Land of the Dead ittotss-3

by Thomas Harlan

  The corner of Susan’s mouth twitched. Her eyes slid sideways, checking to see if anyone was standing close, then she said: “On the Hill of Grasshoppers, Old Chapultepec, you could not keep your child’s name, and you could not yet take an adult name. So the Sisters chose one for you. Randomly, they said, but they always picked ones which fit-or we grew to fit them, I suppose. He was sayu -water almost boiling, hot enough to scald-and they called me yakka, which is-”

  “-annoying little girl.” Gretchen finished with a grimace. Her head was throbbing. She groped for her medband, mashing the override glyph, hoping for a flood of cool relief.

  “Or in a gruesome tale my grandmother was fond of telling on stormy nights, a goblin.”

  The Wilful

  From a discreet vantage inside a cloud of radioactive debris leaking from one of the broken Khaid destroyers, the little freighter waited to see if the raiders would dare to cross the Barrier in force. Hadeishi watched the situation unfolding on their jimmied-up holocast with interest, forefinger smoothing his ragged mustache. The Khaid squadron had resorted to pitching missiles one at a time into the Pinhole.

  “They’re stuck,” Tocoztic offered, looking up from the Fleet identity packet. “They’ll never get anywhere that way.”

  Mitsuharu raised an eyebrow. “In comparison to the Khaid commanders I’ve encountered before, Thai-i, this one is the very model of a modern naval officer. He is circumspect, wary, and mindful of the resources he has to hand-which are greatly reduced from considerable strength.”

  “We would do no better, Lieutenant,” De Molay remarked, only her eyes visible above a pile of blankets Tadohao had brought up from the living quarters. “They-my sources-say the guardians of this place are like whipping knives, and they move from place to place, unaccountably.”

  “Interesting.” Hadeishi looked across the darkened bridge at the old woman. “Perhaps their pattern mimics the changing currents of some ancient sea. And the dreadful weapons drift like shoals of kelp on an unseen, ethereal wind.”

  “Or schools of stinging jellyfish, O poet,” De Molay retorted. She was tired and cold, despite the blankets. “Dare we continue with your good work while they are fishing?”

  “Not yet. They are in motion again.” As they watched on the holocast, the Khaid squadron began a maneuvering burn. Soon the majority of ships withdrew from the area around the Pinhole entrance. The lighter vessels that remained began quartering the area of battle, apparently recovering survivors. “They will not go far. They know something valuable is here-even if they do not comprehend what that might be.”

  Mitsuharu looked expectantly at the old woman. “Do we know, Captain?”

  De Molay avoided his eyes, taking a long drink of hot tea. “These raiders seem to have come out of nowhere. What do you suppose brought them here in such numbers? And at just the right moment to encounter and destroy so many Imperial ships?”

  Hadeishi’s lips twitched, closely observing De Molay. “Why-it could only be treachery, Captain. But now-they know there is a prize to be won, as well, and I do not think they will wish to give it up.” He lifted his hand, palm up. “The Khaiden Kabil Rezei commanding this hunting pack has paid a dear price-he will want payment in kind. And this-weapon-if it is such, would make him more than a chieftain-it would make him king, or emperor.”

  “I doubt they have the means to mount a long campaign.” The old woman made a circular gesture, encompassing the whole of the kuub. “It’s very expensive to field three squadrons in this wasteland, no matter how rich you are.” Then she peered curiously at Tocoztic, who had made a strangled noise in reaction to something he was reading.

  “The prize is too great,” Mitsuharu replied. “When you are a pirate, the taking of even one treasure ship can secure your clan for a lifetime. If left alone indefinitely, these Khaiden will find a way, even if they have to bargain with Mictlantecuhtli himself and take his skull and meatless bones for their own.”

  “A cheerful assessment.” De Molay gulped the rest of her tea and indicated the holocast. “Now only two remain.”

  Hadeishi leaned forward, tapping through the various sensor logs and displays. Neither ship matched anything in the commercial registry, but then he suspected these were a brand-new class, quite possibly the first the clans built and fielded themselves. They’re surely not stolen from us, not with those drive signatures and hull outlines. And they don’t look like anything the Kroomakh would build-they would be the most likely power to sell the Khaid some heavy metal.

  “Battleships-probably the least damaged,” he said at last.

  De Molay shrugged. “If they remain near the station wreckage, then we will know they are playing watchdog. After all, any ship that exits might reveal the gap in the Barrier.”

  “And would be attacked.” Hadeishi thought of the lone battle-cruiser they’d seen escape on long-range scan. That ship had vanished into seemingly clear space, by which he assumed the weapon was actually blocking passive scan on some level. There is a hidden pocket here, tucked away inside this wall of knives. “Against these Khaid we need at least a heavy cruiser. Anything less will only buy us tea in Yomi. Thai-i Tocoztic, switch your panel to run sensor analysis. We must be about our business.”

  The Thai-i pushed Mitsuharu’s identity papers away with a scowl. “You lost your ship!” he said in an accusing voice. “You were discharged from service by the court of review! And you still-”

  De Molay glared at the pilot, but Hadeishi’s rueful laugh cut him short.

  “You were aboard the Falchion, Thai-i?” Mitsuharu gave the young man his full attention.

  Tocoztic nodded stubbornly. “What does that-”

  Hadeishi drifted his hand across the holocast controls. A section of nearby space expanded, revealing the scattered wreckage of a heavy cruiser. “There she lies,” he said sadly, grief plain in his voice. “A fine ship, now gone to destiny, to die in the service of our lord… I fear, Thai-i, you are the last of her officers to survive.” Mitsuharu fixed him with a steady, unnerving stare. “Have I done you disservice, by saving you and your men from death? Did you wish to join your ship, your Chu-sa, your fellows in final repose, in this funereal pyre of cooling plasma? That is a noble end.”

  “No!” Tocoztic drew back, horrified. “A useless death-”

  “And there you have my own desperate strait,” Hadeishi said quietly. “My ship died-as yours has done-yet I lived. Do you know the Hagakure of Tsunemoto?”

  “Of course,” the Thai-i replied huffily. “It is required reading in the Academy…”

  “Have you hit your target?”

  Tocoztic frowned, not grasping the reference. “I do not-It is an old text. Written by one long dead. How do those legends apply here?”

  Mitsuharu nodded. “An excellent question. Tsunemoto relates the words of a vain young samurai: ‘If you die before striking your enemy, then you die the death of a dog.’ Many believed this to be a truth, and thereby found cause to avoid battle, to avoid sacrifice, to avoid risk. What did Tsunemoto say to those men?”

  Tocoztic’s face turned a rather mealy color. “I am Mexica. I am not afraid of death. I am an officer and sworn to sacrifice my life for the Emperor.”

  “He said: If you put death foremost in your thoughts, if you resolve yourself to death each time you wake, then you will always strike your enemy with the utmost force.”

  “To embrace death so readily! I don’t-This has nothing to do with-”

  Hadeishi’s face suddenly became calm and still, as though the grief and weariness and fear etched in his features had been washed away by a sudden, unseen rain. His eyes were upon the holocast, looking far beyond the puzzled face of the Thai-i. De Molay’s attention snapped around, following his gaze.

  “Stand to battle stations!”

  Before the command was fully uttered, De Molay had activated the ship’s internal alarm. Tocoztic jumped, startled by the blaring sound, and then switched all his attention onto the pilot’s conso
le. Thousands of hours of Imperial drill seized him up and put his hands, his thoughts, his entire purpose on the right path.

  At the limit of their sensor range, a Khaid destroyer nosed through the dark towards them.

  The land of the Dead

  The Naniwa ’s acceleration faded off a point, and under Kosho’s gentle direction, the battle-cruiser slid around a particularly dense accretion of the veils. Beyond this-to her surprise-there was nothing on the navigational display. No queer, interlocking geometry of billions of infinitesimal razors, only emptiness. The Chu-sa blinked, easing off on the engines, dropping her acceleration to almost zero. The ship continued to speed ahead, but she left her velocity undiminished.

  “I think we’re clear,” Anderssen announced to a hushed bridge crew. She took her hands away from the corroded bronze rectangle. As she did the threatwell’s sketchy, alien display faded away-showing only a few trailing quantum distortions at the edges-and then, nothing. The normal navigational plot flickered in and out of view, and then stabilized. A moment later, keyed up by Chu-i Pucatli, the long-distance camera feeds appeared on the main v-displays behind the threatwell.

  There was a hiss of surprise from nearly every member of the bridge crew. Susan smoothed back her hair and then turned to the communications officer. “ Chu-i, pipe this to all of the news displays shipside. I’ll make an announcement momentarily.”

  Then the Chu-sa turned to consider the long-range scan display now building on her console.

  The plot confirmed what the eye beheld. Beyond the Barrier, deep at the heart of the kuub, the protostellar debris folded back to reveal three diminutive stars in a tight cluster. Between their sallow pinpoints, the hard white slash of an ejection jet speared “up” and “down,” bisecting the visible universe. Illuminated by its radiance, towering plumes and great walls of dust glowed with a brilliant, jeweled fire. If the gravity scan was to be believed, the rosette of stars concealed an infinitesimal black hole in their center. On the ship’s plot, the gaudy roil of an accretion disc spiraling into a maelstrom of distorted gravity reached out to lap around the suns. The dim stars were shedding long sinuous trails of mass, drawn down into the hidden maw of the singularity.

  The sound of the main bridge hatch cycling open was jarringly loud in the silence.

  Kosho looked over her shoulder, seeing an exhausted and work-stained Oc Chac limp onto the bridge. His combat armor-a necessity for engineers working in the midst of battle-was scored with dozens of impact dimples on the battle-steel. The Mayan’s face was uncharacteristically open, his lips parted, the muted glare of glowing night reflecting in his eyes.

  “Mictlan,” the Sho-sa sighed. “Beneath the cold lands of the north from whence Quetzalcoatl retrieved the bones of the first people, a tomb filled with decay and rivers of ash, where reigns the dreadful god Mictlantecuhtli, his face covered with a bony mask, sitting amongst owls and spiders, ruling the land of the dead: The destination an unfortunate corpse must strive towards for four long years: first through a whirlwind of knives, then against icy winds, daring all the dangers of the underworlds, at last to cross nine waters and dissolve into the void. A dreadful place where the living dare not tread…”

  “Approximately three light-years from us-three superjovian brown dwarfs in perfect balance,” Susan said quietly, fingernails brushing across the navigational plot. The images tightened, zooming in. Her med-band was pulsing, flooding her with stimulants to keep onrushing fatigue from overwhelming her mind. The tension of battle and headlong flight was beginning to fade, leaving her entire body throbbing with pain. “And a singularity at their center, drinking their mass like blood.”

  At the navigational console, Gretchen stirred-tearing herself away from the wonder resplendent before them-and looked back to Kosho. The civilian’s face was fairly glowing with desire.

  “No.” Kosho’s eyes were half-lidded, but her voice was firm. “We’ll be going no closer. Pilot, find us somewhere to lie up and rest the crew. We’ll repair what we can, and then we’ll move a goodly distance away from the Pinhole and see if we can reach gradient… Yes, Sho-sa?”

  Oc Chac had moved to Holloway’s station at Nav and was shaking his head. “Even when repairs are complete, Chu-sa, and the coil is back in operation… Gravitometric readings around us are off the scale-we’ve passed over some kind of equilibrium point, where the curve of physical space has inverted-we can’t make transit out of this… this pocket. That inversion is forcing gradient well beyond ships’ capacity to punch through into hyper.”

  Susan suppressed a curse. “What about inside the pocket? Can we reach superluminal here?”

  “Perhaps.” The Mayan adjusted the scan controls on the navigational console. “We’ll need to move deeper in-see if gradient slopes off abruptly.” He turned back to Kosho, jaw clenched. “It may be, kyo, that the pinhole we’ve slipped through has taken us into a captive universe.”

  “What do you mean?” Susan felt the tide of cold reach her sinuses, which abruptly made her head feel both light, empty, and clear. The engineer’s statement hung before her, seemingly profound, but also beyond practical reach. “What does that mean to us, Sho-sa?”

  “It means, kyo,” Oc Chac said, considering his words carefully, “that here we may be able to punch through to hyperspace-but we won’t have anywhere to go. The Barrier itself may be wrapping gravity-and the core fabric of realspace-back around to the other side of the pocket. Indeed, if we traveled the six light-year-width of this place from end to end, we may well wind up at our starting point.”

  Holloway-who seemed as confused as Susan-scratched the back of his head, then said: “But there’s a break in the fabric, right, because we just came through from the ‘outside.’ So the only way out, would be right back the way we came-and into the waiting claws of that Khaid battle-group.”

  The Mayan shrugged. “ Thai-i, such may be our fate.” He lifted his chin, giving Kosho a questioning look. “Hennig’s crews are ready to tear into the coil and replace those damaged cells-if we’re done maneuvering at high-g for a couple hours.”

  Kosho nodded. “Get to it, Sho-sa. Keep the duty officer informed of your progress and estimated time to complete. As soon as we can find somewhere to lie up, we’ll go off battle-stations.”

  Gretchen stirred expectantly, her parchment-wrapped block tucked under one arm. The Swedish woman looked ghastly-her face was a sallow frame for enormous, fatigue-blackened eyes-but she was still game to plunge ahead into the unknown, seeking the thrill of first-light shining upon something lost eons ago.

  “I said no.” Susan eased herself out of the shockchair, feeling every muscle and bone throb violently. “ Thai-i Holloway, we need to get third watch on duty stations and send everyone else to the showers. Myself included. Chac is busy, and you and Konev are due for a break, so see if Thai-i Goroemon survived the last sixteen hours and get her up here to stand in as officer of the watch.”

  “ Hai, kyo! ”

  Stiff beyond measure, Kosho limped through a slow circuit of Command, checking in with each duty station. As she approached Comm, Pucatli popped up with his hand extended. The young Mexica was holding a glass vial filled with a pale rose-colored fluid. “For you, Chu-sa .”

  Susan frowned. “An antibiotic?”

  “No, no, Chu-sa.” Pucatli grimaced. “Those are poison! What’s bad for microbes can only be bad for people. This is a tincture for the weary, made from the root and flowers of chunuli plants in my mother’s garden. Mix it with very hot water and partake gently.”

  Drink it with sayu? Susan converted the near-hysterical laugh that rose in her throat to a polite nod. “Thank you for the kind thought, Chu-i.”

  The Wilful

  The Khaid destroyer-another classified as Neshter -class by the commercial registry, though Mitsuharu’s practiced eye had already picked out a number of differences between this ship and the Qalak -loomed in the threatwell, its icon surrounded by a constellation of informative graphics.

>   “Launch signature,” Tocoztic announced suddenly, his voice tight. “Looks like a one-rail sprint missile.” In the ’well, a glowing streak appeared, following the track of the weapon. “Vectors do not overlap.”

  Hadeishi had already seen the target and his face stiffened in fury.

  “An evac capsule,” De Molay said, a moment later. “We picked up their signal about an hour ago.”

  “As did the Khaid,” Mitsuharu bit out with difficulty. “They haven’t a chance.”

  The missile icon intersected the capsule’s graphic and both winked out. A quarter-second later, a tiny bright flare appeared on one of the camera displays, and then faded away. Against the slow roil of the dust clouds-all ruddy red, purple, and orange luminescence-the explosion went almost unnoticed.

  Hadeishi was motionless, his face in shadow on the darkened bridge, staring at the ’well. And I was unable to do even the slightest thing to save the men aboard.

  “She’s turning,” the Thai-i announced into the silence. “We have-we have vector overlap if they hold course.”

  The Nisei stirred, forcing his attention back to the ’well and the movement of ships, wreckage, anything else which might affect his tiny command. He rewound the ’well through the last three hours of data, the myriad icons a blur of motion. “They’re into the return leg of their patrol pattern.”

  He clicked his teeth, seeing that the intercept solution was very poor for the Wilful. “We’re going to have to go to zero-power and lose steering way, hope they pass over us as wreckage. We’re too close to-”

  Tocoztic gave him a sick look. “They’re sure to catch us on active scan-we’re not Imperial, we’re not Khaid-they will know we’re a scavenger that didn’t get caught up in the battle. That fate”-he stabbed a finger at the location of the obliterated capsule-“will be ours!”

  “Going dark,” De Molay announced, when Hadeishi failed to respond immediately. Her face drew tight with concentration and Mitsuharu could see that another set of v-panes had appeared on her console. The markings-and he could not see them clearly from his vantage point-did not seem to be formed of human letters.