Land of the Dead (37 page)

“To embrace death so readily! I don’t—This has nothing to do with—”

Hadeishi’s face suddenly became calm and still, as though the grief and weariness and fear etched in his features had been washed away by a sudden, unseen rain. His eyes were upon the holocast, looking far beyond the puzzled face of the
Thai-i
. De Molay’s attention snapped around, following his gaze.

“Stand to battle stations!”

Before the command was fully uttered, De Molay had activated the ship’s internal alarm. Tocoztic jumped, startled by the blaring sound, and then switched all his attention onto the pilot’s console. Thousands of hours of Imperial drill seized him up and put his hands, his thoughts, his entire purpose on the right path.

At the limit of their sensor range, a Khaid destroyer nosed through the dark towards them.

THE LAND OF THE DEAD

The
Naniwa
’s acceleration faded off a point, and under Kosh
ō
’s gentle direction, the battle-cruiser slid around a particularly dense accretion of the veils. Beyond this—to her surprise—there was nothing on the navigational display. No queer, interlocking geometry of billions of infinitesimal razors, only emptiness. The
Chu-sa
blinked, easing off on the engines, dropping her acceleration to almost zero. The ship continued to speed ahead, but she left her velocity undiminished.

“I think we’re clear,” Anderssen announced to a hushed bridge crew. She took her hands away from the corroded bronze rectangle. As she did the threatwell’s sketchy, alien display faded away—showing only a few trailing quantum distortions at the edges—and then, nothing. The normal navigational plot flickered in and out of view, and then stabilized. A moment later, keyed up by
Chu-i
Pucatli, the long-distance camera feeds appeared on the main v-displays behind the threatwell.

There was a hiss of surprise from nearly every member of the bridge crew. Susan smoothed back her hair and then turned to the communications officer. “
Chu-i
, pipe this to all of the news displays shipside. I’ll make an announcement momentarily.”

Then the
Chu-sa
turned to consider the long-range scan display now building on her console.

The plot confirmed what the eye beheld. Beyond the Barrier, deep at the heart of the
kuub
, the protostellar debris folded back to reveal three diminutive stars in a tight cluster. Between their sallow pinpoints, the hard white slash of an ejection jet speared “up” and “down,” bisecting the visible universe. Illuminated by its radiance, towering plumes and great walls of dust glowed with a brilliant, jeweled fire. If the gravity scan was to be believed, the rosette of stars concealed an infinitesimal black hole in their center. On the ship’s plot, the gaudy roil of an accretion disc spiraling into a maelstrom of distorted gravity reached out to lap around the suns. The dim stars were shedding long sinuous trails of mass, drawn down into the hidden maw of the singularity.

The sound of the main bridge hatch cycling open was jarringly loud in the silence.

Kosh
ō
looked over her shoulder, seeing an exhausted and work-stained Oc Chac limp onto the bridge. His combat armor—a necessity for engineers working in the midst of battle—was scored with dozens of impact dimples on the battle-steel. The Mayan’s face was uncharacteristically open, his lips parted, the muted glare of glowing night reflecting in his eyes.

“Mictlan,” the
Sho-sa
sighed. “Beneath the cold lands of the north from whence Quetzalcoatl retrieved the bones of the first people, a tomb filled with decay and rivers of ash, where reigns the dreadful god Mictlantecuhtli, his face covered with a bony mask, sitting amongst owls and spiders, ruling the land of the dead: The destination an unfortunate corpse must strive towards for four long years: first through a whirlwind of knives, then against icy winds, daring all the dangers of the underworlds, at last to cross nine waters and dissolve into the void. A dreadful place where the living dare not tread.…”

“Approximately three light-years from us—three superjovian brown dwarfs in perfect balance,” Susan said quietly, fingernails brushing across the navigational plot. The images tightened, zooming in. Her med-band was pulsing, flooding her with stimulants to keep onrushing fatigue from overwhelming her mind. The tension of battle and headlong flight was beginning to fade, leaving her entire body throbbing with pain. “And a singularity at their center, drinking their mass like blood.”

At the navigational console, Gretchen stirred—tearing herself away from the wonder resplendent before them—and looked back to Kosh
ō
. The civilian’s face was fairly glowing with desire.

“No.” Kosh
ō
’s eyes were half-lidded, but her voice was firm. “We’ll be going no closer. Pilot, find us somewhere to lie up and rest the crew. We’ll repair what we can, and then we’ll move a goodly distance away from the Pinhole and see if we can reach gradient.… Yes,
Sho-sa
?”

Oc Chac had moved to Holloway’s station at Nav and was shaking his head. “Even when repairs are complete,
Chu-sa
, and the coil is back in operation … Gravitometric readings around us are off the scale—we’ve passed over some kind of equilibrium point, where the curve of physical space has inverted—we can’t make transit out of this … this
pocket
. That inversion is forcing gradient well beyond ships’ capacity to punch through into hyper.”

Susan suppressed a curse. “What about inside the pocket? Can we reach superluminal
here
?”

“Perhaps.” The Mayan adjusted the scan controls on the navigational console. “We’ll need to move deeper in—see if gradient slopes off abruptly.” He turned back to Kosh
ō
, jaw clenched. “It may be,
kyo
, that the pinhole we’ve slipped through has taken us into a captive universe.”

“What do you mean?” Susan felt the tide of cold reach her sinuses, which abruptly made her head feel both light, empty, and clear. The engineer’s statement hung before her, seemingly profound, but also beyond practical reach. “What does that mean to us,
Sho-sa
?”

“It means,
kyo
,” Oc Chac said, considering his words carefully, “that
here
we may be able to punch through to hyperspace—but we won’t have anywhere to
go
. The Barrier itself may be wrapping gravity—and the core fabric of realspace—back around to the other side of the pocket. Indeed, if we traveled the six light-year-width of this place from end to end, we may well wind up at our starting point.”

Holloway—who seemed as confused as Susan—scratched the back of his head, then said: “But there’s a break in the fabric, right, because we just came through from the ‘outside.’ So the only way out, would be right back the way we came—and into the waiting claws of that Khaid battle-group.”

The Mayan shrugged. “
Thai-i
, such may be our fate.” He lifted his chin, giving Kosh
ō
a questioning look. “Hennig’s crews are ready to tear into the coil and replace those damaged cells—if we’re done maneuvering at high-g for a couple hours.”

Kosh
ō
nodded. “Get to it,
Sho-sa
. Keep the duty officer informed of your progress and estimated time to complete. As soon as we can find somewhere to lie up, we’ll go off battle-stations.”

Gretchen stirred expectantly, her parchment-wrapped block tucked under one arm. The Swedish woman looked ghastly—her face was a sallow frame for enormous, fatigue-blackened eyes—but she was still game to plunge ahead into the unknown, seeking the thrill of first-light shining upon something lost eons ago.

“I said
no
.” Susan eased herself out of the shockchair, feeling every muscle and bone throb violently. “
Thai-i
Holloway, we need to get third watch on duty stations and send everyone else to the showers. Myself included. Chac is busy, and you and Konev are due for a break, so see if
Thai-i
Goroemon survived the last sixteen hours and get her up here to stand in as officer of the watch.”

“
Hai, kyo!
”

Stiff beyond measure, Kosh
ō
limped through a slow circuit of Command, checking in with each duty station. As she approached Comm, Pucatli popped up with his hand extended. The young Méxica was holding a glass vial filled with a pale rose-colored fluid. “For you,
Chu-sa
.”

Susan frowned. “An antibiotic?”

“No, no,
Chu-sa
.” Pucatli grimaced. “Those are poison! What’s bad for microbes can only be bad for people. This is a tincture for the weary, made from the root and flowers of
chunuli
plants in my mother’s garden. Mix it with very hot water and partake gently.”

Drink it with sayu
? Susan converted the near-hysterical laugh that rose in her throat to a polite nod. “Thank you for the kind thought,
Chu-i.”

THE
WILFUL

The Khaid destroyer—another classified as
Neshter
-class by the commercial registry, though Mitsuharu’s practiced eye had already picked out a number of differences between this ship and the
Qalak
—loomed in the threatwell, its icon surrounded by a constellation of informative graphics.

“Launch signature,” Tocoztic announced suddenly, his voice tight. “Looks like a one-rail sprint missile.” In the ’well, a glowing streak appeared, following the track of the weapon. “Vectors do not overlap.”

Hadeishi had already seen the target and his face stiffened in fury.

“An evac capsule,” De Molay said, a moment later. “We picked up their signal about an hour ago.”

“As did the Khaid,” Mitsuharu bit out with difficulty. “They haven’t a chance.”

The missile icon intersected the capsule’s graphic and both winked out. A quarter-second later, a tiny bright flare appeared on one of the camera displays, and then faded away. Against the slow roil of the dust clouds—all ruddy red, purple, and orange luminescence—the explosion went almost unnoticed.

Hadeishi was motionless, his face in shadow on the darkened bridge, staring at the ’well.
And I was unable to do even the slightest thing to save the men aboard.

“She’s turning,” the
Thai-i
announced into the silence. “We have—we have vector overlap if they hold course.”

The Nisei stirred, forcing his attention back to the ’well and the movement of ships, wreckage, anything else which might affect his tiny command. He rewound the ’well through the last three hours of data, the myriad icons a blur of motion. “They’re into the return leg of their patrol pattern.”

He clicked his teeth, seeing that the intercept solution was very poor for the
Wilful
. “We’re going to have to go to zero-power and lose steering way, hope they pass over us as wreckage. We’re too close to—”

Tocoztic gave him a sick look. “They’re sure to catch us on active scan—we’re not Imperial, we’re not Khaid—they will
know
we’re a scavenger that didn’t get caught up in the battle. That fate”—he stabbed a finger at the location of the obliterated capsule—“will be ours!”

“Going dark,” De Molay announced, when Hadeishi failed to respond immediately. Her face drew tight with concentration and Mitsuharu could see that another set of v-panes had appeared on her console. The markings—and he could not see them clearly from his vantage point—did not seem to be formed of human letters.

“Hostile is less than a light-second away,” Tocoztic breathed, sounding anguished. “She’s accelerating. We’re getting side scatter from an active scanning array—”

“There!” The old woman sighed in relief. “Memory still holds true!”

At the same moment, the
Wilful
’s engines died and the lights dimmed markedly. The constant vibration of the reactor drew down, and then entirely faded away. Hadeishi watched with intense interest as each on-board system shut down in swift succession. On his console, the myriad v-panes and controls faded away—the threatwell went dark—and the environmental monitors indicated that every compartment had dialed down air circulation and scrubber activity to the absolute minimum. The only activity registered on the shipskin, which was assuming a new aspect—one that Mitsuharu had never seen before. Part of the forward hull was visible in the camera display, which was still active, and there he saw that the hull had deformed into a strange, “fuzzy” configuration, the surface extruding millions of what appeared in close-up to be tiny matte-black cilia.

Truly we have turned into a creature of the abyss!

He gave De Molay a curious glance. “We’re in an absorptive mode?” he asked quietly.

“We are,” she replied with the hint of a smile. Hadeishi hid his reaction, suddenly mindful of Tocoztic and the other Fleet ratings who might be listening down deck
. There’s no heat sump on this ship capable of absorbing the impact radiation on the skin. Nothing big enough to swallow our own emissions, not for more than a few seconds. So—what lies behind those closed-off compartments on the Engineering deck? Something to hide us completely?