Land of the Dead

by Thomas Harlan

  “No.” Koshō’s eyes were half-lidded, but her voice was firm. “We’ll be going no closer. Pilot, find us somewhere to lie up and rest the crew. We’ll repair what we can, and then we’ll move a goodly distance away from the Pinhole and see if we can reach gradient.… Yes, Sho-sa?”

  Oc Chac had moved to Holloway’s station at Nav and was shaking his head. “Even when repairs are complete, Chu-sa, and the coil is back in operation … Gravitometric readings around us are off the scale—we’ve passed over some kind of equilibrium point, where the curve of physical space has inverted—we can’t make transit out of this … this pocket. That inversion is forcing gradient well beyond ships’ capacity to punch through into hyper.”

  Susan suppressed a curse. “What about inside the pocket? Can we reach superluminal here?”

  “Perhaps.” The Mayan adjusted the scan controls on the navigational console. “We’ll need to move deeper in—see if gradient slopes off abruptly.” He turned back to Koshō, jaw clenched. “It may be, kyo, that the pinhole we’ve slipped through has taken us into a captive universe.”

  “What do you mean?” Susan felt the tide of cold reach her sinuses, which abruptly made her head feel both light, empty, and clear. The engineer’s statement hung before her, seemingly profound, but also beyond practical reach. “What does that mean to us, Sho-sa?”

  “It means, kyo,” Oc Chac said, considering his words carefully, “that here we may be able to punch through to hyperspace—but we won’t have anywhere to go. The Barrier itself may be wrapping gravity—and the core fabric of realspace—back around to the other side of the pocket. Indeed, if we traveled the six light-year-width of this place from end to end, we may well wind up at our starting point.”

  Holloway—who seemed as confused as Susan—scratched the back of his head, then said: “But there’s a break in the fabric, right, because we just came through from the ‘outside.’ So the only way out, would be right back the way we came—and into the waiting claws of that Khaid battle-group.”

  The Mayan shrugged. “Thai-i, such may be our fate.” He lifted his chin, giving Koshō a questioning look. “Hennig’s crews are ready to tear into the coil and replace those damaged cells—if we’re done maneuvering at high-g for a couple hours.”

  Koshō nodded. “Get to it, Sho-sa. Keep the duty officer informed of your progress and estimated time to complete. As soon as we can find somewhere to lie up, we’ll go off battle-stations.”

  Gretchen stirred expectantly, her parchment-wrapped block tucked under one arm. The Swedish woman looked ghastly—her face was a sallow frame for enormous, fatigue-blackened eyes—but she was still game to plunge ahead into the unknown, seeking the thrill of first-light shining upon something lost eons ago.

  “I said no.” Susan eased herself out of the shockchair, feeling every muscle and bone throb violently. “Thai-i Holloway, we need to get third watch on duty stations and send everyone else to the showers. Myself included. Chac is busy, and you and Konev are due for a break, so see if Thai-i Goroemon survived the last sixteen hours and get her up here to stand in as officer of the watch.”

  “Hai, kyo!”

  Stiff beyond measure, Koshō limped through a slow circuit of Command, checking in with each duty station. As she approached Comm, Pucatli popped up with his hand extended. The young Méxica was holding a glass vial filled with a pale rose-colored fluid. “For you, Chu-sa.”

  Susan frowned. “An antibiotic?”

  “No, no, Chu-sa.” Pucatli grimaced. “Those are poison! What’s bad for microbes can only be bad for people. This is a tincture for the weary, made from the root and flowers of chunuli plants in my mother’s garden. Mix it with very hot water and partake gently.”

  Drink it with sayu? Susan converted the near-hysterical laugh that rose in her throat to a polite nod. “Thank you for the kind thought, Chu-i.”

  THE WILFUL

  The Khaid destroyer—another classified as Neshter-class by the commercial registry, though Mitsuharu’s practiced eye had already picked out a number of differences between this ship and the Qalak—loomed in the threatwell, its icon surrounded by a constellation of informative graphics.

  “Launch signature,” Tocoztic announced suddenly, his voice tight. “Looks like a one-rail sprint missile.” In the ’well, a glowing streak appeared, following the track of the weapon. “Vectors do not overlap.”

  Hadeishi had already seen the target and his face stiffened in fury.

  “An evac capsule,” De Molay said, a moment later. “We picked up their signal about an hour ago.”

  “As did the Khaid,” Mitsuharu bit out with difficulty. “They haven’t a chance.”

  The missile icon intersected the capsule’s graphic and both winked out. A quarter-second later, a tiny bright flare appeared on one of the camera displays, and then faded away. Against the slow roil of the dust clouds—all ruddy red, purple, and orange luminescence—the explosion went almost unnoticed.

  Hadeishi was motionless, his face in shadow on the darkened bridge, staring at the ’well. And I was unable to do even the slightest thing to save the men aboard.

  “She’s turning,” the Thai-i announced into the silence. “We have—we have vector overlap if they hold course.”

  The Nisei stirred, forcing his attention back to the ’well and the movement of ships, wreckage, anything else which might affect his tiny command. He rewound the ’well through the last three hours of data, the myriad icons a blur of motion. “They’re into the return leg of their patrol pattern.”

  He clicked his teeth, seeing that the intercept solution was very poor for the Wilful. “We’re going to have to go to zero-power and lose steering way, hope they pass over us as wreckage. We’re too close to—”

  Tocoztic gave him a sick look. “They’re sure to catch us on active scan—we’re not Imperial, we’re not Khaid—they will know we’re a scavenger that didn’t get caught up in the battle. That fate”—he stabbed a finger at the location of the obliterated capsule—“will be ours!”

  “Going dark,” De Molay announced, when Hadeishi failed to respond immediately. Her face drew tight with concentration and Mitsuharu could see that another set of v-panes had appeared on her console. The markings—and he could not see them clearly from his vantage point—did not seem to be formed of human letters.

  “Hostile is less than a light-second away,” Tocoztic breathed, sounding anguished. “She’s accelerating. We’re getting side scatter from an active scanning array—”

  “There!” The old woman sighed in relief. “Memory still holds true!”

  At the same moment, the Wilful’s engines died and the lights dimmed markedly. The constant vibration of the reactor drew down, and then entirely faded away. Hadeishi watched with intense interest as each on-board system shut down in swift succession. On his console, the myriad v-panes and controls faded away—the threatwell went dark—and the environmental monitors indicated that every compartment had dialed down air circulation and scrubber activity to the absolute minimum. The only activity registered on the shipskin, which was assuming a new aspect—one that Mitsuharu had never seen before. Part of the forward hull was visible in the camera display, which was still active, and there he saw that the hull had deformed into a strange, “fuzzy” configuration, the surface extruding millions of what appeared in close-up to be tiny matte-black cilia.

  Truly we have turned into a creature of the abyss!

  He gave De Molay a curious glance. “We’re in an absorptive mode?” he asked quietly.

  “We are,” she replied with the hint of a smile. Hadeishi hid his reaction, suddenly mindful of Tocoztic and the other Fleet ratings who might be listening down deck. There’s no heat sump on this ship capable of absorbing the impact radiation on the skin. Nothing big enough to swallow our own emissions, not for more than a few seconds. So—what lies behind those closed-off compartments on the Engineering deck? Something to hide us completely?

  The thought gave him
a chill down the back of his neck.

  “Here it comes,” the Thai-i breathed, “we’ll have visual in—”

  The Khaid destroyer emerged from a screen of stellar dust, black bulk dwarfing the Wilful, flanks etched with the landing lights outlining her boat-bay doors. On the camera display, Mitsuharu could make out rows of launcher hard-points, the shallow pits of particle beam emitters and point-defense guns. The hypercoil ring to aft and the maneuver drives were arranged in an unfamiliar pattern, but close up the Nisei could guess at her manufacturer. A refitted Megair Vampyre-class light cruiser. Interesting—the Khaid Zosen must have bought her as a hulk and replaced all of the internal systems—the Khaiden body form doesn’t fit very well to the arthropod. Those drives look new, too.

  Regardless of her provenance, the destroyer sailed on past, showing every sign of being unaware of their presence. Tocoztic stared at his console, stylus busily tapping away. He checked and double-checked the paltry stream of data available. “Their active scan is pinging right over us!” he whispered loudly.

  Suddenly Hadeishi had to suppress a full-on grin; not a proper hint of a smile or a careful mask of command, but a fierce, predatory snarl.

  The Khaid rolled on past, and the Wilful shuddered a little as the wash of radiation from her engines pelted the shipskin. Mitsuharu, properly somber again, paid close attention to the status displays from the hull configuration. What excellent engineering, he thought. The emission wave from the enemy radar failed to spike our surface temperature. The drive wake has been absorbed as well. But … how could shipskin cool to relative zero so fast?

  The Nisei sat back, nearly overcome with wonder. Then he noticed that the subsonic vibration of the reactor interface had soared up, almost to an audible level. He looked to De Molay in concern, but the old woman just shook her head minutely. Her gray eyes rested steadily on him. For the first time in a long time, Mitsuharu felt nervous, jumpy. A tramp freighter, eh? I am six kinds of a fool.

  Tocoztic squirmed in his chair, looking around curiously at the walls. “What’s that weird vibration?”

  “Engine phase-transition, Thai-i. Every ship has its own quirks and noises,” Hadeishi replied with deliberate calm as he reviewed his console again. Power output is up 300 percent. But—we’re not leaking heat, the internal temperature is actually cooling.… The reason was obvious, but Mitsuharu was having a hard time believing the data before him. Every engineer in the Empire would fall on his sword to bring this secret home. Someone has developed an effective thermodynamic shunt. And it’s working and it’s on this ship, on my ship.

  “Thai-i Tocoztic, eyes on your console, mind on the mission.” Hadeishi’s voice was sharp, ringing with hidden elation. The tone gained the younger officer’s complete attention. “Pilot De Molay, plot a course for the next surviving evac capsule. We still have work to do, even if the Khaid are careless and blind. The next patrol ship may be more attentive.”

  “Hai, Chu-sa!”

  Hadeishi felt something tight in his chest release at the long-familiar words: Ah, now my heart is beating again!

  THE NANIWA

  The last of the officers and ratings who’d ridden through the Pinhole had crawled off to their bunks by the time Thai-i Goroemon managed to reach Command. Koshō was still in her shockchair, reviewing the telemetry captured by shipnet during their passage, looking for somewhere to hide her battered ship.

  “Chu-sa? Holloway-tzin said you needed me to stand officer of the watch?”

  “I do, Thai-i. I am very glad you survived. Can you handle another eight hours awake?”

  Goro shrugged, broad shoulders stretching the gel of her z-suit. “Hard to sleep with all the racket, kyo—but we didn’t get hit too hard down in the Backbone. Two magazine conveyors went down due to jams, but nothing punched past into the inner hull where we were.”

  The lieutenant rarely stood a Command watch, though she was technically fifth on the roster. Her usual duty station was in the munitions roundhouse controlling the network of high-speed magnetic railways threading between the primary and secondary hulls of the battle-cruiser. The Naniwa’s main magazines were spaced along the shipcore itself, as far from hostile fire as possible, while a network of secondary—or “ready”—depots served each hard-point, launch-rail, or gun-pit. Managing the Backbone ammunition network was third in complexity among the ship’s systems, behind the engines and shipskin.

  “How soon will we be reloaded?” Susan asked, frustrated with herself that she hadn’t already checked in with logistics.

  “Another hour, kyo, and we’ll have all the conveyors back in operation,” Goro replied. “Kikan-cho Hennig’s men have both of the jammed ones torn apart right now. He said there’s some fabrication problem with the pass-along sensors, so they’re getting pulled, hand-tested, and replaced as needed.”

  “Better than I expected.” Koshō was pleased. For a ship so fresh from the yards, the Naniwa had experienced very few outright component failures. “What I need you to do, Thai-i, is—”

  She turned to the navigational plot shipnet had pieced together from data recorded during their passage. Oddly, the changes made to the navigational interfaces—and to the threatwell and other Command systems—when Anderssen had taken them over, had all reverted to their Fleet-standard configurations. Even the massive rush of topology information which had allowed Susan to navigate through the Pinhole had purged itself. Only second-by-second Command camera images of the threatwell remained, but from them shipnet had reverse-engineered a model of their exit point and the surrounding area.

  “—find us a place to lie up while all immediate repairs are completed. We’ve moved into a peculiar area of space—one without charts, and which may obey different physical laws than we’re used to—so I don’t want to rush about until we’ve laid down a tight nav plot. But here”—Koshō indicated a convoluted set of folds in the nearest dust clouds—“is a region free of the Barrier threads, and excited and dense enough we may be masked from passive sensors if someone comes along, banging on the temple-wall with a stick. Drop a remote to watch the Pinhole for us, and then move the Naniwa in there and go to zero-v. The engines need maintenance as well—we’ve taken enough dings, dents, and outright punctures to warrant a thorough inspection.”

  “Hai, kyo.” Goro covered a yawn with her salute and settled herself gingerly in the command chair.

  Susan looked around the bridge one last time, saw that Anderssen had already been taken away, nodded to herself, and strode off to find her own cabin.

  * * *

  A monofilament saw shrieked, cutting away at the airlock on a badly battered evac capsule. Two burly engineers, their combat armor awash in a flood of sparks, were sawing away the last of the hinges holding the hatch closed. The portal itself was badly scarred and had been slightly twisted in the framing socket by some massive impact. The evac capsule had fared no better—carbon-scoring had turned nearly the entire surface black and the view ports were milky with tiny fissures. Another crew of engineers were dragging away a couple hundred meters of high-v cargo netting—the net Thai-i Holloway had arranged to snatch up the capsule at speed, while the Naniwa barreled past in the Pinhole—though its landing in boat-bay one had been … rougher … than the navigator intended.

  “Clear!” barked the Joto-Heiso bossing the team of engineers. He stepped back, swinging the saw up onto his shoulder. Hot hexacarbon fragments littered the deck, filling the air of the cargo bay with thick spirals of smoke. “Get ’er open.”

  The hatch squealed as pry bars dug in around the periphery, then popped free with a ting! Four of the Joto-hei on hand seized hold with magnetic grapples and wrestled the enormously heavy block of battle-steel, hexacarbon, and glassite onto a waiting grav-sled. As soon as the portal was removed, there was movement inside the capsule and two battered-looking Jaguar Knights emerged, shipguns at the ready. The Joto-Heiso stood his ground, unsuccessfully hiding a sneer behind a thick walruslike mustache. “Muddies,” he muttere
d under his breath to the engineers standing behind him.

  “Xochitl-tecuhtzintli, welcome.” Heisocho Von Bayern was waiting for the next man to emerge. Prince Xochitl stamped out, his armor streaked with vomit and stippled with fresh dents. The Méxica lord’s face—his helmet was now canted back—was glacial with fury, his dark eyes flashing dangerously. One of his high, chiseled cheekbones had acquired a dark, purpling bruise. The Diplomatic Service warrant officer bowed appropriately, and then saluted sharply. “Gensui on deck,” he barked.

  A dozen meters back, Socho Juarez and the full remaining complement of marines aboard the battle-cruiser stamped their right feet in unison, presented arms—they’d scrambled to unpack their Macana assault rifles—and then held rigid while the cruiser’s piper wailed through the Imperial March.

  Xochitl stared at the welcoming committee, his expression congealing into something very much like icy mud. Nothing about the reception was in the least irregular, though rousting out a piper for the March was generally falling from fashion. Von Bayern offered the Prince a gracious smile, hands clasped behind his back, until the drone of the bagpipes had ceased.

  “My lord, I hope you will accept our apologies for detaining you and your crew within your evac capsule during transit. Your physical safety is of tremendous concern to Chu-sa Koshō. And … here are the medics.”

  A pair of corpsmen had arrived with orderlies and stretchers. They immediately climbed in through the mangled airlock to help out the men still inside the capsule. The first to emerge was the hulking, seven-foot-high shape of the alien, in its unfamiliar armor. The marines and engineers stiffened, hands going to personal weapons. The creature looked around; head tilted back a little, and then saw the Prince. Xochitl looked back to the warrant officer.

  “Take me to the Chu-sa immediately. Quarters for my men can wait. I will not. This one”—he pointed to Sahâne—“send to whatever cabin is reserved for me. I will take something else, anything else.”