Land of the Dead (61 page)

The tiny ships had already vanished, just before the remote’s telemetry stopped cold.

“They found our remote, too.” Susan clasped her hands behind her back, teeth clicking thoughtfully. “
Sho-sa
, did you notice how well shielded their drives are? Like ghosts…”

The Mayan barked a hoarse, exhausted laugh. “Like they weren’t even
there
,
Chu-sa
. Until they were on that cruiser and firing.”

THE
KADER

Humanoid shapes moved abruptly in the shadows, armor glinting in the intermittent strobe of emergency lights. Some sections of the old
Spear
-class cruiser had their own generators to run critical subsystems, which meant there were pockets of atmosphere and occasional overheads still working. Hadeishi was crouched down behind a shattered section of interior wall, watching the advance of the enemy through a remote v-eye tucked into a dead lighting socket. A good dozen Khaid marines were leapfrogging up the main corridor into the habitat ring, five of the aliens in powered armor in the lead. Mitsuharu guessed they were a combat team detached from the main body of the attackers, who had managed to fight their way into the shipcore.

The Nisei officer turned, signing
Stand by
to the four Imperials behind him with their motley assortment of weapons. When he checked the v-eye again, the Khaid were shifting smoothly from door to bulkhead frame to door, their heavy shipguns shining oily in the flickering light.

Now.
Hadeishi flashed a quick sign, and then tripped the switch on a portable fuel-cell generator they’d lugged down from the Command ring. Electrons flooded the local circuits and every light and door activated. The room hatches being forced by the Khaid suddenly cycled open, sending at least one of the invaders sprawling into the compartment beyond. The overheads flared to life, shedding a bright warm glow over the wreckage strewn along the corridor. The Khaiden marines swiveled, guns quartering the nearest openings—and found nothing. Their advance paused for an instant as each hunter assessed every possible threat within his field of view.

Heated to flashpoint by the lights in the overheads, twenty or thirty pounds of fuse paper—all they had left from the landing site clearing supplies the Khaid had been dragging around—ignited with a rippling
bang-bang-bang
and the overhead panels popped free, swinging wildly in the oozing clouds of smoke. The Khaiden marines reacted violently, six of them ripping loose with suppressive fire to shred the ceiling tiles and shatter the remaining lights. The vanguard loped forward, looking to clear the “ambush” zone, while the rear-guard fell back to the closest intersection, ensuring their line of retreat was secured.

Hadeishi popped up as the lead Khaid sprang past a fallen beam, and the
Yilan
tucked into his shoulder stuttered, flash-suppressor spitting flame in a brief, brilliant cross. At point-blank range, the armor-piercing munitions tore up the chest, faceplate, and shoulder of the hunter’s armor, knocking him back into the Khaid following behind. The other Imperials also let loose, all fire concentrated on the same lead figure. By the time the hunter had collided with his companions, the armor had been punctured twice by the hundreds of rounds and he drifted limply away.

“Go!” Mitsuharu barked, ducking back. One of his men tossed a grenade—their last—into the midst of the enemy vanguard and then kicked off, sailing down their escape route. The other Imperials were already gone as the grenade cooked off in a sharp, hot blast. The Khaid hunters were thrown back by the pressure wave, but it was an even chance any of them suffered any lasting damage. Their armor was too tough for the lightweight weapons Hadeishi’s crew had managed to scavenge. The blast did collapse the roof, however, which had already been weakened by an engineering crew.

The spitting howl of a squad support weapon replied—Mitsuharu didn’t remember the code-name assigned by Fleet intelligence—but the flechettes tore a horizontal gap across the fallen debris and hot sparks chased him down the hallway.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, the
Chu-sa
ducked under a haphazardly strung line of glowbeans and went to one knee, his face seamed with worry. The main medbay had been abandoned an hour ago, when the Khaid attack into the shipcore had focused on the secondary command ring, which also held the medical section. The surviving Imperials needing a corpsman—and there were many now—had been hauled out by grav-sled or z-line to the armored compartment managing the boat and cargo bays in the primary hull, which had escaped the initial assault. On a properly equipped Fleet ship, Hadeishi might have had one or two spare shuttles tucked away in the boat-bays. But the
Kader
had nothing spare, so they’d cut power to the bays and vented as much debris and garbage as could be found through the doors to discourage the Khaid from trying to land in them.

Lovelace was tacked to the floor, her body wrapped in a survival blanket, leaving only the status readouts of her z-suit visible. Her rounded face was pale behind the faceplate, eyes closed. On her wrist, the med-band was a softly glowing bracelet of amber and green.

“Not dead yet,” Mitsuharu said softly, squinting at the tiny readout. “But you’re not going to last without proper facilities.”

“Sorry,
kyo
.” The Mirror Comms officer’s voice was a broken rasp. “They sealed the hull splinter in with me, but I can feel the knife twisting when I breathe.”

“Don’t talk then.” Hadeishi sat, his back against the wall, her wrist held lightly between thumb and forefinger. “We’ve all run out of time in any case. And the Khaid are sadly lacking in regen pods. They don’t eat their own dead, but do employ a species of shipbug blessed by their priests for the very purpose.”

“I taste terrible,” the girl said; her voice very, very faint.

Mitsuharu nodded, watching her respiration flutter. The pale blue light of the glowbeans painted her cheekbones a deathly hue. “I’m sure you do,
Sho-i
. It was an honor to serve with you. I am sorry I did not listen—you tried to keep me from this fool’s errand.”

“We—” A bubbling wheeze stopped her for a moment, but then she managed to say: “We were dead if we tried to run out past those two destroyers. You bought us another sixteen hours, at least.”

I did that,
he thought.
To no good end, save to bring down a few more Khaid before the black sea takes us all.

One of the lights on her med-band began to pulse red. Feeling a terrible sense of
déjà vu
, he gently dialed the band to send the Comms officer unconscious.
Plum petals are falling, sickle moon sharp as—

The poem faltered in his memory, the pace and tenor of the chatter and background noise on his comm suddenly changing. Hadeishi looked away from Lovelace, eyes closed, letting the voices of his men, his subcommanders, the sound and feel of the ship penetrating his back, his hands, the soles of his feet wash over him. On one of the channels, Tocoztic’s familiar voice—his breathing labored—said: “Is this getting easier, or is it my imagination?”

Mitsuharu stiffened, rising from the floor. “All units report. Are you currently in contact with the enemy?”

“No,
Chu-sa
,” worried voices replied. “It’s been quiet on either side of us for maybe five minutes.”

Just as Hadeishi thumbed the all-channel push control on his z-suit comm, the partially open bay doors flared into a white-hot bar. The debris cloud outside was ionizing as a particle beam ripped across the surface of the
Kader
. The impact reverberated through the frame of the ship seconds later, transmitting itself to Mitsuharu as a keening shriek rising from his boot-soles. Screams on the comm channels were snuffed out abruptly as the beam punched through the central ring of the cruiser.

The boat-bay doors crumpled as the primary hull twisted, suddenly torqued by a series of explosive blasts. Hadeishi dropped to the floor, crouching over Lovelace’s body, and felt the walls and floor ripple. Glassite shattered as the boat-bay windows tore from their frames. A second colossal impact followed as a shipkiller rammed into the gap torn by the particle beam. The missile vented plasma into the shipcore, immolating the dozens of Imperials still trapped within the secondary hull.

The concussive wave transmitted to the primary hull as well, tearing the bay doors away entirely. The old cruiser split open, though Mitsuharu knew only that he and Lovelace were thrown against the far wall of the compartment along with everyone else in the makeshift medbay. Cries of agony filled his ears, but the
Chu-sa
’s attention was fixed on the violently glowing dust-clouds now visible through the gaping hole where the boat-bay had been. What tiny bit of atmosphere had remained in the management compartment now vented out into hard vacuum, crystallizing as frost on their suits.

Hadeishi’s suit visor flickered, trying to focus on the abyss outside, then suddenly picked out—and enhanced—the outline of a Khaid destroyer sliding past at ten thousand kilometers, a long black shape with a blue-white flare where the drive nacelles were burning at one-quarter power. The first thing springing to mind was the image of a missile hatch cycling open as he watched …

“We’ve got to get out”—he forced himself away from the wall, one arm snaking behind Lovelace’s shoulders to pull her with him—“of here.”

Before he could drag her away a stabbing white glare flooded the compartment, momentarily polarizing Hadeishi’s visor to black.

“What is—” someone shouted on the channel, before being drowned out by a tidal wave of static.

Hadeishi felt his skin burning painfully from residual heat the z-suit could not disperse and gasped, blinded by even the microsecond of exposure to the antimatter reactor annihilating itself. When his vision cleared, the compartment was filled with drifting corpses, the walls discolored by the blast of radiation.

“Report,” he croaked, “any survivors, report!”

For a minute, or more, there was silence—stunned, wordless silence—but he could hear someone breathing harshly. Then a handful of voices babbled back, reporting status of their teams and their compartments.

“
Chu-sa
, what happened?” Cajeme’s voice was suddenly clear and sharp; and the thought of the little Yaqui’s survival released a tiny fraction of the bone-crushing despair Mitsuharu had been struggling to wade through.

“A
Neshter
-class destroyer,” Hadeishi managed to croak out, “blew to atoms within visual of us. I do not know why, or how, but nothing else has hit us in the last sixty seconds, so I claim victory.”

THE PYLON

Gretchen flinched away from a sudden, titanic plasma blast. The air erupted with blinding flame and a whirlwind of shrapnel. She lost her balance, teetering at the edge of the platform. Both Piet and Hummingbird lunged forward, gloved hands seizing her arms. Only then did she realize the burning cloud was passing through the two of them without harm. Eons in the past, the technicians at the consoles were strewn about like matchsticks. The mighty Hjogadim Lord burned like a torch while the golden serpent suddenly, violently, escaped from its physicality. The great hall, to its farthest corners, boiled with unforeseen catastrophe.

Anderssen blinked tears from her eyes, trying to focus on the present. Meanwhile, Piet had torn away her utility rig and was digging through the pockets.

“I saw her stash it … back in the ship,” his voice rasped over the comm. “It must be here somewhere!”

“It is gone,” Sahâne barked in amusement. The Hjogadim gestured towards the shaft. “Cast into the abyss.”

Piet glared at the alien. “Then you will serve in her place.”

Sahâne nodded and rose to his feet, helped by one of the other Templars. To Gretchen it was plain that something in the Hjo had found surety at last, banishing his chronic fear. “What will you have me say?”

Confused, Gretchen eyed the Europeans, Hummingbird, and the alien.
A message? To the dead? No … to those sleeping below? But they cannot hear us—not without a Voice—uh oh …

Piet paused, squaring his shoulders, and then recited: “That we await their coming and are prepared to aid, as did their servants of old. That we pledge true service, where so many failed them before. That we have need, for a great peril will soon return.”

Sahâne’s snout twitched in amusement, but he nodded.

Out of the corner of her eye, Gretchen caught a glimpse of a thin blue-black furred shape shrouding the pilot like a ghostly cloak.
How could anything have survived that plasma blast?
She turned in amazement to get a better look. But the apparition was already gone. The ghost-world was fading now, consumed by the chaos of ancient battle. Too many fleeting events to leave a lasting mark on the substance of the consoles or the time-worn floor. Only one last glimpse of the Lord Serpent wicking through the air as a burning ribbon. Then it plunged into the cowering body of a still-living blue-black technician.

In a last burst of memory, the slim, now-radiant alien escaped over the edge of the pylon.