Land of the Dead

by Thomas Harlan

  Susan tapped her fingers lightly on the armrest. “And the scientists?”

  “Ordered back aboard their transports, kyo. All technical personnel have been transferred to the Tlemitl. The Can is being abandoned.”

  “The Prince is certainly decisive!” He is cutting the Mirror out of the picture. That will be his father’s direction. So—is this a Fleet operation now? Or are Hummingbird and Xochitl actually acting in concert?

  Oc Chac suppressed a scowl at her sarcasm—one which Koshō was too distracted to notice, or comment upon—and returned to his station. The Chu-sa remained in her seat, her expression distant, ignoring the comings and goings of Command, old memories unspooling in her mind’s eye.

  The Naniwa pressed on, following her patrol pattern, wake surging bright with particle decay.

  * * *

  Down on deck six, in an officer’s cabin with two bunks, a shower, proper desks, and a real closet, Gretchen threw down her duffle bag and kicked off her boots. “By the Risen Christ, Hummingbird, do you think they have fresh hot water? That would be a relief after bathing in recycled spit for a week.…” She sorted out her field comp and notebooks from the backpack, including a little Hesht figurine that Magdalena had given her in parting. Grrault is the god of travelers, bachelors, and the unlucky, so keep him close and remember to give him bits of meat or bone from time to time, Magdalena had said in complete seriousness. See this cavity? Place the sacrifice within and after a moment or two, watch the color of his eyes. Amber means the meat is poisoned, red means it is safe to eat. Then the Hesht had paused, snout wrinkling up. Safe for a Hesht to eat, of course. For a cub like you with only one stomach … perhaps not. But still, he’s sure to bring good luck.

  Parker had laughed, pressing his favorite multitool into her hands and giving her an awkward hug. If you need a ride, he said, sniffling, you just comm, right?

  Hummingbird did not reply, and when Anderssen turned around, she whistled in appreciation.

  The nauallis had unlocked both of his traveling bags. One of them had unfolded cleverly into an entire desktop-style comp station with three large v-displays and two stylus pads. The other bag was packed tight with equipment boxes of all kinds. Hummingbird had already appropriated one of the desks and was plugging in cables as fast as he could.

  After watching for a moment, Gretchen dove in beside him and started unpacking comm relays and other devices from the second bag. Hummingbird, obviously in a tearing hurry, flashed her a warning look—to which Anderssen gave a smirk in return, saying: “Don’t give me that sour face, Crow, I know which end is which.”

  “Very well. Find a set of modules marked with double bands of green—they can be assembled into a t-relay station. It would speed things up tremendously if you could get that operational.” He seemed dubious, but gestured for her to proceed before turning back to completing his system setup.

  Gretchen smiled to herself and began rooting through the bag, looking for the doubled green bands. Almost immediately, she ran across a bricklike object wrapped in—of all unlikely things—a parchment envelope.

  “Well now,” she said to herself, running a finger across the smooth material. “What is this? A book?”

  The envelope was held closed by a silver clasp ornamented with a well-worn device. Peering closer and turning the envelope to throw the sigil into relief, she made out the stylized figures of two men—were they in armor? They seemed to be sporting pointed helmets—riding on a single horse.

  I’ve seen this sigil before, she thought, slipping a fingertip under the clasp and opening the envelope.

  A heavy metal block—corroded bronze or brass at first glance—slipped out into her hands. As soon as the device touched bare skin, Gretchen felt there was a fundamental imbalance in the mechanism. Attempting to resolve this, she switched the block around and found one end was fitted with a strip of Imperial-standard interface ports. “A comp,” she said aloud, though not meaning to. “It feels so old.…”

  Puzzled, she ran her fingertips across the corroded surface, but no rust or scale came away. Instead, Anderssen realized that the surface was quite smooth, but had been mottled by tremendous heat at some time in the past. This isn’t right, she felt, and tugged at the interface strip until it came away. Better. She sat down on her bunk and opened her backpack, pulling out her trusty old octopus and jacking the multilead into her own comp. Then, humming softly to herself, she began testing the tiny pits revealed by the removal of the interface strip.

  After an hour, Gretchen realized she was thirsty and looked up to see that Hummingbird had quietly completed the assembly of his comp station, including the t-relay, and was running well over a hundred v-panes, all showing a wide range of data and visualizations.

  “Who made this, Crow? This little comp I’ve got here?”

  Hummingbird did not turn, but shrugged his wiry old shoulders. “It came to me in trade, Anderssen-tzin. I did not think it wise to show while we remained on the Moulins.”

  Gretchen snorted. “You didn’t trust Captain Locke and his devout crew?”

  “Not at all.” The old nauallis rubbed the back of his head. “Their beliefs are genuine, but while I have some standing among them, I am not one of them, if you follow my meaning. They agreed to help us come this far, but we will need a better conveyance to move forward. To reach the device.”

  “Hmm.” Gretchen turned the bronze block over in her hands. It was quite dense for its size. The interface strip was reattached and reconfigured. She reached for her portable input panel and v-display. “You don’t know where this came from?”

  “I know who gave it to me,” he answered, in a very dry tone. “But before that? I could not say.”

  “And what did you trade for it?” Anderssen regretted asking the question immediately, realizing she did not want to know the answer. He might trade anything, for anything, she thought, feeling a cool chill trip across her shoulders.

  “Services rendered, Anderssen-tzin. By another, not by you—or I—if you are concerned.”

  “Well,” Gretchen said, distracted, “then let me see.…”

  She powered up her input devices, socketed them into the interface strip, and settled back to see what presented itself. Almost immediately a node appeared in her little local network, right alongside the tiny blue birds representing her field comp and hand comp. Time to negotiate, Anderssen thought, initiating conversational algorithm.

  * * *

  Three hours later, Hummingbird was sitting cross-legged on his bunk, his stylus clicking irregularly on the control surface, when a double-chime sounded from one of the v-panes open before him. A thin line of bloody spots ran along his left arm, where he’d been pricking himself with a maguey spine as he worked. Thoughtfully he nodded, closing a series of other windows and expanding the one demanding attention.

  “Squadron ’cast access achieved,” he said softly, scarred hand flexing. “Protocols are open with all ships save the Tlemitl.”

  Gretchen had been following along with her own systems, which seemed positively paltry in comparison to what the nauallis had brought into play. Still, their activities and agents were now able to move where they willed throughout the battlecast network. Only the flagship remained isolated, but Anderssen had the impression the dreadnaught’s shipnet was an order of magnitude beyond that of the smaller ships, including the Naniwa.

  Hummingbird bit at his thumb, eyes narrowed. “Who came with the Prince?” he mused. “What resources does he have to hand?…”

  The nauallis fell silent then, his attention wholly focused on defeating the protections girding the Tlemitl. Anderssen lost interest in his struggle. The question of the mysterious weapon and the barrier it had drawn across this whole section of space was far more intriguing. She had never had an opportunity to investigate an artifact of such colossal scale before. No way I’m passing this up, Gretchen thought gleefully and rubbed her hands together briskly in anticipation. Her initial forays into the resources av
ailable through the ’cast network had already discovered a whole series of robotic probes deployed along the “frontier” of the hidden weapon, probes which had been under the control of the Mirror scientists working on the Can, but now they were drifting aimlessly, having been abandoned at the Prince’s direction.

  Come here my pretties, she thought, grinning. Watching Hummingbird at work had revealed his outgoing stellarcast transmissions were masquerading as authorized ’net access from the Naniwa. The probes were happy to recognize her request as official and socket into her network. After handshaking, they began unspooling an enormous volume of data back to her little set of comps. Almost immediately, she received warning errors from the data interfaces. Frowning, she eyed Hummingbird’s constellation of devices but decided it would be unwise to steal storage from him. What about the local shipnet, maybe I can hijack someone’s … Hold up, what’s this?

  A new icon had appeared on her main v-display; one showing a glyph indicating it “belonged” to her set of resources. There was no description and only a generic symbol with the identifier 333 attached. Curious, Anderssen queried the storage available and then sat back in surprise when the node responded with a long string of nines. That is … a hell lot of crystal lattice, she thought, impressed. Is this the public storage cloud on the Naniwa? No, it would have a serial number and description and all sorts of wonky detail …

  Now concerned, she flipped from the logical view she’d been operating through to a physical resource diagram and then stared over at the corroded bronze block. “You?” she said aloud, startled. The protocol mapping algorithm had apparently completed, determining that the device did have storage available and there was some kind of pathway to allow access.

  Gretchen’s first instinct was to yank out the octopus and sever the connection. But then, when her fingers touched the cable, her eyes drifted back to the long string of nines and all of the raw storage they represented. I could build a nice dataset with all of those probes feeding in … I wonder how fast it can process?

  A little guiltily she glanced over at Hummingbird, who seemed entirely oblivious to her activities. His face seemed remote and unapproachable and the click-click-click of his stylus was swift and sure, the patter of hail on a tin roof in a high country storm.

  One step at a time, she decided, and reconfigured the octopus to allow only one-way communication. At least, she thought, I can store all of the data right now, then disconnect from the probes before someone notices I’ve hijacked them. That would be prudent.

  Five minutes later the first of the probes was unspooling its history log across the ’net and into the bronze block at a very reasonable speed. Watching the performance metrics built into her comp, Anderssen realized after about ten minutes that the limiting factor on the transfer was the octopus itself, which had not been designed for moving such enormous volumes of data.

  I’m going to short the poor thing out. What else do I have available?…

  Her stylus tapped through a series of panes, looking for alternate methods of transfer, and on the fourth one she paused, eyebrow rising, to see that node 333 had registered twenty-seven wireless access ports, all open and unsecured. I wonder … will stellarcast let me multichannel onto this device? Gretchen poked around some more, cursing at the arcane interface for the shipnet, until she figured out how to assign the data feeds from the sixty-plus probes across all the available access ports. Then she tapped a GO icon and sat back.

  All of the probe data was loaded nine minutes later.

  Anderssen blinked, smoothed back her straight blond hair, and got up to get a kaffe.

  Well, well, well, she mused, pouring instacream into the black liquid. Now how to model all this and find the keyhole I need, or the shape of this … or, or … Gretchen hissed in frustration. When she held a physical object in her hands—potsherds, a broken mechanism, a bone—something would usually suggest itself to her, some clue or guide to its proper purpose. But in the comp system? There was a disconnect between the object—or truly the data trying to describe the object—and her ability to grasp its totality.

  I can’t go EVA and touch the damned thing. She felt daunted. I have to figure this one out the old way.

  Across the room, Hummingbird stirred, his eyes focusing on her as though from a great distance. “How very interesting,” he said. “It would seem the Prince has arrived with no Judge or Mirror oversight. No Seeking Eye commissars, no political officers.”

  Gretchen gave him a look over the rim of her kaffe cup. “A Prince of the realm, riding the finest steed in the land, with not the slightest restraint on his activities? What a marvelous adventure for him!”

  “For all of us, I fear,” Hummingbird muttered, producing a small paper wrapper from his mantle. He withdrew two small white tablets and placed one of them under his tongue. “Curious—there is only a skeleton crew aboard the Tlemitl. Barely enough men to operate her.”

  “That many fewer to share the loot.” Anderssen sat back down, scratching her ear, attention already sliding away into this new puzzle.

  “Abominations!” Hummingbird exclaimed in outrage as he peered at one of the v-panes. “I’m bumped out.”

  “Oh, you’ll get back in, eventually,” Gretchen assured him. “You are a nauallis, after all.”

  “Anderssen…” Hummingbird finally looked at her directly and the shock of meeting his dark eyes drew her full attention. “Have you considered what it means to encounter, to experience a First Sun device?”

  Gretchen laughed bitterly. “You mean, will fame and fortune go to my head? Isn’t your whole purpose to make sure that no one realizes such a thing has even been encountered? There’s no fortune there, for me, and certainly no fame.”

  The old man shook his head slowly. “Such things are only the shell, only the surface of the matter.” He pointed with his chin and Anderssen looked down, surprised to find the corroded bronze block in her hands.

  “Your ability to use such things imperils your very humanity. You must tread very softly.”

  “This? This is just a computer—one of the tools at our command. Do you think using tools threatens anyone’s humanity?”

  He nodded. “The men who devised the first rifle, or machine gun, or thermonuclear bomb let go of something innate in themselves. Then those who used them left all pretense of humanity behind. How”—he paused, searching for the right words—“how can even a warrior countenance the death of an enemy he has not faced, met eye to eye, and traded blows with in the circle? Anything else is murder. I would say that a murderer has abandoned the common thread which ties us all together.”

  Anderssen squinted, wondering if the Crow was mocking her, then shook her head. “None of those atrocities were initiated by the tools—the rifle, the machine gun, the bomb only had the misfortune to fall into the hands of men who had already decided upon atrocity.”

  Then she set the block down, picked up her stylus, and returned to her work.

  Hummingbird became quite still, seeing that the European woman had turned her back on him. He watched her intently for nearly thirty minutes, but Gretchen’s attention was wholly devoted to building a new analysis model. Apparently satisfied by what he’d seen, the old Crow returned to his own efforts, and the hours passed by in quiet save for the clicking of their styluses on the control surfaces.

  At length, Hummingbird pushed away from his comp—breathed out a deep, long sigh—and stared for a moment at the pale blue wall behind his still oblivious companion. “The dreadnaught’s shipnet is using an unknown encryption and security system. Not only is it unfamiliar to my tools, but it seems impervious to investigation.”

  Gretchen made no sign she had heard. Hummingbird scratched the back of his head and surveyed the rest of their cabin. Conversationally, he said: “There are the afterimages of cranes in flight, etched into this ceiling. A former tenant must have needed at least the illusion of the homeworld to ease his mind.”

  Still Anderssen ignored him.
The nauallis grimaced and rose, swaying a little. After two cups of thickly sugared kaffe he found steadier footing. Then he sat down on the edge of his bunk and unwrapped a threesquare. Even when he’d finished, the Swedish woman was still hard at work.

  Experimentally, he said: “The Tlemitl is one of the Emperor’s personal ships—long rumored but never proven. Never have I encountered an Imperial system which could resist my overrides. Always before, the Judges have contrived to know what transpired in Imperial Space. Things are now afoot to which we are not privy. Shall even the Judges shine dim beside the Tlaltecutli, the Lord of the Earth? Surely the human race would be at insupportable risk if we cannot penetrate new secrets as they arise! We must get inside this mystery box that is the Firearrow.”

  “In a minute,” Anderssen mumbled.

  “Of course,” he said, watching her with a sort of cool detachment.

  At much the same time, his comp constellation completed the process of dumping a set of infiltrators into the Naniwa’s communications network, allowing Hummingbird to open a tachyon relay channel without anyone on the bridge being the wiser. A short, discrete burst of data was dispatched out into the wasteland of the kuub. A bit later, the reply filtered back to Hummingbird’s console.

  Excellent, he thought, setting a timer to run. Seventeen hours and counting.

  * * *

  On the command deck, another watch came on duty and Sho-sa Oc Chac was once more at his console, monitoring the efforts of the rest of the bridge crew and ancillary departments. Given his background, the Mayan was paying close attention to the efforts of the Zosen still rounding out a few tail-end projects. When Chu-i Pucatli suddenly tilted his head and stared at the status board in puzzlement, he was up out of his seat and beside the Comms station before the sub-lieutenant could sound an alarm.