Mutineer's Moon

he had said them. He’d had to, pointless as they both knew it was. He had to believe he would come back—that he could come back—yet he knew as well as she that if she wasn’t right on his heels, she would never make it out at all.

But what she had carefully not told him was that she wouldn’t be following him. She’d said there would be friends, but she couldn’t be certain, and even if there were, someone had to occupy the attackers’ attention to keep them from noticing movement in the tunnel when Colin passed beyond the confines of the shield. And she’d meant what she’d said. If he had a bridge officer’s implants, they had to get him out. She didn’t understand everything that was happening, but she knew that. And that he needed time to make his escape.

Lieutenant Colonel Sandra Tillotson, United States Air Force, laid a spare magazine beside her and prepared to buy him that time.

Colin raced down the basement stairs, sick at heart. Deep inside, he suspected what Sandy intended, and she was right, damn it! But the thought of abandoning her was a canker in his soul. This night of horrors was costing too much. He remembered what he’d thought when Dahak’s cutter deposited him here, and his own words were wormwood and gall. He hadn’t realized the hideous depth of what would be demanded of him, for somehow he’d believed that only he must lose things, that he must risk only himself. He hadn’t counted on people he knew and loved being slaughtered like animals … nor had he realized how bitter it could be to live rather than die beside them.

He sensed the stuttering fire of her grav gun behind him, the fury of energy weapons gouging at the house, and his eyes burned as he seized the heavy furnace in a mighty grip. He heaved, wrenching it entirely from its base, and the ladder was there. He ignored it, leaping lightly down the two-meter drop, and hit the tunnel running. Even as he passed under the edge of the shield and it sliced off his sensors, he felt the space-wrenching discharges of her grav gun, knew she was still there, still firing, not even trying to escape, and tears and self-hate blinded him as he raced for safety.

The tunnel seemed endless, yet the end was upon him almost before he realized it, and he lunged up another ladder. The shaft was sealed, but he was already probing it, spotting the catch, heaving it up with a mighty shoulder. He burst into the night air … and his senses were suddenly afire with more power sources. More combat armor! Coming from behind in the prodigious leaps of jump gear and waiting in the woods ahead, as well!

He tried to unlimber his energy gun, but a torrent of energy crashed over him, and he cried out as every implant in his body screamed in protest. He writhed, fighting it, clinging to the torment of awareness.

It was a capture field—not a killing blast of energy, but something infinitely worse. A police device that locked his synthetic muscles with brutal power.

He toppled forward under the impetus of his last charge, crashing to the ground half—in and half-out of the tunnel. He fought the encroaching darkness, smashing at it with all the fury of his enraged will, but it swept over him.

The last thing he saw was a tornado of light as the trees exploded with energy fire. He carried the vision down into the dark with him, dimly aware of its importance.

And then, as his senses faded at last, he realized. It wasn’t directed at him—it was raking the ground behind him and cutting down the mutineers who had pursued him…

Chapter Ten

Colin swam fearfully up out of his nightmares, trying to understand what had happened. Something was wrong with his senses, and he moaned softly, frightened by the deadness, the absence, where he should have felt the whisper and wash of ambient energy.

He opened his eyes and blinked, automatically damping the brilliant light glaring down over him. He made out a ceiling beyond it—an unfamiliar roof of an all-too-familiar, bronze-colored alloy—and his muscles tightened.

It had been no dream. Sean was dead. And Cal … his family … and Sandy…

Memory wrung a harsh, inarticulate sound of grief from him, and he closed his eyes again. Then he gathered himself and tried to sit up, but his body refused to obey and his eyes popped open once more. He tried again, harder, and his muscles strained, but it was like trying to lift the Earth. Something pressed down upon him, and he clenched his teeth as he recognized the presser. And a suppression field, as well, which explained his dead sensory implants.

A small sound touched his ear, and he wrenched his head around, barely able to move even that much under the presser.

Three grim-faced people looked back at him. The one standing in the center was a man, gray-haired, his seamed face puckered by a smooth, long-healed scar from just under his right eye down under the neck of his tattered old Clemson University sweatshirt. His leathery skin was the olive-brown of the Fourth Imperium, and Colin recognized the signs from Dahak’s briefings; this man was old. Very old. He must be well into his sixth century, but if he was old, he was also massively thewed, and his olive-black eyes were alert.

A woman sat in a chair to his left. She, too, was old, but with the shorter span of the Terra-born, her still-thick hair almost painfully white under the brilliant light. Her lined, grief-drawn face was lighter than the man’s, but there was a hint of the same slant to her swollen eyes, and Colin swallowed in painful recognition. He’d never met Isis Tudor, but she looked too much like her murdered grandson to be anyone else.

The third watcher shared the old man’s complexion, but her cold, set face was unlined. She was tall for an Imperial, rivaling Colin’s own hundred-eighty-eight centimeters, and slender, almost delicate. And she was beautiful, with an almond-eyed, cat-like loveliness that was subtly alien and yet perfect. A thick mane of hair rippled down her spine, so black it was almost blue-green, gathered at the nape of her neck in a jeweled clasp before it fanned out below, and she wore tailored slacks and a cashmere sweater. The gemmed dagger at her belt struck an incongruous note, but not a humorous one. Her slender fingers curled too hungrily about its hilt, and her dark eyes were filled with hate.

He stared silently back at them, then turned his face deliberately away.

The silence stretched out, and then the old man cleared his throat.

“What shall we do with you, Commander MacIntyre?” he asked in soft, perfect English, and Colin turned back to him almost against his will. The spokesman smiled a twisted smile and slipped one arm around the old woman. “We know what you are—in part—” he continued, “but not in full. And—” his soft voice turned suddenly harsher “—we know what you’ve cost us already.”

“Spend not thy words upon him,” the young woman said coldly.

“Hush, Jiltanith,” the old man said. “It’s not his fault.”

“Is’t not? Yet Calvin doth lie dead, and his wife and daughters with him. And ’tis this man hath encompassed that!”

“No.” Isis Tudor’s soft voice was grief-harrowed, but she shook her head slowly. “He was Cal’s friend, ’Tanni. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Which changeth naught,” Jiltanith said bitterly.

“Isis is right, ’Tanni,” the old man said sadly. “He couldn’t have known they were looking for Cal. Besides,” the old eyes were wise and compassionate despite their own bitterness, “he lost his own brother, as well … and avenged Cal and the girls.”

He walked towards the table on which Colin lay and locked a challenging gaze with him, and Colin knew it was there between them. He’d warned Sean the relay might be detected, and it had. His mistake had killed Cal and Frances, Harriet and Anna, Sean and Sandy. He knew it, and the same knowledge filled the old man’s eyes, yet his captor clasped his hands behind him and stopped a meter away, eloquently unthreatening.

“What use vengeance?” Jiltanith demanded, her lovely, hating face cold. “Will’t breathe life back into them? Nay! Slay him and ha’ done, I say!”

“No, ’Tanni,” the man said more firmly. “We need him, and he needs us.”

“I say thee nay, Father!” Jiltanith spat furiously. “I’ll ha’ none of him! Nay, nor any part in’t!”

“It’s not for you to say, ’Tanni.” The man sounded stern. “It’s up to the Council—and I am head of the Council.”