Land of the Dead (19 page)

Perfect,
he thought, suppressing a laugh. A Khaid sailor in a blue-and-black z-suit was just inside, watching an environmental control panel as the shuttle started to pick up speed. After a moment of preparation, Mitsuharu began banging hard on the porthole with the severed forearm. Then, before waiting to see what happened, he secured the limb with two quick passes of stickytape so that the bloody glove was easily visible in the window, and scrambled up and over the roof of the shuttle.

Crouching, he took his bearings and saw the shuttle was turning away at an angle from both the
Qalak
and the
Wilful
. It was hard to gauge distance with no backdrop, but he guessed the freighter was a good kilometer away.
Two hundred, fifteen seconds.

Hadeishi pulled out the little plasma cutter, oriented himself towards the
Wilful
—looked back towards the passenger door with a wry twist to his lips—and when he saw the top edge of the door cycle outward, he rotated the strength ring to full and thumbed the control.

The plasma jet flickered out in a long, blue-white line and Hadeishi felt his boots tug—kicking away, he lost adhesion—and then saw the shuttle falling away below him. Long seconds passed … he imagined the hatch cycling open, the limb being retrieved, the Khaid sailor stepping back inside to examine the queer artifact. Then the portholes on the sides of the shuttle suddenly flared with a stabbing, orange-red light. The spacecraft shuddered, spilling debris. Out of the corner of his eye, Mitsuharu saw a swarm of combat suits boiling out of the
Qalak
’s boat-bay. EVA carts winged towards the shuttle, which was now leaking spheroids of gray-white smoke as the interior fittings burned.

Two hundred, forty seconds.

He switched off the plasma cutter and curled himself up into a ball. It was a long fall to the freighter and he hoped—devoutly prayed—that the Khaiden commander on the
Qalak
didn’t decide to turn on full active scanning for the immediate volume around his ship.
Then I would fry like a sweet dumpling!

At two hundred forty-five seconds a wave of metallic debris, intermixed with charred cushions, chunks of piping, internal framing, and bits of z-suit accelerated past him. Buffeted by the flotsam, he looked back and saw that the entire shuttle had vanished in a blast cloud. The Khaid marines—barely visible at this range—were in equal disarray.
Score one for the army! Good thing, too,
he thought
. That combat armor will sport an IR mode for extravehicular combat.
Gritting his teeth, he dialed down his suit temperature regulator.
Can’t go to zero, but I can draw down my signature.…

*   *   *

Sixteen minutes later, his limbs numb with cold and his radiation monitor strobing red, Hadeishi collided with cargo hold B on the
Wilful
’s port quarter. Shocked out of a hypothermia-induced daze, he bounced along the pitted, scarred surface of the freighter for five or six seconds until he managed to get his hands flat against the metal hull and his z-suit adhered. The jerky stop sent stabbing pains up each arm, but he managed to hold on.
Ah, now that hurt.

Now able to dial up his suit temperature, Mitsuharu scrabbled along on all fours, looking for the nearest airlock. If memory served, there was a cargo door between two of the drive fairings. The last six meters seemed a vast distance, but he managed to drag himself to the control panel and punch in his access code. Human-friendly lights flickered on inside the lock chamber and he fell in, feeling utterly drained. Hands shaking, Mitsuharu managed to get the outer lock closed and atmosphere cycling before he collapsed.

Gravity kicked in as he lay on the floor, inner door rotating open. For a long moment Hadeishi couldn’t even lift his head, but when he could, the cargo hold access way was empty. No alarms had triggered, no sirens sounded.
Khaid haven’t reprogrammed the ship yet.

Dragging himself over the threshold, Hadeishi managed to prop himself against the nearest wall and close the hatch. His hands and feet were getting warmer, and he felt some strength returning. When he could get to his feet, Mitsuharu shuffled down to the cargo master’s office—really no more than a closet with controls to manage the gangways and cranes—and rummaged through the storage bins. This yielded up a Gogozen bar—a kind of high-fat candy he usually avoided, but now stuffed into his mouth without delay—and far better, three cans of Kuka-Kolo—a carbonated
chocolatl
beverage sweetened with the sap of the Nopal cactus. When all three were drained dry, Hadeishi began to feel human again.
Ah, sugar. Very delicious. Now I need a weapon, or more than one.

He missed the grenades, but they seemed to have done well by the Khaid shuttle.

After searching the closet one more time, Hadeishi signed into the shipboard net and paged through the security camera views available to him. Restricted to below-decks, he found nothing in ten fruitless minutes.
No Khaid down below … they must be up on the bridge.

Picking up a long pry bar stowed behind the comp panels, Mitsuharu slipped out of the closet and made his way towards the shipcore with his helmet external audio turned up, listening for anything beyond the usual groaning and hissing of the old ship.

*   *   *

The starboard cargo lift rattled to a halt on the accommodation deck—not an area Hadeishi had ever set foot in before—and he eased out, pry bar in both hands like a bat, and stepped lightly towards the shipcore. Almost immediately he encountered a rec room strewn with burned fabric and paper, fallen
kaffe
cups, and broken plates. His boots crunched on scattered shipgun flechettes, and the walls and cupboards were badly torn up. Two bodies lay sprawled on the floor—both wearing the jumpsuits favored by the
Wilful
’s crew—and as he gingerly approached, they convulsed with a rippling wave of motion.

“Shipbugs,” Mitsuharu muttered under his breath, skipping backward, face twisting in disgust.

Both corpses collapsed into a tatter of cloth and white bone. The Khaid shipbugs, an insectile omnivore about the length of his thumb, swarmed across the floor, their silvery carapaces making a queer, shimmering mass. Hundreds of antennae turned in his direction, waved about tasting the air, and then the entire swarm turned away with a rustling
tik-tik-tik
, looking for more decomposing organics to consume.

Why the Khaid—who were not one of the insectoid species known to the Méxica—employed the shipbug, Hadeishi did not know. One intel briefing he had seen suggested the Khaiden themselves had once been a subject race of the Kryg’nth or Megair and had adopted some of their past masters’ technologies and practices. Too, he understood they found the insects a delicacy. He found the bugs loathsome and stayed back, out of the room, until the swarm had departed for some other corpse-strewn pasture.

Then he forced himself to search through the remains of the two men, and gathered up their identity cards, pocket multitools, and anything else of use he could find. The refrigerator in the rec area also yielded up more to eat and two bottles of Mayahuel brand beer, which he stowed in the leg pockets of his z-suit.

Do they have a handler?
he wondered, thinking of the shipbugs again.
So far they are the only sign of life.… Perhaps the Khaid close off the ship, let the bugs scour everything clean, and then come in to gather them up. All fat and juicy and …
He spat violently in the sink, then wiped his mouth.
I need to find a real command console with access to all of the security cameras.

*   *   *

Hadeishi crouched at the junction between the shipcore and an access way to the main passenger airlock, morbidly amused to stand no more than a meter from where he’d been marched out in chains no more than an hour earlier. This time the roundabout was empty—all of the bodies had been dragged away and the Khaid marines were gone. Cautious, Mitsuharu held a small mirror mounted on a telescoping handle around the corner, looking for the expected guards. The airlock itself was open, but no one seemed to be in the gangway leading to the
Qalak
.
There must be someone just out of sight on the other side.…

Wary of showing himself in the crossroads, Mitsuharu backtracked to the nearest door and slipped inside. The room was one of a set ringing the top of the shipcore and seemed to be sleeping quarters for four. On the far side was a sliding doorway leading into a shared bathroom. Hadeishi wasted no time in passing through, giving the fresher a quick once-over—no weapons or tools—and then easing open the doorway to the second bunkroom.

Here he found the bodies from the roundabout and bridge. They were thrown in a heap—and the
tik-tik-tik
of the shipbugs was loud enough to hear through his helmet. Suppressing an urge to vomit, Mitsuharu kept to the edge of the room and made a quick exit out the far door.

Breathing fast, Hadeishi forced himself to stop—now he was in a short corridor leading back to the roundabout—and he was suddenly afraid he’d walked out in full view of any Khaiden camera pointing down the gangway between the two ships. Luckily, the corridor was not in line with the airlock itself. Breathing a sigh of relief, he ducked across to the other side of the passage and was about to chance angling back to the crossroads to get to the bridge itself when he realized that the thick trail of blood and offal leading into the charnel room had a companion. Not much more than a scrape of blood here and there, but a clear sign that someone had come out of the slaughterhouse—crawled across the corridor on hands and knees—and through a door at the end of the passage.

Well now, they missed someone on their sweep.
He followed the trail down a short maintenance passage filled with racked air filtration membranes and into a space holding the plumbing risers for the bathrooms.

The blood trail led into an opening beneath the gray water return. Taking a risk, Mitsuharu cracked open his z-suit helmet, set down the pry bar, and then knelt on the deck, peering under the pipes.

The dim glow of his helmet lamp glittered back from a pair of pale gray eyes.

An elderly, silver-haired woman was squeezed in among the plumbing, her jumpsuit caked with blood, her face gashed open. Now he could hear her labored breathing and see the muzzle of an automatic—a Webley Bulldog, from what he could see—pointed in his general direction.

“
Sencho
,” he said quietly, recognizing the rank tabs on her collar. “I’d better get you out of there.”

*   *   *

An hour later, on the bridge, Captain De Molay was lying back on the pilot’s shockchair, her face bandaged and a mug of instant
kaffe
clutched in hands shining with antibiotic biogel. She looked only marginally better and her breathing was still hoarse. Hadeishi was sitting at the captain’s panel, carefully paging through the onboard cameras, a long machete-like knife close by his hand, and two different earbugs inserted. The
Wilful
’s systems were more of a hodgepodge than he’d believed, but on-board power was up, the transit coil was spun down to a low idle, reactors were cooking, and every kind of weapon on the ship had been gathered up by the Khaid and hauled away.

Well
, he thought,
almost everything
. He patted the machete.

“You’re our new engineer’s mate then,” De Molay wheezed, trying not to cough. “Azulcay said you were showing some promise.”

“Kind of him,” Mitsuharu replied, glancing over at the main hatchway. The door was locked and barred, though he knew there was a shipbug swarm busily cleaning up the blood sprayed across the floor and walls outside. The thought still turned his stomach. “Are there any explosives on board? Grenades?”

“If the bastards didn’t take it,” she coughed, pointing at the bridge gun locker—whose door was hanging open, the locks sprung. “There might be some blasting putty in there. I keep some on hand when we have to clear a landing zone.”

Hadeishi nodded, distracted by a faint tremor suddenly running through the floor and making his fingertips buzz on the control panes. He checked the exterior camera feeds, and saw the
Qalak
’s shipskin was deforming. The forests of radiating fins were drawing inward, while the destroyer’s transit drive foils were unwinding.

“She’s prepping to jump and take us with her. Finish that
kaffe
,
kyo
, we’re going to have to move.”

“Move where?” De Molay managed to lift her mug and drain the rest of the sludge. “Two poor pilgrims are we, with only one tired horse—not even one we can fly out of here!”

“No, not yet.” Hadeishi rummaged quickly through the gun locker—twice looted between the
Wilful
’s crew and the Khaid—and came up with a half-used cylinder of grayish putty, no more than a finger in length. “No triggers?”