Mutineer's Moon

plus at least five of their remaining Imperials. Probably at least six, since there would have been one Imperial in the raiding force, as well, and possibly seven if they’d been foolish enough to use a live pilot in the lead cutter.

She let herself smile thinly. Not a single survivor—and no indication of a message home to tell Nergal what had happened, either. Their entire attack force had been gobbled up, and it was unlikely they’d even know how it had happened. It was the worst they’d ever been hurt. Proportionately, it made Cuernavaca meaningless, and she had been in command. She’d commanded both successful interceptions!

“I’ve got Ganhar,” Caman said, and Shirhansu let her smile broaden as she took over the com link.

“Ganhar? ’Hansu. We got ’em all-clean sweep!”

Jiltanith and Rohantha let themselves relax, knowing Hanalat and Carhana were doing the same aboard their fighter.

Their equipment losses had been severe, but that had been planned, and there had been no loss of life. Not theirs, anyway, Jiltanith reminded herself, and tried to turn her mind away from the Terra-born who must have been caught in the fireballs and radiation of the cross-fire. At least the area was thinly populated, she thought, and knew she was grasping at straws.

But the southerners couldn’t know the northerners had lost none of their own personnel, which meant that they would believe Nergal’s losses had been staggering enough to frighten them into suspending offensive operations.

They might actually pull it off, and she looked forward to returning to Nergal to report the mission’s success. Hector would be pleased at how well it had gone, she thought, but her lips curved in a small, secret smile, hidden from Rohantha as she admitted a surprising truth to herself.

It was Colin’s face she truly wished to see.

Chapter Twenty-One

General Gerald Hatcher stood beside his GEV command vehicle on a hill overlooking what had once been a stretch of pleasantly wooded countryside and listened to the radiation detectors snarl. The wind was from behind him and the levels were relatively low here, but that was cold comfort as he looked down into the smoldering mouth of Hell.

Smoke fumed up from the forest fires, but they were still far away and the Forestry Service and fire departments and volunteers from the surviving locals along the fringe of the area were fighting to bring them under control. Most of those people didn’t have dosimeters, either, and Hatcher shook his head slowly. Courage came in many guises, and it never ceased to amaze and humble him, but this carnage went beyond anything courage could cope with. Hatcher’s bearing was as erect and soldierly as ever, but inside himself he wept.

Red and blue flashers blinked atop emergency vehicles further out into the smoking wasteland, and the night sky was heavy with helicopters and vertols that jockeyed through the treacherous thermals and radiation. They would not find many to rescue out there … and this was only one of the nuked areas.

He turned at the whine of fans as another GEV swept up the slope, blowing a gale of downed branches and ash from under its skirts, and settled beside his own. The hatch popped, and Captain Germaine, his aide, climbed down. His battle dress was smutted with dirt and ash and his face was drawn as he removed his breathing mask and walked heavily over to his commander.

“How bad is it, Al?” Hatcher asked quietly.

“About as bad as it could be, sir,” Germaine said in a low voice, waving a hand out over the expanse of ruin. “The search teams are still working their way towards the center, but the last body count I heard was already over five hundred and still climbing.”

“And that doesn’t include the flash-blinded and the ones who’ll still die,” Hatcher said softly.

“No, sir. And this is one of the bright spots,” Germaine continued in bitter, staccato bursts. “One of the goddamned things went off right over a town to the south. Sixteen thousand people.” His mouth twisted. “Doesn’t look like there’ll be any survivors from that one, General.”

“Dear God,” Hatcher murmured, and even he could not have said whether it was a prayer or a curse.

“Yes, sir. The only good thing—if it’s not obscene to call anything about this bitched—up mess ‘good’—is they seem to’ve been mighty clean. The counters show a relatively small area of lethal contamination, and the wind’s out of the southeast, away from the big urban areas. But God knows what it’s going to do to the local gene pool or what the Candians are going to catch from all this shit.”

The last word came out of him in a half-strangled shout as his attempted detachment crumbled, and he half-turned from his general, clenching his fists.

“I know, Al. I know.” Hatcher sighed and shook himself, his normally sharp eyes sad as he looked out over the battlefield. And battlefield it had been, even if none of the United States’ detection systems had picked up a thing before or after the explosions. At least they’d had satellites in place to see what happened during the battle … not that the records made him feel any better.

“I’m heading back to the office, Al. Stay on it and keep me informed.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hatcher gestured, and his white-faced young commo officer stepped to his side. Her auburn hair was cut a bit longer than regulations prescribed, and it blew on the winds the fires ten kilometers away were sucking into their maw.

“Get hold of Major Weintraub, Lieutenant. Have him meet me at HQ.”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant headed for the command vehicle’s radios, and Hatcher rested a hand on Germaine’s shoulder.

“Watch your dosimeter, Al. If it climbs into the yellow, you’re out of here and back to base. The major and I’ll want to talk to you, anyway.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hatcher squeezed the taut shoulder briefly, then walked heavily to his GEV. It rose on its fans and curtsied uncomfortably across the rough terrain, but Hatcher sat sunken in thought and hardly noticed.

It wasn’t going well. Hector’s people had started on a roll, but they were getting the holy howling shit kicked out of them now, and the rest of the human race with them.

The first wave of counter-attacks had puzzled Hatcher. A handful of attacks on isolated segments of the aerospace effort, a few bloody massacres of individual families. They’d seemed more like pinpricks than full-scale assaults, and he’d tentatively decided the bad guys, whoever they were, were going after those few of Hector’s people they could identify, which had been bad enough but also understandable.

But within twelve hours, another and far bloodier comber of destruction had swept the planet like a tsunami. The Point, Sandhurst, Klyuchevskaya, Goddard … Eden Two.

Clearly the other side had opted for the traditional terrorist weapon: terror. Coupled with the reports from La Paz, which could only have been a direct clash between the extra-terrestrial opponents, and this new obscenity in New York, it sounded terribly as if the momentum was shifting, and his preliminary examination of the satellite tapes seemed to confirm it.

The first warning anyone had was the burst of warheads, but the cameras had watched it all. Clearly one side had gotten the shit kicked out of it, and judging by the warheads each had used, it hadn’t been the bad guys. Hector’s people had used only small-yield nukes, when they’d used them at all, but their enemies didn’t give a shit who they killed. They went in for great big bangs and hang the death toll, and his satellite people put the winning side’s yields in the twenty kiloton range, maybe even a bit higher.

Hatcher sighed unhappily. Other bits and pieces had come together as his analysts tried to figure out what was going on, and one thing had become clear: the nature and pattern of Hector’s people’s operations all suggested meticulous planning, economy of force, and conservation of resources, whereas their opponents were operating on a far vaster scale, their actions wider-spread and more often simultaneous rather than sequenced. All of which indicated the balance of force was against Hector’s side, probably by a pretty heavy margin.

History was replete with examples of out-numbered forces that had triumphed over clumsier enemies or