Land of the Dead

by Thomas Harlan

  “You’re next,” he barked, seizing her by the lanyard loop on her belt and handing her off to the last of the Team Three marines ducking into the hole. “Get her core-ward, Gunso! There’s an engineering console at the junction of the fourth spaceframe and compartment ninety-six on this class—she needs to be there, and working, in eleven minutes!”

  Get inside, Chu-sa; I’ve got gun emplacements in motion up here.

  “My men are still outside, Sencho, keep your rotation and head back down the drive-wake. They’ll punch you full of holes other—”

  The Wilful suddenly rippled from one end to the other as a wave of burning pinpoints and wild color swept across her. Mitsuharu gaped, watching in stunned surprise as the freighter pulled the raiment of heaven over her head and disappeared from visual sight. “Goddess of the dawn,” he breathed, “I’ve been sold a lame horse!”

  * * *

  Team Four was inside the hatch in less than one hundred and sixty seconds, though the time lag dragged into an eternity for the Chu-sa as he crouched at the edge of the hatchway, urging them on. As far as he could tell, the Wilful had entirely vanished. He couldn’t see maneuvering jet flare, star-occlusion, anything to tell where she was. Despite this, he guessed De Molay was waiting it out, hiding in plain sight, so when the last of his men had dropped inside the hull, Mitsuharu climbed down himself, squirting “twenty-four seconds” on his earbug before the shipskin cut off the transmission.

  The maintenance hatch airlock was a wreck, all plasma-burns and torn metal. The inner airlock was no better, and as soon as Hadeishi was inside the hull proper, his radio burst alive with the combat-chatter of men running, fighting, being killed, the roar of gunfire and the distant unmistakable whine of a monofilament saw cutting into hexacarbon. The interior of the ship seemed mostly unchanged, at least on this deck, though the old Imperial signage had been torn down and replaced, or pasted over, with Khadesh equivalents.

  The marine Gunso commanding Team Three was waiting as Hadeishi kicked through a secondary interior door, just past the corridors servicing the cargo bay. “Shut this hatch,” the Chu-sa snapped. “We’ve artillery incoming.”

  A pair of Team Four kashikan-hei slammed the portal closed, rotating the manual locking mechanism. “Report, sergeant.”

  The marine grinned, his faceplate scored with black streaks. “Kyo, this compartment’s secure and we’ve punched through to the shipcore along the immediate axis. Cargo elevators are knocked out, as is the tube car system. There’s atmosphere in most compartments, but not all. We blew out a set of blast doors at frame three and I’ve got the combat team pushing downdeck towards frame four—”

  At that moment, the ship groaned and everything shuddered. The overheads flickered, shading from a Khaid-friendly bright white to a more normal yellow tone, then popped back. The alarms, which had been blaring since Mitsuharu had entered the primary hull, shifted tone—now they squealed like a pierced bladderfish.

  “We’re hit!” The Gunso stared at the ceiling. “Sounded like a bomb-pod going off at short range.”

  Hadeishi shook his head, starting to grin ferally. “The freighter’s lit off her maneuver drives. I doubt she’ll punch through the shipskin, but we need to abandon this corridor. Move everyone downdeck towards the engineering ring. That’s where we’ll settle this.”

  Then he—and the others—were thrown violently to one side as the light cruiser went into some violent evolution and the g-decking on their whole ring fluctuated. Hadeishi hit the wall hard, feeling chitin splinter, and then bounced back as the decking failed entirely. He tucked in tight, getting his feet under before hitting the far wall. The marine had done the same. One of the kashikan-hei was floating limp, his faceplate filled with crimson bubbles.

  “Move!” Mitsuharu pulled himself along the guiderail set into the wall, heading downdeck as fast as he could. The Gunso followed with the other kashikan-hei, the two men dragging a spool of comm-wire and a repeater with them. The hammering roar of shipguns swelled in on the radio feed, and from the sound of his team commanders shouting, the Chu-sa guessed the Khaid on board were counterattacking along the shipcore.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Hadeishi swung himself through a jagged hole hacked from a sidewall and into the engineering station at frame four. The room, controlling the cruiser’s dorsal power mains and shipskin sensor nodes, was tucked in behind a thermocouple relay and the motors for a pair of the big cargo elevators. Dead Khaid were webbed to one of the walls, and everything was scorched by plasma-cutter backwash.

  Lovelace had found the main console, but she was engaged in a furious shouting match with one of the engineers when Mitsuharu reached her.

  “Kyo,” the Kikan-shi pleaded, turning towards him, “she’s going to get us all killed—she wants to—”

  Hadeishi stopped the engineer with a cold glance. His face was rigid when he turned to the comm officer. “We’re four minutes behind schedule and you’ve already been here at least that long. What’s wrong?”

  “This idiot,” Lovelace spat, wrenching her field comp from the Kikan-shi’s hands. “Is trying to convince me we can crack the authorization codes for the shipnet interface by guessing them with something he’s hacked together on his hand-comp.”

  “We don’t have time. Give me that cutter.” Hadeishi hooked one boot under the console, took the proffered plasma cutter—a small one, not the big industrial version they’d used on the wall—and sliced open the paneling directly under the display panel. “There are thirty-six billion combinations allowed in the authorization interface of a Spear-class cruiser, Engineer. There’s a lockout after fifteen tries in the base software—and we don’t have time to work around that.” He shoved aside a handful of hardwired data threads, and found—by feel—a comm node nestled behind them in the kind of socket that Defense Consortium salesmen liked to say was “easy to service, but hard to dislodge accidentally.”

  “Sho-i, you ready up there?” Mitsuharu plucked a multitool from his belt and wiggled half his shoulder into the panel.

  “Ready, Chu-sa.” Lovelace’s voice was tight and trembling on the edge of open panic. “Are you really sure—”

  “It worked before,” Mitsuharu said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible. At the academy, on a different class of training cruiser—but from the same manufacturing yard and design shop—if memory serves. “Shorting the shipnet relay for this compartment—now.” He jammed the tool’s screwdriver into the node’s service socket and twisted to the right, grinding his wrist against the bundle of data threads. There was a sharp, bright flash and he felt his glove spark. “Done!”

  The lights went out. There were a series of explosions very close by, followed by the high-pitched whine of shipguns on full automatic opening up. I didn’t mean to do that.

  “They’re in the corridor,” barked the Gunso on the team radio. “Power’s down in the whole compartment!”

  “Hachiman’s spear, they’ve cut the mains!” Hadeishi popped up from under the console, finding the room had cleared save for Sho-i Lovelace, who was staring at him with wide eyes. The engineering panel was dead, along with the overheads and everything else in the room save one emergency light which had flickered on to shed a feeble reddish glow.

  “No power,” she bleated, pointing at the lightless displays.

  Mitsuharu glared around the room, and then caught sight of her field comp, which was still humming away. “Powercell—pull the powercells from everything you’ve got. Move!”

  Lovelace’s face cleared and she tore open the satchel, dragging out two Fleet-standard cells, just like the ones that ran her comp. “Here—and I’ve an adapter!”

  Hadeishi was back under the panel, one ear listening to the scrum in the hallway, with both cells in his hands and the adapter wrapped around one wrist. The choonk of a grenade launcher punched through all the other noise and he hooked an arm out, grabbing the Sho-i by the foot. “Down!” She yelped, pitching over backward, ju
st as the doorway billowed with smoke, shrapnel, and the whine of flechettes. Two sharp booms followed, and then the marine Gunso ducked back in.

  “They’re coming again, Chu-sa—I can hear ’em howling up past the bathrooms at that junction.”

  “One minute,” Hadeishi replied. “Jacking power to the console—now.”

  Lovelace rose up enough to see the display, watching as the interface flickered to life. An unfamiliar set of v-panes unfolded, filled with the tight columns of technical Khadesh, but the arrangement was familiar enough, and some of the icons were still Fleet standard issue. “Panel’s coming up; switching to maintenance—”

  Under the console, Hadeishi rotated the comm node to face him and saw the main power feed was still in place. Gingerly—there was no telling if the Khaid up on Command would decide to flip the mains back on—he levered the connector out. “Node is dead, no power!”

  “I’m in maintenance mode on the console, Chu-sa. Overwriting the diagnostics suite now.”

  Lovelace’s field comp, plugged socket-to-socket into the sub-comp running the console itself, chuckled and whirred for approximately four seconds, reloading the tools, interface image, and ’net matrix which ran the display itself. All of the v-panes went blank for an instant, and then reappeared, now showing the Fleet-standard interface.

  “We’re live,” Lovelace said, keying a blur of commands with a stylus in either hand.

  The Gunso at the door caught Hadeishi’s eye, signing They’re coming.

  Mitsuharu nodded, flipping himself out from under the console. He had the second powercell in his hand, thumb on the safety switch. “Twenty seconds, Sho-i, and you’ll be back on the shipnet.”

  “Ready,” she snapped, back in her element, thin-boned face gleaming with the reflected light of the v-panes unfolding like a thousand blooming flowers on the display. Hadeishi flipped the switch, feeling the cell come to life, and his earbug suddenly woke up as an Imperial-standard comm frequency flooded the room. “Hit it.”

  Lovelace keyed a complicated, thirty-six ideogram sequence. A screaming howl rose on their radios—the sound of a hunting pack in full cry—and the Gunso at the door ducked out, his shipgun hammering away at some unseen target. A pane popped up on the display, filled with warning notices in white lettering on a red background. Mitsuharu leaned over the panel, waiting for the authorization glyph to appear.

  When it did, he keyed the reset code distributed by the Fleet to all commanding officers in the event of their encountering—or capturing—a starship of Imperial manufacture in inhuman hands. There was a tidy business in reselling retired Fleet spacecraft—some of which found their way into service with hostile powers. Too, the Fleet did—occasionally—lose ships in battle, ships that might be refurbished or rebuilt by those with the technical infrastructure to do so.

  Another blast, larger than the last, smashed at the doorway, flinging the Gunso back into the room. Smoke billowed from something burning, filling the air with thousands of tiny black globules. A hulking figure, easily a meter taller than any of Hadeishi’s team, bounced through the opening.

  The Yilan bucked twice in quick succession against Mitsuharu’s shoulder, his thigh braced against the console, and the Khaid was thrown back, chest armor splintering as the blast hit him square-on. Lovelace squealed, ducking under the console.

  “Sho-i, back to your station!” Hadeishi shouted, dodging across the room with a kick. He got an angle on the corridor, saw there was hand-to-hand fighting amongst a swirl of figures—nearly all of them in Khaid armor—and double-tapped the tallest attacker he could see. “Seal every hatch, door, ventilator, and compartment partition from frame four updeck, and flood the Command ring with fire-suppression foam!”

  THE NANIWA

  The battle-cruiser had accelerated inbound at superluminal, having found the hyper gradient dropping off precipitously as they moved away from the Barrier. Now, having leapt three light-years from the Pinhole to the immediate vicinity of the rosette, her forward big eye filled with the ever-growing glare of the ejection jet. With initial repairs complete and Command fully staffed again, Koshō watched the plot unfold with a weather eye. The near edge of the vast shoal of debris was quickly approaching and she was on edge. There were more spectators on hand than she was used to. Prince Xochitl was still camped out in Secondary Command, and a v-pane showing his handsome but worn face had acquired a permanent—and unwelcome—place on her console.

  The camera displays revealed static undulations of deep purple hue, crested with orange from the glare of the plasma stream, which gradually resolved into strings of gigantic beads, and then into enormous individual entities drifting in a black soup of smaller, irregular material. Ship’s comp began scanning, trying to pattern-match the jagged shapes.

  Susan stood up slowly, both eyes on the screen, one hand on the edge of her console. She had already recognized what lay before them and the sheer scale of it held her speechless for a moment.

  At the XO’s console, Oc Chac stiffened as the first models began to flow onto his display from the comp analysis. “Ships!” he exclaimed. “They’re starships.”

  “All wrecked.” Holloway started to bite at a fingernail, before forcing his hands to the console.

  “A fleet of hundreds—no, thousands!” Prince Xochitl’s expression was a study in mingled awe and excitement. He looked off-screen, and then said: “Initial analysis detects four thousand, thirty-four objects in this debris field which are likely starships of some provenance.”

  “The Prince is impressed,” Susan said without emotion. What will he want to do with an armada of leviathans that perished deep in the abyss of time, leaving us only traces of their titanic struggle? And Queen of Heaven, four thousand ships? There might not be four thousand starships of this size in the entire Empire!

  Oc Chac sat down again, spreading his hands to indicate the spectra telemetry duly generated by ship-comp. “This is all old. Ancient. Who were they, Gensui?”

  Xochitl did not respond, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. Koshō stirred herself, saying: “We have more pressing concerns, Sho-sa. Radiation levels from that accretion disc are climbing by the hour. Reconfigure the shipskin for maximum protection and pull in any sensor booms or nodes which may be adversely affected.”

  In his v-pane, the Prince stirred, anger shading his expression.

  “However,” Susan continued, shooting Xochitl a quelling look. “We want as detailed a scan as we can manage, while maintaining hull integrity and our protection, as we pass through the wreckage. Pay close attention for energy sources! Thai-i Holloway, please find us a path through with as little debris as possible.”

  * * *

  The Naniwa edged through the ancient armada, her engines at one-quarter, booms extended, and the shipskin deployed for maximum data absorption in those parts of the battle-cruiser which were not inhabited. Koshō was back on the bridge, a great feeling of unease riding her shoulders, as the massive shapes drifted past on the camera displays. The alien vessels were enormous—far larger than even the Tlemitl—and formed of three “wings” joined at a central core. Most were shattered, showing gaping wounds in the unknown metal, but despite this—to her eye—Susan was gaining the uncomfortable impression that all of the ships were of a very similar kind.

  “Even the smallest is the size of one of our colony stations,” the Prince mused. He had not left Secondary Command in almost thirty-six hours, obsessively reviewing every data-point as it flowed across the sensor network.

  “Chu-sa.” Konev’s voice barely concealed his eagerness. “Should we dispatch an exploration team? We could board one of the smaller wrecks! Maybe there is something useful to be gleaned, like a memory core or a switch capable of controlling the thread-barrier? Even a training manual?”

  Prince Xochitl interrupted before Susan could reply. “A waste of time! I need something in operation, Chu-sa. This is all”—he made an angry motion towards the wraparound v-display configured in Seconda
ry Command—“a diversion.”

  That would be “no,” thought Koshō, hiding her reaction behind an impassive, cool mask.

  “Hai, Lord Prince,” she replied, then shook her head at the Russian. “Not one energy source has cropped up in the scan data, Thai-i. We’d need a proper science team to evaluate all of this.”

  Xochitl nodded, satisfied, and then turned away to stare at the vista playing out on his screens.

  Susan was not pleased. So we leave Chekov’s famous pistol lying beside the road at our backs. What can the man want with an “operating mechanism?” Does he believe that we can divine or control something of this magnitude without any technical resources to draw on?

  More troubling was the intuition that the Prince believed exactly that. Koshō tried to put the issue from her mind, tapping up the latest data from the remote she’d dropped at the Pinhole. Nothing had yet appeared from out of the Barrier, but she didn’t believe her luck would hold in that respect either. Wish we’d had more mines left.…

  * * *

  Six hours later, they had completed their passage of the wrecked fleet and come within viewing range of the structure, which stood at a resonance point formed by the gravity wells of the three brown dwarves—now huge, distorted discs on the display, shedding a ruddy glare which the v-panes automatically blocked out—and the swirling vortex of the accretion disc hiding the singularity. Each sun was distended, extruding a long tail of mass corkscrewing down into the black hole.

  “Kyo? We’ve lost hyper gradient—the local g field is tremendously distorted.” Thai-i Olin licked his lips nervously. “Something emanating from that—object—is maintaining field equilibrium. While we’re inside its influence … there’s no way we can punch through to superluminal.”