Glory's People

by Alfred Coppel

  But no one had died. Not yet.

  Broni turned and swam swiftly downward through the reflections toward a drogue in the wall near the valve into the outer plenum. She needed to talk with the others--the others of her own kind: Anya, Buele and Dietr. Above all with Dietr, who was, aboard Gloria Coelis, a master of hard knowledge.

  32. Across The Vault Of Heaven

  The man calling himself Ishida was confused. He had imagined, when Lord Yoshi contrived to obtain a place for him aboard the MD craft that would penetrate the Near Away, that the voyage would be short and the murder of the gaijin simple. Now he told himself that he had not only been mistaken, but that he had been manipulated into a situation from which there would be no escape.

  In his persona of Tsunetomo, the Master Ninja of Yamato, Ishida was a man to be feared and respected. He was skilled in the one thousand and one ways of killing, with sword, knife, star, dart and bare hands, that all ninjas were expected to master, and he had taken command of this particular assassination when his first messenger had floated away headless from the city of Yedo in a grav harness.

  To Master Tsunetomo (which was the way he thought of himself) there was no more demanding duty than the killing of the foreign Starman. Once it was known on the home planet that the Order of Ninjas had been hired to put the Goldenwing’s commander to death and had failed to do so, a millennium of tradition and power would come to nothing. This could not be.

  In the cramped quarters of the mass-depletion spaceship, where consoles, racks of equipment and five men had to share a few square meters of space, it was difficult to compose one’s mind for the burst of killing activity needed to eliminate the gaijin.

  It did not even occur to the ninja that with every moment that passed, it became more and more likely that no one, certainly no Yamatan, would ever know what transpired in the small ship while it traversed the Near Away for meters or light-years. Ishida was not a scientist, nor was he an engineer. He did not understand the principles of mass-depletion spaceflight, nor did he care to speculate. Since earliest childhood, in fact since the moment his nameless and impoverished mother had delivered him as an infant to the dark mansion of the Order, Ishida had learned only the old ways, the ancient skills and traditions. He had been in space only once before, on a training mission aboard an antique shuttle--the vessel dedicated to the purpose of teaching novice ninjas the skills needed to kill in null gravity.

  He was discovering now, to his dismay, that he disliked spaceflight. That it unsettled him and made it difficult to maintain the draconian discipline to which he had dedicated his life.

  He had no duties aboard the MD ship. The suggestion from the Lord of Kai to the Shogun was that he could assist in the serving of the MD’s one, hastily mounted weapon--a low-power lazegun--a weapon no one was certain would be of any value whatever against the thing they were pursuing.

  The plunge through the Gateway, and through the singularity that should never have been where it was, had shaken Ishida. For a man with a profound respect for fantasy and hallucinations, the timeless, dimensionless void that all the outer imaging cameras returned was frightening. Worse still was the behavior of the gaijin, blank-eyed and necklaced with the three cats that had been brought aboard. Ishida had seen men in the grasp of the spirit world before. During the Order’s prayers to Hachiman, the God of War and Death, men often drifted into dream states during which they sweated and foamed and even bled. All from exertions and battles fought and wounds taken in wars of the Inner World.

  It had never happened to him, and so he had doubted. Yet there, before his eyes, the towering man from the Goldenwing had experienced something. Ishida had been shocked to see that Duncan’s hands and feet were scratched and bleeding, as though he had moved on all fours through some, unseen field of razor grass.

  The ninja rose from his seated position and considered striking the death blow now, while the others on board seemed riveted to the imaging screens. But he was unable to touch the hilt of the wakizashi thrust into his belt.

  He stared unbelieving at his own hands. They were unchanged, familiar. Yet it seemed that he had never really seen them before. The weapons work of a lifetime had hardened them. They were as strong as a raptor’s claws, and as deadly.

  “Ishida! What is the matter with you, man? Lend a hand here!” The shogun’s nephew, Minamoto, spoke sharply and commandingly. He and the second gaijin were struggling, awkwardly in the absence of gravity, to move the dazed Kr-san out of the pilot’s chair and onto a cleared area on the deck. The tall gaijin's eyes were still unfocused, but his lips were drawn back in a snarling gesture that made him look terrifyingly like a hunting animal. The impression was so strong that Ishida had to recite a sutra to calm himself sufficiently to touch the foreigner.

  His skin was hot, as though his body temperature were degrees higher than normal. His respiration made growling noises in his throat. And the cats hovered over him, furiously protective, teeth bared, ears flattened, fur on end. One of them, the older female, uttered a taut, challenging wail of rage as he touched the foreigner.

  “All right!” Minamoto Kantaro said. “Leave it, then. Don’t anger them.”

  The ninja retreated, watching in disbelief. He had never seen a living leopard or tiger. He knew them only from the books and films brought long ago from Earth aboard the Hachiman. Yet for one insane instant it seemed to him that the gaijin had not been a man at all, but a long, pale-skinned cat.

  Duncan, near to shock from the swiftly changing states, opened his eyes. The first image that registered on his brain was the intense cat face of Mira, her gaze fixed upon him. He instantly translated her expression with a clarity never possible to him before. Mira regarded him with a mixture of fear, concern, and a hunger to continue the chase. She was communicating, urgently, but in images that were far from the human referents he had been using all his life. He became aware that for the first time he had shared the feline mystery in a way no man had ever done before. The experience had changed both cat and man profoundly. He shifted his gaze to Pronker. (He knew of course that Pronker was not his name; it was not even an approximation of the gestalt that identified this cat and made it possible for Duncan to know him in a population of millions.) Little Hana uttered a soft meow and ran her raspy tongue across his cheek. I know you, small sister, Duncan thought. We shared a dark savannah. Instantly, from Mira, whose true name was a symphonic cascade of sensations and sounds and smells and tastes, came a sending that was received with a clarity as powerful as hot sunlight.

  “The cruel one is out there. We are very near. I want to kill it. “

  No adult human being would communicate so basic a desire with such singleness of purpose. A brilliant child might put it in such terms, but human adults spent their lives unlearning such directness.

  Duncan struggled to sit erect. His heart still raced. The breath was thick in his throat with the smells of the savannah that Mira’s and Hana’s and Pronker’s distant forebears had known and passed on across tens of thousands of generations to these three. The miracle was stunning in its implications.

  Damon and Kantaro supported Duncan as he steadied his overloaded senses.

  Damon looked closely at Duncan and whispered, “Thank God you’re alive, Captain.”

  Before Duncan could reply, the confined space rang with a cry of mingled terror, astonishment and disbelief.

  “Minamoto-sama! Look! Oh, God, look at the sky!”

  Duncan pushed aside Damon and Kantaro and steadied himself on the holographic screen of an imager. What he saw took his breath away.

  Duncan Kr had become a creature of Deep Space. When he departed the majestic coasts of his homeworld where the mists fell but could never quite obscure the sky-filling grandeur of the great Moon Bothwell--the commanding object that dominated the heavens above Thalassa’s endless, turbid seas--he had never expected to see anything so grand again.

  But this ...

  He flew to the closed port that opened directl
y into space. “Draw back the shutters,” he shouted. “Draw them back!”

  The young pilot looked at Kantaro. The shutters of the direct ports were never opened aboard a mass-depletion ship. It was the opinion of the physicians, those few who had been in the Near Away, that prolonged exposure to the blank emptiness of the medium through which the small ships moved was a temptation to mental instabilities.

  “Do what Kr-san orders!” Kantaro said in a voice he did not recognize as his own. He, too, had caught a glimpse of the image in the holo projector.

  The shutters slid back into their sheaths and the port opened like a diaphragm so that only crystal glass separated the men at the port from what lay beyond.

  Duncan felt a hand close around his heart. He had seen much, but not this. Never anything like this.

  The ambiguity of the Near Away was gone. The Terror had opened another Gateway and the MD ship had plunged through it in pursuit.

  To what appeared to be the celestial north the sky was ablaze, thickly populated with young stars scintillating in flaming colors against the obsidian darkness of space.

  Duncan gripped the frame of the port with both hands. Blood from his injuries oozed between his fingers. He searched the overarching vault of the alien heaven. In this region of the sky, the stars were colder, older, less exuberant. Duncan looked across an unpopulated gulf of darkness. It was as though he stood naked on the edge of infinity.

  The ship lay near the edge of an elliptical cloud of suns, and beyond, across the dark southern sky, lay the most gorgeous object he had ever seen.

  Spread across a third of the great starry vault lay a nebula, an immense galaxy with spiral arms alive with colors. At the center of the great disk rose a cloudy mountain of stars that resembled the tumbled silvery mists of Thalassa.

  I know that mountain of star-mist, Duncan thought. I know the Great Nebula, too, though I have never seen it from this angle. The stellar cloud where I stand is also something I have seen--from an enormous distance.

  And beyond the nebula lay another star cloud, diamond bright against the clear dark of Deep Space. Even if I could not see it ablaze with stars beyond the vast, perfect spiral, Duncan thought, I would recognize it.

  He closed his eyes against the tears that formed unbidden under his lids. He thought, I do know this place. I have dreamed of it all my years in space.

  We stand on the edge of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, Duncan thought. The distant star cloud is the Greater Magellanic Cloud. And that is M31--so near one might almost reach out and touch it. Oh, Black Clavius, Duncan thought. How you would delight to be in this place. The old Starman would surely stand here, and in his resonant voice he would proclaim the words of the Psalmist:

  “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.”

  Filled with the wonder of it, Duncan said, “We are two million light-years from home.”

  Though he should not have been, he was amazed by the reaction of his human companions. Have we become so dulled, Duncan thought, so accustomed to the safety of the familiar, that we cannot see what has happened to us? We are the children of Earth, he thought, a small planet lost in a great and now distant galaxy. Yet here we stand amid the suns of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

  He looked at his human companions in surprise. All that I see, he thought, is fear. Desolation. Isolation. The glory of what we have done means nothing to them. Damon, at least, should share my joy, Duncan thought. He is a Starman. But fear and shock robbed one of the exaltation that was due.

  Duncan looked from Damon to Kantaro to the MD pilot and finally to the brooding Ishida. “We have done what no one has ever done,” he said. “We have turned the Einsteinian laws upside down. Does that mean nothing to you?”

  The men looked at him with dumb fear in their eyes. The cats sat in the pilot’s chair, indifferent, now that the moment had passed, to the meaning of their impossible journey. The Folk only waited impatiently to carry on the chase, to find the dark enemy, to kill it.

  “Mira, “ Duncan thought. “Can you explain it?”

  Mira showed no interest whatever in explaining anything. Her tail lashed the cushions of the pilot’s chair, announcing that she was interested only in getting on with the chase--finishing it with the kill. The cats had enormous Talents and abilities, but they were simply not interested in any distance that could not be covered in a leap.

  Damon Ng lowered his head and spoke in a strained, low voice. “We are ordinary men, Master and Commander. We do not see things as you do. It takes us more time.”

  “There is no more time,” Minamoto Kantaro said. “Look.” Approaching from the direction of the celestial pole at a speed that shifted their images to blue, a fleet of ships was drawing near. Duncan studied the vessels intently. Who could know, he thought, what beings were contained in those nearly relativistic hulls?

  For the first time since penetrating this space, the Kaian Ishida Minoru spoke. His voice was ragged with tension. Duncan recognized the signs of impending emotional cascade. “Those ships,” Ishida said, “look at them. They are warships.” He flexed his hands as though to draw the katana--which he did not carry--from a scabbard. He glared at Duncan. “You brought us here, Starman. You brought us to this spirit place to die without the comfort of our gods or the honor of our clan--”

  Kantaro got a grip on his own fears and said sharply, “Since when did a ninja fear dying?”

  Duncan reacted automatically, but it was still too late. A short blade materialized in Ishida’s hand and he leapt at Kantaro. “Nooo!” wailed Damon. “You’ll draw the thing to us!”

  But it was already too late. The young pilot, acting on his own secret instructions from Minamoto no Kami, produced a laze pistol and raised it in the direction of Ishida.

  Ishida switched his attack from Kantaro instantly and struck with the short-bladed wakizashi, drawing the blade through the young man’s neck as tidily as a surgeon. Blood from a severed carotid artery fountained in the near-zero gravity.

  Kantaro had also drawn a weapon, but Duncan stepped between him and Ishida. He delivered a single blow with a rock-hard fist and the Kaian was lifted from the deck to rebound like a rubber man from the blood-drenched pilot’s console. Duncan caught him by an arm and twisted it behind him with such violence that he felt it break in his grip. “Enough!” he commanded, shaken by his own anger.

  But it was already far more than enough. Between the distant alien ships and the MD craft, a darkness had formed, a vast, dark shape laced with streaks of angry fire. Duncan felt the unreasoning rage of the thing. It was no different here, two million light-years from home, than it had been in the Ross Stars: lonely fury, killing rage. And fear. Fear of the creatures that had coursed it across the miles and light-years and parsecs without pause or caution.

  The beings in the warships were empaths. Whatever their intent, they forewarned the Terror with the waves of emotion that preceded them. The Dark Intruder had come this way before, Duncan guessed.

  Duncan took the fighting chair and initialized the lazegun. Kantaro took the pilot’s place. The cats yowled their fighting cries as the MD, under Kantaro’s guidance, came to life and moved, with shocking acceleration, in the direction of the coming battle.

  33. A War Above The Sky

  Minamoto Kantaro, sweat-streaked and disheveled, took command of the MD ship as it accelerated toward the swirling dark that blotted out the strange, bright stars. The mass-depletion coils had converted most of the ship’s mass to energy in the passage through the Near Away. How much remained was unknown. The MDs were experimental craft, not intended for violent and lengthy adventures in the Near Away or wherever else outside normal space they might find themselves.

  For over a thousand years it had been assumed by all Terrestrial colonists that fighting in space was next to impossible. As far as Earth’s colonial children were concerned, a space-warship was an oxymoron. Or had been, until now.

  “We have almost no maneuv
ering mass, Kr-san,” Kantaro reported. “I will have to make the shortest, most direct approach.”

  Duncan charged the laze rifle mounted in the nose section of the MD. “Do it,” he said. He glanced at the proximity radar screen. The Terror was off the inner range scale. The targets beyond, more than a thousand of them, formed an encircling pattern at ranges of from one to two hundred kilometers. Their delta had fallen from nearly ten thousand kilometers per hour at approach to less than a thousand as they closed.

  “Those ships are big, “ Duncan said. The size of the alien craft shocked him. They were larger than Glory and bristling with sinister projections that Duncan suspected were weapons. But the fleet was primitive, even by Goldenwing standards. Ships such as these would be useless in the space Duncan knew, even for planetary exploration, unless the beings who owned them were physically enormous and lived long, very slow lives. Duncan did not get that impression. What he sensed was anger and fear that were almost Terrestrial in character.

  What could have persuaded a spacefaring culture to devote the resources necessary to build such an armada as this? The answer emanated empathically from the alien fleet. What the aliens aboard their great slow battleships sought was revenge. Duncan had guessed that the Terror had passed this way before. This confrontation confirmed it. But how long ago had all this taken place? The elapsed time-span was staggering. If these people were as bound by their temporal frame of reference as were Terrestrials, the probability was that they had been preparing for this engagement for whatever interval passed for millennia in this place. They were ready at a moment’s notice to swarm into the sky and defend their civilization. The concept of such fear and hatred was staggering--even to one with Duncan’s record of struggle with the Terror. These creatures must have detected the Terror’s approach, and over a span of time that had lasted moments to those aboard the MD ship but must have lasted--here and now for these beings--months, years, even millennia, or whatever units of time they used to organize their lives.