Land of the Dead (56 page)

Leaving the marines to scavenge for weapons and tools, Hummingbird slipped out into the dim, chaotic vastness of the landing bay. Packing foam lay scattered at the base of the landing cradle. He grimaced, seeing that the Order crewmen had brought, and assembled, a grav sled.
Prepared, were they?

He ducked back inside the ship and returned moments later with a single-rider grav-ski. The device unfolded in swift, programmed motions. A bit of a smile shone in the old man’s face, remembering long summers wasted skidding around the alleys and avenues of Coyoacán with his classmates, a tight noisy pack of boys. Then the sense of fleeting time gripped him. He hopped on and grasped the controls.

“Go now.” He sped away with the wide flare of the running lights searching the enormous corridor ahead.

THE
KADER

I
N THE
P
INHOLE

Hadeishi frowned, his jaw clenched tight as Cajeme’s voice burred in his earbug.
Capsule lock is completely jammed—we’re having trouble cutting through without frying the nitto-hei inside—and there are four more capsules outside we can’t bring onboard until we’ve got these men out.

The Nisei officer’s eyes darted to the nav plot, which still showed the
Tlemitl
between them and the Khaid fleet—or what of the enemy they could see with their sensors greatly obscured by the Barrier, the radiation clouds from discharged weapons, and the sensor shadow of the broken dreadnaught. From his vantage, several Khaid destroyers were hanging off at a distance, but the rest of the enemy had disappeared.

“
Thai-i
, do we have a remote we can run out to the edge of the wreck?”

Tocoztic shook his head in disgust. The Arawak’s beard was starting to grow in, which made him look particularly disreputable. “Nothing,
kyo
. We’ve got nothing
useful
aboard. I’d use an evac pod, but their maneuvering jets are exhausted once we get them into cargo one…” He gestured angrily at the plot. “Something is going on out there—I can pick up gravity-wave changes and some partial drive emission signatures—but we can’t see anything directly.”

Mitsuharu’s expression darkened further, considering the movements of the enemy.
Out of sight is not out of my mind … that battle-cruiser’s drive emissions could easily be visible to these new-model battleships of theirs. This
Spear
does not carry the most advanced electronics quills can buy. Not like the … wait a moment.

“What about the
Tlemitl
? Are there any sensor booms or subsystems we can connect to and use?”

“The—” Tocoztic stopped himself, initial disbelief replaced by curiosity. “I don’t know,
Chu-sa
, but she hasn’t lost
all
power to systems—just her mains. One moment…”

Hadeishi swiveled his shockchair, feeling the carapace creak under him. All of the Command stations were now filled with crewmen from the pods they’d recovered initially. Cajeme and his engineers downdeck were busily shuffling off the newly recovered ratings and officers, which looked to swell the
Kader
’s complement by another eighty or ninety bodies. Most of those recovered, however, had been injured to greater or lesser degree.

Now for the second act,
he thought, gaze settling on
Sho-i
Lovelace at the Comm’s station, despite being—perhaps—the junior-most tech aboard. The ensign had tucked two spare console styli into her hair, which was bound up in a blond bun behind her head. The young woman’s expression was distant, all attention focused on sorting out the confusion of signals picked up by their sensor booms.

Hadeishi caught her eye. “
Sho-i
? Are we still synched with the Khaid battlecast?”

“No,
kyo
. I’m getting intermittent bursts of traffic, but we’re out of the loop now.” She offered a crooked smile. “I’m sure they’ve figured out we’re no longer running with the
surtu
.”

“Very well. Route what you have to my earbug on sixty-three and—”

Lovelace started to nod in acknowledgment, then became quite still. “Wait one. Wait one.”

She stared at her console, gently adjusting the signal filtering, before scowling. “We’re picking up a rebroadcast,
kyo
. It’s the Khaid ’cast channel, but not from our immediate area. Routing to sixty-three.”

A babble of excited Khadesh flooded Mitsuharu’s hearing. The translator kicked in, but the hunt-lords were yowling so quickly, and overlapping one another, that the software produced only a garbled mess on the secondary channel.

“Fix a vector,
Sho-i
!” he ordered, barely able to hear himself think. “Are they behind, or ahead?”

I want that ship!
popped out of the howling.
She escaped once, not again!

Hadeishi twisted the earbug around, frustrated.
That sounds like the one named Sylahdeposu—he’s quick off the mark, but who does he have in his sights? Has another Imperial combatant dropped into the area, or …

“
Chu-sa
Hadeishi!” Inudo had turned in his seat. The pilot had a finger to his earbug, his voice loud over the chatter on the
Kader
’s crowded bridge. “I think he means the
Naniwa
. Comp says she is the one that survived the ambush and ducked into the Pinhole—a squadron of the Khaid must have slipped past us, following their drive track.”

Mitsuharu blinked and everything seemed to slow.
The
Naniwa
? The missing battle-cruiser is—

“How did they get through?” Tocoztic demanded of Inudo. “How can they track her—
we
can barely see her signature in this mess!”

“Do we have comm to the
Naniwa
?” Hadeishi’s expression made Lovelace stiffen in her seat.

“No,
Chu-sa
! We’re just picking up fragments of battlecast from a relay the Khaid dropped behind them. I’m getting five or six different emitter tags—one per ship probably.” The
Sho-i
swallowed nervously. “She won’t last long if she’s alone.”

“The
Naniwa
will fight to the last missile, the last gun…” Mitsuharu viciously suppressed an urge to order Inudo to take them to maximum acceleration and to the Eight Hot Narakas with the rest of the evacuation capsules. Despite this, his voice was a harsh growl which made every man and woman in Command straighten up in alarm. “
Chu-i
, I want to see a ticker on the plot telling me how long the engineers have to get those capsules inboard. Tocoztic-
tzin
, get your crews to their guns, get me status on anything we have left to throw. Pilot—lock down that drive plume signature and stand by for battle acceleration.”

The howling and yammering of the
surtu
pounded in his ear, though Hadeishi felt their bloodlust only as a ticking sense of time falling away into darkness. He eyed the plot—still no sign of the enemy moving against them—but now he was certain at least one of the
surtu
was loitering in the
Tlemitl
’s sensor shadow, waiting for them to break cover.

“Comms. Broadcast on the last frequency we had for the
Wilful
. Say only, “We are visiting Osaka.” Do not repeat the message.”

Lovelace stared back at him, pale brow furrowed as she resolved the reference, her stylus poised over the v-pane. “Do you think Captain De Molay will hear?”

“Perhaps.”

“A little boat like hers—what could she—?”

“Much depends upon the purity of one’s intent,
Sho-i
. Send the message.”

AMONG THE FALLEN

T
HREE
L
IGHT
-Y
EARS FROM THE
P
INHOLE

In quick succession, a handful of widely spaced icons popped up enemy-red in the
Naniwa
’s threatwell. The gravity spike of the Khaid ships dropping from transluminal reached the Imperial ship only instants after they emerged into realspace. Kosh
ō
was watching, elbow on the armrest of her shockchair, eyes hooded. Command was fully staffed, everyone having gotten at least a round of the showers and an hour off duty.

“Confirming five transits,” Konev announced, the icons beginning to annotate with glyphs indicating expected speed, throw-weight, and countermeasures. “All cruisers or smaller—
Mishrak
and
Aslan
-class—acceleration and emissions are within expected ranges.”

“Undamaged.” Oc Chac grimaced, tapping through a series of v-panes showing the wreckage being cleared from the battle-cruiser’s downship compartments. “Are they fresh,
Chu-sa
?”

“Doubtful,
Sho-sa
. Their captains are pushing hard—the Khaid have little need of patience. They will be wounded, like us, but keen to bring us to ground. Time to cover?”

Holloway eyed the plot. Fully half of the threatwell was a blizzard of icons representing the dead fleet. “Fifteen minutes to the nearest wrecks,
Chu-sa
. About twelve minutes until we’re inside the Khaid launch envelope.”

“Deflector status, Chac-
tzin
?” Susan looked back to the Mayan. “Are we still running hot?”

Oc Chac shook his head. “No,
kyo
. We can pull another three, four gravities.”

“Give us a boost, Holloway-
tzin
. But don’t open the throttle wide—we need to be able to turn once we’re in the debris field.”

The console under Susan’s fingers began to thrum with the vibration of the antimatter reactors chewing mass. “Nav—what are our options?”

Thai-i
Olin looked up from his console, shaking his head. “Active scan is showing a lot of small fragments between the hulks—no good avenues for us to maneuver down—no holes yet, to hide in.”

“Find us something,
Thai-i
. Quickly now.” Kosh
ō
’s voice was pointed. “We have two minutes…”

“Launch signatures!” Konev’s voice was relaxed, almost a drawl, but the tenseness in his arms was as clear to Susan as an ash-cloud over Mount Talol. “Sixty missile tracks are on the board.”

“Initiating countermeasures.” Pucatli—at Comms—dumped the first of her spoofer pods.

“Counter-fire,
kyo
?” Konev looked to Kosh
ō
with a fierce gleam shining in his eyes. “If we concentrate, we might knock one or two out before they close to gun range.”

“Save your launchers,
Thai-i
. We need to conserve every shipkiller we have left.” Susan had already considered the fire rate from the on-rushing destroyers and their range of engagement. “Engage the missile cloud with kinetics and ECM starting at six minutes.”

“Isn’t this a brawl,
Chu-sa
?” Oc Chac looked at her questioningly, his face pale with fatigue. “Even one or two of the enemy down at this range will even the odds appreciably.”

Kosh
ō
lifted her chin, indicating the ’well. “Not yet,
Sho-sa
. This is 3-v
Ullamaliztli
with only one player left on our side. You played at Academy, I’m sure—”

A warning Klaxon honked, cutting her off. A fresh icon popped into view on the ’well.

“A
Hayalet
-class battleship,
kyo
.” Konev’s voice was tight as he reeled off the specifications of the new indicator. “Punched straight through from the Pinhole, right on our track.”

Susan swiveled, lifting an eyebrow at Olin and Holloway. “Time to enter the maze?”

“Five minutes,
Chu-sa
.” The pilot’s eyes were wide with fear. “I’ve picked up some options but—”

“They’ll have to do. Pilot, take us in.”

On the plot, the destroyers continued to close, their launchers cycling a new spread of missiles every one hundred and twenty seconds. The first wave was still three minutes out, but the
Naniwa
’s point-defense was already hammering away at the incoming targets. Pucatli’s spoofer pod was squealing, flooding the spectrum with distorting noise and false signals. Khaid penetrators began to flare, and then wink off of the plot.

Behind them, the
Hayalet
held course at an angle away from the
Naniwa
and her running firefight. Susan watched the vector firm up, heading in-system at a good clip.