Adrenaline flushed her limbs with a quivering, bright energy. The only thing missing was Hadeishi’s voice in her earbug, calm and controlled, his presence radiating a contained focus as he put the ship through her paces. I am alone. Susan felt a tight, stabbing pain in her diaphragm. On the plot, the density of the wrecks was soaring, and Holloway’s brow was dappled with sweat as he maneuvered. Here we go.
Kosho detached a series of v-panes showing the movement of the Khaid battleship towards the Sunflower to her Executive console.
A good six hours for them to reach the artifact, she saw. Long time to stay in this dance.
A shipkiller blew only three compartments away, shredding the Naniwa ’s shipskin and venting a huge gout of atmosphere and flotsam. In Command, the overheads flickered, half the consoles cut out and someone cursed violently as their v-display shorted, spilling smoke globules and hot sparks into the air.
Oc Chac was at the man’s side in an instant, a portable extinguisher spitting foam into the splintered console. “Damage control, this is Main Command, we’ve lost a ’net node and five consoles.”
Susan saw the wreckage occlude the pursuing destroyers as Holloway put them into a jinking curve, fleeing past another of the dead behemoths. “Weapons, tight pattern-rear launchers only-delayed fuse while we’re in scan-shadow.”
“ Hai, kyo! ” Konev cycled his launchers, stylus darting across his console. Preconfigured munitions packages punched outbound, venting from the eight rearward rails at nearly a hundred g’s.
At the same moment, Olin’s voice cut across the Russian’s. “New contact! New contact! Aslan -class cruiser to ventral-range sixty thousand kilometers-enemy is launching now, thirty missile tracks incoming! Impact in eighty seconds!”
“Now, Sho-sa,” Susan said, her voice preternaturally calm. “Now we’re in the brawl.”
Command was awash in confused voices as the last of the evacuation pods was winched into the cargo hold. Hadeishi tapped his med-band, injecting another dose of anti-inflammatory to suppress a spiraling migraine. Five or six conflicting channels of information were vying for his attention, and the low-level confusion amongst his scratch crew kept jarring his attention away from the Khaid battlecast. The enemy had started to frequency-hop, but Lovelace was keeping up, though the translator always seemed to be five or six words behind what he could make out himself.
One of the new officers-his name had escaped Mitsuharu in the latest round of introductions-signaled cargo one was sealed, and the armored partitions were rotating closed over the bay doors. The Chu-sa switched to Cajeme’s team, catching the exhausted-looking Yaqui as they were hauling two corpses from the pod, along with one midshipman who looked like she might live.
“ Nitto-hei -how many pods do we have aboard?”
Cajeme stared back blankly for a moment, then shook himself, saying: “Eleven, kyo, we have eleven.”
“Get them prepped to eject,” Hadeishi said sharply, a hard edge in his voice. “A Weapons team is on their way to you now-there were fifteen thermonukes in munitions storage-I want those pods refitted as fast as you can.”
“ Hai ”-Cajeme wheezed, his face black with carbon from the backwash of the cutter he’d been slinging for the past eighteen hours-“ kyo.”
Mitsuharu turned his attention back to Command, feeling his shoulder blades itching in anticipation. They’re coming… more than one of them. “ Thai-i Tocoztic-any progress on connecting to the Tlemitl ’s sensor array?”
The Islander shook his head, expression mournful. “Nothing, kyo. We’re locked out hard-the Sho-i tried breaking in, but found not a single loose beam.”
Lovelace nodded, looking equally grim. “We found some survivors, kyo. One of the compartments is still intact and-”
“Do they have shipnet access?” Hadeishi cut her off coldly, his mind rotating the problem through every angle he could conceive. “Do they have power? Sensors? Anything?”
The young woman’s face went blank, stung by his tone. “ Chu-sa, they’re on emergency power, but yes-they have ’net access and access to the node in their fragment…”
“Put me through.” Hadeishi turned to the plot, lips a tight, compressed line. “Pilot, are we ready to maneuver?”
Inudo nodded, his face wan with exhaustion. “Drives are hot, Chu-sa, standing by.”
“Survivors on channel sixty-three, kyo,” Lovelace said, her voice far more formal than she’d offered before. Hadeishi wasn’t even aware of the change, his whole attention focused on the wavering, jittery v-pane which popped up on his display. Two z-suited figures were framed in the pickup, a room filled with floating debris behind them.
“This is Mitsuharu Hadeishi, Chu-sa of the Kader. I am your new commanding officer. I need you to open a ’cast feed to my Comms officer- Shoi-i Lovelace-and do everything you can to allow her to relay through your subsystems. Do you understand?”
The sharp, harsh edge to his voice galvanized both men, though he knew they must be running low on air, were probably out of water, and had little chance of surviving even to see another watch pass. A ragged “ Hai, kyo! ” echoed back to him across the circuit. The Nisei officer nodded sharply to his Comms officer. “Get me a sensor feed from the far side of the hulk-there’s another Khaid out there, we need to find it immediately.”
Then he paused, considering the plot for a long, endless three seconds and then-resolving an internal struggle-his stylus sketched out a new maneuvering vector on the plot. “Pilot, get us underway. I want maximum acceleration while holding to this path. Weapons, stand by to engage the enemy. Expect a missile exchange at a blade’s distance.”
Inudo stared at the new vector, then nodded jerkily to himself. “Plotting course, Chu-sa.”
Frowning thunderously, Lovelace stared over at the pilot, whose expression had gelled into a stoic mask. “ Chu-sa…” The Mirror officer caught Hadeishi’s eye, her face filled with raw appeal. “The drive trail from the battle-cruiser is fragmentary now-and the Barrier moves! We couldn’t possibly-”
“We don’t need the Naniwa ’s trace, Sho-i.” Mitsuharu nodded to the plot as the console under his fingertips began to shiver with the engines igniting. “The Khaid fleet has already blazed the trail for us-their emissions will be impossible to miss.”
“Underway, kyo.” Inudo’s report was mechanical. “Building v-we’ll be out of the shadow of the Tlemitl in five-four-three-two-”
“Contact, kyo! We have contact!” Tocoztic’s blurt of alarm overrode the Pilot. “Bearing eleven high, she’s massing like a battleship! Cast analysis says she’s the Kukumav!”
The noise level in Command jolted upward, but now Hadeishi felt everything extraneous-even the joyful howl from the Khaid channel-drop away. “Weapons-launch everything you have, dead on. Pilot-get us out of here!”
The cruiser’s hull shuddered, groaning as the drives kicked up to all nodes combusting full-bore and the launch rails and hardpoints belched a cloud of shipkillers and a hammering stream of kinetic warheads. Tocoztic’s countermeasures display was already alight with the incoming Khaid missile storm, which outmassed theirs by five or six to one.
“Cast relay active, Chu-sa!” Lovelace’s fingers were flying across her panel, the tik-tik-tik of her styli a seamless stream, like the clicking of spinning gears. “We’re synching to the Tlemitl -wait one, wait one-she needs authorization!”
A fresh v-pane popped up on Hadeishi’s console, showing the Fleet authentication interface. Cursing to himself-there was no chance the Tlemitl would have the authorization glyph cluster for a cashiered reserve officer-Mitsuharu framed his face in the pickup window, got a green rectangle and then keyed his sequence. The v-pane flickered, showing an IDENTITY REJECTED message for a fraction of a second, and then suddenly blanked. In its place, an oblong glyph of intertwining roses appeared, holding a black-on-white flame. Hadeishi felt a shock of recognition, though he’d only seen the icon once before, while another was manipulating a ring-zero system.