Land of the Dead ittotss-3

by Thomas Harlan

  “Green Hummingbird!” she hissed. Kosho turned on her heel and plunged through a squad of enlisted ratings sprawled on transit couches, the floor around them littered with Mayahuel bottles and patolli gaming mats sprinkled with money and dice sticks, to fetch up before two men-no, one human and one alien-sitting in a quiet corner of the huge, bustling room.

  “What are you doing here?” Susan’s voice was cold.

  The human was holding a package in his hands, something rectangular wrapped in twine and brown paper. He looked up, catching Kosho’s gaze with a pair of green eyes deep as Tuxpan jade, and his polished old mahogany face, etched with tiny scars and sharp wrinkles, expressed nothing more than the most polite interest. “ Chu-sa Kosho, a pleasure.”

  “What are you doing here?” A horrible suspicion had formed in her mind the instant she’d set eyes on the old Mexica. He was well known to her-an Imperial nauallis or Judge, of the sort who traveled the backwaters of the Rim, poking and prying into all sorts of dangerous business, showing up at odd places and times, commandeering the Cornuelle or any other Imperial ship on hand as he pleased-he and Hadeishi had some kind of history, for the captain had always been generous, bending rules and regulations with aplomb to accommodate the Judge and his “business.” An Imperial agent, a spy, an assassin, a sorcerer… a walking career disaster.

  “I am waiting for my ship, like everyone else,” Hummingbird said, showing the ghost of a smile, “and catching up with a recent friend.”

  His scarred hand-now empty, the package having disappeared into one of the medium-sized travel cases at his feet-indicated the alien in the opposite chair. Susan spared a glance for the creature-a slight shape with a vaguely humanoid face. Thin, ancient-seeming fingers covered with a close-napped blue-black fur held a chain of beads. Much like Hummingbird, the alien was wearing a hooded mantle over tunic and trousers, this one a faded, mottled green with a dull-colored red cross quartering its chest.

  “Holy one, this is Captain Susan Kosho. Chu-sa, the honored Sra Osa.”

  Kosho bowed politely. “My pleasure, Osa -tzin.”

  Then her whole attention was on Hummingbird again, her face tight with barely repressed anger. “Did you have anything to do with this? With the Tribunal’s compromise? With what happened to us on Jagan?”

  “I had nothing,” the old Mexica said carefully, “to do with the astounding success of the xochiyaotinime in providing Fleet and Army with such a vigorous martial test. And I am very pleased Captain Hadeishi was not forced to satisfy his honor, or that of the Emperor, in some… final way.”

  “Are you?” Kosho managed to keep from curling her lip, all in deference to the old priest watching the two of them with bright, inquisitive eyes. “Then why have you done nothing to help him, when he has always rendered you aid-even in defiance of his ordered duty? Is this how the nauallis repay their allies?”

  Hummingbird’s chiseled face tightened. He was rarely challenged by anyone, much less a Fleet officer whose career he could destroy with a comm call. Susan knew this and failed to care. She had never found him intimidating-dangerous, yes, like a redwood viper loose on your command deck-but not a source of fear. Though she would be loath to admit such a thing, the Judge did not exist high enough on the slopes of the Heavenly Mountain to impress her.

  “I have done what I can,” he snapped. “He lives, does he not? He will have a command again, when enough time has passed to dim the memory of his enemies.”

  “He only has such enemies,” Kosho allowed a faint exhalation of disgust, “because of his association with you.”

  The old nauallis became quite still, eyes narrowing, and he seemed to settle into the lounge chair like a mountain finding its footing in the earth. “What would you have of me, child, that Hadeishi would not ask himself? For he has not asked me for aid, though I have offered.”

  Have you? How many visitors has my captain entertained in his empty rooms? How many well-meaning friends has he turned away?

  The admission stilled her angry rush, letting unexpected venom drain from her thoughts.

  “He has to be saved,” she said, controlled once more. “Before he simply fades away.”

  Hummingbird shrugged. “Perhaps you should let him tread his own path?”

  “No.” Kosho fixed him with a steady, considering eye. “He will languish and die if left without purpose. Find him a ship. Put a g-deck under his feet. Give him what he deserves.”

  Hummingbird rubbed the top of his head, which was brown and smooth as a betel-nut. He cast a sideways glance at Sra Osa, whose attention seemed far away, politely ignoring the argument playing out before him, rosary beads clicking one by one through pelted fingers.

  “Arrangements could be made,” the old Mexica allowed with a grimace.

  “Good.” Kosho offered the most minimal bow, glanced up to check the transit board, cursed at the time, and then left in haste.

  The nauallis watched her go, his expression pensive. Hummingbird rubbed the back of his head again, glancing sideways at his wizened companion. “Ah, if only she had a gram of Hadeishi’s native circumspection! He will be hard to replace… but what is done is done. Once the arrow has flown…”

  Sra Osa said nothing, ancient face impassive beneath the woolen hood.

  Hummingbird nodded to himself, some internal judgment weighed and accepted, checked his bag for the twine-wrapped package, then lifted both cases and moved away.

  In the kuub antispinward of Mexica space, beyond the rim

  The navigator of the IMN DD-217 Calexico frowned at her console, tapping her throatmike to life: “ Chu-sa Rae? We’re at barely thirty-percent see-through in this… combat reaction range is down to less than a light-minute.”

  At the other end of the narrow twenty-meter-long bridge, Captain Rae’s grimace matched the navigator’s wary expression. His destroyer had an upgraded sensor suite to match the two Deep Range scouts for which he was flying gunsight, but in this protostellar murk nothing was working quite to Engineering Board specifications.

  “Are Kiev and Korkunov still in relay? Are we getting a clean telemetry feed?”

  “ Hai, kyo,” the navigator responded, watching the particle collision counts on the forward transit deflectors flicker rapidly in and out of redline on her stat panel. “Feed is clean, but we’re edging towards full-stop.”

  “I see it.” Rae had the same readout running on his console. Calexico lacked the new battle shielding Fleet was refitting onto the capital ships, and her transit deflectors-though upgraded to match Survey requirements-were finding it hard going in the heavy interstellar dust endemic to this region of space. “Comm, patch me through to the K and K.”

  Rae waited patiently while his communications officer rounded up the captains of the two Survey ships. Watching the collision counts surging red did not ease his mind. The kuub was notorious for its hazards to navigation. Ancient stellar debris-rumor said the science team was feeling warm about a double-supernova-swirled in a hot murk glowing with radiation from the few suns still embedded in the nebula. There were solid fragments as well, the bits and pieces of planets shattered by the catastrophic detonation, mixed with cometary debris, stray asteroids… a nebula of incredible breadth and density.

  There were hints of a massive gravity sink down at the heart of the region. A black hole, or maybe more than one. The navigator was starting to see queer distortions in the local hyperspace gradient, though they didn’t look anything like the usual fluctuation patterns around a singularity. She tapped her throatmike again.

  “ Chu-sa, we’re approaching transit vertex pretty quickly. I think we’d better slow. I’m seeing… wait a minute. Hold one. Hold one.” Her voice turned puzzled.

  Rae, in the midst of offering the Kiev an engineering team to tear down a degraded shield nacelle, caught the change in her voice and his reaction was instantaneous. He slapped the FULL STOP glyph on his main console and barked a confirming order to his crew: “All engines, go to zero-v and prepare
to rotate ship! All power to transit shielding, all stations report!”

  Six seconds later, amid the crisp chatter of his department heads reporting their status, the t-relay from Kiev stopped cold.

  In the threatwell directly in front of Rae’s station, the icon representing the Survey ship winked out. A camera pod immediately swiveled towards the event and two seconds later the Chu-sa was watching with gritted teeth as the Kiev vanished in a plume of superheated plasma.

  “Antimatter containment failure-” Rae’s voice was anguished, but then his eyes widened in real horror. The Korkunov vanished from the plot three seconds after its sister ship. A second burst of sunfire stabbed through the dust. His fist slammed the crash button on his shockframe.

  “Full evasion! Guns hot, give me full active scan! Battle stations!”

  A Klaxon blared and every lighting fixture on the ship flashed three times and then shaded into a noticeable red tone. Rae’s shockframe folded around him and a z-helmet lowered and locked tight against his z-suit’s neckring. A groan vibrated from the very air as the destroyer’s main engines flared and the g-decking strained to adjust. The Calexico -which had been about to rotate and slow with main drives-surged forward into a tight turn, its radar and wideband laser sensors emitting a sharp full-spectrum burst to paint the immediate neighborhood.

  Down on the gun deck, a message drone banged away from the ship, thrown free by a magnetic accelerator and immediately darted back along the expedition’s path of entry into the kuub. The drone’s onboard comp was already calculating transit gradients, looking to punch into hyperspace as quickly as possible. A second drone was run out by a suddenly frantic deck crew, ready to launch as soon as the results of the wide-spectrum scan were complete.

  ***

  A louder alarm was blaring in Engineering, drowning both the warble of the drive coil and the basso drone of the antimatter reactor and its attendant systems. In the number three airlock, Engineer Second Malcolm Helsdon turned in place, his z-suit already sealed, a gear-pack slung over one shoulder and ten meters of heat-exchange thermocouple looped around the other. Through the visor of his suit helmet, he peered back through the closing inner door of the lock, seeing the on-duty crew moving quickly- as they should, he thought-to action stations.

  That heat exchanger is going to have to wait. Helsdon’s habitually serious expression soured.

  The engineer reached out to key the lock override, but the looped thermocouple bound his arm and he paused, shifting his feet, swinging the ungainly package around to his other side, to get a free hand on the control panel. Sweat sprung from his pale forehead, and the usual shag of unkempt brown hair was in his eyes.

  Through the outer door’s blast window, the blur of motion was so swift only the faintest afterimage registered in his retinas.

  “What-” was that? The overhead lights in the airlock went out.

  There was an instant of darkness and Helsdon knew, even before the local emergency illumination kicked in, that main power had failed catastrophically. Without a second thought, he threw himself back against the wall opposite the interior lock door and seized hold of a stanchion. As he moved, local g-control failed and he slammed hard into the plasticine panel. The Calexico was at full burn and only the armored resiliency of his Fleet z-suit kept Helsdon from breaking both shoulder and arm. For an instant, all was whirling lights and vertigo.

  A moment later, the engineer steadied himself and ventured to open his eyes.

  Everything was terribly quiet.

  Still alive, he thought, blinking in the dim glow of the emergency lights. The thermocouple had come loose and was drifting in z-g, slowly uncoiling to fill the airlock with dozens of silvery loops. Reactor hasn’t fried me yet… He kicked to the inner lock window, bracing one leg against the side of the heavy pressure door. Streaks of frost blocked most of the view, but Helsdon had no trouble seeing out.

  Grasping what he saw took a heartbeat, then another… two breaths to realize he wasn’t looking down at an engineering drawing, but rather at the heart of the Calexico herself laid bare. Somehow Engineering was falling away from him-along with the great proportion of the destroyer itself-every deck exposed, every hall and conduit pipe gaping wide to open space. A huge cloud of debris-sheets, kaffe cups, papers, shoes, the stiff bodies of men already dead from hypoxia-spilled from the dying ship.

  Helsdon’s helmet jerked to one side, searching for a point of reference-anything that made sense-and fixed on a section of wall jutting out into his field of view to the left. He could see three-quarters of the hallway-flooring with nonslip decking, dead light fixtures, a guide-panel-and then nothing. Only an impossibly sharp division where the ship simply ended.

  We’ve been cut in half.

  Shinedo on the Chumash Sound, North America, Anahuac

  A week’s tips feeling very light in his pocket, Hadeishi trudged up a long low hill through fresh snow. In summer, the hillside would be covered with neatly cropped grass and the misty forest on either side of the parkland would be a deep cool green, filled with croaking ravens and drifting butterflies. Now everything was crisp and white, the mossy pillars covered with hanging ice. Behind him, where the sea broke against a reddish slate headland, gray waves shone with pearlescent foam. Walking carefully between the ice-slicked walkway and endless rows of grave markers, Mitsuharu picked his way along a turfed horse path. Even in this weather, the springy sod beneath the frost yielded queasily with each step. Here, he thought wistfully, everything is just as I remember. So our dead sleep quietly, shielded from the restless chaos of the city.

  The other places he’d held unchanged in childhood memory were simply gone.

  Fifteen years of Fleet service-and at least a decade since he’d spent leave in the bustling commercial capital stretching east and south of this quiet peninsula-had seen his old neighborhood leveled. His parents’ single-story house with the green tin roof and white-painted walls was gone. The entire street-ancient cobblestones and crumbling asphalt and peeling advertisements on the garden gates-had vanished. No more little single-door shops, tucked in between the warehouses and old factories, selling tea and cakes and hot noodles. Even the narrow park along Deception Creek-which marked the southern edge of downtown-had been replaced. Ancient rows of cherry and mulberry trees sawn down, replaced by a modern promenade of expensive shops and brisk, gleaming cafes catering to the young and rich.

  Civilians. Merchants, he thought, dully angered by the wall of gleaming sea-green-glass apartment towers burying his boyhood memories beneath sixty stories of luxury flats and their attendant hovercar garages. Even a dirty industrial neighborhood should be allowed to putter along… without improvements, without renovations.

  But Shinedo of the Nisei had grown enormously while he’d been gone among the stars. A new high-speed maglev cargo railway now ran day and night to the far eastern coast, moving millions of tons of Asiatic goods from Shinedo’s deepwater port to the grimy coastal cities of Oswego and New Canarsie in the Iroquois Protectorate. And from there, onward to Europe and Afriqa. The sprawling spaceport in the wetlands south of the city benefited as well. Though there were larger Fleet installations planet-side, Shinedo uchumon handled a constant and lucrative passenger service. The industrial districts Mitsuharu prowled in his youth had moved south to sprawl around uchu in a thick belt of newly built factories, smokestacks, and office parks.

  But little of that ugliness was visible within the quiet solitude of the preserve. Here-and only here within greater Shinedo metro, still protected by the edict of an Emperor long dead when the first human spacecraft lumbered into orbit from the Nanchao testing range-towering groves of old coastal redwoods remained. The entire park, save for the serpentine meadows containing the cemetery, was filled with the same nearly impenetrable rain forest which had greeted the first Nisei to set foot upon Gumshan- the Golden Mountain.

  Beneath their broad eaves, heavy with snow, there was a deep sense of quiet.

  As befits the hon
ored dead, Hadeishi thought as he turned onto a side path-this one set with wooden steps and a railing-which climbed the westernmost hill in the park. Let them rest, distant from the garish, uncaring noise of those who still live.

  His Fleet discharge pay had evaporated once he’d stepped off the shuttle. Shinedo was not cheap. Food, lodging, bus tickets… everything was expensive. Even the most wretched grade of sake was a full quill the jar. Two ceramic bottles clinked in his jacket pocket, rubbing a handful of wilted flowers to pale yellow dust. There was a dole for the indigent, but Mitsuharu had prided himself on having useful skills. His comp, waiting messages ignored, and other things reminding him of the Fleet, he sold. So his old life had been eaten away by the new.

  Solving a four-dimensional puzzle with seventy-six vectors in less than a second has no value in the civilian world. Knowing the little tricks of command, of gaining men’s loyalty, of making them work harder, faster, more accurately as a team under fire… who needs that here? There is no war in the city.

  Very near the shuttle port, in the maze of narrow alleys and bars and tea houses making up the district called Water Lantern, he had managed to secure employment. He played the samisen in a tea house on the evenings, while the off-duty Fleet and merchanter ratings wasted their money on girls and rice beer and gambling at patolli or dice or cards. His father-who had been very good with almost any stringed instrument-would have been appalled to see his so-promising son picking away at the kind of cheap lute a tea house teishu could afford.

  No vinegar left, he thought, passing beneath a wooden arch wound with heavy snow-dusted vines. All spilled out of me at Jagan with the Cornuelle burning up in the atmosphere. With all the dead…

  Beyond the arch was a small clearing laid with fitted stones-swept clean even on such a cold day-surrounding a temple-house of red enamel and dark, polished wood. The smell of incense hung in the frigid air, tapers twining long loops of smoke through the rafters. Hadeishi’s Fleet boots made a tapping sound as he walked and his careful eye could make out ideograms cut into each of the paving stones. Ever here, in the Western Chapel, where at winter’s end the Emperor came to witness the sun of the vernal equinox settle into the distant sea, surrounded by the great nobles and the deep, throaty roll of massed drums, the dead lay close at hand.