Mutineer's Moon

thought the fire had come from.

An armored southerner lurched up and fell back into death, but it was hardly a fair trade, MacMahan thought savagely, leading the surviving members of his team forward. Darnu had been worth any hundred southerners, and he was far from the first Imperial Nergal had lost this bloody night.

But they were pushing the bastards back. The tanks were making the difference—that and the teams who’d gotten aboard the other transports and kept their armored vehicles from ever being manned. They had a chance, a good chance, if they could only keep moving…

The last of Nergal’s cutters swept out of the tunnel and exploded in mid-air. MacMahan swore again, and his men went forward in a crouching run.

Ganhar darted a look over his shoulder. He didn’t recognize the implants on either of those two armored figures. Breaker! There was a third unknown looming up behind them! It was always possible that if they’d known he’d let them through the door they would have greeted him as an ally, but they couldn’t know that, could they? Besides, he was closer to Osir than they were.

He reached a ramp and hurled himself up it, seeking the cover of the battle steel hull while beams and grav gun darts lashed at his heels. He landed on a shoulder and rolled in a clatter of armor, coming up onto his feet and running for the transit shaft. Anu would be on the command deck.

Jiltanith and Colin went up the main ramp under a hurricane of fire from the automatics, but none of the surviving weapons could depress far enough to hit them. The hatch was open, and Colin crashed through it first, dodging to the right. Jiltanith followed, spinning to the left, but the lock was empty and the inner hatch stood open as well. They edged forward as cautiously as they dared in their need for haste.

It was quieter in here, and the clank of an armored foot was loud behind them. They wheeled, but it was one of their own—Geb, his armor as smoke and soot—smutted as their own. Something had hit him in the chest, hard enough to crack even bio-enhanced ribs, but the dished—in armor had held, though Colin didn’t like the way the old Imperial was favoring his left side.

“Glad to see you, Geb,” he said, suppressing a half-hysterical giggle at how inane the greeting sounded. “Feel like a little walk?”

“As long as it’s upstairs,” Geb panted back.

“Good. Watch our backs, then, will you?” Geb nodded and Colin slapped Jiltanith’s armored shoulder. “Let’s go find Anu, ’Tanni,” he said, and led the way towards the central transit shaft.

Ganhar stepped out of the transit shaft twelve decks below the command deck, for the shaft above was inactive. So, a security measure he hadn’t known about, was it? There were still the crawl ways, and he pressed the bulkhead switch to open the nearest of them.

“Hello, Ganhar.” He froze at the soft voice and did a quick three-hundred-sixty-degree scan. She was unarmored, but her energy gun was trained unwaveringly on his spine.

“Hello, Inanna.” He spoke quietly, knowing he could never turn fast enough to get her with the grav gun. “I thought we were on the same side.”

“I told you before, Ganhar—I’m a bright girl. I had my own bugs in Jantu’s outer office.”

Ganhar swallowed. So she’d seen it all, and she knew why he was here.

“My quarrel’s with Anu,” he said. “If I can take him out, maybe they’ll let us surrender.”

“Wrong idea, Ganhar,” Inanna said calmly. “I told you that before.”

“But why, Inanna?! He’s a fucking maniac!”

“Because I love him, Ganhar,” she said, and fired.

Colin and Jiltanith rode the transit shaft as high as they could, but someone had deactivated it above deck ninety. They stepped out of it, looking for another way up, and Colin gasped in sudden alarm as the blast of an energy gun echoed down the passageway behind him. He was trying to turn towards it when a second beam from the same weapon slashed across the open bore of the shaft. It missed him by a centimeter as he heard Jiltanith’s weapon snarl and looked up to see an unarmored figure tumble to the deck.

“Jesus!” he muttered. “That one was too fucking close!”

“Aye,” Jiltanith replied, then paused. “Methinks our way lieth thither wi’ all speed, Colin. Unless mine eyes deceive me, there lie two bodies ’pon yonder deck. I’ll warrant well the first o’ them did seek out Anu as do we.”

“Methinks you’re probably right,” he grunted, stepping back across the transit shaft. Jiltanith’s shot had caught the unarmored woman in mid-torso, and the gruesome sight made him look away quickly. He had no time to examine her, anyway, yet an odd sense of familiarity tugged at a corner of his brain. He glanced at her again, but he’d never seen her before and he turned his attention to the half-opened crawl way, stepping over the mangled, armored figure lying before it.

“Wonder who the hell he was?” he muttered, opening the hatch fully.

Geb came out of the transit shaft and paused for breath as Jiltanith eeled into the crawl way after Colin. His ribs must be pretty bad, he decided. His implants were suppressing the pain, but it was hard to breathe, and they were using enough painkillers to make him dizzy. Best not to squeeze into quarters that narrow. Besides, they’d need someone here to watch their retreat.

He squatted on his heels, trying not to think about how many friends were dying beyond this quiet hull, and glanced at the dead, armored figure beside him, wondering, like Colin and Jiltanith, who he’d been and why his fellow mutineer had killed him. Then he glanced at the dead woman and froze.

No, he thought. Please, Maker, let me be wrong!

But he wasn’t wrong. He knew that face well, had known it millennia ago when it belonged to a woman named Tanisis. A beautiful young woman, married to one of his closest friends. He’d thought her dead in the mutiny and mourned her, as had her husband … who had named a Terran-born daughter “Isis” in her memory.

And now, so many years later, Geb cursed the Maker Himself for not making that the truth. She’d lived, he thought sickly, slept away the dreamless millennia in stasis, alive, still young and beautiful … only to be obscenely murdered, butchered so that one of Anu’s ghouls could don her flesh.

He rose slowly, blinded by tears, and adjusted his energy gun to wide-angle focus, breathing a prayer of thanks that Jiltanith either had not remembered her mother’s face or else had not looked closely at the body. Nor would she have the chance to, for there was one last service Geb could perform for his friend Tanisis. He pressed the firing stud and a fan of gravitonic disruption wiped the mangled body out of existence.

Hector MacMahan looked about cautiously. All six of Nergal’s tanks were in action now, and only one southern heavy had gotten free of its transport hold to challenge them. Its half-molten wreckage littered two hundred square meters of cavern floor, spewing acrid, choking smoke to join the fog shrouding the hellish scene.

An awful lot of their Imperials were dead, he thought bitterly. Their own hatred, coupled with their need to protect their weaker Terra-born, had cost them. He doubted as many as half were still alive, even counting the tank crews, but their sacrifice had given Nergal’s raiders control of the entire western half of the enclave and four of the seven transports on the eastern side. They were closing in on pockets of resistance, Terra-born moving cautiously under covering fire from the tanks.

Unless something went dreadfully wrong in the next thirty minutes, they were going to win this thing.

Colin let his armor’s “muscles” take the strain of the climb, questing ahead with his Dahak-modified implants as he neared the humming intensity of the command deck. They were only one deck below it when he felt the automatic weapons. They were covered by a stealth field, but it needed adjustment, and even in its prime it hadn’t been a match for his implants.

“Hold it,” he grunted to Jiltanith.

“What hast thou spied?”

“Booby traps and energy guns,” he replied absently, examining the intricate field of interlocking fire. “Damn, it’s a bitch, too. Well…”

He plucked his grav gun from its webbing. The energy gun might have been better, but the quarters were far too cramped for it.

“What dost thou?”

“I’m going to open us a little path,” he said, and squeezed the trigger.

A hurricane of needles swept the crawl way, drilling half their lengths even into battle steel before they