Hello, old friend. The voice on the comm channel was so unexpected, yet so familiar, that Mitsuharu could not place it for a seeming eternity. I knew you would come, if anyone could win through, and you would need every tool at your command. The sigil vanished, Hummingbird’s voice faded, and Lovelace drew back at her station in alarm, watching as the Tlemitl ’s fragmentary shipnet unfolded before her on the Comms console.
“We’re in,” Hadeishi barked, watching the intercept solution for the Khaid missile storm wind down towards their destruction. “Lovelace-shift control to Tocoztic-Weapons, you have full control over anything still working in the hulk of the Firearrow -dump it all! Everything! Now!”
The Kader ’s hull shuddered again as the point-defense guns lit up, filling the rapidly shrinking interval between the Khaid shipkillers and the fleeing cruiser with a wall of hyper-accelerated depleted uranium pellets. Bomb-pods began to stutter in sun-bright flares, stabbing at the shipskin with invisible beams of high-energy X-rays. The first wave of shipkillers rode in hot behind the suppressive fire, tearing through the Kader ’s counter-measure.
Hadeishi felt the cruiser heave, hull hammered by a dozen impacts. His status displays flashed wildly, shading red. Dozens of compartment alerts howled as pressure vented from the secondary hull. The primary hull shredded, gouged open by massive explosions.
Tocoztic, his face bone white, stabbed a command glyph on the v-display relayed from the ruin of the Tlemitl. “Dumping ordnance, now!”
All along the flank of the Tlemitl ’s carcass, hard-points woke up, draining local emergency power, and went into remote mode. The launch rails and missile racks surviving the dreadnaught’s dissection cycled open. They could not hurl their weapon loads into battle at high v, but approximately eighty shipkillers separated from the hull and immediately locked onto the Kukumav, which was building velocity past them at a relatively low speed. At the same time, the kinetic weapons began firing, spitting a cloud of ballistic munitions towards the Khaid ship.
For her part, the Kader punched deeper into the Pinhole at maximum burn on her engines, her flight punctuated by the flare of shipkillers and penetrators detonating across her hull. The Kukumav ’s gunners cycled their launch rails, subcommanders howling new targeting orders. A cloud of debris, atmosphere, and chaff spewed out behind the damaged cruiser.
Hadeishi watched the streaking missile tracks on the plot with cold eyes. Inudo was pushing the maneuver drives for all they were worth-and making gradient inside the Barrier itself was obviously impossible. The transit metrics were off the scale.
“Forty seconds to the second wave,” Tocoztic announced, sweat gleaming on the sides of his face. “Point-defense is down to thirty percent, shipkillers are exhausted. One salvo of penetrators and two spoofer pods left-”
“Weapons, drop pods,” Mitsuharu snapped, switching his attention to the navigation plot. The track of the Khaid fleet was marvelously clear-their battleship drives coughed high-order radiation with reckless abandon-and he was praying the Barrier had not already shifted enough to swing a lattice of knives into their path. The two spoofer pods spun out from their launchers and Lovelace was waiting to key them up as duplicates of the Kader as soon as they had separated from her signature. “Pilot, cut drives and rotate fresh armor!”
Another ship icon popped up on the plot-a hundred thousand k behind the Kukumav -pulling high g acceleration. For an instant, Hadeishi thought it might be the Moulins, but then shipnet crunched the emissions signature and a whirl of hostile glyphs surrounded the contact.
“ Mishrak -class destroyer Han’zhr on the board,” Tocoztic barked.
“Rotating aspect,” Inudo followed as the main drives cut out.
Mitsuharu snarled, lips drawing back. The Kukumav ’s second missile volley slammed into the Kader at a bad angle. Perhaps a quarter of the shipkillers had swerved away, following the two spoofer pods, but the remainder rained in on her aft-ventral quarter. Inudo had swung them round hard, bringing an undamaged section of shipskin into line with the attack, but the guttering flare of penetrators and bomb-pods ripped aside their point-defense and tore at the primary hull in a wave of explosions.
Command lost power entirely for a microsecond, and Hadeishi felt the carapace lining the shockchair splinter as the g-decking failed. He slammed hard into the frame, and then bounced back. Secondary mains cut in, and their consoles flickered back to life in time for him to see the Kukumav ’s icon flicker. The weapons cloud from the Tlemitl had hammered her, shredding armor and turning hard-points into plasma-consumed hells. The battleship swerved away, rotating to bring fresh guns to bear on the remaining missiles boosting towards her.
“Pilot,” Mitsuharu croaked, seeing that Inudo was still alive and clinging to his console. “Hold course and get us out of here!”
The Altar of the Undying Flame Burning at the Sunflower’s Heart
Prince Xochitl reached the top step of a pyramidlike stair ascending from the enormous floor. He glanced down at the others still toiling upward on the wide, gleaming steps, and then strode onto a platform marking the summit of the pylon. By the pale light of the distant accretion jet, he began to comprehend the scope of the massive chamber. Scaled for giants! Or the gods themselves! The floor stretched away for kilometers in both directions. In a place like this, clouds will form. Rain will fall. Lightning might strike. Surely a First Sun artifact! He turned slowly, taking everything in. He became aware of a strange, singing hum permeating his suit and vibrating through every surface on his body.
Piercing the center of the pylon was a six-meter-wide shaft, a nine-pointed star in cross-section which plunged down into darkness. Poised directly above this unfathomable hole was a second pyramidal shape, apex pointing down from the unseen ceiling. At the junction between these mirror-like pyramids, the platform measured at least thirty meters on each side. The surface was composed of a metallic alloy bearing the endlessly repeating design of two nested, equilateral triangles, while each side was circumscribed by three raised, angular consoles. Their upper surfaces were glassy-smooth, though Xochitl’s exo was beginning to annotate the featureless expanse with faint glyphs indicating minute imperfections of the surface.
At much the same time, his z-suit environmental sensors began to register that the tremendously cold air in the chamber had warmed a degree, and the atmospheric mixture, which had been almost entirely nitrogen was now beginning to percolate with oxygen.
Perhaps there… The Prince’s thought broke off as the others clambered up to the last of the steps and stopped to goggle in wonderment as he had done.
Gretchen hardly noticed the Prince. Her consciousness was suffused with data pouring into her perception from all sides. Here, everything was thick with meaning. Even node 3^3 3 seemed barely able to keep up with the flood of information. Something in the flow-so many glyphs and icons and ghost-images were popping up around her she could barely process the visual stimuli-caught at her. This isn’t right-there’s something broken somewhere-no, not broken, a translation matrix is throwing errors.
“How… how does this all work?” Xochitl’s voice came as if from a great distance.
Gretchen struggled to focus on the man standing in front of her. When she could separate out the visual channel, the Prince was sweating behind his faceplate. Gretchen knew beyond doubt that his “mask” was gabbling unknown languages into his mind and troubling his vision with intermittent flashes of undecipherable symbols. She felt pummeled by the same forces. Xochitl reached out, seized Gretchen’s suit-collar, and dragged her close. “Where is… where is the command interface?”