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  She squared her shoulders, regarding the older man with a stern expression. He was struggling to frame a response.

  “ Sho-sa, we have sixteen hours to finish loading supplies and get underway. The rest of the squadron is already formed up off Europa-two more battle-cruisers in Tokiwa and Asama, with the heavy cruisers Axe, Gladius, Falchion, and Mace as escorts for the Fleet tender Hanuman and the science platforms Fiske and Eldredge. They’re our real purpose, I expect.”

  Chac let out a long, sober hiss of dismay.

  “The Mirror, kyo.”

  Kosho lifted one eyebrow. The battle-group manifest was terse but could not disguise the throw-weight surrounding the two exploration ships. “What suggests this?”

  “Sealed orders, Chu – sa, we’ve had no real-time 3-v onto the stellarcast in weeks. No regular mail coming or going. All incoming manifests under crypt, but you’re doubled on every kind of ration, repair-part, and munitions they can pack in. Be gone…” The Mayan pursed his lips, calculating stowage. “At least nine months.”

  “Back of beyond…” Susan smiled tightly, tapping her own orders packet. “Stepping out into the big dark.”

  “A bad omen, kyo,” Chac growled, “a very poor precedent. The festival of Mictecacihuatl is underway…”

  “Prove them wrong, Sho-sa. Dispel this apprehension.” She paused minutely. “Put on a brave face!”

  ***

  Two days later, with her comm-panel singed by a vitriolic series of messages from her commander, Chu-sho -or Vice Admiral-Xocoyotl, Kosho was on the bridge of the Naniwa as she matched velocity with the rest of the battle-group nearly sixty million kilometers off Europa. One pane of her command comp showed their approach to gradient as a sharply narrowing spike.

  Below her and to one side, Oc Chac was standing behind the two Thai-i on the Navigation boards, gnarled hands clasped behind his back.

  “There’s the go-ahead, kyo,” he announced. Mace and Falchion were in the lead, and both cruisers had cut maneuvering thrust in preparation for transit.

  “They’re not wasting time.” Susan switched to the all-hands channel. “All hands prepare to make gradient. Transit in five minutes. Repeat, transit in five minutes.”

  Susan sat back, her heart steady, looking for a moment upon the golden orb of Jupiter arrayed behind the blue-black of nightside Europa. Where now, she wondered. An ancient jisei crossed her mind as the whine of the main coil began to shudder through the decking, lifting the fine hairs on her arms and making her inner ear sing in counterpoint.

  Rise, let us go- along the path lies the clear dew.

  The Wilful

  Hadeishi woke, feeling the ship drop from transit with a twisting sensation. Almost immediately a subsystem somewhere in the ceiling kicked into operation. With a frown he realized that a capacitor was discharging at sharp, staccato intervals. Transit shielding is taking a hit; he thought and swung down easily from the hammock. His boots, a heavy jacket he’d scrounged, and his tool belt peeled off the wall easily enough. Out of habit, he tugged at the bolt cutters, hand-torch, welding arc, and other useful items on the belt. All were secure. Though the ship was under acceleration and there was gravity of a sort, he’d spent too many long-suffering hours as a cadet to trust even Fleet g-decking.

  He padded to the engineering boards in the outer room and ran through a quick checklist.

  We’re running hot, he saw, and tapped open a series of v-panes showing exterior telemetry. There was only one hull camera patched through to Engineering-which was odd of itself-and it revealed only a confused roil of dust clouds shot with intermittent points of reddish light. But the shielding monitors were in constant motion, registering thousands of impacts a second. Hadeishi frowned and his stylus-dug out of a crevice behind the main comp panel-skittered quickly across the control surface. Two more capacitors dropped into the circuit, and the secondary fusion pump shivered awake.

  “Captain didn’t ask for that,” growled a voice at his shoulder. Hadeishi nodded, feeling Azulcay’s scrutiny hot on his neck. “What are you thinking?”

  “In protostellar debris like this,” Mitsuharu said, his voice level and unconcerned, “sensor reaction times degrade-sometimes masking something more massive behind lesser dust. The shielding control relays would have tried to bring more capacity on-line-but by then, we might have lost deflection… and even if the deflectors snapped back in time to push aside something big…”

  “We’d already be punched full of a thousand little holes.” The engineer grunted in agreement and then-with a grudging air-went through his own checklist on the panels. Hadeishi stepped away, keeping a polite distance, and took a moment to make sure his boots were strapped tight and all of the tools in his belt were in place.

  When he looked up, Azulcay was peering curiously at the video feeds, one olive-skinned hand scratching at his tight, curly beard. “What is this place?” The Marocain tapped the v-pane with a ragged fingernail. “Can we run for long in this much debris?”

  “Depends on how fast the captain tries to go,” Mitsuharu said quietly. “May I?”

  The man nodded, and Hadeishi folded most of the v-panes away, replacing them with a large single pane containing the camera feed surrounded by a constellation of smaller displays showing hit rates and the status of the various shielding nodes on the outer hull. For some time he scrutinized the ocean of dimly lighted debris streaming alongside as the Wilful pressed onward. Thrust rates from the engines seemed to indicate the captain was pressing a hard course. The dust thickened as they watched, showing whorls and patterns in the fitful light.

  Mitsuharu weighed the time since last they had passed an Imperial navigation beacon. Out of range of Search and Rescue, I think. One of the sensor panels dinged quietly, warning of scattered asteroidal fragments in the murk. The ship shifted course minutely and the engineer let out a soft whistle.

  “Someone upstairs is paying attention… but we’d better get ready for damage con-”

  The comp displays on the main panel wavered, blinked twice, and went dark. The engineer cursed fluently in Norman, then jerked a frayed power cable from its socket in the back of the board. “Gimme those spacers and a meter probe.”

  Hadeishi had the tools in hand already, and he hid a smile at how quickly the action had become second nature. For all his faults, Azulcay knew far more about the Wilful ’s systems than anyone else. The Wilful ’s mix of systems were not up to Fleet standard, and they made a constantly mutating puzzle to unravel.

  “There!” The Marocain scrambled up from behind the console as the screen flickered to life again, revealing even an ever-thicker murk, now glowing in long striated bands with the light of some distant, unseen star. “Damn, it’s worse.”

  Mitsuharu nodded, though he noted the engineer did not open a comm channel to the bridge, or issue any kind of warning to the captain. Interesting, he wondered. His faith in the command staff is remarkable. In this murk, I would have my damage control crews in z-suits and waiting in the airlocks to go hullside… The paucity of data irritated him immensely, but there was only a single, shielded comm run connecting the engineering spaces to the bridge. One camera, one shipnet conduit… we’re blind down here. Still, I should “What the hell! We’re right on a moon.” Even as the Marocain spoke, the rumble of the maneuvering drive hiccupped into a lower pitch. “That’s orbit. To stations!”

  Mitsuharu immediately took his place at the secondary console. It was the “station” he had appropriated from the beginning, giving him a reasonable view of the engineer’s panel and control of some useful secondary systems. A moon, he saw, but without a planet or star in reasonable distance. Only a dim glow illuminated the indistinct sphere. One could imagine ice-shrouded peaks piercing the roughened surface, but without better sensors it looked dimply red-purple, like the passing boulders.

  “Looks like a beat-up billiard ball,” Azulcay muttered. He looked curiously at Hadeishi. “Where’s the solar system? There’s no proper star in senso
r range.”

  “Gravitational eddies could form a moon from stellar debris without forcing an orbit.” Mitsuharu shrugged. “Or the star could have lost fuel millions of years ago… who could say?”

  “See if you can get a read on…” The engineer stopped, listening.

  Hadeishi heard the sound, too, and reflexively hit the ALERT glyph on his control pane.

  “Explosions. Coming our…”

  The alarm began to blare, but the wailing noise did not drown out a succession of dull, heavy thuds.

  “We are attacked.” Who? I wonder. Perhaps Kryg’nth? A dull whoomp came from the direction of the nearest loading bay. Something dark and jagged flickered across the camera pickup before the entire control console died again with a massive thud that made the flooring shake. All the loading bays.

  “We’re boarded,” cursed the Marocain.

  It wasn’t a question. Hadeishi was already sealing up his z-suit as Azulcay fumbled with his. The feeling of the suit gelling around his neck and face brought back a thousand memories. Wind was rattling the bamboo, making the surface of the stream flowing past at Musashi’s feet sparkle with tiny wavelets. A series of mossy boulders made an uneasy path to the far side. Kiyohara was poised on the largest of them, his nodachi slung insolently across his massive shoulders. “Come then,” the brigand shouted, “unsheath your famous blade, King of Swordsmen!” Behind him, on the far bank, the sally drew a raucous laugh from the dozens of ronin gathered there.

  “Gun locker code?” Hadeishi was at the armored cabinet, but the battle-steel door was properly secured. The engineer nodded, his face paling. Despite obvious fear, his fingers were steady enough to punch in the authorization code and the gray metal doors swung aside to reveal a brace of shipguns and two bandoliers of ammunition.

  “Pretty light,” Mitsuharu muttered, pulling a Bloem-Voss TK6 from the padded cradle. The civilian weapon only carried a single kind of round, a ship-safe flechette, and lacked a grenade launcher or a thermal sight. The Nisei had the bandolier over his shoulder and secured, with the gun tucked under his arm and lanyard snugged to his tool belt before the engineer had even managed to get the ammunition and snub-nosed rifle out of the cabinet.

  “Let me,” ordered the Nisei, quickly righting the civilian’s gear. “Follow me and shoot at anything you don’t recognize. But, please, not the back of my head.” The proper helmet for the z-suit slid down over Hadeishi’s brow and he locked the neckring with a practiced twist of his fingers.

  ***

  A moment later, Mitsuharu eased out into the main corridor connecting the cargo bays to the shipcore. The overhead lights were flickering on and off as something interfered with environmental power, so he tripped the nearest panel and killed them entirely. Azulcay’s breathing was harsh and fast in his ear.

  “What’s-” Two crewmen bolted down the passageway towards them, followed immediately by a stabbing flare of gunfire. One of the spacers staggered and spun around, crashing into a wall. The other threw himself down, caught on the nonskid decking, and scrambled past them on hands and knees. Behind the gun-flashes, five or six bulky figures advanced at a quick pace, the muzzle of the leader’s gun glowing like a hot star in the gloom.

  The sideways, skittering approach of the invaders told the Nisei all he needed to know about the enemy which had overtaken them. Khaiden, he thought, a brief flash of memory bringing back visions of a bulky starship breaking apart under the impact of three well-placed shipkillers. The Cornuelle had taken severe structural damage in that affray, but shipboard losses had been light. We were lucky, part of his mind commented as he moved. They thought we were too small to Hadeishi squeezed off a burst just low of the enemy gun in his sights, then darted aside into the corridor, his shipgun pointed at the floor. Answering fire raked the wall, shredding the paneling and sending the Marocain into the nearest room with a yell. One of the Khaiden was down, and the others rushed forward. Mitsuharu stepped in, emptied the rest of his clip into the nearest hostile at point-blank range and then darted past, trying to burst past the following two in the darkness.

  The roar of Imperial guns filled the corridor behind him as the other crewman and the engineer opened up. Flechettes hissed past, spattering from his armor and Mitsuharu felt something clip his shoulder. He stumbled, thrown off balance and into the last of the Khaiden boarders.

  The creature towered over the slightly built Nisei by at least a meter and its shipgun lashed out hard, butt-first, to slam into Hadeishi’s faceplate. The tempered glassite rang with a clear, bell-like tone and Mitsuharu was thrown to the decking. Teeth clenched, he snatched a fresh clip from the bandolier and snapped open the Bloem-Voss’ cartridge bay-then froze, the glowing bore of a Khaiden zmetgun jammed hard into his faceplate. Smoke curled across his vision and the glassite popped with the heat. Hadeishi groped for a suitable koan. No time left, he thought sadly. For a proper parting.

  The Khaiden kicked the human’s shipgun away, and then wrenched the bandolier from his shoulder.

  Ah, Mitsuharu realized with dismay. They do prize technicians-a life of servitude awaits…

  ***

  With two of the enemy in close proximity, there was nothing to be done but clasp both hands behind his back and feel the bite of a heavy pair of steel cuffs through the z-suit gel. Hadeishi kept his eyes lowered as the Khaiden dragged him down the corridor past the bodies of Azulcay and the other starman. The Marocain’s face was invisible behind shattered glassite coated with congealing blood. The Khaiden in front of him kicked the corpses aside, ignoring their tools and comm bands.

  They are in a hurry, they haven’t taken my tool belt. Mitsuharu hurried along between the two invaders, chin tucked to chest, trying to see anything he could out of the corners of his eyes. The shipcore was swarming with the enemy, most in battle armor-the usual grab-bag of stolen equipment-but some were kitted out in dark blue z-suits with a gold-colored icon of some kind of hunting bird. The tight, blocky script on the sides of their helmets was hard to read, but Hadeishi thought it might be something like Qalak, or Khaerak. Those are custom-fitted uniforms, he realized with a little chill shock. He did not remember ever seeing a Khaiden raider sporting standardized equipment, much less uniforms or heraldry.

  Mitsuharu was herded up the shipcore, following a swing-line with three other crewmen from the Wilful, and then into a cross-corridor marked with heavy yellow stripes warning of environment change ahead. The port, forehull airlock, he guessed. They had passed several more squads of Khaiden, and now he was thinking the dark-blue z-suits were officers. The boarding parties-the equivalent of the Fleet marines-showed little standardization in their arms, armor, or personal gear. That’s business as usual…

  At the entrance to the airlock, he stopped abruptly as the lead guard jammed the other prisoners against the wall without warning. Four Khaiden jetted past, z-suit maneuvering jets spitting exhaust, with two more of their fellows on litters between them. Still keeping his head bowed, Hadeishi smiled tightly. That little gun did some good.

  Ahead, the airlock cycled open, sending a gust of damp, hot air into the corridor. The medical party disappeared through without a pause. Mitsuharu weighed his chances, but then the guard behind him was pushing him forward. They passed a cross-corridor leading upship and for the first time Hadeishi caught a glimpse of the command deck. There was a drift of corpses-all of them apparently human-pinned against one wall with a net of sprayfoam. More of the dark-blue-suited Khaiden were busy at the consoles. The doors were pitted with thousands of tiny sparkling blemishes where shipgun flechettes had impacted.

  Fierce smugglers in these parts, he thought, seeing a cloud of tiny ruby-colored droplets drifting in the hatchway. Then the momentary vision was gone, and the airlock was cycling around them. Hadeishi tensed, feeling the hot, humid air of a Khaiden ship wash over him.

  The Qalak, then, he thought. Into the belly of the carrion bird.

  The guard jammed him in the back with the muzzle of a tribarrel,
pushing him forward, and as they passed into the dull, redlit space beyond, his earbug cycled frequency-losing contact with the Wilful ’s shipnet-and for just a moment, before an encrypter kicked in, he caught a burst of Khadesh.

  “-blood-drinking Maltese! A pestilence upon their-!”

  The Naniwa

  In the Kuub

  Kosho sat easily in the captain’s chair, one leg crossed over the other, comp control surfaces arrayed to the left to allow an unobstructed view of the engineering stations on her right. Midafternoon watch was nearly half over and there were crewmen at every station. The threatwell forming the center of Command was filled with light-the hard diamonds of the battle-group and a contorted maze of filaments representing the dust clouds they had been passing through for the last three days.

  On her central board, the transit shielding status displays were flickering crimson and amber much like the fluttering of hummingbird wings-nearly too swift for the eye to follow. One of the graphics surged into red, and then scarlet, and a soft ding-ding sounded. Susan looked up from the readiness reports filling her displays and frowned, a sharp crease splitting her forehead.

  Gravitational densities were fluctuating in an uncomfortable way, causing the protostellar debris to congeal in ever-moving eddies. The Naniwa ’s newly installed deflectors were easily shrugging aside the constant stream of impacts, but she was beginning to worry about the other smaller, older, ships in the convoy. At present the combat elements made a widely dispersed globe around the Fiske, Eldredge, and Hanuman. The squadron was currently arrayed to prevent wake overlap and further damage to the smaller ships following the heavy warships.

  Kosho brushed the readiness reports closed with a flick of her wrist, then keyed into battlecast with her stylus.

  After a few minutes of considering telemetry from the noncombatants, she tapped her earbug awake and paged Engineering.