Land of the Dead (13 page)

“What the hell! We’re right on a moon.” Even as the Marocâin spoke, the rumble of the maneuvering drive hiccupped into a lower pitch. “That’s orbit. To stations!”

Mitsuharu immediately took his place at the secondary console. It was the “station” he had appropriated from the beginning, giving him a reasonable view of the engineer’s panel and control of some useful secondary systems.
A moon,
he saw
, but without a planet or star in reasonable distance.
Only a dim glow illuminated the indistinct sphere. One could imagine ice-shrouded peaks piercing the roughened surface, but without better sensors it looked dimply red-purple, like the passing boulders.

“Looks like a beat-up billiard ball,” Azulcay muttered. He looked curiously at Hadeishi. “Where’s the solar system? There’s no proper star in sensor range.”

“Gravitational eddies could form a moon from stellar debris without forcing an orbit.” Mitsuharu shrugged. “Or the star could have lost fuel millions of years ago … who could say?”

“See if you can get a read on…” The engineer stopped, listening.

Hadeishi heard the sound, too, and reflexively hit the A
LERT
glyph on his control pane.

“Explosions. Coming our…”

The alarm began to blare, but the wailing noise did not drown out a succession of dull, heavy thuds.

“We are attacked.”
Who? I wonder. Perhaps Kryg’nth?
A dull
whoomp
came from the direction of the nearest loading bay. Something dark and jagged flickered across the camera pickup before the entire control console died again with a massive thud that made the flooring shake.
All the loading bays.

“We’re boarded,” cursed the Marocâin.

It wasn’t a question. Hadeishi was already sealing up his z-suit as Azulcay fumbled with his. The feeling of the suit gelling around his neck and face brought back a thousand memories.
Wind was rattling the bamboo, making the surface of the stream flowing past at Musashi’s feet sparkle with tiny wavelets. A series of mossy boulders made an uneasy path to the far side. Kiyohara was poised on the largest of them, his
nodachi
slung insolently across his massive shoulders. “Come then,” the brigand shouted, “unsheath your famous blade, King of Swordsmen!” Behind him, on the far bank, the sally drew a raucous laugh from the dozens of ronin gathered there.

“Gun locker code?” Hadeishi was at the armored cabinet, but the battle-steel door was properly secured. The engineer nodded, his face paling. Despite obvious fear, his fingers were steady enough to punch in the authorization code and the gray metal doors swung aside to reveal a brace of shipguns and two bandoliers of ammunition.

“Pretty light,” Mitsuharu muttered, pulling a Bloem-Voss TK6 from the padded cradle. The civilian weapon only carried a single kind of round, a ship-safe flechette, and lacked a grenade launcher or a thermal sight. The Nisei had the bandolier over his shoulder and secured, with the gun tucked under his arm and lanyard snugged to his tool belt before the engineer had even managed to get the ammunition and snub-nosed rifle out of the cabinet.

“Let me,” ordered the Nisei, quickly righting the civilian’s gear. “Follow me and shoot at anything you don’t recognize. But, please, not the back of my head.” The proper helmet for the z-suit slid down over Hadeishi’s brow and he locked the neckring with a practiced twist of his fingers.

*   *   *

A moment later, Mitsuharu eased out into the main corridor connecting the cargo bays to the shipcore. The overhead lights were flickering on and off as something interfered with environmental power, so he tripped the nearest panel and killed them entirely. Azulcay’s breathing was harsh and fast in his ear.

“What’s—” Two crewmen bolted down the passageway towards them, followed immediately by a stabbing flare of gunfire. One of the spacers staggered and spun around, crashing into a wall. The other threw himself down, caught on the nonskid decking, and scrambled past them on hands and knees. Behind the gun-flashes, five or six bulky figures advanced at a quick pace, the muzzle of the leader’s gun glowing like a hot star in the gloom.

The sideways, skittering approach of the invaders told the Nisei all he needed to know about the enemy which had overtaken them.
Khaiden
, he thought, a brief flash of memory bringing back visions of a bulky starship breaking apart under the impact of three well-placed shipkillers. The
Cornuelle
had taken severe structural damage in that affray, but shipboard losses had been light.
We were lucky,
part of his mind commented as he moved.
They thought we were too small to—

Hadeishi squeezed off a burst just low of the enemy gun in his sights, then darted aside into the corridor, his shipgun pointed at the floor. Answering fire raked the wall, shredding the paneling and sending the Marocâin into the nearest room with a yell. One of the Khaiden was down, and the others rushed forward. Mitsuharu stepped in, emptied the rest of his clip into the nearest hostile at point-blank range and then darted past, trying to burst past the following two in the darkness.

The roar of Imperial guns filled the corridor behind him as the other crewman and the engineer opened up. Flechettes hissed past, spattering from his armor and Mitsuharu felt something clip his shoulder. He stumbled, thrown off balance and into the last of the Khaiden boarders.

The creature towered over the slightly built Nisei by at least a meter and its shipgun lashed out hard, butt-first, to slam into Hadeishi’s faceplate. The tempered glassite rang with a clear, bell-like tone and Mitsuharu was thrown to the decking. Teeth clenched, he snatched a fresh clip from the bandolier and snapped open the Bloem-Voss’ cartridge bay—then froze, the glowing bore of a Khaiden zmetgun jammed hard into his faceplate. Smoke curled across his vision and the glassite popped with the heat. Hadeishi groped for a suitable
koan
.
No time left
, he thought sadly.
For a proper parting.

The Khaiden kicked the human’s shipgun away, and then wrenched the bandolier from his shoulder.

Ah,
Mitsuharu realized with dismay.
They do prize technicians—a life of servitude awaits.…

*   *   *

With two of the enemy in close proximity, there was nothing to be done but clasp both hands behind his back and feel the bite of a heavy pair of steel cuffs through the z-suit gel. Hadeishi kept his eyes lowered as the Khaiden dragged him down the corridor past the bodies of Azulcay and the other starman. The Marocâin’s face was invisible behind shattered glassite coated with congealing blood. The Khaiden in front of him kicked the corpses aside, ignoring their tools and comm bands.

They are in a hurry, they haven’t taken my tool belt.
Mitsuharu hurried along between the two invaders, chin tucked to chest, trying to see anything he could out of the corners of his eyes. The shipcore was swarming with the enemy, most in battle armor—the usual grab-bag of stolen equipment—but some were kitted out in dark blue z-suits with a gold-colored icon of some kind of hunting bird. The tight, blocky script on the sides of their helmets was hard to read, but Hadeishi thought it might be something like
Qalak
, or
Khaerak
.
Those are custom-fitted uniforms,
he realized with a little chill shock. He did not remember ever seeing a Khaiden raider sporting standardized equipment, much less uniforms or heraldry.

Mitsuharu was herded up the shipcore, following a swing-line with three other crewmen from the
Wilful
, and then into a cross-corridor marked with heavy yellow stripes warning of environment change ahead.
The port, forehull airlock,
he guessed. They had passed several more squads of Khaiden, and now he was thinking the dark-blue z-suits were officers. The boarding parties—the equivalent of the Fleet marines—showed little standardization in their arms, armor, or personal gear.
That’s business as usual.…

At the entrance to the airlock, he stopped abruptly as the lead guard jammed the other prisoners against the wall without warning. Four Khaiden jetted past, z-suit maneuvering jets spitting exhaust, with two more of their fellows on litters between them. Still keeping his head bowed, Hadeishi smiled tightly.
That little gun did some good.

Ahead, the airlock cycled open, sending a gust of damp, hot air into the corridor. The medical party disappeared through without a pause. Mitsuharu weighed his chances, but then the guard behind him was pushing him forward. They passed a cross-corridor leading upship and for the first time Hadeishi caught a glimpse of the command deck. There was a drift of corpses—all of them apparently human—pinned against one wall with a net of sprayfoam. More of the dark-blue-suited Khaiden were busy at the consoles. The doors were pitted with thousands of tiny sparkling blemishes where shipgun flechettes had impacted.

Fierce smugglers in these parts,
he thought, seeing a cloud of tiny ruby-colored droplets drifting in the hatchway. Then the momentary vision was gone, and the airlock was cycling around them. Hadeishi tensed, feeling the hot, humid air of a Khaiden ship wash over him.

The
Qalak,
then
, he thought.
Into the belly of the carrion bird.

The guard jammed him in the back with the muzzle of a tribarrel, pushing him forward, and as they passed into the dull, redlit space beyond, his earbug cycled frequency—losing contact with the
Wilful
’s shipnet—and for just a moment, before an encrypter kicked in, he caught a burst of Khadesh.

“—blood-drinking Maltese! A pestilence upon their—!”

THE
NANIWA

I
N THE
KUUB

Kosh
ō
sat easily in the captain’s chair, one leg crossed over the other, comp control surfaces arrayed to the left to allow an unobstructed view of the engineering stations on her right. Midafternoon watch was nearly half over and there were crewmen at every station. The threatwell forming the center of Command was filled with light—the hard diamonds of the battle-group and a contorted maze of filaments representing the dust clouds they had been passing through for the last three days.

On her central board, the transit shielding status displays were flickering crimson and amber much like the fluttering of hummingbird wings—nearly too swift for the eye to follow. One of the graphics surged into red, and then scarlet, and a soft
ding-ding
sounded. Susan looked up from the readiness reports filling her displays and frowned, a sharp crease splitting her forehead.

Gravitational densities were fluctuating in an uncomfortable way, causing the protostellar debris to congeal in ever-moving eddies. The
Naniwa
’s newly installed deflectors were easily shrugging aside the constant stream of impacts, but she was beginning to worry about the other smaller, older, ships in the convoy. At present the combat elements made a widely dispersed globe around the
Fiske
,
Eldredge
, and
Hanuman
. The squadron was currently arrayed to prevent wake overlap and further damage to the smaller ships following the heavy warships.

Kosh
ō
brushed the readiness reports closed with a flick of her wrist, then keyed into battlecast with her stylus.

After a few minutes of considering telemetry from the noncombatants, she tapped her earbug awake and paged Engineering.

“Hennig here,
kyo
.” The
Kikan-cho
was a dough-faced Saxon of very conservative mind. Kosh
ō
found him refreshingly direct and, like many engineers, disinterested in politics of any kind. Had he shown any flickering of concern for the past glories of Imperial Denmark—of which Saxony had been long part—he would not have found a posting in the Fleet at all.

Which would be a shame,
Susan thought,
because we are short enough of talented officers as it is.

“Emil,” she said aloud, “how does the shielding on the
Fiske
or
Eldredge
compare to ours, in this dust, at our current velocity?”

“Poorly,
Chu-sa
.” He looked off-pane, and Kosh
ō
was heartened to see that the engineer already had the ’cast telemetry on his own monitors. “We’re pegging up to five or six percent capacity—that last bolus deflected from the port shielding at nineteen percent—but
Fiske
is showing sixty or seventy percent just in the easygoing.”

“You’d agree the densities are increasing, the deeper we go?”

He nodded. “
Kyo
, whatever gravitational sources are causing all of this debris to collect are—more or less—dead ahead. The closer we come, the tighter the influx spirals are going to be. Right now, if you plot back to our entry point, you can see we’re cutting across deeper ‘valleys’ in the clouds. The interval between each ridge is growing shorter as well.”