The infiltrator then waited an eternity – three seconds – and exhausted the last of its tiny power cell with a piercing burst of hi-band radio noise.
Four meters away, a series of organic detonators woven into the lohaja wood tripped at the infiltrator's signal and initiated a catastrophic chain reaction through the six hundred kilos of nitro-cellulose explosive forming the plank cores. The officer's mess vanished in a shocking blast of flame and super-pressure plasma. The internal doorway to the galley blew apart and the blast engulfed two storage spaces and the dishwasher. Vent covers for removing waste heat and cooking smoke – closed by the battle alert – crumpled and flames roared down four air circulation shafts – two heading aft and two forward. The main door to the officer's mess was torn from its hinges and smashed into the opposite bulkhead.
A damage control party kicking past at that moment – heading for the number three boat bay, which was at that moment open to naked vacuum and venting atmosphere – was engulfed in plasma and their z-suits, shredded by flying splinters of steel-sharp wood, failed. They all died instantly. The whole center section of the command ring convulsed, ripped by the explosion, and then filled with a rushing wall of flame.
The wall behind the officer's mess, which contained one of the three primary nerve conduits handling all of the ship's data networks, buckled, and most of the blast boiled through the gaping hole where the command panel had been mounted. Luckily, the critical networks were encased in heavy armor, and the blast – though the conduit was severely kinked and sections were badly melted – did not penetrate into the datacore.
A third of the ship's comp, however, did go momentarily off-line as the automatic damage control system shut down the conduit and rerouted traffic into the other two cores. The wrecker viruses, which had already permeated the ship's neural web, began a systemic attack on every sub-system, interface and command and control system within their reach.
Asale counted under her breath, hand on the manual system restart. "Two…and one!"
The lever clicked forward, there was a chirping sound, and the command panels in the cockpit of the captain's launch jolted awake.
"We have system restart," Hadeishi announced, watching the boot log flash past on his display. "Fitzsimmons, Deckard – you still with us?"
"Hai, kyo," Fitzsimmons answered, sounding a little rattled. Both Marines had been completely silent while the pilot and the Chu-sa were working feverishly to get the launch controls operating again. "Is there anything we can do?"
"Yes," Hadeishi said, perfectly calm and collected. "The Cornuelle has been severely damaged, if our sensors are reporting the atmosphere and radiation cloud around her properly. We are going to match velocity and go aboard. The locks and boat bays may be damaged, so hunt around back there and collect anything we can use to cut into a lock or handle damage control and medical emergencies once we're inside. Take everything you can carry."
"Engine restart in three…two…one…" Sho-i Asale twisted the ignition handle, felt the drive reactor in the back of the launch rumble awake and mimed wiping sweat from her high brow with her free hand. "The gods are smiling, Chu-sa. We've lost comm and external video and some of the navigational sensors, but we can still fly."
"Good." Hadeishi cleared a display showing all comm interfaces offline from his panel. "Get me to my ship as fast as you can."
The launch trembled, the drives lit off and they jolted forward. Jagan continued to swell before them, and Hadeishi imagined he could see the matte black outline of the Cornuelle ahead, growing nearer every second. His face became a mask, his eyes cold obsidian.
The Chu-sa was trying to keep from bursting into tears. I've failed my men, my ship…everyone. What did I think I was doing – haring off on a political visit with combat imminent? Ah, the gods of chance are bending against me tonight. The only thought which gave him some shred of hope was the knowledge that Susan was on the ground, far from their dying ship, perhaps safely ensconced in a command bunker at Sobipurй or the Regimental cantonment.
Hold on, he prayed, watching the fragmentary navigational plot for signs of the Cornuelle. Hold on, I'm coming. Hayes knows what to do, he'll get maneuvering drive back and pull you into a safe orbit. Just hold on, just a little longer…
Six thousand kilometers behind the launch, the Tepoztecatl continued to shudder with explosions as more systems failed. Atmospheric venting continued unabated and the long, curving rooms filled with communications equipment drifted with clouds of paper, globules of vomit and blood and water. Bodies clogged the doorways where the explosive decompression of the ship had sucked the hapless priests to an ugly, instant death. The main reactor had shuddered into an emergency shutdown, preventing the kind of catastrophic failure which had claimed the Beowulf, but only isolated portions of the ship glowed with emergency lights.
The bridge and command spaces were twisted wreckage – the laser burst from the nearest mine had smashed lengthwise into the ship directly through the control deck. Chimalpahin and all of his subordinates had been instantly killed, either incinerated or boiled alive as the internal atmosphere roared out through the shattered hull.
All possibility of the Flower Priest network being restored was wiped away with one brilliant flash of light. Across Jagan, the Whisperers working quietly in town, countryside and metropolis stared in alarm at their comms, finding the ever-present voice from the sky had fallen silent.
Warning lights flared, nearly blinding Isoroku as he struggled back to consciousness. The engineer raised a hand, found his ears ringing with a warbling emergency alarm, and seized hold of the nearest stanchion. The engineering deck was in chaos, filled with drifting men, loose hand-held comp pads, tools and broken bits of glassite. Weakly, he tapped his comm.
"Engineering to Bridge…ship's status?"
Static babbled on the channel and Isoroku stared at his wrist in alarm. "Hello the bridge! Hayes? Smith?"
His comm continued a sing-song wail, warbling up and down the audible frequency. Isoroku shut it off and swung to the nearest v-display. Finding the display still up by some miracle, he mashed a control glyph with a gloved thumb and the blaring alarm shut off. In the following silence, his breath sounded very harsh in his ears. The engineer stared at the panel, felt his stomach fall into a deep pit and clenched the sides of the station to keep from drifting away.
Every readout and v-pane was filled with random, constantly changing garbage. Isoroku glanced around the engineering deck, finding his staff struggling back to stations, though at least two drifted limply, one leaking crimson from a shattered face-plate. He tried tapping up the all-hands channel on his comm. A blast of scratchy music assaulted his hears, accompanied by a wailing voice like a lost soul writhing in the torment of a Christian's hell.
Comms are down, he realized, feeling even sicker. Main comp is corrupted – or at least the interfaces are. This is a cold day indeed. Isoroku lifted his wrist, eyeballed the environmental readouts, saw the air was still breathable and unsealed the helmet of his z-suit.
As soon as he tasted burned circuit and fear in the air, he kicked across to the main comp station and rapped his fist on the helmets of two crewmen trying to get the panel to reboot. Alarmed, they unsealed their faceplates, staring at him with wide eyes. Fleet discipline was very strict about keeping z-suit integrity in an emergency.
"Main comp is corrupted," Isoroku barked as soon as they could hear him. "Drop the entire ship-wide network – every node, relay and interface – and keep main comp off-line. We'll need altitude control and environmentals back as quickly as possible, but we'll have to bring them up as standalone systems."
Before they could reply, he turned and kicked across to the cluster of stations controlling the main reactor and the massive hyperspace drive systems. Chu-i Yoyontzin, his second, was already at the panel, haggard face sheened with sweat. The NГЎhuatl officer's helmet was tipped back behind his head, though Isoroku could see the engineer was nearly paralyzed with fear at t
he prospect of losing pressure on the deck.
"Reactor is still up," Yoyontzin reported, biting his lip. "Main drive was on standby, but I think we can bring her on-line in thirty minutes…"
Isoroku shook his head, the dull glare of the emergency lights shining on his bald pate. "Shut down main power and the transit drive and maneuvering. Right now – manually, if you have to."
"But, kyo, we were in the middle of a maneuvering burn! One engine was still firing. We need to adjust attitude control and establish a stable orbit!"
"Can't do that while the comp network is corrupted." The lead engineer stabbed a thick finger at the sidepanel displays flanking the reactor and drive subsystem. They were crowded with garbage and wild images. Pornographic three-d's pulsed on two of them, emitting a shrieking wail of sound and the whompwhomp-whomp of electric drums. "We need cell power to bring up critical systems and we can't spare it to keep the main drive hot. Shut down all drives right now."
"Hai!" Yoyontzin bleated in response, bending over his panel.
Isoroku spared himself an instant of relief that the corruption had not managed to penetrate the isolated reactor and hyperspace drive systems, and was even happier when Yoyontzin managed to initiate a controlled shutdown without missing a step and tipping the hyperspace matrix into some kind of catastrophic transit gradient.
"Communications are down," he bawled, drawing the attention of every other rating in the compartment. Everyone who was still up and mobile had at least cracked their helmets. "We need shipside comm up so we can handle damage control – every third man to the repair lockers – pull the commwire spools and local relays. Every z-suit comm switches to local point-to-point mode, no central relay allowed. Four teams – one for each fore-aft access way – run those spools out from here and affix local repeaters at each bulkhead. Move!
"Environmental section! Bring up your systems isolated from main comp, reflash your control code from backup and get the air recyclers working again." More ratings scattered and the engineer fixed his gaze on the damage-control section, which was staring helplessly at rows of displays which were showing flashing, endlessly repeated images of an animated rabbit hopping through a field of psychedelic, oversaturated flowers.
"Damage control is -"
Main comp shut down hard and every single display on the ship went black with a pitiful whine. The rabbits flickered wildly before vanishing with a pop! The engineering deck was suddenly very, very quiet.
The subsonic background thunder of the main reactors stuttered and failed.
Even the space-bending, subliminal ringing tone of the hyperspace coil fell silent.
Isoroku swallowed, suddenly feeling cold, and realized he was trapped in the heart of a nine-thousand-ton tomb of hexacarbon and glassite and steel.
The House of Reeds Within the Nautilus
Dust billowed along a trapezoidal passage, enveloping Gretchen and Malakar in a dirty tan cloud. Coughing, the Jehanan fell to her hands, overcome. Anderssen, thankful for her goggles, bit down on her breathing tube, seized the gardener under the shoulders and forged ahead. Twenty meters on, a ramp cut off to the left and they staggered up the slope, rising out of the toxic murk stirred up by the collapse of the vault three levels below.
Snuffling loudly, Malakar collapsed on the stone floor, gasping for breath.
Gretchen knelt beside the gardener and shook a thick coating of limestone powder from her field jacket. Everything was permeated with the fine gritty residue. "Can you breathe?"
Malakar responded with a wheezing snort, spitting goopy white fluid on the ground.
"I guess you can." Gretchen offered the Jehanan her water bottle.
Watching the alien drink, Anderssen was struck again by the dilapidated age of the entire structure. The grimy sensation of every surface being caked deep with the debris of centuries was only reinforced by the strange, massive pressure the kalpataru was exerting on her mind.
"Do your people – the priests, I mean – do they ever make new halls, cut new passages?"
"Is there need?" Malakar shook her head, returning the empty bottle. "Even I can become lost – once a Master ordered maps and charts made – but after a hand of years, the project was abandoned. I saw the room of books so made, when I was a short-horn, they were rotting. Paper is treacherous with its promises. No, all the priests do now is close up the places they fear to tread."
Gretchen nodded and helped the Jehanan to her feet. "Do you know the way out?"
"This old walnut doesn't even know where we are," Malakar grumbled, sniffing the air. "Perhaps this way."
After an hour or more, they turned into a long narrow hall, spaced with graven pillars reaching overhead to form a roof of carved triangular leaves. Malakar picked up her pace, forcing Gretchen to jog along behind. Here the floor was cleared of dust and ahead a gipu gleamed in the darkness.
"Quietly now," the gardener whispered. "We will reach the first level of terraces soon, and there will be priests – or even more of those profaning soldiers – about. The closest outer door known to me is some distance away, but that one is watched and guarded. We must reach one of the forgotten ones…"
They reached the end of the pillared hall, found themselves in an intersection of three other passages – all of them lit – and Malakar turned down the one to the right, then immediately stepped between two of the pillars – into a shadowed alcove – and began climbing a very narrow set of stairs. Once they had ascended beyond the lights, the gardener brought out the gipu and held the egg aloft. Picking her way along in the faint light, Gretchen ventured to speak again.
"Do you call this place the Garden because of the terraces?"
Malakar shook her head, still climbing. "They are new – or as new as such things can be in this hoary old place. Once they were broad platforms edged with rounded walls on each level above the entrance tier. One of the Masters – six of them ago now? – decided they should be filled with earth and planted. Some fragments still surviving from those times speak of a dispute with the kujen over the provision of tribute to the House."
"They provide all your food now?" Gretchen was thinking of the countless rooms and dozens of levels and the failure of her comm to penetrate the walls of the massif. "How many priests live within the House?"
"Two hundred and nineteen in these failing days," Malakar said, coming to the end of the stairs. "We no longer use the Hall of Abating Hunger – too many echoes and shadows for so few. But there I wager over a thousand could comfortably squat and stanch their hunger with freshly grilled zizunaga." Her long head poked out into a new passage and sniffed the air. "We are very near the terrace where I hid the pushta in the soil."
"I can find my way back to the entrance I used from there." Gretchen checked her comp. The mapping soft was still running, showing her path as an irregular, looping line of red through half-filled-in rooms, chambers and halls. The cross-corridors fanned out like spines from the back of a broken snake. "Was I wrong before, when I said this was one of the spacecraft which brought your people to Jagan? Was this a fortress, a citadel raised at the heart of their landing, to secure the new conquest? And all these new halls and tunnels and rooms cut from the rock – they're not as ancient as they seem – only hundreds of years old, from the time of the Fire."
Malakar did not answer, but waved her forward and they hurried down another curving passage. A faint radiance began to gleam on the walls ahead, a slowly building light, promising a smoggy sky and clouds pregnant with rain.
The Jehanan remained silent, head moving warily from one side to the other, until they reached a junction where – suddenly and without warning – Gretchen's goggles picked up a UV-marker arrow pointing down a side passage.
"There!" she exclaimed, enormously relieved. "That's the way I came."
"Hooo…" Malakar squatted down in the passageway with the pierced stone screen, claws ticking against the floor. The bright light of afternoon filtered through the trees and picked out shining scales
on her head. The gipu was tucked away. "I know this path. A steep stair with many broken steps leads to a laundry and a bakery selling patu biscuits. I had not thought the entrance still open, but…memories fade and fail. Hoooo… I am weary now."
"Both the inner and outer doors are frozen open." Gretchen knelt as well, thumbing her comp to the display showing the analysis results from the scan of the kalpataru. "Are there stories of the House during the time of the Fire? Could the entire population of the city fit inside? Is it that vast? Are there – were there – other citadels like this one?"
The Jehanan opened her jaws, trilling musically. Anderssen guessed she was laughing.
"So hungry, so hungry…W ith your claws full, you reach for more! Does this hunger ever abate or fade?"
"No, not often." Gretchen shook her head sadly. "Sometimes, when I am at home, with my children – I have a hatchling, as you would say, and two short-horns – I forget for a little while. But then I rise one morning and my heart wonders when the liner lifts from port, what quixotic vista is waiting for me, what dusty tomb will reveal the lives of the dead and the lost to me. Then I am happy for a little while, until I miss my children again."
"Hur-hur! One day you will catch your own tail and eat yourself up before you've noticed!"
Anderssen grimaced at the image, then held up the comp. "There is a preliminary analysis, as I promised, if you still want to know the truth of the kalpataru."
Malakar raised her snout, flexed her nostrils and hooted mournfully. "Does it matter now?" She stabbed a claw at the floor. "Everything is buried for all time…Who could say how many lie mewed up in that bright tomb? Will truth taste as bitter as the other fruit I've plucked from your tree?"
Gretchen shrugged and looked the gardener in the eye. "Neither sweet nor sour, I venture. Not, perhaps, what you expected."
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