Glory's People (38 page)

I did not see that
, Kantaro thought.
None of us saw that. It was a dream. A hallucination. A projection of all Man’s imaginings.

Yet it had been there.
As we were
, he thought. And if it had not been for the resumption of the chase of the Terror, the Magellanic stars and the Great Nebula would still dominate the crystalline port that he, himself,, had closed to make his grip on reality strong enough to pilot the small spacecraft on, in search of the vanished Terror, or, far better still, back home.

On the back of the pilot’s chair, Hana crouched, claws fixed in the fabric upholstery. Her coat resembled that of a porcupine; her tail, thick as a bottle brush, she held straight up at ninety degrees from her twitching back. Kantaro found it hard to believe, but he was receiving a series of powerful sendings from the halfgrown kitten. At first he made an effort to translate them into the Yamatan tongue, but soon he found that this was hopeless. The sendings from the small cat were garbled with indications of anger, of fear, and of anxious appeal.

Kantaro could also sense that they came through Hana rather than from her. The impressions he was getting were directional--though under the circumstances, and without any frame of reference within which to place the MD he now piloted, the directionality of the feline demands were beyond his level of empathy.

The mass indicators on his console warned that the ship had consumed most of its mass. What would happen when the mass was totally depleted, he could only guess. And the guesses did not include one that saw them bursting out of the Near Away in close low orbit with Planet Yamato.

Hana howled with exhaustion and anxiety. The empathic signals wavered and became unreadable by Kantaro. He swept the cat from the chair-back and cradled her against his chest. She whimpered and tried to purr. “Dear Hana,” Minamoto Kantaro murmured, “are we killing you?”

Kantaro looked at Mira and Pronker. The two mature Folk looked intent on what seemed to be their first priority: doing something to assist Damon Ng in the rapidly complicating task of keeping Duncan Kr alive.

That is my fault,
Kantaro thought bitterly
. To my everlasting shame, it is I who acquiesced in the hiring of the Order of Ninjas, and so it is I who bears the responsibility for Tsunemoto being here on board, and for the repeated attempts to kill Duncan Kr. If, by some miracle, I survive this adventure, it will be my honorable task to ask the Shogun for permission to commit seppuku.

Thoughts of death did not affect the cats. They ignored death, as they had when they were wildcats in the dawn of Earth’s lifetime. When they became excited and assumed fighting stances, backs arched and ears flattened, one forgot that they were complex creatures of surprising depth.

These were not lost animals. Kantaro reminded himself that on the ancient homeworld they had been known, when lost or abandoned, to find their owners over ranges of thousands of kilometers. So was it possible that they
were
receiving calls from the animals populating the Goldenwing?

Hana squirmed free and took an excited fighting stance. Pronker and Mira seemed torn between their duty to Duncan and their instinct to survive. Kantaro’s anxieties peaked as the temperature inside the MD began to climb.

The fleeing Terror had turned on its small tormentor and reached out to crush and burn it.

On
Glory's
bridge the first indication of the Terror’s presence was from the untrained cats spread throughout the nearly empty ship. For the second time in memory,
Glory
howled with the fury of the Folk. Artemis, snarling at the air, sent a clear and unambiguous message to Anya Amaya:
“The black dog is back!”

Instead of rising panic, Amaya felt a stir of furious hope. When it had vanished, Duncan and the people aboard the Yamatan ship had plunged headlong after it. In a typically male, testosterone-driven attack mode, Amaya, child of New Earth, thought bitterly. Well, if they were still alive, the men aboard the MD would follow the killer back into normal space. The war was not yet over.

She concentrated on interpreting Artemis’s sendings accurately. She could sense Buele and Big crowding close behind her. If there was to be any disagreement on a plan of battle, Amaya thought, her support would have to come from Broni--who was young, often foolish, but well partnered by Clavius, and
a woman
.

We have no weapons to speak of, Amaya thought. Only the ship. Could the million metric tons of Glory's mass injure the Terror? Duncan had never tried it, but Duncan would never deliberately put the ship herself at risk. The syndics, yes. But not the Goldenwing
Gloria Coelis
. Never.

"Broni, ”
she sent.
“Where is It?”

"Clavius sees It, I think. A spatial distortion a hundred kilometers off our port bow. ”

"Dietr, what does Para see?”

"Nothing, Sailing Master.”

“Buele?”

“Big sees the anomaly. It looks like a Gateway opening. ”

Amaya weighed the options of command. A man would not divide his forces. But a woman might disperse her battle assets. “It is all in the perception, Duncan,” she whispered aloud.

“Buele, Broni. Suit up and take a shuttle out. Dietr, we are going to fight. Be ready for casualties. ”

"Aye, Acting Captain, ”
the Cybersurgeon sent.

In the surgery, Dietr Krieg initiated the healing pods. These devices had not been used since Broni Ehrengraf had come aboard with her leaking, rheumatic heart. Paracelsus watched from his position clinging onto the surgery wall.

“Yes, Para, ”
Dietr sent.
“If any of the Folk are hurt there is room for them. ”

The lean tabby trilled at him and looked wise.

You are a fraud, my friend,
Dietr Krieg thought
. So are we all.

Here, in the Amaterasu Sun’s gravity well, time was real, moving, as time often did, with precise intent.

Monkeys raced through the rig; the skylar sails of the great Goldenwing shifted and retrimmed to a port tack and filled to the tachyon wind.
Glory's
change of course was dignified, majestic. Nearly three thousand years ago the great, wind-driven wooden warships of Earth had performed just such ponderous evolutions to close with their enemies.

Glory
, child of that harsh tradition, sailed toward the spatial anomaly.

Duncan struggled to make himself understood. His powers were fading. When he opened his eyes it seemed he looked through a long, darkening tunnel. But Mira’s warning was still clear. Damon and Pronker were too engaged with the effort to keep Duncan breathing to react to the warning Mira sensed.

But Damon, not understanding, sent angrily,
“Mira, your partner is dying. Don’t abandon us. We need your help. ”

Mira snarled and cuffed at him.
“Look. Look where we are and where we are going! ”

Hana, her attention fixed, with Kantaro’s, on the empty-seeming space ahead, uttered a cry of fright.

With a burst of light and radiation, space ahead of the MD ship changed character. In a microsecond a brilliant singularity appeared, followed by an involuted spatial construct with dark, liplike boundaries. Fans of light in the near ultraviolet flashed, and beyond could be seen a dark sky shot with dim stars.

Duncan took control of his own respiratory system and sucked air painfully into his punctured lung. The pain was like a blade of fire piercing him from the inside out.

“Kantaro! “

There was not enough trained Talent in the Yamatan to receive Duncan’s command. He cried aloud, “Kantaro! Block the opening! It must not enter normal space again! Use the ship and block the Gateway!”
“Help him, Mira! Guide him!”

The effort brought Duncan back to the edge of death. Damon caught him as he slumped back to the bloody deck.

Kantaro glimpsed the shoulder of the mass-depletion coil encircling the ship. It glowed deep violet. The ship’s maneuvering was consuming the last of the mass-depletion energy.

Buele and Broni Ehrengraf, armored for space and seated side by side in the strongest of
Glory
's wedge-shaped shuttles--the nearest thing to a gunship
Glory
could boast--saw the first gleam that warned of the imminence of an opening Gateway. It appeared as a point of light only microns in diameter, but potent with the energy of a collapsing sun. Big and Clavius gave shrill warning cries and Broni, acting as pilot, swung the shuttle so that the point of the wedge, heavily coated with heat-and-radiation-proof ceramic, faced the event horizon that was in the process of materializing around the singularity.

The event, as an astronomical phenomenon, violated all the laws of astrophysics the young syndics knew, but on this voyage they had been forced to confront many similar events.

Duncan had once passed on to Broni and Buele a dictum learned from Han Soo, formerly
Glory
's Astroprogrammer, who had died in space a shiptime month from planetfall at Planet Voerster. “Know what you believe,” the ancient Earthman had often said, “but believe what you can see.”

Duncan had passed a number of Han Soo’s homilies on to the younger syndics. Han claimed to have been born in the Yangtze Valley of China the year the Jihad began. He counted his 120 shiptime years as more than a thousand of the swift downworld kind.

Since neither Broni nor Buele had ever known Han Soo, they allowed themselves to be a bit skeptical about his age. But about his wisdom they had no doubt.

The singularity, the heart of a tiny black hole, was there. They had seen it before. And if it challenged the Einsteinian dogma spacefaring people lived by, so be it. Their own elongated lifetimes were just such a challenge.

Buele used the com unit in his suit helmet. “Can you see it, Sister Anya?” It was a measure of his stress that he had fallen back into his early habit of addressing his shipmates as “Sister” and “Brother.”

Anya Amaya’s reply was loud and clear in Buele’s helmet. Anya said, “Stay clear but stay near. That thing will have
Glory
to deal with now.” The headset also produced a trilling growl that Big acknowledged as Artemis’s signature.

Those syndics aboard
Glory
who had partnered with cats had modified their helmets so that they would protect the partner riding on a shoulder. Broni settled Clavius on her shoulder and closed the helmet of her suit. She and Buele had already discussed and decided upon a move through the Gateway to see if the Yamatan mass-depletion ship had remained close to the swirling black of the Terror. How they would present this plan to the Acting Captain was an unresolved argument between them. Broni, ever more impulsive than her companion, favored a straightforward rush through the Gateway as soon as it was fully open. Buele, with his greater respect for rules, insisted that they must get Anya Amaya’s approval before attempting so hazardous an action.

The shuttle’s track lay below and to the right of the spreading Gateway. From their vantage point the two syndics could see nothing beyond the puffy black lips of the spatial opening.

As sometimes happened to Buele, he received a sudden sending that came from he knew not where.

“Kantaro... follow it... use the lazegun. “

“Broni! “
Buele sent.
“Did you get that? Did you, Big? Clavius? Anyone?”

No human responded. But Clavius did. It was an ever-recurring mystery that the ability to send and receive empathic messages varied from cat to cat, and from cat to cat hour to hour.

Clavius, greatly agitated, projected a garbled image of a man, badly injured by one of his own kind, down and close to death. The personal signal that identified every living thing capable of empathic exchange was so faint Clavius could not read it.

It was followed by another identifier:
“Damon! “

“Sailing Master! They are there, on the other side of the singularity, “
Buele sent.

Broni demanded,
“Are you sure?”

Buele ignored her. He had his plan of action complete now. He took the controls from Broni, intending to plunge through the Gateway.

But the black, shapeless threat they had come to know had materialized in the throat of the anomaly. Long ago, Buele had sensed primitive emotions from the Terror. Then it had been loneliness. Now it was anxiety. It was trying to run away. Into Near Space, Buele guessed. He fired thrusters and accelerated the spear-pointed shuttle directly at the Gateway.

The Terror was forming on the near side of the Gateway. Broni said, “Wait, Buele! Look!”

Even as she spoke, a beam of laser fire pierced the center of the darkness and drove off into space.

“Sailing Master, did you see that? Stay clear. Stay clear. “
Broni’s sending was sharp and as authoritative as a pubescent Voertrekker empath could make it.

The laser seemed more an annoyance than a threat to the Terror. It folded in upon itself like a great Klein bottle, and sent a streamer of fire-threaded black back into the singularity.

Buele intercepted another sending.

“Drive into it! Into it, Kantaro!”

This time the sending was unmistakably Damon Ng’s. With Big’s help, Buele began to send, filling Near Space with empathic signals, trying to pierce the open Gateway.

“We are here! We are here, Brother Damon!”

Simultaneously from Amaya and Dietr: “Duncan?”

So they could hear Damon now. But nothing from Duncan. Buele wondered with sinking heart: Was the dying man in his empathic images Duncan Kr?

Sensitive to all that concerned Duncan, Broni had picked up his thought and began an emotional torrent.
“It can’t be. I won’t have it. Not now that he is so nearby. “
Then,
“Duncan! Duncan! Please answer! “

The Klein-bottle shape of the Terror seemed to be convulsing. It protruded from the anomaly, sending unaimed bolts of violent lightning fifty kilometers into normal space.

Then with breathtaking suddenness, a ball of yellow fire exploded inside the Terror. All the empaths within range were staggered with a burst of fear, surprise and rage from the Terror.