Glory's People (35 page)

Kantaro got a grip on his own fears and said sharply, “Since when did a ninja fear dying?”

Duncan reacted automatically, but it was still too late. A short blade materialized in Ishida’s hand and he leapt at Kantaro. “Nooo!” wailed Damon. “You’ll draw the thing to us!”

But it was already too late. The young pilot, acting on his own secret instructions from Minamoto no Kami, produced a laze pistol and raised it in the direction of Ishida.

Ishida switched his attack from Kantaro instantly and struck with the short-bladed
wakizashi
, drawing the blade through the young man’s neck as tidily as a surgeon. Blood from a severed carotid artery fountained in the near-zero gravity.

Kantaro had also drawn a weapon, but Duncan stepped between him and Ishida. He delivered a single blow with a rock-hard fist and the Kaian was lifted from the deck to rebound like a rubber man from the blood-drenched pilot’s console. Duncan caught him by an arm and twisted it behind him with such violence that he felt it break in his grip.
“Enough!”
he commanded, shaken by his own anger.

But it was already far more than enough. Between the distant alien ships and the MD craft, a darkness had formed, a vast, dark shape laced with streaks of angry fire. Duncan felt the unreasoning rage of the thing. It was no different here, two million light-years from home, than it had been in the Ross Stars: lonely fury, killing rage. And fear. Fear of the creatures that had coursed it across the miles and light-years and parsecs without pause or caution.

The beings in the warships were empaths. Whatever their intent, they forewarned the Terror with the waves of emotion that preceded them. The Dark Intruder had come this way before, Duncan guessed.

Duncan took the fighting chair and initialized the lazegun. Kantaro took the pilot’s place. The cats yowled their fighting cries as the MD, under Kantaro’s guidance, came to life and moved, with shocking acceleration, in the direction of the coming battle.

Minamoto Kantaro, sweat-streaked and disheveled, took command of the MD ship as it accelerated toward the swirling dark that blotted out the strange, bright stars. The mass-depletion coils had converted most of the ship’s mass to energy in the passage through the Near Away. How much remained was unknown. The MDs were experimental craft, not intended for violent and lengthy adventures in the Near Away or wherever else outside normal space they might find themselves.

For over a thousand years it had been assumed by all Terrestrial colonists that fighting in space was next to impossible. As far as Earth’s colonial children were concerned, a space-warship was an oxymoron. Or had been, until now.

“We have almost no maneuvering mass, Kr-san,” Kantaro reported. “I will have to make the shortest, most direct approach.”

Duncan charged the laze rifle mounted in the nose section of the MD. “Do it,” he said. He glanced at the proximity radar screen. The Terror was off the inner range scale. The targets beyond, more than a thousand of them, formed an encircling pattern at ranges of from one to two hundred kilometers. Their delta had fallen from nearly ten thousand kilometers per hour at approach to less than a thousand as they closed.

“Those ships are big, “ Duncan said. The size of the alien craft shocked him. They were larger than
Glory
and bristling with sinister projections that Duncan suspected were weapons. But the fleet was primitive, even by Goldenwing standards. Ships such as these would be useless in the space Duncan knew, even for planetary exploration, unless the beings who owned them were physically enormous and lived long, very slow lives. Duncan did not get that impression. What he sensed was anger and fear that were almost Terrestrial in character.

What could have persuaded a spacefaring culture to devote the resources necessary to build such an armada as this? The answer emanated empathically from the alien fleet. What the aliens aboard their great slow battleships sought was revenge. Duncan had guessed that the Terror had passed this way before. This confrontation confirmed it. But how long ago had all this taken place? The elapsed time-span was staggering. If these people were as bound by their temporal frame of reference as were Terrestrials, the probability was that they had been preparing for this engagement for whatever interval passed for millennia in this place. They were ready at a moment’s notice to swarm into the sky and defend their civilization. The concept of such fear and hatred was staggering--even to one with Duncan’s record of struggle with the Terror. These creatures must have detected the Terror’s approach, and over a span of time that had lasted moments to those aboard the MD ship but must have lasted--here and now for these beings--months, years, even millennia, or whatever units of time they used to organize their lives.

Damon, closely attended by an excited, tail-lashing Pronker, crouched by the fighting chair. “What happens if we attack the Terror and
they
”--he indicated the cluttered radar screen--”decide to attack us?”

“During the Jihad, our ancestors learned a simple reality from the Muslims. ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ “ Duncan replied.

Damon was silent, his eyes fixed on the enlarging images on the screens. Then he asked quietly, “Will we ever get back, Master and Commander?”

“I don’t know, Damon,” Duncan said. “At the moment I see no way we can return. I’m sorry.”

The alien ships were sparks of colored light in the screens. The Terror was a mass of darkness and threads of fire. Duncan drew in a slow, deep breath. If the killer’s attention were not already heavily engaged, Duncan was sure that it would by now have made an attempt to engulf the MD ship. There was nothing whatever about the Yamatan technology that inhibited attack. Perhaps a Gateway and a retreat into the Near Away might forestall the Terror. But that path seemed foreclosed. Ahead was where duty lay for
Glory
's syndics.

Duncan spared a glance for Ishida, who lay, still dazed and cradling a broken arm, against a bulkhead. The young pilot lay dead in a veritable lake of blood. There were still englobed droplets in the air. When they struck the imaging screens they adhered and smeared the surface of the cathode-ray tubes.

“Kantaro-san,” Duncan said. “Can you give me a clear holograph?”

In the well of the flightdeck an image formed. Tiny spacecraft closed on a star-killing darkness. As Duncan watched, one of the first wave of alien craft loosed what appeared to be a spread of torpedoes. They left golden trails as they vanished into the fire-shot cloud. Two flashed with a brightness that was unmistakably nuclear. Two hot globes appeared within the darkness and were swiftly engulfed. A crooked bolt of electric-violet light snaked across the intervening distance between the Terror and the leading ships of the attacking fleet.

Two of the vast vessels that had fired missiles began to dissolve into dazzling fountains of light. How many lives aboard those ships? Duncan wondered. Judging from the size of the vessels, there were probably thousands. They imploded, collapsed into corroding fire. Within seconds, two of the mammoth ships were reduced to white-hot debris tumbling away from the heart of the destruction.

How long had it taken the Terror to learn such combat? The scope of the puzzle was mind-numbing, Duncan thought.
When it fought us in the Ross Stars it was an
elemental--
a force of nature, violent, but devoid of destructive sophistication
. Yet now it attacked the alien ships as though it were itself a vehicle of war. It took years, perhaps centuries, to change so radically. That left a daunting question: How many years, centuries, aeons, had passed since the battle at Ross 248?

We are disadvantaged by our need for linear time
, Duncan thought.
We can accept
intellectually
that we have passed through a space, a dimension (what should One call it?) in which time, like space itself, either did not exist or existed informs corporeal entities such as we could not conceive.

Yet the battle developing now was real enough. Those beings aboard the destroyed ships, whatever and whoever they might be, were beyond question dead, destroyed, reduced to their constituent atoms.

The injured ninja began to stir.

“Keep him under control, Damon,” Duncan ordered.

“Aye, Captain.” Damon stepped over the body of the MD pilot and stationed himself over the reviving Ishida. The man’s broken arm, bent in the wrong place and wrong direction, made Damon feel queasy. The only violence Damon had ever experienced were the earlier encounters with the Terror. He considered binding Ishida, but decided against it. He did not wish to inflict pain.

Kantaro, in the pilot’s chair, said over his shoulder, “Two more ships are coming in to attack, Kr-san. With five more behind them.”

“Get us closer,” Duncan said, raising the power of the laze-gun to the maximum setting. He suspected that the laser would have no effect. So far the weapons used by the alien spaceships had been ineffective, and they were clearly more powerful than what the Yamatan craft deployed.

But we have not come all this way to surrender
, Duncan thought, and Mira yowled angry agreement.

The spark representing the MD ship within the holograph moved in a tightening curve as it approached the dark shadow. Duncan put his forehead against the sight and directed a hot beam of coherent light into the center of the target. The beam penetrated the darkness and vanished. No damage had been inflicted. None at all. But the laze had provided a distraction, and the alien vessels closed to exploit it. Whoever or whatever fought the ships of that alien fleet were being strained and trained again for battle. Whatever else the Terror might have done in the distant past of this space, it had impressed upon this race the absolute need for an ability to wage war.

This time the aliens attacked with energy weapons. Jagged beams of violet light formed on forward projections of the lead craft and then flung themselves at the enemy. It was as though the beams themselves were intelligent and sought their target with a malevolence to match the Terror’s own.

At the point within the darkness where the beams intersected, a coruscating fireball formed, extended fiery, questing tendrils of light. For a moment the Terror seemed in danger of being overwhelmed by the power of the weapon, then it recovered, smothering the inner fire with its darkness.

“Again!”
Damon shouted empathically.
“Shoot again!”

As though the alien warriors heard the empathic command, a rank of the huge warships repeated the attack with the beams of violet light. Duncan counted an attack by a dozen ships before the Terror’s movement blotted out half the ships and left the others gutted and in expanding masses of ruin. The environment resonated with the death agonies of thousands.

The cats screamed and Duncan fought off the avalanche of pain and death that radiated from the destroyed ships. Damon had slumped to the deck, his anima outraged by the terrible dying of the alien thousands.

Even Kantaro, who was only a partial empath and totally untrained, was staggered by the tsunami of death. He fought to keep the MD pointed at the swirling, furious darkness.

Duncan felt its anger. He felt, too, its fear. It was orders of magnitude greater than that of the quarry he remembered from the dark savannah of their passage to this place. He fired a second bolt of light into the sooty cloud. Again the tiny attack distracted, and Duncan felt its attention focus on him at last.

There was a flash of recognition.
“The thing remembers us, Mira, “
he sent. He fired the laser still again. Mira sent back,
“Kill it, dominant tom. “

“If only I could, “
Duncan lamented.

But he had drawn its attention, and the warriors aboard the ships of the alien fleet had millennia of battle knowledge to guide them. The violet weapon formed on the projectors of the entire fleet, held there for one long moment, and then converged upon the Terror.

The darkness was shot through with light and fire. Duncan wondered what the accumulated power of those weapons might be. Millions of gigawatts? Billions? Without
Glory
's computer banks and sensors he had no way of knowing. But the effect on the Terror was vast. Duncan felt Mira’s triumphant surge of pleasure. Small Hana gripped the top of a console and trilled with satisfaction.

Have they killed it?
Duncan wondered
. Is it truly ending now? Will we see it die here and know
Glory's
people are safe at last?

The fire spread through the cloud like a cancer. Second and third discharges from the alien fleet struck the Terror again and again.

Surely it is dying now
, Duncan thought savagely.
Die, damn you. Die!

“They have done it, Kr-san!” Kantaro shouted.

The Terror swirled, diminished. The fires within burned hot and white. Duncan remembered how men had died in the Ross Stars, consumed by fire from within.

Between the MD and the Terror a point of light appeared. Duncan stared, appalled.

“What is it, Duncan?” Damon shouted. “What’s happening?”

“A singularity,” Duncan said, aghast. “It is opening a Gateway!”

The point opened into a double fan of light. Beyond the light lay the indeterminate space of the Near Away.

“Kantaro!” Duncan called desperately.
“Follow it! “
He heard Mira’s scream of rage and fear.

Damon Ng’s voice was shrill as he screamed, “No! Duncan, look out!”

That was the last thing Duncan Kr heard before the point of a throwing knife struck him in the back and began to drain the life out of him.

Anya Amaya, exhausted by the undesired responsibility of commanding Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis,
lay lightly tethered to her bunk in her austere quarters. Her eyelids twitched in Rapid Eye Movement sleep. The feminist from New Earth was dreaming.

Duncan lay bleeding from a wound that would kill him, yet his eyes were open and filled with some urgent message that she, Amaya, could not grasp. And while she failed in her task, Duncan slipped farther from life, drowning in a lake of blood.