The thought gave him a chill down the back of his neck.
“Here it comes,” the
Thai-i
breathed, “we’ll have visual in—”
The Khaid destroyer emerged from a screen of stellar dust, black bulk dwarfing the
Wilful
, flanks etched with the landing lights outlining her boat-bay doors. On the camera display, Mitsuharu could make out rows of launcher hard-points, the shallow pits of particle beam emitters and point-defense guns. The hypercoil ring to aft and the maneuver drives were arranged in an unfamiliar pattern, but close up the Nisei could guess at her manufacturer.
A refitted Megair
Vampyre
-class light cruiser. Interesting—the Khaid Zosen must have bought her as a hulk and replaced all of the internal systems—the Khaiden body form doesn’t fit very well to the arthropod. Those drives look new, too.
Regardless of her provenance, the destroyer sailed on past, showing every sign of being unaware of their presence. Tocoztic stared at his console, stylus busily tapping away. He checked and double-checked the paltry stream of data available. “Their active scan is pinging right over us!” he whispered loudly.
Suddenly Hadeishi had to suppress a full-on grin; not a proper hint of a smile or a careful mask of command, but a fierce, predatory snarl.
The Khaid rolled on past, and the
Wilful
shuddered a little as the wash of radiation from her engines pelted the shipskin. Mitsuharu, properly somber again, paid close attention to the status displays from the hull configuration.
What excellent engineering
, he thought.
The emission wave from the enemy radar failed to spike our surface temperature. The drive wake has been absorbed as well. But … how could shipskin cool to relative zero so fast?
The Nisei sat back, nearly overcome with wonder. Then he noticed that the subsonic vibration of the reactor interface had soared up, almost to an audible level. He looked to De Molay in concern, but the old woman just shook her head minutely. Her gray eyes rested steadily on him. For the first time in a long time, Mitsuharu felt nervous, jumpy.
A tramp freighter, eh? I am six kinds of a fool.
Tocoztic squirmed in his chair, looking around curiously at the walls. “What’s that weird vibration?”
“Engine phase-transition,
Thai-i
. Every ship has its own quirks and noises,” Hadeishi replied with deliberate calm as he reviewed his console again.
Power output is up 300 percent
.
But—we’re not leaking heat, the internal temperature is actually cooling
.… The reason was obvious, but Mitsuharu was having a hard time believing the data before him.
Every engineer in the Empire would fall on his sword to bring this secret home. Someone has developed an effective thermodynamic shunt. And it’s working and it’s on this ship, on
my
ship.
“
Thai-i
Tocoztic, eyes on your console, mind on the mission.” Hadeishi’s voice was sharp, ringing with hidden elation. The tone gained the younger officer’s complete attention. “Pilot De Molay, plot a course for the next surviving evac capsule. We still have work to do, even if the Khaid are careless and blind. The next patrol ship may be more attentive.”
“
Hai, Chu-sa!
”
Hadeishi felt something tight in his chest release at the long-familiar words:
Ah, now my heart is beating again!
THE
NANIWA
The last of the officers and ratings who’d ridden through the Pinhole had crawled off to their bunks by the time
Thai-i
Goroemon managed to reach Command. Kosh
ō
was still in her shockchair, reviewing the telemetry captured by shipnet during their passage, looking for somewhere to hide her battered ship.
“
Chu-sa?
Holloway-
tzin
said you needed me to stand officer of the watch?”
“I do,
Thai-i
. I am very glad you survived. Can you handle another eight hours awake?”
Goro shrugged, broad shoulders stretching the gel of her z-suit. “Hard to sleep with all the racket,
kyo
—but we didn’t get hit too hard down in the Backbone. Two magazine conveyors went down due to jams, but nothing punched past into the inner hull where we were.”
The lieutenant rarely stood a Command watch, though she was technically fifth on the roster. Her usual duty station was in the munitions roundhouse controlling the network of high-speed magnetic railways threading between the primary and secondary hulls of the battle-cruiser. The
Naniwa
’s main magazines were spaced along the shipcore itself, as far from hostile fire as possible, while a network of secondary—or “ready”—depots served each hard-point, launch-rail, or gun-pit. Managing the Backbone ammunition network was third in complexity among the ship’s systems, behind the engines and shipskin.
“How soon will we be reloaded?” Susan asked, frustrated with herself that she hadn’t already checked in with logistics.
“Another hour,
kyo
, and we’ll have all the conveyors back in operation,” Goro replied. “
Kikan-cho
Hennig’s men have both of the jammed ones torn apart right now. He said there’s some fabrication problem with the pass-along sensors, so they’re getting pulled, hand-tested, and replaced as needed.”
“Better than I expected.” Kosh
ō
was pleased. For a ship so fresh from the yards, the
Naniwa
had experienced very few outright component failures. “What I need you to do,
Thai-i
, is—”
She turned to the navigational plot shipnet had pieced together from data recorded during their passage. Oddly, the changes made to the navigational interfaces—and to the threatwell and other Command systems—when Anderssen had taken them over, had all reverted to their Fleet-standard configurations. Even the massive rush of topology information which had allowed Susan to navigate through the Pinhole had purged itself. Only second-by-second Command camera images of the threatwell remained, but from them shipnet had reverse-engineered a model of their exit point and the surrounding area.
“—find us a place to lie up while all immediate repairs are completed. We’ve moved into a peculiar area of space—one without charts, and which may obey different physical laws than we’re used to—so I don’t want to rush about until we’ve laid down a tight nav plot. But here”—Kosh
ō
indicated a convoluted set of folds in the nearest dust clouds—“is a region free of the Barrier threads, and excited and dense enough we may be masked from passive sensors if someone comes along, banging on the temple-wall with a stick. Drop a remote to watch the Pinhole for us, and then move the
Naniwa
in there and go to zero-v. The engines need maintenance as well—we’ve taken enough dings, dents, and outright punctures to warrant a thorough inspection.”
“
Hai, kyo
.” Goro covered a yawn with her salute and settled herself gingerly in the command chair.
Susan looked around the bridge one last time, saw that Anderssen had already been taken away, nodded to herself, and strode off to find her own cabin.
* * *
A monofilament saw shrieked, cutting away at the airlock on a badly battered evac capsule. Two burly engineers, their combat armor awash in a flood of sparks, were sawing away the last of the hinges holding the hatch closed. The portal itself was badly scarred and had been slightly twisted in the framing socket by some massive impact. The evac capsule had fared no better—carbon-scoring had turned nearly the entire surface black and the view ports were milky with tiny fissures. Another crew of engineers were dragging away a couple hundred meters of high-v cargo netting—the net
Thai-i
Holloway had arranged to snatch up the capsule at speed, while the
Naniwa
barreled past in the Pinhole—though its landing in boat-bay one had been … rougher … than the navigator intended.
“Clear!” barked the
Joto-Heiso
bossing the team of engineers. He stepped back, swinging the saw up onto his shoulder. Hot hexacarbon fragments littered the deck, filling the air of the cargo bay with thick spirals of smoke. “Get ’er open.”
The hatch squealed as pry bars dug in around the periphery, then popped free with a
ting!
Four of the
Joto-hei
on hand seized hold with magnetic grapples and wrestled the enormously heavy block of battle-steel, hexacarbon, and glassite onto a waiting grav-sled. As soon as the portal was removed, there was movement inside the capsule and two battered-looking Jaguar Knights emerged, shipguns at the ready. The
Joto-Heiso
stood his ground, unsuccessfully hiding a sneer behind a thick walruslike mustache. “Muddies,” he muttered under his breath to the engineers standing behind him.
“Xochitl-
tecuhtzintli
, welcome.”
Heisocho
Von Bayern was waiting for the next man to emerge. Prince Xochitl stamped out, his armor streaked with vomit and stippled with fresh dents. The Méxica lord’s face—his helmet was now canted back—was glacial with fury, his dark eyes flashing dangerously. One of his high, chiseled cheekbones had acquired a dark, purpling bruise. The Diplomatic Service warrant officer bowed appropriately, and then saluted sharply. “
Gensui
on deck,” he barked.
A dozen meters back,
Socho
Juarez and the full remaining complement of marines aboard the battle-cruiser stamped their right feet in unison, presented arms—they’d scrambled to unpack their Macana assault rifles—and then held rigid while the cruiser’s piper wailed through the Imperial March.
Xochitl stared at the welcoming committee, his expression congealing into something very much like icy mud. Nothing about the reception was in the least irregular, though rousting out a piper for the March was generally falling from fashion. Von Bayern offered the Prince a gracious smile, hands clasped behind his back, until the drone of the bagpipes had ceased.
“My lord, I hope you will accept our apologies for detaining you and your crew within your evac capsule during transit. Your physical safety is of tremendous concern to
Chu-sa
Kosh
ō
. And … here are the medics.”
A pair of corpsmen had arrived with orderlies and stretchers. They immediately climbed in through the mangled airlock to help out the men still inside the capsule. The first to emerge was the hulking, seven-foot-high shape of the alien, in its unfamiliar armor. The marines and engineers stiffened, hands going to personal weapons. The creature looked around; head tilted back a little, and then saw the Prince. Xochitl looked back to the warrant officer.
“Take me to the
Chu-sa
immediately. Quarters for my men can wait. I will not. This one”—he pointed to Sahâne—“send to whatever cabin is reserved for
me
. I will take something else, anything else.”
Von Bayern nodded amiably, apparently unaffected by the fury radiating from the Prince like a furnace draft. “Of course, my lord Prince, our transport is standing by.” He gestured to a nearby grav-sled—a regular cargo carrier which had a pair of bench-seats bolted on and draped with fabric in colors approximating the Imperial eagle crest. Xochitl shook his head, now beyond words, and climbed aboard.
As the grav-sled whined away, one of the corpsmen helped Helsdon out of the capsule, supporting his shoulder. The engineer looked ghastly, but was able to keep his head up as they loaded him onto a stretcher. The
Joto-Heiso
from the work crew was waiting with a flask, along with Juarez and four of the marines.
“Welcome aboard,
kyo
. The
Chu-sa
says you’re straight to a spare cabin and twenty, thirty hours of sleep.” The engineer flashed a broken-toothed smile behind his white mustache, pressing the flask into Malcolm’s hands. “Here, this’ll set you right. She sent it down. A twenty-year malt
uisge-beatha
—like velvet!”
Helsdon laid his head back on a pillow, puzzlement pushing aside his exhaustion for a moment. “Who—who sent this?”
“
Chu-sa
Susan Kosh
ō
, Engineer.” Juarez patted him gently on the shoulder, and then motioned for the marines to escort him away. “Welcome aboard the
Naniwa
. The captain apologizes for keeping you in the can so long, but there wasn’t time to peel you out properly until now.”
* * *
All Gretchen could see was corridor roof, gleaming with overheads, and occasionally the superstructure of a hatchway as the grav-stretcher zipped along. A corpsman was jogging along beside her, though she could hear his voice only intermittently. Her left arm was throbbing with tremendous pain hidden behind a wall of meds, and now the rest of her had seemingly converted into an enormous ache.
At least the bees are gone,
she thought blearily. Her skin had settled down, which was a mercy. Whatever had happened when her hands had been on the corroded bronze block seemed to have faded, leaving only a faint golden tinge at the edges of her vision.