For the moment, she had not connected the bronze block to anything. Despite this measure, it seemed heavy against her chest, and warm to the touch, as though some internal process was underway.
Even without node 3
3
3 in operation, however, enough data was flowing into her conceptual models and analysis matrices to leave her feeling slightly drunk. Fingers trembling, she unwrapped an
oliohuiqui
packet and pressed the acidic tablet beneath her tongue. Her skin was singing with the tension congealing in the Command compartment, but the promise of so many wonders to come pushed all of her concerns away.
“Radiation levels are rising,” Piet reported, tapping a winking glyph on his display to expand the warning message. “Captain?”
“Reconfigure the shipskin for maximum protection,” Locke replied without bothering to consult with the Prince. “Let’s try not to fry!”
Anderssen paid them little attention, though part of her mind wondered what had happened to the shipskin, for the flow of data into her analysis array did not diminish at all. The exterior configuration of the ship
had
changed however, shifting into an unfamiliar alignment.
But for the moment, Gretchen didn’t care about the crew’s machinations.
As long as we’re capturing clean data … wait a moment.
A subtle change had occurred in the visual flow of the artifact. Nothing obvious—the intersecting triangles had a vertiginous effect on the eye—but the consistency of the shadows pooling in their depths had begun to thicken. “There!” Anderssen suddenly spoke, half-rising from her seat. “Quadrant six by sixteen—that’s a lock entrance.”
“How can you tell?” Xochitl glared over her shoulder in disgust at the flurry of bizarre glyphs and patterns dancing across her v-displays. “What
is
all of this static?”
“Our eyes in the darkness, Lord Prince,” she replied distantly. “Löjtnant—slow a bit…” Her stylus danced across a v-pane cross-connected to the comm system. A burst of indecipherable noise flooded from the ship’s tachyon array. “Now, wait … wait … there!”
One of the triliths moved—its motion obvious even to the naked eye—receding into sudden darkness. The constellation of other triliths around the missing triangle followed, sliding backward into shadow without evident mechanism. An opening emerged with fluid suddenness—a channel or corridor leading into the interior of the structure. Measurements popped up on Gretchen’s console and she whistled softly, breaking into a huge grin. “Six kilometers on a side, Lord Prince. I think the
Moulins
will make easy passage.”
“This was built for truly giant ships,” Xochitl said, his voice tinged with awe. “Like the thousands of wrecks in the debris cloud.”
No one replied. Locke and Piet were motionless, their faces settled into expressionless masks. Gretchen felt a current of raw fear circulate among the men in Command, but the taste was distant and of little consequence. “Go on, enter,” she directed. “We’ll be shielded from the radiation storm inside.”
The freighter passed in, maneuvering drives flaring, and was swiftly enveloped by abyssal darkness. Behind them, the constellation of triliths reformed with admirable speed, abruptly cutting off sight of the hot, glowing sky outside.
“It seems the artifact is not entirely dead,” Gretchen said cheerfully. “No matter. I believe we can open the passage again, when the need arises.”
In the suddenly dim bridge, Xochitl scratched his nose and—taking a deep breath—began to compose a series of numbers in his thoughts.
Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one …
ABOARD THE
KADER
“We have comm intercept available,
Chu-sa
,” De Molay announced in an offhand way.
Hadeishi’s command chair rotated to face her with an audible whine. Apparently the Khaid refit had failed to properly seal the gimbals, and fire suppression foam was eating away at the mechanism. The Nisei officer shifted restlessly. “We’re synched into their battlecast? Is the translator running?”
“Such as it is.” De Molay shrugged, her thin shoulders swallowed by the expedition jacket. “Channel eleven.”
Mitsuharu pressed a finger to his earbug, jumping channels until the hissing growl of the enemy flooded in, making him wince. Dialing down the volume, he found the jury-rigged translator circuit could use a great deal of improvement—about every fourth word of Khadesh echoed back in Nihongo on channel two. He grimaced, feeling a truly staggering migraine coming on, before settling back with his eyes closed, trying to parse some kind of meaning from the staticky roaring.
After thirty minutes, he wrenched the earbug free and stared cross-eyed at Lovelace and De Molay. Hadeishi said nothing for a moment, keying his med-band to dispense as much painkiller as it would allow.
“This won’t work. Your efforts are tremendous, but the shipnet comps just can’t keep up with all of the cross-conversations. Have you been recording all of this traffic?”
The
Sho-i
nodded vigorously. “We have sixteen hours in the can,
Chu-sa
.”
“Can we translate that, if the comp has time to grind away?”
“
Hai, Chu-sa
.”
Mitsuharu shook his head slowly, beginning to despair. “Without following the ’cast in real time, there’s no way we can insert ourselves into the formation … we’d trip ourselves up the first time someone commed to discuss the weather!”
De Molay spread her hands. “Then we give up and go home. No loss.”
Her nonchalant expression sparked a flare of anger in the Nisei officer. He glowered at the freighter captain, which drew an amused snort from the old woman, and then he sat back in the uncomfortable chair again, thinking furiously.
The youngest of the Seven Sisters pressed her forehead to the straw matting covering the floor of Musashi’s hut. “Please, sensei,” she begged earnestly, “none of us can defeat Möngke; he is a monster, gifted with inhuman powers, surrounded by an army of tens of thousands of men. Osaka castle itself is a maze of fortifications, towers, moats … We’ve tried sneaking in, but he’s suborned the ninja clans as well, and they watch by night while his archers watch by day.”
“He only has one weakness,” Eldest said, kneeling beside her irrepressible sibling. “He believes himself the finest swordsman in all of Asia—not just Nippon—and if you challenge him, then he will come forth to meet you in single combat, for his pride will admit no other rival.”
“I no longer travel the sword-saint’s road,” Musashi croaked, his voice raspy from disuse. He indicated a small stone statue of the Buddha with a seated bow. “I no longer seek conflict in the world of men. Ieyasu and I strove to overthrow the Yuan seven years ago, and failed utterly. Now he is dead and I have found sanctuary here on Mount Iwato. Only the Dokk
ō
d
ō
remains.” He gestured to a series of scrolls sitting on a small side table.
Eldest glanced sidelong at Squeaker’s twin, who was standing in the doorway, keeping watch.
“What if the Emperor summoned you, called you forth to do battle with the invaders? Would you deny him, foreswear your duty to all Nippon?”
Musashi shook his head sadly. “The last Emperor fell at Nara generations ago.”
“Not so.” The third Sister turned in the doorway. “The Imperial line is sustained even today. Would the plea of the Son of Heaven move you to action?”
The hermit fell silent, eyes downcast, for a long time. When he looked up, at last, the sunset was gilding the rough-hewn timbers of his hut. “It would.”
The third Sister extended his hand. “Then stir yourself, Musashi Miyamoto, Nippon calls you.”
* * *
“Attention the bridge,” Hadeishi announced, standing up. The low murmur in the circular room died away. The regular watch had swollen to include the leaders of the various ships’ crews rescued from the abyss. Mitsuharu looked about slowly, considering each man and woman as though seeing them for the first time. He stepped to the center of the bridge, where Lovelace had rigged up a holocast projection in place of the old-fashioned plotting display which had formerly served the
Kader
.
It’s no threatwell,
Hadeishi thought,
but will do for now.
He marked off the area of interest with his stylus. A series of vector tracks appeared in the ’cast.
“The
surtu
, as the Khaiden name their hunting pack, has dispersed over the last forty-eight hours.” Mitsuharu’s tone was crisp. “Four of their
Hayalet
-class battleships remain at the entrance to the Pinhole. They are supported by six destroyers, several tenders, and what seems from message traffic to be a troop ship. It is difficult to keep track of their movements under the current conditions, but I would hazard they are making a serious attempt to chart the outlines of the aperture. The other surviving ships have scattered to police the battleground, and to search along the periphery of the Barrier for another way through.” The corners of his eyes tightened minutely. “One of their prey—an Imperial battle-cruiser of the
Provincial
-class—has escaped the battle by navigating through the Barrier itself.”
“How?” An officer from the
Mace
blurted without thinking. “Our sensors can’t even…”
“We do not know how,” Hadeishi said quietly. “But the telemetry we’ve deciphered from
this
ship indicates they did so. It is also possible that the battle-cruiser took aboard at least one evac capsule from the super-dreadnaught which was destroyed in the Pinhole itself—”
“Surely your Prince Xochitl left the field of battle in haste, then!” De Molay said loudly, drawing a round of glares from the Imperials seated or standing around her.
Hadeishi continued, unperturbed. “Speculating about who may have lived or died is useless.
“And we are not concerned with the Prince.” The stylus in his hand circumscribed a constellation of glowing dots on the plotting board. “There are sixteen evac capsules from the
Tlemitl
hiding in the sensor-shadow of the dreadnaught’s hulk. We are going to go in and get them out.” A smile lit his face for a moment. “And if some Khaiden ships fall afoul of our passage, well then—all the better.”
“Impossible,” breathed an ensign, now the sole officer remaining from the
Gladius
. “We haven’t a third the weight of a single
Hayalet
! We’ll be shot to bits within moments of our initial missile salvo!”
“Therefore,” Hadeishi said, turning and surveying them all, “we will not attack until it is too late for them to respond. And preferably, we will not attack
at all
while achieving our goal.”
The Imperial officers stared at him in confusion. Then there was a babble of questions.
“Show us,” De Molay said loudly. That quieted the group. Her seamed old face showed skepticism, but Hadeishi saw that her eyes were merry with anticipation. “Show us what you plan to do,
Chu-sa
.”
WITHIN THE SUNFLOWER
The
Moulins
crept forward through the dark, exterior floods stabbing into a colossal empty space. Hints of enormous structures wreathed in shadow ghosted by on either side. On the bridge, Gretchen had her eyes half closed, fingers drifting lightly across her console. The
oliohuiqui
she’d taken was burning at the back of her throat, and the flood of data populating her v-displays had coalesced in her perception, becoming a fluid thing, shifting and deforming with each passing moment, as more and more information flowed into the array of comps. Dozens of passageways branched off in all directions as they moved, but only one thread through the maze seemed proper to her. If pressed, she would have said the volume of the channel they were following felt the
most used
, though nothing obvious about the ranks of triliths they passed would have indicated this.
“Six hundred k from the entrance now,” the pilot said quietly. “How deep are we g—”
“As deep as necessary,” Xochitl snapped. His mood, if possible, had worsened while sitting in the darkness at the back of the bridge.
He doesn’t like it that Europeans are handling the ship
. Gretchen clearly felt the nervous tension throbbing in the Prince, as though a wire were being twisted tighter and tighter around some fulcrum. His discomfort was now beginning to cause
her
physical pain.
Xochitl stirred, glaring accusingly at Anderssen. “We have passed several hundred thousand openings into the structure, Swede. Why haven’t we stopped?”
Though her attention was focused far from the Prince, after a lengthy pause Gretchen remembered to reply: “None of them are suitable.”