Land of the Dead (31 page)

“What happened,
Chu-sa
?” The comm officer ventured. “The Khaid battleships—”

“Are gone,” Susan said steadily. “Holloway-
tzin
, tracking update please.”

“Ten containment failures,
kyo
,” the navigator reported, shaken. “Three more badly damaged and losing way. The Khaid battle-group is trying to reverse course. The
Tlemitl
 … she’s … she’s a dead ship,
Chu-sa
. Battlecast status is flickering in and out, but the last report says she’s lost nearly a quarter of her compartments. Reactors are intact, but her drives are dead. She’s coasting…”

Belching atmosphere and debris, the giant ship spun inexorably into another thread. Aboard the
Naniwa
, the Command crew watched in horror as another infinitely thin razor dissected the super-dreadnaught, shearing through decks, bulkheads, hapless crewmen.… Now they were close enough for the cameras to interpolate, picking out the disintegrating flagship through iridescent streamers of dust.

“Gods,” Konev blurted, his face shining with sweat. “They’re sure to lose containment now!”

We’re alone
, Kosh
ō
thought, forcing herself to look away. A tight knot was forming in her stomach.
The Khaid are as badly shaken as we are—but they still outnumber me by five to one, at least.

THE
TLEMITL

Emergency lighting sputtered, flickering on and off in a red-lit haze, along the corridor. Helsdon rotated slowly in midair, disoriented. Then his eyes caught on a doorway swinging past and his mind snapped back into focus. “We’ve lost the g-decking,” he wheezed, suddenly aware that his chest and side were throbbing with pain. “Damage control team, report.”

A chorus of groans and cursing answered him. The engineer tucked in, giving himself a little momentum, and his boots adhered to the nearest surface. Stable, he found himself standing on the wall of the passageway. Debris was loose everywhere, filling the air with clouds of paper, broken bits of furniture, loose shoes—anything which hadn’t been secured when the
Tlemitl
had suffered an enormous blow.

Swallowing against a very dry throat, Helsdon retrieved his hand-comp—which was attached by a retractable cord to his tool-belt—and thumbed the device awake. Status lights flickered and then a display came up. “Power is down across the whole grid,” he said aloud. The others were gathering, hauling themselves along the walls and floor. “No gravity, no environmental control.” He blinked rapidly.

“What the hell happened?” One of the midshipmen was staring around wildly.

“We hit the—we hit the phenomena,” Helsdon croaked, feeling a horrible constriction in his chest. “Part of the ship—most of the ship?—has been cut away from—from us.”

A cook caught his shoulder, holding the engineer steady. “We’ve gotta get off, chief.”

“There’s nowhere to go,” Helsdon whispered, watching his hand-comp scan uselessly for a live shipnet node. “The reactors are in shutdown, but who knows how long that will last?”

“Help the chief, he’s hurt.” The cook gestured for the midshipmen to lay hands on the engineer. “Anyone see an evac capsule sign? That way? Chop-chop, everyone, let’s go.”

*   *   *

A grav-sled had been thrown the length of the entryway to the flag admiral’s quarters, smashing into the stone pillars framing the monumental door. Broken chunks of stone floated in a slow eddy, making Xochitl’s progress difficult. Both sets of mural walls had shattered, adding a glittering drift of glassite which flared and shimmered in the suit lights as he moved. One of his Jaguars led the way, combat suit jets puffing whitely, and another followed. Here in officer’s country, the internal damage seemed worse—there had been more ornamentation to rip free from the walls and smash into things—than down on the deck holding secondary command.

His men hadn’t asked what had happened, but the Prince had an excellent idea.

«
The Mirror plotting data was flawed,
» his exo supplied, completing his thought.

“I know,” he whispered, forgetting to concentrate on the thought-interface between them. “I know.”

The Jaguar sergeant in the lead pushed aside the fallen statuary—his powered combat armor made the task possible—and forced open the door beyond. Xochitl swung through the opening, thankful for the moment that they were in z-g. With proper EVA gear, they had made very swift progress through the wreckage. The sitting room beyond was utterly destroyed—tables, screens, personal artifacts all jumbled together in a drifting cloud of flotsam—but in one corner, curled up into a turtle-like shell, was a larger-than-human figure in a dark metallic z-suit. In their suit-lights, the metal surface gleamed with thousands of tiny, incised glyphs and markings. Their meanings were unknown to the Prince.

«
Recording,
» the exocortex reported, tucking away thirty seconds of high definition video for later analysis. «
Seven hundred and twenty-nine distinct ideograms identified. Spawning subtasks to collate comparisons against known Hjogadim character sets.
»

Xochitl drifted close to the figure—careful not to touch the alien z-suit—and oriented himself face-to-face. The suit mask was almost opaque, but he could make out the gleam of helmet lights flickering in a pair of deep-set eyes.

“Come, Esteemed One,” Xochitl commanded, barely polite. “We must get you to safety.”

He was answered by a long, violent harangue in a lilting, sing-song tongue, and entirely inhuman growling. The noise was abrasively loud on point-to-point comm. The Prince grimaced, his ears ringing, and then he gestured at the two Jaguar Knights.

“No one can stay here, Esteemed One. We’re taking you to a place of safety.”

The Knights seized the creature’s shoulders and kicked off, carrying the Hjo towards the door. There was another outburst of growling and snarling, interspersed with a long tirade in the unknown tongue. But the Hjo remained tightly curled up, trying to hide its long tapering head, and this made it possible for the two
Ocelotl
to hustle the alien along.

Back outside, once they’d left the security corridor and its intrinsic shielding, Xochitl’s exo conjured up a deck plan in his field of view. “Ah, good,” the Prince said aloud on the local comm circuit. “There’s an escape pod rail not far from here.”

The Jaguars looked at him, puzzled. Their sergeant gestured at the comp built into his suit. “Nothing on shipnet, my lord. Everything’s down.…”

“No matter,
Cuauhhuehueh
, I’ve a backup copy. This way.”

They turned left, jetting down a main corridor—large enough to drive two grav-sleds side-by-side—filled with drifting debris. Constellations of smoke globules parted before them, bumping into their facemasks as they sped along. Though they passed scattered corpses and even some wounded, Xochitl did not stop. Hidden by his facemask, the Prince’s expression was set and hard.

THE
NANIWA

Susan watched her bank of displays with a fixed, stony glare. The threatwell showed their situation only too well. On the hull of the once-great
Firearrow
, the last of the battle-shield projectors flickered and died. The Khaid ships which had survived the reckless pursuit were underway at last, pulling back from the unexpected weapon which had consumed their fellows. From what she saw on her ’well they would be successful in escaping the trap if they just reversed along their own drive trails.

They’re going to figure this out pretty fast,
she mused, her thoughts filled with foreboding.
They’ve got too much data on hand, and now they have the time to let it all sink in.…

But for the moment, her way forward was clear. Behind, however, the flotilla of destroyers that had been nipping at the
Naniwa
’s heels was still there, slowly closing range, their beam weapons snapping past or flaring out as the aft point-defense knocked them down. None of these hounds had the missile throw-weight to punch past her counter-missiles and Konev had gathered up fifteen or sixteen remote weapons platforms initially deployed by the
Tokiwa
and
Asama
in the early stages of the battle.

The platforms were low on munitions, but still had some capacity left. They were keeping pace, extending both her missile intercept envelope and the battle-cruiser’s sensor range, and in this kind of knife-fight Kosh
ō
would take anything she could get. Susan sat stiffly, back ramrod straight, and her eyes flickered across the arrayed data one more time. “We need to determine if there are any survivors,” she said softly, drawing Oc Chac’s attention. “We can take on several thousand, if we triple-bunk.”

The Mayan shook his head in dismay. “
Chu-sa!
We’ll overtax environmentals in a few days with that sort of passenger load! Only we remain,” he ventured. “We dare not help them—”

There is no time for reckless gestures,
Susan realized, brow furrowing sharply.
We have to get out.

“Status of our hypercoil? How long to make gradient?”

The Mayan
Zosen
stared at her blankly, one dark-complected finger pressed to his earbug. “
Kyo?
”

“How long,” she said steadily, staring at him with a cold, considering expression, “to make transit to hyperspace?”

Oc Chac swallowed, dark eyes darting to his status panel. “Coil is down,
Kyo
. We’ve taken fragmentation damage along cells nineteen to thirty-six.” He looked up, expression impassive. “I need two hours to make her right,
Chu-sa
.”

Susan nodded, looking back to the threatwell. “We have no more than thirty minutes before they come at us again,
Sho-sa
. Take direct command of the repair crews.”

“
Hai, kyo!
” The engineer bolted from Command, speaking rapidly into his throatmike as he ran.

Plasma detonations blossomed in the threatwell, bracketing the
Naniwa
as she maneuvered.

“They’re getting our range,
kyo
,” Konev reported, voice hoarse. “We’ve lost two of the remotes.”

Susan’s gaze swept across her console. Though mauled, the battle-cruiser was still game for a fight, but against so many Khaid? Her eyes flicked up, fixing on the long-range sensors. The Pinhole was still abroil with radiation and shattered ships. Their emissions blocked any sign of what lay beyond in the ever thicker dust-clouds. She grimaced, tapping her earbug.

“Medical? Get our Swedish passenger up here—awake—
right now!
—with all of her possessions.”

*   *   *

Xochitl, the suited creature, and his
Ocelomeh
arrived at the evac-capsule cluster to find only one pod remaining. The other access-doors showed only empty cradles beyond thick glassite windows. The door to the last capsule was apparently stuck, as a motley collection of officers and ratings was banging away at the hatch with pry bars and other tools cribbed from the nearest damage control closet.

“Is it working?” the Jaguar Knight
Cuauhhuehueh
demanded, his voice booming on the local circuit.

A pale, sandy-haired man with Engineer’s insignia turned to face the Prince’s party. His light brown eyes registered the unit insignia of the Jaguars and his face grew still. “Yes. The capsule’s intact. The launch rails are clear and the release subsystems are showing green across the board. We just have to get the hatch open.”

Xochitl could see the pod was last in queue on the shared maglev launch tube.
A rough ride out of Firearrow
’s
guts. And then where?

«
Staying mobile and capable of reacting to circumstance improves our chances of survival by several orders of magnitude,
» the exo stated, displaying a variety of helpful graphs and comparison metrics on the Prince’s field of view.

Without orders, the Jaguars bulled forward and gestured the sailors away from the hatchway. Two of them—a cook and a midshipman from laundry—started to protest, but the engineer waved his companions back. He was watching Xochitl with a wary expression, his mouth a tight line.

The Prince met his gaze with a level stare. “How many of us will fit?”

The man’s eyes lost focus for an instant, and then he looked down at his hand-comp. “This one holds ten, Great Lord.”

Xochitl’s eyelid twitched. Including his Jaguars, there were twelve people floating in the compartment, most staring at him with suddenly wide eyes. His expression hardened as he considered the larger-than-human-size of his guest with a sidelong glance.

“Three of you must remain behind,” Xochitl declared, his exo whispering details of skills, time in service, and political reliability in one ear. A pistol-model shipgun was already in his hand and leveled on the two cafeteria attendants. They froze. The Prince’s face remained utterly cold as the pistol snapped twice, punching a flechette through each of their suit masks.