Land of the Dead

by Thomas Harlan

  “Doubtful, Sho-sa. Their captains are pushing hard—the Khaid have little need of patience. They will be wounded, like us, but keen to bring us to ground. Time to cover?”

  Holloway eyed the plot. Fully half of the threatwell was a blizzard of icons representing the dead fleet. “Fifteen minutes to the nearest wrecks, Chu-sa. About twelve minutes until we’re inside the Khaid launch envelope.”

  “Deflector status, Chac-tzin?” Susan looked back to the Mayan. “Are we still running hot?”

  Oc Chac shook his head. “No, kyo. We can pull another three, four gravities.”

  “Give us a boost, Holloway-tzin. But don’t open the throttle wide—we need to be able to turn once we’re in the debris field.”

  The console under Susan’s fingers began to thrum with the vibration of the antimatter reactors chewing mass. “Nav—what are our options?”

  Thai-i Olin looked up from his console, shaking his head. “Active scan is showing a lot of small fragments between the hulks—no good avenues for us to maneuver down—no holes yet, to hide in.”

  “Find us something, Thai-i. Quickly now.” Koshō’s voice was pointed. “We have two minutes…”

  “Launch signatures!” Konev’s voice was relaxed, almost a drawl, but the tenseness in his arms was as clear to Susan as an ash-cloud over Mount Talol. “Sixty missile tracks are on the board.”

  “Initiating countermeasures.” Pucatli—at Comms—dumped the first of her spoofer pods.

  “Counter-fire, kyo?” Konev looked to Koshō with a fierce gleam shining in his eyes. “If we concentrate, we might knock one or two out before they close to gun range.”

  “Save your launchers, Thai-i. We need to conserve every shipkiller we have left.” Susan had already considered the fire rate from the on-rushing destroyers and their range of engagement. “Engage the missile cloud with kinetics and ECM starting at six minutes.”

  “Isn’t this a brawl, Chu-sa?” Oc Chac looked at her questioningly, his face pale with fatigue. “Even one or two of the enemy down at this range will even the odds appreciably.”

  Koshō lifted her chin, indicating the ’well. “Not yet, Sho-sa. This is 3-v Ullamaliztli with only one player left on our side. You played at Academy, I’m sure—”

  A warning Klaxon honked, cutting her off. A fresh icon popped into view on the ’well.

  “A Hayalet-class battleship, kyo.” Konev’s voice was tight as he reeled off the specifications of the new indicator. “Punched straight through from the Pinhole, right on our track.”

  Susan swiveled, lifting an eyebrow at Olin and Holloway. “Time to enter the maze?”

  “Five minutes, Chu-sa.” The pilot’s eyes were wide with fear. “I’ve picked up some options but—”

  “They’ll have to do. Pilot, take us in.”

  On the plot, the destroyers continued to close, their launchers cycling a new spread of missiles every one hundred and twenty seconds. The first wave was still three minutes out, but the Naniwa’s point-defense was already hammering away at the incoming targets. Pucatli’s spoofer pod was squealing, flooding the spectrum with distorting noise and false signals. Khaid penetrators began to flare, and then wink off of the plot.

  Behind them, the Hayalet held course at an angle away from the Naniwa and her running firefight. Susan watched the vector firm up, heading in-system at a good clip.

  How could they fail to notice the singularity? The sensor suite on one of those battlewagons must be the equal of ours—some daring hunt-lord sees the realization of an entire race’s dreams of empire riding on that thread.

  This reminded her of Prince Xochitl and the missing Hummingbird, and her heart lifted at the thought of the Khaid howling in behind those two “gentlemen,” well stoked with blood lust.

  They’re all suited to one another, she thought bitterly. Then Susan felt a pang of conscience, just for an instant. An Imperial officer should be mindful of her duty.

  A proximity alarm sounded—the battle-cruiser sped past an outlier of the vast shoal of wreckage—even as the first wave of Khaid shipkillers began to flare around her. The Naniwa groaned, shipskin hammered by the stabbing flare of fusion detonations. Now the plot was filled with the tracery of outgoing kinetics, the flash of bomb-pods erupting and Command was loud with the swift, urgent voices of her crew reacting. Konev’s counter-missile wave banged away, shaking the secondary hull with the violence of launch rails cycling.

  Adrenaline flushed her limbs with a quivering, bright energy. The only thing missing was Hadeishi’s voice in her earbug, calm and controlled, his presence radiating a contained focus as he put the ship through her paces. I am alone. Susan felt a tight, stabbing pain in her diaphragm. On the plot, the density of the wrecks was soaring, and Holloway’s brow was dappled with sweat as he maneuvered. Here we go.

  Koshō detached a series of v-panes showing the movement of the Khaid battleship towards the Sunflower to her Executive console.

  A good six hours for them to reach the artifact, she saw. Long time to stay in this dance.

  A shipkiller blew only three compartments away, shredding the Naniwa’s shipskin and venting a huge gout of atmosphere and flotsam. In Command, the overheads flickered, half the consoles cut out and someone cursed violently as their v-display shorted, spilling smoke globules and hot sparks into the air.

  Oc Chac was at the man’s side in an instant, a portable extinguisher spitting foam into the splintered console. “Damage control, this is Main Command, we’ve lost a ’net node and five consoles.”

  Susan saw the wreckage occlude the pursuing destroyers as Holloway put them into a jinking curve, fleeing past another of the dead behemoths. “Weapons, tight pattern—rear launchers only—delayed fuse while we’re in scan-shadow.”

  “Hai, kyo!” Konev cycled his launchers, stylus darting across his console. Preconfigured munitions packages punched outbound, venting from the eight rearward rails at nearly a hundred g’s.

  At the same moment, Olin’s voice cut across the Russian’s. “New contact! New contact! Aslan-class cruiser to ventral—range sixty thousand kilometers—enemy is launching now, thirty missile tracks incoming! Impact in eighty seconds!”

  “Now, Sho-sa,” Susan said, her voice preternaturally calm. “Now we’re in the brawl.”

  THE KADER

  Command was awash in confused voices as the last of the evacuation pods was winched into the cargo hold. Hadeishi tapped his med-band, injecting another dose of anti-inflammatory to suppress a spiraling migraine. Five or six conflicting channels of information were vying for his attention, and the low-level confusion amongst his scratch crew kept jarring his attention away from the Khaid battlecast. The enemy had started to frequency-hop, but Lovelace was keeping up, though the translator always seemed to be five or six words behind what he could make out himself.

  One of the new officers—his name had escaped Mitsuharu in the latest round of introductions—signaled cargo one was sealed, and the armored partitions were rotating closed over the bay doors. The Chu-sa switched to Cajeme’s team, catching the exhausted-looking Yaqui as they were hauling two corpses from the pod, along with one midshipman who looked like she might live.

  “Nitto-hei—how many pods do we have aboard?”

  Cajeme stared back blankly for a moment, then shook himself, saying: “Eleven, kyo, we have eleven.”

  “Get them prepped to eject,” Hadeishi said sharply, a hard edge in his voice. “A Weapons team is on their way to you now—there were fifteen thermonukes in munitions storage—I want those pods refitted as fast as you can.”

  “Hai”—Cajeme wheezed, his face black with carbon from the backwash of the cutter he’d been slinging for the past eighteen hours—“kyo.”

  Mitsuharu turned his attention back to Command, feeling his shoulder blades itching in anticipation. They’re coming … more than one of them. “Thai-i Tocoztic—any progress on connecting to the Tlemitl’s sensor array?”

  The Islander shook his head, expr
ession mournful. “Nothing, kyo. We’re locked out hard—the Sho-i tried breaking in, but found not a single loose beam.”

  Lovelace nodded, looking equally grim. “We found some survivors, kyo. One of the compartments is still intact and—”

  “Do they have shipnet access?” Hadeishi cut her off coldly, his mind rotating the problem through every angle he could conceive. “Do they have power? Sensors? Anything?”

  The young woman’s face went blank, stung by his tone. “Chu-sa, they’re on emergency power, but yes—they have ’net access and access to the node in their fragment.…”

  “Put me through.” Hadeishi turned to the plot, lips a tight, compressed line. “Pilot, are we ready to maneuver?”

  Inudo nodded, his face wan with exhaustion. “Drives are hot, Chu-sa, standing by.”

  “Survivors on channel sixty-three, kyo,” Lovelace said, her voice far more formal than she’d offered before. Hadeishi wasn’t even aware of the change, his whole attention focused on the wavering, jittery v-pane which popped up on his display. Two z-suited figures were framed in the pickup, a room filled with floating debris behind them.

  “This is Mitsuharu Hadeishi, Chu-sa of the Kader. I am your new commanding officer. I need you to open a ’cast feed to my Comms officer—Shoi-i Lovelace—and do everything you can to allow her to relay through your subsystems. Do you understand?”

  The sharp, harsh edge to his voice galvanized both men, though he knew they must be running low on air, were probably out of water, and had little chance of surviving even to see another watch pass. A ragged “Hai, kyo!” echoed back to him across the circuit. The Nisei officer nodded sharply to his Comms officer. “Get me a sensor feed from the far side of the hulk—there’s another Khaid out there, we need to find it immediately.”

  Then he paused, considering the plot for a long, endless three seconds and then—resolving an internal struggle—his stylus sketched out a new maneuvering vector on the plot. “Pilot, get us underway. I want maximum acceleration while holding to this path. Weapons, stand by to engage the enemy. Expect a missile exchange at a blade’s distance.”

  Inudo stared at the new vector, then nodded jerkily to himself. “Plotting course, Chu-sa.”

  Frowning thunderously, Lovelace stared over at the pilot, whose expression had gelled into a stoic mask. “Chu-sa…” The Mirror officer caught Hadeishi’s eye, her face filled with raw appeal. “The drive trail from the battle-cruiser is fragmentary now—and the Barrier moves! We couldn’t possibly—”

  “We don’t need the Naniwa’s trace, Sho-i.” Mitsuharu nodded to the plot as the console under his fingertips began to shiver with the engines igniting. “The Khaid fleet has already blazed the trail for us—their emissions will be impossible to miss.”

  “Underway, kyo.” Inudo’s report was mechanical. “Building v—we’ll be out of the shadow of the Tlemitl in five—four—three—two—”

  “Contact, kyo! We have contact!” Tocoztic’s blurt of alarm overrode the Pilot. “Bearing eleven high, she’s massing like a battleship! Cast analysis says she’s the Kukumav!”

  The noise level in Command jolted upward, but now Hadeishi felt everything extraneous—even the joyful howl from the Khaid channel—drop away. “Weapons—launch everything you have, dead on. Pilot—get us out of here!”

  The cruiser’s hull shuddered, groaning as the drives kicked up to all nodes combusting full-bore and the launch rails and hardpoints belched a cloud of shipkillers and a hammering stream of kinetic warheads. Tocoztic’s countermeasures display was already alight with the incoming Khaid missile storm, which outmassed theirs by five or six to one.

  “Cast relay active, Chu-sa!” Lovelace’s fingers were flying across her panel, the tik-tik-tik of her styli a seamless stream, like the clicking of spinning gears. “We’re synching to the Tlemitl—wait one, wait one—she needs authorization!”

  A fresh v-pane popped up on Hadeishi’s console, showing the Fleet authentication interface. Cursing to himself—there was no chance the Tlemitl would have the authorization glyph cluster for a cashiered reserve officer—Mitsuharu framed his face in the pickup window, got a green rectangle and then keyed his sequence. The v-pane flickered, showing an IDENTITY REJECTED message for a fraction of a second, and then suddenly blanked. In its place, an oblong glyph of intertwining roses appeared, holding a black-on-white flame. Hadeishi felt a shock of recognition, though he’d only seen the icon once before, while another was manipulating a ring-zero system.

  Hello, old friend. The voice on the comm channel was so unexpected, yet so familiar, that Mitsuharu could not place it for a seeming eternity. I knew you would come, if anyone could win through, and you would need every tool at your command. The sigil vanished, Hummingbird’s voice faded, and Lovelace drew back at her station in alarm, watching as the Tlemitl’s fragmentary shipnet unfolded before her on the Comms console.

  “We’re in,” Hadeishi barked, watching the intercept solution for the Khaid missile storm wind down towards their destruction. “Lovelace—shift control to Tocoztic—Weapons, you have full control over anything still working in the hulk of the Firearrow—dump it all! Everything! Now!”

  The Kader’s hull shuddered again as the point-defense guns lit up, filling the rapidly shrinking interval between the Khaid shipkillers and the fleeing cruiser with a wall of hyper-accelerated depleted uranium pellets. Bomb-pods began to stutter in sun-bright flares, stabbing at the shipskin with invisible beams of high-energy X-rays. The first wave of shipkillers rode in hot behind the suppressive fire, tearing through the Kader’s counter-measure.

  Hadeishi felt the cruiser heave, hull hammered by a dozen impacts. His status displays flashed wildly, shading red. Dozens of compartment alerts howled as pressure vented from the secondary hull. The primary hull shredded, gouged open by massive explosions.

  Tocoztic, his face bone white, stabbed a command glyph on the v-display relayed from the ruin of the Tlemitl. “Dumping ordnance, now!”

  All along the flank of the Tlemitl’s carcass, hard-points woke up, draining local emergency power, and went into remote mode. The launch rails and missile racks surviving the dreadnaught’s dissection cycled open. They could not hurl their weapon loads into battle at high v, but approximately eighty shipkillers separated from the hull and immediately locked onto the Kukumav, which was building velocity past them at a relatively low speed. At the same time, the kinetic weapons began firing, spitting a cloud of ballistic munitions towards the Khaid ship.

  For her part, the Kader punched deeper into the Pinhole at maximum burn on her engines, her flight punctuated by the flare of shipkillers and penetrators detonating across her hull. The Kukumav’s gunners cycled their launch rails, subcommanders howling new targeting orders. A cloud of debris, atmosphere, and chaff spewed out behind the damaged cruiser.

  Hadeishi watched the streaking missile tracks on the plot with cold eyes. Inudo was pushing the maneuver drives for all they were worth—and making gradient inside the Barrier itself was obviously impossible. The transit metrics were off the scale.

  “Forty seconds to the second wave,” Tocoztic announced, sweat gleaming on the sides of his face. “Point-defense is down to thirty percent, shipkillers are exhausted. One salvo of penetrators and two spoofer pods left—”

  “Weapons, drop pods,” Mitsuharu snapped, switching his attention to the navigation plot. The track of the Khaid fleet was marvelously clear—their battleship drives coughed high-order radiation with reckless abandon—and he was praying the Barrier had not already shifted enough to swing a lattice of knives into their path. The two spoofer pods spun out from their launchers and Lovelace was waiting to key them up as duplicates of the Kader as soon as they had separated from her signature. “Pilot, cut drives and rotate fresh armor!”

  Another ship icon popped up on the plot—a hundred thousand k behind the Kukumav—pulling high g acceleration. For an instant, Hadeishi thought it might be the Moulins, but then shipnet crunched the emis
sions signature and a whirl of hostile glyphs surrounded the contact.

  “Mishrak-class destroyer Han’zhr on the board,” Tocoztic barked.

  “Rotating aspect,” Inudo followed as the main drives cut out.

  Mitsuharu snarled, lips drawing back. The Kukumav’s second missile volley slammed into the Kader at a bad angle. Perhaps a quarter of the shipkillers had swerved away, following the two spoofer pods, but the remainder rained in on her aft-ventral quarter. Inudo had swung them round hard, bringing an undamaged section of shipskin into line with the attack, but the guttering flare of penetrators and bomb-pods ripped aside their point-defense and tore at the primary hull in a wave of explosions.

  Command lost power entirely for a microsecond, and Hadeishi felt the carapace lining the shockchair splinter as the g-decking failed. He slammed hard into the frame, and then bounced back. Secondary mains cut in, and their consoles flickered back to life in time for him to see the Kukumav’s icon flicker. The weapons cloud from the Tlemitl had hammered her, shredding armor and turning hard-points into plasma-consumed hells. The battleship swerved away, rotating to bring fresh guns to bear on the remaining missiles boosting towards her.

  “Pilot,” Mitsuharu croaked, seeing that Inudo was still alive and clinging to his console. “Hold course and get us out of here!”

  THE ALTAR OF THE UNDYING FLAME

  BURNING AT THE SUNFLOWER’S HEART

  Prince Xochitl reached the top step of a pyramidlike stair ascending from the enormous floor. He glanced down at the others still toiling upward on the wide, gleaming steps, and then strode onto a platform marking the summit of the pylon. By the pale light of the distant accretion jet, he began to comprehend the scope of the massive chamber. Scaled for giants! Or the gods themselves! The floor stretched away for kilometers in both directions. In a place like this, clouds will form. Rain will fall. Lightning might strike. Surely a First Sun artifact! He turned slowly, taking everything in. He became aware of a strange, singing hum permeating his suit and vibrating through every surface on his body.