Land of the Dead (59 page)

Dandelion seeds on the last breeze of autumn.

Tocoztic had been watching, his display updating with scattered icons. “Capsules away,
kyo
. They’ll be on the Khaid sensor plot already.”

I don’t think they’re going to take the bait,
Hadeishi thought, feeling his stomach clench. A horrible pain was starting to pierce his heart, stealing the strength from his limbs.
Another ship lost … another crew killed.

On passive sensors, the two Khaid destroyers were unmistakably clear as they closed in on the coasting-cruiser, each properly spaced to overlap point-defense while retaining a clear field of fire for their missile racks and hardpoints. Mitsuharu hoisted the
Yilan
shipgun from the scabbard at the side of his shockchair and checked the magazine charge.
Six hundred rounds, armor-piercing.

Then he thumbed an override glyph on the console, sending the main reactor into shutdown and cutting all internal power. The dimmed lights flickered and went out. In the sudden darkness, Mitsuharu toggled his suit-comm alive and said: “Stand by to repel boarders.”

Musashi crouched beneath the battlement of Shimabara Castle, his armor in tatters. A huge ringing sound filled his head, as though an enormous gong had been cloven by a giant. Blood was everywhere, streaking the rough-hewn stones. At the edge of his stunned vision, a gaping section of the wall had been torn away by the impact of a Mongol bombard stone. All of the samurai on the parapet had been cast to the ground as jackstraws. He groped fruitlessly for his
bokut
ō
, but the weapon was nowhere to be found. Despite the stunned weakness of his limbs, Musashi rose up, finding a katana still scabbarded in the belt of a dead man. By the time he’d reached the steps leading down into the courtyard below, the first of the Mongol spearmen were swarming over the lower curtain wall. The sight of them sent a shock of vigor through his limbs. Here was an enemy within the length of his blade!

IN THE DEAD FLEET

A
BOARD THE
N
ANIWA

Oc Chac, Helsdon, and Konev cursed in unison, levering at the hatchway into Main Command with a magnetic ram. The compartment frame had warped in the last exchange of shipkillers, though their continued survival spoke volumes to the resistance afforded by the hexacomb armor between the primary and secondary hulls. Kosh
ō
hung back, one arm tucked around a stanchion, paying only partial attention to the efforts of the bridge crew to force an exit from the ruined compartment. Her earbug was still live, and she could monitor the chatter from Secondary Command, which was in operation. She could have used one of the escape hatches that led to an evac pod, but there was still work to be done, and her ship to fight.

Chu-i
Pucatli was nearly helmet-to-helmet with her, a field comp tucked into his elbow while the Comms officer tried to keep track of everything happening elsewhere on the ship.

We’ve broken contact, Chu-sa,
reported the second watch pilot from Secondary.
That last exchange blinded the destroyer and we’ve gone to ground between two of the leviathans.

“How much clearance do we have?” Susan did not like the thought of getting too close to something that might wake up at any time, though she admitted to herself that
beggars cannot be choosers.

Enough, kyo. But once they start hunting, we’ll have to run for it and drives are at sixty percent.

Kosh
ō
shook her head in displeasure, eyeing Pucatli. “Are you picking up anything from their ’cast traffic?”

The Comms officer’s lips twisted into a puzzled grimace. “Fragments,
kyo
—I think something’s happened in-system from us.” The younger officer clipped his z-suit to the stanchion and crossed his legs, pinning the field comp in place as he floated. “Most of our sensors are blocked by the wrecks, but—”

“What about the remote we dropped at the Pinhole?” Susan folded her arms, glaring at Oc Chac and Helsdon working on the door. Being denied the threatwell or any kind of proper information feed was making her almost violently nervous. The
Sho-sa
was now cutting into the doorframe with a plasma torch, which was generating a huge cloud of sparks and smoke droplets. “Do we still have a t-relay connection?”

“
Hai, kyo
.” Pucatli was working the comp as fast as he could, but no good answers were coming back. “But it’s six light-years from the
Chimalacatl
—so we’ve nothing on sensor or visual. Gravity plot now … here we go.”

The
Chu-i
turned the comp, showing Susan a navigational plot. Multiple tracks arrowed inbound from the Pinhole, showing a line-pattern indicating they’d gone superluminal to leap across the six light-year interval to the immediate region of the Sunflower. One of the traces ended abruptly—and the timestamp on the vector indicated they’d ceased to exist less than fifteen minutes ago.

“See that,
Chu-sa
?” Pucatli could not help but grin, teeth white behind his grimy faceplate.

“That last
Hayalet
stepped too close to the sun,” Susan stated flatly.

“Boom-boom,
kyo
,” the Comms officer observed, rubbing fine particles of ash from his screen.

Now we know what happened to this fleet,
Kosh
ō
thought, feeling the weight of the dead pressing against the hull of her ship.
Did they try and attack the artifact? No—they weren’t warships. Whoever—whatever—controlled the weapon system turned upon them.

She turned up the filters on her z-suit against the electrical smoke now obscuring their vision.
Anderssen and Hummingbird must have had some way to slip us past before, when we were so close to the artifact. Damn the old man … somehow he knows how to control the weapon.

*   *   *

Thirty minutes later, in Secondary Command, Susan stretched gingerly and sucked down some water. She’d taken a bad crack on the shoulder while the command team had scrambled downdeck. Most of her ship was seriously damaged, though they’d been lucky enough not to lose the shipcore entirely.

“The main squadron will be coming back this way, Fujiwara,” she said to the Home Islander sitting at the Pilot’s station. “We need to move closer to the
Chimalacatl
at every opportunity. The Khaid will fear it now, and we’ll take every advantage the Goddess sends us.”

Oc Chac looked up from the other end of Secondary. “
Chu-sa
, won’t we fall prey to the same fate, if we move too close to the device?” His gloved fingers tapped restlessly on the back of his helmet. “That Khaid ship was destroyed well out from the artifact—when we dropped off that freighter we were much closer—” The
Sho-sa
suddenly stopped, having reached an unpalatable conclusion. “How will we tell what our safe distance is
now
?”

Susan looked pointedly at Helsdon. The engineer grimaced, wishing he could clear the taste of ashes from his throat, and immediately fell to work at one of the consoles. “For now,” the
Chu-sa
said, “we will assume it’s safer near the Sunflower than in the crosshairs of a Khaid missile battery.”

Oc Chac nodded in agreement, and then pointed wordlessly at the compartment status v-panes showing a wild mixture of red, orange, and yellow on his display. Kosh
ō
leaned in, feeling a slow trickle of despair at the state of her fine new ship.

“Release emergency air to decks thirteen and fifteen. Close down atmosphere to the rest of the compromised compartments.”

Turning back to the threatwell—what a relief to have some view of the battle, even if the display had substantial arcs of darkness where there was simply no data to be had—Susan tilted her head, puzzled for a moment by the latest positions of the enemy.

“
Chu-sa
, they’re regrouping—the destroyers hunting us are shifting vector out of the shoal.” Pucatli sounded wary, and Kosh
ō
shared his concern.

“Assume they
are
taking stock of the situation,
Chu-i
. They will need to set some priorities—so keep a close eye on any movements in our direction. See if that remote at the Pinhole can pick up their ’cast traffic.”

Then she sat, at last, and drank some more water and managed to force down a threesquare. Everyone else remained furiously busy with damage control and trying to get updated inventory and arranging for the wounded and the dead. Susan sat quietly in the commander’s shockchair, watching the ’well update.

“Can you project their rendezvous point?” Susan asked Fujiwara as the minutes crawled by.

The pilot shrugged. “No guarantees,
kyo
. Comp has tagged this one”—he highlighted one of the icons—“as the
Kartal
—an
Aslan
-class heavy cruiser—and presumably the Flag for the remains of their squadron. She’s building vector away from the
Chimalacatl
and away from us. The others might be converging on her, but there’s no guarantee yet.”

Kosh
ō
nodded, considering the dimensional model herself. After a minute, she said: “They may have found the chase too hot to follow—or they may be resolving internal differences of
surtu
hierarchy. Set course for the Sunflower—but keep us well back from the destruction point of those two Khaid ships.”

Then she smiled tightly at Helsdon, who had looked up from his console for a moment.

Blanching, he set himself to work again.

“
Kyo
?” Pucatli looked up from the Comms console, where he was sharing space with the duty officer. “We’ve synched a channel to the remote at the Pinhole. You should see this…”

Susan tapped up the feed on her own console and pursed her lips, whistling in surprise. The relay telemetry showed three ships erupting from the aperture, engaged in a long-distance missile duel. All three of them popped up on the display with the familiar collection of Khaid glyphs. The pursued—a light cruiser tagged “
Kader
” by shipnet from the ’cast traffic they’d captured during the initial fighting—was taking a beating, shedding a coiling cloud of debris and weaving drunkenly. In comparison, the two pursuers seemed sleek and fast, shrugging aside any counter-fire with contemptuous ease.

“A clan dispute,
kyo
? Did one of the ship commanders try a coup?” Oc Chac peered at her display.

“No.” Susan’s hand clenched on the armrest beside the shockchair.
He tried to reach me.

“No,” she continued. “This must be the Khaid ship captured by
Chu-sa
Hadeishi. He found himself in the same predicament as we did—and passed through the Pinhole as well.”

“To no avail,
Chu-sa
.” The Mayan shook his head sadly. “See, they’ve lost that last drive—they’re ballistic now. If they don’t lose containment, the Khaid will finish them off with a single shipkiller.”

Kosh
ō
nodded, feeling sick. The
Kader
’s maneuvering drives had sputtered out, leaving the cruiser a hulk coasting into the void. A cloud of tiny pinpoints popped, spilling away from the dying ship.

He’s ejected pods,
she thought, feeling an enormous distance open in her heart.
Reactors are off-line. She’s just scrap metal now, falling into infinity. Not even worth—

The two Khaid destroyers cut their drives as well, and on the plot, the paths of the three vessels began to converge.

“Why are—” Pucatli fell silent, seeing that Oc Chac was nodding to himself.

The Mayan scratched at a tiny fringe of beard he’d started to accumulate. “The coil on that ship might still be intact,
Thai-i
, and her reactors are still working—even if they’ve had to shut them down. Some quick work by the engineers on those two
Mishrak
-class boats might salvage the whole ship. No reason to waste a shipkiller
and
a working starship.”

Oc Chac looked to Kosh
ō
, a speculative expression on his face. “And the captains of those two destroyers haven’t read
Chu-sa
Hadeishi’s service jacket, have they?”

“No.” Susan sat up, feeling an enormous, crushing weight begin to dissipate. “They have no idea the evacuation pods are empty. No idea at all.”

Then she scowled forbiddingly at the
Sho-sa
and the rest of the crew. “Back to work! We need our drives back on line, missile racks refreshed, guns working!” She clapped her hands sharply, making a fierce explosive sound that made everyone in Secondary jump in alarm. “
Banzai!
”