“Forty seconds to the second wave,” Tocoztic announced, sweat gleaming on the sides of his face. “Point-defense is down to thirty percent, shipkillers are exhausted. One salvo of penetrators and two spoofer pods left—”
“Weapons, drop pods,” Mitsuharu snapped, switching his attention to the navigation plot. The track of the Khaid fleet was marvelously clear—their battleship drives coughed high-order radiation with reckless abandon—and he was praying the Barrier had not already shifted enough to swing a lattice of knives into their path. The two spoofer pods spun out from their launchers and Lovelace was waiting to key them up as duplicates of the
Kader
as soon as they had separated from her signature. “Pilot, cut drives and rotate fresh armor!”
Another ship icon popped up on the plot—a hundred thousand k behind the
Kukumav
—pulling high g acceleration. For an instant, Hadeishi thought it might be the
Moulins
, but then shipnet crunched the emissions signature and a whirl of hostile glyphs surrounded the contact.
“
Mishrak
-class destroyer
Han’zhr
on the board,” Tocoztic barked.
“Rotating aspect,” Inudo followed as the main drives cut out.
Mitsuharu snarled, lips drawing back. The
Kukumav
’s second missile volley slammed into the
Kader
at a bad angle. Perhaps a quarter of the shipkillers had swerved away, following the two spoofer pods, but the remainder rained in on her aft-ventral quarter. Inudo had swung them round hard, bringing an undamaged section of shipskin into line with the attack, but the guttering flare of penetrators and bomb-pods ripped aside their point-defense and tore at the primary hull in a wave of explosions.
Command lost power entirely for a microsecond, and Hadeishi felt the carapace lining the shockchair splinter as the g-decking failed. He slammed hard into the frame, and then bounced back. Secondary mains cut in, and their consoles flickered back to life in time for him to see the
Kukumav
’s icon flicker. The weapons cloud from the
Tlemitl
had hammered her, shredding armor and turning hard-points into plasma-consumed hells. The battleship swerved away, rotating to bring fresh guns to bear on the remaining missiles boosting towards her.
“Pilot,” Mitsuharu croaked, seeing that Inudo was still alive and clinging to his console. “Hold course and get us out of here!”
THE ALTAR OF THE UNDYING FLAME
B
URNING AT THE
S
UNFLOWER
’
S
H
EART
Prince Xochitl reached the top step of a pyramidlike stair ascending from the enormous floor. He glanced down at the others still toiling upward on the wide, gleaming steps, and then strode onto a platform marking the summit of the pylon. By the pale light of the distant accretion jet, he began to comprehend the scope of the massive chamber.
Scaled for giants! Or the gods themselves!
The floor stretched away for kilometers in both directions.
In a place like this, clouds will form. Rain will fall. Lightning might strike. Surely a First Sun artifact!
He turned slowly, taking everything in. He became aware of a strange, singing hum permeating his suit and vibrating through every surface on his body.
Piercing the center of the pylon was a six-meter-wide shaft, a nine-pointed star in cross-section which plunged down into darkness. Poised directly above this unfathomable hole was a second pyramidal shape, apex pointing down from the unseen ceiling. At the junction between these mirror-like pyramids, the platform measured at least thirty meters on each side. The surface was composed of a metallic alloy bearing the endlessly repeating design of two nested, equilateral triangles, while each side was circumscribed by three raised, angular consoles. Their upper surfaces were glassy-smooth, though Xochitl’s exo was beginning to annotate the featureless expanse with faint glyphs indicating minute imperfections of the surface.
At much the same time, his z-suit environmental sensors began to register that the tremendously cold air in the chamber had warmed a degree, and the atmospheric mixture, which had been almost entirely nitrogen was now beginning to percolate with oxygen.
Perhaps there …
The Prince’s thought broke off as the others clambered up to the last of the steps and stopped to goggle in wonderment as he had done.
* * *
Gretchen hardly noticed the Prince. Her consciousness was suffused with data pouring into her perception from all sides. Here, everything was thick with meaning. Even node 3
3
3 seemed barely able to keep up with the flood of information. Something in the flow—so many glyphs and icons and ghost-images were popping up around her she could barely process the visual stimuli—caught at her.
This isn’t right—there’s something broken somewhere—no, not broken, a translation matrix is throwing errors.
“How … how does this all work?” Xochitl’s voice came as if from a great distance.
Gretchen struggled to focus on the man standing in front of her. When she could separate out the visual channel, the Prince was sweating behind his faceplate. Gretchen knew beyond doubt that his “mask” was gabbling unknown languages into his mind and troubling his vision with intermittent flashes of undecipherable symbols. She felt pummeled by the same forces. Xochitl reached out, seized Gretchen’s suit-collar, and dragged her close. “Where is … where is the command interface?”
Anderssen felt immortal, weightless, and unassailable. Xochitl’s problems did not concern her—or were so remote to her experience he was negligible in any calculation involving her attention. “Didn’t they tell you what it looked like?” Part of her regarded him coolly. “When they sent you out here? No diagrams, no pictures of your goal?”
“No! Yes—a theory—just to find a control interface.” Xochitl blinked, looking away. He batted jerkily at the air between them. “Is this hot light in my mind—or is it—”
“It is she,” Sahâne accused in a wheezy growl as he finally reached the top of the long stair. The marines, growing more and more nervous for the Prince’s safety, twitched toward the Hjogadim. The alien looked worse, as the inside of his helmet was smeared with bruised-plum-colored vomit. “It’s been this female all along. She and the queer old ape with the bright eyes. They are the ones that brought us to this terrible place.”
Gretchen nodded calmly. She hoped no one would see her hands clench into claws. The golden overlay was seeping so quickly through her synapses that the ability to command her body was running thousands of cycles behind her consciousness.
These biological interfaces are so slow!
“This is so.”
“I think,” Sahâne said, making a sign of command at the Prince. “That you should kill it right now.”
Xochitl jerked around with a gasp, combat automatic flying out of his holster, and there was a sharp
snap-snap!
A cloud of flechettes slammed into Anderssen’s chest, knocking her across the platform to crash into a console near the outer edge of the pylon. She gasped, spat blood from a split lip, and clawed weakly at the smoking wound.
Seeing that the Prince had taken action, the marines lunged forward to throw themselves between Xochitl and Sahâne. The Hjo coughed out a bitter laugh. “Tell your servants to step away,
toy
. Tell them to—”
* * *
“No,” Xochitl grated out, crashing his exo again. With relief he found his vision abruptly clear of the strange artifacts. The muttering drone in his mind fell quiet. “Those patolli beans only get one throw, and you’ve used up all your luck, you worthless coward.”
Sahâne blinked in surprise and hastily made another sign of command. The Prince shoved past the marines. “No Hjo-designed exo,” Xochitl said tightly, his automatic sighted on the creature’s faceplate. “No
magical
control of me. No more wastrel Sahâne, he was lost in some
accident
in the back of beyond.” The Méxica lord essayed a grim smile. “No one will ever miss you, assistant-under-attaché to the ambassador. Let’s see how long your bio-armor lasts against this—”
The whine of a grav-sled echoing on his comm brought the Prince up short.
* * *
Out of sight and out of mind, Gretchen crawled away, leaking atmosphere in a deadly hiss from her punctured suit, nerveless fingers scrabbling into the ruin of her field jacket to drag out the corroded bronze tablet. The device was now pierced with dozens of pinpoint, smoking holes. The golden glare in her mind had dissolved into confusion with hundreds of voices chattering away. Random images flared across her retinas. Then the memory of a raspy, irritating old voice speaking impeccable Náhuatl forced its way through into her stunned, shocky consciousness:
The second enemy of perception is seeing too much. You must learn true focus for the first time in your life.
Then, those were
not
my thoughts! All the events I could see! Everything was so clear in the golden light
—Anderssen’s hand twitched in horror and the bronze block skittered away across the floor of the platform. Sliding on the smooth metal, the tablet encountered little or no resistance.
Meters away, the others jerked around as the tablet sailed across the shaft opening and was sliced cleanly in half by an invisible thread running vertically through the open space. Both halves vanished into the depths without a sound.
“The singularity is down there,” Gretchen gasped out. She rolled over and punched her med-band override. She felt a sharp pinching in her chest and the cool flood of meds rushing into her bloodstream as the little device reacted in confusion, thinking the collapse of the neural overlay represented her own imminent demise. A raging headache from fighting the gold-tinged invader in her consciousness faded with the onslaught of painkillers. “Down at the root of all this … a string tied to a stone cast into a deep dark pool …
aaaaah!
”
Anderssen felt her own native sight awaking, pricked by the stabbing pain in her chest.
Focus,
she commanded and went limp on the platform. Her sightless eyes stared up into the darkness.
Focus,
she commanded, and her mind fell quiet.
Distantly she heard one of the marines say, “Someone’s coming up the steps.”
Another—this one very close by—said, “Her band has redlined.”
AT THE PINHOLE EXIT
The
Kader
limped out of the Barrier passage, coughing clouds of debris and leaking radiation. In Command, Hadeishi watched the plot stonily as the Khaid destroyer
Han’zhr
nimbly avoided the last of their makeshift mines and closed to gun-range with a flare of her engines.
Tocoztic coughed hoarsely, his z-suit patched up with quickseal, and stabbed a series of glyphs on his console. “Another contact emerging from the Barrier,
Chu-sa
.” He squinted at the v-display, which was fluctuating as shipnet nodes crashed and rebooted themselves in quick succession. “Looks like another
Mishrak
. No ident confirm … I don’t think the ’net is going to hold up through another hit.”
Mitsuharu nodded, jaw clenched, and surveyed the wrecked bridge. A penetrator had chewed through part of the Command compartment, killing more than half of the men standing watch. Lovelace had been carried away by the corpsmen, but Inudo and the weapons officer were left. “Pilot, can we still maneuver?”
“Barely anything left,
kyo
. Adjustment thrusters are wrecked, we only have one drive nacelle in operation and there’s nowhere to go.” The Nisei pilot indicated the navigational scanners with a shaky hand. “The nearest object here is about three light-years away and our hypercoil is shot to hell.”
The race is over,
Mitsuharu thought bleakly.
The
Naniwa
is nowhere to be found and our sensor suite is reduced to almost nothing … two destroyers are more than a match for this cripple, and there’s nothing stopping that
Hayalet
from coming through the Barrier after us.
“Pilot, cut thrust to zero.”
Then he switched his comm to ship-wide channel, hoping the crews of men struggling to keep them spaceworthy were all within range of a repeater or a shipnet node in operating condition. “All hands, this is
Chu-sa
Hadeishi. We can see Fuji-san, but there is still one last kilometer to travel. All hands to arms, all hands to battle stations. Form up on your section leaders, check your sidearm loads, and regroup to the Command deck.”
Mitsuharu paused, checking the v-panes arrayed on his console. Some of the ship’s automatic systems were still in operation. He’d lost touch with Cajeme and the engineering crew on comm, but the ’net v-eyes in cargo one and two showed ranks of evacuation pods lined up and ready. Mentally saluting the little Yaqui, the Nisei officer punched in a launch code, then watched with half-lidded eyes as both cargo bays vented to space. The pods scattered, some of them retaining enough maneuvering fuel to kick off preprogrammed escape vectors.