Mutineer's Moon

“How? No, wait. I see it. You tell me, I trap their courier, and we pass it off as a counter—intelligence ploy, is that it?”

“Exactly!”

“Hmmmmmm.” Ganhar stared down at his holo map, then shook his head. “No, there’s a better way,” he said slowly. “You could go ahead and make the drop. We could give them the code, then wait for them with everybody in armor and all our equipment on line and wipe them out—gut them once and for all.”

“Yes. Yes!“ Ramman said eagerly.

“Very neat,” Ganhar said, trying to picture what would follow such an overwhelming triumph. Nergal’s people would be neutralized, but what would happen then? He’d be a hero, but even as a hero, his life would hang in the balance, for Ina

“When are you supposed to make the drop?” he asked finally.

“I already have,” Ramman admitted.

“I see,” Ganhar said, and nodded absently as he opened a desk drawer. “I’m glad you told me about this. I’m finally going to be able to do something effective about the situation on this planet, Ramman, and I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.”

His hand came out of the drawer, and Ramman gaped at the small, heavy energy pistol it held. He was still gaping when Ganhar blew his head to paste.

Book Four

Chapter Twenty

Jiltanith and Rohantha settled into their flight couches and checked their computers with extraordinary care, for the stakes were higher this night than they had ever been before, and not just for them.

They were not in a fighter, but in a specially modified pi

Jiltanith nodded, satisfied with the reports of her own flight systems and the ready signals flowing through her cross links to Rohantha’s equipment, and opened a cha

“Ready,” was all she said.

“Good hunting,” a voice responded, and she smiled down at her console, for the response came not from Hector but from Colin MacIntrye. Since admitting he’d chosen her to succeed him, he seemed to have been constantly at hand, almost hovering there, and she knew he’d resigned himself to letting her fly this mission without really accepting it. She thought about saying something back to him, but their new relationship—whatever it was—remained too fragile, too unexplored. There would be time for that later. She hoped.

Instead, she lifted the pi

More than that, she was heavier, less fleet of wing. Slower and shorter-ranged than a fighter in vacuum, the pi

They floated up the shaft, alert for any last-minute warning from Nergal’s scan crews. But there were no alarms, and the small craft slipped undetected into the open atmosphere. Calm, cool thoughts flowed to the computers, and they turned to the east.

Under the false tranquillity of her surface thoughts, Jiltanith’s mind whirred like yet another computer, probing even now for any last-minute awareness of error. She expected to find none, but she could not stop searching, and that irritated her. It wasn’t the mark of the confident person she liked to believe she was.

For all the equipment committed to Stalking-Horse, there were only four people involved in the mission. She and Rohantha in the pi

The use of the pi

Yet only a pi

She stiffened as a warning tingled in her link to Rohantha. Hostile fighters—two of them—to the south. They were higher and moving faster than her own formation, degrading the performance of their stealth systems, and had she piloted a fighter of her own, Jiltanith would have asked nothing better than to scream up after them in pursuit. As it was, she stifled a sudden desire to cram on power and run and held her breath as her mind joined with Rohantha’s, following the enemy’s movements. They swept on upon their own mission and faded from the passive sca

Jiltanith made herself relax, trying to forget her dread of which new i

Shirhansu yawned, then took a quick turn around the camouflaged bunker. If Ganhar was right (and his analysts had done a bang-up job so far), they might see some more action soon. She hoped so. The shoot-out in La Paz, what there’d been of it, had been a relief despite the frustration of knowing so many enemies had escaped, and this time she’d left Tarban behind. Of course, there were always risks, but her own position was well protected, and she had plenty of firepower on hand this time. In fact, it would be—

“We’re getting something, ’Hansu!”

She stepped quickly to Caman’s side. He was leaning forward slightly, eyes unfocused as he listened to his electronics, and she glanced at the display beside him. Caman had no need of it, but it let her see what his sca

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