“Yes, Captain. Broni and Buele can help.” Damon sent. “Mass-depletion-powered ships, Captain? “
“Yes.”
Damon could not resist asking, “Are they as fast as the rumors say?”
Dietr interceded testily. “What does that matter right now? Captain, the Planetary News Net is saying something about an accident in space. We felt something--ah, familiar. Is it what we suspected it was?”
“Yes.”
Damon sent, “It’s what frightened the monkeys. I am sure of it.”
“It frightened the Yamatans, too. At just the right time.”
“Is this meeting going to be political or scientific, Duncan?” The surgeon’s communications were tightly controlled, drained, insofar as possible, of emotional content.
“It will be a gathering. That is all I can say without guessing. Yamato has a unique political structure. There are no real nations, only clans and families. We have to convince the daimyos to go outside.”
Aboard Glory there was silence. Then Broni’s sending came through fresh and clear: “The Yamatans surely understand we must fight together. “
All could sense Duncan’s regard for Eliana Ehrengraf’s daughter. “I hope so, Broni. I do sincerely hope so. But there is self-interest, too. They have spent a century developing mass-depletion power. They have a reason to resist being confined in Near Space. Damon, in addition to six MD ships the Shogun’s barge will be coming aboard. I want you and Buele to meet us at a thousand kilometers and guide us in. Make certain that Glory is her most impressive. Open an ob-deck for the visitors and make their quarters as comfortable as possible. They think we are archaic. Be prepared to make them think otherwise. “ Duncan addressed them all. “Be Wired as often as you can, and keep checking with Glory. I don’t want any misunderstandings. “
“Aye, Captain. “
“You felt the event in space, “ Duncan sent. “What was it like aboard? “
Dietr said, “It sent the monkeys into fugue. “
“Very likely. Start considering how you are going to bring them out of it. “
Everyone aboard Glory had felt the burning death of the Yamatans aboard the distant spacecraft. The syndics had recognized the threat instantly. But only Duncan thought ahead.
There was a flare of feral anger that shook both Dietr and Damon. It was directed at Duncan, but it was carelessly directed and enormously demanding. Though it was not couched in human words its meaning was heatedly clear. A translation into human language would be as plain as it was angry: “Why are you not here with the Folk where you belong, defending what you must defend?” There followed an unmistakable demand that Duncan return at once to the lair.
“Ah, Mira, “ he sent. “Very soon now. “
The cat was not placated. Mira had a strong sense of Terrestrial, mammalian distribution of duties. At this time the proper place for the dominant tom was with the Folk and the great-queen-who-was-not-alive. That was the way of life.
“She is very upset, Duncan, “ Dietr said. “All the cats are. “
Damon said, “I think she can communicate with the monkeys. “
“I hope so, “ Duncan sent. “Someone will have to or Glory will never leave this system. “
Dietr’s comment was devoid of his usual bravado. “Lieber Gott, Master and Commander, I was never really cut out to be a warrior.”
“You’re warrior enough, Dietr, “ Duncan said.
Every living thing aboard and in the loop received an emanation of power from the Goldenwing and her Captain. To Damon it was like an infusion of pure courage. He hoped that it was the same for the others. If we fail now, Damon thought, we have come as far in space as men ever will. . . .
He felt Mira and her pride making themselves large, ruffs and guard-hairs erect and extended, ready for battle, and he had a small but potent epiphany. “They call themselves the Folk. “
Buele interceded powerfully. “You should think of them that way, Damon. It pleases them.“ Damon had never received so clear a sending from a fellow syndic. Not even from Duncan.
Buele meant the cats, of course. How could he know what the animals felt and how was he able to state it in such simple, human--no, Terrestrial--terms?
“In ten orbits, then, “ Duncan sent, preparing to break contact. The message was clearly for Dietr Krieg, and the Cybersurgeon acknowledged it--and the shift of responsibility--willingly.
“Aye, Captain, “ he sent.
Ten orbits was nine hours eight minutes Standard, Damon thought. What he had learned from Glory's database about the splendid Yamatans had rather intimidated him. But, the exchange with Buele reminded him, even out here, they were all children of the Earth. That is the most important truth of all our lives, he thought.
Broni Ehrengraf, at her Astroprogrammer’s post on the bridge, listened to the nuances she detected in Duncan’s sending. With his customary intuitiveness, he had picked up the feelings of tension that flowed from the ship. It was more than a simple horror of recalling the fight in the Ross Stars. It was the enervating fear that despite anything that could be done, failure and horrible death lay at Glory's end.
Broni’s carelessly held religious beliefs had always taught that the universe lay balanced between the powers of good and evil. Kaffir preachers on her homeworld sang of Armageddon, the Final Battle at the end of the world. Such matters had always seemed quaint to the daughter of the Voertrekkerpraesident of Planet Voerster. But Glory's encounters with the Terror changed that. Her religious training had been too cursory to provide comfort, but her personal experience at Ross 248 was a real memory and it terrified her.
Now the Terror had struck again--across the Amaterasu System, to be sure, but what did time and distance matter?
Duncan’s personal command was like the touch of his hand. “Broni, “ he sent. “You are our resident aristocrat. That makes you chief of protocol. In ten orbits the daimyos are visiting in state, or as much state as they can manage aboard their MD ships. Have Glory brief you on what they will expect. Will you do that, please?”
Somehow, Duncan’s manner was bantering, and Broni knew the Captain was smiling. She sensed that the others aboard, Damon, Buele and Cybersurgeon Krieg, responded to it and to one another. It seemed to warm the air they breathed. Now Damon and Buele were exchanging sendings about either the cats or the monkeys. She could not be sure which. But the particulars didn’t matter. Tension had diminished aboard Glory.
What a beautiful man you are, Duncan Kr, she thought.
The thought was unshielded and there came instant, sardonic comments from the other syndics aboard. She accepted them without comment. She had what she wanted: a swift, unguarded flash of warmth and affection from Duncan.
And perched on the curve of Broni’s pod, Mira regarded young human female with the intent, inscrutable stare that only the Folk can manage.
10. Aboard The Dragonfly
The bridge of the Shogun’s barge, Dragonfly, a reaction-powered craft of ten meters’ beam, was crowded with Yamatan clansmen dressed for space in colorful pressure suits over which they wore their traditional finery. Duncan had explained in some detail that EVA gear would not be needed since the barge and the MD craft accompanying it would all be accommodated in one of Glory's multiplicity of empty holds. But plainly the Yamatans had only a vague notion of the dimensions of the vessel they would soon be boarding and fully expected to walk her unprotected decks.
It appeared to be a quirk of the colonial man to forget the nature of the ships that had carried his ancestors into Near Space. Pictorial evidence abounded, but the ships were overbearing. There was a reluctance among Earth’s children to acknowledge the vastness of the ancient technology.
The result was that colonials almost always suffered culture shock when they approached a Goldenwing. The reality of Glory and her sisters was stunning to men and women who had spent their lives either downworld or, at most, in low orbit.
The Dragonfly was decorated for the occasion
with flags bearing the mon of the Minamotos, their silk held extended by frames in the airless void. The barge was a substantial ship used by the Shoguns of Yamato primarily for inspections and planetary surveys from orbit. As spacecraft went, the Dragonfly went slowly. It was a ceremonial craft, gilded and decorated like the ships that once had sailed the seas around the Japanese Home Islands on Earth. The sled Damon and Anya had ridden downworld from Glory was stowed (with some difficulty) in the belly of Dragonfly. The barge’s Captain, a gray-haired samurai named Honda, the head of a clan that had served the Minamotos for two hundred years, had been cautioned to keep a sharp lookout for the small craft that had been launched from the Goldenwing to guide Dragonfly and the accompanying flotilla of MD ships to rendezvous with Glory.
Anya Amaya, uncomfortable but resplendent in a brocaded kimono (a gift from the Shogun she was assured she must accept) stood with Minamoto Kantaro and several other shogunal court notables (whose names she had great difficulty pronouncing or even remembering) near the forward-facing quartz windows. Dragonfly was still laboring into orbit, struggling to match the orbital parameters sent down from Glory. The effort created a low gravity and a disorienting pitch to all onboard movement.
From where Amaya stood she could see two of the MD craft accompanying Dragonfly. To Amaya the experimental light-speed ships were unprepossessing. If anyone had ever told the New Earth woman that she had the aesthetic sensibilities of an artist, she would have scorned the notion. Centauri colonists were known for their hard-rock feminism, political intolerance and a well-developed taste for severity in all things. Amaya’s nurturing had been as austere as any New Earther’s, and she had been sold to Glory's syndicate because she had denied the Population Authority’s right to artificially inseminate her. In the absence of a Goldenwing fortuitously in orbit, her punishment could have been far worse. Nothing in Amaya’s early life as a New Earth clone had nurtured aesthetic appreciation. But life aboard Glory had remade her. At this moment the beautiful kimono she wore seduced her (comfort was another matter--as was wearing finery over space gear), as other fine or beautiful things often did now.
The bronze-colored clouds below her pleased her innate sense of color, and she awaited with pleasure the moment when Glory, in all her splendor, would appear above the advancing planetary horizon.
Anya regarded Kantaro-san’s handsome face and wondered what his reaction would be to his first true sight of a Goldenwing in space. Not an image, but the real thing. For that matter, how would the Shogun react? In the Ross Stars, Glory had awed the bitter folk of Nimrud and had made them a trifle less formidable. But for that, the intervention of the Terror might have finished them all while they were fighting among themselves. She shivered at the memory.
“Are you uncomfortable, Amaya-san?” Minamoto Kantaro showed his concern for Amaya with some reticence. Women were valued but not highly ranked on Yamato. “Females are often affected by null gravity.”
Amaya, her Centauri prickliness aroused, said, “I have spent the last six years in space, Daimyo.” In fact, the opulence of the salon aboard the Shogun’s barge rather dismayed her. Its classic Japanese elegance attracted her, and she disapproved of the attraction. There was still much New Earther in Glory's Sailing Master. “It takes a great deal more than null gravity to upset me,” she said primly. She knew she must restrain herself from marching into a feminist confrontation with the Lord of Yedo.
Anya stood with her eyes fixed on the distant horizon of the planet below. The vast stretches of empty, copper-colored sea moved swiftly beneath the climbing Dragonfly and her MD consorts. Directly ahead of the flotilla, all of Yamato’s natural satellites hung in one of their frequent conjunctions. Hideyoshi, smallest and brightest of the moons, and the scientific base that produced the MD ships accompanying Dragonfly, had only just risen from the planetary ocean. Above it, Nobunaga, the mining-colony moon, reflected with the color of rusting iron.
Above the smaller pair, the methane yellow and baleful disk of Tokugawa dominated the celestial zenith. It was surrounded with a halo of stars and the soft luminescence of Amaterasu’s zodiacal light. Many of the constellations familiar to Earth’s night sky could be seen here, only slightly distorted by distance. There were others, named by the Yamatans, that no native of Earth would recognize: the Shark, Amaterasu’s Comb, the Crucified Warrior. At the zenith shone the bright beacon of Alpha Carinae, known on Yamato as Ryukotsu--the Keel of Argo--and to Glory's syndics as Canopus, 165 light-years from Yamato, an impossible distance even for Glory's far-reaching wings.
For a moment Amaya allowed herself to think what space travelling might become if the ugly little ships accompanying them were the precursors of true hyperlight flight. The idea both thrilled and repelled her. Human reach would be unlimited, but mankind had a way of cheapening whatever became easy.
Perhaps, she thought, that was the purpose allotted the Terror in the great plan of the Universe. She grimaced. It was a thought more suited to her dour Thalassan Captain than to a woman of New Earth.
The Dragonfly's compartment was filled with magnificently clad--and armed--daimyos. Each lord of a Domain had with him a dozen retainers, all dressed in the manner of a Sixteenth-Century feudal-clan court. There had to be five hundred kilograms of archaic, useless, beautifully wrought weaponry in the barge’s salon. What odd people the Yamatans were, Amaya thought, modern in almost every sense of the word, skilled in technology beyond any other colonials, yet still choosing to costume themselves for special occasions as did their ancestors of nearly two millennia ago.
How human, she thought.
And then she smiled again, secretly, thinking that the phrase was better suited to the small, feral mind of Mira, Glory's cat.
Shogun Minamoto no Kami left the group of daimyos around Duncan and appeared at Anya’s side. “Does my spacecraft please you, Anya-san?”
“She is quite beautiful, Minamoto-sama,” Anya said as tactfully as she could manage. The ship’s salon was actually reminiscent of the teahouses she had studied in Glory's database on the inward journey from the Ross Stars. The room was panelled in real wood and there were brocaded tatami on the floor. Anya Amaya did not truly approve. Elsewhere in the vessel the flight crew worked in titanium compartments lined with flight instruments and gear, but here one stood in a Sixteenth-Century Japanese manor.
It was perplexing--and oddly touching. But take care not to sentimentalize these people, Amaya, she warned herself. They are not what they seem to be. “I have never seen a spacecraft quite like it,” she said neutrally.
A veiled smile crossed the old man’s lips. “Are you certain there are no Japanese among your ancestors, Anya-san? You have our gift of saying nothing most gracefully.” He glanced pointedly at Kantaro. It was an unmistakable command to withdraw. The younger man did so, with a formal bow.
“Try to forget what you have learned aboard your far-travelling ship of diplomacy,” the Shogun said. “I believe you to be intuitive, Anya-san. Perhaps it is that quality you Wired Ones call empathy. Whatever it may be, I ask you to put it at my service.” He inclined his head at the daimyos gathered in suspicious groups at the forward end of the salon. “The lords of Kai and Hokkaido. With them are the leaders of the daibatsu--do you know that word?”
“It is what you call the industrialists, tono.”
Minamoto acknowledged the use of the word for “lord” with an almost imperceptible nod. “They are a good bit more than that, Anya-san. On Yamato, the daibatsu is ancient history that people say no longer exists. Yet they are powerful men and they are suspicious of you and Kr-san. Their research departments have brought the mass-depletion engine to the point where short voyages at hyperlight speeds are possible. They suspect that as Goldenwing syndics you have good reasons either to take the technology for yourselves or to destroy it. They are not convinced there is a threat--out there.” He looked somberly at the stars beyond the aligned moons. “With Kai and Hokkaido we have the worst of antiquity and modern times
. Kai is arrogant and Hokkaido is impoverished. Lord Yoshi imagines he is a genuine Takeda, and Lord Genji sits on his frozen island hoarding his bloodlines and guarding his poor treasury. They both would profit by your failure at Yamato.”
“We did not come to steal,” Anya said.
“I believe that, Anya-san,” the Shogun said. “But there should be no misunderstanding. Our MD ships represent a huge investment by the daibatsu.”
“Whereas, Shogun, we syndics risk only our lives, our ship, and the future of man in space,” Anya said icily.
“I do not blame you for resenting our caution, Anya-san. But we have always been a careful people. Please understand us. It is a great concession that our ruling caste has agreed to this conference aboard your Goldenwing.”
“I have studied your history, tono,” Anya Amaya said. “Our definition of caution is apparently not the same as yours. Unless the Yamatan word also carries with it the inference of ‘self-interested.’ “
The Shogun remained silent, his attention fixed on the visible stars.
“Tell the daibatsu, Shogun, that we Starmen have seen the enemy close by. It attacked us because we drew near to its preserves. It attacks your MD vessels because you are crossing a border. The two acts are alike. They vary only in degree. But the stakes are the same for us all. Tell your merchant lords that, Shogun.”
“Is that what your empathic sense tells you is the best course, Anya-san?”
“It is what my every sense tells me, Shogun. There is really no other choice.”
“Surrender?”
Several of the nearer daimyos were now listening to the conversation between their Shogun and the gaijin woman. It is just as well, Anya thought. Duncan might give these people an illusion of escape. I will not.
“There is no surrender, tono.” She looked at the circle of faces that now surrounded them. “Only annihilation.”
Duncan had joined the group at the salon window. Instinctively, the Yamatans looked to him for masculine confirmation.
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