Jiltanith wasn’t where the people who’d designed that fire program had assumed she would have to be, and Colin felt a detached sort of awe for her raw flying ability as he popped off another missle.
Unlike the fighter, the energy weapons couldn’t bob and weave. The missile sizzled home, and a fresh burst of fury defiled the earth.
Jiltanith came around for a third pass, two more than their ops plan had called for or considered safe, and the ground defenses were silent. Despite the shields’ best efforts, the weapon emplacements were huge, raw wounds, and the entire valley floor was a sea of blazing grass and trees, touched to flame by thermal radiation. The palatial estate’s buildings were flaming rubble, but the real installations hidden under them, though damaged, were still intact.
One of the ready fighters was already clawing upward, but Colin ignored it. He had all the time in the world, and his final launch was textbook perfect. A spread of four missiles bracketed the target, streaking the fire—sick heavens with fresh flame. There were no shields to absorb the destruction this time, and there was, at most, no more than a microsecond between the first missile impact and the last.
A hurricane of light lashed upward as vaporized earth and stone and flesh vomited into the night, and the fireballs ballooned out, merging, melding into one terrible whole. A second southern fighter was caught just at lift off and spat forth like a molten, tumbling spark from Vulcan’s forge, and the pressure wave snatched at them. It shook them as a terrier shook a rat, but Jiltanith met it like a lover. She rode its ferocity—embracing it, not fighting it—and the universe danced crazily, even madder somehow from within the protection of their drive field, as she shot the rapids of concussion. But then they flashed out the far side, and Colin realized she had used the terrible turbulence to put them on the track of the single fighter that had escaped destruction.
Colin needed no evaluation of his final attack. All that could be left was one vast crater. He had just killed over two hundred people … and all he felt was satisfaction. Satisfaction, and the need, the eagerness, to hunt down and kill the single southern fighter that had escaped his wrath.
There was no way to know who piloted that other fighter, nor if it was fully crewed or what weapons it carried. Perhaps there was only the pilot. Perhaps it wasn’t even armed.
All Colin would ever know was that he felt a sort of merciless empathy—not pity, but something like understanding—for that fleeing vessel. He and Jiltanith were invincible, and they were vengeance. He bared his teeth and called up his air-to-air weaponry as the firestorm’s white heat dulled to red astern, and Jiltanith hurled them out over the night-dark Pacific in pursuit.
His targeting systems locked. A command flicked through his feed to the computers, and two more missiles launched. They were slower than mass missiles, homing weapons with their speed stepped down to follow evasive maneuvers, but this time they carried warheads: three-kiloton, proximity-fused nukes. His eyes were dreamy as his electronic senses watched them all the way in, but in the moment before detonation a third missile came scorching in from the west. He’d almost forgotten Geb and Tamman, and the southern fighter probably never even realized he and Jiltanith weren’t alone.
There was no debris.
Jiltanith needed no orders. She swept on into the west, reducing speed, losing altitude, and their drive strength coasted back down to wrap invisibility about them once more. Colin checked his sensors carefully, and not until he was certain they had evaded all detection did she turn and flee homeward into the north while he switched on the fighter’s com and activated the fold-space implant he had dared not use in over a month. He felt an odd little “click” inside his skull as Dahak’s receivers recognized and accepted his implant’s ID protocols.
“Category One Order. Do not reply,” he sent at the speed of thought. “Authentication Delta-One-Gamma-Beta-One-Seven-Eight-Theta-Niner-Gamma. Priority Alpha. Stand by for squeal from this fighter. Execute upon receipt.”
He closed his implant down instantly, praying that the almost equally strong pulse from the fighter com had hidden it from Anu’s people. The coded squeal he and he alone had pre-recorded and tacked into the middle of the strike report lasted approximately two milliseconds, and Dahak had his orders.
And then, at last, there was a moment to relax and blink his eyes, refocusing on the interior of the cockpit. A moment to realize that they had succeeded … and that they were alive.
“Done,” he said softly, turning to look at Jiltanith for the first time since they launched their attack.
“Aye, and well done,” she replied. Their gazes met, and for once there was no hostility between them.
“Beautiful flying, ’Tanni,” he said, and saw her eyes widen as he used the familiar form of her name for the first time. For a moment he thought he’d gone too far, but then she nodded.
“Art no sluggard thyself … Colin,” she said.
And she smiled.
Book Three
Chapter Fifteen
Colin MacIntyre sat in Nergal’s wardroom and shuffled, hiding a smile as Horus bent a hawk—like eye upon him across the table while they waited for Hector’s next report.
Battle Fleet’s crews had gone in for a vast array of esoteric games of chance, most of them electronic, but Horus disdained such over-civilized pastimes. He loved Terran card games: bridge, canasta, spades, hearts, euchre, blackjack, whist, piquet, chemin de fer, poker … especially poker, which had never been Colin’s game. In fact, Colin’s major interest in cards had been that of an amateur magician, and Horus had been horrified at how easily a full Imperial who’d learned to palm cards with purely Terran reflexes and speed could do that … among other things.
“Cut?” Colin invited, and shook his head sadly as Horus made five separate cuts before handing the deck back.
“What’re your losses by now?” he mused as he dealt. “About a million?”
“ ’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 spider-web 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—or iented military establishments worked against them.
