Glory's People (7 page)

“No, Daimyo. I do not,” Duncan said. “Amaya is my Sailing Master, my second-in-command.”

“As you wish. First allow me to instruct the Mayor of Yedo.” The Shogun spoke rapidly to Kantaro in an ancient Japanese dialect. The younger man, on his knees, bowed low with his knuckles touching the tatami. Then he moved to the entry, slid the door panel aside, and departed.

Duncan felt a flash of anxiety. “Daimyo,” he said. “The happening before the ryokan in Yedo was probably unavoidable. I would regret if our presence in your Domain of Honshu became the cause of any administrative trouble.”
I wish I could say
, Duncan thought,
that the worst thing that could happen would be to have Yamatan society turned upside down to uncover some plot or other against the
gaijin--the foreigners. That was not the way to win allies in a very losable war.

The Shogun’s old eyes turned frigid. “Let me be the judge of that, Kr-san. Let Japanese problems be solved with Japanese methods.” The statement was remarkable for the use of the word Japanese. The ethnic name for the people of Planet Yamato was almost never used. When it was, the intention was extreme emphasis and separation from the rest of human society. It was a clear warning that said:
Keep out. This concerns only us, not the
gaijin.

The old man smiled grimly. “Don’t expect ritual disembowelments, honored syndic. Such things are seldom done here among our people, and never by the enlightened.”

“I am relieved to hear it, Shogun.”

“I have instructed my nephew to, among other things, make contact with your vessel and inform your people that you are safe and well.” The old man looked at Anya and essayed a barely perceptible smile. “Does that meet with your approval, Sailing Master?”

“We are in your house, Shogun,” Anya said, guided by her Hispanic ancestors. “We rely on your wisdom.”

The Shogun’s smile broadened. “Very good, Sailing Master. Well said. Spoken like a Japanese.”

Duncan was thinking that this encounter was becoming more and more like a wandering ronin's reception in some castle in the feudal Home Islands of two millennia ago.

“Kantaro has spoken to me about your battle at the Twin Planets,” the Shogun said. “Tell me now. All that you can remember.”

“It was scarcely a battle, Shogun,” Duncan said. “It was at the most a skirmish.”

“One that, without the cats, you would have lost?”

“I believe so.”

“Say on, Kr-san. Old men love war stories.”

Duncan felt a surge of impatience. The daimyo’s elliptical manner grew exasperating. Anya gave Duncan a covert look of caution. It was fitting that she, who came from the most rigid social order represented aboard
Glory
, should best understand the old Shogun.

But Duncan could not help replying, “Isn’t it more fitting to speak of that which is to come rather than that which has been, Shogun?”

“We have fought battles as well, Starman. And lost them, too. The people who sent the ninja are frightened. They think we can hide. I do not. But first let us be certain we fight the same enemy.”

Higashi Ichiro, Commander of the test ship MD-23, was tremendously pleased with the performance of his craft and three-man crew. The handling of the mass-depletion engine had been all that the engineers and research physicists back on Yamato could have wished, and Masao Kendo, the Specialist in Astrogation, now confirmed that the MD-23 had jumped a full 278,000,000 kilometers in an interval too small for the craft’s chronometer to record. There had been no perceptible acceleration and no apparent passage of time. The event was mind-boggling. Ichiro had been warned that actually doing the impossible was unsettling, to say the least. But the reality left him and his crewmates speechless.

Ichiro felt disoriented. He had read of the time dilation experienced by Goldenwing Starmen as their ships approached light-speed. This was time dilation multiplied by infinity. In the Near Away time did not exist. No Yamatan physicist understood it, but such was the medium through which mass-depletion devices moved.

Now, however, MD-23’s mass-depletion engine was drained of power. The return journey to Yamato would be powered by reaction engines and would take months.

And, unnerved or not, Ichiro couldn’t prevent the burst of joy in his chest when Masao-san confirmed that MD-23 had actually completed its first flight into and through the Near Away.

With this test flight, the fleet of Yamatan ships capable of attaining more than lightspeed numbered eleven. Of the eighteen constructed on Moon Hideyoshi, seven had failed to return from test journeys. That was frightening, but a samurai understood that a nation was advanced by the self-sacrifice of its people.

MD-23 had been fuelled correctly with sufficient capacity to emerge from the Near Away on the far side of Amaterasu, in the satellite system of the gas giant Toshie--which now filled a substantial part of the sky visible in MD-23’s navigational screen. What the engineers called the Law of Inertial Mass Depletion had functioned exactly as the techs had predicted it would. The ship had emerged into normal space near to, but not dangerously within, the vast gravity well of Planet Toshie, and still within a tedious but manageable distance from Yamato in normal space. Ichiro had never before been so far from home, and the sight of the huge yellow planet ringed with cloud belts was overpowering.

Ichiro was no physicist. He understood the principles of inertial-depletion flight imperfectly. This ignorance he shared with his fellow astronauts.

He had been taught that the engine was powered in the environment of the Near Away by the tachyons storming out of the white hole at the galaxy’s center. Goldenwings, Ichiro knew, were powered by the same tachyons, but their capture of tachyons with skylar sails was primitive compared with the processes within the tokamak at the heart of the MD propulsion unit.

Goldenwings used tachyon pressure on square kilometers of golden skylar sails to drive their great tonnage in the same way the winds had driven the clipper ships across Earth’s vast oceans. Since tachyons exceeded lightspeed only by a small fraction, the sailing ships could never actually surpass lightspeed. The Near Away remained forever out of reach. Like all sublight matter and particles, the Goldenwings were subject to all Einsteinian time-dilation effects.

The mass-depletion engines operated with a complexity orders of magnitude greater than the Goldenwing sailplans. Tachyons were captured by the engine and stripped of inertia. The resultant power was channelled to the plasma rings that were the most obvious physical feature of MD ships. In flight the vessels were ringed with plasma that glowed like St. Elmo’s fire. The MD rings converted the tachyons’ inertia into delta-V, driving the ship into and through the analog of normal space the Yamatan builders called the Near Away.

In that “place,” analogs of distance and direction existed, but an analog of time did not. Entry and exit from the Near Away were simultaneous; direction and distance were controlled (or so the crews hoped and believed) by the amount of inertial mass depleted by each jump. The results were stunning. A voyage that would take a nuclear rocket-powered spacecraft years to complete would take a Goldenwing months of shiptime (and decades of “nondilated” downtime). But an MD-powered spacecraft, destroying its own inertia as it went, took no time.

To the visionaries on Yamato, the new technology offered instantaneous travel throughout the galaxy--and even extragalactic voyages seemed within reach. The dreams were unlimited.

The first problem to arise for the MD engineers was the endurance of the engines. A voyage of three hundred light-days totally depleted the largest tokamak’s inertial mass-destroying capability, leaving the spacecraft stranded months, or even years, from planetfall in ordinary space.

From Tau Ceti, to the nearest star, Epsilon Eridani, was a mere 5.4 light-years--a voyage of months in a Goldenwing, but quite unreachable through the Near Away because an MD ship would burst helplessly out of the Near Away a light-year and a third from its launch point, tokamak drained of power, marooned between the stars. The Near Away eliminated time, but in normal space distance remained, real and demanding.

There were “to-come” MD ships in the design computers, ships capable of carrying two or even more of the massive MD engines to be used serially. But an MD tokamak functioning in the vicinity of another destroyed the passive engine’s ability to generate the necessary plasmas. Unless shielded with impossibly dense barriers, an MD engine, when carried within the inertialess field created by another MD engine, swiftly became useless.

The problems would be solved, all Yamato’s space engineers agreed with that. What no one could be sure about was when.

For the moment, in order not to exceed the Point of No Return, Yamato’s Near Away craft were limited to a journey through the Near Away of less than 300,000,000 kilometers. Enough to reach the orbit of ringed Toshie, Amaterasu’s inner gas giant, but no more. Higashi Ichiro and his experimental ship floated in normal space at the end of Planet Yamato’s reach.

Whatever the unsolved technical problems, Ichiro thought, Yamatan physicists’ and engineers’ genius had brought them across the system faster than light could make the journey.

Shorter flights were routinely made now, but this great leap forward was a triumph.

Ichiro-san spoke into his com-set to Alto Yamashiro, the ship’s Communicator. “Dispatch the yes signal to home base, Alto-san. The numbers confirm that the MD-23 is fully operational.”

It would take the message a hundred and eighty minutes to cross the Amaterasu system. Radio emissions operated under Einsteinian laws. Ichiro had no doubt that soon messages would travel through the Near Away instantaneously.

Ichiro forced himself to suppress his excitement and turn to his other duties. All computer readings had to be stored on bubbles and then transmitted to Moon Hideyoshi. It was an ironclad rule that since the last disappearance of an experimental Near Away craft, flight records had to be transmitted to base after each stage of a transit. Should an accident occur, only the machine and the men--replaceable items--and not totally unique flight data would be lost. Records fuelled the MD project.

Some of the experimental pilots complained that the engineers valued their precious data more than they did the MD crews. But in this Ichiro Higashi came down on the side of the engineers. The ships were the future. Not only of Yamato, but of spacefaring humankind. Test information was priceless because the inertial-mass-depletion engine would make Yamato the foremost planet in the galaxy, and soon MD-powered Near Away vessels would leave the Amaterasu System for truly deep space, that great dark ocean heretofore the exclusive venue of the majestic Goldenwings. Ichiro intended to be aboard one of those pioneering MD ships.

“Alto-san, send the flight-recorder records first,” he ordered.

“Shouldn’t we send the engine scans before anything else, Ichiro?”

Ichiro tried briefly--and ineffectively--to suppress his quick surge of fury. Ever since he, Ichiro, had taken Miyako-san, Alto’s cousin, to be his concubine, his subordinate had begun to put himself forward. This was common among Yamatans, and it was universally castigated. But the rigidity of society on Planet Yamato assured that any ambitious man would take whatever advantage he could derive from his circumstances. Alto Yamashiro was more than ordinarily ambitious and, because of his pretty cousin’s new status, he chose this moment to challenge his senior officer’s authority.

Alto-san was no fool. The challenge was mild and carefully contrived. Whether or not the engine scans preceded the astrogational numbers in the radio message to Moon Hideyoshi was unimportant. The careful rebellion was calculated to cause the commander of MD-23 to consider the opinions of someone who was, almost, an in-law.

But the Commo Officer miscalculated. Commander Higashi was, at the moment, on an emotional high. For a year and a half, since a minor contretemps with a superior on Hideyoshi, the young man had been deeply worried about his advancement in the Exploration Corps. Alto’s argumentativeness--at the moment he was engaged in a prolix explication of why it would be more suitable that the astro numbers be sent before the rest of the message--seemed an outright provocation.

In point of fact, the dispute was meaningless. Aboard a happier ship than MD-23, it would not be taking place.

But Ichiro, suddenly red-faced and explosive, began shouting at his junior officer. Alto-san, taken aback by the flash of fury, chose to shout back. The two officers found themselves face to face in a particularly acrimonious, escalating quarrel.

Masao Kendo, the Astrogation Specialist, attempted to intervene. “Commander--Alto-san--This is not seemly, sirs. I beg you to control your tempers. We are too close to Toshie to allow our attention to wander into trivialities.”

Kendo’s use of the word trivialities exacerbated the Commander’s already aroused bad temper. Ichiro’s rages were famous on Moon Hideyoshi, and on this auspicious occasion he allowed his stormy nature to rage free.

But the storm was brief. Brief and horrible. Before the horrified eyes of his subordinates, Higashi Ichiro seemed suddenly to be caught up in an invisible tornado of force. An ordinary bad-tempered, arm-waving tirade typical of his age and class changed violently into a spastic, wrenching dance. His right arm was flung about with such ferocity that the crew of MD-23 heard the ulna crack like a dry twig. Angry words were supplanted by a scream of anguish as his inner organs were squeezed and torn with ripping force. Blood spewed from his open mouth and his blinded eyes extruded from their sockets as the internal pressure in his skull was doubled, then doubled again. In the microgravity, his grotesque dance was executed with such ferocity that he left a thick, bloody smear on the overhead before being flung into space through an inexplicably twisted bulkhead.

The crewmen of MD-23 had only moments to take in the horror of Ichiro Higashi’s destruction before the tensions twisting the small spacecraft ripped it apart, spilling the crew, unarmored, into space.