The
Kader
’s maneuvering thrusters flared briefly as she turned away from running parallel with the
Sokamak
, her nose angling towards the entrance to the Pinhole itself. There, the walls of dust were burning with a deep orange and azure, making a sea of fire to blind the unwary eye.
Against this background,
Hadeishi thought,
the thrust-signature of our so-able friend would be nearly undetectable if one did not know exactly what to look for.
But Lovelace and Tocoztic had painstakingly reassembled the course taken by the battle-cruiser, and now Mitsuharu was watching for traces of her drive plume wending its way amongst the hidden shoals and reefs of the depthless ocean.
Musashi stands poised on the bridge at Windlodge, goose-feathers brushing the enamel of his cheek-guard, the Iroquois swarming up the levee in a numberless, copper-skinned mass. One of their
ohnkanetoten
surges through the ranks of charging pike men astride a roan stallion … sun-dogs gleaming from his garishly ornamented plate-mail, his long sword shining silver in the summer light.
THE
NANIWA
O
UTBOUND FROM THE
C
HIMALACATL
The battle-cruiser had clawed its way back up out of the interlocking g-fields wrapped around the singularity in realspace, finally reaching a point where the hypercoil could punch them through to transluminal. In Command, Kosh
ō
sat in her shockchair, one slim leg crossed over the other, watching the threatwell rotate slowly. The cloud of broken ships was fast approaching as they climbed gradient, and the sight of such colossal devastation weighed heavily on her thoughts. Helsdon, having completed his mandatory sleep cycle, was sitting at the Nav station with
Thai-i
Olin. Together they had reconfigured nearly half of the shipskin to watch for the kind of quantum disturbances the engineer suspected heralded the movement or presence of the Barrier threads.
Better than nothing,
Susan thought tiredly,
but I am already missing Doctor Anderssen’s presence.
She paced over to their console. “Any luck,
Kikan-shi
?”
“There must be a defensive Thread array associated with the Sunflower,” Helsdon muttered, one pale hand trembling over a plot of the broken armada. “Most of these ships were cut apart, just as ours were.…”
“An attack?” Kosh
ō
leaned over his shoulder, puzzled. “They’re bunched together so tightly…”
“No…” Helsdon replied, scratching nervously at a week’s beard. “They’ve fallen into a balance point in the gravitation of this system. This is an eddy of flotsam … the ships might have all been destroyed out by the Barrier itself … or even closer to the artifact.”
“Why not a battle?”
Helsdon seemed to shrink, shoulders hunching in, and an expression of pain flitting across his face. “These weren’t warships,
Chu-sa
.” His stylus tapped unevenly across the control panes and a series of comp-projected reconstructions sprang to life. The alien craft were revealed as sixty-kilometer-long trihedrons with bulky drive fairings at the rear.
“Tens of thousands of cargo containers—suspension pods, I would guess—are held in each of those three lobes. But that’s only what we see nearby in this image. In the whole of the debris swirl, there are over four thousand ships, the comp says.…”
Kosh
ō
’s eyes widened, taking in the lift capacity of the dead fleet. “Troop transports for a million-man army?”
“Colony ships?” Helsdon shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe refugees? A million isn’t much to lift from some dying world—but it’s sure better than what
we
could pull together.”
“Was all this a fortress?” Susan wondered softly, her eyes turning to the system plot and the delicate balance of the brown dwarves, the singularity, and the
Chimalacatl
. “It must have been, hidden behind the wall of knives. But not a refuge, not in the end…” Her voice strengthened. “Engineer, can you find out if these ships were empty or full when they were destroyed?”
Helsdon nodded. Kosh
ō
turned to Oc Chac. “Meanwhile, we need another way out of this pocket, one that is not barred by the enemy. You’ve the search-pattern set?”
“
Hai
,
Chu-sa
… starting from the Pinhole and spiraling out.”
“Excellent.” Susan nodded approval.
“But
Chu-sa
, if what Engineer Helsdon mentioned is true—if the whipping knives destroyed this great fleet of souls—why haven’t we been attacked?”
“I do not know,
Sho-sa
, but I hope our luck holds.” Kosh
ō
returned to her station, intending to comm up Engineering and see how Hennig was getting along, then stopped, looking quizzically around Command. S
omething’s not right …
Frowning, she tapped open a v-pane showing the guest quarters, then scanned through a series of empty cabins with rising alarm.
Damn his scrawny bones!
She commed Ship Security,
“Thai-i
, can you determine if either of our diplomatic guests are available to meet me in the command bridge conference room? This is urgent.”
Beside her, Oc Chac glanced up nervously, saw her stormy expression, and ducked back to the search pattern. Five minutes went by with no word from the brig. “Very well
,”
Susan said. “Full speed ahead,
Sho-sa
. We’ve no time to waste.”
Hummingbird would not have taken that “ambassador” with him—contravening the Prince’s express order—if the creature were not part of the old witch’s plan.
Another ugly thought came to her.
He has his own ship—if he knows a way out of here, then we’ve been left behind to decoy and delay the Khaid. But even so—I would not trade places with Sayu now.
WITHIN THE SUNFLOWER
Forty minutes after the
Moulins
was secured in the landing cradle and Captain Locke’s crew had completed their set-down checklist, the marine fire team disembarked from the freighter in full combat armor, assault rifles at the ready. They confirmed what the exterior cameras had already shown Gretchen and the others on the bridge.
The rest of the chamber was filled with an enormous drift of bones, plasma-scored metal, and the desiccated corpses of thousands of inhuman creatures. Fifteen minutes after the marines had signaled the all-clear for the immediate vicinity, the Prince, Gretchen, and a very nervous Sahâne stepped out of the cargo elevator and crunched their way across a slope of crumbling bones to a platform facing an exit door.
There Xochitl stopped, panning his helmet light across the ossuary in grudging wonder. “Battle,” he commented, eyes drawn to the shattered limbs and broken armor thigh-deep in the bay. “But not here … these bodies were dumped.” His gaze traveled upward, the light picking out the angled shape of a monstrous crane hanging over the chamber, and beside it another, and another. They were folded up against the ceiling like a resting spider’s knobby legs. The Prince turned to Gretchen. “What kind of entryway did you choose for us?”
“Garbage disposal,” Sahâne said, his alien voice thick with bitterness. He knelt and lifted one of the cadaverous skulls. It was long-snouted, with a tapering jaw, and a mouth filled with rows of crushing molars aft and shredding incisors forward. Some remnant of a pelt remained, preserved by vacuum, apparently a mottled black or dark gray. “For discarded husks which could not be properly cremated.”
Looking over his shoulder, Anderssen nodded, unsurprised.
I will send Professor Griffiths in the Comparative Languages Department a thousand roses, should I ever see Imperial space again!
She wanted to handle the bones, but wondered if the ambassador would take offense.
A skull much like that of a Hjogadim
,
though larger in cross-section. Perhaps only a difference in nutrition, but if I could look at the whole thing, it might turn out to be a genetic difference. Maybe the old Hjogadim were a different sub-species. Wouldn’t that be interesting!
Curious, Gretchen moved off across the midden, her fingers brushing lightly across the most exposed of the corpses. Most of them seemed morphologically similar, though there were other, more alien-seeming races among the dead.
Has the history of these others been wholly lost? Is this where they became extinct? How long ago did all this occur?
She stopped, going to one knee, and pulled out her field comp.
“This is your
suitable entrance
?” Xochitl crunched over to her, his voice a harsh rasp. “How far are we from a control structure? From whatever mechanism manages the entrance to the Barrier?”
Anderssen flashed a wintry smile up at the Prince. Her field comp had flickered awake and she was scanning one of the better-preserved skulls with her sensor wand turned to short-focus x-ray. “I am not sure
we
can enter the control spaces of this device. But I believe that
he
can.” She indicated Sahâne with a tilt of her helmet. “If he chooses to lead us there.”
Looking back at the alien, the now-familiar sense of disassociation stole over her, filling her chest with pleasant warmth, drawing her mind far from her body, which seemed to recede below her. Standing in this ancient place, her eyes filled with glorious Sight. The snap and glare of plasma guns, the screams of the wounded and dying dinned against her ears. A swirl of faint ghosts washed over her, as the ancient Hjogadim struggled and died, slaughtering each other in the corridors and control spaces. Then machines came, bearing the dead, laying them in ordered rows in the disposal bay, even as the tide of battle washed on to other shores. In her vision, a solitary Hjo—in comparison to the others, seeming almost solid—moved among the dead, giving some kind of last blessing. His skin and armor were anointed with the same glyphs and markings as Sahâne bore.
Watching the—priest?—passing among the dead, Gretchen became peripherally aware of a golden tinge tainting her sight. Tentatively, her fingers moved, drifting to touch the bronze block. They stopped short, encountering an aura of heat, almost hot enough to scald.
“We had best move on—if we are to stay,” she said, forcing herself to focus on the Prince. “If you intend to carry through with your purpose.…”
“I do,” Xochitl said, his face pinched and pale.
He’s removed his mask again. Only a frightened man remains in Huitzilopochtli’s place.
“Sahâne-
tzin
, what do you say to this?” Xochitl asked.
The living Hjo’s face greatly resembled that of the long-dead priest walking in Gretchen’s golden vision, a ghastly mask of suppressed horror. His limpid gray-black eyes fixed on Gretchen for the first time. “
You
know what this place is … how can this be? How can a
toy
know what I—one of the Guided Race—do not!”
“There are legends,” she replied carefully, “and fragments out of the past that still endure. Not all fantastical tales are false … but all that
I
know is that this whole enormous structure”—she extended her arms, taking in the entirety of the
Chimalacatl
and the singularity—“is the work of
your
people. Are you not pleased to look upon their greatness?”
“I despair,” Sahâne croaked, voice thick with emotion, “to find myself amid this ruin and find the greatness of my people is ash!”
Xochitl seemed confounded. His face went blank. Gretchen caught a fragment of his helplessness, but made no move to enlighten him.
Sahâne favored them both with a contemptuous stare. “Apes! Such skills as tore suns from their orbits and compressed matter into ultimate annihilation, such skills as made this … this mausoleum … are
lost to us
. This place, it might as well have been made by the gods themselves! By the Living Flame which Guides! We are so petty now…” His voice trailed away into a disgusted, lamenting mumble.
A flicker of emotion lighted Xochitl’s face. He scrutinized Gretchen warily. “Team one, to me.” The Prince ordered half of his men forward. “Team two, secure the ship. Doctor Anderssen, you help the Esteemed Sahâne here
find a command structure
!”
With the heavy black assault rifles of the marines at her back, Gretchen reached up to place a gentle hand on the young Hjogadim’s armored wrist. “Lord Sahâne, let us go further on. Is this not a cathedral of your caste? Has not the place of it been lost to your line? Have a care here. So many lie untended.”
She led the Hjo onward, picking their way out of the disposal chamber through a triangular doorway. As they passed through, Gretchen caught sight of a faint radiance shining in the metal.
After all this time there are still glimmers within the material. What marvelous alloy could this be? Or are there bioluminescent organisms trapped within?