Land of the Dead (15 page)

The freighter’s master, a short balding little man named Locke, was standing over the pilot’s shoulder, peering at the main navigational display. The camera displays were filled with a riot of iridescent color. Thick clouds of dust congealed out of the void on every side, lit with the radiance of distant, unseen stars. In comparison to the usual emptiness of interstellar space, the view seemed dangerously crowded. Hummingbird was also squeezed in, on the other side of the pilot, and his face seemed tight.

“One drive trace,” muttered Locke, chewing on the edge of his thumb. “Too big for our contact.”

“Maybe two,” ventured the pilot. His stylus clicked on the display surface. The navigation holo shifted slightly and Gretchen, now quite alert, could see two vectors illuminated by the computer. “But this big signature is washing out the other.”

“Our ship?” Green Hummingbird was watching Locke closely.

The freighter captain rubbed his forehead, and then swung into the navigator’s seat. “The commercial shipping registry has some drive signatures on file,” he said, uneasy. “Let’s see what it kicks up.”

Hummingbird waited patiently, while Gretchen—who felt an urge to start tapping her fingers—took the opportunity to examine the little room and the adjacent compartments. In comparison to the mess area, things were cleaner, and some components might have been recently replaced—but even so, there was a sense of age and hard use permeating everything she could see.

No,
she suddenly thought,
that’s not right—

Locke cursed, drawing her attention back to the three men. Two ship’s schematics had come up on his display—one obviously of considerable size, the other showing an outline almost exactly like their own paltry freighter. The captain sat back, covering his mouth with one hand. He pointed at the larger schematic with his chin.

“This is the flux signature of a Khaid
Neshter
-class destroyer. And the smaller one must be your ride.”

The pilot hissed in dismay, looking back to the drive trails on the navigation holo.

“The smaller ship’s signature is showing a couple hours newer than the entry-point for that destroyer … but their chrono tracks synch up on exit.”

“I warrant the freighter went in chains!” Locke stood up, giving Hummingbird a hard look. “There’s no ride onward for you, Méxica. We’re turning around and getting the hell out of here.”

“Our agreement, Captain Locke, says you deliver me and my assistant to our destination.” Hummingbird’s tone was even, showing neither anger nor concern. “I will provide you with new transit coordinates and we will press on.”

Locke bristled and Gretchen could feel his agitation like a sharp, prickly heat on her face. Before the captain could continue, however, Hummingbird raised a hand and looked over to Anderssen.

“Could you step outside, and see we’re not disturbed?”

Meeting his gaze directly, Gretchen felt the adrenaline-heat suddenly flow away, replaced by cool calculation.
He expected this,
she realized. The old
nauallis
didn’t seem fazed by the turn of events, though there was a substrate of annoyance in his voice.

“Sure, boss,” she said, ducking out through the hatch. The heavy steel drew closed behind her, though she didn’t let the panel lock into the socket. Three crewmen were now standing around the dispenser, their attention drawn by her sudden appearance and the clank of the hatch.

“I think,” she said brightly, “that you’re all going to get a hazard bonus.”

The men looked at her quizzically, and then one bustled off down-ship with three cups balanced in his hands. Gretchen leaned against the hatchway and unwrapped a stick of chicle from her pocket.
I am so very nonchalant,
she thought in amusement as the hot taste of cinnamon filled her mouth.
Very much the idler.

The remaining two crewmen ignored her and sat down to the table.

Without consciously intending to, Anderssen turned to examine some old bulletins posted on the nearest wall and let her eyes lose focus. Like magic—if sensory prioritization could be called magic—her hearing sharpened and she heard one of the men say: “Spero Lockenem maleficum eum circuagere non permissurum esse.”

The other replied, equally softly: “Navarchus non stultus est. Claude os et oculos aperi!”

How odd. They’re speaking
—

She forced herself to step away from the door and pick up her cup of coffee. The little sound leaking through from the control space indicated a vigorous discussion was under way, and now that these two burly specimens were watching her, it wouldn’t be polite to overhear. She swirled the cold liquid around in the cup, frowned, and went to the dispenser. Both of the men at the table turned away as she passed, but something about their clothing—no, their tool belts—caught her eye.
Nothing unusual about them,
she thought, wondering what had set her on edge.
You’re getting paranoid … that’s Hummingbird’s business, not yours.

Hot liquid steamed into the cup and she thumbed the glyph for extra cream, extra sugar-substitute.

Both of the crewmen stood up, pitched their cups, and climbed down the ladder to the engineering spaces.

Not their work tools
, she realized, watching them go out of the corner of her eye.
They have the same sidearm.
The thought caught in her memory and other fragmentary images suddenly coalesced.
Tattoos—at least two, maybe three of these men have a crimson cross fitche on a white field. Like an insignia. Every one of them has at least one handgun. All about the same size, too, as though they were issued arms. These men must be ex-military.

She gave the mess deck a considering glance, then cast about in memory for any other details she’d glossed over in the last two days while the ship had bounced from transit point to way station and onward into this trackless expanse. The
Moulins
was small; listed as a freighter seeking supercargo passengers, or some kind of high-value, low-mass cargo that couldn’t wait for a big liner or cargo-carrier to come by. Or, she realized, for fugitives to smuggle … like her, like the Crow. Or information—very low mass; data-crystals or comp discs—and that could turn a tidy profit.

That familiar pressure—the constant, draining, exhausting need for quills which had been omnipresent her whole life—seemed out of place here.
That’s not right. This captain, this crew, they don’t taste right, feel right; they’re not mercenaries.
She couldn’t say quite why, but she was suddenly certain that Locke and his men were not out in the back of beyond looking for money.

A spy-ship? But not an Imperial one.
Her heart skipped. None of the crew she’d seen were Méxica or Nisei or Skawtish or any of the other nations bound by the compact of the Four Hundred families.
Could this be an HKV courier? A Resistance ship? Glorious Christ, there is still a Royal Navy at work amongst the stars?
She thought of
her
great-grandfather, a fiery old man with a neat white beard, killed in the Last War. He had served aboard a Swedish cruiser in battle near Saturn. A flood of emotion filled her and for an instant—her heart aching—she perceived something of the
shape
of the ship, the crew, even the irritable Captain Locke. She saw a
bloody spear, shining in the darkness, radiating roseate light into the void. Pointed ever outward, fixed upon the heart of an invisible, implacable enemy.

Chilled and sweating, Gretchen slumped back against the bulkhead. The coffee cup squeaked in her hand. When she looked down, her knuckles were white.
Oh. Well. I guess I don’t need Malakar’s singing to bring on this … this … whatever it is.

The peculiar perceptual gestalt which came and went—incited by stress, or by psychotropic drugs, or the presence of another being in a state of extreme agitation—had been absent from her daily existence while she’d toiled away in the basement office on New Aberdeen. The nightly visions or dream-states which caused her to speak aloud in the tongues of ancient Mokuil had been slowly diminishing as time passed and her body recovered from being exposed to the memory-echo of the
kalpataru
. Malakar’s notebooks were filled with drawings, songs, tales long lost to her people—Gretchen’s troubled sleep had yielded up an unexpected bounty for the old librarian—but even that had been drawing to an end when the Hummingbird had arrived.

Now, with her mind feeling awake for the first time in months, Anderssen licked her lips in unease.
Is simply being in the presence of the
nauallis
enough to fray the veil blinding my perception? On Ephesus he had to give me a pill—a dose of oliohuiqui to part the shadows—but on Jagan all I needed was the presence of the Tree Which Gives What You Desire. And here? There doesn’t seem to be even so much …

The prospect of perceiving the true shape of the world around her, to glimpse the underpinning of men’s purposes, was both troubling and exciting.
Now if only I could make it work when I want it to! That would be a bonus. What a tremendous tool. Just seeing the proper pattern of a broken pot would—

Then, with her mind alert to the present, she heard through the hatchway Hummingbird’s low, sharp voice speaking in an unfamiliar language, though the vowel cadence sounded terribly familiar. Locke’s astonished reaction was like a bucket of ice water.

“You?
Præceptor
? Impossible!”

Peering through the partially open hatch, Gretchen caught sight of the old Méxica’s face. The
nauallis
nodded slowly, his arm lifted as though displaying some symbol to the merchanter.

Ah, a pity.
Anderssen’s throat felt tight with disappointment. These men were not HKV, not Resistance.
A crimson cross on a white field. A bloody spear and some secret language. No crew-women to be found. Just some marginal religious sect fallen prey to the Crow’s blandishments.

Disappointed, she gathered up her things and crawled back to their tiny cabin behind the food recyclers. Lying in the narrow bunk, with barely enough room for her shoulders, much less her feet, the hurt curdled in her breast. The thought that Grandfather’s cause—noble and doomed as it had been—was still secretly alive in the wilderness out beyond the Rim, had lifted a little of the weariness upon her heart. Now the same cold weight settled again, twice as heavy, and she fell into a fitful sleep, troubled by dreams of men’s voices singing beyond a golden doorway, in a lost tongue she ought to understand.

THE PINHOLE

D
EEP IN THE
KUUB

“Transit kick in three—two—one…”

Susan’s stomach flipped, settled, and she swallowed the faint taste of bile. At the pilot’s station,
Sho-i
Holloway counted down his post-insertion checklist, announcing all systems green; deflectors intact and the ship in proper spatial position. By then, two minutes had passed.

“Status of the squadron?” Susan had already reviewed her own boards, seeing that all three battle-cruisers had kept station after dropping to normal space, but it never hurt to check. Particularly with a piglike Fleet tender along. The
Fiske
and
Eldredge
had done well in keeping up so far, but she doubted they had any legs at all if things got hot.

“All present and accounted for,” Holloway replied. “We have three friendly IFF registers. Fleet says they are—” He reviewed a side-pane on his panel, making sure that the battlecast relays had come up, verified the new ships, that they matched registry entries and the
Naniwa
’s long-range cameras had confirmed their outlines in the heavy murk. “—
Temasek
,
Corduba
, and … no name on the third vessel, but she’s registered as a ‘mobile science platform’—same as ours in the registry, but the silhouette is markedly different.”

That will be the Mirror hard at work
. Susan nodded. Then the debris density they’d dropped into registered on her consciousness and she felt mildly ill.

In transluminal space, the physical protostellar matter collecting in the wasteland of the
kuub
was represented by both a gravity dimple and a quantum-level spore, or nugget, which interacted with the translated quantum-frame state of a ship much as a physical rock would interact—that is, smash into—the physical hull of a ship in realspace. Here, though, where physicality assumed its usual guise of solidity, the swarms of dust particles, or even micrometeoroids and outright boulders or asteroidal fragments, posed an even greater danger to the
Naniwa
and other ships trying to make realspace headway.

Everything within optical range of the battle-cruiser’s cameras was a thick haze of heavy dust and debris. What dim light filtered through the murk from distant, half-hidden stars was diffuse and red-shifted. It made an appalling sight for a Fleet captain. Even a miner’s scow would find heavy going in this environment.