Glory's People (31 page)

“There is nothing to see, Yamaguchi-san,” Duncan said. “There is no space, no time outside our own perception.” It was not courage the MD pilot lacked. It was belief. Yamaguchi simply found it near to impossible to find himself--here.

Duncan sympathized. He was struck by the stunning thought that even if a return should be possible, the MD ship might pass again through the singularity into a universe or a reality--the words were interchangeable in this situation--in which a year or ten thousand years had passed.

We must retain a link with our own actuality
, he thought. It was vital. To relinquish that link meant madness.

Damon Ng was succumbing to the stress. His eyes widened, tried to roll back in his skull. Pronker sought him out and fastened himself to his skinsuit. Pronker’s sending--a cry for help--was so powerful that Mira and Hana reacted by seeking close physical contact with the young tom. Somehow the group sending created an image Damon could interpret. He said hollowly, “It is running from us, Captain. We must follow.”

It was what Duncan had hoped for, yet had dared not expect, the smallest weakening in the Outsider’s merciless behavior. But he had to be certain. “How do you know?” Duncan demanded.

Damon put his arms around the cats in his lap who were struggling to be understood. Pronker and Mira yowled with a mixture of fright and anger. Hana, young and with powers not fully developed, sought comfort by attempting to burrow through the slick skinsuit and touch Damon’s flesh.

“
I
don’t know.
They
do.” His eyes were glazing. He looked Wired. Without
Glory
's massive computing power sustaining their psychic Talents that should be impossible, Duncan thought. Yet what did “should be” and “impossible” mean in this place--if place it was?

Ishida spoke in a flat, uninflected voice. “The pilot is fainting, Kr-san. Shall I take over?” In fact, the Kaian retainer was right. The pilot was sinking more and more deeply into shock.

Duncan lifted the weightless Yamatan from his seat and took his place. His knowledge of colonial vessels was almost primitive. But plainly this nameless mass-depletion spacecraft was of the first generation of things to come.
If we live
, Duncan thought.
If we survive and return
...

That was Duncan’s third epiphany.

Mira launched herself at Duncan, eyes wild and tail brushed. It was a pose Duncan knew well. She assumed it often when, in the privacy of the Captain’s quarters aboard
Glory
, they played with crumpled balls of paper and lengths of cord. But Mira was not playing now. With her ears flat against her skull and her small but formidable teeth bared, she had the look of a predator making a sudden, final rush at her prey.

I do not know if we humans are ready,
Duncan thought
. But Mira is ready. Mira, in fact, is ready for war.

Was the Terror weaker than Duncan remembered it from the Ross encounter? There might be unsuspected reasons. How long had it lived in this null space that might be native to it? A hundred centuries? A thousand? Once again his humanity betrayed him. Human beings lived by the clock and calendar, but Time had no meaning here. Had never had meaning. There was no past, no future, only a null-dimensional ...
what?

Duncan reined himself. He could feel the deep and terrible loneliness of this place without sun, stars, without light or sound or time or distance. Few humans had ever been so divided from their own kind.

Duncan treated his momentary weakness with self-contempt. Surely a man who spent a solitary boyhood in the open skiffs of Chalkmeer, one who, before he could walk or swim, learned from the adults of his marriage group how to face the toothed, fur-bearing fishes alone under the great red glow of Moon Bothwell, could face this raging emptiness?

He had actually stalked the Terror hoping to find some weakness. Had he done so? Its use of the Red Sprite to feed from the Yamatan aurora was an activity none of the syndics had seen before. How efficient was the energy transfer? How much life must the entity consume to perform the miracle of the Gateway, so like a black hole in miniature? But though it ate life, it consumed energy in many forms. The transfer of power from the Yamatan aurora had been a dazzling, daunting,
intimidating
event.

There is so much we do not know
, Duncan thought.
What weapons might one use against such an entity? And where was the monstrous thing?
Outside the ship, his human eyes could see nothing.

How large was the Terror? No human had ever seen it fully materialized and lived. The Collective of Nimrud’s soldiers had discovered that. They, at least, were granted the mercy of dying under their own sun.

Possibilities were racing across the landscape of Duncan’s mind. He broke through the blindness and glimpsed the rocky coast of Thalassa in a driving rain. Lost in the mist and distance, a furred leviathan was thrashing furiously in the tumultuous sea. Was it wounded? Old? Surrounded by enemies? Dying?

Or was it not there at all?

His intimacy with Mira and the Folk aboard
Glory
had taught him that reality had an infinity of faces.
Glory
's syndics most particularly knew this to be so because their Talent made it possible for them to create mental surrogates for what their feeble eyes and ears failed to detect. It was this ability that formed the core, the very heart, of the link between the human beings of the
Gloria Coelis
and the new and strange cats who populated their world.

Duncan thought
, When familiar reason abandons us to the irrational, then we must do as the Folk do--create an alternate reality in which we can effectively live, and fight, and if need be, die, for we are Wired Starmen
.

That was Duncan’s fourth epiphany.

They are gone and we don’t know where,” Anya Amaya said to the group gathered on the bridge deck. “It was Duncan’s intention to take the battle to the Terror rather than run from it. He did that. Now he and the others are gone. And so, I think, is the Terror. None of the Folk can sense it nearby, and neither can
Glory
. “ Amaya was too straightforward a person not to go on. “It is almost certain that we will not see any of them again. Duncan warned me the price of driving the intruder off could be high. He and Damon were willing to pay it.” She looked at the colonists clinging to the fabric bulkheads. “I hope your people were as willing,” she said.

Her eyes were red, but there were no more tears. She had received all of Duncan’s behests from
Glory
and she was now the acting Master and Commander. A single hour had passed since the sky had opened and swallowed the MD vessel. In that awful moment there had been a surge in the empathic signature of fear, genuine fear, and anxiety aboard the Goldenwing, but there was no corresponding counterattack from the Terror. Quite the contrary. The cats aboard had lost interest in the chase, and the humans felt only their personal grief. Their friends and fellow syndics had vanished, and with them the devil that had stalked
Glory
half across the sky.

The Sailing Master had ordered sail taken off the spars the moment the level of tension began to fall. Duncan had left instructions that
Gloria Coelis
come about “immediately we are engaged” and return with all haste to Planet Yamato.

Anya had seen no reason why all aboard should not hear, in Duncan’s own words, what he had left for them to do.

“No matter if a fight begins,” he said in
Glory
's voice, “and assuming we are not immediately consumed or destroyed,
Glory
must return to synchronous orbit at Yamato, which is the only place, so far as we know, in Near Space where the relativistic-speed problem is even being addressed. This means that if we fail to incapacitate, or at least discourage, the phenomenon we have been referring to as the Terror, another attempt must be made. I leave it to you, Anya, and you, Minamoto no Kami, to assume this duty. It must be done, or Mankind’s time among the stars is at an end.”

The Yamatans, wearing funereal white, responded to Duncan’s words with formal bows. The Shogun’s face was etched with the loss of his nephew, and Anya was touched with the memory of a thought she had had only yesterday, and that now seemed a whisper from the distant past.

We were never lovers, Minamoto Kantaro. Perhaps it is as well. Grief should be pure.

It was a thought worthy of the grim-faced women who had raised and then rejected her on New Earth.

Despite this, and despite the love and respect Anya had for Duncan, her inbred feminism rose in a surge of anger and grief. Duncan had performed an act that was typically a man thing, heroism fuelled with testosterone.
And now I am alone to deal with what comes after
, Anya thought bitterly.

The Shogun wore a
hachimaki
, a cloth headband bearing the sun disk of Amaterasu and a calligraphic prayer for the “happy rebirth” of the Yamatans who had died, as the colonists put it, “in the Near Away.”

The old man’s grief was evident. A lifetime of stoicism did not ease the pain of the loss of his nephew and heir. Yet only now could he allow himself to consider whether or not Kantaro had been as blameless as he, Minamoto no Kami, would have preferred him to be.

Before the dismissal of the war fans and the return to Yamato by most of the daimyos, Minamoto had struggled against the suspicion that Kantaro knew more about the attempts on Duncan’s life than was honorable. The young man had shown a reticence to speak of the ninja attacks that Minamoto had found disturbing.

Well, he thought bleakly, it was unimportant now. But had Kantaro’s complicity in some plot against the Goldenwing syndics and even--may the Gods forbid--against the legitimate order on Planet Yamato made it easy for the young man to volunteer so insistently for the MD mission to the Near Away?

Minamoto no Kami put such thoughts out of his mind. If what the woman syndic declared was the way things actually were, his duty as Lord of Honshu and Shogun of Yamato was to return and suppress any unrest or even insurrection that the loss of Kantaro and the others might encourage.

The thing these Wired people called the Terror was apparently gone, attacked and possibly even destroyed by the starship Captain’s reckless thrust into the unknown. The cost was high and the unknown and unknowable nature of the battle, if battle there was, left a Yamatan samurai unsatisfied. But Minamoto no Kami, a feudal Japanese to his fingertips, understood where his own duty lay.

“Is there any service we can render, Sailing Master?” he asked formally. “We are few, but you are fewer.”

“I thank Minamoto-sama,” Anya Amaya replied as formally. “But this Goldenwing is self-sufficient. However, it will take some time and distance for us to change course. We shall have to swing around Moon Hideyoshi to turn
Glory
. I have ordered the monkeys and the computer to use the light pressure of Tau Ceti.” A New Earther under all and any circumstances, she disregarded the discomfort among the Yamatans at the use of the Terrestrial name for Amaterasu--who was, after all, the astronomical aspect of the Sun Goddess. Already, Amaya was disengaging herself from the colonists. It was a defense ingrained in the syndic psyche. Only by such separation could the “immortal” Starman survive his or her life of continuing personal loss.

Amaya recognized what she was doing and was of no mind to change it, even if she could.
A Starman once, a Starman always
. It was an axiom aboard Goldenwings. Amaya herself had never truly needed--until now--to accept terrible losses without complaint. Duncan had shown her that it was possible when he left Eliana Ehrengraf on Voerster. Now the crew of Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis
must all do the same. Leave Yamato and leave Duncan Kr and Damon Ng, relegating them to the log and legend of the ship.

“We are still within range of Yamato, Amaya-san,” the Shogun said. “Since you have no further need of us, we will make preparations to depart at once. Our MD ships can shed their inertia and make an almost instantaneous turnaround by using the mass-depletion engines. So we will go in the MD ships and leave
Dragonfly
aboard to reclaim when you reestablish orbit. If that is acceptable, Master and Commander.”

Broni, defiantly floating in air above a control console and holding Clavius as though he were a kitten, bridled visibly at the use of Duncan’s title. Buele, close enough to her to touch, squeezed her wrist in warning, displaying a social sophistication he had not heretofore been known to possess.

“Your plan is acceptable, Lord Shogun,” Anya said. “Our speed is dropping swiftly. What inertial overload can your engines handle?”

The Shogun looked to one of his companions, a mass-depletion engineer. “Point zero zero five lightspeed, Minamoto-sama.”

The Shogun looked to Anya for confirmation. “Is it possible, Amaya-san?”

“We will be down to that speed within an hour, Shogun.”

Minamoto steadied himself with a hand on the flexing bulkhead and inclined his head. “We will prepare, Master and Commander.”

Once again Buele’s short-fingered lumpen's hand closed on Broni’s wrist. Still far from being in command of herself, the Voertrekker girl snatched her arm away. Big, perched on Buele’s shoulder, raised his hackles and hissed at Broni. Buele silenced him with an unspoken interspecies caution. Anya Amaya shot a stem look at Buele and Broni. It would not do, particularly at this time, to give the Yamatans the impression that the syndics of Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis
were at odds.

Minamoto no Kami and his people left the bridge. Most had come to terms with the business of moving about in the almost nonexistent gravity aboard
Glory
. Those who had not still wore the grav units. Yoshi Eiji, the Lord of Kai, was one of these.

When the colonists had cleared the bridge, Amaya rounded on her crewmates.

“I do not want to see a display like that one ever again,” she said. “We are syndics. I expect us all to act like syndics.” She glared at Broni. “Without exception.”