Land of the Dead (28 page)

*   *   *

Six decks away, Kosh
ō
watched calmly as the
Naniwa
’s abrupt course change sent the battle-cruiser careening into a pack of six oncoming Khaiden destroyers. The battle-cruiser’s deflectors rippled with millions of tiny impacts as irradiated dust and battle debris hammered at the electromagnetic veil. Missiles punched straight through, while particle beam traces speared past as the Khaid gunners lost lock on the elusive Imperial ship. In turn, she was designating priority in her ’well, the stylus stabbing like a dagger into the heart of the enemy.

“Weapons, target number four, give me a tight grouping!”

The
Naniwa
shuddered as the starboard missile launchers went to rapid-fire, spitting a cloud of smaller interceptors around a single big
Tessen
shipkiller. The destroyers had broken ranks, each burning maneuver mass to break away from the oncoming Imperial. The
Naniwa
’s beam nacelles strobed, capacitors discharging with a high shrieking whine that carried through the shipframe like the lament of the damned. Secondary launchers spat out a handful of spoofer pods. Target five flared with a brilliant violet-hued detonation and the ensigns on the lower tier of Command shouted, “
Seikou!
”

Susan nodded to Konev, whose beam gunners had gotten in a choice hit.

To starboard, target four had gone into a corkscrew pattern, trying to shake the outbound munitions package—but the interceptors fragmented on final approach, separating into dozens of smaller missiles, each radiating as hot as the parent chassis. Point defense lasers and ballistic munitions tore through them, causing a sparking cascade of smaller explosions. Serenely, the
Tessen
sailed through the weak ECM spewing from the destroyer’s emitters and slammed into the smaller ship’s hull at a hundred g. At the instant before impact, the multiphase warhead ignited, spearing a needle-sized plasma jet into the Khaiden shipskin.

A seven-meter-wide hole blew through the side of the destroyer before the
Tessen
blew up inside the hull proper. The destroyer convulsed, filling with superheated plasma, and then shattered into a cloud of molten debris.

The other Khaid lightweights scattered, dumping a cloud of missiles and bomb-pods behind them.

Kosh
ō
nodded thoughtfully, then tapped an execute glyph Pucatli had prepped for her.

Each of the fleeing destroyers had acquired a spoofer pod running passive when the
Naniwa
had interpenetrated the formation. Now they each lit off with the battle-cruiser’s signature and sped off, keeping pace with the Khaid ships, each now followed by a swiftly closing pack of missiles.

“Pilot, vector to join the Flag,” Kosh
ō
snapped, letting her attention return to the larger battle. “Get us into their envelope and synched up on point-defense.”

She did not have time to give Tloc, his holds full of
chocolatl
, or the lamentable
Chu-sho
Xocoyotl even the brief parting Muldoon had received.

*   *   *

«
Enemy battlecast pattern is adapting,
» exo announced.

Prince Xochitl had sunk back in his chair, expression thunderous as he realized how heavily the odds had turned against him. The
Tlemitl
outweighed any single enemy ship by three or six to one, but now his battle-group was stripped down to only three supporting cruisers. Even the two Scout frigates had disappeared.

As he watched, the Khaid battleships coalesced—showing admirable skill, one part of his mind commented—into a tight pack. Now they veered towards the
Tlemitl
, their point-defense overlapping, with a stormfront of shipkillers, penetrators, and bomb-pods hurtling towards the Imperial ships. Behind their munitions screen, the heavy beam weapons on the Khaiden battlewagons were sparking, searching for a weakness in the battle-shields surrounding the
Firearrow
.

The shield-generator status display was a patchwork of green, amber, and red. Some of the nodes had already failed, having shorted on backfeed from the shields themselves, or failing under the massive stress. Xochitl’s teeth bared, gleaming white and sharp, and he cursed the
pochtecas
who had sold his father such junk.

«Projected failure rate of the shield nodes, from field trials, is almost thirty percent. Current failure rate is thirty-four percent.»

“Unacceptable.” Xochitl straightened in his chair, attention drawn to the emergence of a second pack of Khaiden heavies which had been screened from the
Tlemitl
’s sensors by the oncoming wave of attackers. This formation was accelerating off at an angle and redeploying on the move, smoothly shifting from their initial wedge into an unfolding “flower-box.”

«Secondary elements are targeting the Gladius,»
exo reported, and the threatwell shifted, focusing in on the heavy cruiser, which was trying to match course with the
Tlemitl
and
Asama
. «
Missile storm intercept in sixteen seconds.
»

The particle beam nacelles covering that quadrant of the envelope began igniting. Yoemon’s gunnery team had reached the same conclusion. Khaid shipkillers began to wink out, obliterated by anion impacts. The
Gladius’
point-defense guns were spinning hot, filling the intervening space with ballistic rounds, and her short-range launchers were discharging as fast as the robotic loaders could clear the launch rails. Better than half of the incoming missiles were obliterated, but the remainder detonated in a staggered wave of plasma flares, washing from one end of the ship to the other.

Xochitl jerked back, his face dark, ruddy bronze as the heavy cruiser’s glyph vanished from the threatwell plot.

«
Three friendly effectives remain,
» exo stated, highlighting the glyphs of the dreadnaught and two remaining battle-cruisers. «
Hostile numbers are now sixteen combatants, twelve noncombatants. Point-defense network is suboptimal, ECM cloud is suboptimal, launcher recycle time is suboptimal, munitions expenditure—all weapon systems—is excessive, and maneuver drive efficiency is—
»

“Enough!” Xochitl felt hot inside his armor and now he heard the whine of the air circulation system trying to shed waste heat like the buzz of a thousand mosquitoes. “Enough.”

His head was throbbing violently and he groped for the medband override.

*   *   *

The
Naniwa
’s hull shook with repeated explosions as a wave of sprint missiles and penetrators crashed through her point-defense. In Command, Oc Chac was speaking rapidly into his throatmike, his status displays a sea of red and amber indicators. Kosh
ō
snarled, seeing three Khaid light cruisers and a pair of destroyers interpose themselves between her and the
Tlemitl
. The enemy ships were formed up tight, and their point-defense interlock had stopped the last salvo of shipkillers Konev and his gunners had spun into them.

“Pilot, time to ’cast interlock with the Flag?”

“Too long,
kyo
.” Holloway looked up, wild-eyed, and shook his head. “We’d have to bull right through them to reach interlock range.”

“Understood,
Thai-i
.” Susan’s attention snapped back to the threatwell, where a second pack of Khaid lightweights was barreling in on her flank, trying to get into the shadow of her drive plume.
We need to shed some of these dogs,
she thought, juggling distance, velocity, and time in a heartbeat. Her stylus slashed through the executive ’well at her console.

“Pilot, new heading. Don’t spare the horses.”

Naniwa
responded, still agile despite the burning craters littering her hull and the cloud of vented atmosphere, splintered radiating fins, and other flotsam she was shedding. The battle cruiser shifted course, angling away from the
Tlemitl
and
Asama
, which were at the center of their own hot, constantly strobing cloud of detonations, and headed dead-on to the Barrier coordinates loaded into Susan’s threatwell.

“Course correction burn complete,
kyo
,” Holloway reported. “Nine hostiles now in pursuit.”

“Incoming spread—one-hundred-six contacts,” Konev barked. “Point-defense engaging.”

Susan hissed, feeling her ship’s pain deep down in her gut. “
Sho-sa
, prepare to roll mines.”

Oc Chac nodded, attention wrenched away from damage control. He stared at her blankly for a heartbeat, then caught himself and nodded abruptly. “
Hai, Chu-sa!
Preparing to roll mines.”

*   *   *

Gretchen picked herself up warily and groped from bunk to desk. Gravity wobbled again, the ship groaning around them, but this time she was ready and held on. Hummingbird had wedged himself into a corner of the room, a comp still in his hand—face tight with some tremendous effort of concentration—and she saw his fingers were a blur on the interfaces. All of his equipment, even scattered under the bunks, was still in operation. Gritting her teeth against a series of bad bruises, Anderssen found her own field comp and flipped it open. Her models were still running, and now they had resolved themselves down to only two alternatives.

“Where are we, Crow?” she gasped, fumbling at the control pad. “We’ve got to get all of this gear secured before we lose g-deck integrity entirely.”

All of her equipment shoveled into the backpack without a problem. A roll of stickytape secured the pack to the bunk, which was in turn welded to the wall of the cabin. Her hand-comp stayed with her, though its interface was tiny in comparison to the bigger units. Hummingbird’s setup was harder to deal with, particularly when her shoulders were itching at the prospect of the next abrupt maneuver. But in a few moments, all of it was stowed save the t-relay, which was a Yule tree of status lights. Grasping the main unit, she cast around for something to secure the device to.

“Leave be!” Hummingbird spared a dark, furious glance for her. “I’ve almost broken into the Khaid battlecast and we’ll need that to survive the next hour. Pin it to the floor, if you must, but don’t move it or disassemble the mechanism.”

You’ll sing a different tune, carrion bird, if this thing cracks you in the head.…

She strapped it down as best she could, feeling the metal radiating hot enough to scorch her fingertips. Then Anderssen crawled back to the other corner, wedged herself into place, and thumbed up the display on her hand-comp.
Plot position,
she ordered the little machine. On the sidebar, Gretchen was heartened to see that node 3
³
3 was still in synch and processing data at a blistering rate.
Excellent, but—

Her latest modeling pass had discarded the data preprocessed by the Mirror scientists and culled from the
Korkunov
’s initial telemetry. Something nagged at her, saying it was too old to be accurate. Instead, drawing on the sheer processing power and storage offered by node 3
³
3, she’d asked the comps to sweep through the most basic data flowing back from the Imperial science probes and break it down, looking for gravitational anomalies at a sub-Planck scale. The descriptions of the damage inflicted on the
Calexico
hinted at a mechanism capable of dissecting battle-steel, which implied the weapon was able to break down the interlocking matrix of the armor without diffusing its impact energy across the enormous, mutually supporting weave of the material.

Her comps now revealed a new “map” of the surrounding space, one far different in detail than the Imperial data they’d received—or stolen. Anderssen cursed, her body jolted with fear. Tearing free of the restraints, she was at Hummingbird’s side in the blink of an eye. She seized hold of the old man’s ear, drawing a bright crimson pinpoint of blood with the corner of one nail.

“Crow! Come back to me. Captain Kosh
ō
is trying to use the Barrier as a weapon, and the Imperial data we have is
no good
for this sector. Break me into the command circuit, right now!”

*   *   *

“Rack eight away,” Oc Chac announced, as a fresh cluster of plasma mine icons popped up on the threatwell. “We’re done,
kyo
.” The Mayan looked back at Susan, his chiseled face questioning.

“Not enough,” the Nisei woman said, watching the last of her area denial munitions spin away behind the
Naniwa
. The battle-cruiser was pushing hard at maximum-v for the level of particulates in this area of space, and there were still nine Khaiden cruisers and destroyers racing after her. “Weapons, start dumping delayed-fuse bomb-pods into our wake. I want them on a timer and dark until they tick over on intercept.”