Mutineer's Moon

Kirinal. He’d felt a cold, skin-crawling fascination as he scanned her dossier. She was Anu’s operations chief, his equivalent of Hector MacMahan, but she enjoyed her work as much as Girru had. Her loss would hurt the southerners badly, but that wasn’t the first thing that flashed through his mind. No, his first thought was that Kirinal personally had ordered the murder of Cal’s family.

“I considered not telling you,” the colonel admitted, “but you’d’ve found out when you get back, and I’ve got enough trouble with you two without adding that to it! Besides, knowing Kirinal’s in there would make it personal for everyone we’ve got, I suppose. But now that you know, I want you to forget it. I know you can’t do that entirely, but if you can’t keep revenge from clouding your judgment, tell me now, and Geb and Tamman will take the primary strike.”

Colin wondered if Jiltanith could avoid that. For that matter, could he? But then his eyes met hers, and, for the first time, there was complete agreement between them.

MacMahan watched them, his expressionless face hiding his worry, and considered ordering them off the target whatever they said. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told them after all? No. They had a right to know.

“All right,” he said finally. “Go. And—” his voice stopped them in the hatchway and he smiled slightly “— good hunting, people.”

They vanished, and Colonel MacMahan sat alone in the empty briefing room, his face no longer expressionless. But he stood after a moment, straightening his shoulders and banishing the hopeless bitterness from his face. He was a highly skilled and experienced pilot, but one without the implants that would have let him execute his own plan, and that was all there was to it.

Colin’s neural feed tapped into what the U.S. Navy would have called the fighter’s “weapons and electronic warfare panel” as he and Jiltanith settled into their flight couches, and he felt a fierce little surge of eagerness from the computers. Intellectually, he knew a computer was no more than the sum of its programming, but Terra-born humans had anthropomorphized computers for generations, and the Imperials, with their far closer, far more intimate associations with their electronic minions, never even questioned the practice. Come to think of it, was a human mind that much more than the sum of its programming?

Yet however that might be, he knew what he felt. And what he felt was the fighter baring its fangs, expressing its eagerness in the system—ready signals it sent back to him.

“Weapons and support systems nominal,” he reported to Jiltanith, and she eyed him sidelong. She knew they were, of course; their neural feeds were cross—connected enough for that. Yet it was a habit ingrained by too many years of training for him to break now. When a check list was completed, you reported it to your command pilot.

He felt her eyes upon him for a moment longer, then she tossed her head slightly. Her long, rippling hair was a tight chignon atop her head, held by glittering combs that must have been worth a small fortune just as antiques, and her gemmed dagger was at her belt beside the pistol she carried in place of his own heavy grav gun. It was semi-automatic, with a down-sized, thirty-round magazine, light enough for her unenhanced muscles. She’d designed and built it herself, and it looked both anachronistic and inevitable beside her dagger. She was, he thought wryly and not for the first time, a strange mixture of the ancient and the future. Then she spoke.

“Check,” she said, and he blinked. “Stand thou by … Captain.”

It was the first time she’d responded to one of his readiness reports. That was what he thought first. And then the title she’d finally given him registered.

He was still wondering what her concession meant when their fighter launched.

Chapter Fourteen

Jiltanith was good.

Colin had recognized her skill and, still more, her natural affinity for her task, even in the simulator. Now she took them up the long, carefully camouflaged tunnel from Nergal without a single wasted erg of power. Without even a single wasted thought. The fighter’s wings were her own, and the walls of their stony birth canal slid past, until, at last, they floated free on a smooth whine of power.

The stars burned suddenly, like chips of ice above them, and a strange exhilaration filled Colin. There was a vibrant new strength in the side—band trickles of his computer links, burning with Jiltanith’s bright, fierce sense of flight and movement. For a time, at least, she was free. She was one with her fighter as she roamed the night sky, free to seek out her enemies, and he felt it in her, like a flare of joy, made still stronger by her hunger for vengeance and aptness for violence. For the first time since they’d met, he understood her perfectly and wondered if he was glad he did, for he saw himself in her. Less driven, perhaps, less dark and brooding, not honed to quite so keen an edge, but the same.

The mutineers had been no more than an obstacle when he returned from Dahak … but Sean had been alive then. He had lost far less than Jiltanith, seen far fewer friends and family ground to dust in the marooned Imperials’ secret, endless war, but he had learned to hate, and it frightened him to think he could so quickly and easily find within himself so strong a shadow of the darkness that he’d known from the start infused Jiltanith.

He cut off his thoughts, hoping she’d been too enwrapped in the joy of flight to notice them, and concentrated on his own computers. So far, they’d remained within Nergal’s stealth field; from here on, they were on their own.

The Imperial fighter was half the size of a Beagle, a needle-nosed thing of sleek curves and stub wings. Its design was optimized for atmosphere, but the fighter was equally at home and far more maneuverable in vacuum, though none of Nergal’s brood had been there in millennia. Most of their time had been spent literally weaving in and out among the treetops to hide from Anu’s sensor arrays, and so they flew now.

They swept out over the Pacific, settling to within meters of the swell, and Jiltanith goosed the drive gently. A huge hand pressed Colin back in his couch, and a wake boiled across the water behind them as they streaked south at three times the speed of sound. The G forces were almost refreshing after all this time, like an old friend he’d lost track of since meeting Dahak, but they also underscored Jiltanith’s single glaring weakness as a pilot.

Atmosphere was a less forgiving medium than vacuum. Even at the fighter’s maximum power, friction and compression conspired to reduce its top speed dramatically. There was one huge compensation—by relying on control surfaces for maneuvering rather than depending entirely upon the gravitonic magic of the drive, the same speed could be produced for a far weaker energy signature—but there were always trade—offs. In this case, one was a greater vulnerability to thermal detection and targeting systems as a hull unprotected by a drive field heated, but that was a relatively minor drawback.

The real problem was that the reduced—strength drive couldn’t cancel inertia and the G forces of acceleration. Flying on its atmospheric control surfaces, the deadly little ship was captive to the laws of motion and no more maneuverable than the bodies of its crew could stand, and that was potentially deadly for Jiltanith. If she found herself forced into maneuvering combat against a fully-enhanced Imperial in this performance envelope, she was dead, for she would black out long before her opponent.

Still, MacMahan was almost certainly right. If it came to aerial combat, stealth would not be in great demand. It would become a matter of brute power, cunning, reaction time, and the skill of the combatants’ electronic warfare specialists, and the first thing that would happen would be that the pilots would go to full power. With a full strength drive field wrapped around her, Jiltanith would be as free of G forces as any Imperial pilot.

Yet the whole object was to avoid any air-to-air fighting. If they were forced to full power, all the ECM in the world couldn’t hide them from Anu’s detectors … which meant they dared not return to Nergal unless they could destroy or shake off any pursuit and drop back into a stealth regime. Trade-offs, Colin thought sourly, checking their airspeed. Always the trade-offs.

They were up to mach four, he noted, and grinned as he imagined the reaction aboard any freighter they happened across when they came hurtling by ahead of their sonic boom with absolutely no radar image to show for it.

They ought to hit their target in about another seventeen minutes. Strange. He didn’t feel the least bit