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  A burst of harsh chatter rose up to them, and the entire ship shuddered with a sharp, reverberating clang-clang-clang. De Molay shifted, and Mitsuharu heard her whisper: “We’ve separated.”

  He nodded, judging the sounds the same way. Their suspicions were confirmed a few moments later when the entire ship shivered awake and the pumps attached to the fuel tanks hummed into action. We’re on maneuvering drive, Mitsuharu thought.

  His fingertips reached out, confirmed the location of the machete, and then he leaned close enough to the freighter captain to feel her faint, thready breath on the side of his face. “They are preparing to take us into hyperspace.”

  Hadeishi twisted around, putting his back to her, and held up a comp he’d appropriated from one of the equipment lockers. The tiny screen displayed a telemetry feed relayed from the navigational system. The whole Khaid fleet was in motion.

  “So many ships,” whispered De Molay. “That doesn’t seem like a raiding party.…”

  Mitsuharu shook his head. “This is a fleet. The first I’ve ever seen—or heard—of the Khaid assembling. Something—larger—is underway.”

  On the display, Khaiden icons shook out into new positions.

  “That is an odd formation,” De Molay wheezed, trying to find a comfortable position. The hammock swayed a little.

  “They’re preparing for a hot combat jump,” Hadeishi replied softly, feeling a trickle of adrenaline start up in his heart. Old familiar feelings—ones he’d thought lost, now welcome in their return—flooded him, watching the alien ships form up. “Heavies pentahedral at the core, lights orbiting at the edge of their combat interlink range. But … what is there to attack out here? No planets, no systems … not so much as a mining enclave in range.”

  De Molay snorted softly. She had recovered some color. “The hidden places are always busy, Nisei. There is an Imperial research station. Five or six light-years from here, I would venture. A secret … but not well kept, as we see.”

  He looked over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised. “You were bound there yourself?”

  “The Wilful? Not directly.” She tapped him gently on the shoulder with gnarled fingertips. “Your destination, Captain Hadeishi, is a little grander … one of our sister ships should have been waiting for us at that moon. I wonder if they suffered our fate, only earlier. Unless they were delayed and have yet to reach rendezvous.”

  Mitsuharu breathed deeply, calming a sudden burst of outrage. So—I’ve been deceived and carted about like a sack of meal! Hmmm … but who would want me out in this desolation?

  “Ah, see? The Khaid fleet is underway.” De Molay’s voice was a bare whisper.

  Indeed, the enemy was rippling out of sight into hyperspace.

  “Three waves. Then us.” In this soup, Hadeishi thought, they’ll be on top of the station without the slightest warning.

  He thumbed through a series of other views, tapping each ship’s system in turn. The hyperspace coil reported coordinates for transit had been locked in and the freighter was quickly approaching gradient. Mitsuharu’s eyes narrowed, but a quick flip back to the navigation feed confirmed what he’d expected—hoped!—when he’d seen the Khaid combat pattern.

  We’re plotted for a different vector. For some frontier depot with a prize crew aboard. Useless in a fight, but too valuable for these scavengers to leave behind. Excellent.

  He thumbed a set of commands into the hand comp, one ear listening to the banter of the Khaid technicians below them at the main engineering panel. A red glyph began to flash on the little display and he covered the icon with his thumb, ready to press.

  The hyperspace coil buried two decks below keened awake. His thumb mashed down—the glyph deformed—then disappeared. The ship spun up to gradient and then—with a shudder and a queasy slide—the Wilful was away as well, racing forward at transluminal speeds.

  Vector confirmed, he thought, smiling to himself.

  De Molay looked up at him questioningly. “What have you done?” she mouthed.

  “A detour,” he whispered. “When one door shuts, another opens.’”

  ABOARD THE CAN

  Kikan-shi Helsdon, formerly 2nd Engineer on the IMN DD-217 Calexico, squinted against the glare of a pair of work lights to see if he could help the shipnet specialist crammed down in the cramped bottom of a holotank housing. “Do we need to run in more power?”

  The specialist coughed, his face spotted with flecks of data crystal interface cable. The sound echoed tinnily in the confined space. “Modelers always need more power, Engineer. And memory. And room. And … how long before somebody comes down here wanting to see a life-size model of the whole damned kuub?”

  The other Mirror technicians in the upper chamber laughed. They were busy laying down conduit and hooking up racks of portable computation engines into the shipnet. The whine of cutting saws echoed from the outer corridor, along with the pang-pang-pang of a nail gun tacking up temporary wall sections.

  Helsdon tried to grin. “Maybe we should have looked around when we appropriated this threatwell tank. Who knows what else Logistics threw in when they loaded up?”

  “I could use less chatter in here,” one of the other techs muttered, “and more computational help. The volume of this flux data is unbelievable. We’re saturating the storage interface!”

  “One moment,” Helsdon replied, wiping his hands clean. “Got a place for me to work?” He crossed to a computer station jammed in next to the pair of double doors leading into the chamber and took a handheld v-pane unit from the Mirror technician.

  The sandy-haired engineer had barely sat down on the floor—no chairs were available—and started to drill down into the configuration of the interfaces when three figures appeared, their imposing bulk blocking the entire doorway. They said nothing, but every technician in the room, including Helsdon, turned instinctively towards them.

  The Imperial Jaguar Knights entered silently, their armor etched with dozens of black spots overlaid on a mosaic of pale blue and yellow lines. Their helmets, the visors currently opaque, rippled with stylized black and white feathers. Though entirely functional, the Ocelototec Mark Sixteen articulated combat suit contained a simple stealthing technology which allowed the wearer to adjust the surface patterning at will. At the moment, all three Jaguar Knights had their distinctive regimental colors and emblems dialed down—but Helsdon had seen them on military parade in Tenochtitlán itself, and knew they could, with the addition of brilliantly feathered nanomechanical cloaks, shine like the sun itself.

  The officer—there were no obvious markings on his armor to indicate this, but Helsdon had a sense of the Knight from the way he carried himself—surveyed the room. The Jaguar’s gaze settled on the engineer, which made Malcolm swallow nervously. Not good; someone has realized I’m the “survivor.”

  “The Prince Imperial will speak with you,” the officer declared, his voice underlain by a vocoder-generated growl.

  A firm grip helped him to his feet and down the hall. I guess consent isn’t required. Wisely Helsdon made no protest, simply following along where directed. Any instinct to resist had been suppressed by his tremendous weariness. A tubecar put him and his escort at the main shuttle bay, which had previously been the Calexico’s cargo loading hangar. A mint-new shuttle was standing by, hull glittering with protostellar debris. He got a good look at the crest above the hatchway as he was hustled inside. The Imperial household! They did mean “the Prince.” Saint Ebba the Younger, preserve me from the attention of On High.

  * * *

  The shuttle drifted into a boat-bay on the side of the Tlemitl which could have swallowed the Calexico whole. The descent of the passenger boat to the landing stage seemed almost ludicrous to Helsdon as he watched acres of freshly constructed pressure wall roll past the porthole. Even the seats on the shuttle were so new they squeaked. Professional curiosity drove him to eyeball the curve of the air intakes, and peer out at the flaps and lifting surfaces on the shuttle wing.
/>   Two versions up, at least, from the last of these Tegus models I worked on.

  Inside the super-dreadnaught, he was struck by the emptiness of the passages. An SDN usually carried an enormous complement; freighting a Fleet Command staff, whole embassies, trade delegations, and a full regiment of marines. But here—as he and his escorts zipped along on a g-sled—most of the offices, or spaces for shops, were empty.

  Only a combat crew aboard, he guessed. At one point they passed a pair of technicians rooting around in a series of access panels in an adjacent hallway. Still doing the fit and finish work. So this heavyweight has been rushed into service.

  The sled passed through two checkpoints—both manned by more Jaguar Knights—and finally they found themselves in a tenanted precinct. Officers, technicians, and staff orderlies filled the passages, each moving with the kind of swift direction which implied a task of tremendous importance.

  They dismounted in a double-height corridor lined with enormous mural-sized v-panes.

  On the left side, as Helsdon hurried past, two towering volcanoes—the doomed lovers Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl—loomed over a vast, bowl-like city drowned in night. But so great was the glow of lights and fires and refineries in the valley that it seemed filled with rivers of molten gold. Beyond the dim outline of the two peaks, the night sky was split by the blazing white-hot descent of an enormous meteor, which would in just moments smash into the plain of Tlaxcallan a hundred kilometers to the east. The streaking fire-trails of thousands of anti-ballistic missiles—launched by the Méxica in a vain hope to destroy the incoming weapon—were frail in comparison.

  That Blow—and even Helsdon, raised on a colony world far from the Center knew the story, which was a foundation stone of Imperial mythology—would shatter the neighboring province, triggering massive earthquakes which would level most of Imperial Tenochtitlán, and inspire a new ice age due to the dust thrown into the upper atmosphere. But all of this would not fatally wound the Empire and, indeed, the Méxica reaction to the attack would carry their armies victoriously to every corner of the globe.

  Curiously, Helsdon could not—in his half-addled state—recall the name of the adversary who had struck the Blow. Must have been one of the European powers—was it Denmark? I cannot remember.

  To the right, the mural panels were dark, showing only intermittent static and a wandering glyph indicating the v-server attached to them had suffered some kind of file corruption problem.

  At the end of the hall, a massive, blocky stone gate stood closed. Each door post was formed in the shape of a jaguar standing on its hind legs, paws raised, talons unsheathed. The lintel was formed of a line of squared-off skulls, deep-set eye sockets filled with shadow. As the engineer approached, one of the jaguar heads swiveled towards him—and even after serving in the Fleet for nearly ten years, the sight still raised the hackles on the back of his neck—and the feline eyes burned a deep, lambent yellow for a moment. Both Knights paused, and their firm grip on Helsdon’s shoulders held him in place while they were scanned. Then the gate swung open, stone valves grinding ominously. The Ocelotl officer stepped inside, muttered something, and then gestured for Helsdon to enter.

  The engineer presumed such quarters would be filled with every kind of luxury. But instead, he found himself facing a slim, dark-haired, copper-skinned young man with perfectly regular features, in a room stacked with shipping crates and a series of oddly decorated free-standing screens. The young man was sitting on the edge of a table heaped with a fortune in papers and real books. On him, Fleet dress whites seemed more than a uniform, they seemed to glow under the strip lights in the ceiling, and the contrast with his dark skin was very striking. In full court regalia, an Imperial Prince would be almost invisible under the weight of a massive, jeweled feather-cloak and pendants and torques of gold.

  But here, in this jumbled room, he exuded an effortless, almost irresistible authority. Only one dissonance caught at Malcolm’s attention.

  He seems … anachronistic, Helsdon thought. Where are all of his electronics? The Prince did not wear a medband or comm bracelet, or even an earbug. There was a velour-skinned sofa, but no chairs and no bed. A strange, not-entirely-unpleasant odor of musk and tobacco hung in the air. The engineer was frankly puzzled when he knelt before the Prince. As he did, he noticed the Jaguars had remained outside, leaving him—apparently—alone with the young man. He was no expert on court ritual and etiquette, but it seemed rash to let one slightly deranged Fleet kika-no within arm’s reach of the Emperor’s son. But he must be well armed of himself. Aren’t the Imperial Family supposed to be superhuman?

  “Tlatocapilli—great lord, son of the Light of the World—how may I—”

  “Get up,” Xochitl snapped irritably. “Tell us—tell me—what you saw and how you survived.”

  Helsdon breathed in deeply. This isn’t the real thing, it’s only a story about what happened to another person. Just another debriefing. Nothing can reach me here.

  “Light of Heaven, I was going EVA to repair a thermocouple relay,” he began.

  He related the momentary glimpse of the “blurred thread” which cut Calexico in half, leading to so many deaths, and then the long desperate struggle to stay alive in the wreck of the destroyer. Eventually—and by this time his voice was hoarse—another Imperial Scout ship had arrived and recovered him.

  When Helsdon finished, he found himself rubbing his hands on his trousers. Why do they sweat so much? Then he stood in the awkward silence, trying to focus on the Prince. The room had darkened into night cycle as he’d talked, and now Xochitl was only a vague shape, his light-colored mantle a lesser shadow in the gloom.

  “Thank you, Engineer Second.” Xochitl stood up slowly.

  Wish I could see his face better. Didn’t he believe me?

  Xochitl spoke to the air: “Kikan-shi Helsdon is ready to return to the research station.”

  Helsdon’s mind—which seemed oddly fogged—cleared at the thought of returning to work. Now there it is again. A sound like a tubercular breathing; such sharp, short gasps. Where is it coming from?

  But then the Jaguars entered and escorted him, gently this time, away.

  In the darkness, when the door had closed, Xochitl threw himself down on the sofa and passed his hand over a side-lamp. A dull, orange-tinted glow sprang up and the Prince raised an eyebrow questioningly at the largest of the screens at the back of the room. A pair of lambent, angular eyes gleamed back at him.

  “Satisfactory, Esteemed?” Xochitl strove to put the proper deference into his voice, but knew in his heart there was only truculence and barely suppressed anger in the words. “Or shall I interview another?”

  THE NANIWA

  The lift dinged politely and a battle-steel hatch cycled open, revealing the semicircle of Command. Koshō stepped onto the bridge feeling tense and unsettled. She rolled a heavy, Fleet-style data crystal between her fingers, her expression distant. Hadeishi was close in her thoughts, but not as she often heard his voice—relating advice or giving orders in the midst of battle—rather with new appreciation for the compromises he had made while commanding the Cornuelle.

  “Transferring ship authority, Chu-sa,” Oc Chac said, switching the command codes from his console to hers.

  “Accepted, Sho-sa,” she replied absently, settling into her shockchair. Susan held up the crystal again and it gleamed with the reflection of dozens of v-displays circling the deck. She had never felt comfortable with the kinds of company Hadeishi had kept, or the odd side diversions he would turn the light cruiser to. Many of those excursions—too many, really—had been at the behest of shadowy figures like Green Hummingbird, who was now sitting in a cabin on deck six, using her water for a shower and eating food from her dispenser system.

  I forced the terms of the trade, so why do I feel I’m the one carrying home a koku of grass seed?

  “Sho-sa?” She beckoned the XO over. “Load this into the navigation system, but do not replicate the data
onto the squadron ’net.”

  “Hai, kyo!” Oc Chac took the crystal gingerly, but then he stopped, trying to formulate a properly deferential question.

  “It is a copy of the Korkunov telemetry, Sho-sa. Recovered from a message drone launched by the Calexico only moments before she was destroyed.” Susan raised a warning hand as the Mayan’s face twitched with surprise. “We are lucky to have the data, but do not question how the goat got into the garden.”

  Oc Chac nodded slowly, and then ventured to say, “Kyo, an access request has been received from a group of visitors on six—with your chop, Chu-sa. Should it be approved?”

  Susan nodded, though a nagging feeling of being cheated remained.

  Doggedly, Oc Chac pressed on: “Kyo … this ship we captured, the Moulins, her crew is to be kept in the brig, secured? But not the, ah, guests in the cabin on six?”

  “Even so, Sho-sa.”

  “Hai, kyo! I’ll have this data loaded immediately.”

  “Excellent. Run it as an overlay in the well. I want to see a comparison with the plot provided by the Mirror scientists.”

  Then she leaned back in her chair, fist pressed to her chin. We’ll have a better picture of this Barrier, but I’m going against the spirit of the operational orders in taking a nauallis aboard in the midst of a Mirror obsidian-op. The Chu-sa never seemed to mind, she thought, feeling a pang at the memory of Hadeishi sitting forlorn and directionless in the fumeiyo-ie on Toroson. Then her expression hardened. And so my sensei lost his ship and nearly his entire crew. And now we are forever apart.

  Oc Chac returned from one of the operations consoles, hands clasped behind his back.

  “New orders have come from squadron, Chu-sa. The Tlemitl has taken over battle-cast control.”

  Koshō lifted one eyebrow. “The whole matrix? Squadron-level targeting and countermeasures? Did this come from Chu-so Xocoyotl or from the Prince?”

  “Everything, kyo, is now routing through the Firearrow. The Tokiwa is lead for the battle-cruiser squadron, but the Flag has switched ships. Prince Xochitl has also ordered all probes presently monitoring the Pinhole to be withdrawn.”