“As long as I knew her, she specialized in visiting the resident gang lord with a gift bottle of uisge-beatha. By the time she’d spent an hour chatting with him in an entirely charming manner, the fearsome and despicable toad had been transformed into her special, professional chum. I never knew her to break any laws, and somehow she always brought her crew home with all their fingers and toes.”
Green Hummingbird raised an eyebrow. “An enviable record, Doctor Anderssen.” He stood up, patting his pockets. “I believe you are going to need all of your equipment in a very short time.”
Six hours later, the Moulins had reached the edge of the Chimalacatl.
Gretchen had appropriated the Comm station from the Jaguar Knight and now watched her v-displays eagerly. Endless ranks of jagged architectural forms glided past as the freighter plowed along at right-angles to the surface of the artifact. The structure was apparently composed entirely of triangular sections, each holding a second inverted triangle recessed within. The bronze block was tucked into a pocket of her equipment rig, now strapped on over her z-suit. Her field comp and secondary equipment were tacked to the console, all components recording at maximum fidelity. Just for good measure, her interface to the Moulin ’s shipskin, cameras, and the single sensor boom was running bidirectional-which allowed her to offload some processing to the shipnet itself when needed.
For the moment, she had not connected the bronze block to anything. Despite this measure, it seemed heavy against her chest, and warm to the touch, as though some internal process was underway.
Even without node 3^3 3 in operation, however, enough data was flowing into her conceptual models and analysis matrices to leave her feeling slightly drunk. Fingers trembling, she unwrapped an oliohuiqui packet and pressed the acidic tablet beneath her tongue. Her skin was singing with the tension congealing in the Command compartment, but the promise of so many wonders to come pushed all of her concerns away.
“Radiation levels are rising,” Piet reported, tapping a winking glyph on his display to expand the warning message. “Captain?”
“Reconfigure the shipskin for maximum protection,” Locke replied without bothering to consult with the Prince. “Let’s try not to fry!”
Anderssen paid them little attention, though part of her mind wondered what had happened to the shipskin, for the flow of data into her analysis array did not diminish at all. The exterior configuration of the ship had changed however, shifting into an unfamiliar alignment.
But for the moment, Gretchen didn’t care about the crew’s machinations. As long as we’re capturing clean data… wait a moment. A subtle change had occurred in the visual flow of the artifact. Nothing obvious-the intersecting triangles had a vertiginous effect on the eye-but the consistency of the shadows pooling in their depths had begun to thicken. “There!” Anderssen suddenly spoke, half-rising from her seat. “Quadrant six by sixteen-that’s a lock entrance.”
“How can you tell?” Xochitl glared over her shoulder in disgust at the flurry of bizarre glyphs and patterns dancing across her v-displays. “What is all of this static?”
“Our eyes in the darkness, Lord Prince,” she replied distantly. “Lojtnant-slow a bit…” Her stylus danced across a v-pane cross-connected to the comm system. A burst of indecipherable noise flooded from the ship’s tachyon array. “Now, wait… wait… there!”
One of the triliths moved-its motion obvious even to the naked eye-receding into sudden darkness. The constellation of other triliths around the missing triangle followed, sliding backward into shadow without evident mechanism. An opening emerged with fluid suddenness-a channel or corridor leading into the interior of the structure. Measurements popped up on Gretchen’s console and she whistled softly, breaking into a huge grin. “Six kilometers on a side, Lord Prince. I think the Moulins will make easy passage.”
“This was built for truly giant ships,” Xochitl said, his voice tinged with awe. “Like the thousands of wrecks in the debris cloud.”
No one replied. Locke and Piet were motionless, their faces settled into expressionless masks. Gretchen felt a current of raw fear circulate among the men in Command, but the taste was distant and of little consequence. “Go on, enter,” she directed. “We’ll be shielded from the radiation storm inside.”
The freighter passed in, maneuvering drives flaring, and was swiftly enveloped by abyssal darkness. Behind them, the constellation of triliths reformed with admirable speed, abruptly cutting off sight of the hot, glowing sky outside.
“It seems the artifact is not entirely dead,” Gretchen said cheerfully. “No matter. I believe we can open the passage again, when the need arises.”
In the suddenly dim bridge, Xochitl scratched his nose and-taking a deep breath-began to compose a series of numbers in his thoughts. Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one…
“We have comm intercept available, Chu-sa,” De Molay announced in an offhand way.
Hadeishi’s command chair rotated to face her with an audible whine. Apparently the Khaid refit had failed to properly seal the gimbals, and fire suppression foam was eating away at the mechanism. The Nisei officer shifted restlessly. “We’re synched into their battlecast? Is the translator running?”
“Such as it is.” De Molay shrugged, her thin shoulders swallowed by the expedition jacket. “Channel eleven.”
Mitsuharu pressed a finger to his earbug, jumping channels until the hissing growl of the enemy flooded in, making him wince. Dialing down the volume, he found the jury-rigged translator circuit could use a great deal of improvement-about every fourth word of Khadesh echoed back in Nihongo on channel two. He grimaced, feeling a truly staggering migraine coming on, before settling back with his eyes closed, trying to parse some kind of meaning from the staticky roaring.
After thirty minutes, he wrenched the earbug free and stared cross-eyed at Lovelace and De Molay. Hadeishi said nothing for a moment, keying his med-band to dispense as much painkiller as it would allow.
“This won’t work. Your efforts are tremendous, but the shipnet comps just can’t keep up with all of the cross-conversations. Have you been recording all of this traffic?”
The Sho-i nodded vigorously. “We have sixteen hours in the can, Chu-sa.”
“Can we translate that, if the comp has time to grind away?”
“ Hai, Chu-sa.”
Mitsuharu shook his head slowly, beginning to despair. “Without following the ’cast in real time, there’s no way we can insert ourselves into the formation… we’d trip ourselves up the first time someone commed to discuss the weather!”
De Molay spread her hands. “Then we give up and go home. No loss.”
Her nonchalant expression sparked a flare of anger in the Nisei officer. He glowered at the freighter captain, which drew an amused snort from the old woman, and then he sat back in the uncomfortable chair again, thinking furiously.
The youngest of the Seven Sisters pressed her forehead to the straw matting covering the floor of Musashi’s hut. “Please, sensei,” she begged earnestly, “none of us can defeat Mongke; he is a monster, gifted with inhuman powers, surrounded by an army of tens of thousands of men. Osaka castle itself is a maze of fortifications, towers, moats… We’ve tried sneaking in, but he’s suborned the ninja clans as well, and they watch by night while his archers watch by day.”
“He only has one weakness,” Eldest said, kneeling beside her irrepressible sibling. “He believes himself the finest swordsman in all of Asia-not just Nippon-and if you challenge him, then he will come forth to meet you in single combat, for his pride will admit no other rival.”