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 bokuto, 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. Kosho 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.
Kosho 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, Kosho 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 scramb
led 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.”
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. Kosho 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 Kosho 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.”
Kosho 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.”
Then she smiled tightly at Helsdon, who had looked up from his console for a moment.
Blanching, he set himself to work again.
“ Kyo?” Pucatli looked up from the Comms console, where he was sharing space with the duty officer. “We’ve synched a channel to the remote at the Pinhole. You should see this…”
Susan tapped up the feed on her own console and pursed her lips, whistling in surprise. The relay telemetry showed three ships erupting from the aperture, engaged in a long-distance missile duel. All three of them popped up on the display with the familiar collection of Khaid glyphs. The pursued-a light cruiser tagged “ Kader ” by shipnet from the ’cast traffic they’d captured during the initial fighting-was taking a beating, shedding a coiling cloud of debris and weaving drunkenly. In comparison, the two pursuers seemed sleek and fast, shrugging aside any counter-fire with contemptuous ease.
“A clan dispute, kyo? Did one of the ship commanders try a coup?” Oc Chac peered at her display.
“No.” Susan’s hand clenched on the armrest beside the shockchair. He tried to reach me.
“No,” she continued. “This must be the Khaid ship captured by Chu-sa Hadeishi. He found himself in the same predicament as we did-and passed through the Pinhole as well.”
“To no avail, Chu-sa.” The Mayan shook his head sadly. “See, they’ve lost that last drive-they’re ballistic now. If they don’t lose containment, the Khaid will finish them off with a single shipkiller.”
Kosho nodded, feeling sick. The Kader ’s maneuvering drives had sputtered out, leaving the cruiser a hulk coasting into the void. A cloud of tiny pinpoints popped, spilling away from the dying ship.
He’s ejected pods, she thought, feeling an enormous distance open in her heart. Reactors are off-line. She’s just scrap metal now, falling into infinity. Not even worth The two Khaid destroyers cut their drives as well, and on the plot, the paths of the three vessels began to converge.
“Why are-” Pucatli fell silent, seeing that Oc Chac was nodding to himself.
The Mayan scratched at a tiny fringe of beard he’d started to accumulate. “The coil on that ship might still be intact, Thai-i, and her reactors are still working-even if they’ve had to shut them down. Some quick work by the engineers on those two Mishrak -class boats might salvage the whole ship. No reason to waste a shipkiller and a working starship.”
Oc Chac looked to Kosho, a speculative expression on his face. “And the captains of those two destroyers haven’t read Chu-sa Hadeishi’s service jacket, have they?”
“No.” Susan sat up, feeling an enormous, crushing weight begin to dissipate. “They have no idea the evacuation pods are empty. No idea at all.”
Then she scowled forbiddingly at the Sho-sa and the rest of the crew. “Back to work! We need our drives back on line, missile racks refreshed, guns working!” She clapped her hands sharply, making a fierce explosive sound that made everyone in Secondary jump in alarm. “ Banzai! ”
The Pylon of Thought
Burning shapes impressed themselves upon Gretchen’s perception, even with her eyes squeezed tightly closed, even without the power of the bronzed tablet flowing through her nervous system. A shining rainbow streak coiled around the Thread tethered at the center of the shaft. The low consoles and the floor itself were filled with quiescent corkscrewlike patterns of brass and silver. Far above, the roof of the enormous room was flowing with filmy curlicues drawn in white, rose, and violet. Dimly, she felt these were the sleeping patterns of control systems, comp nodes, and other undecipherable systems.
In her ghost-sight, the phantasmal bodies of uniformed Hjogadim congealed from the air, busy at the control consoles on either side of the platform. There were other beings with them-slighter of form, indigo-blue-pelted, with thin, ancient-seeming faces and depthless eyes. These creatures stood apart from the Hjo operators though they were intensely focused on the work underway.
Are those the Vay’en themselves? she wondered for an instant, before something else climbed onto the platform. The powerfully built physicality of the Hjogadim was barely visible as a vaporous skeleton. The organic frame was obscured by the scintillating golden glare of something coiled at the top of the inhuman spine.
A serpent of fire, was the first image springing to mind. Naga-kanya, the bringer of wisdom. Where are the five heads?
The crack of assault rifles and the darting transparencies of the Prince’s marines were ephemeral to her. The shapes of the ancient past were far, far clearer. She rolled to her knees, taking in the valley-sized chamber below in one sweeping glance. Hundreds of thousands of ancient ghosts thronged the rows of platforms. Countless golden-haloed Hjogadim lay within the crystalline cradles, while swarms of slightly built blue-black creatures tended to the machines. Platoons of armored Hjo-massive in powered red-and-black battle armor-stood ready at the intersections between the triangular sectors. The hiss of her suit atmosphere esc
aping failed to register upon Anderssen’s conscious mind. Despite the cold pricking her chest as her clothing turned brittle in the near-zero atmosphere, Gretchen crawled unhindered to the edge of the shaft at the center of the pylon.
Far below, the singularity swelled in her sight: a pulsating void streaked with fire as a constant, thin stream of matter plunged down to annihilation. The Thread descended beyond the limit of her sight, a cable of nine atoms stretched enormously thin, forming an unbreakable path into the abyss. The wavering mercury-sheen of some kind of force field blocked the full glare of annihilation from blinding her. Is this their heaven? They are below, somewhere between here and the event horizon. Millions of them, basking in the crucible of creation-are they healing? Giving birth to a whole new generation? Sleeping until it is time to wake again? Is this a natural cycle? A serpent’s egg warmed by the cascade of dying mass from three carefully-balanced suns?
The stuttering roar of an assault rifle firing wildly only meters away broke her concentration. Gretchen scrambled back into the shelter of a console, gasping as bones ground raw in her chest and side. A Fleet marine staggered across her field of view, blood hissing to vapor from rents in his armor. Across the gaping maw of the shaft, she saw Prince Xochitl and Sahane crouched behind another console. The Prince’s attention was on his attackers, his visage grim, teeth bared in a snarl of defiance. As she watched, he ejected an ammunition spool from his rifle and slammed in a fresh one. The Hjogadim, its long snout wrinkled up in fear, stared wide-eyed across at Gretchen. Is he capable of pleading for mercy?
A priest, she remembered. Like those toiling on the field of abandoned husks below. But that isn’t right… a technician. A medical technician?
Xochitl nosed his rifle around the corner of the console and squeezed off a burst of flechettes in the direction of the stair.
But the cubbyholes in the halls were all empty, Anderssen thought, her mind drawn inexorably back to the puzzle at hand. Wheezing, she lay back and fumbled quickseal from a thigh pocket. Even in her elevated state, she could now feel bitter cold biting at her heart. Where did all the Hjo bodies… oh, the garbage disposal port. Outside, then, and into the maw of the black hole. Discarded servants.
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