Glory's People (23 page)

Dietr Krieg felt Para’s claws strike into his shoulder. He reacted to that before he could react to the other, somehow dreadfully familiar, assault.

With an effort he projected himself into the closed circle of the
Gloria Coelis
’s Starmen, all of whom were reeling with the impact of the attack.

On the bridge, Broni and Amaya cried out in agony before
Glory
could act to shield them from the worst of the dark anger flowing around the ship.

Duncan’s response was the most controlled. Mira had warned him microseconds before the blast of rage and hatred smashed through the ship. Instantly, Duncan was ranging through the bridge-crew stations, testing responses and resistance to the attack.

“
Glory
, give me a holograph! “

Duncan’s command was harsh and comforting.
Glory
’s people responded to his authority instinctively.

‘‘Broni, Buele, Damon! Bring them back inside, now!”

There was no question who was meant. Clavius, Big and Pronker had been mind-probing Outside, ahead of the ship. Two of the three cats were wildly agitated, and Pronker lay next to Damon, stiff with shock and terror.

Mira released her hold on Duncan and leaped across the bridge to Damon’s pod, where Pronker lay shivering in the gel. Damon seemed more frightened by what had happened to his feline companion than by what was happening Outside. He offered a stunned hand to Mira, who snarled and cuffed it aside as she crouched to groom and comfort Pronker, who responded by uttering a piteous howl.

The broad-spectrum holo materialized in the bridge. Seen from above, the red disk looked menacing. Lightning played through the clouds below it. Purple, searching tendrils were questing.

Duncan saw to his dismay that a small spacecraft, the last mass-depletion ship to leave
Glory
, was being savagely tom apart. Between the lashing, electrically charged tentacles of the red object Duncan could catch glimpses of a blackness so deep it seemed infinite.

This was the familiar Terror at work; Duncan’s own savaged instincts confirmed it. But the great red disk, kilometers across, and the questing tendrils of purple light reaching down into the storm, were things he had never seen--or even imagined.

Amaya made contact.
“Duncan, what is that?”

“
Glory.
Search.”
Duncan ignored the Sailing Master’s question and made his sending as brief and as urgent as he could manage.
“A red disk, fifty to one hundred kilometers in diameter. Mean altitude, one-fifty to two hundred kilometers. Multiple discharges from the ventral surface resembling tentacles. These extend into the lower atmosphere. It appears that they, or some other force, have produced structural failures in a penetrating spacecraft. “
He paused, dry-mouthed.
Glory
was now passing over the edge of the red disk. The purple discharges from the underside of the phenomenon were invisible.

“Oh, God,” Amaya said aloud. The fragments of the Hokkaidan MD vessel were reentering the atmosphere in a display like a meteor shower.

“Duncan, what can we do?”
That was Broni, still child enough to seek hope where there was none. The crew of the mass-depletion ship were burning to cinders as the fragments of their craft fell through the curtain of light the color of rotting blood.

The tension in the bridge deck was raw, a palpable presence. From time to time one of the cats, overcome by anxiety, would raise a yowling cry of protest.
Glory
's search of the database was under way.
If only we could do more
, Duncan thought. But
Glory
was rapidly picking up delta now; the tachyon pressure on the mains and courses was adding speed enough to be felt as gravity aboard the ship. The fabric walls bowed and throbbed as the air aboard was moved as if by a tide.

Duncan sent a brief message to Dietr in the sick bay a half kilometer from the bridge. The response was slow,, and when it came Duncan had a swift impression of a huge dog or wolf looking up at
Glory
from within the shimmering auroral construct below. Dietr came through less sharply than did Para’s fearsome images.

“Duncan ... it’s the Outsider again . . . did you see it?”

What Duncan had seen, or rather sensed, was Paracelsus’s interpretation of the ultimate enemy. Duncan received a jumble of images from the cats. Mira saw a thing of fire, tooth and claw. Big and Black Clavius snarled at a leaping dogpack, all felt the Outsider’s rage as
Glory
swept over and beyond the red apparition.

Broni sent,
“It’s bound to the red thing, whatever it is. It can't rise above it. “

Duncan gave an order to Damon:
“Make more sail. “

More skylar appeared on the yards, bowed to the tachyon wind. Duncan swivelled the mast-mounted imaging cameras to keep the Red Sprite in view and duplicated in miniature inside the bridge.

At once he reacted to the term
Red Sprite
. It had come through the drogue from
Glory
's data bank. Swiftly, the mainframe filled in the sending.

“Red Sprites were first observed on Earth in the last decade of the Twentieth Century by geophysical researchers at Stanford University. The fanciful name was given them by Professor Umran S. Inan and his assistants, Victor Pasko and Timothy Bell. Sprites appeared intermittently in and over Earth’s atmosphere with increasing frequency over the next two hundred years. The phenomenon reaching a peak in the middle years of the Jihad. “

Glory
’s sending reached each syndic simultaneously.

The implications of
Glory
's statement were stunning. If, as Broni sensed, the red construct was bound in some way to the Terror, the Jihad must have drawn the horror to Earth. Who could guess how many of the reputed atrocities committed in those years were the work of the Outsider?

“Specifics,
Glory
,”
Duncan commanded.

“The disk is a plasma, as are the tentacles that appear to descend into the planetary atmosphere, “ Glory
complied.
“There is no confirmed information in the database, but the observed evidence suggests that the Sprite is used to draw energy from powerful planetary storm systems.

“Hypothesis: While the Outsider is absorbing energy from planetary weather systems, it is unable to disengage until the transfer is complete or until an unspecified percentage of capacity is reached. The degree of local cosmic-ray bombardment is probably a factor in the planetary-Outsider exchange. What this means in terms of actual elapsed time is unknown, and given my resources, probably unknowable. It is a valid supposition that the presence of a Red Sprite is a sure indication of the intimate proximity of an Outsider, and it is also a valid supposition that given the assumed purpose of the Outsider-Sprite relationship, Red Sprites are a creation of the Outsider and can exist only in the low stratosphere of an atmosphere-bearing planet.

“I suggest, Duncan, that we put as much distance as possible between ourselves and Planet Yamato. “

Mira snarled in agreement.

Buele asked aloud, “How are the Yamatans taking all this, Brother Captain?”

Glory
made the calm reply:
“I have confined them to their quarters. I could not risk the damage they might inflict on me if they should panic and take it into their heads to leave.
”

Ever practical
Glory, Duncan thought. But how were Minamoto no Kami and his people facing the waves of angry emotion that had moments ago penetrated the ship?

“Duncan?”
It was Broni.
“I am puzzled. “

“Yes, Broni?”

“Why did it kill Baka Ie? He wasn't angry. He was happy at the honor done him by his daimyo. “

Duncan sent,
“We have assumed that only rage and fear draw the Outsider. It may be that pleasurable emotions do as well. “

Amaya: “
That’s horrifying, Duncan. “

“It’s a possibility we can’t ignore. A second is that Baka’s mass-depletion engine interfered in some way with the energy transfer that was under way through the Red Sprite. “

“How much grace do you think we have, Duncan?”
the Cybersurgeon sent from the surgery.

“There’s no way of knowing until the Sprite begins to dissipate, “
Duncan replied.

“Then may I suggest more sail still, Master and Commander?”

Duncan was grateful for Dietr’s irony. Men didn’t indulge in irony when they were in the grip of panic.

“Anya, “
Duncan sent,
“I think we are safe for the moment. Un-Wire and go down to the Yamatans. Do what you can to calm them. “

The Sailing Master emerged from the pod still gleaming with gel, and, without a word, launched herself into the plenum beyond the valve.

The holoimage in the center of the bridge deck glowed with ruddy malevolence. It seemed as bright as ever, but Duncan had no way of judging how long it might last. When it vanished, the Terror would be free again;
Glory
's people were only too aware what that meant to them and to their ship.

The cats on the bridge moved away from their partners and began to prowl across the deck around the holo of the Red Sprite. Big, more adventurous than most of the cats, rose slowly onto his hind legs and cuffed speculatively at the projected image. Its insubstantial nature seemed to puzzle him and he dropped back onto all fours and circled the holograph still again, ears laid back, eyes wide and pupils dilated. Black Clavius, still under the influence of Broni’s sexual reaction to the storm of tachyons now passing through the ship, dropped to the deck and snarled at the diminishing Sprite. Mira, who had remained at Duncan’s shoulder, trilled commandingly at the young toms.

The animals’ reaction to the image of the Red Sprite was not what any of the syndics would have expected. Clearly the cats’ understanding was imperfect, but just as clearly they chose to treat the holograph as something more than a natural phenomenon.

Mira’s mind brushed hard against Duncan’s. The import of her sending was crystal clear.

“There are times for fighting and times for flight. Run, dominant tom, run far and run fast. “

Anya Amaya arrived at the section of compartments assigned to the Yamatans still sensitized from her Wired session on the bridge. Through the woven monofilament walls of the plenum she could feel the agitation of the confined colonists.

She opened a wall storage, withdrew a drogue and settled it in the socket in her skull. Immediately the raw emotion of the men on the other side of the plenum wall was amplified into a turmoil of fear and anger. Amaya had noticed, ever since arriving at Planet Yamato, that the Yamatans had unique emotional valences. Her experience, other than that acquired on feminist New Earth, had been with a dour and often melancholy Duncan Kr, with the Teutonic Cybersurgeon Dietr Krieg, and with the tensely controlled Damon Ng.

The readiness of the Yamatans to express their emotions under stress unsettled the Sailing Master. She had learned, from her study of
Glory
's data bank, that ethnic Japanese could be extreme stoics under some circumstances and extravagantly emotional under others. It was noted in the data bank that many of the folktales of Terrestrial Japan had been prized for a unique combination of heroism and blatant sentimentality. A favorite legend--and one that Minamoto Kantaro seemed to treasure--was the tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin, the classic story of forty-seven samurai whose master was forced to commit seppuku for having attacked--within the grounds of the imperial palace--a nobleman who had diminished his dignity. For this offense, his clan was disbanded and his followers, the forty-seven among them, reduced to penury as ronin--masterless samurai. These same men banded together, attacked the nobleman who had caused the misfortune, killed him--and then surrendered to the Shogun’s justice. Which consisted of an order to slit their bellies at once.

Kantaro had recounted this 2,500-year-old story to Amaya with tears flowing down his cheeks. “It is, Amaya-san,” he said, “a tragic tale.” Anya had been amazed to realize that the young man was genuinely moved.

Now as Anya prepared to release the Yamatans from
Glory
's temporary confinement, she recalled Kantaro’s reaction to the gory end of the ninja in Yedo and his stoic acceptance of the fact that his uncle might require him to apologize to the
gaijin
by emulating the Forty-Seven Ronin and committing suicide.

It was difficult for a woman, a product of so politically correct a world as New Earth, to reconcile Kantaro’s tears and his acceptance of suicide as a means of apology with Kantaro’s obvious modernity of outlook and his courage.

She gave
Glory
instructions to unlock and open the valve confining the Yamatans. As it dilated she was struck by the emotional blast of fear and suspicion
Glory
had caused by locking the colonists in place.

The section containing the quarters assigned to the colonists consisted of a large compartment (once, long ago, filled with titanium racks and cold-sleep gear, but now stripped and empty) and a concentric ring of smaller and more livable spaces where the individual daimyos might conduct their own private affairs.

The complex was near--that is, within a kilometer of--the hangar deck where
Dragonfly
and the seven MD ships remaining on board were secured. It was the proximity of the Yamatans’ spacecraft that had decided
Glory
to restrain the guests. The Goldenwing had made a computer decision that the colonists were safer and less troublesome confined during the encounter with the Intruder and the Red Sprite. Anya did not expect them to be pleased about
Glory
's arbitrary decision, and they were not. Inside the dilating valve Amaya found a rank of colonists, not wearing antique armor now, but space armor of obviously sophisticated design, and carrying energy weapons--heavy laze-guns.

Only the typically Japanese clan crests on the space armor recalled the pageantry of several hours before. At the head of the first angry rank stood Kantaro, his titanium armor blazoned with the
mon
containing the three inward-growing hollyhock leaves that had blazoned all that belonged to descendants of leyasu Tokugawa.