Land of the Dead ittotss-3

by Thomas Harlan

  “ 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, expression 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, shipkiller
s 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 emissions 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.

  Piercing the center of the pylon was a six-meter-wide shaft, a nine-pointed star in cross-section which plunged down into darkness. Poised directly above this unfathomable hole was a second pyramidal shape, apex pointing down from the unseen ceiling. At the junction between these mirror-like pyramids, the platform measured at least thirty meters on each side. The surface was composed of a metallic alloy bearing the endlessly repeating design of two nested, equilateral triangles, while each side was circumscribed by three raised, angular consoles. Their upper surfaces were glassy-smooth, though Xochitl’s exo was beginning to annotate the featureless expanse with faint glyphs indicating minute imperfections of the surface.

  At much the same time, his z-suit environmental sensors began to register that the tremendously cold air in the chamber had warmed a degree, and the atmospheric mixture, which had been almost entirely nitrogen was now beginning to percolate with oxygen.

  Perhaps there… The Prince’s thought broke off as the others clambered up to the last of the steps and stopped to goggle in wonderment as he had done.

  ***

  Gretchen hardly noticed the Prince. Her consciousness was suffused with data pouring into her perception from all sides. Here, everything was thick with meaning. Even node 3^3 3 seemed barely able to keep up with the flood of information. Something in the flow-so many glyphs and icons and ghost-images were popping up around her she could barely process the visual stimuli-caught at her. This isn’t right-there’s something broken somewhere-no, not broken, a translation matrix is throwing errors.

  “How… how does this all work?” Xochitl’s voice came as if from a great distance.

  Gretchen struggled to focus on the man standing in front of her. When she could separate out the visual channel, the Prince was sweating behind his faceplate. Gretchen knew beyond doubt that his “mask” was gabbling unknown languages into his mind and troubling his vision with intermittent flashes of undecipherable symbols. She felt pummeled by the same forces. Xochitl reached out, seized Gretchen’s suit-collar, and dragged her close. “Where is… where is the command interface?”

  Anderssen felt immortal, weightless, and unassailable. Xochitl’s problems did not concern her-or were so remote to her experience he was negligible in any calculation involving her attention. “Didn’t they tell you what it looked like?” Part of her regarded him coolly. “When they sent you out here? No diagrams, no pictures of your goal?”

  “No! Yes-a theory-just to find a control interface.” Xochitl blinked, looking away. He batted jerkily at the air between them. “Is this hot light in my mind-or is it-”

  “It is she,” Sahane accused in a wheezy growl as he finally reached the top of the long stair. The marines, growing more and more nervous for the Prince’s safety, twitched toward the Hjogadim. The alien looked worse, as the inside of his helmet was smeared with bruised-plum-colored vomit. “It’s been this female all along. She and the queer old ape with the bright eyes. They are the ones that brought us to this terrible place.”

  Gretchen nodded calmly. She hoped no one would see her hands clench into claws. The golden overlay was seeping so quickly through her synapses that the ability to command her body was running thousands of cycles behind her consciousness. These biological interfaces are so slow! “This is so.”

  “I think,” Sahane said, making a sign of command at the Prince. “That you should kill it right now.”

  Xochitl jerked around with a gasp, combat automatic flying out of his holster, and there was a sharp snap-snap! A cloud of flechettes slammed into Anderssen’s chest, knocking her across the platform to crash into a console near the outer edge of the pylon. She gasped, spat blood from a split lip, and clawed weakly at the smoking wound.

  Seeing that the Prince had taken action, the marines lunged forward to throw themselves between Xochitl and Sahane. The Hjo coughed out a bitter laugh. “Tell your servants to step away, toy. Tell them to-”

  ***

  “No,” Xochitl grated out, crashing his exo again. With relief he found his vision abruptly clear of the strange artifacts. The muttering drone in his mind fell quiet. “Those patolli beans only get one throw, and you’ve used up all your luck, you worthless coward.”

  Sahane blinked in surprise and hastily made another sign of command. The Prince shoved past the marines. “No Hjo-designed exo,” Xochitl said tightly, his automatic sighted on the creature’s faceplate. “No magical control of me. No more wastrel Sahane, he was lost in some accident in the back of beyond.” The Mexica lord essayed a grim smile. “No one will ever miss you, assistant-under-attache to the ambassador. Let’s see how long your bio-armor lasts against this-”

  The whine of a grav-sled echoing on his comm brought the Prince up short.

  ***

  Out of sight and out of mind, Gretchen crawled away, leaking atmosphere in a deadly hiss from her punctured suit, nerveless fingers scrabbling into the ruin of her field jacket to drag out the corroded bronze tablet. The device was now pierced with dozens of pinpoint, smoking holes. The golden glare in her mind had dissolved into confusion with hundreds of voices chattering away. Random images flared across her retinas. Then the memory of a raspy, irritating old voi
ce speaking impeccable Nahuatl forced its way through into her stunned, shocky consciousness: The second enemy of perception is seeing too much. You must learn true focus for the first time in your life.

  Then, those were not my thoughts! All the events I could see! Everything was so clear in the golden light -Anderssen’s hand twitched in horror and the bronze block skittered away across the floor of the platform. Sliding on the smooth metal, the tablet encountered little or no resistance.

  Meters away, the others jerked around as the tablet sailed across the shaft opening and was sliced cleanly in half by an invisible thread running vertically through the open space. Both halves vanished into the depths without a sound.

  “The singularity is down there,” Gretchen gasped out. She rolled over and punched her med-band override. She felt a sharp pinching in her chest and the cool flood of meds rushing into her bloodstream as the little device reacted in confusion, thinking the collapse of the neural overlay represented her own imminent demise. A raging headache from fighting the gold-tinged invader in her consciousness faded with the onslaught of painkillers. “Down at the root of all this… a string tied to a stone cast into a deep dark pool… aaaaah! ”

  Anderssen felt her own native sight awaking, pricked by the stabbing pain in her chest. Focus, she commanded and went limp on the platform. Her sightless eyes stared up into the darkness. Focus, she commanded, and her mind fell quiet.

  Distantly she heard one of the marines say, “Someone’s coming up the steps.”

  Another-this one very close by-said, “Her band has redlined.”

  At the Pinhole Exit