Land of the Dead

by Thomas Harlan

  She shook her head and keyed open a comm channel. The message had been composed in her mind for at least a day, but she had needed the bridge to herself before risking a transmission.

  Peregine, Pervicax transmito. Cohortes imperatoris deletae sunt. Khai sepulchrum intraverunt. Quinque custodes Khaianes consisti sunt, whispered out into the aether.

  De Molay felt a mingled sense of relief and wary anticipation. There had been a dozen times in the last week that she’d expected to be incinerated, or captured, or simply vanish in the blossoming flare of an antimatter detonation. But—somehow—she had won through, and now her entire purpose had been discharged with a single message. One which will likely go—

  The console chimed softly, indicating an incoming message spooling through the relay. She stiffened, startled to receive such a quick reply.

  The message read: Venimus. Signa transitu pone pro insertio directio teleportano. Evigila.

  Ready we shall be, then. By the Lord, they must be close by.

  Her attention shifted to the plot. All four Khaid destroyers on sentry duty remained in their watchful pattern. No missile launches were detected by the forest of sensors extruded from the hull of the Wilful, no movement towards her on their part. De Molay settled back, wincing a little at the enduring pain in her face, her side, and her leg. I am far too old for this, she grumbled mentally.

  Which, said a voice much like her own—damnable conscience!—is why you’d retired. Why exactly did you volunteer for this excursion?

  Patzanil clattered onto the bridge, a large bowl tucked under one arm. The smell washed over her like the tidal return from Port Valletta on a long, hot summer day.

  “Is it meatlog?” she asked politely.

  The Thai-i gave her a devil-may-care smile. “I don’t know, but if the Khaid can eat it, I can, too.”

  De Molay suppressed a laugh. “Back to sleep for me, then. Nothing new on the plot.”

  THE NANIWA

  Koshō felt her stomach quail and the lighting in Command pulsed twice as the battle-cruiser dropped gradient into realspace. Brisk, well-practiced chatter flowed across the bridge stations as the officers of the watch confirmed they had made transit properly, that ship’s systems were on-line and they had a solid navigational fix. The threatwell began to refresh as the remote watching the Pinhole unspooled the last eight hours of captured data. Oc Chac was working his checklist in a low fast voice, ensuring they still had maneuvering drives, nothing had lost pressure or vented during the transition, and all compartments were secure for combat.

  Only Pucatli was frowning, and the tense line of his head drew Susan’s eye like a magnet from her consideration of the survey plot. “Comms?”

  Puzzlement clouded the Chu-i’s face. “Chu-sa, there’s a recorded transmission on one-hundred-ten you need to hear.”

  Koshō tapped her earbug, cycling channel. Immediately, she heard: All Imperial evac capsules, converge on this signal.…

  “An Imperial broadcast! Someone’s alive? How could…”

  We have captured a Khaid vessel and come to take you home. Converge upon this signal with all haste. The familiar voice spoke quickly, concisely. It hummed with adrenaline; its familiar tone was inextricably connected in her mind, in her body, to imminent violence and battle. Susan’s gaze tracked back to the threatwell—but there was nothing to be seen. The gravity-plot around the Pinhole remained quiescent.

  “Mitsuharu?” she said aloud, without meaning to. Oc Chac—who had switched his own earbug to listen in—caught her eye, his head canted in a questioning pose.

  Koshō replied to the unspoken question. “The Khaiden are not alone outside the Pinhole. That is the voice of a Fleet officer well known to me—it seems he is gathering up the fallen. But…” She paused, rewinding the message. “He can only have one ship under his command, and one taken from the enemy at that.” Despite herself, she started to grin in delight.

  Oc Chac shook his head in astonishment. “A tremendous feat, if true. But, Chu-sa, this could easily be a trick—a stratagem of the Khaid to lure us into a trap!”

  “It could.” Koshō straightened her shoulders, trying to quell a fierce and unexpected joy blooming in her heart. “But this officer was recently forced to the beach and the Fates would truly be against us if the Khaid intelligence services were so far-thinking as to capture his voice patterns for use against me. No, fantastic as it sounds I believe that Chu-sa Mitsuharu Hadeishi is—somehow!—beyond the Barrier, that he has captured a Khaid ship, and is using that same vessel to recover our lost evac capsules.”

  The Mayan’s expression became dour. “Sounds brave as the deeds of Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the heroic stories of my people, but doomed, surely. There is a full Khaid fleet at the other end of the Pinhole, Kyo. And against them, one ship will not last long at all.…”

  Susan laughed out loud. “Your twin heroes were fashioned from mortals who excelled at contests to the death, Sho-sa. In this living world, there is no ship commander more likely to achieve the impossible than the man whose voice we’ve just heard.”

  Then her expression darkened, lips drawing tight. “But more likely, the Khaid fleet is no longer waiting outside the Barrier. No—they have likely found a way through as well, and will soon be upon us. Then we will be the lone lion amongst the wolf pack.”

  Koshō turned to the pilot. “Sho-i Holloway, bring us about and prep the coil to punch gradient. We need room to maneuver. Weapons, prep your launchers!”

  ON THE MOULINS

  DOCKED WITHIN THE CHIMALACATL

  A groan escaped Hummingbird’s lips as consciousness returned in fits and starts. He opened his eyes, finding nothing but darkness. He tested the movement of his arms and legs, and found they were tightly bound. Shifting his head from side to side, the old Náhuatl determined that something—a rubbery plastic—had been stretched over his eyes. He was not gagged, which indicated to the nauallis that there was no one within shouting distance. In any case, he did not like to make noise when he could not see who might be listening.

  On my own, am I? Hummingbird shifted his shoulders, feeling walls on either side. A closet perhaps? But they were in a hurry—I am still wearing my skinsuit.

  The old Náhuatl twisted his head from side to side, testing the limits of his ability to move. Discovering that both knees could reach his chin, he managed to roll forward gently and get both feet beneath him. Then, Hummingbird stood up slowly and found the roof of the confined space less than a meter above his resting position. A bit cramped, but then I am not the largest of men.

  He twisted one shoulder around to bring the sealing strip of the skinsuit within range of his lips and then spent a good fifteen minutes trying to catch the recessed plastic tab in his teeth. Finally, after relaxing all of the muscles in his neck, back, and arms individually, he was able to do so. When the tab popped free, the skinsuit puddled to the ground in a pool of gelatinlike oil, leaving only the neckring. With a two-millimeter clearance between his bonds and skin, the nauallis was able to shimmy free in another twenty minutes of hot, sweaty work in the closet.

  As he worked, he felt a slow, steady sense of outrage building in his mind. A pity they couldn’t accept me as a fellow brother of the Order! Srá Osá will be most displeased by their shortsightedness. Protecting humanity from itself requires broader thinking.

  Pulling the skinsuit back on was also a bit of work, but now he was fully awake and feeling quite limber. The compartment door was locked, but liquefying the suit had also deposited a number of tools from the gel matrix on the floor. He found them by feel, sorted them with deft fingers and then cut open the locking mechanism with a tiny plasma torch no longer than his little finger. Then he duck-walked out into one of the crew cabins and—thankfully—stood up.

  As Hummingbird did so, the dissonance of his thought patterns concerning the crew of the Moulins finally caught his attention. An initial sensation of puzzlement was swiftly replaced by shock. I’ve been “pushed,” he realize
d. That “Old One” is stronger than I suspected. Disgusted, he spat on the floor of the empty room. I’ve made a deadly mistake in helping an Order ship come here. They are after the same prize as the Prince. Christ the Guardian curse them down through all nine hells!

  Fifteen minutes later having recovered his clothing and z-suit, he padded onto the mess area and found the marines had been taken away. Worried, the old nauallis moved carefully through the rest of the little ship. Finally, he found the Imperials laid out on the floor of a cargo area above Engineering, trapped in their dead armor. Hummingbird squatted next to the squad leader with a pleasant smile. Something to salvage. We are all “friends” here … the Order hasn’t broken fully with the Empire yet. The marine glared back at him, sullen-eyed and gagged.

  “Go-cho Pequah,” the old Crow greeted him amiably, running practiced fingers down the desealer strip at the marine’s shoulder. The wrecked armor sighed; tension released from the gelcore, and it fell away in a limp pool of black oil and plexisteel laminate. The Iroquois flexed his fingers, toes, and then rolled up—clad only in his service skinsuit, his body stiff as lightning with restrained fury. The other four marines made angry, muttering sounds behind their gags.

  “We’ve all been played dirty,” Hummingbird commented, peeling a flattened sleepytime capsule from Pequah’s neck. “And I appreciate your natural desire to eviscerate someone, but your first concern must be the Prince’s safety.”

  Released, all five marines nodded slowly, grudgingly, as they flexed oxygen-deprived limbs. For a long moment the nauallis met their eyes in turn, then nodded, satisfied. “Leave the Europeans to me. The Prince has a tracker in his suit. Follow the repeaters until you find him and make sure he gets back here in one piece.”

  Leaving the marines to scavenge for weapons and tools, Hummingbird slipped out into the dim, chaotic vastness of the landing bay. Packing foam lay scattered at the base of the landing cradle. He grimaced, seeing that the Order crewmen had brought, and assembled, a grav sled. Prepared, were they?

  He ducked back inside the ship and returned moments later with a single-rider grav-ski. The device unfolded in swift, programmed motions. A bit of a smile shone in the old man’s face, remembering long summers wasted skidding around the alleys and avenues of Coyoacán with his classmates, a tight noisy pack of boys. Then the sense of fleeting time gripped him. He hopped on and grasped the controls.

  “Go now.” He sped away with the wide flare of the running lights searching the enormous corridor ahead.

  THE KADER

  IN THE PINHOLE

  Hadeishi frowned, his jaw clenched tight as Cajeme’s voice burred in his earbug. Capsule lock is completely jammed—we’re having trouble cutting through without frying the nitto-hei inside—and there are four more capsules outside we can’t bring onboard until we’ve got these men out.

  The Nisei officer’s eyes darted to the nav plot, which still showed the Tlemitl between them and the Khaid fleet—or what of the enemy they could see with their sensors greatly obscured by the Barrier, the radiation clouds from discharged weapons, and the sensor shadow of the broken dreadnaught. From his vantage, several Khaid destroyers were hanging off at a distance, but the rest of the enemy had disappeared.

  “Thai-i, do we have a remote we can run out to the edge of the wreck?”

  Tocoztic shook his head in disgust. The Arawak’s beard was starting to grow in, which made him look particularly disreputable. “Nothing, kyo. We’ve got nothing useful aboard. I’d use an evac pod, but their maneuvering jets are exhausted once we get them into cargo one…” He gestured angrily at the plot. “Something is going on out there—I can pick up gravity-wave changes and some partial drive emission signatures—but we can’t see anything directly.”

  Mitsuharu’s expression darkened further, considering the movements of the enemy. Out of sight is not out of my mind … that battle-cruiser’s drive emissions could easily be visible to these new-model battleships of theirs. This Spear does not carry the most advanced electronics quills can buy. Not like the … wait a moment.

  “What about the Tlemitl? Are there any sensor booms or subsystems we can connect to and use?”

  “The—” Tocoztic stopped himself, initial disbelief replaced by curiosity. “I don’t know, Chu-sa, but she hasn’t lost all power to systems—just her mains. One moment…”

  Hadeishi swiveled his shockchair, feeling the carapace creak under him. All of the Command stations were now filled with crewmen from the pods they’d recovered initially. Cajeme and his engineers downdeck were busily shuffling off the newly recovered ratings and officers, which looked to swell the Kader’s complement by another eighty or ninety bodies. Most of those recovered, however, had been injured to greater or lesser degree.

  Now for the second act, he thought, gaze settling on Sho-i Lovelace at the Comm’s station, despite being—perhaps—the junior-most tech aboard. The ensign had tucked two spare console styli into her hair, which was bound up in a blond bun behind her head. The young woman’s expression was distant, all attention focused on sorting out the confusion of signals picked up by their sensor booms.

  Hadeishi caught her eye. “Sho-i? Are we still synched with the Khaid battlecast?”

  “No, kyo. I’m getting intermittent bursts of traffic, but we’re out of the loop now.” She offered a crooked smile. “I’m sure they’ve figured out we’re no longer running with the surtu.”

  “Very well. Route what you have to my earbug on sixty-three and—”

  Lovelace started to nod in acknowledgment, then became quite still. “Wait one. Wait one.”

  She stared at her console, gently adjusting the signal filtering, before scowling. “We’re picking up a rebroadcast, kyo. It’s the Khaid ’cast channel, but not from our immediate area. Routing to sixty-three.”

  A babble of excited Khadesh flooded Mitsuharu’s hearing. The translator kicked in, but the hunt-lords were yowling so quickly, and overlapping one another, that the software produced only a garbled mess on the secondary channel.

  “Fix a vector, Sho-i!” he ordered, barely able to hear himself think. “Are they behind, or ahead?”

  I want that ship! popped out of the howling. She escaped once, not again!

  Hadeishi twisted the earbug around, frustrated. That sounds like the one named Sylahdeposu—he’s quick off the mark, but who does he have in his sights? Has another Imperial combatant dropped into the area, or …

  “Chu-sa Hadeishi!” Inudo had turned in his seat. The pilot had a finger to his earbug, his voice loud over the chatter on the Kader’s crowded bridge. “I think he means the Naniwa. Comp says she is the one that survived the ambush and ducked into the Pinhole—a squadron of the Khaid must have slipped past us, following their drive track.”

  Mitsuharu blinked and everything seemed to slow. The Naniwa? The missing battle-cruiser is—

  “How did they get through?” Tocoztic demanded of Inudo. “How can they track her—we can barely see her signature in this mess!”

  “Do we have comm to the Naniwa?” Hadeishi’s expression made Lovelace stiffen in her seat.

  “No, Chu-sa! We’re just picking up fragments of battlecast from a relay the Khaid dropped behind them. I’m getting five or six different emitter tags—one per ship probably.” The Sho-i swallowed nervously. “She won’t last long if she’s alone.”

  “The Naniwa will fight to the last missile, the last gun…” Mitsuharu viciously suppressed an urge to order Inudo to take them to maximum acceleration and to the Eight Hot Narakas with the rest of the evacuation capsules. Despite this, his voice was a harsh growl which made every man and woman in Command straighten up in alarm. “Chu-i, I want to see a ticker on the plot telling me how long the engineers have to get those capsules inboard. Tocoztic-tzin, get your crews to their guns, get me status on anything we have left to throw. Pilot—lock down that drive plume signature and stand by for battle acceleration.”

  The howling and yammering of the surtu pounded
in his ear, though Hadeishi felt their bloodlust only as a ticking sense of time falling away into darkness. He eyed the plot—still no sign of the enemy moving against them—but now he was certain at least one of the surtu was loitering in the Tlemitl’s sensor shadow, waiting for them to break cover.

  “Comms. Broadcast on the last frequency we had for the Wilful. Say only, “We are visiting Osaka.” Do not repeat the message.”

  Lovelace stared back at him, pale brow furrowed as she resolved the reference, her stylus poised over the v-pane. “Do you think Captain De Molay will hear?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “A little boat like hers—what could she—?”

  “Much depends upon the purity of one’s intent, Sho-i. Send the message.”

  AMONG THE FALLEN

  THREE LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE PINHOLE

  In quick succession, a handful of widely spaced icons popped up enemy-red in the Naniwa’s threatwell. The gravity spike of the Khaid ships dropping from transluminal reached the Imperial ship only instants after they emerged into realspace. Koshō was watching, elbow on the armrest of her shockchair, eyes hooded. Command was fully staffed, everyone having gotten at least a round of the showers and an hour off duty.

  “Confirming five transits,” Konev announced, the icons beginning to annotate with glyphs indicating expected speed, throw-weight, and countermeasures. “All cruisers or smaller—Mishrak and Aslan-class—acceleration and emissions are within expected ranges.”

  “Undamaged.” Oc Chac grimaced, tapping through a series of v-panes showing the wreckage being cleared from the battle-cruiser’s downship compartments. “Are they fresh, Chu-sa?”