House of Reeds

Aboard the Captain's Launch Approaching the Cornuelle

"Hold on," Sho-i Asale said, twisting her control yoke. The launch dodged to one side as a section of hull plating flew past. The fragment was only a dark blot against the abyssal darkness beyond the windows. Hadeishi, standing beside the airlock, felt a twinge in his gut, realizing they had entered the corona of debris around the Cornuelle.

"We're clear for final approach." The pilot eased back the thrusters. "I have visual on the aft shuttle bay."

Hadeishi braced one arm against the side of the lock, peering through the forward windows. The aft bay doors seemed intact, though he could see the starboard ventral point defense mount had taken some kind of directed beam damage. The shipskin was bubbled and twisted like taffy. Two stubby anti-missile railguns were exposed, the armor over their emplacement entirely missing, leaving a ragged edge. Mottled, ashy expanses of the shipskin showed the rippling effects of an energy overload to the reactive armor.

"Any response to your access code?" The Chu-sa could hear himself breathing harshly.

"None." Asale twisted around in her seat, looking back at the captain and the two Marines. "I can take us around to the other side. The launch bay is well armored, perhaps -"

"No." Hadeishi tapped the EVA bag clamped to his chestplate. "Too far from engineering. We'll need to get there first, if any good is to be done. Open the lock. We'll jet across and cut our way in if need be. Keep transmitting our ident codes. Something might wake up in time to let us inside."

"Hai, kyo." The pilot turned back to her controls and began nudging the launch sideways towards the hull a meter at a time.

Hadeishi craned his neck, watching for the surface of the shuttle bay doors to appear in the tiny window of the airlock. A cold band twisted tighter around his heart each time his chrono elapsed another minute. The Cornuelle had failed to reply to their hails as they approached, and even the navigational display in the launch showed the light cruiser's wildly degraded orbit. The two-minute-long irregular burn by the out-of-control number three engine had thrown the Cornuelle into a sharp dive towards the planetary atmosphere.

The Chu-sa was sure the abrupt cut-off of the misfiring engine had been the work of someone still alive, aboard, throwing the ship into emergency shutdown. The damage inflicted by the mines was severe – Hadeishi had never seen his ship vomit so much atmosphere, so much radioactive debris, in any of her countless engagements – but the loss of navigational control was a mystery. Something else has happened, he thought grimly, pressing his forehead against the inside of his helmet. Perhaps main comp was damaged, or one of the control nodes severed. He refused to believe everyone aboard was dead.

On her new heading, the Cornuelle would not corkscrew to a fiery doom – gravity had already seized hold and she was wallowing towards a tentative orbit – but the upper reaches of the Jaganite atmosphere were already reaching up to clutch at her battered surface. Friction would follow as the cruiser settled deeper into the thermosphere, and that would steal her angular momentum. The end would come, later rather than sooner, with a glowing, red-hot hull and the stress of re-entry tearing the crippled starship apart.

"Twenty meters." Asale tapped the braking jets and the launch gentled to a halt relative to the crippled ship. "Cycling airlock."

The inner door irised open and Hadeishi stepped in, followed by Fitzsimmons. The launch airlock was too small to allow more than two men in z-suits with all the repair gear which could be salvaged from the launch strapped to their bodies inside at once. Hadeishi squeezed to one side – the Marine was nearly a foot taller than he – and took hold of the outer door locking bar.

Deckard waved cheerfully as the inner door closed between them. Hadeishi waited, listening to Asale breathing and counting their displacement from the Cornuelle, while air pumped out of the lock.

"Nineteen…back to twenty…nineteen…holding at twenty meters."

The outer lock blossomed open. Hadeishi clenched his fists around the jet controls and puffed out of the opening. The vast bulk of the Cornuelle loomed before him, a wall of ebon darkness slanting up against a rampart of stars. He thumbed the thruster control and swept toward the bay doors outlined on his visor by suit comp. Fitzsimmons waited two breaths, and then followed himself, careful to keep from fouling the medical aid pack on his back in the airlock.

"I have the bay access door in sight," Hadeishi said, changing course slightly.

Understoo -

The autonomic targeting system in the nearer railgun suddenly identified the launch as a hostile vessel launching self-propelled missiles towards the Cornuelle. The anti-missile mount flared a brilliant blue-white. A depleted uranium needle two millimeters long accelerated to near-relativistic speed, exited the magnetic 'racetrack' and punched through the captain's launch from end to end. The needle pierced the forward pressure windows fifteen centimeters from Asale's head, flashed the length of the tiny cabin, drilled directly through Deckard's z-suit, his ribs on the right side, one lung and then out the other and impaled itself in the launch's magnetically shielded Hosukai-Tesla reaction drive chamber. An enormous amount of energy vomited into the interior of the tiny ship as the needle stopped abruptly. Deckard was incinerated as thousand degree plasma flooded in through the rupture in his z-suit. Asale lasted a moment longer, smashed against the control panel, her suit withstanding the pressure and heat for three and then four seconds, then suffering catastrophic structural failure. The launch spaceframe buckled, unable to contain the explosion and then sublimated into a blast of heat and light and debris.

The explosion flared out, smashing into Hadeishi and Fitzsimmons and hurling them against the side of the Cornuelle. Both men were still accelerating towards the boat bay door. Fitzsimmons and his heavy load afforded the Chu-sa a tiny fraction of protection, but the Marine's corpse became a missile a half-second later and Hadeishi was slapped against the armored hull of the ship by a giant, raging hand of flame.

The z-suit stiffened on impact, trying to bleed away the shock of collision, but the violence was too much for Hadeishi's nervous system to absorb and he grayed out, grasping fruitlessly at the smooth metal surface of the hull. His medband triggered, flushing his system with adrenaline, anti-radiation agents and painkillers. Tangled in Fitzsimmons' body, fragments of the launch smashing against the bay doors around him, the Chu-sa skidded across the hull, impelled by the dying wavefront of the explosion.

Jolted back to awareness by the drugs, his heart hammering violently in his chest, arms and legs numb, Hadeishi twisted, trying to get his hands and feet face-front. Fitzsimmons' charred z-suit sloughed away, breaking up as the straps for the Marine's ruck disintegrated. A cloud of blackened and melted medpacks flew out around the Chu-sa. Hundreds of hours of z-suit drill as a cadet and a junior officer reasserted themselves in a reflexive, four-square crouch. The gripper pads in Hadeishi's gloves and boots realized they were in proximity to shipskin and activated. Friction increased dramatically between the two surfaces and the Chu-sa slid to a halt.

Ionized gases and plasma-hot particles blew past, dinging on his faceplate and z-suit. Hadeishi focused, saw the boat bay door was a hundred meters away, and tried to grapple mentally with the concept his launch, his pilot and two of his men had been obliterated from the universe in less than sixteen seconds of sidereal time.

Ah, he moaned inwardly, so many ghosts will haunt me. So many ghosts. Is there enough incense in all Shinedo to placate your wailing cries?

Then the Chu-sa settled his breathing, forced every thought from his mind but the necessity of survival and began spider-walking across the hull towards the access door. Hidden by the z-suit, his med-band was burning crimson. A too-familiar stabbing pain rippled up his side with each movement, but Hadeishi only bent his head and continued to force arms and legs to move.

I will never fear loneliness, he sang to himself, crawling forward. I will always be accompanied.

Before long, I shall be a ghost

But just now, how they bite my flesh

These autumn winds.