Hold on, he prayed, watching the fragmentary navigational plot for signs of the Cornuelle. Hold on, I'm coming. Hayes knows what to do, he'll get maneuvering drive back and pull you into a safe orbit. Just hold on, just a little longer…
Six thousand kilometers behind the launch, the Tepoztecatl continued to shudder with explosions as more systems failed. Atmospheric venting continued unabated and the long, curving rooms filled with communications equipment drifted with clouds of paper, globules of vomit and blood and water. Bodies clogged the doorways where the explosive decompression of the ship had sucked the hapless priests to an ugly, instant death. The main reactor had shuddered into an emergency shutdown, preventing the kind of catastrophic failure which had claimed the Beowulf, but only isolated portions of the ship glowed with emergency lights.
The bridge and command spaces were twisted wreckage – the laser burst from the nearest mine had smashed lengthwise into the ship directly through the control deck. Chimalpahin and all of his subordinates had been instantly killed, either incinerated or boiled alive as the internal atmosphere roared out through the shattered hull.
All possibility of the Flower Priest network being restored was wiped away with one brilliant flash of light. Across Jagan, the Whisperers working quietly in town, countryside and metropolis stared in alarm at their comms, finding the ever-present voice from the sky had fallen silent.
Warning lights flared, nearly blinding Isoroku as he struggled back to consciousness. The engineer raised a hand, found his ears ringing with a warbling emergency alarm, and seized hold of the nearest stanchion. The engineering deck was in chaos, filled with drifting men, loose hand-held comp pads, tools and broken bits of glassite. Weakly, he tapped his comm.
"Engineering to Bridge…ship's status?"
Static babbled on the channel and Isoroku stared at his wrist in alarm. "Hello the bridge! Hayes? Smith?"
His comm continued a sing-song wail, warbling up and down the audible frequency. Isoroku shut it off and swung to the nearest v-display. Finding the display still up by some miracle, he mashed a control glyph with a gloved thumb and the blaring alarm shut off. In the following silence, his breath sounded very harsh in his ears. The engineer stared at the panel, felt his stomach fall into a deep pit and clenched the sides of the station to keep from drifting away.
Every readout and v-pane was filled with random, constantly changing garbage. Isoroku glanced around the engineering deck, finding his staff struggling back to stations, though at least two drifted limply, one leaking crimson from a shattered face-plate. He tried tapping up the all-hands channel on his comm. A blast of scratchy music assaulted his hears, accompanied by a wailing voice like a lost soul writhing in the torment of a Christian's hell.
Comms are down, he realized, feeling even sicker. Main comp is corrupted – or at least the interfaces are. This is a cold day indeed. Isoroku lifted his wrist, eyeballed the environmental readouts, saw the air was still breathable and unsealed the helmet of his z-suit.
As soon as he tasted burned circuit and fear in the air, he kicked across to the main comp station and rapped his fist on the helmets of two crewmen trying to get the panel to reboot. Alarmed, they unsealed their faceplates, staring at him with wide eyes. Fleet discipline was very strict about keeping z-suit integrity in an emergency.
"Main comp is corrupted," Isoroku barked as soon as they could hear him. "Drop the entire ship-wide network – every node, relay and interface – and keep main comp off-line. We'll need altitude control and environmentals back as quickly as possible, but we'll have to bring them up as standalone systems."
Before they could reply, he turned and kicked across to the cluster of stations controlling the main reactor and the massive hyperspace drive systems. Chu-i Yoyontzin, his second, was already at the panel, haggard face sheened with sweat. The NГЎhuatl officer's helmet was tipped back behind his head, though Isoroku could see the engineer was nearly paralyzed with fear at the prospect of losing pressure on the deck.
"Reactor is still up," Yoyontzin reported, biting his lip. "Main drive was on standby, but I think we can bring her on-line in thirty minutes…"
Isoroku shook his head, the dull glare of the emergency lights shining on his bald pate. "Shut down main power and the transit drive and maneuvering. Right now – manually, if you have to."
"But, kyo, we were in the middle of a maneuvering burn! One engine was still firing. We need to adjust attitude control and establish a stable orbit!"
"Can't do that while the comp network is corrupted." The lead engineer stabbed a thick finger at the sidepanel displays flanking the reactor and drive subsystem. They were crowded with garbage and wild images. Pornographic three-d's pulsed on two of them, emitting a shrieking wail of sound and the whompwhomp-whomp of electric drums. "We need cell power to bring up critical systems and we can't spare it to keep the main drive hot. Shut down all drives right now."
"Hai!" Yoyontzin bleated in response, bending over his panel.
Isoroku spared himself an instant of relief that the corruption had not managed to penetrate the isolated reactor and hyperspace drive systems, and was even happier when Yoyontzin managed to initiate a controlled shutdown without missing a step and tipping the hyperspace matrix into some kind of catastrophic transit gradient.
"Communications are down," he bawled, drawing the attention of every other rating in the compartment. Everyone who was still up and mobile had at least cracked their helmets. "We need shipside comm up so we can handle damage control – every third man to the repair lockers – pull the commwire spools and local relays. Every z-suit comm switches to local point-to-point mode, no central relay allowed. Four teams – one for each fore-aft access way – run those spools out from here and affix local repeaters at each bulkhead. Move!
"Environmental section! Bring up your systems isolated from main comp, reflash your control code from backup and get the air recyclers working again." More ratings scattered and the engineer fixed his gaze on the damage-control section, which was staring helplessly at rows of displays which were showing flashing, endlessly repeated images of an animated rabbit hopping through a field of psychedelic, oversaturated flowers.
"Damage control is -"
Main comp shut down hard and every single display on the ship went black with a pitiful whine. The rabbits flickered wildly before vanishing with a pop! The engineering deck was suddenly very, very quiet.
The subsonic background thunder of the main reactors stuttered and failed.
Even the space-bending, subliminal ringing tone of the hyperspace coil fell silent.
Isoroku swallowed, suddenly feeling cold, and realized he was trapped in the heart of a nine-thousand-ton tomb of hexacarbon and glassite and steel.
The House of Reeds
Within the Nautilus
Dust billowed along a trapezoidal passage, enveloping Gretchen and Malakar in a dirty tan cloud. Coughing, the Jehanan fell to her hands, overcome. Anderssen, thankful for her goggles, bit down on her breathing tube, seized the gardener under the shoulders and forged ahead. Twenty meters on, a ramp cut off to the left and they staggered up the slope, rising out of the toxic murk stirred up by the collapse of the vault three levels below.
Snuffling loudly, Malakar collapsed on the stone floor, gasping for breath.
Gretchen knelt beside the gardener and shook a thick coating of limestone powder from her field jacket. Everything was permeated with the fine gritty residue. "Can you breathe?"
Malakar responded with a wheezing snort, spitting goopy white fluid on the ground.