True enough, Lachlan replied. But whoever brought in the Seitaj knew they'd be fighting some kind of Imperial troops. Only surprising they managed to get it on-planet without anyone noticing. They must have some mercs running the gear – quick-trained natives wouldn't be able to mount an attack like this.
"Pertinent," the old woman nodded sharply. The truck shuddered into motion under her and rolled out onto the street. "Dispatch a report to the Mirror. Whoever provided this equipment needs to be dealt with. As for the Seitaj itself, my Arachosians will find and destroy it soon enough…"
Lachlan signed off and she leaned back against the jostling side of the truck, frowning in thought. Something is out of place. They launch an escalated attack…three surprises now…near-modern arms, this comp neutralizer and modern countermeasures to try and level the field of combat. Do they have more in hand? She laughed softly to herself. We didn't need to meddle at all! Yacatolli and Hadeishi will have quite a time putting these lizards back into their bucket! Now wait… Something about the presence of the Seitaj nagged at her. A system like that is useless against troops fighting with sword, shield and lance. Did someone know an Arrow Knight regiment was coming here or did they expect us to equip the native princes with modern weapons?
The old woman scowled, fingertips tapping on her cane as the truck shook and jostled around her, engine rumbling, speeding through the streets of Parus. Rain-heavy clouds began to blot out the sun as the afternoon advanced.
The Fane of the Kalpataru Deep Within the House of Reeds
A succession of sharp popping sounds rippled across the vault. The banks of floodlights hanging from the wooden scaffolding flickered and died. Darkness engulfed the Jehanan soldiers scrambling to react to Gretchen's mad dash across the floor. The durbar blinked, suddenly blind.
"Lights!" he shouted, edging backwards, claw out to find the cover of the generator housing. "Get some lights on in here, you fools!"
His wild, panicky voice touched Anderssen's ears as a long, muffled huuuummmaaa. For her, the air was still thick and impenetrable – the glorious radiance of the shining black arc was failing, swallowed by the air, by the stone dome overhead, by the inert marble of the floor – but its influence still pervaded the vault. Ghostly forms thronged around her – both the Jehanan workers in the distant past as they cleared away the shockfoam from the kalpataru, and those in the present, who were cowering wherever they could, fearful of being struck by a stray bullet.
She turned, the delicate shining curve of the divine tree drawing her eye.
The boiling green void was dimming, the vast array of sharp angles collapsing, softening, the buckling vortices of space and time folding back in upon themselves, the half-open gate disintegrating as quickly as it had begun to form.
Gretchen saw: A jagged stone plunging from the sky, white-hot with atmospheric friction, spearing into a green mountainside with a burst of flame. Spindly-looking trees toppled, blown down, and the stone – hissing and popping – lay inert at the bottom of a crater.
Tri-lobed grass grew with dizzying speed, violet-colored fern-trees lifted themselves from the ashes. Millennia passed. The forest was swept away by fire, then renewed, over and over again. The sun darkened. The violet-leafed saprophytes failed and were replaced by hardier species that could live on the slowly dimming radiance of Bharat.
Gods raged in the heavens, splitting the clouds, fighting among themselves. Cities rose, glittering, on the plain below the mountain and then failed, wiped away by the relentless pressure of time. Still, the sun continued to dim. Slowly the forest darkened as the implacable hand of circumstance winnowed the weaker species away.
Something came pacing in the nighted forest – a shining chitinous creature with long bifurcated legs and shimmering wings bearing a glowing eye – in the radiance of the eye, the mossy stone was ablaze with light. The Jeweled-King plucked it from the heather and carried it away.
The stone sat alone in a blue-green room, undisturbed until slender machines descended from the roof, poking and prodding, examining the striations in the jagged surface. Then the stone split, falling into three equal portions. Behind glassite windows, the jewel-colored insects chimed in horror as a single glistening dark seed was revealed.
The seed split and split again, unfolding into a sharp, jagged arc of darkness which lifted towards the sky…
Anderssen wrenched her attention away from the distant past. Furtive images of burning cities and vast armies of insectile creatures warring upon one another for custody of the dreadful arc slipped away from her awareness.
The vault was aglow with shifting, subtle patterns. Gretchen turned with enormous effort – everything seemed frozen, but now she realized her perception of time was drastically altered. Something was approaching her – a cylindrical bullet, corkscrewing through the heavy air, leaving a twisting trail of disrupted gas behind it – and she dragged her head out of its path.
The Jehanan durbar was caught in mid-lunge, lurching towards the freshly punctured fuel-cell generator.
Technicians were scattering, claws over their heads.
One of them was crouched by the entrance, beside the dead generator, hands placing packs of blasting gel and triggers into a metal carrier bearing the Sandvik logo. Gretchen saw him, perceived a shining glide path in the air between her and the back of his scaly skull, felt the heaviness of the cutting tool in her hand.
Breathe, she commanded herself, struggling to wrench her arm back. Let yourself breathe.
A dry, acerbic voice cut through her thoughts – Clarity is the enemy of action, Green Hummingbird said mockingly – and the illusion of elapsing time snapped violently back into synch with her perception.
The bullet snapped past, spanging away from the glossy metal. Gretchen thumbed the cutting tool to life and pitched the heavy rod in one desperate motion. Malakar was hooting wildly, her pistol blasting again and again. The durbar rolled behind the generator, his own automatic blazing back at the stuttering flashes of the gardener's weapon.
Ducking low, Anderssen spun and scrabbled wildly across the floor. "Malakar, go go go!"
The old Jehanan flung the empty pistol away and scrambled towards the hole.
The cutting tool clipped the Jehanan technician on the back of his head, hissing plasma-jet searing the side of his face, and bounced away into the auditorium beyond the broken wall, still spewing flame. Crying out in terrible pain, the technician jerked to the side, mashing the trigger pack in his hands down into the container of cutting gel. There was a sharp, hot spark.
Gretchen threw herself into the crevice, cracking her shoulder against the marble, and immediately had her nose smashed by Malakar's wildly lashing tail. "Ahhh! Move move move!"
The gardener bolted up, reached back to seize hold of Anderssen's jacket collar and staggered off down the tilted passageway.
Sixty kilos of cutting gel ignited in the container. Ravening flame burst upwards, incinerating the wounded technician and engulfing the wooden scaffolding. Marble groaned, tormented by raging heat. The air in the vault rushed inwards, fueling the flames roaring outwards. The kalpataru was wrapped in liquid fire, though the ancient metal remained unmoved and untouched. All three fuel-cell packs blew apart, adding yet more heat to the incandescent explosion. Stone ribs flexed, expanding violently, and then the roof of the dome splintered, raining debris down on the huge room below.
A shockwave of white-hot flame, smoke and dust boomed out through the adjoining corridors, overcoming more Jehanan soldiers rushing towards the fane. The entire structure, buried deep within the body of the House, buckled, crashing down, burying the divine tree in thousands of tons of limestone and marble.
The Captain's Launch In Orbit Over Jagan, Approaching the Tepoztecatl
An indicator on Hadeishi's navigation plot spun downwards, showing the launch closing rapidly with the freighter. Asale began her braking maneuver, swinging the launch below the main axis of the ship as the most suitable boat bay faced the
planet. The Chu-sa was listening intently to reports being relayed to him from the bridge of the Cornuelle. The burgeoning revolt on the planet looked to require Fleet intervention.
"Can you patch me through to Yacatolli?" Hadeishi reached out and touched the pilot's shoulder while he waited for the communications duty officer on the Cornuelle to respond. Asale looked over questioningly, dark face composed and attentive. He signed for her to hold position.
"Groundside comm is shot to hell, kyo," a very sleepy Three-Jaguar replied. Both the first and second watch communications officers had taken his advice to get some sack time – and then had been jarred awake by the combat stations alert only an hour later. "Smith-tzin is trying to reestablish comm to the Legation, to Sobipurй and to the Army cantonment, but the main relay station at the landing field is off the air and some kind of general jamming is flooding the whole area."
"Where did the request for atmospheric suppression come from?" Hadeishi caught Asale's eye, made a circling motion with his z-suited finger and pointed towards the Cornuelle. The light cruiser had completed its initial maneuvering burn and was now sliding into a lower orbit, one almost directly over Parus. The pilot nodded, twisting her control yoke, and the launch shuddered, dumping the last of its velocity.
"We're picking up fragmentary fire-control requests from elements of the 416th in Takshila in the north and near Fehrupurй in the south. They're being engaged by atmospheric attack craft – old-style supersonic jet airplanes – with a variety of munitions. The jamming storm is interfering with their vehicle-mounted fire-control radar. They want us to establish air superiority from orbit."
Hadeishi coughed in polite amusement. "Well, it is a welcome change to be appreciated. What does Hayes think – one moment…"
The quiescent channel to the freighter flickered to life and the face of Captain Chimalpahin appeared. His choleric expression had been replaced by a pale sheen of sweat and worried eyes. A claxon was ringing in the background.
"Chu-sa Hadeishi! The situation on the planet has deteriorated. A number of our surveillance networks have been destroyed and we've lost touch with the Legation and Regimental command. We need your ship to take over master relay from lower orbit, allowing us to reestablish comm."
"We're already working on that," Hadeishi said in a dry voice. "Our first priority is to resynch the combat comm net with the Regiment and any dispersed elements. Then we will work on contacting the Legation and the consulates. After that…we'll see about your surveillance networks."
"Chu-sa!" Chimalpahin's face turned dark red. "Fleet is not the command authority here! Our precedence is well established -"
"I am not concerned about your little war of flowers and padded swords." Hadeishi let a little of his anger flare, shocking the man into silence. "You've put thousands of citizens in harm's way – once we've seen to their safety, then we will help you restore your comm network. Do you -"
An enormously bright light flared off to Hadeishi's right and above his shoulder. For an instant, he saw everything in the cockpit of the launch cast in sharp, unadulterated shadow. The view ports polarized a microsecond later and an alarm blared in his ear.
"Evasive!" he shouted, pressing himself reflexively into the shockchair. "Full power!"
Asale had already thrown the launch into a break to the left, engines howling, the entire frame of the little ship groaning with rapidly mounting g-stress. Hadeishi felt his chest compress, then the z-suit kicked in and the shockwebbing took the brunt of the acceleration. His fingers darted across his command board, bringing up a situational plot and tasking the two realtime cameras on the launch to track the Tepoztecatl and the Cornuelle.
A tiny fragment of his mind heard the two Marines shouting in alarm and Sho-i Asale hissing through clenched teeth as the launch tumbled into a random series of spins and hops, hoping to avoid whatever enemy had crept up out of the dark.
His eyes focused on the video-feed of the freighter. In the seconds since the blast – another part of his mind had already correlated the flare of light with the detonation of some kind of anti-ship mine – a third of the Tepoztecatl had been smashed into ruin. Sections of the freighter's hull were glowing white-hot, while atmosphere boiled out in white clouds of ice crystals. The fans of comm relays on the outer hull were twisted wreckage. A secondary explosion ripped through the engine spaces as he watched, spewing a cloud of debris and short-lived flame. The fore part of the ship still seemed to be intact, but all of the habitat rings had stopped violently, their guide-rails torn and mangled. Inside, he knew from cruel experience, every compartment would be in chaos, filled with mangled bodies, crushed equipment and a cloud of paper, unsecured objects, fire-suppression foam, droplets of blood from the wounded and the stink of burning electrical circuitry.
"Situation report," Hadeishi rasped, wrenching his attention back to the plot. He hadn't served as weapons officer for nearly a decade, but an eternity of cadet drill did not die easily. "Comp shows twelve orbital detonations. Dirty anti-matter signatures are coming in…bomb-pumped x-ray lasers…" He snarled in disgust. The flash plot on the tiny board matched up perfectly with traffic control's last update showing the Development Board's planetary communications network satellite array. "Max acceleration, pilot, match orbit with -"
Hadeishi stopped, heart in his throat, a chill feeling of horror flooding his z-suit. Six of the mines had erupted in a nearly perfect flower-box formation around his ship. Even at this distance, the v-feed of the Cornuelle showed massive ruptures in her hull, atmosphere venting in an ever-expanding cloud, the intermittent flare of secondary explosions, and worst – one maneuvering drive still firing in an orbital correction burn while the other five were silent. The light cruiser slid sick-eningly towards the upper atmosphere of Jagan, spewing bodies, debris and radiation.
"Jaguar-tzin!" Hadeishi's face froze. "Hadeishi to the Cornuelle, come in. Hadeishi to the Cornuelle, come in!"
Static roared across the standard comm bands, popping in and out as the launch's little comp attempted to restore communications with the ship. Hadeishi flinched as the display flared again. Two thirds of the way around the planet, the free merchantman Beowulf – struck by only one of the mines – suffered catastrophic reactor failure and vanished in a sun-bright burst of hard radiation. The flare rippled across the launch – now racing to catch the wounded Cornuelle – only seconds later, and Hadeishi watched grimly as his display sparked, shuddered and went dark. The launch's shipskin groaned, toasted by the wave-front. The lights flickered and went out.
Asale released her hands from the control yoke. She flipped the main system reset control experimentally. Nothing happened. "Comp is down. The radiation tripped a safety."
Hadeishi leaned back in his shockchair, staring out at the vast tan-and-blue shape of Jagan. He breathed slowly through his nose, counting to ten with each breath. His z-suit had automatically switched to internal atmosphere. His heart slowed, his mind settled and he watched with cold eyes as the launch coasted ever deeper into the planetary gravity well.
Aboard the Cornuelle, the senior officer's ward-room was empty. Though there were no crewmen present to take heed, the battle-stations alarm blared from speakers hidden in the ceiling. Decompression warning lights flashed above both doors, which had automatically sealed themselves when the call to battle-stations went out. A terrible groaning sound echoed through the walls as the ship's spine flexed unnaturally. Unlike some of the other compartments, the mess had been tidied up long before the combat alert sounded. Isoroku had finished the repairs to the floor himself and made sure everything was shipshape before moving on to other, more pressing, duties.
The resulting floor was a beauty to the eye. The varnished surface glowed golden in the light of the overhead lamps. The subtle hexagonal accretion pattern in the lohaja fit well with the rice-paper paintings hanging on the walls and an expanse of native carpet. Even by his own high standard, Isoroku had done an excellent job in refurbishing the dining room.
Space on the Astronomer-class light cruiser being at a premium, most of the common interior spaces had been fitted to do double duty as necessary. The senior officer's ward-room was no exception, possessing a relatively large table and room for eight or more to sit, and the design firm handling the class specifications had provided appropriate furnishings to allow the room to function as a planning center with full access to main comp if the need arose.
The alarms continued to blare and gravity failed in the command spaces. Battle-lights came on as normal lighting dimmed. The mess was plunged into near-darkness. Inside the Sandvik box, a sensor tripped and one of the spare power cells – hidden beneath two of its fellows – hummed to life. A cutting beam sparked, cut through the shockfoam around the tools and out through the side of the wooden case in a perfect circle. A moment later a disc of wood popped out and a small 'bot – a cylinder no more than the size of a man's pinky – crawled out on six joined legs.
The infiltrator rotated, scanning the surrounding volume for a data-port, and found nothing. Secondary programming kicked in and a different set of patterns was loaded into its minuscule processor. This time the scan identified a comp conduit interface hanging in the void where the command display had been. The 'bot climbed the wall easily, reached up two forelimbs and seized hold of the hanging cable. A moment later the 'bot matched interface to interface, negotiated systems access, and disgorged a flood of wrecker viruses directly into the Cornuelle's master comp network.
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