Land of the Dead

by Thomas Harlan

  “Your crew, kyo.” His left hand stabbed at the hull beneath their feet. “These men and women toiling inside, all effort concentrated to our safety. They are my enemy, and a cunning, devious one they are, too! More than a match for all fail-safes and interlocks, able to overcome every restraint we put upon them.

  Koshō attempted to keep her expression still, but Oc Chac snarled at something in her countenance. “Still, Chu-sa, you do not understand. Listen!

  “The Agarwal was a Fleet battleship in the Vishnu-class. A planetary commission financed by the colonies around Maghada Prime. Two thousand, five hundred crew. Lost with all hands off Tau Ceti during her second trials. The wreck was recovered and the Zosen tore the remains of the ship apart, seeking to understand her death.

  “This much they found—” he held his thumb and forefinger apart by the smallest fraction. “One of the waste recirculators failed behind a bulkhead, seeping biochemical sludge into the between-hull. Line-sensors reported the initial leak, but the engineering tech investigating the alert did not enter the between-hull. Instead he checked the flow meters on either end of the line, saw they were within variance of each other, and then suppressed the alert.

  “The sludge—containing a robust strain of mycelium—seeped through the between-decks, multiplying vigorously. Now it infiltrated the air circulators for a series of sleeping compartments and poisoned the men occupying those quarters. A contamination alert was triggered, but the men didn’t realize they were suffering from mycotoxic infection when they went on shift. A sanitation crew arrived after they had left—and by then it was too late. Two of the uchu were gunnery crewmen and began suffering violent hallucinations at their duty station. Agarwal was destroyed by a sprint missile ignited in the launch-rack by mistake.”

  Susan said nothing, waiting for the Mayan to continue. After a long moment, Chac continued: “The technician refused to enter the between-hull because one of his coworkers had suffered a bad injury in the same area during construction. The man had lost his left arm when his z-suit was ruptured by a dislodged stanchion. His z-suit autosealed, of course, but the severed limb was too badly damaged by cyanosis by the time the rest of the work crew got him inside.”

  “And what,” Susan asked, now truly curious, “would you have done to prevent this?”

  “Chu-sa, my purpose is to address kaach’al—the things which are broken. To mend them. One of the most curious things to repair is men’s apprehension—their fear of ill-luck. Had I been aboard the Agarwal, then my huitzitzilnahaualli and I would have attended to the compartments where the man was injured. And every crewman aboard would have known of what happened and how any ill-luck was taken away from that place.”

  “What?” Koshō could not help herself. “How is this not wild superstition?”

  Oc Chac shook his head in dismay.“How is a dwelling haunted, Chu-sa? There is nothing that can be measured, no true apparitions to behold—but you enter and feel a deadly chill, you walk night-drowned hallways and your heart races with quiet panic. What makes this dreadful place so different from your parents’ quiet peaceful garden where your heart finds ease?

  “Nothing! Do not delude yourself, kyo, every centimeter of Anáhuac is drenched in blood. No meter of the earth has not seen murder, rape, betrayal, theft … if you knew the provenance of every stone in that garden, you would recoil, your mind’s eye filling with the blood of the innocent, your ears with the shrieks of those enslaved or betrayed. There is no difference between the cursed dwelling and the beautiful garden, save that you do not know what has occurred there.

  “This is the purpose of the huitzil—to go into these dreadful places, to show himself to all, for his feathered cloak to shine alabaster white, to take upon himself the burden of this ill-luck, these curses, this dreadful karma—before an entire crew, a nation, a planet. And by his sacrifice, to ease so many minds and lighten so many hearts that you can, once more, lift the tool, use the chamber, send the ship of war into the face of the enemy with an unburdened heart.”

  He fell silent, and Koshō did not speak. Instead, she stepped away, circling among the radiating fins, her head bowed in thought. When at last her steps led back to the old Mayan, she regarded him with a new appreciation and a faint smile.

  “Then you cannot leave the ship until all is done, can you?”

  Chac shook his head sharply. “Chu-sa, you cannot have her for—at least!—another three weeks. Then you can catch up with your admiral! I will not authorize release from the yards until then.”

  “Very well.” Susan removed the second packet from her pouch. “Sho-sa MacMillan will not be joining us from the Akashi. He has been brevetted to command in place of her late captain. And I must replace him with someone the men trust, particularly if they are wary of me and my inexperience.”

  “Very wise, kyo,” the Mayan nodded sharply. “You will not interfere with my duties?”

  “I will not. But I will guide them, as needed, and expect you to perform admirably.” With this she presented the packet and gave an abbreviated, but proper bow. “Welcome to the Naniwa, Sho-sa Oc Chac. I’ve had the orderlies move your gear to the XO’s cabin—a bit more spacious than your old bunk, I trust, but not palatial!”

  Chac stared at the orders packet, then at her in horror. “Impossible, kyo. Zosen are not Fleet line of battle officers! I’ve no—”

  “Due to his knowledge of the crew, the ship, and all on-board systems,” Susan recited from memory, “Oc Chac-tzin is the most expedient and effective replacement available for MacMillan.”

  She squared her shoulders, regarding the older man with a stern expression. He was struggling to frame a response.

  “Sho-sa, we have sixteen hours to finish loading supplies and get underway. The rest of the squadron is already formed up off Europa—two more battle-cruisers in Tokiwa and Asama, with the heavy cruisers Axe, Gladius, Falchion, and Mace as escorts for the Fleet tender Hanuman and the science platforms Fiske and Eldredge. They’re our real purpose, I expect.”

  Chac let out a long, sober hiss of dismay.

  “The Mirror, kyo.”

  Koshō lifted one eyebrow. The battle-group manifest was terse but could not disguise the throw-weight surrounding the two exploration ships. “What suggests this?”

  “Sealed orders, Chu-sa, we’ve had no real-time 3-v onto the stellarcast in weeks. No regular mail coming or going. All incoming manifests under crypt, but you’re doubled on every kind of ration, repair-part, and munitions they can pack in. Be gone…” The Mayan pursed his lips, calculating stowage. “At least nine months.”

  “Back of beyond…” Susan smiled tightly, tapping her own orders packet. “Stepping out into the big dark.”

  “A bad omen, kyo,” Chac growled, “a very poor precedent. The festival of Mictecacihuatl is underway…”

  “Prove them wrong, Sho-sa. Dispel this apprehension.” She paused minutely. “Put on a brave face!”

  * * *

  Two days later, with her comm-panel singed by a vitriolic series of messages from her commander, Chu-sho—or Vice Admiral—Xocoyotl, Koshō was on the bridge of the Naniwa as she matched velocity with the rest of the battle-group nearly sixty million kilometers off Europa. One pane of her command comp showed their approach to gradient as a sharply narrowing spike.

  Below her and to one side, Oc Chac was standing behind the two Thai-i on the Navigation boards, gnarled hands clasped behind his back.

  “There’s the go-ahead, kyo,” he announced. Mace and Falchion were in the lead, and both cruisers had cut maneuvering thrust in preparation for transit.

  “They’re not wasting time.” Susan switched to the all-hands channel. “All hands prepare to make gradient. Transit in five minutes. Repeat, transit in five minutes.”

  Susan sat back, her heart steady, looking for a moment upon the golden orb of Jupiter arrayed behind the blue-black of nightside Europa. Where now, she wondered. An ancient jisei crossed her mind as the whine of the main coil began to
shudder through the decking, lifting the fine hairs on her arms and making her inner ear sing in counterpoint.

  Rise, let us go—

  along the path lies

  the clear dew.

  THE WILFUL

  Hadeishi woke, feeling the ship drop from transit with a twisting sensation. Almost immediately a subsystem somewhere in the ceiling kicked into operation. With a frown he realized that a capacitor was discharging at sharp, staccato intervals. Transit shielding is taking a hit; he thought and swung down easily from the hammock. His boots, a heavy jacket he’d scrounged, and his tool belt peeled off the wall easily enough. Out of habit, he tugged at the bolt cutters, hand-torch, welding arc, and other useful items on the belt. All were secure. Though the ship was under acceleration and there was gravity of a sort, he’d spent too many long-suffering hours as a cadet to trust even Fleet g-decking.

  He padded to the engineering boards in the outer room and ran through a quick checklist.

  We’re running hot, he saw, and tapped open a series of v-panes showing exterior telemetry. There was only one hull camera patched through to Engineering—which was odd of itself—and it revealed only a confused roil of dust clouds shot with intermittent points of reddish light. But the shielding monitors were in constant motion, registering thousands of impacts a second. Hadeishi frowned and his stylus—dug out of a crevice behind the main comp panel—skittered quickly across the control surface. Two more capacitors dropped into the circuit, and the secondary fusion pump shivered awake.

  “Captain didn’t ask for that,” growled a voice at his shoulder. Hadeishi nodded, feeling Azulcay’s scrutiny hot on his neck. “What are you thinking?”

  “In protostellar debris like this,” Mitsuharu said, his voice level and unconcerned, “sensor reaction times degrade—sometimes masking something more massive behind lesser dust. The shielding control relays would have tried to bring more capacity on-line—but by then, we might have lost deflection … and even if the deflectors snapped back in time to push aside something big…”

  “We’d already be punched full of a thousand little holes.” The engineer grunted in agreement and then—with a grudging air—went through his own checklist on the panels. Hadeishi stepped away, keeping a polite distance, and took a moment to make sure his boots were strapped tight and all of the tools in his belt were in place.

  When he looked up, Azulcay was peering curiously at the video feeds, one olive-skinned hand scratching at his tight, curly beard. “What is this place?” The Marocâin tapped the v-pane with a ragged fingernail. “Can we run for long in this much debris?”

  “Depends on how fast the captain tries to go,” Mitsuharu said quietly. “May I?”

  The man nodded, and Hadeishi folded most of the v-panes away, replacing them with a large single pane containing the camera feed surrounded by a constellation of smaller displays showing hit rates and the status of the various shielding nodes on the outer hull. For some time he scrutinized the ocean of dimly lighted debris streaming alongside as the Wilful pressed onward. Thrust rates from the engines seemed to indicate the captain was pressing a hard course. The dust thickened as they watched, showing whorls and patterns in the fitful light.

  Mitsuharu weighed the time since last they had passed an Imperial navigation beacon. Out of range of Search and Rescue, I think. One of the sensor panels dinged quietly, warning of scattered asteroidal fragments in the murk. The ship shifted course minutely and the engineer let out a soft whistle.

  “Someone upstairs is paying attention … but we’d better get ready for damage con—”

  The comp displays on the main panel wavered, blinked twice, and went dark. The engineer cursed fluently in Norman, then jerked a frayed power cable from its socket in the back of the board. “Gimme those spacers and a meter probe.”

  Hadeishi had the tools in hand already, and he hid a smile at how quickly the action had become second nature. For all his faults, Azulcay knew far more about the Wilful’s systems than anyone else. The Wilful’s mix of systems were not up to Fleet standard, and they made a constantly mutating puzzle to unravel.

  “There!” The Marocâin scrambled up from behind the console as the screen flickered to life again, revealing even an ever-thicker murk, now glowing in long striated bands with the light of some distant, unseen star. “Damn, it’s worse.”

  Mitsuharu nodded, though he noted the engineer did not open a comm channel to the bridge, or issue any kind of warning to the captain. Interesting, he wondered. His faith in the command staff is remarkable. In this murk, I would have my damage control crews in z-suits and waiting in the airlocks to go hullside.… The paucity of data irritated him immensely, but there was only a single, shielded comm run connecting the engineering spaces to the bridge. One camera, one shipnet conduit … we’re blind down here. Still, I should—

  “What the hell! We’re right on a moon.” Even as the Marocâin spoke, the rumble of the maneuvering drive hiccupped into a lower pitch. “That’s orbit. To stations!”

  Mitsuharu immediately took his place at the secondary console. It was the “station” he had appropriated from the beginning, giving him a reasonable view of the engineer’s panel and control of some useful secondary systems. A moon, he saw, but without a planet or star in reasonable distance. Only a dim glow illuminated the indistinct sphere. One could imagine ice-shrouded peaks piercing the roughened surface, but without better sensors it looked dimply red-purple, like the passing boulders.

  “Looks like a beat-up billiard ball,” Azulcay muttered. He looked curiously at Hadeishi. “Where’s the solar system? There’s no proper star in sensor range.”

  “Gravitational eddies could form a moon from stellar debris without forcing an orbit.” Mitsuharu shrugged. “Or the star could have lost fuel millions of years ago … who could say?”

  “See if you can get a read on…” The engineer stopped, listening.

  Hadeishi heard the sound, too, and reflexively hit the ALERT glyph on his control pane.

  “Explosions. Coming our…”

  The alarm began to blare, but the wailing noise did not drown out a succession of dull, heavy thuds.

  “We are attacked.” Who? I wonder. Perhaps Kryg’nth? A dull whoomp came from the direction of the nearest loading bay. Something dark and jagged flickered across the camera pickup before the entire control console died again with a massive thud that made the flooring shake. All the loading bays.

  “We’re boarded,” cursed the Marocâin.

  It wasn’t a question. Hadeishi was already sealing up his z-suit as Azulcay fumbled with his. The feeling of the suit gelling around his neck and face brought back a thousand memories. Wind was rattling the bamboo, making the surface of the stream flowing past at Musashi’s feet sparkle with tiny wavelets. A series of mossy boulders made an uneasy path to the far side. Kiyohara was poised on the largest of them, his nodachi slung insolently across his massive shoulders. “Come then,” the brigand shouted, “unsheath your famous blade, King of Swordsmen!” Behind him, on the far bank, the sally drew a raucous laugh from the dozens of ronin gathered there.

  “Gun locker code?” Hadeishi was at the armored cabinet, but the battle-steel door was properly secured. The engineer nodded, his face paling. Despite obvious fear, his fingers were steady enough to punch in the authorization code and the gray metal doors swung aside to reveal a brace of shipguns and two bandoliers of ammunition.

  “Pretty light,” Mitsuharu muttered, pulling a Bloem-Voss TK6 from the padded cradle. The civilian weapon only carried a single kind of round, a ship-safe flechette, and lacked a grenade launcher or a thermal sight. The Nisei had the bandolier over his shoulder and secured, with the gun tucked under his arm and lanyard snugged to his tool belt before the engineer had even managed to get the ammunition and snub-nosed rifle out of the cabinet.

  “Let me,” ordered the Nisei, quickly righting the civilian’s gear. “Follow me and shoot at anything you don’t recognize. But, please, not the ba
ck of my head.” The proper helmet for the z-suit slid down over Hadeishi’s brow and he locked the neckring with a practiced twist of his fingers.

  * * *

  A moment later, Mitsuharu eased out into the main corridor connecting the cargo bays to the shipcore. The overhead lights were flickering on and off as something interfered with environmental power, so he tripped the nearest panel and killed them entirely. Azulcay’s breathing was harsh and fast in his ear.

  “What’s—” Two crewmen bolted down the passageway towards them, followed immediately by a stabbing flare of gunfire. One of the spacers staggered and spun around, crashing into a wall. The other threw himself down, caught on the nonskid decking, and scrambled past them on hands and knees. Behind the gun-flashes, five or six bulky figures advanced at a quick pace, the muzzle of the leader’s gun glowing like a hot star in the gloom.

  The sideways, skittering approach of the invaders told the Nisei all he needed to know about the enemy which had overtaken them. Khaiden, he thought, a brief flash of memory bringing back visions of a bulky starship breaking apart under the impact of three well-placed shipkillers. The Cornuelle had taken severe structural damage in that affray, but shipboard losses had been light. We were lucky, part of his mind commented as he moved. They thought we were too small to—

  Hadeishi squeezed off a burst just low of the enemy gun in his sights, then darted aside into the corridor, his shipgun pointed at the floor. Answering fire raked the wall, shredding the paneling and sending the Marocâin into the nearest room with a yell. One of the Khaiden was down, and the others rushed forward. Mitsuharu stepped in, emptied the rest of his clip into the nearest hostile at point-blank range and then darted past, trying to burst past the following two in the darkness.

  The roar of Imperial guns filled the corridor behind him as the other crewman and the engineer opened up. Flechettes hissed past, spattering from his armor and Mitsuharu felt something clip his shoulder. He stumbled, thrown off balance and into the last of the Khaiden boarders.