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  The cable of tension in Susan’s stomach bent over on itself, wire grating against wire.

  “The Naniwa, I hope,” Mitsuharu ventured, recalling a dim memory. “She should be out of trials by now … did they hold her for you?”

  Koshō nodded and felt a sharp pain in her gut, as though the imaginary cable had frayed past breaking and steel wires spun loose to stab into her flesh. “They did. She is waiting at Jupiter for me right now.”

  There was the ghost of a smile on Hadeishi’s lips. “She is a fast ship, Susan, new and bold … tough for her size, but still no dreadnaught! I pulled her specs months ago. A sprinter she is, not a plow horse, not a charger … you’ll need to keep her dancing in the hot of it—no standing toe to toe—not with the armor she lifts. In and out, missile-work and raids…” The momentary surge of energy failed, and his eyes grew dull again. “You’ll do well … a Main Fleet posting, I’d wager … something where you’ll be seen, noticed.…”

  Where my family connections can lift me up, Koshō thought bitterly as he fell silent. Where my advantage of birth can show its strength. Where the son of a violin-maker and a shop clerk would not even be accorded the time of day by his fellow officers.

  “Chu-sa—”

  “Say nothing, Sho-sa. Say nothing.”

  “No. You are the finest combat commander I’ve ever met. All of my skill springs from your example. You will be wasted on the List, waiting for some … some scow to need a driver. Let me…” She struggled to frame the proper words, failed, and blurted out: “Enter my service, Sensei. You’ve the heart of a samurai; let me make you one in truth. Then you will command a ship again! Come with me—”

  Hadeishi stiffened, almost recoiled, and a quick play of emotions on his agile face exposed—just for an instant—astonishment and then a stunning grief shown by suddenly dead eyes and a waxy tone to his flesh.

  “Sensei,” he whispered, almost too faintly for her to hear. “Your samurai. This is how you see me?”

  “Hai!” she said, overcome with embarrassment, and bowed so deeply in apology her forehead brushed the mat. “Please, you mustn’t lose hope. I can—”

  “No, thank you,” Hadeishi said faintly, staring at her as though an apparition had risen through the gleaming floor, a yakka-goblin out of legend to torment him and lay bare every scar carried in his heart. “An honest gesture, Sho-sa, but the weight of my failure will only drag your star down into shadow.”

  Susan almost flinched from the icy tone in his voice. She felt short of breath. Koshō blinked, forcing her face back to accustomed impassivity, falling back behind her shield of customary remoteness. “Chu-sa…”

  “You should leave now,” he said coolly. “Your ship is waiting.”

  Entirely unsure of what she’d said to put such abrupt distance between them, Koshō left quietly, gathering up her boots. Outside, the day-program of the garden had advanced into twilight, yielding mist from the streams and pools. The panels far overhead dimmed still further. The twin suns at the core of the Michóacan system were now reduced to sullen pinpoints, no brighter than the other main sequence stars in the sky.

  * * *

  Susan strode into the base’s main departure lounge in a black mood. Riding alone in the tubecar from the Fumeiyo dome she had turned her conversation with Hadeishi through all five directions. He does not wish your charity, Koshō-sana. He will starve and die rather than ask a friend for assistance. Idiot. Three kinds of idiot. No, four kinds!

  But it was a familiar idiocy.

  How many of grandfather’s retainers went the same way? Wasting away, living on less and less, refusing to admit their sons and daughters needed to learn useful skills—would it be so terrible to master a craft? To … to sell goods in the marketplace?

  That Koshō’s grandmother had steered her into a military career—the one paying profession which remained honorable for her caste, though the subject of intense competition—seemed now the most natural thing in the world. An admirable and direct answer to the nagging question that plagued all of the old nobility: How does one pay the rent, when there are no koku of land remaining to till, leasehold, or sell? Changes in Nisei tax law under a succession of canny Diet prime ministers, and the constant pressure of the mercantile classes, had eroded the vast estates of the old families. Susan was sure the Tai-Sho was quite pleased with the outcome. No one can raise and arm men from houses filled with antiques. And the merchants pay their taxes.

  Susan’s pace slowed, eyes drawn to the huge transit board filling the far wall of the lounge. Hundreds of ships were listed, heading in every direction. One of them was hers—a Fleet personnel liner bound for the home system, to Anáhuac, and the massive Akbal yards off Jupiter.

  My first command. My own ship … the dream of every junior officer in the Fleet. For a moment, she felt uneasy, aware of an incipient loneliness, and part of her devoutly wished Hadeishi had accepted her service. I will miss him, but I do not need him to guide my hand.

  Then a half-familiar shape glimpsed from the corner of one eye drew her head around. The general ill-feeling of anger, resentment, and thwarted intent endemic to the passages of the base suddenly had a singular, unmistakably clear focus.

  “Green Hummingbird!” she hissed. Koshō turned on her heel and plunged through a squad of enlisted ratings sprawled on transit couches, the floor around them littered with Mayahuel bottles and patolli gaming mats sprinkled with money and dice sticks, to fetch up before two men—no, one human and one alien—sitting in a quiet corner of the huge, bustling room.

  “What are you doing here?” Susan’s voice was cold.

  The human was holding a package in his hands, something rectangular wrapped in twine and brown paper. He looked up, catching Koshō’s gaze with a pair of green eyes deep as Tuxpan jade, and his polished old mahogany face, etched with tiny scars and sharp wrinkles, expressed nothing more than the most polite interest. “Chu-sa Koshō, a pleasure.”

  “What are you doing here?” A horrible suspicion had formed in her mind the instant she’d set eyes on the old Méxica. He was well known to her—an Imperial nauallis or Judge, of the sort who traveled the backwaters of the Rim, poking and prying into all sorts of dangerous business, showing up at odd places and times, commandeering the Cornuelle or any other Imperial ship on hand as he pleased—he and Hadeishi had some kind of history, for the captain had always been generous, bending rules and regulations with aplomb to accommodate the Judge and his “business.” An Imperial agent, a spy, an assassin, a sorcerer … a walking career disaster.

  “I am waiting for my ship, like everyone else,” Hummingbird said, showing the ghost of a smile, “and catching up with a recent friend.”

  His scarred hand—now empty, the package having disappeared into one of the medium-sized travel cases at his feet—indicated the alien in the opposite chair. Susan spared a glance for the creature—a slight shape with a vaguely humanoid face. Thin, ancient-seeming fingers covered with a close-napped blue-black fur held a chain of beads. Much like Hummingbird, the alien was wearing a hooded mantle over tunic and trousers, this one a faded, mottled green with a dull-colored red cross quartering its chest.

  “Holy one, this is Captain Susan Koshō. Chu-sa, the honored Sra Osá.”

  Koshō bowed politely. “My pleasure, Osá-tzin.”

  Then her whole attention was on Hummingbird again, her face tight with barely repressed anger. “Did you have anything to do with this? With the Tribunal’s compromise? With what happened to us on Jagan?”

  “I had nothing,” the old Méxica said carefully, “to do with the astounding success of the xochiyaotinime in providing Fleet and Army with such a vigorous martial test. And I am very pleased Captain Hadeishi was not forced to satisfy his honor, or that of the Emperor, in some … final way.”

  “Are you?” Koshō managed to keep from curling her lip, all in deference to the old priest watching the two of them with bright, inquisitive eyes. “Then why have you done nothing to help h
im, when he has always rendered you aid—even in defiance of his ordered duty? Is this how the nauallis repay their allies?”

  Hummingbird’s chiseled face tightened. He was rarely challenged by anyone, much less a Fleet officer whose career he could destroy with a comm call. Susan knew this and failed to care. She had never found him intimidating—dangerous, yes, like a redwood viper loose on your command deck—but not a source of fear. Though she would be loath to admit such a thing, the Judge did not exist high enough on the slopes of the Heavenly Mountain to impress her.

  “I have done what I can,” he snapped. “He lives, does he not? He will have a command again, when enough time has passed to dim the memory of his enemies.”

  “He only has such enemies,” Koshō allowed a faint exhalation of disgust, “because of his association with you.”

  The old nauallis became quite still, eyes narrowing, and he seemed to settle into the lounge chair like a mountain finding its footing in the earth. “What would you have of me, child, that Hadeishi would not ask himself? For he has not asked me for aid, though I have offered.”

  Have you? How many visitors has my captain entertained in his empty rooms? How many well-meaning friends has he turned away?

  The admission stilled her angry rush, letting unexpected venom drain from her thoughts.

  “He has to be saved,” she said, controlled once more. “Before he simply fades away.”

  Hummingbird shrugged. “Perhaps you should let him tread his own path?”

  “No.” Koshō fixed him with a steady, considering eye. “He will languish and die if left without purpose. Find him a ship. Put a g-deck under his feet. Give him what he deserves.”

  Hummingbird rubbed the top of his head, which was brown and smooth as a betel-nut. He cast a sideways glance at Sra Osá, whose attention seemed far away, politely ignoring the argument playing out before him, rosary beads clicking one by one through pelted fingers.

  “Arrangements could be made,” the old Méxica allowed with a grimace.

  “Good.” Koshō offered the most minimal bow, glanced up to check the transit board, cursed at the time, and then left in haste.

  The nauallis watched her go, his expression pensive. Hummingbird rubbed the back of his head again, glancing sideways at his wizened companion. “Ah, if only she had a gram of Hadeishi’s native circumspection! He will be hard to replace … but what is done is done. Once the arrow has flown…”

  Sra Osá said nothing, ancient face impassive beneath the woolen hood.

  Hummingbird nodded to himself, some internal judgment weighed and accepted, checked his bag for the twine-wrapped package, then lifted both cases and moved away.

  IN THE KUUB

  ANTISPINWARD OF MÉXICA SPACE, BEYOND THE RIM

  The navigator of the IMN DD-217 Calexico frowned at her console, tapping her throatmike to life: “Chu-sa Rae? We’re at barely thirty-percent see-through in this … combat reaction range is down to less than a light-minute.”

  At the other end of the narrow twenty-meter-long bridge, Captain Rae’s grimace matched the navigator’s wary expression. His destroyer had an upgraded sensor suite to match the two Deep Range scouts for which he was flying gunsight, but in this protostellar murk nothing was working quite to Engineering Board specifications.

  “Are Kiev and Korkunov still in relay? Are we getting a clean telemetry feed?”

  “Hai, kyo,” the navigator responded, watching the particle collision counts on the forward transit deflectors flicker rapidly in and out of redline on her stat panel. “Feed is clean, but we’re edging towards full-stop.”

  “I see it.” Rae had the same readout running on his console. Calexico lacked the new battle shielding Fleet was refitting onto the capital ships, and her transit deflectors—though upgraded to match Survey requirements—were finding it hard going in the heavy interstellar dust endemic to this region of space. “Comm, patch me through to the K and K.”

  Rae waited patiently while his communications officer rounded up the captains of the two Survey ships. Watching the collision counts surging red did not ease his mind. The kuub was notorious for its hazards to navigation. Ancient stellar debris—rumor said the science team was feeling warm about a double-supernova—swirled in a hot murk glowing with radiation from the few suns still embedded in the nebula. There were solid fragments as well, the bits and pieces of planets shattered by the catastrophic detonation, mixed with cometary debris, stray asteroids … a nebula of incredible breadth and density.

  There were hints of a massive gravity sink down at the heart of the region. A black hole, or maybe more than one. The navigator was starting to see queer distortions in the local hyperspace gradient, though they didn’t look anything like the usual fluctuation patterns around a singularity. She tapped her throatmike again.

  “Chu-sa, we’re approaching transit vertex pretty quickly. I think we’d better slow. I’m seeing … wait a minute. Hold one. Hold one.” Her voice turned puzzled.

  Rae, in the midst of offering the Kiev an engineering team to tear down a degraded shield nacelle, caught the change in her voice and his reaction was instantaneous. He slapped the FULL STOP glyph on his main console and barked a confirming order to his crew: “All engines, go to zero-v and prepare to rotate ship! All power to transit shielding, all stations report!”

  Six seconds later, amid the crisp chatter of his department heads reporting their status, the t-relay from Kiev stopped cold.

  In the threatwell directly in front of Rae’s station, the icon representing the Survey ship winked out. A camera pod immediately swiveled towards the event and two seconds later the Chu-sa was watching with gritted teeth as the Kiev vanished in a plume of superheated plasma.

  “Antimatter containment failure—” Rae’s voice was anguished, but then his eyes widened in real horror. The Korkunov vanished from the plot three seconds after its sister ship. A second burst of sunfire stabbed through the dust. His fist slammed the crash button on his shockframe.

  “Full evasion! Guns hot, give me full active scan! Battle stations!”

  A Klaxon blared and every lighting fixture on the ship flashed three times and then shaded into a noticeable red tone. Rae’s shockframe folded around him and a z-helmet lowered and locked tight against his z-suit’s neckring. A groan vibrated from the very air as the destroyer’s main engines flared and the g-decking strained to adjust. The Calexico—which had been about to rotate and slow with main drives—surged forward into a tight turn, its radar and wideband laser sensors emitting a sharp full-spectrum burst to paint the immediate neighborhood.

  Down on the gun deck, a message drone banged away from the ship, thrown free by a magnetic accelerator and immediately darted back along the expedition’s path of entry into the kuub. The drone’s onboard comp was already calculating transit gradients, looking to punch into hyperspace as quickly as possible. A second drone was run out by a suddenly frantic deck crew, ready to launch as soon as the results of the wide-spectrum scan were complete.

  * * *

  A louder alarm was blaring in Engineering, drowning both the warble of the drive coil and the basso drone of the antimatter reactor and its attendant systems. In the number three airlock, Engineer Second Malcolm Helsdon turned in place, his z-suit already sealed, a gear-pack slung over one shoulder and ten meters of heat-exchange thermocouple looped around the other. Through the visor of his suit helmet, he peered back through the closing inner door of the lock, seeing the on-duty crew moving quickly—as they should, he thought—to action stations.

  That heat exchanger is going to have to wait. Helsdon’s habitually serious expression soured.

  The engineer reached out to key the lock override, but the looped thermocouple bound his arm and he paused, shifting his feet, swinging the ungainly package around to his other side, to get a free hand on the control panel. Sweat sprung from his pale forehead, and the usual shag of unkempt brown hair was in his eyes.

  Through the outer door’s blast wi
ndow, the blur of motion was so swift only the faintest afterimage registered in his retinas.

  “What—” was that? The overhead lights in the airlock went out.

  There was an instant of darkness and Helsdon knew, even before the local emergency illumination kicked in, that main power had failed catastrophically. Without a second thought, he threw himself back against the wall opposite the interior lock door and seized hold of a stanchion. As he moved, local g-control failed and he slammed hard into the plasticine panel. The Calexico was at full burn and only the armored resiliency of his Fleet z-suit kept Helsdon from breaking both shoulder and arm. For an instant, all was whirling lights and vertigo.

  A moment later, the engineer steadied himself and ventured to open his eyes.

  Everything was terribly quiet.

  Still alive, he thought, blinking in the dim glow of the emergency lights. The thermocouple had come loose and was drifting in z-g, slowly uncoiling to fill the airlock with dozens of silvery loops. Reactor hasn’t fried me yet.… He kicked to the inner lock window, bracing one leg against the side of the heavy pressure door. Streaks of frost blocked most of the view, but Helsdon had no trouble seeing out.

  Grasping what he saw took a heartbeat, then another … two breaths to realize he wasn’t looking down at an engineering drawing, but rather at the heart of the Calexico herself laid bare. Somehow Engineering was falling away from him—along with the great proportion of the destroyer itself—every deck exposed, every hall and conduit pipe gaping wide to open space. A huge cloud of debris—sheets, kaffe cups, papers, shoes, the stiff bodies of men already dead from hypoxia—spilled from the dying ship.

  Helsdon’s helmet jerked to one side, searching for a point of reference—anything that made sense—and fixed on a section of wall jutting out into his field of view to the left. He could see three-quarters of the hallway—flooring with nonslip decking, dead light fixtures, a guide-panel—and then nothing. Only an impossibly sharp division where the ship simply ended.