Colin pushed back in his chair and nodded. Jiltanith only looked daggers at MacMahan, but he chose to construe her silence as agreement.
“All right. I know there’s some bad blood between you two,” the colonel said with generous understatement, “but there’s no room for that here. This—as all three of us have just pointed out to Granddad—is important.
“Colin, you’re the only person who can initiate the message, and if we send you on the strike, you should be able to hide your fold–space transmission by burying it under an ostensible strike report to our HQ. But we don’t know how quickly or strongly Anu’s people will be able to respond, so we can’t afford anything but our very best pilot behind those controls. You’re good, Colin, and your reaction time is phenomenal even by Imperial standards, but good as you are, you have very little actual experience in an Imperial fighter.
“ ’Tanni, on the other hand, is a natural pilot and the youngest of our Imperials, with reaction time almost as good as yours but far, far more experience. The overall mission will be under your command, but she’s your pilot and you’re her electronics officer, or neither of you goes.”
He regarded them steadily, and Colin glanced over at Jiltanith. He caught her unaware, surprising her own gaze upon him, and a flicker of challenge passed between them.
“All right,” he sighed finally, then grinned. “If I’d known what an iron-assed bastard you are, I’d never have agreed to let you run this op, Hector.”
“Ah, but I’m the best iron-assed bastard you’ve got … Sir,” MacMahan replied.
Colin subsided, and his grin grew as a new thought occurred to him. Once he and Jiltanith were crammed into the same two—man fighter, she was going to have to think of something to call him!
It was amazing how consistently wrong he could be, Colin thought moodily as he checked his gear one last time. He and Jiltanith had worked in the same simulator for a week now, and she still hadn’t chosen to call him anything.
There were only the two of them, so who else could she be talking to? It actually made it easier for her to make her point by refusing to use his name or rank. And he was certain she would rather die than call him “Sir.”
He grinned sourly. At least it gave him something to think about besides the butterflies mating in his middle. For all that he’d been a professional military man before joining NASA, Colin had fired a shot in anger exactly twice, including his abortive attack on Dahak’s tender. The other time had been years before, when a very junior Lieutenant MacIntyre had found his Lynx fighter unexpectedly nose-to-nose with an Iraqi fighter in what was supposed to be international airspace, and Colin still wasn’t certain how he’d managed to break lock on the self-guiding missile the Iraqi pilot had popped off at him. Fortunately, the other guy had been less lucky.
It helped that the other Imperials were all veterans of their long, covert war. Their calm preparations had steadied his nerve more than he cared to admit … but that, in its own way, made it almost worse. Here he was, their commander-in-chief, and every one of his personnel had more combat experience than he did! Hardly the proper balance of credentials.
He sealed his flight suit and checked the globular, one-way force field that served an Imperial pilot as a helmet. He had to admit it was a vast improvement to be able to reach in through his “helmet,” and the vision was superb, yet he felt something like nostalgia over the disappearance of all the little read-outs that had cluttered the interior of his NASA-issue gear.
He hung his gray gun on his suit webbing, not that the weapon was likely to do him much good if they had to ditch. Or, for that matter, that they were likely to have a chance to ditch if the bad guys managed to line up on them with anything in the way of heavy weapons.
There. He was ready, and he strolled out of the armory towards the ready room, glad that he and only he could read the adrenalin levels reported by the bio-sensors in everyone else’s implants.
The fighters’ crewmen sat quietly in Nergal’s ready room. There were only eight of them, for sublight battleships were not planetoids. They carried only a half-dozen fighters, and each one they crammed aboard cut into their internal weapon tonnage.
Most of the Imperials looked frighteningly old to Colin. Geb was flying wing on his and Jilanith’s fighter—the only one that would have an escort—and his weaponeer was the only other “youngster” present. Tamman had been ten at the time of the mutiny, but he hadn’t been sent back into stasis for as long as Jiltanith and he had a good two centuries of experience behind him.
Yet for all their apparent age, the other Imperials were Hector MacMahan’s hand—picked first team. This would be the first time in three thousand years that Nergal’s people had used Imperial technology in an open, full-blooded smash at their foes, but there had been occasional, unexpected clashes between the two sides’ small craft, and these were the victors from those skirmishes.
“All right.” MacMahan entered the compartment briskly and sat on the corner of the briefing officer’s console. “You’ve all been briefed, you all know the plan, and you all know the score. All I’ll say again is that all other attacks must be held until ’Tanni and Colin have gone in and transmitted. Till then, you don’t do a single damned thing.”
Heads nodded. Waiting might expose them to a bit more danger from the southerners, but attacking before Colin flashed his “strike report” and warned Dahak what was going on would be far riskier. The old starship was far more likely to get them than were Anu’s hopefully surprised personnel. This time.
“Good,” MacMahan said. “Get saddled up, then.” The crews began to file out, but the colonel put a hand on Colin’s shoulder when he made to follow. “Wait a sec, Colin. I want to talk to you and ’Tanni for a minute.”
Jiltanith waited with Colin while the others left, but even now she chose to stand on MacMahan’s other side, separating herself from her crewmate.
“I asked you to wait because I’ve just gotten an update on your target,” MacMahan said quietly. “Confirmation came in through one of our people in Black Mecca—Cuernavaca is definitely the base that mounted the hit on Cal, and, with just a bit of luck, Kirinal will be there when you go in.”
The hatred that flared in Jiltanith’s eyes was not directed at Colin this time, and he felt his own mouth twist in a teeth-baring grin.
Kirinal. He’d felt a cold, skin-crawling fascination as he scanned her dossier. She was Anu’s operations chief, his equivalent of Hector MacMahan, but she enjoyed her work as much as Girru had. Her loss would hurt the southerners badly, but that wasn’t the first thing that flashed through his mind. No, his first thought was that Kirinal personally had ordered the murder of Cal’s family.
“I considered not telling you,” the colonel admitted, “but you’d’ve found out when you get back, and I’ve got enough trouble with you two without adding that to it! Besides, knowing Kirinal’s in there would make it personal for everyone we’ve got, I suppose. But now that you know, I want you to forget it. I know you can’t do that entirely, but if you can’t keep revenge from clouding your judgment, tell me now, and Geb and Tamman will take the primary strike.”
Colin wondered if Jiltanith could avoid that. For that matter, could he? But then his eyes met hers, and, for the first time, there was complete agreement between them.
MacMahan watched them, his expressionless face hiding his worry, and considered ordering them off the target whatever they said. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told them after all? No. They had a right to know.
“All right,” he said finally. “Go. And—” his voice stopped them in the hatchway and he smiled slightly “—good hunting, people.”