Land of the Dead

by Thomas Harlan

  Piercing the center of the pylon was a six-meter-wide shaft, a nine-pointed star in cross-section which plunged down into darkness. Poised directly above this unfathomable hole was a second pyramidal shape, apex pointing down from the unseen ceiling. At the junction between these mirror-like pyramids, the platform measured at least thirty meters on each side. The surface was composed of a metallic alloy bearing the endlessly repeating design of two nested, equilateral triangles, while each side was circumscribed by three raised, angular consoles. Their upper surfaces were glassy-smooth, though Xochitl’s exo was beginning to annotate the featureless expanse with faint glyphs indicating minute imperfections of the surface.

  At much the same time, his z-suit environmental sensors began to register that the tremendously cold air in the chamber had warmed a degree, and the atmospheric mixture, which had been almost entirely nitrogen was now beginning to percolate with oxygen.

  Perhaps there … The Prince’s thought broke off as the others clambered up to the last of the steps and stopped to goggle in wonderment as he had done.

  * * *

  Gretchen hardly noticed the Prince. Her consciousness was suffused with data pouring into her perception from all sides. Here, everything was thick with meaning. Even node 333 seemed barely able to keep up with the flood of information. Something in the flow—so many glyphs and icons and ghost-images were popping up around her she could barely process the visual stimuli—caught at her. This isn’t right—there’s something broken somewhere—no, not broken, a translation matrix is throwing errors.

  “How … how does this all work?” Xochitl’s voice came as if from a great distance.

  Gretchen struggled to focus on the man standing in front of her. When she could separate out the visual channel, the Prince was sweating behind his faceplate. Gretchen knew beyond doubt that his “mask” was gabbling unknown languages into his mind and troubling his vision with intermittent flashes of undecipherable symbols. She felt pummeled by the same forces. Xochitl reached out, seized Gretchen’s suit-collar, and dragged her close. “Where is … where is the command interface?”

  Anderssen felt immortal, weightless, and unassailable. Xochitl’s problems did not concern her—or were so remote to her experience he was negligible in any calculation involving her attention. “Didn’t they tell you what it looked like?” Part of her regarded him coolly. “When they sent you out here? No diagrams, no pictures of your goal?”

  “No! Yes—a theory—just to find a control interface.” Xochitl blinked, looking away. He batted jerkily at the air between them. “Is this hot light in my mind—or is it—”

  “It is she,” Sahâne accused in a wheezy growl as he finally reached the top of the long stair. The marines, growing more and more nervous for the Prince’s safety, twitched toward the Hjogadim. The alien looked worse, as the inside of his helmet was smeared with bruised-plum-colored vomit. “It’s been this female all along. She and the queer old ape with the bright eyes. They are the ones that brought us to this terrible place.”

  Gretchen nodded calmly. She hoped no one would see her hands clench into claws. The golden overlay was seeping so quickly through her synapses that the ability to command her body was running thousands of cycles behind her consciousness. These biological interfaces are so slow! “This is so.”

  “I think,” Sahâne said, making a sign of command at the Prince. “That you should kill it right now.”

  Xochitl jerked around with a gasp, combat automatic flying out of his holster, and there was a sharp snap-snap! A cloud of flechettes slammed into Anderssen’s chest, knocking her across the platform to crash into a console near the outer edge of the pylon. She gasped, spat blood from a split lip, and clawed weakly at the smoking wound.

  Seeing that the Prince had taken action, the marines lunged forward to throw themselves between Xochitl and Sahâne. The Hjo coughed out a bitter laugh. “Tell your servants to step away, toy. Tell them to—”

  * * *

  “No,” Xochitl grated out, crashing his exo again. With relief he found his vision abruptly clear of the strange artifacts. The muttering drone in his mind fell quiet. “Those patolli beans only get one throw, and you’ve used up all your luck, you worthless coward.”

  Sahâne blinked in surprise and hastily made another sign of command. The Prince shoved past the marines. “No Hjo-designed exo,” Xochitl said tightly, his automatic sighted on the creature’s faceplate. “No magical control of me. No more wastrel Sahâne, he was lost in some accident in the back of beyond.” The Méxica lord essayed a grim smile. “No one will ever miss you, assistant-under-attaché to the ambassador. Let’s see how long your bio-armor lasts against this—”

  The whine of a grav-sled echoing on his comm brought the Prince up short.

  * * *

  Out of sight and out of mind, Gretchen crawled away, leaking atmosphere in a deadly hiss from her punctured suit, nerveless fingers scrabbling into the ruin of her field jacket to drag out the corroded bronze tablet. The device was now pierced with dozens of pinpoint, smoking holes. The golden glare in her mind had dissolved into confusion with hundreds of voices chattering away. Random images flared across her retinas. Then the memory of a raspy, irritating old voice speaking impeccable Náhuatl forced its way through into her stunned, shocky consciousness: The second enemy of perception is seeing too much. You must learn true focus for the first time in your life.

  Then, those were not my thoughts! All the events I could see! Everything was so clear in the golden light—Anderssen’s hand twitched in horror and the bronze block skittered away across the floor of the platform. Sliding on the smooth metal, the tablet encountered little or no resistance.

  Meters away, the others jerked around as the tablet sailed across the shaft opening and was sliced cleanly in half by an invisible thread running vertically through the open space. Both halves vanished into the depths without a sound.

  “The singularity is down there,” Gretchen gasped out. She rolled over and punched her med-band override. She felt a sharp pinching in her chest and the cool flood of meds rushing into her bloodstream as the little device reacted in confusion, thinking the collapse of the neural overlay represented her own imminent demise. A raging headache from fighting the gold-tinged invader in her consciousness faded with the onslaught of painkillers. “Down at the root of all this … a string tied to a stone cast into a deep dark pool … aaaaah!”

  Anderssen felt her own native sight awaking, pricked by the stabbing pain in her chest. Focus, she commanded and went limp on the platform. Her sightless eyes stared up into the darkness. Focus, she commanded, and her mind fell quiet.

  Distantly she heard one of the marines say, “Someone’s coming up the steps.”

  Another—this one very close by—said, “Her band has redlined.”

  AT THE PINHOLE EXIT

  The Kader limped out of the Barrier passage, coughing clouds of debris and leaking radiation. In Command, Hadeishi watched the plot stonily as the Khaid destroyer Han’zhr nimbly avoided the last of their makeshift mines and closed to gun-range with a flare of her engines.

  Tocoztic coughed hoarsely, his z-suit patched up with quickseal, and stabbed a series of glyphs on his console. “Another contact emerging from the Barrier, Chu-sa.” He squinted at the v-display, which was fluctuating as shipnet nodes crashed and rebooted themselves in quick succession. “Looks like another Mishrak. No ident confirm … I don’t think the ’net is going to hold up through another hit.”

  Mitsuharu nodded, jaw clenched, and surveyed the wrecked bridge. A penetrator had chewed through part of the Command compartment, killing more than half of the men standing watch. Lovelace had been carried away by the corpsmen, but Inudo and the weapons officer were left. “Pilot, can we still maneuver?”

  “Barely anything left, kyo. Adjustment thrusters are wrecked, we only have one drive nacelle in operation and there’s nowhere to go.” The Nisei pilot indicated the navigational scanners with a shaky hand. “The
nearest object here is about three light-years away and our hypercoil is shot to hell.”

  The race is over, Mitsuharu thought bleakly. The Naniwa is nowhere to be found and our sensor suite is reduced to almost nothing … two destroyers are more than a match for this cripple, and there’s nothing stopping that Hayalet from coming through the Barrier after us.

  “Pilot, cut thrust to zero.”

  Then he switched his comm to ship-wide channel, hoping the crews of men struggling to keep them spaceworthy were all within range of a repeater or a shipnet node in operating condition. “All hands, this is Chu-sa Hadeishi. We can see Fuji-san, but there is still one last kilometer to travel. All hands to arms, all hands to battle stations. Form up on your section leaders, check your sidearm loads, and regroup to the Command deck.”

  Mitsuharu paused, checking the v-panes arrayed on his console. Some of the ship’s automatic systems were still in operation. He’d lost touch with Cajeme and the engineering crew on comm, but the ’net v-eyes in cargo one and two showed ranks of evacuation pods lined up and ready. Mentally saluting the little Yaqui, the Nisei officer punched in a launch code, then watched with half-lidded eyes as both cargo bays vented to space. The pods scattered, some of them retaining enough maneuvering fuel to kick off preprogrammed escape vectors.

  Dandelion seeds on the last breeze of autumn.

  Tocoztic had been watching, his display updating with scattered icons. “Capsules away, kyo. They’ll be on the Khaid sensor plot already.”

  I don’t think they’re going to take the bait, Hadeishi thought, feeling his stomach clench. A horrible pain was starting to pierce his heart, stealing the strength from his limbs. Another ship lost … another crew killed.

  On passive sensors, the two Khaid destroyers were unmistakably clear as they closed in on the coasting-cruiser, each properly spaced to overlap point-defense while retaining a clear field of fire for their missile racks and hardpoints. Mitsuharu hoisted the Yilan shipgun from the scabbard at the side of his shockchair and checked the magazine charge. Six hundred rounds, armor-piercing.

  Then he thumbed an override glyph on the console, sending the main reactor into shutdown and cutting all internal power. The dimmed lights flickered and went out. In the sudden darkness, Mitsuharu toggled his suit-comm alive and said: “Stand by to repel boarders.”

  Musashi crouched beneath the battlement of Shimabara Castle, his armor in tatters. A huge ringing sound filled his head, as though an enormous gong had been cloven by a giant. Blood was everywhere, streaking the rough-hewn stones. At the edge of his stunned vision, a gaping section of the wall had been torn away by the impact of a Mongol bombard stone. All of the samurai on the parapet had been cast to the ground as jackstraws. He groped fruitlessly for his bokutō, but the weapon was nowhere to be found. Despite the stunned weakness of his limbs, Musashi rose up, finding a katana still scabbarded in the belt of a dead man. By the time he’d reached the steps leading down into the courtyard below, the first of the Mongol spearmen were swarming over the lower curtain wall. The sight of them sent a shock of vigor through his limbs. Here was an enemy within the length of his blade!

  IN THE DEAD FLEET

  ABOARD THE NANIWA

  Oc Chac, Helsdon, and Konev cursed in unison, levering at the hatchway into Main Command with a magnetic ram. The compartment frame had warped in the last exchange of shipkillers, though their continued survival spoke volumes to the resistance afforded by the hexacomb armor between the primary and secondary hulls. Koshō hung back, one arm tucked around a stanchion, paying only partial attention to the efforts of the bridge crew to force an exit from the ruined compartment. Her earbug was still live, and she could monitor the chatter from Secondary Command, which was in operation. She could have used one of the escape hatches that led to an evac pod, but there was still work to be done, and her ship to fight.

  Chu-i Pucatli was nearly helmet-to-helmet with her, a field comp tucked into his elbow while the Comms officer tried to keep track of everything happening elsewhere on the ship.

  We’ve broken contact, Chu-sa, reported the second watch pilot from Secondary. That last exchange blinded the destroyer and we’ve gone to ground between two of the leviathans.

  “How much clearance do we have?” Susan did not like the thought of getting too close to something that might wake up at any time, though she admitted to herself that beggars cannot be choosers.

  Enough, kyo. But once they start hunting, we’ll have to run for it and drives are at sixty percent.

  Koshō shook her head in displeasure, eyeing Pucatli. “Are you picking up anything from their ’cast traffic?”

  The Comms officer’s lips twisted into a puzzled grimace. “Fragments, kyo—I think something’s happened in-system from us.” The younger officer clipped his z-suit to the stanchion and crossed his legs, pinning the field comp in place as he floated. “Most of our sensors are blocked by the wrecks, but—”

  “What about the remote we dropped at the Pinhole?” Susan folded her arms, glaring at Oc Chac and Helsdon working on the door. Being denied the threatwell or any kind of proper information feed was making her almost violently nervous. The Sho-sa was now cutting into the doorframe with a plasma torch, which was generating a huge cloud of sparks and smoke droplets. “Do we still have a t-relay connection?”

  “Hai, kyo.” Pucatli was working the comp as fast as he could, but no good answers were coming back. “But it’s six light-years from the Chimalacatl—so we’ve nothing on sensor or visual. Gravity plot now … here we go.”

  The Chu-i turned the comp, showing Susan a navigational plot. Multiple tracks arrowed inbound from the Pinhole, showing a line-pattern indicating they’d gone superluminal to leap across the six light-year interval to the immediate region of the Sunflower. One of the traces ended abruptly—and the timestamp on the vector indicated they’d ceased to exist less than fifteen minutes ago.

  “See that, Chu-sa?” Pucatli could not help but grin, teeth white behind his grimy faceplate.

  “That last Hayalet stepped too close to the sun,” Susan stated flatly.

  “Boom-boom, kyo,” the Comms officer observed, rubbing fine particles of ash from his screen.

  Now we know what happened to this fleet, Koshō thought, feeling the weight of the dead pressing against the hull of her ship. Did they try and attack the artifact? No—they weren’t warships. Whoever—whatever—controlled the weapon system turned upon them.

  She turned up the filters on her z-suit against the electrical smoke now obscuring their vision. Anderssen and Hummingbird must have had some way to slip us past before, when we were so close to the artifact. Damn the old man … somehow he knows how to control the weapon.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, in Secondary Command, Susan stretched gingerly and sucked down some water. She’d taken a bad crack on the shoulder while the command team had scrambled downdeck. Most of her ship was seriously damaged, though they’d been lucky enough not to lose the shipcore entirely.

  “The main squadron will be coming back this way, Fujiwara,” she said to the Home Islander sitting at the Pilot’s station. “We need to move closer to the Chimalacatl at every opportunity. The Khaid will fear it now, and we’ll take every advantage the Goddess sends us.”

  Oc Chac looked up from the other end of Secondary. “Chu-sa, won’t we fall prey to the same fate, if we move too close to the device?” His gloved fingers tapped restlessly on the back of his helmet. “That Khaid ship was destroyed well out from the artifact—when we dropped off that freighter we were much closer—” The Sho-sa suddenly stopped, having reached an unpalatable conclusion. “How will we tell what our safe distance is now?”

  Susan looked pointedly at Helsdon. The engineer grimaced, wishing he could clear the taste of ashes from his throat, and immediately fell to work at one of the consoles. “For now,” the Chu-sa said, “we will assume it’s safer near the Sunflower than in the crosshairs of a Khaid missile battery.”

&
nbsp; Oc Chac nodded in agreement, and then pointed wordlessly at the compartment status v-panes showing a wild mixture of red, orange, and yellow on his display. Koshō leaned in, feeling a slow trickle of despair at the state of her fine new ship.

  “Release emergency air to decks thirteen and fifteen. Close down atmosphere to the rest of the compromised compartments.”

  Turning back to the threatwell—what a relief to have some view of the battle, even if the display had substantial arcs of darkness where there was simply no data to be had—Susan tilted her head, puzzled for a moment by the latest positions of the enemy.

  “Chu-sa, they’re regrouping—the destroyers hunting us are shifting vector out of the shoal.” Pucatli sounded wary, and Koshō shared his concern.

  “Assume they are taking stock of the situation, Chu-i. They will need to set some priorities—so keep a close eye on any movements in our direction. See if that remote at the Pinhole can pick up their ’cast traffic.”

  Then she sat, at last, and drank some more water and managed to force down a threesquare. Everyone else remained furiously busy with damage control and trying to get updated inventory and arranging for the wounded and the dead. Susan sat quietly in the commander’s shockchair, watching the ’well update.

  “Can you project their rendezvous point?” Susan asked Fujiwara as the minutes crawled by.

  The pilot shrugged. “No guarantees, kyo. Comp has tagged this one”—he highlighted one of the icons—“as the Kartal—an Aslan-class heavy cruiser—and presumably the Flag for the remains of their squadron. She’s building vector away from the Chimalacatl and away from us. The others might be converging on her, but there’s no guarantee yet.”

  Koshō nodded, considering the dimensional model herself. After a minute, she said: “They may have found the chase too hot to follow—or they may be resolving internal differences of surtu hierarchy. Set course for the Sunflower—but keep us well back from the destruction point of those two Khaid ships.”