Glory's People (28 page)

Tsunetomo watched the man in the fighting chair intently. The foreigner was a worthy challenge to the greatest ninja of the age. He was the only man Tsunetomo had attacked and failed to kill. A ninja could not live long with such shame.

“Kantaro-san.” Duncan spoke aloud.

“Hai, Kr-san?” The Lord Mayor of Yedo was transfixed by the images sweeping past the exterior imaging cameras on the MD ship’s hull. It had been a very long time since Kantaro had piloted a spacecraft. He had been a novice pilot when his uncle, the Shogun, plucked him from Orbital School for training in the life of a Yamatan politician.

He drew his eyes away from the displays with an effort and swivelled his chair to face Duncan. Hana trilled softly and leaped the distance between Kantaro’s station and Duncan’s. She landed on Duncan’s lap and leaned against his chest, purring loudly. Mira, atop the fighting chair’s exterior imager, regarded her second-generation offspring with aloof but watchful interest.

“There’s been no chance to speak of tactics,” Duncan said.

“No, Kr-san. None,” the Yamatan replied.

Duncan sketched a mirthless smile. “That is because we have no tactics. You should understand that--I regret there was no time to tell you so.”

“Perhaps there is no need,” Kantaro said. “Perhaps it has gone far away.” Even as he said this, he knew it to be untrue. He was receiving a somewhat muddled sending from Hana. Something about a pack of black dogs stalking her through the dry grass of some alien equatorial plain. He knew it was equatorial because Hana had seen a distant sky, harsh with the summer of a G0 sun. And the white summer light was
Earth
. The impression was dreamlike and filled with contained fear. Hana had never seen Earth. Hana had seen only the massed and woven plena and compartments of the Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis
. But she knew Earth. She knew Earth as Kantaro himself knew it. It lived in racial memory.

Duncan said, “They can do that, Kantaro-san. I don’t know how. You will see more clearly when you become accustomed to her. And better still when she matures.”

Kantaro should have shown delight. But instead he shivered and returned to watching the images of Near Space on his console screens.

From the stern
Glory
was slender-flanked and spiky with masts and yards that seemed to Kantaro like the spokes of a wheel. He had not noticed this manifestation when first he saw
Glory
from the Shogun’s lounge aboard Dragonfly. With the masts and spars all laden with vast hectares of golden skylar, the Goldenwing had grown perceptibly smaller in the last few minutes. Running before both the solar wind and the Coriolis trade circling out of the galaxy’s center,
Glory
was gaining speed from a storm of photons and tachyons against the gleaming golden skylar.

This, Duncan had told him, was
Glory
's finest point of sail. The rest of the syndic crew, Duncan had said, did have a tactic--a simple one. He had told them to open as great a distance as possible between themselves and Planet Yamato.

The appearance of the Red Sprite and some research and calculation with
Glory
's powerful mainframe had alarmed Duncan. It was not a certainty, but possible, that the Sprite could not only drain the plasmas of the aurora, but also life from a planetary populace as well. It might be far-fetched, Duncan had said, but it was not to be considered impossible that the Red Sprite could be used to make a direct attack on the people of Yamato.

If that were so, Kantaro’s world was in deadly peril. He had seen images of men dying under attack by the Terror. The thought of such flaming deaths taking place by the tens of thousands on the streets of his Yedo filled the Yamatan with dread.

Yet even this is denied me
, Kantaro thought bitterly.
If I do not rein my emotions, I may call the horrid thing down upon us.

He glanced covertly at Duncan. But wasn’t that exactly what Kr-san wished to do? Hadn’t Kantaro heard Anya-san’s cry of anger and anguish as she accused Kr-san of baiting a trap with the MD ship and its people?

Duncan sensed the surge of conflicts in the younger man. Hana had felt them most profoundly and complained to Mira, who passed the conflict on to Duncan. In effect, she said,
“I will stand with you, fight beside you, help you. But the solution is yours, dominant tom. “

How like the matriarch that was, Duncan thought. Mira and her kind were as complex as any human, but their instincts remained as straightforward as they had been before
Felis libyca
became a god in Egypt. The Folk were creatures of infinite variability, but their core belief was simple. Mira was informing Duncan,
“Challenge me, and I will fight or flee. If there are other choices you must make them. “

Duncan was by now well aware of how Mira and her get responded when faced with the unthinkable. The blurred image that came from Kantaro’s Hana was charged with feline imagery and tension. Duncan received it only incompletely, but he smelled the dry grasses and heard the black dogs barking under the African sun.

He projected an empathic sending at the small cat, making himself large and protective. She responded with a trill and a tiny growl. Duncan was pleased to sense that Kantaro was comforting her, offering protection. The exact form of the Yamatan’s sending was indistinct because he was untrained, unpracticed and clumsy in the method. But Hana was reassured and for the moment that was enough.

On the sunward side of the two ships’ track, their changing attitude unmasked the ring that circled Moon Tokugawa. The thin cut of a line it had displayed while
Glory
was in orbit, around Yamato broadened like a wound opening. Duncan had suggested to Minamoto no Kami that all the people on Tokugawa should be evacuated. But there had not been sufficient time. Duncan hoped that he, the MD ship, and
Glory
would be enough to distract the stalking Terror. He had the chest-tightening feeling that they were all on the edge of a massacre. The unpredictability of the situation was unnerving. But this was a moment for patience. Each second of shiptime that passed was a second plus a fraction of downtime that increased Planet Yamato’s slight margin of safety.
For the moment let that be enough
, Duncan thought, willing time to pass.

Four hours later, in the exterior image screen Duncan’s finely tuned perceptions could detect the first slight reddening of the stars astern. The percentage of the speed of light attained at this point was infinitesimal, but it was detectable. Details of the Goldenwing could no longer be discerned without magnification of the image. To starboard and astern, the half-disk of Planet Yamato occupied an eighth of the dark sky. Moon Tokugawa stood high and large in the holographic image, its methane atmosphere bright yellow against the blue-black of space.

At the mass-depletion-engine console, the Kaian crewman sat in a state of what was plainly high tension. Duncan would have wished for an older man in that position, but the Lord of Kai had insisted on “giving the
gaijin-san
the very best pilot among his retainers.” Whether this was so or not, Duncan had no way of knowing. He had not been favorably impressed with Yoshi Eiji, but it was obvious that the Shogun had had his particular reasons for holding the contingent from Kai aboard
Glory
when with the ceremony of the war fans he had contemptuously dismissed the rest of the company of samurai. It plainly stated that this small ship, Kantaro, the dark-visaged warrior Ishida, and young Yamaguchi at the pilot’s station were the best aid Minamoto no Kami could offer in the shadow war to come.

“Yamaguchi-san,” Duncan said. “What percentage of light-speed have we reached?”

The young pilot, conscious of his low status, used the ancient designation for the Captain of a vessel. “One point three percent,
Kaigun taisa
. “

As the lightspeed percentage rose, Duncan knew, a spaceship’s mass would normally increase. But the Yamatan engineers had devised an engine that reversed the expected effects and caused mass to deplete, leaving the ship on the very cusp of Einsteinian reality, able to open a Gateway into an adjoining universe--if a state of being without true space or time could be called a universe.

In such a state the MD could, in effect,
jump
to another locus and instantly return to normal space--vast distances from where the first locus had been opened. It was an achievement of enormous potential: instantaneous movement unaffected by relativistic limits.

But this effect was attained, the Yamatan scientists had explained to the syndics, by a huge consumption of energy. If an MD “outjumped” its energy reserve by more than fifty percent, it would return to normal space to become a derelict, unreachably far from its point of origin.

Duncan intended to use the MD’s capabilities not as a means of far travelling, but as an intrusion on the Terror’s own space-not-space.

The chances for disaster were too large to compute. The MD’s weapon was not very formidable; no one knew with certainty how long Terrestrial animals could survive in the blankness beyond the mass-depletion portals. And worst of all was the inability to know with certainty that the Terror would be there--rather than in one of uncounted similar contiguities of the known universe.

“Kaigun taisa-sama. “

“What is it, Yamaguchi-san?”

“I am getting fluctuations in our energy reserves.”

It was far more than that, Duncan thought. Mira had leapt across the console to be physically near him. Hana returned to Kantaro, and as she did so she uttered a yowl of mingled anger and fear. Duncan felt a psychic buildup that seemed about to swamp his empathic sense. It was an effect he remembered with dread from his encounter with the stalking Outsider in the Ross Stars. One’s physical senses became overloaded. Skin, sensitized by the tingling bombardment of tachyons, grew painful to the most ordinary touch. Mira was growling and yowling with her own discomfort. Duncan could feel her seeking refuge in his mind, and he could “see” the image she had of the encounter. Long ago, and often enough to remember, he recalled that Mira--the first of the enhanced cats--would sense the threat at a vast distance, dire wolves prowling through a dark, primeval night.
“We are the prey”:
The thought was clear and urgent. Duncan reacted to a kind of spillage from some unknown, unknowable place. Raw emotion, not human, not animal, but more clearly alien than it had been during the battle aboard
Glory
near Ross 248. His talent supercharged by fear, Duncan recognized the difference in the two occasions. In the Ross Stars encounter, the Terror had been drawn by the chaotic emotions of contingents of two warlike people.

This time, the thing that drove it was self-created, a thick, dark mingling of loneliness and fury.

A kilometer from
Glory
's quarter, very near the englobature that Broni and Clavius were guarding, a black rent in space began to form.

Damon Ng, who had been tense and silent ever since boarding the MD ship, cradled Pronker and studied the ominous, growing distortion of space shown in the imaging screens.

Damon was both proud and terrified that Duncan had chosen him to accompany him on this desperate thrust at the Terror. Ever since his childhood in the tree-cities of Planet Nixon, he had been cursed with an assortment of psychological challenges he must face.

He had no sooner begun to control his rampant acrophobia than he now found himself serving as a casualty replacement for a man whose courage and skills were untouchably above his own. Duncan had meant well when he explained that he would be expected to bring the Yamatans and their small craft back if Duncan himself should be unable to do so.

The very idea of such a responsibility chilled Damon Ng to the marrow. Pronker put his forepaws on Damon’s chest and raised his head so that his amber eyes were on a level with Damon’s brown ones. The message was clear:
“Do not fear. I am with you. “

Bruele, lying in his control pod in
Glory
's bridge with Big twitching beside him, had an astral-eye’s view of the first contact.

Using a dozen of the imaging cameras scattered throughout the Goldenwing’s rig to localize his view, he had placed himself, in effect, a half-dozen kilometers off
Glory
’s port quarter and facing forward along
Glory
’s track. The Voersterian boy had learned to enjoy these EVA-by-proxy affairs. He had heard the Sailing Master discussing his skill with the Cybersurgeon a number of times, and her opinion seemed to be that Buele was showing a greater Talent at these out-of-body tasks than had anyone ever before in
Glory
’s history.

Duncan had told him that even though he himself had learned to enjoy the business of projecting his anima (a Jungian term, Buele learned from
Glory
’s computer) out of the ship and into Near Space, he had never found the task easy. Even Mira’s assistance did little to reduce the cold, chilled loneliness the procedure brought about. Yet Buele found it a simple matter to project his awareness almost anywhere within a hundred-kilometer englobature of the ship. The presence of his friend Big made the task more pleasant rather than easier. Buele had begun to wonder if it might not be possible to extend his anima much farther into space than he had so far done. The boy often wondered how his early mentor, Mynheer Osbertus Kloster, the Astronomer Select of Voerster, with whom Buele had lived much of his early life on the Grassersee, would respond to his potboy’s developing gifts. Buele remembered the old scientist with genuine affection; it saddened him to know that the laws of relativity had already forever separated him from those early years at Stemheim in the company of the ancient one-meter refracting telescope that had been brought so lovingly and at such great expense from Earth.

I would have become Brother Osbertus’s heir
, Buele thought,
although I never guessed it then
.

Differences of class and status had made an adoption appear impossible. But it had never been as far out of reach as it had seemed before Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis
had appeared in Planet Voerster’s sky. Buele had come to realize that old Osbertus had truly loved him. So much so that an orphan lumpen boy might actually have turned Voersterian society on its head and become a part of the Mynheerenshaft. Eliana, Broni’s mother, the rebellious Voertrekkerschatz who became the Elmi, would have sanctioned it. Buele had no doubt of that.