“ Hai, kyo! ”
Stiff beyond measure, Kosho limped through a slow circuit of Command, checking in with each duty station. As she approached Comm, Pucatli popped up with his hand extended. The young Mexica was holding a glass vial filled with a pale rose-colored fluid. “For you, Chu-sa .”
Susan frowned. “An antibiotic?”
“No, no, Chu-sa.” Pucatli grimaced. “Those are poison! What’s bad for microbes can only be bad for people. This is a tincture for the weary, made from the root and flowers of chunuli plants in my mother’s garden. Mix it with very hot water and partake gently.”
Drink it with sayu? Susan converted the near-hysterical laugh that rose in her throat to a polite nod. “Thank you for the kind thought, Chu-i.”
The Khaid destroyer-another classified as Neshter -class by the commercial registry, though Mitsuharu’s practiced eye had already picked out a number of differences between this ship and the Qalak -loomed in the threatwell, its icon surrounded by a constellation of informative graphics.
“Launch signature,” Tocoztic announced suddenly, his voice tight. “Looks like a one-rail sprint missile.” In the ’well, a glowing streak appeared, following the track of the weapon. “Vectors do not overlap.”
Hadeishi had already seen the target and his face stiffened in fury.
“An evac capsule,” De Molay said, a moment later. “We picked up their signal about an hour ago.”
“As did the Khaid,” Mitsuharu bit out with difficulty. “They haven’t a chance.”
The missile icon intersected the capsule’s graphic and both winked out. A quarter-second later, a tiny bright flare appeared on one of the camera displays, and then faded away. Against the slow roil of the dust clouds-all ruddy red, purple, and orange luminescence-the explosion went almost unnoticed.
Hadeishi was motionless, his face in shadow on the darkened bridge, staring at the ’well. And I was unable to do even the slightest thing to save the men aboard.
“She’s turning,” the Thai-i announced into the silence. “We have-we have vector overlap if they hold course.”
The Nisei stirred, forcing his attention back to the ’well and the movement of ships, wreckage, anything else which might affect his tiny command. He rewound the ’well through the last three hours of data, the myriad icons a blur of motion. “They’re into the return leg of their patrol pattern.”
He clicked his teeth, seeing that the intercept solution was very poor for the Wilful. “We’re going to have to go to zero-power and lose steering way, hope they pass over us as wreckage. We’re too close to-”
Tocoztic gave him a sick look. “They’re sure to catch us on active scan-we’re not Imperial, we’re not Khaid-they will know we’re a scavenger that didn’t get caught up in the battle. That fate”-he stabbed a finger at the location of the obliterated capsule-“will be ours!”
“Going dark,” De Molay announced, when Hadeishi failed to respond immediately. Her face drew tight with concentration and Mitsuharu could see that another set of v-panes had appeared on her console. The markings-and he could not see them clearly from his vantage point-did not seem to be formed of human letters.
“Hostile is less than a light-second away,” Tocoztic breathed, sounding anguished. “She’s accelerating. We’re getting side scatter from an active scanning array-”
“There!” The old woman sighed in relief. “Memory still holds true!”
At the same moment, the Wilful ’s engines died and the lights dimmed markedly. The constant vibration of the reactor drew down, and then entirely faded away. Hadeishi watched with intense interest as each on-board system shut down in swift succession. On his console, the myriad v-panes and controls faded away-the threatwell went dark-and the environmental monitors indicated that every compartment had dialed down air circulation and scrubber activity to the absolute minimum. The only activity registered on the shipskin, which was assuming a new aspect-one that Mitsuharu had never seen before. Part of the forward hull was visible in the camera display, which was still active, and there he saw that the hull had deformed into a strange, “fuzzy” configuration, the surface extruding millions of what appeared in close-up to be tiny matte-black cilia.
Truly we have turned into a creature of the abyss!
He gave De Molay a curious glance. “We’re in an absorptive mode?” he asked quietly.
“We are,” she replied with the hint of a smile. Hadeishi hid his reaction, suddenly mindful of Tocoztic and the other Fleet ratings who might be listening down deck. There’s no heat sump on this ship capable of absorbing the impact radiation on the skin. Nothing big enough to swallow our own emissions, not for more than a few seconds. So-what lies behind those closed-off compartments on the Engineering deck? Something to hide us completely?
The thought gave him a chill down the back of his neck.
“Here it comes,” the Thai-i breathed, “we’ll have visual in-”
The Khaid destroyer emerged from a screen of stellar dust, black bulk dwarfing the Wilful, flanks etched with the landing lights outlining her boat-bay doors. On the camera display, Mitsuharu could make out rows of launcher hard-points, the shallow pits of particle beam emitters and point-defense guns. The hypercoil ring to aft and the maneuver drives were arranged in an unfamiliar pattern, but close up the Nisei could guess at her manufacturer. A refitted Megair Vampyre -class light cruiser. Interesting-the Khaid Zosen must have bought her as a hulk and replaced all of the internal systems-the Khaiden body form doesn’t fit very well to the arthropod. Those drives look new, too.
Regardless of her provenance, the destroyer sailed on past, showing every sign of being unaware of their presence. Tocoztic stared at his console, stylus busily tapping away. He checked and double-checked the paltry stream of data available. “Their active scan is pinging right over us!” he whispered loudly.
Suddenly Hadeishi had to suppress a full-on grin; not a proper hint of a smile or a careful mask of command, but a fierce, predatory snarl.
The Khaid rolled on past, and the Wilful shuddered a little as the wash of radiation from her engines pelted the shipskin. Mitsuharu, properly somber again, paid close attention to the status displays from the hull configuration. What excellent engineering, he thought. The emission wave from the enemy radar failed to spike our surface temperature. The drive wake has been absorbed as well. But… how could shipskin cool to relative zero so fast?
The Nisei sat back, nearly overcome with wonder. Then he noticed that the subsonic vibration of the reactor interface had soared up, almost to an audible level. He looked to De Molay in concern, but the old woman just shook her head minutely. Her gray eyes rested steadily on him. For the first time in a long time, Mitsuharu felt nervous, jumpy. A tramp freighter, eh? I am six kinds of a fool.
Tocoztic squirmed in his chair, looking around curiously at the walls. “What’s that weird vibration?”
“Engine phase-transition, Thai-i. Every ship has its own quirks and noises,” Hadeishi replied with deliberate calm as he reviewed his console again. Power output is up 300 percent. But-we’re not leaking heat, the internal temperature is actually cooling… The reason was obvious, but Mitsuharu was having a hard time believing the data before him. Every engineer in the Empire would fall on his sword to bring this secret home. Someone has developed an effective thermodynamic shunt. And it’s working and it’s on this ship, on my ship.
“ Thai-i Tocoztic, eyes on your console, mind on the mission.” Hadeishi’s voice was sharp, ringing with hidden elation. The tone gained the younger officer’s complete attention. “Pilot De Molay, plot a course for the next surviving evac capsule. We still have work to do, even if the Khaid are careless and blind. The next patrol ship may be more attentive.”