Land of the Dead (47 page)

«
Four seconds to cortical failure
.»

Xochitl fought to form a coherent thought, and found he
could
still command his conscious mind, despite the annoying overlay of the exo. Desperate, feeling his mentation slipping away, he brought to focus a string of numbers—
three
,
five
,
five
,
seven
,
eleven
,
thirteen
,
seventeen
,
nineteen
,
twenty
-
nine
and … the voice of the exo abruptly stopped. There was no audible sound, no flashing overlay informing his vision of the event—but the fail-safe tripped, shutting down his implant.

Wheezing, his chest thudding with pain, the Prince closed his eyes, hoping to avoid further agony. His mind, suddenly, seemed quiet and empty—desolate. His limbs weak, helpless. The Prince began to panic, realizing that his interface to the shipnet would now have to be managed manually—and he didn’t even have a hand-comp stowed in his luggage.

*   *   *

“Get us underway,
nongmin
.” The Hjogadim stepped away from Xochitl’s body, careful to keep his eyes averted from the vast panorama filling the v-display. Then he loped from Command, making a beeline for the lift a corridor away.

Gretchen looked up questioningly from her pirated console, trying to catch Hummingbird’s attention. The
nauallis
had tilted his head, watching with great interest as the Prince struggled to his feet. Xochitl’s skin had turned waxy and he blinked incessantly. Without the exo to refine his vision, he did not see well at all.

“My Lord?” The old Náhuatl offered the Prince his hand.

“We’re not leaving,” Xochitl rasped, his throat raw. He slumped weakly into the command shockchair. He pointed at Gretchen. “You—the one with the ugly hair—what happened to our probe?”

Turning slightly in her chair, Anderssen shrugged. “The relic is guarded by the same kind of protective lattice as the whole star system.” She caught the Prince’s eye and grinned. “But if we stay, I can get you inside.”

“We should leave,” Hummingbird snapped, glaring across at the Swedish woman.

Xochitl looked the
nauallis
up and down, realizing he did not know who the old man was or where he’d come from. “Who the devil are—wait, you’re one of the
tlamatinime
!” His face contorted in a snarl. “
Cuauhhuehueh
Koris—get this old witch off my bridge! Put him in the brig—someplace locked tight! With nothing on him but his skin.”

The remaining Jaguar Knight rose from inspecting the body of his comrade. The master sergeant’s visor was opaque, having shifted into combat mode, but his voice boomed hollowly. “As you bid, Lord Prince.”

Hummingbird clasped his hands behind his head without a fuss and was escorted away. Gretchen watched him go with interest, wondering what the old Crow was up to now.
He’ll be closeted with that alien in sixty seconds,
she wagered with herself.
He doesn’t really want us to leave—just nudge the Flowery One in some direction of his choosing. But,
she thought,
two can play that game.

Seeing the initial results from her analysis of the
Chimalacatl
’s surface—even just on the battle-cruiser’s shipnet, much less after node 3
³
3 had taken the datastream apart and put it back together—had solidified a chaos of options vying for her attention.
I need to set foot on this thing, if that can be managed safely; even a half-hour would make all of this worthwhile.
Another certainty had formed in her heart, crystallizing out of a thousand points of long-held despair, anger, hatred, and delighted curiosity.
Hummingbird needs to be there, too. Oh yes, he does.

“Now you, woman, what is your name?” Xochitl blinked owlishly at her, trying to glare in a properly Imperial manner.

“Doctor Gretchen Anderssen, xenoarchaeologist, University of New Aberdeen, Lord Prince.”

“Are you now?” The Prince sat up straight in his chair, surprised and pleased at the same time. “How did you get out here?”

Gretchen said the first thing that came to mind. “I was supposed to be with the others, but I missed the survey ship, so I came on this one.” She spread her hands, encompassing the whole of the
Naniwa
.

“How fortunate for you.…” Xochitl’s attention, now that he still lived and breathed, was drawn inexorably back to the enormous shape of the Sunflower. He bit nervously at his thumb. “Do you … do you know what this thing is?”

Anderssen felt something like an electrical shock, a tingling jolt from crown to toe. In that instant, something blossomed in her mind and, for an instant, she was back under that overhang on Ephesus III, staring up at a rock-face which had grown so impossibly detailed and distinct in her vision that she could barely process the flood of sensation streaming into her from the totality of the world. But now there was a sensation of discrimination and all of the extraneous data could be discarded, leaving the Flowery Prince isolated in her perception and laid bare before her.

She absorbed all of the Prince’s frailty, fear, doubt, ignorance. She glimpsed a fading half-image of a peculiar, inhuman second self which had shrouded him like a ceremonial mask. A façade which had worn
him
, completing his persona, investing him with a thousand subtle cues to authority and rule. Without that, he was only a shadow, less than half himself.

“No,
Tlatocapilli
.” she said, supremely confident. “But if you give me leave, I will peel back all of its secrets for you—every last one. But … didn’t you tell the ambassador we were leaving? What will you do about him?”

Xochitl swallowed, blinking again, his hand trembling in physical memory of incandescent pain twisting in every nerve. “I’ll have to kill it—kill him—and atomize the body. Or, or cast it into the sun—or…” The Prince seemed paralyzed by the decisions before him. Without his exo providing summaries and risk-vectors, everything seemed suddenly gray and murky.

*   *   *

In Main Command,
Chu-sa
Kosh
ō
watched the Prince and Doctor Anderssen discussing the attributes of the
Chimalacatl
on her surveillance cameras. Though her mien was impassive and controlled, she was deeply troubled by what she’d seen. A command sequence was waiting on her console, constructed in great haste during the scuffle and now refined, to vent the entire compartment to the void, and flood the evacuated rooms with hard radiation.
Would that be enough to kill this “ambassador” with the self-generating combat armor?
She was furious with herself for not attaching more security to the alien.

Susan had never encountered a “Hjogadim” before, and shipnet had nothing for her—no detail, no rumors, and no warnings—despite the fact that the creature spoke passable Náhuatl and was obviously well known to both the Prince and the
nauallis
. The thought of Hummingbird loose upon her ship made Kosh
ō
’s stomach twist. Brow growing thunderous, she tapped up the security cameras for the ship’s brig.

The remaining Jaguar had brought the old Náhuatl to a primary security cell and stripped him naked before locking him inside. Oc Chac, at Susan’s direction, had already scrambled the codes and reviewed the list of those crewmen with access to the compartment.

His kind will not remain contained for long, Sayu.

Alone in the bare room, the old man looked up into the cameras and the faintest hint of a smile crossed his lips as he lowered himself gingerly into a cross-legged position on the floor.

Kosh
ō
sneered back, wishing once more that her
sensei
Hadeishi were on hand to deal with his “old friend” and all these intrigues.
I am not cut out for this,
she thought darkly.
We should flee this place, not stay, poking at a dark hole in the cliff with sticks … no matter what the Emperor demands.

ABOARD THE KHAID CRUISER

Hadeishi wiped a coating of yellowing foam from the captain’s console of the light cruiser. His armor was blackened and scored by flechette impacts and all of his grenades were gone. Cajeme and the other Team One survivors were dragging the last of the Khaid corpses away, for the enemy had tried to make a stand on the Command deck. The console was flickering in and out of focus—part of the glassite surface had shattered—and the Nisei officer shook his head in dismay. Disgusted, he shut down the entire console, then went to the Navigator’s station where he was pleasantly surprised to see the Fleet standard interface was up and awaiting input.

He clicked channel. “Found one working,
Sho-i
.”

Lovelace was still far down the ship, barricaded into the Engineering compartment, with the remains of Team Four as her guardians. Between them, the shipcore was momentarily in Fleet hands, but there were still gangs of Khaiden roaming the side passages, exchanging intermittent gunfire with the Team Three commandos. Locked out of all of the control interfaces, the enemy had little chance of mounting an effective defense, but the Khaid were nothing but persistent. In some places they had cut their own way through the internal doors—but none of them had any heavy equipment, which meant the frame bulkheads and the main hatches were a serious barrier. “Keying in.”

Got your login, kyo,
she responded a moment later.
Handing off shipnet on deck one to your console.

“Received.” Weary, he sat down in the chair, ignoring the foam which spilled onto the floor. His first thought was to check in with De Molay, so he activated the intership channels and pinged around until one of them locked onto the
Wilful
.

The freighter captain’s face appeared on the display a moment later and she brightened to see him. “Well, if it isn’t our Engineer’s Mate, gone missing the last day.”

“Fortune has smiled,” Hadeishi replied, glad himself that she still lived. “Did you take any damage?”

De Molay shook her head. “Your wounded have been coming over in a steady stream—didn’t someone tell you?” She looked off-screen. “There are at least a dozen more laid out in what space we can spare. But we’re entirely out of meds and ancillary supplies.”

Mitsuharu levered up his faceplate, scratching a terrible itch beside his nose. “The sickbay here is all Khaid supplies, but I’ll have
Gunso
Ad-Din peel someone off to search the holds—there may be useful meds somewhere…” A shipbug scuttled across the console, wearing a crown of foam. “Are you low on vermin? We have more than I can stomach over here.”

She shook her head. “I can live without them. How stands your new ship? Does she have a name?”

“The Khaid called her the
Kader
. I haven’t found a hull-plate or record to indicate the Fleet designation.” Mitsuharu rubbed one eye. Adrenaline was draining from his system, leaving only the ache of lactic acid buildup. “The Khaid failed to destroy the communications equipment and their sensor records.
Sho-i
Lovelace reports we have all of the telemetry of the attack on the
Tlemitl
, the Research Station, and the IMN escort fleet—if I understand her correctly. But she is speaking far too quickly today for me to follow. Can you come across and take over cleanup here in Command? I need to go back downdeck and make sure the Khaid holdouts are run to ground.”

De Molay nodded, pursing her lips. “You want me to break down the Khaid battlecast?”

“With Lovelace’s help, yes.” Hadeishi suddenly looked thoughtful. “Also, you will want to bring a cushion.”

“A cushion?”

He shrugged. “Khaid chairs do not fit us so well. There’s no sign any of the Fleet interior fittings survived, which is a great pity.”

De Molay laughed in delight. “You
are
having trouble sitting down these days. I will see you in an hour or two.”

*   *   *

Three hours later, after one of the burlier Team Four
kashikan-hei
had carried her up from the cargo bay where the
Wilful
was now docked, De Molay stared around at the wreckage of
Kader
’s Command deck and wrinkled up her nose. The thick musk of Khaid blood was mixed with the astringence of fire suppression foam to make a particularly foul smell. Beyond that, the chair at the weapons officer’s console she’d been offered by a slightly built, worried-looking
Sho-i
gave her serious pause. “A beetle shell?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lovelace offered an apologetic smile. “Haven’t found anything better.”

De Molay shrugged and fitted an instafoam pillow into the peculiar dished chair back, then sat down gingerly. “We’re underway again? I felt the drives light up while that big fellow hauled me up ten decks on his back.…”