"Smith-tzin, find the Imperial Prince Tezozуmoc and keep track of his locator. Just in case the long arm of the gaijin has reached out here to do him mischief."
Sweat ran freely from Senior Engineer Isoroku's bald head as he knelt on the floor of the officer's dining room, a metal saw howling in his hand. Showers of red sparks burst around him as he cut the last of the damaged panels free from the underfloor supports. The saw whined back to silence and the engineer shuffled back on his knee-pads. "Done," he coughed, and then cleared his throat of hexacarbon dust with a long swallow from his water bottle. "Take it away."
Two Marines privates – seconded to Engineering for the duration of repairs – ducked in and hefted the heavy panel. Grunting, they duck-walked out of the mess and stacked the partially melted chunk of metal on a grav-lifter in the corridor outside. Isoroku spat to clear his mouth and then thumbed the cutting blade on his saw over to a finishing surface.
Deftly, he ran the blade over the jagged edges, burring them down to a smooth bevel. The elderly Nisei abhorred sloppy work, even in locations – like the sub-floor supports – where no one would see his care and attention. This particular project was very relaxing too – a far cry from trying to clear and seal compartments shattered by battle damage, while alert horns blared in your ear and Khaid cluster bombs shook the ship like a rat in a Kochi terrier's mouth. Isoroku was fond of carpentry, particularly making cabinets and furniture. The chance to rebuild this whole suite of rooms brought a faintly pleased expression to his habitually impassive face.
"Kyo? Do you want the new flooring in now?" One of the Marines, sweat making his face shine like polished mahogany, leaned in the doorway. Most of the corridor was filled with stacks of pre-cut floor panels. Isoroku had arranged a very sweet trade, he thought, with the Development Board warehouse. All of the hexacarbon floor plating – even the sections gouged and damaged by combat – for four times the amount of highest-grade native lohaja, cut and planed to his specifications. The wood was incredibly wear resistant and took varnish to a truly beautiful gloss.
To his even greater delight, the lohaja was too hard to cut with the paltry set of woodworking tools aboard, so he'd been forced by circumstance to dig into the departmental budget to acquire – again through the sources Helsdon had found on the planet – a complete, matching set of Sandvik power tools designed to cut, finish and fit the native woods. Isoroku was itching to try them out. The tools themselves were works of art.
"Not yet. Not yet. Let me finish edging these support s…"
His personal comm chimed and the engineer sat back, turning off the saw and locking the safety cover in place. "Hai?"
This is Hadeishi. How are repairs progressing?
"Very well, sir!" Isoroku plucked a hand-comp out of his toolbox and thumbed up the current status display. "We're on schedule for repairing all the non-critical battle damage we've accrued in the past nine months. I'm in the dining room now, replacing the flooring. Crews are replacing the passageway vent filters by alternate decks. We've got one water recycler down while we flush and scrub the tanks before refilling with fresh supplies. The other will get the same treatment the day after tomorrow. Supply replenishment is underway – though you'll have to ask Sho-sa Kosho about her time-to-complete."
There was silence on the link, and Isoroku started to frown. When the captain started asking for status reports, something was going on. The engineer's forehead furrowed and he rubbed his pug-nose vigorously, trying to clear the metallic bite of ozone away.
Thai-i, I want you to scale back your repair schedule. A situation might be developing on the planet and we can't go to combat acceleration if you've got the corridors filled with unsecured construction materials.
"Kyo!" The engineer sat upright, horrified. "We reviewed the schedule just yesterday! You and the Sho-sa approved the whole list – we've already torn out everything designated first phase! We can't…we can't just put everything back."
We're still on a combat duty station, Thai-i. Adjust your schedule to pull and repair a compartment at a time. You must assume we are always a moment's notice from battle alert. The comm-band beeped cheerfully, signaling the channel had closed. Isoroku stared in horror at his wrist.
"One at a time?" Isoroku's voice rose violently and then, with a massive effort of will, he closed his mouth, swallowed a bellowing shout of disgust, and ground both palms into his eyes. "One at a time…oh, mother Ameratsu, save me from flight officers of all kinds."
His thick, muscular fingers separated and he peered at the comp pad on the deck beside him. "My beautiful, perfect schedule…" The thought of having to stand down all of the extra hands he'd been given and having his technicians concentrate on one compartment at a time, rather than addressing entire decks at a go, made him want to weep. "What a waste of able hands and hours. What a waste!"
For once, Itzpalicue was not in her darkened bedroom, surrounded by the pervasive hum of comps and the sullen glare of v-displays, when a system alert sounded. Instead, the old Mexica was sitting on the covered veranda running along the southern side of the rented house. Elaborately carved wooden screens blocked out most of the sun's glare, leaving the porch dim and quiet. Some kind of a vine with petite white flowers climbed the roof supports and exhaled a thick, heady fragrance. Her bare feet were in sunlight, and her head was in cool shadow.
Her comm-band chimed again. She opened one eye and regarded the turquoise and silver bracelet sitting on a side table at her elbow, alongside a tumbler filled with the local equivalent of limonata. She had been trying to write a letter to one of her nieces, but the effort of putting pen to paper – the old woman did not send recorded messages – had lulled her into a drowsy nap.
"Ah, Lachlan must still be asleep," she said when the band chimed for the third time. "They will wake him if I'm not properly responsive." Sticking out her tongue at the device, she picked it up and tapped the channel open. "Yes?"
Your pardon, mi'lady, a tentative voice answered. We've registered a system trace alert. The communications officer of the Cornuelle has begun a planet-wide scan of the local comm networks, including our own and the ship-to-shore traffic control system.
"Has he noticed our cell tap?" Itzpalicue shifted in the chair, sitting up straight, her mind waking slowly from its comfortable doze. "Are our secure relays compromised?"
We don't believe so, replied the voice. He's only just started. Shall we shut him down?
"No! There's no need to draw attention. Use the relay tap on the Cornuelle to monitor his progress. If he finds any data we don't already have, shunt it to my message queue. If he impinges on our surveillance network, or seems likely to come across the time-delay interfaces on the military and diplomatic comm channels, dial back our presence and let him find the Flower Priest operation instead. The xochiyaotinime can deal with Fleet for us."
Yes, ma'am. The operator went off-line and Itzpalicue shrugged her shoulders, a little annoyed at being disturbed. "Lachlan needs to ease up on his staff, I think," she mused aloud. "They're far too timid for my taste."
A private channel glyph started to wink on Hadeishi's command display and the Chu-sa coughed, interrupting Isoroku, who was in the midst of an impassioned speech regarding the sacred and infallible nature of engineering repair schedules. "We will discuss your concerns later, Thai-i," Hadeishi said smoothly as he terminated the call. "I have an incoming call from Sho-sa Kosho."
"Hello, Susan. How is resupply going?"
Ahead of schedule, kyo. The executive officer's voice was a cool, confident breeze after Isoroku's affronted tirade. Shuttle two has just finished unloading – three months' supply of local firewater, fresh bed linens and a hundred cases of hand-milled soap. Assorted local flavors, but none of them will make you gag.
"I see you and Heicho Felix see eye-to-eye on certain critical matters, Sho-sa. When is the water supply coming aboard?"
Shuttle three is downbound now with the reinforced bladder in place. They should be back in ab
out sixteen hours. I'm preparing to take shuttle two down as well – Helsdon's managed to find us three to four tons of miscellaneous spare parts. All Imperial issue. Not the latest revisions, but then the ship is not exactly fresh from the Jupiter Yards.
"Excellent. Be aware the situation on the ground is starting to cook. If you've space on the shuttle, take a squad of Marines. I've – ah – freed some up from Isoroku's repair projects. If anything happens, evac to orbit immediately. We need you and those crewmen back here more than the repair parts."
Understood. Felix's fireteam is already standing by with Helsdon and two of his technicians. We'll see you in about twenty hours. Kosho, out.
On the bridge of the Cornuelle, midshipman Smith leaned heavily on the armrest of his shockchair, eyes half-closed, one finger pressed to his earbug. His free hand drifted across the v-display, tweaking frequencies and absorption ranges. A constant stream of static, chattering, booming music, lilting singing voices, twenty-second advertisements and encrypted bursts of garbage noise washed over him. In comparison to the spare interstellar communications environment he usually worked in, Smith felt like he'd thrust his head into a hive of angry, polyphonous bees.
A particular warbling squeal caught his attention. "I've heard that before. Three-Jaguar, can you isolate the comm spike at six-thousand-and-fifteen?"
The second watch communications officer, a petite Tlaxcalan girl with perfectly straight ink-black hair, nodded, tapping up a new pane on her display. The frequency isolated and Smith leaned in, watching the main comp apply a score of decrypt filters in dizzying succession.
"Doesn't that look familiar? I'm sure it's an Imperial code…"
Jaguar nodded absently, her attention wholly focused on the v-display. Short, neatly manicured fingers skipped across the board, pulling slates of Fleet, Army and Diplomatic code images from archive and queuing them for decrypt comparison. After a moment, she paused and lifted her sharp chin. "I remember this," she said slowly, "it's from commtech school – an old-style encrypt used by one of the priestly orders."
"A military order? Like the Knights of the Flowering Sun?" Smith started scanning through the code archive. After a moment, he found something which looked vaguely like the pattern flowing across their panel. "Might be an upgraded version of this one…I'd tell the captain. Jag, look at this other thing…" He swapped in a completely separate v-display showing clusters of locator signals scattered all along the Parus-Sobipurй-Fehrupurй axis. "Run down these locator idents – there are Imperial signatures all over this countryside – like school let out or something…they're encrypted too and we'd better find out who they are."
The second watch tech nodded, transferring the v-display to her panel, quick mind already nibbling away at the new problem. Smith changed his earbug channel to the command push and thumbed the priority glyph for Chu-sa Hadeishi. Not for the first time, he found it amusing the main comm system was required to route a talktime request to the captain, who was seated behind and above the comm station and no more than two meters away.
"Yes, Sho-i Smith?" Hadeishi spoke quietly into his comm-thread. A particular feeling was beginning to steal over him, a sensation he associated with patrolling in hostile space. A sense of impending action, as if a steadily building weight was pressing on his mind. He had been keeping an eye on the communications station – Smith had not left his station when second watch arrived on the bridge, which meant he had gotten wrapped up in the analysis project. Hadeishi let him stay; Three-Jaguar did not appear to mind and they made a good team.
"Have you found something?" The Chu-sa was keeping track of Isoroku and his repair crews who, despite the mournful protests of the senior engineer, were making excellent progress at securing all of the repair supplies and adapting to a more conservative schedule. If only we had received some kind of munitions resupply. Fresh soap has a laudable effect on morale, but will do little for us if we have to provide ground-support for the Army.
Unfortunately, despite considerable investigation, the local industrial base simply could not provide the Cornuelle with fresh sprint and shipkiller missiles, or even capacitors and munitions for the point-defense network.
"Hai, kyo." The boy's face was keen with anticipation. "First, we've started to pick out a lot of chatter on fringe Imperial bands – all encrypted – using an old-style code formerly associated with certain Imperial religious military orders. We've had no indication there are any Templar or Tlahulli brigades operating on Jagan, so that's a little strange."
Hadeishi considered this for a moment, turning the indication over in his mind. That does not seem to fit at all. So it must be a foundation piece of the puzzle…"And?"
Jaguar leaned over, whispering in Smith's ear. Hadeishi waited patiently. As the two junior officers consulted their panel, the Chu-sa kicked off a ship-wide request for departmental status.
"Second, kyo, it looks like the 416th Arrow Knight regiment has taken to the field. Motorized elements apparently departed their cantonment south of Parus two and a half hours ago. The furthest afield are almost at Fehrupurй, but they're encountering sporadic resistance."
"What?" Hadeishi stiffened, his entire body suddenly and completely awake. "We've had no notification of an operational deployment! Get me Colonel Yacatolli right now."
Jaguar immediately began speaking into her comm-thread, the glow of a fresh v-feed from the surface shining on her cheekbones. Smith tapped a copy of his locator map to Hadeishi's station.
"What kind of resistance is the Army encountering?" Hadeishi tagged the flight paths of his shuttles into the map. Number three was already on the ground, while Susan's shuttle two was inbound to the main shuttle field at Sobipurй. Shuttle One, with a Marine drop-squad standing by, was still in boat bay one. "Local military contingents?"
"No, kyo." Smith shook his head and copied a set of thumbnails to the command station. "Kids throwing rocks and firebombs – mostly methanol and soap in glass. Some of the squad commanders have reported roads blocked or bridges under repair where satellite sweeps yesterday showed plenty of local traffic crossing."
"I see. Jaguar-tzin, do you have Yacatolli on comm for me yet?"
The Tlaxcalan ensign shook her head, pixyish features immobile with anger. "Regimental headquarters is saying he's busy and doesn't have time to talk to you right now. They say…they say they'll call us when he's free."
Hadeishi's eyes narrowed and he considered overriding the channel himself. For a moment. Then he pushed the anger aside and turned his attention back to the two junior officers. "Very well. Smith-tzin, find out where all this priestly traffic is coming from. Yacatolli's belief in the superiority of his regiment over the locals is a known quantity – this other business is more disturbing."
Takshila District of the Molt
Humming softly to herself, Gretchen gently drifted her hand across the control surface of a Zeiss-Hanuman field camera. The lens and imaging body of the surveillance scope were mounted in a north-facing window. She was sitting cross-legged, watching the 60X image of the monastery with great interest.
On the v-display, a line of Jehanan elders was slowly climbing one of the external staircases cut into the rock of the hill. One by one they bent down and entered a T-shaped doorway near the summit. Some kind of domed building nestled in the rock, filling what the geodetic survey revealed was an old ravine. Gretchen was interested in this particular vignette because a similar number of monks made the same journey every morning. They did not return the same way. None of the penitents – if they were, in fact, performing a religious service – carried anything, as far as she could tell, and had dispensed with the usual leather harnesses and disc-shaped signs of status and rank.
A purification bath? she wondered.
She moved her hand again, and the camera scanned to one side. More cliffs pierced by tall narrow windows and occasional doors leading onto precarious walkways or steep sets of steps blurred past and she found the terrace Magdalena had labeled 'Southern
Orchard' on the comprehensive three-d map their cameras, radar packs, and geomagnetic sensors were building on a base of out-of-date satellite photos. The orchard was filled with slender-trunked trees with perfectly rounded crowns. Gretchen's lips twitched into a faint smile – the ornamental arrangement of the naragga trees was the result of meticulous daily maintenance by a stooped old Jehanan and a swarm of children who carefully plucked wayward leaves from the trees and trimmed the stems with scissors.
"I'm amazed those trees are still standing. A dozen kids should have reduced the whole terrace to a desert by now."
Magdalena looked up from her comps – now laid out on a low wicker table Parker had found in the district furniture market – and twitched her ears lazily. "Perhaps the orb-trees grow quickly in this nnningurshimakkhul climate. Perhaps the kits are specially trained guardians who protect the world from being consumed by leaf demons."
"Ha!" Gretchen laughed, grinning at the Hesht. "You're in a good mood this morning."
"Hrrr… This ssshuma will be in a good mood when we find the gifting-bush and leave this nose-biting place."
Anderssen shrugged, looking at the northeastern sky through the windows. A pall of yellow-gray smoke filled the sky, drifting west from a huge district of chemical refineries. The noxious cloud choked the city whenever the wind turned. Magdalena had been particularly revolted to find the smog left a gummy residue on her fur.
"Any luck on getting the ground-penetrating radar to work?"
The Hesht shook her head and the tip of her tail lashed from side to side in annoyance. "There must be shielding beneath all the ornamental carving." She tapped a claw on one of her displays. "Each open window and door gives us a paws-breadth slice of the interior, but only for six, seven meters – then nothing. Without sensor relays placed inside the complex? No more than this."
Magdalena flexed her claws, letting them slide out of cartilage-sheaths, and tipped her chin at the three-d map. Three quarters of the surface of the hill had been mapped in painstaking detail by the array of sensors clipped to the windows or mounted on tripods. The far northern quadrant was still a mystery, though Gretchen intended to hike around to the far side in a day or so and mount their two spare cameras and radar packs on a rooftop, if she could find a suitable location.
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