by David Weber
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 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 crawlways, 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 crawlway, 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 gla
nced 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 exploded. Scanner arrays, trip signals, and targeting systems shredded under his fire, and the weapons went mad. The shaft above him became a crazy-quilt of exploding energy beams and solid projectiles.
Anu's head jerked up as bedlam erupted in one of the crawlways. His automatic defenses had been triggered, but there was something wrong. They weren't firing under proper control - they were tearing themselves apart!
The carnage lasted a good thirty seconds, and Colin probed the smoking wreckage carefully.
"That's got it. On the other hand, we just rang the doorbell. Think we should keep going?"
" 'Twould seem we ha' scant choice."
"I was afraid you'd say that. C'mon."
Anu turned away from his console, and his face was almost relaxed.
It would take a while yet, but the sheer audacity of the attack had been decisive. Those heavy tanks had hurt, but it was surprise that had done in the enclave. The dreams of fifty thousand years were crumbling in his fingers, and it was all the fault of those crawling traitors from Nergal. Their fault, and the fault of his own gutless subordinates.
But if he'd lost, he could still see to it they lost, too. He walked calmly across the command deck to the fire control officer's couch, insinuating his mind neatly into the console. He really should have provided a proper bomb, but this would do.
He initiated the arming sequence, then paused. No, wait. Let whoever was in the crawlway get here first. He wanted to watch at least one of the bastards know what was going to happen to his precious, putrid world.
Colin helped Jiltanith out of the crawlway, then paused, his face white. Jesus! The son-of-a-bitch was arming every warhead in the magazines!
"Come on!" he shouted, and hurled himself toward the command deck. His gauntleted hand slapped the emergency over-ride, and he charged through as the hatch licked open. His energy gun was ready, swinging to cover the captain's console, but even as he burst onto the command deck, he knew he'd guessed wrong. The heavy hand of a grab field smashed at him, seizing him in fingers of iron. He stopped instantly, not even rocking with the impetus of his charge, unable even to fall in the armor that had become a prison.
"Nice of you to drop by," a voice said, and he turned his head inside his helmet. A tall man sat at the gunnery console with an energy pistol in one hand. He didn't look like the images of Anu from the records, but he wore the midnight blue of Battle Fleet with an admiral's insignia.
"It's over, Anu," Colin said. "You might as well give it up."
"No," Anu said calmly, "I don't think I'm the surrendering kind."
"I know what kind you are," Colin said contemptuously, keeping his eyes on Anu while his implants watched Jiltanith creeping closer and closer. She was belly-down on the deck, trying to work her way under the plane of the grab field, but her enhanced senses were less keen than his. Could she skirt it safely, or not?
"Do you, now?" Anu mocked. "I doubt that. None of you ever had the wit to understand me, or you would have joined me instead of trying to pull me down to your own miserable level."
"Sure," Colin sneered. "You've done a wonderful job, haven't you? Fifty thousand years, and you're still stuck on one piddling little planet."
Anu's face tightened and he started to trigger the warheads, then stopped and uncoiled from the couch like a serpent.
"No," he murmured. "I think I'll watch you scream a bit first. I'm glad you're in armor. It'll take a while to burn through with this little popgun, and you'll feel it so nicely. Let's start with an arm, shall we? If I start with a leg, you'll just fall over, and that won't be any fun."
He came nearer, and sweat beaded Colin's forehead. If the bastard came another three meters closer, Jiltanith would have a shot through the hatch - but he'd be able to see her, and she was flat on her belly. He wracked his brain as Anu took another step. And another. There had to be a way! There had to! They'd come so far…
Wait! Anu had been so damned confident, he might not have changed -
Anu took another step, and Jiltanith raised her grav gun. Her armor scuffed the deck so gently normal ears would not have heard it, but Anu was an Imperial. He whirled snake-quick, his eyes widening in shock, and the energy pistol swung down and fired like lightning.
It was all one blinding nightmare. Anu's pistol snarled. Its energy bolt hit Jiltanith squarely in the spine and held there. Smoke burst from her armor, but she pressed the trigger and an explosive dart hit blew his right leg into tatters an instant before a sparkling corona of ruptured power packs glared above her armored body.
Colin heard her scream over his com link. Her grav gun fell from her hand and her armored body convulsed, and his world vanished in a boil of fury.
Anu hit the deck, screaming until his implants took control. They damped the pain, sealed the ruptured tissues, drove back the fog of shock, but it took precious seconds, and Colin's implants - his bridge officer implants - reached out and demanded access to Osir's computers.
There was a flicker of electronic shock, and then,
like Nergal, Osir recognized him, for Anu hadn't changed the command codes; it hadn't even occurred to him to try. He stared at Colin in horror, momentarily stunned as even the loss of his leg had not stunned him, unable to believe what he was seeing. There were no bridge officers! He'd killed them all!
Colin's mind flooded into Osir's computers, killing the grab field. But hate and madness spurred Anu's own efforts, and his command licked out to the fire control console. He enabled the sequenced detonation code.
Colin raced after it, trying to kill it, but he was in the wrong part of Osir's brain. He couldn't get to it, so he did the only other thing he could. He slammed down a total freeze of the entire command network, and every single system in the ship locked.
Anu screamed in frustration, and Colin staggered as the pistol snarled again. Energy slammed into his chest, but his armor held long enough for him to hurl himself aside. Anu swung the pistol, trying to hold it on his fleeing target, but he hadn't counted on the adjustments Dahak had made to Colin's implants. He misjudged his enemy's reaction speed, and Colin slammed into a bulkhead in a clangor of armor and battle steel. He richocheted off like a bank shot, bouncing himself back towards Anu, and Anu screamed again as an armored foot reduced his pistol hand to paste. He tried to roll away, but Colin was on him like a demon. He reached down, jerking him up in a giant's embrace, and his hands twisted.
Anu shrieked as his arms shattered, and for just an instant their eyes met - Anu's mad with terror and pain, his own equally mad with hate and a pain not of his flesh - and Colin knew Anu's life was his.