Land of the Dead ittotss-3

by Thomas Harlan

The Yaqui’s leathery face remained impassive as he waited, but his nut brown eyes were sparkling. “The Chu-sa relates an excellent joke, kyo. Knowing how difficult it is to drop things in z-g.”

  “Eight minutes.” The Thai-i ’s voice was growing tenser by the second.

  “All teams, sound off by section,” Mitsuharu ordered as Cajeme finished checking the Chu-sa ’s armor. Team Two was also six men-two engineer’s mates and the rest of the blasting plastic, along with a portable monofilament saw from the Wilful ’s shop and a plasma cutter carried by two more able-bodied men-then another two marines with salvaged Khaid grenade launchers. Team Three was next-eighteen men in the heaviest armor and shipguns, either Fleet or Khaid, they could scrape together-and then Team Four, the cleanup crew, which comprised the remaining twenty-five. These men were armed, in some cases with no more than their personal sidearms.

  “Six minutes, kyo. Target is holding steady course.”

  Hadeishi nodded to Cajeme and the junior comm officer. “Load up.”

  Cajeme and his cutters swung up into the first tray on the cargo gantry. Hadeishi and the comm officer followed, spacing themselves equidistant across the second tray, with the marine to her left.

  I’ll miss our little talks, De Molay’s voice came in his earbug, when you’ve had your guts pulverized on the side of that ship.

  Mitsuharu clicked his teeth, switching channels. “The cruiser’s still off-vector?”

  By a point and a half. The freighter captain’s voice was very dry. You’ll only have three minutes and you won’t be coming in at a right angle.

  “As long as our velocities match, we’ll be fine.” Hadeishi felt his blood quicken, his vision sharpen, everything begin to grow preternaturally clear. “Just keep a steady hand on the tiller, Sencho .”

  “Five minutes.” Tocoztic’s voice had settled, becoming hard and flat. “We’re in their wake. Powering up the gantries.”

  A set of rails embedded in the roof and floor of the cargo bay rattled to life, warning lights blinking and their motors whining. Team One was on the ventral rail, crouching in their successive loading trays-each a large, X-shaped rectangle a few centimeters larger than an Imperial-standard cargo pod. Team Two had already secured themselves to the second tray-and directly “below” them the rest of the teams were swarming into the second rail.

  We’re in the drive-plume full-on, De Molay reported, though Mitsuharu could already hear a roar of background static on the Khaid radio as the exhaust of the Khaiden ship’s antimatter drive washed over the Wilful ’s hull. Three minutes and we’re popping out like an appleseed. Primary hull temperature is soaring and we’re getting radiation damage to the secondary.

  “All teams, secure yourselves!” Hadeishi craned his neck, eyeballing everyone. He secured his tether to Cajeme, who was already linked to the others. “Three minutes, thirty seconds to the bay doors, four minutes to contact!”

  Time dragged as Mitsuharu breathed slowly and steadily through each nostril in succession, steadying his heartbeat. The radio circuit was filled with tiny noises-men praying under their breath, the rasp of someone with smoke-damaged lungs, the tic-tic-tic of someone nervously clicking their teeth together.

  ***

  Musashi’s sandals slid on black sand, the whole slope under his feet breaking free and cascading down towards the beach. Behind him, the jagged crown of Suribachiyama loomed up against a darkening sky, filled with the outriders of the taifun blowing up out of the Western Ocean. This time the trusty bokuto had shattered on whale-bone armor, leaving him with nothing. He tossed the splintered rattan away, keeping his balance with a shift of his hips. The beach itself was hard and flat, the sand gleaming wet as the tide ran out. Heke and his retinue were waiting, weapons drawn, some of the younger men leveling muskets at the ronin.

  “ Nowhere to run, Pakeha,” the chieftain shouted, his tattooed face twisting with anger. “Put down your sticks and take up a man’s blade!”

  One of the other Maori overhanded a bolo at Musashi, which he caught from the air with a twisting motion. The long, flat steel blade felt tremendously heavy in his hands-far heavier than any katana. Then Heke and his men came on at a run, their war-cries booming against the counterpoint of the surf.

  ***

  “One minute, thirty seconds, Chu-sa.” Tocoztic announced, his voice barely a whisper. “Maneuvering burn-now!”

  The ship quivered, the motion magnified by the cargo-rails, and Hadeishi felt the engines tick up to barely a g of acceleration. The momentary burst, he hoped, would be obscured by the Khaid ship’s own engine flare. The immediate roar of static faded slightly as the little freighter slipped out of the drive plume.

  “Cycling bay doors,” the Thai-i announced. Warning lights along the sides of the fifteen-meter-wide cargo doors flared to life as the motors kicked in. An audible alarm blared in their ears. “Vector match in-wait one, wait one.”

  Hadeishi stiffened, suddenly wild to see the navigation plot and the holocast. The bay doors rolled aside, revealing the glare of the Khaid ship’s drive plume falling away above them.

  She’s lit off her own maneuvering burn, De Molay snapped, her voice tight. She’s preparing to roll aspect and change direction. But we don’t know which way “He’s turning a dog-leg, doubling back on his trail.” Mitsuharu’s blood was singing. “This one alternates in thirds-he’s going to swing to port, Sencho, to port. Match course and give me thirty percent power for seventeen seconds, then snap the gantries and we’ll take it from there.”

  You are mad.

  “Do it!” Hadeishi reached down and unsnapped his tether from the cargo tray. “All teams! Release your tethers. The Khaid ship is rolling aspect and we need to match v on her. No step-through, repeat no step-through. We’re going to make contact in free flight.”

  There was a flurry of activity, but the Nisei officer had already turned to watch the bay doors thud back into the hull. A vast expanse of boiling dust and hidden, gleaming stars opened before him, swallowing all sight and vision. The beauty of the kuub -the intricate traceries of debris plumes and the shining coronas of distant stars-poured in, filling the cargo bay with a hot jeweled light.

  The appearance of the black shape of the Khaid ship was an abrupt jolt as the Wilful went into a hard burn herself. It loomed up suddenly, still in the middle of its own maneuver, the drive-plume blazing like a rising sun off to starboard as the massive ship turned inside their own course.

  “Velocities match!” Tocoztic and De Molay’s voices overlapped. “Gantries away!”

  Rail one slammed forward, safety interlocks disengaged, and Mitsuharu and his two crewmen were suddenly blown out of the side of the freighter as the tray slammed into the end of the rail and flipped down and out of the way. The successive trays on the gantry banged away, one every three seconds. Clouds of men hurtled across the void between the two ships, suddenly enveloped in a coruscating radiance.

  The Khaid light cruiser continued her burn, the hull swelling before them like a basalt cliff, a jagged landscape of thermocouple fins, airlocks, gun emplacements… Hadeishi’s eye grasped her outline in a flash and exulted. His intuition had been right, the drive signature confirmed.

  “She’s an old Spear -class cruiser,” he barked on both channels, hands light on his suit propellant controls. “Cargo locks are dorsal mount, to our right and high. All hands, maneuver on my mark. Mark!”

  Mitsuharu angled to the right, jets hissing, and the black wall came rushing on. Even without a suit-comp to feed him intercept times and distances, his eye was keen enough to gauge the right moment.

  “Team one, braking!” He blew the last of his propellant, but even this was not enough to avoid slamming hard into the shipskin of the old Spear. The junior comm officer hit next, then the marine. Off to their left, Cajeme and his team had done a better job, touching down at almost zero delta. “Team One is down, repeat Team One is down.”

  Hadeishi staggered up, letting his boots adhere to the shipski
n. The marine was cursing, his right arm injured, and the comm officer was just clinging in panic to the hull with both hands and feet.

  “Up you get, Sho-i,” Mitsuharu growled, seizing her by the shoulder. The ensign yelped but got her feet beneath her. “ Joto-hei, are you mobile? We’ve thirty seconds to get inside.”

  The marine nodded, his face parchment-pale behind his helmet visor. “Good to go, kyo! ”

  The hull shivered under Hadeishi’s feet and he moved left, a lanyard snapped to the Sho-i ’s belt, another cast to the marine. Cajeme had already scuttled towards them, sparing only seconds for himself before the demo plastic he’d slapped down around the periphery of a maintenance hatch offset from the set of massive cargo doors blew-a hard white flash stabbing at their eyes, sending everyone’s visor polarized-and the shipskin peeled away from the edges of the portal. A pair of remote-controlled antipersonnel guns had also taken the brunt of the explosion, and their short, stubby barrels were now pointed off at the distant stars.

  “Team One, go!” Mitsuharu was at the side of the two crewmen with the magnetic rams as they slammed them into place at the edge of the hatchway, where the locking bolts were now exposed. Each ram consisted of a half-circle of molybdenum-steel wrapped around the magnet array and a fusion-pumped capacitor. The crewmen snapped the adhesion arm into place, stamped down on the locking mechanism to fix the rams to the shipskin and then-bracing themselves-triggered the two devices on a count of “And one!”

  Hadeishi’s radio squealed, flooded with radiation, and the bolts tore free. Chunks of metal spalled away, spiraling off into the void. The crewmen cranked back the rams, peeling away the hatch.

  “Team Two, go!” The engineers’ mates with the blasting plastic swarmed into the hole, their tethers taut in the hands of the men behind them. Mitsuharu spared a glance for the comm officer, seeing she still had hold of her comp and the data-crystals. The marine was right at her side, shipgun at the ready, his face a blur of sweat. The two engineers popped back out of the hatch, shouting “Clear!”

  A jet of plasma erupted from the hatchway, boiling the shattered edges and licking out thirty or forty meters into the jewel-hot sky.

  You’ve got company coming, De Molay suddenly announced in his earbug. We’re getting a storm of chatter on that circuit you pirated.

  “Team Three, go!” Mitsuharu rotated in a quick circle, picking out the rest of his men, spread out across the hull. “Cargo doors first, then punch through to the shipcore.” He clapped a hand on the Sho-i ’s shoulder. “We need to get Ensign Lovelace as far into the hull as we can!”

  Then he toggled the throatmike channel. “Get out of here, Sencho; they can’t miss seeing you now.”

  We’ll hold on just a little longer. I have an idea, but you’ve got to get clear of the outer hull.

  Hadeishi’s heart skipped, catching a wild tone in the freighter captain’s voice. “You have to leave my ship in one piece, too, Sencho .”

  De Molay laughed and at this short distance, he could see the black outline of the Wilful rotate on her maneuvering jets, swinging the main drives ’round to face him. Marines were dropping through the hatch as fast as they could, but Mitsuharu was suddenly certain they wouldn’t all get through before De Molay lit off her drives.

  “One hundred eighty-six seconds to get them all inside,” squeaked a tiny voice at close range. Hadeishi looked down, seeing Lovelace crouched on the hull, her satchel clutched to her chest and one hand gripping a twisted piece of metal. Her eyes were huge and he suddenly realized she was susceptible to vertigo. “Three seconds for a marine, five seconds for a crewman.”

  “You’re next,” he barked, seizing her by the lanyard loop on her belt and handing her off to the last of the Team Three marines ducking into the hole. “Get her core-ward, Gunso! There’s an engineering console at the junction of the fourth spaceframe and compartment ninety-six on this class-she needs to be there, and working, in eleven minutes!”

  Get inside, Chu-sa; I’ve got gun emplacements in motion up here.

  “My men are still outside, Sencho, keep your rotation and head back down the drive-wake. They’ll punch you full of holes other-”

  The Wilful suddenly rippled from one end to the other as a wave of burning pinpoints and wild color swept across her. Mitsuharu gaped, watching in stunned surprise as the freighter pulled the raiment of heaven over her head and disappeared from visual sight. “Goddess of the dawn,” he breathed, “I’ve been sold a lame horse!”

  ***

  Team Four was inside the hatch in less than one hundred and sixty seconds, though the time lag dragged into an eternity for the Chu-sa as he crouched at the edge of the hatchway, urging them on. As far as he could tell, the Wilful had entirely vanished. He couldn’t see maneuvering jet flare, star-occlusion, anything to tell where she was. Despite this, he guessed De Molay was waiting it out, hiding in plain sight, so when the last of his men had dropped inside the hull, Mitsuharu climbed down himself, squirting “twenty-four seconds” on his earbug before the shipskin cut off the transmission.

  The maintenance hatch airlock was a wreck, all plasma-burns and torn metal. The inner airlock was no better, and as soon as Hadeishi was inside the hull proper, his radio burst alive with the combat-chatter of men running, fighting, being killed, the roar of gunfire and the distant unmistakable whine of a monofilament saw cutting into hexacarbon. The interior of the ship seemed mostly unchanged, at least on this deck, though the old Imperial signage had been torn down and replaced, or pasted over, with Khadesh equivalents.

  The marine Gunso commanding Team Three was waiting as Hadeishi kicked through a secondary interior door, just past the corridors servicing the cargo bay. “Shut this hatch,” the Chu-sa snapped. “We’ve artillery incoming.”

  A pair of Team Four kashikan-hei slammed the portal closed, rotating the manual locking mechanism. “Report, sergeant.”

  The marine grinned, his faceplate scored with black streaks. “ Kyo , this compartment’s secure and we’ve punched through to the shipcore along the immediate axis. Cargo elevators are knocked out, as is the tube car system. There’s atmosphere in most compartments, but not all. We blew out a set of blast doors at frame three and I’ve got the combat team pushing downdeck towards frame four-”

  At that moment, the ship groaned and everything shuddered. The overheads flickered, shading from a Khaid-friendly bright white to a more normal yellow tone, then popped back. The alarms, which had been blaring since Mitsuharu had entered the primary hull, shifted tone-now they squealed like a pierced bladderfish.

  “We’re hit!” The Gunso stared at the ceiling. “Sounded like a bomb-pod going off at short range.”

  Hadeishi shook his head, starting to grin ferally. “The freighter’s lit off her maneuver drives. I doubt she’ll punch through the shipskin, but we need to abandon this corridor. Move everyone downdeck towards the engineering ring. That’s where we’ll settle this.”

  Then he-and the others-were thrown violently to one side as the light cruiser went into some violent evolution and the g-decking on their whole ring fluctuated. Hadeishi hit the wall hard, feeling chitin splinter, and then bounced back as the decking failed entirely. He tucked in tight, getting his feet under before hitting the far wall. The marine had done the same. One of the kashikan-hei was floating limp, his faceplate filled with crimson bubbles.

  “Move!” Mitsuharu pulled himself along the guiderail set into the wall, heading downdeck as fast as he could. The Gunso followed with the other kashikan-hei, the two men dragging a spool of comm-wire and a repeater with them. The hammering roar of shipguns swelled in on the radio feed, and from the sound of his team commanders shouting, the Chu-sa guessed the Khaid on board were counterattacking along the shipcore.

  ***

  Fifteen minutes later, Hadeishi swung himself through a jagged hole hacked from a sidewall and into the engineering station at frame four. The room, controlling the cruiser’s dorsal power mains and shipskin sensor node
s, was tucked in behind a thermocouple relay and the motors for a pair of the big cargo elevators. Dead Khaid were webbed to one of the walls, and everything was scorched by plasma-cutter backwash.

  Lovelace had found the main console, but she was engaged in a furious shouting match with one of the engineers when Mitsuharu reached her.

  “ Kyo,” the Kikan-shi pleaded, turning towards him, “she’s going to get us all killed-she wants to-”

  Hadeishi stopped the engineer with a cold glance. His face was rigid when he turned to the comm officer. “We’re four minutes behind schedule and you’ve already been here at least that long. What’s wrong?”

  “This idiot,” Lovelace spat, wrenching her field comp from the Kikan-shi ’s hands. “Is trying to convince me we can crack the authorization codes for the shipnet interface by guessing them with something he’s hacked together on his hand-comp.”

  “We don’t have time. Give me that cutter.” Hadeishi hooked one boot under the console, took the proffered plasma cutter-a small one, not the big industrial version they’d used on the wall-and sliced open the paneling directly under the display panel. “There are thirty-six billion combinations allowed in the authorization interface of a Spear -class cruiser, Engineer. There’s a lockout after fifteen tries in the base software-and we don’t have time to work around that.” He shoved aside a handful of hardwired data threads, and found-by feel-a comm node nestled behind them in the kind of socket that Defense Consortium salesmen liked to say was “easy to service, but hard to dislodge accidentally.”

  “ Sho-i, you ready up there?” Mitsuharu plucked a multitool from his belt and wiggled half his shoulder into the panel.

  “Ready, Chu-sa.” Lovelace’s voice was tight and trembling on the edge of open panic. “Are you really sure-”

  “It worked before,” Mitsuharu said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible. At the academy, on a different class of training cruiser-but from the same manufacturing yard and design shop-if memory serves. “Shorting the shipnet relay for this compartment-now.” He jammed the tool’s screwdriver into the node’s service socket and twisted to the right, grinding his wrist against the bundle of data threads. There was a sharp, bright flash and he felt his glove spark. “Done!”