“I no longer travel the sword-saint’s road,” Musashi croaked, his voice raspy from disuse. He indicated a small stone statue of the Buddha with a seated bow. “I no longer seek conflict in the world of men. Ieyasu and I strove to overthrow the Yuan seven years ago, and failed utterly. Now he is dead and I have found sanctuary here on Mount Iwato. Only the Dokkodo remains.” He gestured to a series of scrolls sitting on a small side table.
Eldest glanced sidelong at Squeaker’s twin, who was standing in the doorway, keeping watch.
“What if the Emperor summoned you, called you forth to do battle with the invaders? Would you deny him, foreswear your duty to all Nippon?”
Musashi shook his head sadly. “The last Emperor fell at Nara generations ago.”
“Not so.” The third Sister turned in the doorway. “The Imperial line is sustained even today. Would the plea of the Son of Heaven move you to action?”
The hermit fell silent, eyes downcast, for a long time. When he looked up, at last, the sunset was gilding the rough-hewn timbers of his hut. “It would.”
The third Sister extended his hand. “Then stir yourself, Musashi Miyamoto, Nippon calls you.”
“Attention the bridge,” Hadeishi announced, standing up. The low murmur in the circular room died away. The regular watch had swollen to include the leaders of the various ships’ crews rescued from the abyss. Mitsuharu looked about slowly, considering each man and woman as though seeing them for the first time. He stepped to the center of the bridge, where Lovelace had rigged up a holocast projection in place of the old-fashioned plotting display which had formerly served the Kader. It’s no threatwell, Hadeishi thought, but will do for now. He marked off the area of interest with his stylus. A series of vector tracks appeared in the ’cast.
“The surtu, as the Khaiden name their hunting pack, has dispersed over the last forty-eight hours.” Mitsuharu’s tone was crisp. “Four of their Hayalet -class battleships remain at the entrance to the Pinhole. They are supported by six destroyers, several tenders, and what seems from message traffic to be a troop ship. It is difficult to keep track of their movements under the current conditions, but I would hazard they are making a serious attempt to chart the outlines of the aperture. The other surviving ships have scattered to police the battleground, and to search along the periphery of the Barrier for another way through.” The corners of his eyes tightened minutely. “One of their prey-an Imperial battle-cruiser of the Provincial -class-has escaped the battle by navigating through the Barrier itself.”
“How?” An officer from the Mace blurted without thinking. “Our sensors can’t even…”
“We do not know how,” Hadeishi said quietly. “But the telemetry we’ve deciphered from this ship indicates they did so. It is also possible that the battle-cruiser took aboard at least one evac capsule from the super-dreadnaught which was destroyed in the Pinhole itself-”
“Surely your Prince Xochitl left the field of battle in haste, then!” De Molay said loudly, drawing a round of glares from the Imperials seated or standing around her.
Hadeishi continued, unperturbed. “Speculating about who may have lived or died is useless.
“And we are not concerned with the Prince.” The stylus in his hand circumscribed a constellation of glowing dots on the plotting board. “There are sixteen evac capsules from the Tlemitl hiding in the sensor-shadow of the dreadnaught’s hulk. We are going to go in and get them out.” A smile lit his face for a moment. “And if some Khaiden ships fall afoul of our passage, well then-all the better.”
“Impossible,” breathed an ensign, now the sole officer remaining from the Gladius. “We haven’t a third the weight of a single Hayalet ! We’ll be shot to bits within moments of our initial missile salvo!”
“Therefore,” Hadeishi said, turning and surveying them all, “we will not attack until it is too late for them to respond. And preferably, we will not attack at all while achieving our goal.”
The Imperial officers stared at him in confusion. Then there was a babble of questions.
“Show us,” De Molay said loudly. That quieted the group. Her seamed old face showed skepticism, but Hadeishi saw that her eyes were merry with anticipation. “Show us what you plan to do, Chu-sa.”
The Moulins crept forward through the dark, exterior floods stabbing into a colossal empty space. Hints of enormous structures wreathed in shadow ghosted by on either side. On the bridge, Gretchen had her eyes half closed, fingers drifting lightly across her console. The oliohuiqui she’d taken was burning at the back of her throat, and the flood of data populating her v-displays had coalesced in her perception, becoming a fluid thing, shifting and deforming with each passing moment, as more and more information flowed into the array of comps. Dozens of passageways branched off in all directions as they moved, but only one thread through the maze seemed proper to her. If pressed, she would have said the volume of the channel they were following felt the most used, though nothing obvious about the ranks of triliths they passed would have indicated this.
“Six hundred k from the entrance now,” the pilot said quietly. “How deep are we g-”
“As deep as necessary,” Xochitl snapped. His mood, if possible, had worsened while sitting in the darkness at the back of the bridge. He doesn’t like it that Europeans are handling the ship. Gretchen clearly felt the nervous tension throbbing in the Prince, as though a wire were being twisted tighter and tighter around some fulcrum. His discomfort was now beginning to cause her physical pain.
Xochitl stirred, glaring accusingly at Anderssen. “We have passed several hundred thousand openings into the structure, Swede. Why haven’t we stopped?”
Though her attention was focused far from the Prince, after a lengthy pause Gretchen remembered to reply: “None of them are suitable.”
“How so?” The Prince brought up the internal map of the structure being constructed by the sensors on the Navigator’s console. “We’ve passed numerous secondary openings-are these doors?-large enough for a dreadnaught to enter-how are they not suitable for our entry?”
“They are closed to us,” Gretchen said, attempting to smile reassuringly at him over her shoulder. The resulting expression was almost feral, for a wild, heedless light had come into her face. “We need just the right kind of way in… nothing fancy, Tlatocapilli. That would be dangerous.”
“And you can tell that which is dangerous and that which is not?” His attempt at sarcasm sounded shrill, for his voice was tight with fear.
“We are still alive, aren’t we?” Gretchen turned back to her console. Oh, what is this?
Illuminated by the Moulin ’s running lights, a constellation of new structures emerged from the darkness. Tall pylons ascended from pooled shadow below to disappear into equal indigo above. Between them, another of the structures which seemed to be a portal door had appeared: a triangular shape several hundred meters high, comprised of four smaller triangles. Each of the inner triangles contained a further inverted, and recessed, triangle. This arrangement, unlike many others they had passed, held a darker hue-almost night-black itself, but irregularly mottled.
Anderssen’s console flickered, all of the v-panes abruptly closing and then reopening again. She stiffened, feeling a flood of heat warm her chest, even through the z-suit and the equipment rig. The edges of the analysis displays on the console began to distort, the lettering transforming into the unintelligible glyphs which had overcome the Naniwa ’s navigational system during their transit of the Pinhole.
Uh-oh. Node 3^3 3 is connecting-but it’s not plugged in! Gretchen felt the pattern of her analysis matrices shifting. The pulsing back-and-forth of her comps and storage nodes shaded as well, starting to move faster-much faster than she could follow. Dreading what she might feel, Anderssen slipped her right hand under her jacket, fingertips brushing against the surface of the bronze block. It was very warm and vibrating faintly. She looked down and was stunned to see that a hot, golden glow was shining between her fingers. What the “Anderssen, what is that?” Xochitl had finally noticed the grouping of pylons.