forward. Mitsuharu stepped in, emptied the rest of his clip into the nearest hostile at point-blank range and then darted past, trying to burst past the following two in the darkness.
The roar of Imperial guns filled the corridor behind him as the other crewman and the engineer opened up. Flechettes hissed past, spattering from his armor and Mitsuharu felt something clip his shoulder. He stumbled, thrown off balance and into the last of the Khaiden boarders.
The creature towered over the slightly built Nisei by at least a meter and its shipgun lashed out hard, butt- first, to slam into Hadeishi’s faceplate. The tempered glassite rang with a clear, bell-like tone and Mitsuharu was thrown to the decking. Teeth clenched, he snatched a fresh clip from the bandolier and snapped open the Bloem- Voss’ cartridge bay-then froze, the glowing bore of a Khaiden zmetgun jammed hard into his faceplate. Smoke curled across his vision and the glassite popped with the heat. Hadeishi groped for a suitable koan. No time left, he thought sadly. For a proper parting.
The Khaiden kicked the human’s shipgun away, and then wrenched the bandolier from his shoulder.
Ah, Mitsuharu realized with dismay. They do prize technicians-a life of servitude awaits…
With two of the enemy in close proximity, there was nothing to be done but clasp both hands behind his back and feel the bite of a heavy pair of steel cuffs through the z-suit gel. Hadeishi kept his eyes lowered as the Khaiden dragged him down the corridor past the bodies of Azulcay and the other starman. The Marocain’s face was invisible behind shattered glassite coated with congealing blood. The Khaiden in front of him kicked the corpses aside, ignoring their tools and comm bands.
They are in a hurry, they haven’t taken my tool belt. Mitsuharu hurried along between the two invaders, chin tucked to chest, trying to see anything he could out of the corners of his eyes. The shipcore was swarming with the enemy, most in battle armor-the usual grab-bag of stolen equipment-but some were kitted out in dark blue z-suits with a gold-colored icon of some kind of hunting bird. The tight, blocky script on the sides of their helmets was hard to read, but Hadeishi thought it might be something like Qalak, or Khaerak. Those are custom-fitted uniforms, he realized with a little chill shock. He did not remember ever seeing a Khaiden raider sporting standardized equipment, much less uniforms or heraldry.
Mitsuharu was herded up the shipcore, following a swing-line with three other crewmen from the Wilful, and then into a cross-corridor marked with heavy yellow stripes warning of environment change ahead. The port, forehull airlock, he guessed. They had passed several more squads of Khaiden, and now he was thinking the dark- blue z-suits were officers. The boarding parties-the equivalent of the Fleet marines-showed little standardization in their arms, armor, or personal gear. That’s business as usual…
At the entrance to the airlock, he stopped abruptly as the lead guard jammed the other prisoners against the wall without warning. Four Khaiden jetted past, z-suit maneuvering jets spitting exhaust, with two more of their fellows on litters between them. Still keeping his head bowed, Hadeishi smiled tightly. That little gun did some good.
Ahead, the airlock cycled open, sending a gust of damp, hot air into the corridor. The medical party disappeared through without a pause. Mitsuharu weighed his chances, but then the guard behind him was pushing him forward. They passed a cross-corridor leading upship and for the first time Hadeishi caught a glimpse of the command deck. There was a drift of corpses-all of them apparently human-pinned against one wall with a net of sprayfoam. More of the dark-blue-suited Khaiden were busy at the consoles. The doors were pitted with thousands of tiny sparkling blemishes where shipgun flechettes had impacted.
Fierce smugglers in these parts, he thought, seeing a cloud of tiny ruby-colored droplets drifting in the hatchway. Then the momentary vision was gone, and the airlock was cycling around them. Hadeishi tensed, feeling the hot, humid air of a Khaiden ship wash over him.
The Qalak, then, he thought. Into the belly of the carrion bird.
The guard jammed him in the back with the muzzle of a tribarrel, pushing him forward, and as they passed into the dull, redlit space beyond, his earbug cycled frequency-losing contact with the Wilful ’s shipnet-and for just a moment, before an encrypter kicked in, he caught a burst of Khadesh.
“-blood-drinking Maltese! A pestilence upon their-!”
THE NANIWA
IN THE KUUB
Kosho sat easily in the captain’s chair, one leg crossed over the other, comp control surfaces arrayed to the left to allow an unobstructed view of the engineering stations on her right. Midafternoon watch was nearly half over and there were crewmen at every station. The threatwell forming the center of Command was filled with light-the hard diamonds of the battle-group and a contorted maze of filaments representing the dust clouds they had been passing through for the last three days.
On her central board, the transit shielding status displays were flickering crimson and amber much like the fluttering of hummingbird wings-nearly too swift for the eye to follow. One of the graphics surged into red, and then scarlet, and a soft ding-ding sounded. Susan looked up from the readiness reports filling her displays and frowned, a sharp crease splitting her forehead.
Gravitational densities were fluctuating in an uncomfortable way, causing the protostellar debris to congeal in ever-moving eddies. The Naniwa ’s newly installed deflectors were easily shrugging aside the constant stream of impacts, but she was beginning to worry about the other smaller, older, ships in the convoy. At present the combat elements made a widely dispersed globe around the Fiske, Eldredge, and Hanuman. The squadron was currently arrayed to prevent wake overlap and further damage to the smaller ships following the heavy warships.
Kosho brushed the readiness reports closed with a flick of her wrist, then keyed into battlecast with her stylus.
After a few minutes of considering telemetry from the noncombatants, she tapped her earbug awake and paged Engineering.
“Hennig here, kyo.” The Kikan-cho was a dough-faced Saxon of very conservative mind. Kosho found him refreshingly direct and, like many engineers, disinterested in politics of any kind. Had he shown any flickering of concern for the past glories of Imperial Denmark-of which Saxony had been long part-he would not have found a posting in the Fleet at all.
Which would be a shame, Susan thought, because we are short enough of talented officers as it is.
“Emil,” she said aloud, “how does the shielding on the Fiske or Eldredge compare to ours, in this dust, at our current velocity?”
“Poorly, Chu-sa.” He looked off-pane, and Kosho was heartened to see that the engineer already had the ’cast telemetry on his own monitors. “We’re pegging up to five or six percent capacity-that last bolus deflected from the port shielding at nineteen percent-but Fiske is showing sixty or seventy percent just in the easygoing.”
“You’d agree the densities are increasing, the deeper we go?”
He nodded. “ Kyo, whatever gravitational sources are causing all of this debris to collect are-more or less- dead ahead. The closer we come, the tighter the influx spirals are going to be. Right now, if you plot back to our entry point, you can see we’re cutting across deeper ‘valleys’ in the clouds. The interval between each ridge is growing shorter as well.”
“Sensor efficiency?”
“Declining, Chu-sa.” Hennig smoothed back short-cropped gray hair. “Have you been watching the cycle-rate on the battlecast itself?”
Susan shook her head, no.
“Increasing as well. Tachyon relay times are starting to vary-which indicates we’re getting deep into a gravitational eddy as well-and ’cast timing is starting to slow. Not noticeable to you, or I, kyo -but our ability to supplement the navigational suites of the smaller ships is starting to degrade.”
“And if-when-we’re attacked?”
