the bolt cutters, hand-torch, welding arc, and other useful items on the belt. All were secure. Though the ship was under acceleration and there was gravity of a sort, he’d spent too many long-suffering hours as a cadet to trust even Fleet g-decking.
He padded to the engineering boards in the outer room and ran through a quick checklist.
We’re running hot, he saw, and tapped open a series of v-panes showing exterior telemetry. There was only one hull camera patched through to Engineering-which was odd of itself-and it revealed only a confused roil of dust clouds shot with intermittent points of reddish light. But the shielding monitors were in constant motion, registering thousands of impacts a second. Hadeishi frowned and his stylus-dug out of a crevice behind the main comp panel- skittered quickly across the control surface. Two more capacitors dropped into the circuit, and the secondary fusion pump shivered awake.
“Captain didn’t ask for that,” growled a voice at his shoulder. Hadeishi nodded, feeling Azulcay’s scrutiny hot on his neck. “What are you thinking?”
“In protostellar debris like this,” Mitsuharu said, his voice level and unconcerned, “sensor reaction times degrade-sometimes masking something more massive behind lesser dust. The shielding control relays would have tried to bring more capacity on-line-but by then, we might have lost deflection… and even if the deflectors snapped back in time to push aside something big…”
“We’d already be punched full of a thousand little holes.” The engineer grunted in agreement and then-with a grudging air-went through his own checklist on the panels. Hadeishi stepped away, keeping a polite distance, and took a moment to make sure his boots were strapped tight and all of the tools in his belt were in place.
When he looked up, Azulcay was peering curiously at the video feeds, one olive-skinned hand scratching at his tight, curly beard. “What is this place?” The Marocain tapped the v-pane with a ragged fingernail. “Can we run for long in this much debris?”
“Depends on how fast the captain tries to go,” Mitsuharu said quietly. “May I?”
The man nodded, and Hadeishi folded most of the v-panes away, replacing them with a large single pane containing the camera feed surrounded by a constellation of smaller displays showing hit rates and the status of the various shielding nodes on the outer hull. For some time he scrutinized the ocean of dimly lighted debris streaming alongside as the Wilful pressed onward. Thrust rates from the engines seemed to indicate the captain was pressing a hard course. The dust thickened as they watched, showing whorls and patterns in the fitful light.
Mitsuharu weighed the time since last they had passed an Imperial navigation beacon. Out of range of Search and Rescue, I think. One of the sensor panels dinged quietly, warning of scattered asteroidal fragments in the murk. The ship shifted course minutely and the engineer let out a soft whistle.
“Someone upstairs is paying attention… but we’d better get ready for damage con-”
The comp displays on the main panel wavered, blinked twice, and went dark. The engineer cursed fluently in Norman, then jerked a frayed power cable from its socket in the back of the board. “Gimme those spacers and a meter probe.”
Hadeishi had the tools in hand already, and he hid a smile at how quickly the action had become second nature. For all his faults, Azulcay knew far more about the Wilful ’s systems than anyone else. The Wilful ’s mix of systems were not up to Fleet standard, and they made a constantly mutating puzzle to unravel.
“There!” The Marocain scrambled up from behind the console as the screen flickered to life again, revealing even an ever-thicker murk, now glowing in long striated bands with the light of some distant, unseen star. “Damn, it’s worse.”
Mitsuharu nodded, though he noted the engineer did not open a comm channel to the bridge, or issue any kind of warning to the captain. Interesting, he wondered. His faith in the command staff is remarkable. In this murk, I would have my damage control crews in z-suits and waiting in the airlocks to go hullside… The paucity of data irritated him immensely, but there was only a single, shielded comm run connecting the engineering spaces to the bridge. One camera, one shipnet conduit… we’re blind down here. Still, I should “What the hell! We’re right on a moon.” Even as the Marocain spoke, the rumble of the maneuvering drive hiccupped into a lower pitch. “That’s orbit. To stations!”
Mitsuharu immediately took his place at the secondary console. It was the “station” he had appropriated from the beginning, giving him a reasonable view of the engineer’s panel and control of some useful secondary systems. A moon, he saw, but without a planet or star in reasonable distance. Only a dim glow illuminated the indistinct sphere. One could imagine ice-shrouded peaks piercing the roughened surface, but without better sensors it looked dimply red-purple, like the passing boulders.
“Looks like a beat-up billiard ball,” Azulcay muttered. He looked curiously at Hadeishi. “Where’s the solar system? There’s no proper star in sensor range.”
“Gravitational eddies could form a moon from stellar debris without forcing an orbit.” Mitsuharu shrugged. “Or the star could have lost fuel millions of years ago… who could say?”
“See if you can get a read on…” The engineer stopped, listening.
Hadeishi heard the sound, too, and reflexively hit the ALERT glyph on his control pane.
“Explosions. Coming our…”
The alarm began to blare, but the wailing noise did not drown out a succession of dull, heavy thuds.
“We are attacked.” Who? I wonder. Perhaps Kryg’nth? A dull whoomp came from the direction of the nearest loading bay. Something dark and jagged flickered across the camera pickup before the entire control console died again with a massive thud that made the flooring shake. All the loading bays.
“We’re boarded,” cursed the Marocain.
It wasn’t a question. Hadeishi was already sealing up his z-suit as Azulcay fumbled with his. The feeling of the suit gelling around his neck and face brought back a thousand memories. Wind was rattling the bamboo, making the surface of the stream flowing past at Musashi’s feet sparkle with tiny wavelets. A series of mossy boulders made an uneasy path to the far side. Kiyohara was poised on the largest of them, his nodachi slung insolently across his massive shoulders. “Come then,” the brigand shouted, “unsheath your famous blade, King of Swordsmen!” Behind him, on the far bank, the sally drew a raucous laugh from the dozens of ronin gathered there.
“Gun locker code?” Hadeishi was at the armored cabinet, but the battle-steel door was properly secured. The engineer nodded, his face paling. Despite obvious fear, his fingers were steady enough to punch in the authorization code and the gray metal doors swung aside to reveal a brace of shipguns and two bandoliers of ammunition.
“Pretty light,” Mitsuharu muttered, pulling a Bloem-Voss TK6 from the padded cradle. The civilian weapon only carried a single kind of round, a ship-safe flechette, and lacked a grenade launcher or a thermal sight. The Nisei had the bandolier over his shoulder and secured, with the gun tucked under his arm and lanyard snugged to his tool belt before the engineer had even managed to get the ammunition and snub-nosed rifle out of the cabinet.
“Let me,” ordered the Nisei, quickly righting the civilian’s gear. “Follow me and shoot at anything you don’t recognize. But, please, not the back of my head.” The proper helmet for the z-suit slid down over Hadeishi’s brow and he locked the neckring with a practiced twist of his fingers.
A moment later, Mitsuharu eased out into the main corridor connecting the cargo bays to the shipcore. The overhead lights were flickering on and off as something interfered with environmental power, so he tripped the nearest panel and killed them entirely. Azulcay’s breathing was harsh and fast in his ear.
“What’s-” Two crewmen bolted down the passageway towards them, followed immediately by a stabbing flare of gunfire. One of the spacers staggered and spun around, crashing into a wall. The other threw himself down, caught on the nonskid decking, and scrambled past them on hands and knees. Behind the gun-flashes, five or six bulky figures advanced at a quick pace, the muzzle of the leader’s gun glowing like a hot star in the gloom.
The sideways, skittering approach of the invaders told the Nisei all he needed to know about the enemy which had overtaken them. Khaiden, he thought, a brief flash of memory bringing back visions of a bulky starship breaking apart under the impact of three well-placed shipkillers. The Cornuelle had taken severe structural damage in that affray, but shipboard losses had been light. We were lucky, part of his mind commented as he moved. They thought we were too small to Hadeishi squeezed off a burst just low of the enemy gun in his sights, then darted aside into the corridor, his shipgun pointed at the floor. Answering fire raked the wall, shredding the paneling and sending the Marocain into the nearest room with a yell. One of the Khaiden was down, and the others rushed
