The problems would be solved, all Yamato’s space engineers agreed with that. What no one could be sure about was when.
For the moment, in order not to exceed the Point of No Return, Yamato’s Near Away craft were limited to a journey through the Near Away of less than 300,000,000 kilometers. Enough to reach the orbit of ringed Toshie, Amaterasu’s inner gas giant, but no more. Higashi Ichiro and his experimental ship floated in normal space at the end of Planet Yamato’s reach.
Whatever the unsolved technical problems, Ichiro thought, Yamatan physicists’ and engineers’ genius had brought them across the system faster than light could make the journey.
Shorter flights were routinely made now, but this great leap forward was a triumph.
Ichiro-san spoke into his com-set to Alto Yamashiro, the ship’s Communicator. “Dispatch the yes signal to home base, Alto-san. The numbers confirm that the MD-23 is fully operational.”
It would take the message a hundred and eighty minutes to cross the Amaterasu system. Radio emissions operated under Einsteinian laws. Ichiro had no doubt that soon messages would travel through the Near Away instantaneously.
Ichiro forced himself to suppress his excitement and turn to his other duties. All computer readings had to be stored on bubbles and then transmitted to Moon Hideyoshi. It was an ironclad rule that since the last disappearance of an experimental Near Away craft, flight records had to be transmitted to base after each stage of a transit. Should an accident occur, only the machine and the men--replaceable items--and not totally unique flight data would be lost. Records fuelled the MD project.
Some of the experimental pilots complained that the engineers valued their precious data more than they did the MD crews. But in this Ichiro Higashi came down on the side of the engineers. The ships were the future. Not only of Yamato, but of spacefaring humankind. Test information was priceless because the inertial-mass-depletion engine would make Yamato the foremost planet in the galaxy, and soon MD-powered Near Away vessels would leave the Amaterasu System for truly deep space, that great dark ocean heretofore the exclusive venue of the majestic Goldenwings. Ichiro intended to be aboard one of those pioneering MD ships.
“Alto-san, send the flight-recorder records first,” he ordered.
“Shouldn’t we send the engine scans before anything else, Ichiro?”
Ichiro tried briefly--and ineffectively--to suppress his quick surge of fury. Ever since he, Ichiro, had taken Miyako-san, Alto’s cousin, to be his concubine, his subordinate had begun to put himself forward. This was common among Yamatans, and it was universally castigated. But the rigidity of society on Planet Yamato assured that any ambitious man would take whatever advantage he could derive from his circumstances. Alto Yamashiro was more than ordinarily ambitious and, because of his pretty cousin’s new status, he chose this moment to challenge his senior officer’s authority.
Alto-san was no fool. The challenge was mild and carefully contrived. Whether or not the engine scans preceded the astrogational numbers in the radio message to Moon Hideyoshi was unimportant. The careful rebellion was calculated to cause the commander of MD-23 to consider the opinions of someone who was, almost, an in-law.
But the Commo Officer miscalculated. Commander Higashi was, at the moment, on an emotional high. For a year and a half, since a minor contretemps with a superior on Hideyoshi, the young man had been deeply worried about his advancement in the Exploration Corps. Alto’s argumentativeness--at the moment he was engaged in a prolix explication of why it would be more suitable that the astro numbers be sent before the rest of the message--seemed an outright provocation.
In point of fact, the dispute was meaningless. Aboard a happier ship than MD-23, it would not be taking place.
But Ichiro, suddenly red-faced and explosive, began shouting at his junior officer. Alto-san, taken aback by the flash of fury, chose to shout back. The two officers found themselves face to face in a particularly acrimonious, escalating quarrel.
Masao Kendo, the Astrogation Specialist, attempted to intervene. “Commander--Alto-san--This is not seemly, sirs. I beg you to control your tempers. We are too close to Toshie to allow our attention to wander into trivialities.”
Kendo’s use of the word trivialities exacerbated the Commander’s already aroused bad temper. Ichiro’s rages were famous on Moon Hideyoshi, and on this auspicious occasion he allowed his stormy nature to rage free.
But the storm was brief. Brief and horrible. Before the horrified eyes of his subordinates, Higashi Ichiro seemed suddenly to be caught up in an invisible tornado of force. An ordinary bad-tempered, arm-waving tirade typical of his age and class changed violently into a spastic, wrenching dance. His right arm was flung about with such ferocity that the crew of MD-23 heard the ulna crack like a dry twig. Angry words were supplanted by a scream of anguish as his inner organs were squeezed and torn with ripping force. Blood spewed from his open mouth and his blinded eyes extruded from their sockets as the internal pressure in his skull was doubled, then doubled again. In the microgravity, his grotesque dance was executed with such ferocity that he left a thick, bloody smear on the overhead before being flung into space through an inexplicably twisted bulkhead.
The crewmen of MD-23 had only moments to take in the horror of Ichiro Higashi’s destruction before the tensions twisting the small spacecraft ripped it apart, spilling the crew, unarmored, into space.
Though there was no human eye nearby to see it happen, the wreckage of MD-23 spun into a tight orbit around a darkness that was blacker than black, a tiny Gateway into the Near Away.
It was never so near, nor so far away.
On the island of Kai, in a planetary observatory atop a mountain called Suribachi, a Junior Astronomer stared in disbelief at a monitor as Planet Yamato’s largest telescope recorded the destruction of MD-23 and the death of its crew.
7. Shock Waves
Aboard Glory the destruction of the MD-23 was captured by a surveillance camera atop the port mizzenmast. This camera, ordinarily used to monitor the condition of the upper five kilometers of the spar, was activated by the FTL flash of tachyon power released across the Tau Ceti Star System by the forcible opening of the Gateway from the Near Away.
When inertial-mass-depletion-powered Yamatan craft transited between the Near Away and normal space, their size and low power created openings that were small, less than a thousand meters in diameter, and the Gateways were not held open for any measurable time. But the disturbance caused by the Gateway that devoured MD-23 was emotionally familiar to Glory’s crew members, who’d encountered it before in the Ross Stars.
Glory’s monkeys, confined for refurbishment and safety while in orbit around Planet Yamato, were frantically disturbed by the power of the distant Gateway’s forcible distortion of normal space.
In the battle Glory had fought in the Ross System, a monkey had been slaughtered by a soldier of the boarding party from Ross 248 Beta. Now, months of shiptime later, the monkeys were still deeply disturbed by what had happened. Since Glory’s commissioning in orbit around Earth’s Moon, no cyberbeast had ever died, and any who met with an accident had been swiftly repaired. Death is a human concept. The chimp-descended monkeys had been shocked by the demise of one of their number. The cats knew this. Their closeness to the human syndics had given them a grasp of what it meant to cease living. But neither Mira nor any of the other members of the pride had yet conveyed to the Starmen the import of what had happened to the monkeys at Ross 248.
Glory’s mainframe had detected both the anxiety and fear the monkeys were feeling. Yet sophisticated as it was, Glory's computer was still only a machine. It had taken no action about the monkeys so long as they performed their duties safely and correctly. Now the impulse that swept through Near Space from the Gateway that had opened across the system agitated the monkeys. Glory tranquilized the small cyberbeasts and saved the information in memory, but she did not alert the syndics, being fully occupied with more serious possible danger to the ship
.
Dietr Krieg, even though the least empathic of the Starmen, nevertheless was able to recognize the emotional signature of the wave of rage that swept across the inner Tau Ceti System. The Cybersurgeon felt the others’ emotional surge.
Warned by the attack on Duncan and Anya on the surface, Glory’s people had been preparing the ship for a precipitous departure. Attempts to contact Duncan and Anya by radio had failed. Almost immediately after the ninja’s attempt--witnessed by all aboard Glory on the Yamato Planetary Television Net--there had been an immediate Loss of Signal from Duncan’s and Anya’s communicators. The phenomenon of LOS was as old as orbital flight. Only on planets ringed by relay satellites could it be avoided when the sending transmitter vanished over the horizon. On Yamato the problem was not a lack of relay satellites; Planet Yamato had them to excess. But the satellites did not transmit or receive in the radio bands used by the personal com devices of the Goldenwing’s crewmen.
Demands sent by the syndics downworld had not immediately produced the geographical coordinates of the Master and Sailing Master’s location. The gaijin’s exact whereabouts was classified because it was also the location of Minamoto no Kami, the planetary daimyo. By ancient tradition the Shogun’s location was a state secret. Shoguns were prime targets for assassins. Except when public duties made it impossible, the Shogun’s whereabouts was kept secret from the ninjas who operated freely on Planet Yamato. Often the attempt at secrecy failed. In the last five hundred years only one hundred Shoguns had died of natural causes.
After a dozen increasingly concerned demands for information, Glory's syndics were coldly informed that a certain dignified patience was the approved demeanor for visitors to Planet Yamato. “We will soon make contact with your officers,” the Planetary Security Net told the anxious syndics. “They are safe and well protected.”
Broni Voerster, though excited and upset by what she had seen on the planetary telecast, was nevertheless determined that when Duncan returned aboard he would have nothing whatever to complain of regarding her performance of duty. At this moment she lay in her pod, Wired to Glory, composing the basic astroprogram for Glory's retreat from the Tau Ceti Star System, maneuver by maneuver.
When the MD-23 was destroyed within the gravimetric confines of Tau Ceti’s gravity well, Broni had received a jolt of malevolent psycho-empathic energy that made her cry out and pull the drogue from her head. She lay nude in the gel, bathed in a surge of stinging inertia-stripped tachyons. From her shoulders to her knees she felt the pulses from across the system. By this time she was syndic enough to reconnect to Glory swiftly and ask that the ship compute the exact location of the Gateway that had caused the surge. That was the first thing Duncan would want to know.
Mira’s image of the open Gateway was part rathole and part dragon’s lair. She had never seen either a rat or a dragon, but she recognized the vast, searching, hungry malevolence. Not only was the knowledge imprinted in her DNA and present in the lessons learned in purrs from her surrogate mother, the great-queen-who-was-not-alive, but Mira herself had sensed it before. Many times. And she had stalked it time and again, through that night without space or time.
All this she had passed on to her offspring, so that when the young cats indulged in their savage play, it was not dead or wounded animals they brought as offerings to Mira and to the syndics, but images of creatures from Glory’s vast database: reptiles, chimerae, phantasms. Recently these images had been reinforced by the memories of the fight at Ross 248 Beta, amplified by kittenish nightmares of teeth and claws and empty eyes burning with a loathing of life.
The cat floated in free-fall on the ob-deck. Above her the pelagic image of Yamato rolled swiftly by, a gleaming copper-tinged panorama of sea and cloud. Beyond it, far beyond, on the far side of Tau Ceti, the Gateway burned an instant and then was gone, closed, leaving only the star-shot sky of Near Space.
Mira uttered a trilling call for her brood to assemble. She, knew, beyond any doubt, that there would soon be a hunt and a battle, and that there was work for her and hers to do. But where was the dominant tom? She raised her small head to see more clearly the planet Glory orbited. There, she thought, the dominant tom is there and we are here to face the dragon without him. And though she could not possibly reach him with her call, she began to yowl.
Buele, working in one of the vast holds where the landing sleds and shuttles were stored, sensed Mira’s furious cries. Immediately he abandoned his task of preparing a shuttle for descent to the planet and settled into the lotus position (a move taught him by the skeptical but open-minded Cybersurgeon). It took the boy no more than four seconds to establish contact with Glory's mainframe. Through the computer, Buele reached out to make mental contact with Mira.
“Angry rejection. You are not what I want. “
He made a mental effort to push into the rapport between cat and computer.
“Stay away! You are not the dominant tom. “ Threat. Image of teeth and claws.
“Mira! You know me. Hear me. Tell the pride to prepare for hunting. It is what the dominant tom would say to you if he were here. “
“Sullen disbelief. “ Feline skepticism. Of which there is no greater.
“Hear me, Mira. Hear me. I am one of you. “
“You are not. “
Buele sensed a wish to disengage. He was in danger of losing his contact with the small queen. He cast about for help and found
Damon Ng. The Rigger had detected the cyberorganisms’ distress and he had hurried to the Monkey House, where he was now fully engaged. Buele cast his search farther afield, found Broni.
“Help me, Sister Broni! “
“Buele? Is that you? You aren’t Wired. How have you reached me?”
“Never mind, Sister Broni. Help me with Mira. “
Mira snarled her exasperation. Cats did not respond well to being forced to pay attention when they chose not to do so. Both Buele and Broni felt the small queen’s anger. It was far greater than her size.
Broni and Buele together addressed the cat: “Pay attention, Mira. Hear what we say. “
Buele once again took control. His thoughts were sharply defined, honed and as sharply delivered as the strokes of a weapon. “Mira. Tell the others. Either we hunt It or It will hunt us. Tell them, little mother. “
Mira: “Call the dominant tom. Do it now. He will know what to do. “
Broni: “We cannot. “
Buele (interrupting): “We can. We will. But we can't wait for his return to prepare. “ The boy and girl felt Mira’s reluctance. There was a moment when her decision rested on such intangibles as the scent of her offspring in Glory's internal atmosphere, the familiar sound of ancient machinery maintaining the life-supporting systems, the trust she had begun to develop in syndics other than the dominant tom. Buele and the girl on the bridge heard her calling her pride. It was a feral, emotional cry. Though they could not smell the air in Mira’s vicinity, somehow both human girl and boy knew it was filled with pheromones.
They heard echoes throughout the vast ship as all the cats replied to the summons.
“Buele,” Broni sent through the computer net. “What’s happening?”
Though un-Wired, the boy heard Broni clearly.
Then Mira said, with shocking clarity: Call Duncan.
Duncan, Buele thought. She called him Duncan.
The net among Glory's syndics--among all her syndics--was forming.
Buele looked around the dark, mainly empty, hold in bewildered wonderment.
Under his touch, in sight of his inner eyes, Glory was becoming a thing that had never existed before in all the universe. Powerful forces were gathering, using Glory as a matrix.
Buele felt himself bathed in icy sweat. It was a frightening thing to become part of an angry god.
Dietr Krieg, Wired to the com panel in the bridge, felt a shift in the forces around him. It was peculiarly comforting, as though he were being gently but firmly guided into a slot, a position he could--
and must--fill until Duncan was once more aboard.
The Cybersurgeon was a man with little empathic Talent. He had served Glory for years by substituting intellect and curiosity for the empathic ability so prized among Goldenwing syndics. What he offered was accepted; he had always sensed that this was so, but now, at this moment, he felt an upwelling of love and gratitude for the whole into which he had, over the course of years and parsecs, been integrated.
Glory spoke through the drogue: “I have located Duncan and Anya. The coordinates are in the communications console. Use the Yamatan com-net and tell Duncan that a Yamatan spacecraft was just destroyed and that others will be unless he can bring them aboard. “
Dietr was shocked. Not by what the Goldenwing’s computer had just told him--he had expected that--but by the fact that Glory had spoken to him directly on a subject not related to his medical specialty. Shock gave way to pride and then to a strong desire to be worthy of Glory's trust.
He began the procedures that realigned the communications antennae. Glory was capable of performing the task more quickly and efficiently than any one of the syndics aboard, but Dietr remembered one of Duncan’s dicta: Never lose your humanity. Dietr also remembered the terrible encounter in the Ross System. An important part of one’s humanity was the ability to feel fear. It had kept early Man alive on the open savannahs of Africa. It might keep Glory's syndics alive here, under the Tau Ceti sun.
In the tube outside the bridge, Mira and three of her sons met and, despite their high anxiety, exchanged feline greetings, ritually sniffing one anothers’ pheromones. Mira’s brood did not yet think in abstract concepts. Their mentation was direct, without embellishments. But the concept of fear was a universal to all species originating on Earth, and among Mira’s kind fear was always accompanied by anger. Mira was angry now. The dominant tom called Duncan was somewhere in that light that could be seen through the transparent overheads, and he belonged with his pride, with the great-queen-who-is-not-alive, with the others of his kind, and most importantly with Mira and her offspring. He should be here, preparing to fight. But since he was not, Mira’s augmented mind sullenly accepted a substitute.
Glory's People Page 6
