Mutineer's Moon

seconds.

The huge cavern was hideous with smoke and flame as more southerners found weapons and armor, emerging as isolated knots of warring figures that sought to link with one another amid the nightmare that had burst upon them. They were badly outnumbered, but they were all Imperials. Even without combat armor, they were more than a match for any Terra-born opponent. Or would have been, had they understood what was happening.

Most of Anu’s automatics were silent now, for both sides were equally at risk from them, and both had been taking them out from the start. But they’d blunted the first rush while more of his people got themselves armed. It was helping, but they’d yielded a dangerous amount of ground. So far he’d lost touch completely only with Bislaht, but fighting raged aboard three other transports, and six more were surrounded, their hatches under intense fire.

Breaker! Who would have thought degenerates could fight like this? There were only a handful of old, worn out Imperials among them, but they were like madmen!

He winced as his scanners watched a quintet of Terra-born suddenly pop up out of a tangle of wreckage. They formed a gantlet, with three of his own Imperials between them. Two of the degenerates went down, but the others swept his armored henchmen with an unbelievable mix of Imperial and Terran weapons. Grav gun darts exploded inside armored bodies, a flamethrower hosed them with liquid fire, and a Terran anti-tank rocket blew the last survivor six meters backward. The surviving degenerates ducked back down under cover and went scuttling off in search of fresh prey.

This couldn’t be happening—he saw it with his own eyes, and he still couldn’t believe it!

But then came the report he’d hoped for. Transhar’s people had finally gotten some of their vehicles powered up, and he grinned again as the first light tank floated towards the hatch on its gravitonics.

Andrew Asnani slid to a halt, sucking in air as he scrubbed sweat from his face. He’d become separated from the rest of his team, and the deafening bellow and crash of battle pounded him like a fist, but for all its horror, it was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. It proved he hadn’t led the colonel and his people into a trap, and he’d been able to shuck off his demolition charge.

He drew another breath and took a firmer grip on his assault rifle as he eased around the rubble of a broken wall. He was in the section that had housed Anu’s terrorists, and he still wasn’t certain how he’d gotten here. Habit, perhaps. Or possibly something else…

He dropped suddenly as shapes loomed in the dust-heavy smoke. Terra-born, not Imperials, for his goggles saw no signature implants. But neither were they his people, he thought grimly, hunkering deeper into the shadow of his broken wall. There were at least twenty of them, all armed, though he had no idea how they’d gotten their hands on weapons. It didn’t matter. The odds sucked, and with a little luck, he’d just let them slip…

But he had no luck. They were coming straight towards him, and the copper taste of fear filled his mouth. Unfair! To have come so far, risked so much, and blunder into contact with—

His mind froze, panic suddenly a thing of the past, and he stopped trying to ease further back out of sight. Abgram! The man leading that group was Abgram, and that changed everything, for it had been Abgram whose operation had planted a truck bomb in New Jersey five years before.

For eleven months, Asnani had known who had killed his family, yet he could do nothing without blowing his own cover and Colonel MacMahan’s op. But the thunder and screams were in his ears, and his own life was no longer essential to success.

He ejected his partially used magazine, replacing it with a fresh one, checking his safety, gathering his legs under him. The terrorists were coming closer, dodging in and out of shadows even as he had. He couldn’t leave his cover without being seen, but they’d see him anyway in another twenty seconds. Ten meters. He’d let them come another ten meters…

Sergeant Andrew Asnani, United States Army, exploded from concealment with his weapon on full auto.

Six men died almost instantly, and the man called Abgram went down, screaming, even as his fellows poured fire into the apparition that had erupted in their midst. He stared up in agony, watching bullets hammer body armor and flesh, seeing blood burst from the man who had shot him.

It was the last thing Abgram ever saw, for only one purpose remained to Andrew Asnani, and his last, short burst blew Abgram’s head apart.

“Shit!”

Colin killed his jump gear and slithered to a halt in a tangle of smashed greenery as the light tank let fly. A solid rod of energy ripped through two of Anu’s madly fleeting Terran allies and what had once been a fountain before it struck an armored figure. Rihani, he thought, one of Nergal’s engineers, but there was too little left to ever know. He watched the tank settle onto its treads for added stability as grenades and rockets exploded about it. Its thick armor and invisible shield shrugged off the destruction as the turret swiveled, seeking fresh prey. The long energy cannon snouted in his direction, and he grabbed Jiltanith’s ankle and hauled her down beside him, not that—

A lightning bolt whickered out of the shattered portal, and the southern tank exploded with a roar. Its killer rumbled into sight, squat and massive on its own treads, grinding out onto the cavern floor, and Colin pounded the dirt beside him in jubilation.

Nergal’s heavy tank moved forward confidently, cannon seeking, anti-personnel batteries flashing, heavy grav guns whining from its upper hull.

Anu roared in fury as Transhar’s tank was killed, but his fury redoubled as the enemy tank took up a firing position that covered Transhar’s vehicle ramp. Another tank tried to come down it, and Nergal’s heavy blew it to wreckage with a single, contemptuous shot.

A warp grenade bounced and rolled, bringing up against the edge of its shield, but nothing happened. Both sides had their suppressers out, smothering the effect of a grenade’s tiny hyper generator. Normally that favored the defense, but now he watched a second enemy tank charge out of the portal—and a third!—and nothing but a nuke or a warp warhead was going to stop those things. That or a proper warship giving ground support. But he had only one active battleship, and the rest of her crew had not yet arrived.

It was a race, he thought grimly. A race between Osir’s personnel and whatever horror Nergal’s people would produce next.

Ganhar leapt lightly down from Cardoh’s number six personnel lock, letting his jump gear absorb the twelve-meter drop. Osir was over that way, he thought, still queerly calm, almost detached, and that was where Anu would be.

“There!” Colin shouted, pointing across two hundred meters of fire-swept ground at the battleship Osir. “Feel it, ’Tanni? Her systems are live! Anu must be aboard her!”

“Aye,” Jiltanith agreed, then broke off to nail a fleeing southerner with a snapshot from her energy gun. In her armor her strength was the equal of any full Imperial’s, and her reflexes had to be seen to be believed.

“Aye,” she said again, “yet ’twill be no lightsome thing to cross yon kill zone, Colin!”

“No, but if we can get in there…”

“We’ve none t’guard our backs and we ’compass it,” she warned.

“I know.” Colin scanned the smoking bedlam, but they’d outdistanced their own people, and few of the southerners seemed to be in the vicinity. It was the automatics sweeping the area that made the approach so deadly.

“Look over there, to the left,” he said suddenly. Some of the robotic weapons had been knocked out, leaving a gap in the defenses. “Think we can get through there before they fry us?”

“I know not,” Jiltanith replied, “yet may we assay it.”

“I knew you’d like the idea,” he panted, and then they were off.

Hector MacMahan ducked, then swore horribly as an enemy grav gun spun Darnu’s shattered armor in a madly whirling circle. The Imperial crashed to the ground, and Hector hosed a stream of darts at the spot he