On passive sensors, the two Khaid destroyers were unmistakably clear as they closed in on the coasting-cruiser, each properly spaced to overlap point-defense while retaining a clear field of fire for their missile racks and hardpoints. Mitsuharu hoisted the Yilan shipgun from the scabbard at the side of his shockchair and checked the magazine charge. Six hundred rounds, armor-piercing.
Then he thumbed an override glyph on the console, sending the main reactor into shutdown and cutting all internal power. The dimmed lights flickered and went out. In the sudden darkness, Mitsuharu toggled his suit-comm alive and said: “Stand by to repel boarders.”
Musashi crouched beneath the battlement of Shimabara Castle, his armor in tatters. A huge ringing sound filled his head, as though an enormous gong had been cloven by a giant. Blood was everywhere, streaking the rough-hewn stones. At the edge of his stunned vision, a gaping section of the wall had been torn away by the impact of a Mongol bombard stone. All of the samurai on the parapet had been cast to the ground as jackstraws. He groped fruitlessly for his bokuto, but the weapon was nowhere to be found. Despite the stunned weakness of his limbs, Musashi rose up, finding a katana still scabbarded in the belt of a dead man. By the time he’d reached the steps leading down into the courtyard below, the first of the Mongol spearmen were swarming over the lower curtain wall. The sight of them sent a shock of vigor through his limbs. Here was an enemy within the length of his blade!
In the dead fleet aboard the Naniwa
Oc Chac, Helsdon, and Konev cursed in unison, levering at the hatchway into Main Command with a magnetic ram. The compartment frame had warped in the last exchange of shipkillers, though their continued survival spoke volumes to the resistance afforded by the hexacomb armor between the primary and secondary hulls. Kosho hung back, one arm tucked around a stanchion, paying only partial attention to the efforts of the bridge crew to force an exit from the ruined compartment. Her earbug was still live, and she could monitor the chatter from Secondary Command, which was in operation. She could have used one of the escape hatches that led to an evac pod, but there was still work to be done, and her ship to fight.
Chu-i Pucatli was nearly helmet-to-helmet with her, a field comp tucked into his elbow while the Comms officer tried to keep track of everything happening elsewhere on the ship.
We’ve broken contact, Chu-sa, reported the second watch pilot from Secondary. That last exchange blinded the destroyer and we’ve gone to ground between two of the leviathans.
“How much clearance do we have?” Susan did not like the thought of getting too close to something that might wake up at any time, though she admitted to herself that beggars cannot be choosers.
Enough, kyo. But once they start hunting, we’ll have to run for it and drives are at sixty percent.
Kosho shook her head in displeasure, eyeing Pucatli. “Are you picking up anything from their ’cast traffic?”
The Comms officer’s lips twisted into a puzzled grimace. “Fragments, kyo -I think something’s happened in-system from us.” The younger officer clipped his z-suit to the stanchion and crossed his legs, pinning the field comp in place as he floated. “Most of our sensors are blocked by the wrecks, but-”
“What about the remote we dropped at the Pinhole?” Susan folded her arms, glaring at Oc Chac and Helsdon working on the door. Being denied the threatwell or any kind of proper information feed was making her almost violently nervous. The Sho-sa was now cutting into the doorframe with a plasma torch, which was generating a huge cloud of sparks and smoke droplets. “Do we still have a t-relay connection?”
“ Hai, kyo.” Pucatli was working the comp as fast as he could, but no good answers were coming back. “But it’s six light-years from the Chimalacatl -so we’ve nothing on sensor or visual. Gravity plot now… here we go.”
The Chu-i turned the comp, showing Susan a navigational plot. Multiple tracks arrowed inbound from the Pinhole, showing a line-pattern indicating they’d gone superluminal to leap across the six light-year interval to the immediate region of the Sunflower. One of the traces ended abruptly-and the timestamp on the vector indicated they’d ceased to exist less than fifteen minutes ago.
“See that, Chu-sa?” Pucatli could not help but grin, teeth white behind his grimy faceplate.
“That last Hayalet stepped too close to the sun,” Susan stated flatly.
“Boom-boom, kyo,” the Comms officer observed, rubbing fine particles of ash from his screen.
Now we know what happened to this fleet, Kosho thought, feeling the weight of the dead pressing against the hull of her ship. Did they try and attack the artifact? No-they weren’t warships. Whoever-whatever-controlled the weapon system turned upon them.
She turned up the filters on her z-suit against the electrical smoke now obscuring their vision. Anderssen and Hummingbird must have had some way to slip us past before, when we were so close to the artifact. Damn the old man… somehow he knows how to control the weapon.
Thirty minutes later, in Secondary Command, Susan stretched gingerly and sucked down some water. She’d taken a bad crack on the shoulder while the command team had scrambled downdeck. Most of her ship was seriously damaged, though they’d been lucky enough not to lose the shipcore entirely.
“The main squadron will be coming back this way, Fujiwara,” she said to the Home Islander sitting at the Pilot’s station. “We need to move closer to the Chimalacatl at every opportunity. The Khaid will fear it now, and we’ll take every advantage the Goddess sends us.”
Oc Chac looked up from the other end of Secondary. “ Chu-sa, won’t we fall prey to the same fate, if we move too close to the device?” His gloved fingers tapped restlessly on the back of his helmet. “That Khaid ship was destroyed well out from the artifact-when we dropped off that freighter we were much closer-” The Sho-sa suddenly stopped, having reached an unpalatable conclusion. “How will we tell what our safe distance is now?”
Susan looked pointedly at Helsdon. The engineer grimaced, wishing he could clear the taste of ashes from his throat, and immediately fell to work at one of the consoles. “For now,” the Chu-sa said, “we will assume it’s safer near the Sunflower than in the crosshairs of a Khaid missile battery.”
Oc Chac nodded in agreement, and then pointed wordlessly at the compartment status v-panes showing a wild mixture of red, orange, and yellow on his display. Kosho leaned in, feeling a slow trickle of despair at the state of her fine new ship.
“Release emergency air to decks thirteen and fifteen. Close down atmosphere to the rest of the compromised compartments.”
Turning back to the threatwell-what a relief to have some view of the battle, even if the display had substantial arcs of darkness where there was simply no data to be had-Susan tilted her head, puzzled for a moment by the latest positions of the enemy.
“ Chu-sa, they’re regrouping-the destroyers hunting us are shifting vector out of the shoal.” Pucatli sounded wary, and Kosho shared his concern.
“Assume they are taking stock of the situation, Chu-i. They will need to set some priorities-so keep a close eye on any movements in our direction. See if that remote at the Pinhole can pick up their ’cast traffic.”
Then she sat, at last, and drank some more water and managed to force down a threesquare. Everyone else remained furiously busy with damage control and trying to get updated inventory and arranging for the wounded and the dead. Susan sat quietly in the commander’s shockchair, watching the ’well update.
“Can you project their rendezvous point?” Susan asked Fujiwara as the minutes crawled by.