Glory's People (27 page)

Yet Duncan had cautioned her against closing her mind to any possibilities. He loved to quote Twentieth-Century Terrestrials, the last thinkers, he said, before the nightfall of the Jihad. One of these men, with the strange name of Eden Phillpotts, once wrote that the universe was “full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

How like the Master and Commander that was, Anya thought. She felt
Glory
's interior winds drying the tears on her cheeks.
Damn you, Duncan,
she thought bitterly.
I am weeping for you already, mourning you even as we fly to our own destruction.

There was no chance, she told herself, no chance at all that Duncan could survive an encounter with the Intruder in so flimsy a shell as a Yamatan mass-depletion ship. Space would open up unseen, the Terror would slip through, raging, and consume all it could reach.

If we had enough time
, the New Earther thought.
If we had hours and days to put distance between us and the darkness, its powers might be diminished
. But it was nearby. She could feel its presence, stirring, pressing, questing. What was Minamoto Kantaro thinking now? No longer could the young man take refuge in ancient samurai traditions. No armor, no war fans. Only the thin shell of a flimsy, experimental relativistic spaceship.

Was the Terror watching? She wondered why it had not already swept Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis
and her people into hell. Duncan must have been right when he guessed that the Red Sprite somehow held it immobile as it drank in the power of Yamato’s aurora borealis. But now the Sprite had vanished. Was the Terror waking?

The Sailing Master reached the carapace deck and dove through the barely open valve into the familiar, starlit cavern. She hastily opened a drogue compartment and, pulling the drogue cable after her, leaped upward toward the transparent overhead fifty meters above. She spanned the silent distance, settling the drogue into her skull socket. She hungered for privacy to face her grief, yet she ached for the comfort of the Wired state.

As
Glory
expanded her Talent, reality exploded around her. The enhancement suffused her consciousness. The gestalt provided by the ship and by her shipmates was warm and familiar. Each time it happened, it seemed to be happening for the first time. Every time the drogue locked into her skull it was the rebirth of the raw girl from New Earth. The universe pinwheeled into wonder all around her.

She projected her anima past the carapace, beyond the glowing net of the rig, away from the gleaming gold of the hectares of skylar
Glory
flew. It seemed that the tachyon wind’s particles penetrated her flesh to tingle against her blood and bones. She felt as airy as one of the meter-long dragonflies of New Earth’s narrow floral jungle. It was said that the short-lived creatures were so finely made that mere light kept them aloft in the still air of equatorial New Earth.

It had been months since Duncan and Anya had floated in the starshot darkness of this vast space. Yet the very fabric of the bulkheads seemed to have absorbed the psychic memories of all that had transpired here. She closed her eyes and remembered the slow floating lovemaking here in the time before the planet-fall at Voerster, where Duncan fell in love with Eliana Voerster, Broni’s mother, and then lost her to some stem sense of duty she had felt she must obey.

Her friend and Captain had turned inward, sustained by his own sense of duty to
Glory
and to all who sailed in her. But Anya thought,
My simple love was something he could always accept, even after you, Eliana of Voerster
.

It was here, too, that Anya the Sailing Master instructed the children of the ship, Broni and Buele, who had never truly seen the stars until they emerged from Dietr’s surgery as Wired Starmen.

At this very moment the animas of the two young Voersterians were out beyond
Glory
's bow-wave, accompanied by their feline familiars, guarding the ship from ahead as Duncan guarded her from behind, where the Terror prowled.

Dietr, Wired in his surgery, greeted her wordlessly. He had been concerned about her from the moment Duncan announced that he was taking the fighting chair in the trailing MD craft. The Cybersurgeon did not delude himself that he was an expert on the psychology of human interactions, but he had made a study of wars and weapons and he was not impressed with Yamatan military preparedness. Their armament was capable, the Cybersurgeon thought, of pyrotechnics and not much else. The combination of Yamatan arms and Duncan’s stem sense of duty had all the syndics concerned, Anya Amaya most of all.

“Anya, everyone aboard is nominal, “
Dietr sent.
“Even the colonials are reasonably calm. “

Amaya was not so certain of that. The Yamatans were more sophisticated than Dietr Krieg credited. They lived an interior life, deeply affected by their admixture of Zen and animist religions. This was a mind-set that Dietr was incapable of penetrating. They could be on the verge of an emotional outbreak and the Cybersurgeon would know nothing of it until the storm broke.

Anya felt the disapproval of Dietr’s familiar, Paracelsus, reacting to her reservations about the Cybersurgeon. It was astonishing, Amaya thought, how well matched to his or her human associate each cat had become. One could almost imagine Para meowing with a Terrestrial German accent.

The notion brought a near-smile. She wiped at her eyes with the heels of her hands, as she had long ago as a child on New Earth.

She felt a distant sending from Duncan. She could not decipher it fully, but she felt his concern for her and the caress of his unique mind. How she envied the other syndics with their feline familiars. She had seen at once how the cats facilitated the empathic bond among the Starmen. It was not fair that only she should still be isolated.

A year ago, she thought, the idea of describing her state as “isolated” would never have occurred to her. But much had changed aboard
Glory
since Mira’s first litter began to mature. Now, with the prowling felines everywhere in the ship, a whole new level of empathic interdependence was standard. What more it was, Amaya did not know. She knew only that she was less a part of life aboard
Glory
than she had been.

She twisted so that she lay in the air with her face upward, painted golden by the sunlight reflected from the great shining sails of skylar above her. Beyond lay the hard, methane yellow disk of Tokugawa, presently framed between the starboard foremast and its supporting shrouds. Farther beyond still lay the dusting of stars that formed the eternal background for a Goldenwing’s celestial hemisphere. To port lay the star nearest Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, which the Yamatans called Eridanusu, five light-years away. So near, in fact, that one could almost see the sixteen points of light that were Epsilon Eridani’s solar system of gas giants.

The light of Amaterasu played on the concave surface of
Glory
's sails from astern. Anya tried to make out the reflection of the MD ship, but she could not. The reddish light of Amaterasu was too bright on the stacked courses, stays’ls and mains.

Broni and Buele were doing a creditable job of sail-handling, she thought. Their feline familiars were making it easier for them to deal with the temperamental monkeys, whom Anya could see, in brief flashes, as they moved through the rig.

The cats were sharpening everyone’s reactions and responses. Every syndic was performing at a steadily higher level.
Except me
, Anya thought bitterly.
Damn them
.

Duncan, even though he was kilometers astern, must have caught her momentary anger. She could feel his swift disapproval, followed by his empathic sending of support and control.

She was tempted to remove the drogue from her socket, and the temptation appalled her. She had never, ever, considered hiding from her shipmates.

She felt a soft thump on her breast and a tingle of pinpricks. She found herself looking closely into the face of a tiny black-and-white kitten whose eyes were the color of topazes. The small face was an inch from hers. The tiny needle-claws were fixed in her skinsuit.

Her first reaction was instinctive. She caught the small cat and pushed it away so that it spun helplessly in the near-zero gravity. The result was a twisting recovery and an angry mew of protest.

Before she could retreat, Anya felt the claws in her shoulder. The kitten had swiftly returned and fixed itself once more to Anya’s skinsuit. It lowered its head and butted Anya’s cheek. The Sailing Master was shocked at the clarity of the sending. Before she could disengage the tiny critter, she heard an explosive command in her mind.

“Don't!”

Anya was stunned to realize that she had received the command so clearly. It had even been delivered with a New Earth arrogance Anya had not heard in years.

“You are mine, “
the kitten sent.

It isn't possible
, the Sailing Master thought.
Cats have no human language.

The little beast was female. That came through with great clarity.

“Where have you come from?”
Amaya asked.

Was it a kind of madness to address a creature that could not be more than two months old as though it were an intelligent human being?

Amaya was rewarded with a sending of confused images.

The Sailing Master saw a long flight through familiar plena. The view was from behind, and she felt in her own muscles the determination of a small creature working very hard to catch up. From this perspective the Amaya ahead was a fleeing giantess. There followed a swift leap though a closing valve. And at last, satisfaction. Huntress’s claws firmly fixed in ... Anya Amaya.

Anya cupped the kitten in her two hands and looked into the topaz eyes.
Artemis
, the Sailing Master thought.
What else?

Despite the fears and concerns of the moment, Anya Amaya, syndic and native of New Earth, felt a great warming in her breast. At last, she thought, at last.

The kitten squirmed in her hands, struggling to be free. Amaya sensed her outrage at being restrained. The message was crystal clear: “I am not a pet. “

“You have much to discover that will delight you, Sailing Master.”

The sending came from Duncan. It was miraculous in its clarity, swift and distinct. It had come from Duncan to Mira to
Glory
to Artemis to Anya.

Anya released the small cat and remained very still until Artemis anchored herself again firmly to the skinsuit.

Anya Amaya sent,
“I hope I have time to learn, Master and Commander.”

Anya felt a soft tattoo on her shoulder. The little cat was kneading her, doing what Broni called making bread, by pressing first one small paw and then the other on Anya’s flesh.

Unwilling to disturb Artemis’s gesture of trust, Anya Amaya floated silent and unmoving in the still air of the carapace deck. The stars overhead slowly rotated through the glowing rig as
Glory
changed attitude. Long spears of red sunlight strobed through the mist of spars and monofilament. Anya closed her eyes and listened to the soft, whispering purr of the small creature on her shoulder.

A warm contentment totally unsuited to the moment and to the hazards stalking the ship suffused Anya.

We are being robbed
, she thought.
We have a right to feel at rest, to feel united to our ship and our shipmates. So stay alert, syndic, lest the darkness know and attack you for anger or for joy. Control your animus, lest that bring the Terror through invisible Gateways
.

She had to cradle the kitten. She could feel the rumble of the tiny throat with her fingertips. The little cat’s eyes were closed. Amaya brushed her lips across the kitten’s small round head. The eyes did not open. In the baffling way of cats, Artemis had fallen asleep.

The Master Ninja Tsunetomo, deeply set in his impersonation of the low-ranking samurai Ishida Minoru of Kai, sat in the lotus position on the vanadium-steel deck of the MD craft and studied the syndic in the fighting chair.

The
gaijin
had long bones, and he was thin, with a melancholy face and deeply set eyes the color of the snow lakes of Hokkaido. None of these things announced a formidable warrior, yet the round-eye had escaped two ninja attacks--one delivered by the Master Killer of all the Order. That made him formidable. And he was even more to be feared if his people were anything at all like he was. Did they really speak to animals? Sometimes it seemed so. And did they have the skill to teach ordinary men to do the same? Ishida glanced at Minamoto Kantaro at the navigation station. A
neko
perched familiarly on the Minamoto’s shoulder. Was it truly a cat, or was it some alien being masquerading as a household pet? Much remained to be learned before another attack was made on the
gaijin
Captain.

Lord Yoshi Eiji had at least solved a part of the problem. By delivering Kr-san alone and separated from his people into the ninja’s hands he had made the Order’s task simple, if not easy.

They were a strange lot, these Wired Ones, Tsunetomo thought. It was said that when they Wired themselves to their ship through those hideous sockets in their heads they became what passed for warriors of darkness in their worlds. How else to explain their mysteries? They seemed to speak with their machines as well as animals. Tsunetomo had seen them do it. There was a weird quality of all-knowingness about them and their precocious cats.

There were telepathic exchanges among them. Even though excluded, one could feel it. Tsunetomo was certain that the
neko
with the long
gaijin
had somehow warned him of the attack in the huge, empty dark of the Goldenwing’s carapace.

The challenge of assassinating a man so protected filled Tsunetomo with excitement. The killing of his animal familiar was only slightly less appealing. Yamatan ninjas might wait generations before the Sun Goddess Amaterasu again offered them so pure a challenge.

All the talk about the mysterious force outside the ship and the hideous way it killed made no impression on the Master Ninja. Though they themselves were shadow warriors and unseen killers, ninjas had no inclination to create any demons more formidable than those whose rice they had eaten and whose sake they had drunk in the secret conclaves of the Order.