News! ( 01/17/2003 )

Chapters 1-3 posted.

The House of Fumeiyo-ie

Toroson Advanced Fleet Base, Imperial Méxica Space

A slim young Nisei woman, her back straight as a swordblade, glossy black hair bound at the back of her head, paused before a shoji-panel of laminate cedar and redwood. She took a moment to straighten the crisply-starched cuffs of her dress whites, to tuck her cap under one arm and to adjust the four tiny golden skulls on her collar tabs before placing a hand against the door itself.

There was a quiet chime – the sound of a temple bell filtered through autumnal leaves – and the panel slid soundlessly to one side. The Imperial Méxica Navy Chu-sa stepped out onto a covered porch, walked down a flight of worn wooden steps and out into a perfectly manicured Tokuga-period garden. A glassite pressure dome vaulted overhead, half of the armored panels polarized against the glare of the twin Michóacan primaries. Her boots clicked on a curving stone bridge crossing a swift, silent brook – the recycled water clear as crystal, reeds and tadpoles wavering in the current running over mossy stones – and she passed beneath the rustling branches of a stand of young aspen.

A tea house stood beneath the golden trees, ancient wood and paper walls meticulously reconstructed in the heart of the Fleet base, slate-tile roof strewn with leaf-litter. The young captain knelt at the door and paused to gather her composure before drawing aside the old-fashioned panel of rice-paper and varnished pine. The large interior room was quite barren. A tatami lay in the middle of the floor, a pale jute-colored island in a sea of gleaming dark fir planking. A man was kneeling on the mat, hands hidden in the folds of a plain civilian kimono. He lifted his head curiously at the sound of the opening door.

His thin face, pale and seamed from long exhaustion, was calm.

Then he recognized her and everything sure and composed about him disappeared in a jolt of surprise – delight – and then slowly dawning grief.

The woman removed her boots and padded across the spotless floor to the edge of the mat.

“Oh Sho-sa,” the man said, shaking his head. “You should not have brought me the honorable blades. A fine gesture, truthfully, but—”

“I bear no swords,” Susan Koshō said, kneeling gracefully and drawing a parchment envelope from the inner pocket of her uniform jacket. “The Admiralty tribunal has concluded its deliberations. You will not satisfy the Emperor’s Honor for the loss of our ship. As of only an hour ago, you are free to depart the base at any time you please.” She set down the envelope, touching the corners to align the rectangle properly between them.

“What is this?” Mitsuharu Hadeishi, recently captain of the ill-starred Imperial Méxica Navy Astronomer-class light cruiser Henry R.Cornuelle, eyed the parchment suspiciously. “This is not an orders packet.”

Koshō shook her head no, gaze politely averted from his, attention unerringly fixed on the hem of his kimono, which was frayed and showing a bit of a tear. She wondered, seeing how shabby his clothing was, what had happened to the old manservant who had tended Chu-sa Hadeishi’s personal affairs aboard the Cornuelle. The rest of the crew – those who had lived through the disaster over Jagan at least – had scattered to the five directions. Even my feet, she thought, are on a strange road, every compass awry with the influence of the fates.With every step, a crossroads appears out of the darkness…

“I have been retired?” Hadeishi’s voice was thin with distress.

“No,” Susan met his eyes at last. “You have been placed on reserve duty, pending the needs of the Fleet. Your service jacket is… all references to the incident at Jagan have been removed. A compromise was reached—”

“But I have no ship,” he said, blinking, trying to take in the abrupt end of his career as a plain envelope pinched between thumb and forefinger. “No duty, no… no…”

He stopped, lips pursed, dark eyebrows narrowed over puzzled, wounded eyes. Susan could feel his mind whirling – imagined touching his brow would reveal a terrible, fruitless heat – and her own face became glacially impassive in response to his distress.

After a moment, Hadeishi’s eyes focused, found her, remembered her words and his head tilted a little to one side. “What of the others? Or am I the only one small enough to be caught in the net of accountability?”

The corners of Koshō’s eyes crinkled very slightly. “Great care was taken that no Imperial agency be found at fault. The Fleet Book shows you fought the Cornuelle against vicious odds--”

Hadeishi stiffened, astonished. “Fought? Fought! I was taken unawares by a weather satellite network – our ship crippled, our crew decimated… -- our only struggle was to stay alive while repairs were underway and the ship kept her nose up!”

Susan nodded, saying. “Representatives of the Mirror-Which-Reveals-The-Truth mentioned this on several occasions – as a mark against you. But the Admiralty has no love for spies and informers, or for the clumsy Flower War priests who incited the Bharat revolt. They would not let you hang for a botched Mirror project. Not when it meant a smudge on their own mantle!”

“But—”

“They cannot give you a ship, Chu-sa. Not with so many powers quarreling over the blame.” Susan frowned, then allowed herself a very small sigh. “Colonel Yacatolli fared no better – he’s been posted to a sub-artic garrison command on Helmand – while Admiral Villeneuve was actually reprimanded, with a black mark struck on his duty jacket for failing to provide Cornuelle with munitions resupply – and Ambassador Petrel has simply left the diplomatic service.”

Hadeishi’s eyes flickered briefly with anger, before he snorted in cynical amusement.

“Did the tribunal assign any blame in this wretched turn of events?”

Susan nodded. “HKV agitators have been blamed for inciting the local population to rebellion against the Empire.”

“The—they are blaming the Europeans for this?” Astonishment flushed Hadeishi’s countenance with a pale rose-colored bloom. “There has not been a European resistance movement in extra-Solar space for nearly fifteen years! Not since—”

“I know.” Susan cut him off gently. “Nonetheless, the tribunal has declared a Finn named Timonen ringleader of the whole sorry affair – and he is conveniently dead, as I understand.”

Mitsuharu snorted again, dismayed. “Do they even care what actually happened?”

Susan shook her head. “They are overjoyed with the Prince’s performance.”

“The P—No, you make a poor, poor jest, sho-sa. Not—”

Koshō – at last – let her properly impassive countenance slip, showing a flash of dismay. She dug into her jacket and produced a carefully folded tabloid. The busyink lay quiescent while Hadeishi unfolded the paper, then sprang to life, showing colorful diagrams, animated graphs, tiny low-res videos…all the appurtances of modern news.

A sallow-faced youth with unmistakable Méxica features blinked out, pockmarked walls visible behind his shoulder, smoke coiling away from hundreds of bullet holes, the glossy black of his Fleet skinsuit spattered with blood, a heavy HV-45B assault rifle slung over one shoulder. The boy – he must have been in his late twenties, but he seemed much younger – was grinning triumphantly.

“The hero of the hour,” Koshō drawled, “savior of the legation, captor of the native ringleaders… Tezozómoc’s public image is shining and bright this week. Someone, somewhere, is very pleased with themselves for this bit of… editing.”

Hadeishi stared at the picture, impassive, eyes hooded, and then turned the tabloid face down on the mat beside the parchment envelope. For a moment he pressed both palms against his eyes, head down, breathing through his nose. Koshō waited, wondering if her old captain would react as she had. I should have brought a sidearm, a ship-pistol, something… to stun him with. When he becomes violently angry. When he threatens to—

“All this…” Mitsuharu did not look up. “Our dead – our broken ship – the wreckage on the surface – my career – it was all for him? To polish his reputation, to give this dissolute Prince some respectability in the eyes of the public?”

“The Heavenly Mountain cannot allow a Prince Imperial,” Susan replied, voice carefully neutral, “to seem the buffoon, to be known as a wastrel, a drunkard, a party-addict… the Emperor is no fool. Even the least, most laughable member of the Imperial Clan must be seen by the general populace as a potentially terrifying warrior of unsurpassed skill. Particularly when Temple of Truth runs a popular weekly featurette detailing his latest lewd binge…”

Hadeishi rocked back, eyes still closed, fists clenched white to the knuckle. Susan waited, feeling a tight, singing tension rise in the pit of her stomach. After ten minutes had passed, the man’s eyes opened and his shoulders slumped. Hastily, Susan looked away, giving her old commander the illusion of privacy, though they were no more than a meter apart.

“So I am the last, least fish caught in this flowery net.”

Koshō did not reply, her gaze fixed on the rear wall of the tea-house.

“And I am left with nothing.” There was the crisp rustle of parchment. “You are to await the pleasure of the Emperor,” he read, “should he have need of your service.” Hadeishi sounded utterly spent. “How long, Sho-sa, do you think I will wait? A year? Two years?”

Forever, she thought, feeling the tension in her stomach turn tighter and tighter. You will be forgotten, like so many other disgraced captains before you.

“There is nothing to say, is there?” Hadeishi lifted a hand and scratched slowly at the stubble on his chin. “There are never enough combat commands for all those who desire them… who need them. Not without some great war to force the hand of the Admiralty and inspire a new building program.” A tiny spark of anger began to lift the leaden tone from his words. “Not when political favor can be exchanged to see some well-connected clan-scion at the helm of a ship of war—”

He stopped abruptly. For the first time, Mitsuharu focused fully on Koshō’s face. A clear sort of penetrating light came into his eyes, wiping aside the despair, but leaving something far more tragic in its place.

“You’ve your fourth zugaikotsu.” He whispered, lifting his chin at the gleaming skulls on her collar. “At last.”

Hadeishi bowed in place, as one honorable officer might to another. “Chu-sa, I regret the words just spoken. Of any man or woman in the fleet who has borne my acquaintance, you – you are worthy of a ship.”

The cable of tension in Susan’s stomach bent over on itself, wire grating against wire.

“The Naniwa, I hope,” Mitsuharu ventured, recalling a dim memory. “She should be out of trials by now… did they hold her for you?”

Koshō nodded and felt a sharp pain in her gut, as though the imaginary cable had frayed past breaking and steel wires spun loose to stab into her flesh. “They did. She is waiting at Jupiter for me right now.”

There was the ghost of a smile on Hadeishi’s lips. “She is a fast ship, Susan, new and bold… tough for her size, but still no dreadnaught! I pulled her specs months ago. A sprinter, she is, not a plow horse, not a charger… you’ll need to keep her in motion in the hot of it – no standing toe to toe – not with the armor she lifts. In and out, missile-work and raids…” The momentary surge of energy failed, and his eyes grew dull again. “You’ll do well… a Main Fleet posting, I’d wager… something where you’ll be seen, noticed…”

Where my family connections can lift me up, Koshō thought bitterly as he fell silent. Where my advantage of birth can show its strength. Where the son of a violin-maker and a shop-clerk would not even be accorded the time of day by his fellow officers.

“Chu-sa—”

“Say nothing, Sho-sa. Say nothing.”

“No. You are the finest combat commander I’ve ever met. All of my skill springs from your example. You will be wasted on the List, waiting for some… some scow to need a driver. Let me…” She struggled to frame the proper words, failed, and blurted out: “Enter my service, sensei. You’ve the heart of a samurai; let me make you one in truth. Then you will command a ship again! Come with me—”

Hadeishi stiffened, almost recoiled, and a quick play of emotions on his agile face exposed – just for an instant – astonishment and then a stunning grief shown by suddenly dead eyes and a waxy tone to his flesh.

“Sensei,” he whispered, almost too faintly for her to hear. “This is how you see me?”

“Hai!” she said, overcome with embarrassment and bowed so deeply in apology her forehead brushed the mat. “Please, you mustn’t lose hope. I can—”

“No, thank you.” Hadeishi said faintly, staring at her as though an apparition had risen through the gleaming floor, a yakka -goblin out of legend to torment him and lay bare every scar carried in his heart. “An honest gesture, Sho-sa, but the weight of my failure will only drag your star down into shadow.”

Susan almost flinched from the icy tone in his voice. She felt short of breath. Koshō blinked, forcing her face back to accustomed impassivity, falling back behind her shield of customary remoteness. “Chu-sa…”

“You should leave now,” he said coolly. “Your ship is waiting.”

Entirely unsure of what she’d said to put such abrupt distance between them, Koshō left quietly, gathering up her boots. Outside, the day-program of the garden had advanced into twilight, yielding mist from the streams and pools. The panels far overhead dimmed still further. The twin suns at the core of the Michóacan system were now reduced to sullen pinpoints, no brighter than the other main sequence stars in the sky.

Susan strode into the base’s main departure lounge in a black mood. Riding alone in the tubecar from the Fumeiyo dome she had turned her conversation with Hadeishi through all five directions. H e does not wish your charity, Koshō-sana. He will starve and die rather than ask a friend for assistance.Idiot. Three kinds of idiot. No, four kinds!

But it was a familiar idiocy.

How many of grandfather’s retainers went the same way? Wasting away, living on less and less, refusing to admit their sons and daughters needed to learn useful skills – would it be so terrible to master a craft? To… to sell goods in the marketplace?

That Koshō’s grandmother had steered her into a military career – the one paying profession which remained honorable for her caste, though the subject of intense competition – seemed now the most natural thing in the world. An admirable and direct answer to the nagging question that plagued all of the old nobility: How does one pay the rent, when there are no koku of land remaining to till, leasehold, or sell? Changes in Nisei tax law under a succession of canny Diet Prime Ministers, and the constant pressure of the mercantile classes, had eroded the vast estates of the old families. Susan was sure the Emperor was quite pleased with the outcome. No one can raise and arm men from houses filled with antiques. And the merchants pay their taxes.

Susan’s pace slowed, eyes drawn to the huge transit board filling the far wall of the lounge. Hundreds of ships were listed, heading in every direction. One of them was hers – a Fleet personnel liner bound for the home system, to Anáhuac, and the massive Akbal yards orbiting Jupiter.

M y first command. My own ship… the dream of every junior officer in the Fleet. For a moment, she felt uneasy, aware of an incipient loneliness, and part of her devoutly wished Hadeishi had accepted her service. I will miss him,but I do not need him to guide my hand.

Then a half-familiar shape glimpsed from the corner of one eye drew her head around. The general ill-feeling of anger, resentment and thwarted intent endemic to the passages of the base suddenly had a singular, unmistakably clear focus.

“Green Hummingbird!” She snarled.

Koshō turned on her heel and plunged through a squad of enlisted ratings sprawled on transit couches, the floor around them littered with Mayahuel bottles and patolli mats, to fetch up before two men – no, one human and one alien – sitting in a quiet corner of the huge, bustling room.

“What are you doing here?” Susan’s voice was cold, each word bitten out of hydrogen ice.

The human was holding a package in his hands, something rectangular wrapped in twine and brown paper. He looked up, catching Koshō’s gaze with a pair of green eyes deep as Tuxpan jade, and his polished old mahogany face, etched with tiny scars and sharp wrinkles, expressed nothing more than the most polite interest. “Chu-sa Koshō, a pleasure.”

“What are you doing here?” She hissed. A horrible suspicion had formed in her mind the instant she’d set eyes on the old Méxica. He was well known to her – an Imperial nauallis or Judge, of the sort who traveled the backwaters of the Rim, poking and prying into all sorts of dangerous business, showing up at odd places and times, commandeering the Cornuelle or any other Imperial ship on hand as he pleased – he and Hadeishi had some kind of history, for the Captain had always been accommodating, bending rules and regulations with aplomb to accommodate the Judge and his ‘business’. An Imperial agent, a spy, an assassin, a sorcerer… a walking career disaster.

“I am waiting for my ship, like everyone else,” Hummingbird said, showing the ghost of a smile, “and catching up on the news with a recent friend.”

His hand – now empty, the package having disappeared into one of the medium-sized travel cases at his feet – indicated the alien in the opposite chair. Susan spared a glance for the creature – a slight shape with a vaguely humanoid face. Thin, ancient-seeming hands covered with a close-napped blue-black fur held a chain of beads. Much like Hummingbird, the alien was wearing a hooded mantle over tunic and trousers, this one a faded, mottled green with a dull-colored red cross quartering its chest.

“Holy one, this is Captain Susan Koshō. Chu-sa, the honored Sra Osá.”

Koshō bowed politely. “My pleasure, Osá-tzin.”

Then her whole attention was on Hummingbird again, her face tight with barely repressed anger. “Did you have anything to do with this? With the Tribunal’s compromise? With what happened to us on Jagan?”

“I had nothing,” the old Méxica said carefully, “to do with the astounding success of the xochiyaotinime in providing Fleet and Army with such a vigorous martial test. And I am very pleased Captain Hadeishi was not forced to satisfy his honor, or that of the Emperor, in some… final way.”

“Are you?” Koshō managed to keep from snarling, all in deference to the old priest watching the two of them with bright, inquisitive eyes. “Then why have you done nothing to help him, when he has always rendered you aid – even in defiance of his ordered duty? Is this how the nauallis treat their allies and friends?”

Hummingbird’s chiseled face tightened. He was rarely challenged by anyone, much less a Fleet officer whose career he could destroy with a comm call. Susan knew this and failed to care. She had never found him intimidating – dangerous, yes, like a redwood viper loose on your command deck – but not a source of fear. Though she would be loath to admit such a thing, the Judge did not exist high enough on the slopes of the Heavenly Mountain to impress her.

“I have done what I can,” he snapped. “He lives, does he not? He will have a command again, when enough time has passed to dim the memory of his enemies.”

“He only has such enemies,” Koshō hissed, “because of his association with you.”

The old nauallis became quite still, eyes narrowing, and he seemed to settle into the lounge-chair like a mountain finding its footing in the earth. “What would have of me, child, that Hadeishi would not ask himself? For he has not asked me for aid, though I have offered.”

Have you? How many visitors has my captain entertained in his empty house? How many well-meaning friends has he turned away?

The admission stilled her angry rush, letting the unexpected venom drain from her thoughts.

“He has to be saved,” she said, controlled once more. “Before he simply fades away.”

Hummingbird shrugged. “Perhaps you should let him tread his own path?”

“No.” Koshō fixed him with a steady, considering eye. “He will languish and die if left without purpose. Find him a ship. Put a g-deck under his feet. Give him what he deserves.”

Hummingbird rubbed the top of his head, which was brown and smooth as a betel-nut. He cast a sideways glance at the Sra Osá, whose attention seemed far away, politely ignoring the argument playing out before him, rosary beads clicking one by one through pelted fingers.

“Arrangements could be made,” the old Méxica allowed with a grimace.

“Good.” Koshō offered the most minimal bow, glanced up to check the transit board, cursed at the time and then left in haste.

The nauallis watched her go, his expression pensive. Hummingbird rubbed the back of his head again, glancing sideways at his wizened companion. “Ah, if only she had a gram of Hadeishi’s native circumspection! He will be hard to replace… but what is done is done. Once the arrow has flown…”

Sra Osá said nothing, its ancient face impassive beneath the woolen hood.

Hummingbird nodded to himself, some internal judgment weighed and accepted, checked his bag for the twine-wrapped package, then lifted both cases and moved away.

In the kuub

Antispinward of Méxica space, beyond the Rim

The navigator of the IMN Calexico frowned at her console, tapping her throatmike to life: “Chu-sa Rae? We’re at to barely thirty-percent seethrough in this… combat reaction range is down to less than a light minute.”

At the other end of the long, narrow bridge, Captain Rae’s grimace matched her wary expression. His destroyer had an upgraded sensor suite to match the two Survey Deep Range scouts he was flying gunsight for, but in this protostellar murk nothing was working quite to Engineering Board specifications.

“Are Kiev and Korkunov still in relay? Are we getting a clean telemetry feed?”

“Hai,” the navigator responded, watching the collision counts on the forward transit shields flicker rapidly in and out of redline on her stat panel. “Feed is clean, but our shielding is edging towards full-stop.”

“I see it.” Rae had the same readout running on his console. IMN DD-217 Calexico lacked the new battle shielding Fleet was refitting onto the capital ships, and her transit deflectors – though upgraded to match Survey requirements – were finding it hard going in the heavy interstellar dust endemic to this region of space. “Comm, patch me through to the K and K.”

Rae waited patiently while his communications officer rounded up the captains of the two Survey ships. Watching the collision counts on the forward shields surging red did not ease his mind. The kuub was notorious for its hazards to navigation. Ancient stellar debris –ward-room rumor said the science team was feeling warm about a double-supernova – swirled in a hot murk glowing with radiation from the few suns still embedded in the nebula. There were solid fragments as well, the bits and pieces of planets shattered by the catastrophic detonation, mixed with cometary debris, stray asteroids… an Oort cloud of incredible density.

There were hints of a massive gravity sink down at the heart of the region. A black hole, or maybe more than one. The navigator was starting to see queer distortions in the local hyperspace gradient, though they didn’t look anything like the usual fluctuation patterns around a singularity. She tapped her throatmike again.

“Chu-sa, we’re approaching transit vertex pretty quickly. I think we’d better stop. I’m seeing… wait a minute. Hold one. Hold one.” Her voice turned puzzled.

Rae, in the midst of offering the Kiev an engineering team to tear down a degraded shield nacelle, caught the change in her voice and his reaction was instantaneous. He slapped the Full Stop glyph on his main console and barked a confirming order to his crew: “All engines, full stop. All power to transit shielding, all stations report!”

Sixteen seconds later, amid the crisp chatter of his departments reporting, the telemetry from Kiev stopped cold.

In the threatwell directly in front of Rae’s station, the icon representing the Survey ship winked out. A camera pod in the destroyer’s nose immediately swiveled towards the event and three seconds later the Chu-sa was watching with gritted teeth as the Kiev vanished in a plume of superheated plasma.

“Antimatter containment failure—” Rae’s voice was anguished, but then his eyes widened in real horror. The Korkunov vanished from the plot five seconds after its sister ship. A second burst of sunfire stabbed through the dust. His fist slammed the crash button on his shockframe.

“Full evasion! Guns hot, give me full active scan! Battle stations!”

A klaxon blared and every lighting fixture on the ship flashed three times and then shaded into a noticeable red tone. Rae’s shockframe folded around him and a z-helmet lowered and locked tight against his shipsuit’s neckring. A groan vibrated from the very air as the destroyer’s main engines ignited and the g-decking strained to adjust. The Calexico surged forward into a tight turn, its radar and wideband laser sensors emitting a sharp full-spectrum burst to paint the immediate neighborhood.

Down on the gun deck, a message drone banged away from the ship, thrown free by a magnetic accelerator and immediately darted back along the expedition’s path of entry into the kuub. The drone’s onboard comp was already calculating transit gradients, looking to punch into hyperspace as quickly as inhumanly possible. A second drone was run out by a suddenly-frantic deck crew, ready to launch as soon as the results of the wide-spectrum scan were complete.

A louder alarm was blaring in Engineering, drowning the usual warble of the drive coil and the basso drone of the antimatter reactor and its attendant systems. In the number three airlock, Engineer Second Malcom Helsdon turned in place, his z-suit already sealed, a gear-pack slung over one shoulder and ten meters of heat-exchange thermocouple looped around the other. Through the visor of his suit helmet, he peered back through the closing inner door of the lock, seeing the on-duty crew moving quickly - as they should, he thought – to action stations.

T hat heat exchanger is going to have to wait. Helsdon’s habitually serious expression soured.

The engineer reached out to key the lock override, but the looped thermocouple bound his arm and he paused, shifting his feet, swinging the ungainly package around to his other side, to get a free hand on the control panel. Sweat had already sprung out on his pale forehead, and the usual shag of unkempt brown hair was in his eyes.

The blur of motion was so swift, only the faintest afterimage registered in his retinas.

“What—” was that? The overhead lights in the airlock went out.

There was an instant of darkness and Helsdon knew, even before the local emergency illumination kicked in, that main power had failed catastrophically. Without a second thought, he threw himself back against the wall opposite the interior lock door and seized hold of a stanchion. As he moved, local g-control failed and he slammed hard into the plasticine panel. The Calexico was at full burn and only the armored resiliency of his Fleet z-suit kept Helsdon from breaking both shoulder and arm. For an instant, everything was whirling lights and vertigo.

A moment later, Helsdon steadied himself and ventured to open his eyes.

Everything was terribly quiet.

Still alive, he thought, blinking in the dim glow of the emergency lights. The thermocouple had come loose and was drifting in z-g, slowly uncoiling to fill the airlock with dozens of silvery loops. Reactor hasn’t fried me yet… He kicked to the inner lock window, bracing one leg against the side of the heavy pressure door. Streaks of frost blocked most of the view, but Helsdon had no trouble seeing out.

Grasping what he saw took a heartbeat, then another… two breaths to realize he wasn’t looking down at an engineering drawing, but rather at the heart of the Calexico herself laid bare. Somehow Engineering was falling away from him – along with the great proportion of the destroyer itself – every deck exposed, every hall and conduit pipe gaping wide to open space. A huge cloud of debris – sheets, coffee cups, papers, shoes, the ruined bodies of men already broken open by explosive decompression – spewed forth from the dying ship.

Helsdon’s helmet jerked to one side, searching for a point of reference – anything that made sense – and fixed on a section of wall jutting out into his field of view to the left. He could see three-quarters of the hallway – flooring with nonslip decking, dead light fixtures, a guide-panel – and then nothing. Only an impossibly sharp division where the ship just ended.

We’ve been cut in half.

Shinedo

On the Chumash Sound, North America, Anahuac

A week’s tips feeling very light in his pocket, Hadeishi trudged up a long low hill through fresh snow. In summer, the hillside would be covered with mown-short grass and the misty forest on either side of the parkland would be a deep cool green, filled with croaking ravens and drifting butterflies. Now everything was crisp and white, the mossy pillars covered with hanging ice. Even behind him, where the sea broke against reddish slate cliffs edging the headland, the gray waves shone with pearlescent foam. Walking carefully between the ice-slicked path and endless rows of grave markers, Mitsuharu picked his way along a turfed horse-path. Even in this weather, the springy sod beneath the newly laid frost yielded queasily with each step. Here, he thought wistfully, everything is just as I remember.So our dead sleep quietly, shielded from wakeful change and the restless chaos of the city.

The other places he’d held unchanged in memory were simply gone.

Fifteen years of Fleet service – and at least a decade since he’d spent leave in the bustling commercial city stretching east and south of this quiet peninsula – had seen his old neighborhood leveled. His parent’s single-story house with the green tin roof and the white-painted walls was gone. The entire street, ancient cobblestones and crumbling asphalt and peeling advertisements on the garden gate had vanished. No more little single-door shops tucked in between the warehouses and old factories, selling tea and cakes and hot noodles. Even the narrow park along Deception Creek – which marked the southern edge of downtown – had been replaced. Ancient rows of cherry and mulberry trees cut down, replaced by a modern promenade of expensive shops and brisk, gleaming cafes catering to the young and rich.

Civilians.Merchants, he thought, dully angered by the wall of gleaming sea-green-glass apartment towers burying his boyhood memories beneath sixty stories of luxury flats and their attendant hovercar garages. Even a dirty, industrial neighborhood should be allowed to putter along… without improvements, without renovations.

But Shinedo had grown enormously while he’d been gone among the stars. A new high-speed maglev cargo railway from the far eastern coast now ran day and night, moving millions of tons of Asiatic goods from Shinedo’s deepwater port to the grimy coastal cities of Oswego and New Canarsie in the Iroquois Protectorate. And from there, onward to Europe and Afriqa. The sprawling spaceport in the wetlands south of the city benefited as well. Though there were larger Fleet installations planet-side, Shinedo uchumon handled a constant and lucrative passenger service. The downtown industrial districts Mitsuharu prowled in his youth now sprawled around uchu in a thick belt of newly-built factories, smokestacks and office parks.

But little of that ugliness was visible within the quiet solitude of the park. Here – and only here within greater Shinedo metro, still protected by the edict of an Emperor long dead when the first human spacecraft lumbered into orbit from the Nanchao – towering groves of old coastal redwoods remained. The entire park, save for the serpentine meadows containing the cemetery, was filled with the same nearly-impenetrable rainforest which had greeted the first Nisei to wade ashore upon gumshan – the Golden Mountain.

Beneath their broad eaves, heavy with snow, there was a deep sense of quiet.

As befits the honored dead, Hadeishi thought as he turned onto a side-path – this one set with wooden steps and a railing – which climbed the westernmost hill in the park. Let them rest, distant from the garish, uncaring noise of those who still live.

His Fleet discharge pay had evaporated once he’d stepped off the shuttle down in uchu. Shinedo was not cheap. Food, lodging, bus tickets… everything was expensive. Even the most wretched grade of sake was a full quill the jar. Two ceramic bottles clinked in his jacket pocket, rubbing a handful of wilted flowers to pale yellow dust. There was a dole for the indigent, but Mitsuharu had prided himself on having useful skills.

Solving a four dimensional puzzle with seventy-six vectors in less than a second has no value in the civilian world.Knowing thelittle tricks of command, of gaining men’s loyalty, of making them work harder, faster, more accurately as a team under fire… who needs that here? There is no war in the city.

Very near the shuttle port, in the maze of narrow alleys and bars and tea-houses making up the district called Water Lantern, he had managed to secure employment. He played the samisen in a tea house on the evenings, while the off-duty Fleet and merchanter ratings wasted their money on girls and rice beer and gambling at patolli or dice or cards. His father – who had been very good with almost any stringed instrument – would have been appalled to see his so-promising son picking away at the kind of cheap lute the tea-house teishu could afford.

Hadeishi had not practiced in nearly twenty years – not since he was a boy – and his fine set of thumbs produced the most appalling racket. But the drunken sailors and their joygirls didn’t seem to mind, not until a string broke with a piercing screech, and then he merely bowed his head and let the broken bottles shatter on the wall behind him. There were little cuts on his neck and hands, but the rough coppery smell of blood was familiar, and Hadeishi had no taste for a fight. Not now. There was nothing to fight for.

No vinegar left, he thought, passing beneath a wooden arch wound with heavy snow-dusted vines. All spilled out of me at Jagan with the Cornuelle burning up in the atmosphere. With all my dead crewmen…

Beyond the arch was a small clearing laid with fitted stones – swept clean even on such a cold day – surrounding a temple-house of red enamel and dark, polished wood. The smell of incense hung in the frigid air, tapers twining long loops of smoke among the rafters. Hadeishi’s Fleet boots made a tapping sound as he walked and the careful eye could make out ideograms cut into each of the paving stones. Even here, in the Western Chapel, where at winter’s end the Emperor came to witness the sun of the vernal equinox settle into the distant sea, surrounded by the great nobles and the deep, throaty roll of massed drums, the dead lay close at hand.

Mitsuharu knelt in the temple, bending his head against the floor in obeisance to the gilded idol. The altar was crowded with candle-stubs, pools of melted wax and drifts of fallen ash. Coins, gew-gaws, trinkets, little toys, chicle-prizes, letters, twists of paper folded with prayers covered every flat surface in the shrine.

“The city is expensive,” he said aloud, shaking his head in dismay. “I’ve little to leave you, mother, father.” Hadeishi dug in his pockets, found the sake, the flowers, the hard plastic shape of his Fleet comm. “But what I have, I will send to you, beyond the sea.”

Beyond the walls of the temple-house, a late afternoon wind guttered among the stones. The first Nisei to be laid to rest in the Western Paradise had been interred within days of the Landing. The fleet had breached upon this shore out of exhaustion. The passage between the outer bulwark of Nootka island and the rocky, forest-shrouded coastline had taken the last burst of energy the refugees could muster. Thirty-six days had passed while the gray vastness of the sea hammered at their boats. Few of the Japanese vessels had been fitted for such a voyage, though in the mad panic to evacuate Edo and Osaka, no mind had been paid to their seaworthiness. More than half of those who fled dying Nippon were lost in the passage. But the Emperor himself had survived, carried forth from the wreck of his ancient realm in a massive Chinese hai-po taken in raid off Taiwan. That enormous ship had run aground in Deception Creek, or so the children said, and the last Emperor to be born in the Immortal Islands had splashed ashore with katana in hand and rusted armor upon his breast. Though the shore he faced was crowded with an impossibly thick forest, and his people were sick and weak, there was nowhere else to run.

Mitsuharu made a little space among the grave goods with his fingers and set both sake bottles among the debris left by other mourners. He considered his comm for a long time. The metal surface was chipped and worn, discolored by plasma backwash, and a sixteen glyph was blinking on the display surface. Messages from fellow officers, he thought, entirely devoid of curiosity, I will never view.

Hadeishi turned off the device and, out of long habit, pocketed the power cell. He placed the flowers atop the comm and bent his head over clasped hands.

“One leaf lets go,” he whispered, eyes squeezed tight, “and another follows on the wind.”

I am sorry, mother, father; I did not come home. News of your illness, your death, reached me by courier off Kodon, when vital repairs were already underway. I am late to bring you these things, to pray for you, to bid you a speedy journey home to the Blessed Isles. I am sorry. I am not a good son. I was not a good captain. Now I am a wretched player in a disreputable tavern. So the wheel turns.

The foundation of the temple-house was laid upon the grave of that first man – a lesser courtier of the Imperial House; a kugyo born in Echizen – to die upon gumshan. He was not the last. Fell beasts roamed the primordial forest and the natives were quick and sly, slipping unseen through deep shadows with knives of knapped stone. The weather was far fiercer than the nobles of Nara and Kyoto expected, and the refugees accounted barely a handful of men experienced in hunting, fishing, carpentry, blacksmithing… by winter’s end, another quarter of the survivors were crudely interred around the temple-house. The great cemetery had begun its millennia-long sprawl.

But the third spring had brought an unexpected sight – long boats with many rowers toiling up the coast from the south. The handful of Nisei ships which remained seaworthy – many had been cannibalized for nails, lumber, cordage and other desperately-needed fittings – met the Toltec pochteca on the low swell at the mouth of Deception Creek. From the temple-house hill, a pillar could been seen on the further shore where the Emperor’s representatives had first held conversation with the emissaries of the great southern kingdoms. By then the Nisei had driven the tribal peoples from their villages along the shore and were beginning to clear the forest for their new city.

Mitsuharu finished his prayers and remained seated, feeling entirely directionless.

I’ve done what must be done, he realized, every commission discharged. Honor to Fleet, family and Emperor satisfied by the most meager effort. My purpose at an end. His lips twisted in dismay and thin, fine-boned hands patted at his service jacket, feeling for the hilt of a knife or blade of some kind. Ah, old fool. You traded your service tanto for new strings for that useless scrap of wood… you have already forgotten yourself, haven’t you? A samurai, an officer, without even the least weapon to hand? What would Lord Musashi think of you now?

Hadeishi grunted, the harsh sound echoing in the silent temple, and answered himself. “Lord Musashi was never bothered by the lack of steel!”

An old, old memory came to mind – the fuzzing screen of an ancient black-and-white 2-d set showing the calm, centered face of a samurai framed by the pillars of another temple, one in Japan itself, where a ring of ruffians – not even samurai, though their nervous hands held blades aplenty, but bandits and honorless men – circled the lone swordmaster. A strong wind was blowing, rustling the leaves of ancient trees, bending their creaking limbs. Lord Musashi had nothing in his hands save a length of willow-wood.

They were doomed, Hadeishi remembered, the ghost of a child’s smile in his eyes. Though he had nothing but the clothes on his back. The Five Rings chambara had played on the 2-d every afternoon throughout Mitsuharu’s childhood. Hundreds of episodes, rarely shown in order, depicting the long and remarkably heroic life of the sword-saint Miyamoto. An excellent reason for a youngster to run home from school and fling himself onto the floor of his parent’s house in a pile of blankets, eyes fixed on the tiny screen. Five Rings was particularly beloved for its setting – Japan itself, during the long struggle of the Restoration, when the Nisei had returned to the home islands and driven out the vile Mongol dynasty which had terrorized their homeland during the five centuries of exile.

I will have to buy a knife next week, Hadeishi thought glumly. When I’ve a little money again.

He tucked trouser into boot-tops and stepped out into the frigid afternoon air. The door of the temple-house slid closed behind him without a sound. Mitsuharu tucked his chin into the collar of his jacket, frost biting his face. A long walk faced him – back into the city, across the bridge vaulting Deception Creek, a hike up over the long ridge separating the well-heeled Khahtsalano district from the area around the spaceport and finally home to his pallet.

Hadeishi was descending the wooden stair into the cemetery proper when a long-drawn-out rumble reached him, carried up from the south in the cold, still air. A laser-boosted shuttle cut through the clouds, a bright spark of red racing away to orbit. He looked back to the shrine, thinking of the sake bottles. Opium would be better, he thought wanly. But I’ve money for neither.Goodbye, mother; goodbye father.

The cold settled in his limbs with a dull ache as he walked through the forest. Hadeishi put aside recurring thoughts of stealing the shrine liquor. He’d never thought of himself as a drunkard before, but now – with all this weight pressing on his spirit – he could see the draw of forgetfulness. Another shuttle was launching from uchu by the time he’d reached the narrows bridge. This time he watched, face lifted to the clouds, until the heavy cargo vessel vanished into a darkening sky. Mist boiled around the ship’s path in a long, filmy corkscrew.

They look big from down here, he thought, remembering sitting on the hillside across the river from the main launch-pits at uchu with his father. Gigantic. Leaping into the heavens on wings of flame… But even the largest shuttle was dwarfed by the massive shape of the commercial liners waiting in orbit, much less the vast bulk of a Fleet carrier or dreadnaught. The cold was in his heart now, and the ache was trickling along his spine.

He trudged across the bridge, bitter sea wind piercing his jacket and sweater, cap tugged low. There was a merchanter’s guild office, Hadeishi remembered, and I’d qualify for a senior rating’s birth. Perhaps even an officer. On a miner, or a cargoman, or a bulk carrier. It would be… something. Better than being a samisen player for drunkards.

He felt colder, realizing his father had made a good living, for many years, playing in tea-houses and inns. Enough to buy a little house and keep his children fed, his son in school uniforms, engineering books, testing fees... It’s not enough for me.I want… I want my family back. I want my command.

The wounded sound of the Cornuelle’s spaceframe groaning as she twisted into the atmosphere over Jagan was suddenly sharp in his memory. The hoarse rasp of his own breath inside the helmet, the queasy nausea of shattered ribs. Corridors clogged with floating debris, bubbles of smoke, the drifting bodies of the dead.

I killed my ship. Susan’s face appearing out of the darkness, her eyes blazing with worry as her helmet visor levered up. The tightening of dismay around her almond-shaped eyes as she realized what he’d done. I killed my own children. For pride. Because I was very good at what I did. But not good enough to beat entropy.

Neon washed his face as he walked, expression vacant, thoughts light years away. Snow was falling again, dusting his hunched shoulders with white. He’d felt terribly cold then too, strapped into his shockchair, hands numb with the effort he’d spent to get the ship’s nose up, her orbit stable. Empty too, then as now, though the white-hot fury which had vomited out of him at the Admiral’s aide was long, long gone.

Ash in the wind. Burned away like the skin of the ship, like Fitzsimmons and Deckard.

Trucks were rumbling past, the streets filled with the comings and goings of a busy mercantile district. The cloying smell of diesel and oil permeated the air. The blare of music from the doorways of dance-halls and pachinko parlors drowned out everything else, even the roar of another shuttle rising from uchu. But Hadeishi felt the subsonic rumble, vibrating through the soles of his boots. It was inescapable.

If I were not prideful, Mitsuharu thought, feeling his spirit sink even lower. I could be among the stars again.But what am I beyond pride, he wondered, without my uniform, without duty? Am I more than a shell of starched linen and golden ribbon? Is there any reason to be anything else?

Without a warship to command, he realized, merely shipping out was without purpose.

Lord Musashi, He remembered, would not compromise his honor at such a pass. He would wait patiently, living on charity, until someone deserving of his service called upon him. Even if he waited until death.

But that was a very cold comfort, on this gray and frigid day.

The House of Fumeiyo-ie

In the kuub

Shinedo

(end of excerpt)