“This wall’s armored, but it faces away from the mountain, so we couldn’t risk shield circuits in it,” Sandy explained tersely, turning into the living room and kneeling beside a picture window. She rested the muzzle of her heavy grav gun on the sill. “Too much chance Anu’s bunch would notice if one of ’em happened by. But it’s the only open wall in the house.”

Colin grunted in understanding, kneeling beside a window on the far side of the room. If they were trying to hide, they’d taken an awful chance just covering the roof and side walls, but not as big a one as he’d first thought. His own sensors were far more sensitive than any mutineer’s, and he realized the shield circuits were actually very well hidden as he traced the forcefield to its source. He’d expected Imperial molecular circuits, but the concealed installation in the basement was of Terran manufacture. It had some highly unusual components, but it was all printed circuits, which explained both its bulkiness and their difficulty in hiding it. Still, the very fact that it contained no molycircs was its best protection.

The shield cut off his sensors in three directions, but he could still use them through the open wall, and he grinned savagely as the emission signatures of combat armor glowed before him. They were far better protected than he, but they were also far more “visible,” and he lifted his energy gun hungrily.

“They’re coming,” he whispered, and Sandy nodded, her face grotesque behind the light-gathering optics she’d clipped over her eyes. They were the latest US Army issue, hardly up to Imperial standards but highly efficient in their limited area. He turned back to the window, watching the night.

A suit of combat armor was a bright glare in his vision, and he raised his energy gun. The attacker rose higher, topping out over the slope, and he wondered why they were no longer using their jump gear. The mutineer rose still higher, exposing almost his full body, and Colin squeezed the stud.

His window exploded, showering the night with glass. The nearly invisible energy was a terrible lash of power to his enhanced vision as it smashed out across the lawn, and it took the mutineer dead center.

The combat armor held for an instant, but Colin’s weapon was on max. There was a shattering geyser of gore, and a dreadful hunger snarled within him as the mutineer went down forever and he heard a rippling hisss-crrackkk!

The near-silent grav gun’s darts went supersonic as they left the muzzle, and Sandy’s window blew apart, but its resistance was too slight to detonate them. A corner of his eye saw gouts of flying dirt as a dozen plunged deep and exploded, and then another suit of combat armor reared backwards. It toppled over the side of the yard, thundering on the road below, and Sandy’s hungry, vengeful sound echoed his own.

Their fire had broken the silence, and the house rocked as Imperial weapons smashed at its side and rear walls. Colin winced as he felt the sudden power surge in the shield circuits. The fire went on and on, flaying the night with thunder and lightning, and the homemade shield generator heated dangerously, but it held.

Then the thunder ceased, and he looked up as Sandy spoke again.

“They know, now,” she said softly. “They’ll be coming at us from the front in a minute. They can’t afford to waste time with all the racket we’re making. They’ve got to be in and out before—” She broke off and hosed another stream of darts into the night, and a third armored body blew apart. “—before someone comes to see what the hell is happening.”

“We’ll never hold against a real rush,” he warned.

“I know. It’s time to bug out, Colin.”

“They’ll follow us,” he said. “Even I can’t outrun combat suits with jump gear.” He did not add that she stood no chance at all of outrunning them.

“Won’t have to,” she said shortly. “There should be friends at the end of the tunnel when you get there. But for God’s sake, don’t come out shooting! They don’t know what’s going on in here.”

“Friends? What—?” He broke off and ripped off another shot, but this time the mutineers knew they were under fire. He hit his target squarely, but his victim dropped before the beam fully overpowered his armor. He was badly hurt—no doubt of that—but it was unlikely he was dead.

“Don’t ask questions! Just get your ass in gear and go, damn it!”

“Not without you,” he shot back.

“You stupid—!” Sandy bit off her angry remark and shook her head fiercely. “I can’t even open the damned tunnel, asshole! You can, so stop being so fucking gallant! Somebody has to cover the rear and somebody else has to open the tunnel! Now move, Colin!”

He started to argue, but his sensors were suddenly crowded with the emissions of combat armor gathering along the roadway below the slope. She was right, and he knew it. He didn’t want to know it, but he did.

“All right!” he grated. “But you’d better be right behind me, lady, or I’m coming back after you!”

“No, you mule-headed, chauvinistic honk—!”

She chopped herself off as she realized he was already gone. She wanted to call after him and wish him luck but dared not turn away from her front. She regretted her own angry response to his words, for she knew why he had said them. He’d had to, pointless as they both knew it was. He had to believe he would come back—that he could come back—yet he knew as well as she that if she wasn’t right on his heels, she would never make it out at all.

But what she had carefully not told him was that she wouldn’t be following him. She’d said there would be friends, but she couldn’t be certain, and even if there were, someone had to occupy the attackers’ attention to keep them from noticing movement in the tunnel when Colin passed beyond the confines of the shield. And she’d meant what she’d said. If he had a bridge officer’s implants, they had to get him out. She didn’t understand everything that was happening, but she knew that. And that he needed time to make his escape.

Lieutenant Colonel Sandra Tillotson, United States Air Force, laid a spare magazine beside her and prepared to buy him that time.

Colin raced down the basement stairs, sick at heart. Deep inside, he suspected what Sandy intended, and she was right, damn it! But the thought of abandoning her was a canker in his soul. This night of horrors was costing too much. He remembered what he’d thought when Dahak’s cutter deposited him here, and his own words were wormwood and gall. He hadn’t realized the hideous depth of what would be demanded of him, for somehow he’d believed that only he must lose things, that he must risk only himself. He hadn’t counted on people he knew and loved being slaughtered like animals … nor had he realized how bitter it could be to live rather than die beside them.

He sensed the stuttering fire of her grav gun behind him, the fury of energy weapons gouging at the house, and his eyes burned as he seized the heavy furnace in a mighty grip. He heaved, wrenching it entirely from its base, and the ladder was there. He ignored it, leaping lightly down the two-meter drop, and hit the tunnel running. Even as he passed under the edge of the shield and it sliced off his sensors, he felt the space-wrenching discharges of her grav gun, knew she was still there, still firing, not even trying to escape, and tears and self-hate blinded him as he raced for safety.

The tunnel seemed endless, yet the end was upon him almost before he realized it, and he lunged up another ladder. The shaft was sealed, but he was already probing it, spotting the catch, heaving it up with a mighty shoulder. He burst into the night air … and his senses were suddenly afire with more power sources. More combat armor! Coming from behind in the prodigious leaps of jump gear and waiting in the woods ahead, as well!