Land of the Dead (4 page)

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 F
ULL
S
TOP
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

O
N THE
C
HUMASH
S
OUND
, N
ORTH
A
MERICA
, A
NÁHUAC

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 cafés 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 honored 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.

Mitsuharu knelt in the temple, bending his head against the floor in obeisance to the gilded idol. The altar was crowded with candle stubs, pools of melted wax, and drifts of fallen ash. Coins, gewgaws, trinkets, little toys, chicle-prizes, letters, twists of paper folded with prayers covered every flat surface in the shrine.

“The city is expensive,” he said aloud, shaking his head in dismay. “I’ve little to leave you, mother, father.” Hadeishi dug in his pockets, found the sake, the flowers, the hard plastic shape of his Fleet comm. “But what I have, I will send to you, beyond the sea.”

Beyond the walls of the temple-house, a late afternoon wind guttered among the stones. The first Nisei to be laid to rest in the Western Paradise had been interred within days of the Landing. The fleet had breached upon this shore out of exhaustion. The rough passage between the outer bulwark of Mowichat Island and the rocky, forest-shrouded coastline had taken the last burst of energy the refugees could muster. Thirty-six days had passed while the gray vastness of the sea hammered at their boats. Few of the Japanese vessels had been fitted for such a voyage, though in the mad panic to evacuate Edo and Osaka, no mind had been paid to their seaworthiness. More than half of those who fled dying Nippon had perished. But the Emperor himself had survived, carried forth from the wreck of his ancient realm in a massive Chinese
hai-po
taken in a raid off Taiwan. That enormous ship had run aground in Deception Creek, or so the children said, and the last true Emperor to be born in the Immortal Islands had splashed ashore with
katana
in hand and rusted armor upon his breast. Though the shore he faced was crowded with an impossibly thick forest, and his people were sick and weak, there was nowhere else to run.