do even the slightest thing to save the men aboard.
“She’s turning,” the Thai-i announced into the silence. “We have-we have vector overlap if they hold course.”
The Nisei stirred, forcing his attention back to the ’well and the movement of ships, wreckage, anything else which might affect his tiny command. He rewound the ’well through the last three hours of data, the myriad icons a blur of motion. “They’re into the return leg of their patrol pattern.”
He clicked his teeth, seeing that the intercept solution was very poor for the Wilful. “We’re going to have to go to zero-power and lose steering way, hope they pass over us as wreckage. We’re too close to-”
Tocoztic gave him a sick look. “They’re sure to catch us on active scan-we’re not Imperial, we’re not Khaid- they will know we’re a scavenger that didn’t get caught up in the battle. That fate”-he stabbed a finger at the location of the obliterated capsule-“will be ours!”
“Going dark,” De Molay announced, when Hadeishi failed to respond immediately. Her face drew tight with concentration and Mitsuharu could see that another set of v-panes had appeared on her console. The markings-and he could not see them clearly from his vantage point-did not seem to be formed of human letters.
“Hostile is less than a light-second away,” Tocoztic breathed, sounding anguished. “She’s accelerating. We’re getting side scatter from an active scanning array-”
“There!” The old woman sighed in relief. “Memory still holds true!”
At the same moment, the Wilful ’s engines died and the lights dimmed markedly. The constant vibration of the reactor drew down, and then entirely faded away. Hadeishi watched with intense interest as each on-board system shut down in swift succession. On his console, the myriad v-panes and controls faded away-the threatwell went dark-and the environmental monitors indicated that every compartment had dialed down air circulation and scrubber activity to the absolute minimum. The only activity registered on the shipskin, which was assuming a new aspect-one that Mitsuharu had never seen before. Part of the forward hull was visible in the camera display, which was still active, and there he saw that the hull had deformed into a strange, “fuzzy” configuration, the surface extruding millions of what appeared in close-up to be tiny matte-black cilia.
Truly we have turned into a creature of the abyss!
He gave De Molay a curious glance. “We’re in an absorptive mode?” he asked quietly.
“We are,” she replied with the hint of a smile. Hadeishi hid his reaction, suddenly mindful of Tocoztic and the other Fleet ratings who might be listening down deck. There’s no heat sump on this ship capable of absorbing the impact radiation on the skin. Nothing big enough to swallow our own emissions, not for more than a few seconds. So-what lies behind those closed-off compartments on the Engineering deck? Something to hide us completely?
The thought gave him a chill down the back of his neck.
“Here it comes,” the Thai-i breathed, “we’ll have visual in-”
The Khaid destroyer emerged from a screen of stellar dust, black bulk dwarfing the Wilful, flanks etched with the landing lights outlining her boat-bay doors. On the camera display, Mitsuharu could make out rows of launcher hard-points, the shallow pits of particle beam emitters and point-defense guns. The hypercoil ring to aft and the maneuver drives were arranged in an unfamiliar pattern, but close up the Nisei could guess at her manufacturer. A refitted Megair Vampyre -class light cruiser. Interesting-the Khaid Zosen must have bought her as a hulk and replaced all of the internal systems-the Khaiden body form doesn’t fit very well to the arthropod. Those drives look new, too.
Regardless of her provenance, the destroyer sailed on past, showing every sign of being unaware of their presence. Tocoztic stared at his console, stylus busily tapping away. He checked and double-checked the paltry stream of data available. “Their active scan is pinging right over us!” he whispered loudly.
Suddenly Hadeishi had to suppress a full-on grin; not a proper hint of a smile or a careful mask of command, but a fierce, predatory snarl.
The Khaid rolled on past, and the Wilful shuddered a little as the wash of radiation from her engines pelted the shipskin. Mitsuharu, properly somber again, paid close attention to the status displays from the hull configuration. What excellent engineering, he thought. The emission wave from the enemy radar failed to spike our surface temperature. The drive wake has been absorbed as well. But… how could shipskin cool to relative zero so fast?
The Nisei sat back, nearly overcome with wonder. Then he noticed that the subsonic vibration of the reactor interface had soared up, almost to an audible level. He looked to De Molay in concern, but the old woman just shook her head minutely. Her gray eyes rested steadily on him. For the first time in a long time, Mitsuharu felt nervous, jumpy. A tramp freighter, eh? I am six kinds of a fool.
Tocoztic squirmed in his chair, looking around curiously at the walls. “What’s that weird vibration?”
“Engine phase-transition, Thai-i. Every ship has its own quirks and noises,” Hadeishi replied with deliberate calm as he reviewed his console again. Power output is up 300 percent. But-we’re not leaking heat, the internal temperature is actually cooling… The reason was obvious, but Mitsuharu was having a hard time believing the data before him. Every engineer in the Empire would fall on his sword to bring this secret home. Someone has developed an effective thermodynamic shunt. And it’s working and it’s on this ship, on my ship.
“ Thai-i Tocoztic, eyes on your console, mind on the mission.” Hadeishi’s voice was sharp, ringing with hidden elation. The tone gained the younger officer’s complete attention. “Pilot De Molay, plot a course for the next surviving evac capsule. We still have work to do, even if the Khaid are careless and blind. The next patrol ship may be more attentive.”
“ Hai, Chu-sa! ”
Hadeishi felt something tight in his chest release at the long-familiar words: Ah, now my heart is beating again!
THE NANIWA
The last of the officers and ratings who’d ridden through the Pinhole had crawled off to their bunks by the time Thai-i Goroemon managed to reach Command. Kosho was still in her shockchair, reviewing the telemetry captured by shipnet during their passage, looking for somewhere to hide her battered ship.
“ Chu-sa? Holloway- tzin said you needed me to stand officer of the watch?”
“I do, Thai-i. I am very glad you survived. Can you handle another eight hours awake?”
Goro shrugged, broad shoulders stretching the gel of her z-suit. “Hard to sleep with all the racket, kyo -but we didn’t get hit too hard down in the Backbone. Two magazine conveyors went down due to jams, but nothing punched past into the inner hull where we were.”
The lieutenant rarely stood a Command watch, though she was technically fifth on the roster. Her usual duty station was in the munitions roundhouse controlling the network of high-speed magnetic railways threading between the primary and secondary hulls of the battle-cruiser. The Naniwa ’s main magazines were spaced along the shipcore itself, as far from hostile fire as possible, while a network of secondary-or “ready”-depots served each hard-point, launch-rail, or gun-pit. Managing the Backbone ammunition network was third in complexity among the ship’s systems, behind the engines and shipskin.
“How soon will we be reloaded?” Susan asked, frustrated with herself that she hadn’t already checked in with logistics.
“Another hour, kyo, and we’ll have all the conveyors back in operation,” Goro replied. “ Kikan-cho Hennig’s men have both of the jammed ones torn apart right now. He said there’s some fabrication problem with the pass- along sensors, so they’re getting pulled, hand-tested, and replaced as needed.”
“Better than I expected.” Kosho was pleased. For a ship so fresh from the yards, the Naniwa had experienced very few outright component failures. “What I need you to do, Thai-i, is-”
She turned to the navigational plot shipnet had pieced together from data recorded during their passage. Oddly, the changes made to the navigational interfaces-and to the threatwell and other Command systems-when Anderssen had taken them over, had all reverted to their Fleet-standard configurations. Even the massive rush of topology information which had allowed Susan to navigate through the Pinhole had purged itself. Only second-by- second Command camera images of the threatwell remained, but from them shipnet had reverse-engineered a
