“And my Fleet rank,” the Nisei continued, “exceeds yours. You may dispute me, or demand satisfaction at a later time. But not today, for there is a great deal of work to be done.”
“Your rank? You have no rank! You’re … you’re a smuggler, an outcast in a grimy z-suit! Barely human.” Tocoztic’s face flushed red as he struggled to express his outrage.
ABOARD THE NANIWA
Koshō looked up, sparing an instant’s attention from the threatwell, at the sound of someone gasping in pain as a grav-stretcher floated into Command. The Swedish woman, Anderssen, arrived in the company of two gun-i. Her left arm was splinted, her face and visible arm badly bruised. An extra med-band had been strapped to her off-wrist, leaving her face drawn and pale. Despite this, she met Susan’s gaze with equanimity.
“Put her next to Thai-i Holloway at Navigation,” Koshō said, inclining her sleek, dark head towards the semicircular console on the second tier. “Secure the shockchair, we can’t have her jolting about.”
Turning back to the ’well, the Chu-sa considered the movements of the Khaid ships at the Pinhole once more. Konev, now moved over to the XO spot, had dialed up a series of secondary schematics, showing the historical track of the enemy contacts over the last hour.
“They’re not leaving, kyo,” the Russian said, rubbing his eyes. He, like the rest of the command crew, was now standing their second straight watch.
“No, they are regrouping. They are curious—did the Tlemitl have a true goal in mind, or did it act in equal ignorance, hurling itself to certain doom?”
“They’re trying to guess the outline of the passage, kyo?” Konev sounded dubious.
Susan smiled, watching a series of darting lights emerge from one of the Khaid ship-icons. “But—wisely—they’ve stopped throwing ships into the grinder’s teeth.” Her stylus circled the minute flecks, directing the ’well to zoom in. “Instead they are testing the opening with missiles from this leeward battleship.”
On the threatwell, the cluster of missiles sailed effortlessly into the Pinhole. Some interpenetrated with the nearest veil, winking out in seemingly empty space, while others sped on, unmolested.
“Kyo, what are we doing?” Konev’s voice was very soft. Koshō nodded, accepting the bold question.
“Finding two more hours for Sho-sa Chac to complete repairs on the coil.” The Zosen were behind schedule, for the damage to some of the hypercells was worse than initially estimated. Susan lifted her chin, indicating the partial gap amongst the thready pattern. “We have this much of a map, and I hope—” She glanced over at Anderssen, who was carefully removing a bronze-colored comp from a parchment envelope and securing the device to the navigation console. The Nisei officer blinked, suddenly certain that the corroded-looking surface was actually gleaming very brightly, as though burnished and new. “I hope we have the rest near to hand.”
Gretchen spread her hands on either side of the block, took a deep breath, and then tapped open a pair of v-panes on either side. Thai-i Holloway, who had been watching her closely from his neighboring chair, stiffened and shot a panicky glance at Koshō.
Susan met his eyes, nodding. We’re only alive now, she thought, because of what Anderssen deduced. If we try and flee into open space, the Khaid will run us to ground in no more than an hour. Chac needs time, and that means we need safe haven. Even a quarter-light-minute inside that barrier, drawing a veil behind us where the Khaid cannot follow, will be enough to complete our repairs.
Holloway swallowed, eyes dragged back to a flurry of geometric diagrams opening and closing on the console. Anderssen was now breathing deeply and steadily through her nose, fingers digging in another envelope from her jacket pocket. Two pale yellow tablets emerged, held gingerly between thumb and forefinger.
Oliohuiqui? wondered Susan. A nauallis drug—ah now, how is our other passenger?
Mindful of the security risk he represented, Koshō attached one of her v-panes to the datastream from the security cameras in Medical. Green Hummingbird was in bay three, his small brown body curled up in a fetal position. The dull gray mantle, hooded brown cloak, and trousers he affected were stained and torn—though those limbs exposed to her sight were unmarked. The vitals feed from bed telemetry showed his heartbeat was slow, his breathing shallow, and his condition marked UNCONSCIOUS.
Susan frowned at this. I wonder …
Holloway and Konev both distracted her from the thought by abruptly stiffening in alarm. A second later her own console flashed a series of warnings. Something had entered the shipnet and begun altering the code controlling the navigational interfaces—or replacing modules wholesale—at fantastic speed.
“Chu-sa!” The navigator had half-risen from his shockchair. “Are you certain this is a good idea?”
“It is the best chance we have,” Koshō replied softly. She directed her gaze at the Swedish woman. “Anderssen-tzin, can your mechanism perceive the Barrier as it ebbs and flows? Can it relay the telemetry we need fast enough to move through at high-v?”
Gretchen turned towards her and Konev hissed in horrified surprise. The woman’s pupils had grown huge, dilated by the drugs now coursing through her bloodstream. Her face had acquired a peculiar waxy sheen. “Zaryá protect us from all witches!”
“I do not know,” Anderssen said, her voice tight and distant, “if your interfaces are fast enough.”
“We will do our best,” Susan answered, nodding to Holloway. “Stand by for our entry run. Bring up main drives, angle deflectors tight in on the hull. Konev—Thai-i Konev!”
Startled, the Russian turned to face her, once more composed and alert.
“Bring the remote platforms in as well, inside our deflector array. I don’t want to lose them, but we’re going to be moving erratically. Gun crews stand by for a hot passage. Chu-i Pucatli, sound battle stations and acceleration alert.” Immediately, Klaxons began to blare.
Koshō turned back to Gretchen. “Anderssen-tzin, you have the con.”
Deep in the bowels of the ship, reaction mass channels opened fractionally and the main maneuver engines roared as Holloway advanced both of his speed controls. The Naniwa surged ahead, building v as fast as she could. The internal frame, already battered by multiple missile impacts, groaned with the stress. In every compartment, crewmen secured their stations and prepared for a rough ride.
* * *
At the navigation console, Gretchen settled back, letting the holocast unfold before her. Attached directly to the shipnet’s fastest interfaces, node 333 seemed to expand, releasing hundreds of the processing nodes which had previously been inactive or inaccessible. The discovery algorithm she’d loaded into her own field comp had mutated, evolved, and returned, rippling across the Imperial systems with blinding speed. Her model was now tremendously detailed, with some kind of interpolative subprocess filling in the gaps in the quantum data feeding back from the battle-cruiser’s sensor suite.
The science probes had been lost in the fighting, though in comparison to the Naniwa’s shipskin, they were tiny black birds, pecking at a leviathan wall of basalt blocks. The warship drank data with every surface, and node 333 swallowed it up just as fast. There was only one jarring note in the rising symphony. Gretchen was suddenly aware that something was out of place in the block pressed between her fingers.
You’re broken, she realized, feeling that same rushing sense of rightness which had first come to her when the last fragment of an Old High Martian Period III bowl had fit into place on Old Mars and the entire object was whole and perfect in her hands, restored after five thousand years of separation. This piece of you is out of place. She felt the mechanism—was it like a clock? No, more a series of orbitals constantly in motion like the arms of an astrolabe, each ring a pressure-wave interlocking with the others in their emptiness—slip and slide under her attention. But then, when she focused her internal image of what should be, the whirling rings suddenly conformed to the pattern she desired.
The block se
emed to change, under her fingertips, though she was sure nothing visible about it had altered, and felt—for the first time—as though it was in proper form. Unblemished, unbroken, at last intact.
In her elevated state, Anderssen’s perceptions shifted, the command deck and the tiny humans there falling away, her vision expanding to taste the dust clouds, the wreckage, the hot flare of the ship’s drives like brilliant jeweled stars. Agitated waves spun away from them as they built velocity, shifting the dust, even brushing the threaded veil which lay ahead, stirring its components with a hot wind.
The gap—the Pinhole—loomed, no more than a long jagged gap of darkness within darkness.
* * *
Prince Xochitl’s evac-capsule sped away from the wreck of the Tlemitl, the momentum imparted by the launch rail carrying them forward. Through one of the viewports Xochitl could see the great ship, now cut neatly into three sections, receding, plumes of burning atmosphere jetting from the black hull. A Khaid cruiser—now no more than a shattered hulk—was within sight as well. The Prince, his helmet faceplate levered up, bit at the corner of his thumb and considered a nav-plot on his tiny control console. There were other capsules in range, and at the edge of sensor capacity, an able-bodied Khaiden destroyer was edging back out of the danger area.
“We cannot detect the threads,” rasped a voice from behind him. Xochitl turned, surprised to see the engineer crouching in the door of the miniscule bridge. Looking more haggard than ever, fear radiating from him in waves, Helsdon gestured at the viewport. “Our sensors just aren’t designed to recognize such a distortion of quantum law. You will want to halt our movement, before we strike one of them.”
Though he was feeling something that—in a lesser mortal—might be termed terror, the Prince essayed a feeble joke: “There are laws at the quantum level?”
“As far as these pitiful computers are concerned, there are.” Helsdon squeezed in beside Xochitl, ignoring centuries of protocol and policy which would have relegated the commoner to some distant precinct of the Prince’s daily routine. The engineer’s fingers trembled as he jacked a hand-comp into the control console. “We were right in the middle of reprogramming everything to ignore known laws, to assume that the Planck-length components of these threads were … well then, you shut us down.” Helsdon laughed ghoulishly, his own fear cutting through any sense of social hierarchy.
Xochitl stiffened, his jaw clenching. Whom do you think you address, Anglishman? No one reproves me. Not even the Imperial family. It is not permitted. My father depends on my judgment. He sent me here to secure this situation. He—
Then the Prince realized his mind was wandering, even his exocortex had fallen silent while his human consciousness whirled in a dozen directions.
«Cognitive capability is impaired,» the exo finally announced, «by chemical reactions to the perception of incipient destruction. Injecting stabilizing compounds.» Xochitl felt a cool tickling sensation in his wrists and raised his hands in confusion. A moment passed before the thudding of his heart slowed and his mind cleared.
When the Prince focused again on the engineer, Helsdon was looking up at him in puzzlement, and as if at an equal. You shall not think me incapable of the task! Xochitl took a deep breath. “Can this sensor array be reconfigured? Tweaked to detect the barrier?”
“It will be slow work.” Helsdon squinted at the intentionally simple capsule controls. “But we—” He paused, staring at the navigational plot. “Isn’t that one of ours?”
* * *
Koshō watched with interest as the Khaid flotilla in the area around the Pinhole—at last—reacted to the Naniwa’s approach. Intermittent bursts of message traffic came and went on the enemy channel and now they were chattering away again. The enemy battleships began to accelerate, swirling out and away from the entrance to the gap like a flock of huge, ungainly birds. Her eyes narrowed to see they were keeping reasonable cohesion and spacing, even when forced to redeploy from disorder.
But they had reacted a little too slowly, given her approaching speed.
“Salvo one away,” Konev reported, and the rumbling echo of launch rails discharging followed hard on his words.
A flight of shipkillers winged away from the Naniwa in a black wedge—exhausting the last of her ready magazines. Konev had been refining their attack vector for the past sixteen minutes and a formation of the remote platforms winged in, leading the swarm of Tessen missiles. With the response time from the remotes looping back through the main t-relay, the weapons officer had shortened his reaction time to the counter-missile storm erupting from the lead battleships. They had also pushed forward the reach of Naniwa’s countermeasures.
“Lead remotes going to rapid-fire,” the Thai-i announced.
The flare of antimatter detonations began to spark in the darkness, almost lost against the fantastic roil of colors from the dust clouds. The Naniwa’s course shifted a point, driving hard against the edge of the Khaid formation, running in hot behind the glare of the sprint missiles discharged from the remote platforms. A secondary cloud of anti-missile munitions had also hared away from the remotes and these slashed into the midst of the Khaiden point-defense, confusing their targeting and ripping up their own counter-missile launch.
The wave of Tessens hammered into the most exposed of the Khaid battleships. A cluster of brilliant flares erupted, each shipkiller warhead separating into dozens of laser emitters. A stabbing white glare rippled from one end of the Khaid battlewagon to the other, shredding shipskin and gun nacelles, cracking open the hardpoints at each rail launcher. The ship shuddered, veering off, and then two of the big maneuver drives blew apart, disgorging clouds of debris.
“Secondary remotes going to full burn … now.”
The other Khaiden ships burst away from the impact point, assuming she was trying to catch them edge-on, where their own fire would be blocked by friendly ships. Missiles and beam-weapons licked out at the speeding Imperial ship. The Naniwa swerved, punching into the dispersing formation where the battleship had fallen from line. The battle-cruiser’s beam-weapons lashed across the nearest Khaiden battleship. Anion impacts rippled over the flank of the bulky ebon vessel, but Koshō had no interest in going toe to toe with such a behemoth. Instead, the Naniwa slipped past, spewing a tight cloud of decoys—the last of the scavenged remotes—that raced off at a sharp angle, breaking for open space, away from the Barrier.
The Khaid ships swung round, belching more shipkillers and penetrators, their formation coalescing again. The Naniwa, engines dead for the moment, plunged into the Pinhole along the drive-plume of the stricken battleship. Only moments from crossing the Barrier line, Koshō jerked back from her executive threatwell as the entire constellation of icons and designators shifted abruptly. Looking up at the main holocast, she saw the familiar symbols winking out, replaced by a crude new array of glyphs flaring to life in the holo.
“What—”
Holloway pointed at Gretchen, his face ashen. Most of the navigator’s v-panes now showed a stream of unintelligible symbols and distorted images. “Shift piloting control to console two,” Susan barked, startling the Command watch from stunned panic.
“No,” Gretchen choked out, barely able to speak. The information density flowing across her v-displays was so dense, even with the assistance of the oliohuiqui to focus her mind she could barely process a tenth of the flood of images, sounds, models, and diagrams rushing past. She was grappling with an overwhelming—and terrifying—sensation that node 333 had woken from some ancient sleep. That the interfaces she had discovered—and prodded and poked—had been operating in some quiescent, dumbed-down state. Now, with the flood of information rolling in from the Naniwa’s sensor array, the device had improved itself, or recalled capabilities long left idle.
Now she was giddily happy that the only communications method between her and the machine was a keypad—a stylus—what her visual perception could reveal. A more direct connection, she was sure, would have rendered
her insensate. And mad, very definitely mad.
“I can’t fly this thing,” Anderssen gasped. “I’ll draw a path. You’ll have to follow.”
“Piloting control to console one,” Koshō commanded, settling her shoulders. Holloway was frozen, agog at the transformation of his control surfaces. In the threatwell, patterns of constantly shifting veils were beginning to emerge from the confusion of symbols and diagrams. Susan tried to focus, finding the hubbub amongst the Command crew distracting and the gelatinlike fluidity of the new control surfaces difficult to grasp.
Despite this, the Naniwa plunged through the Pinhole and into the unknown spaces beyond. Koshō’s grasp of the new controls—and of the information contorting her threatwell—grew rapidly. Her hands light on the flight interface, she sidestepped past both a stricken Khaiden destroyer and the spray of filaments which had torn the warship to shreds.
To Susan’s right, on the second tier of Command, Anderssen was beginning to groan in a peculiar way, as though iron nails were being driven into her eyes.
* * *
Down in medical, Hummingbird opened one eye to a bare slit. He’d heard nothing for the past fifteen minutes, which augured well. The second eye opened and he turned his head gently. No one was in sight—not a marine guard, not a medical officer, not even his lovely assistant. Alone at last, the old Méxica sat up, moving slowly, letting his heartbeat return to normal, blood flow resuming.
The poor vitals showing on the med-panel ticked up to normal after a few minutes. The nauallis listened again—now hearing and feeling the vibrations of a ship operating at high velocity—ignored the warning lights blinking on the med-panel, and jacked his remaining comp into the nearest access port. Then he lay back down, clasped both hands on his chest, and closed his eyes again.
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