Wasteland of Flint

The Cornuelle

Mitsuharu was sitting cross-legged on the edge of his sleeping mat, a fall of snarled dark hair spread over his shoulders and chest when the comm lit up with an incoming message. An officious two-tone chime sounded, indicating a priority connection from the bridge.

"Hadeishi here," he said, putting down an ivory-handled brush. Guiltily pleased by the interruption — he did not enjoy the tedium of brushing — the chu-sa began plaiting his traditionally long hair up in a thick braid. "On screen."

Comm stabilized to reveal Sho-sa Kosho sitting on the bridge. To unfamiliar eyes the exec's stiff, controlled demeanor would have revealed very little beyond an impression of cool consideration. Mitsuharu saw a certain eager excitement in the tilt of the woman's eyes and the set of her mouth. There was also a brief, nearly undetectable, reaction of embarrassment to finding him almost naked, clad only in an undershirt, belt, trousers, boots, comm unit and medband.

"The g-sensor array has yielded up a match for the refinery ship," Kosho reported in a more-than-usually terse voice. "Distance is forty thousand k, by my estimate. Bearing two-six-three, elevation plus thirty-two."

"Right on top of us." Hadeishi allowed himself a quick, pleased smile. He botched the smaller over-and-under at the end of the plait and gave up, letting the shining dark hair, a little streaked with gray, lie loose against his back. "Deeper into the belt?"

Kosho shook her head, looking sideways at a hidden display. "Near the outsystem fringe. The bulk of the local drift is between us, so I've not been able to get a secondary detect with passive sensors."

"Clever." Hadeishi unfolded himself from the bed and found his uniform shirt. "Keeping close to the area they want to work, neh? And behind a shield of debris. What is their gravitational situation? Could they make gradient to hyperspace from their current location?"

The exec shook her head, an eager gleam of flickering in her eyes. "The local field is not smooth enough," she said. "They will have to bolt from cover if they wish to transit."

"A location fraught with compromise." Hadeishi sealed the shirt in a smooth motion with his thumb. "Their holds must be only half-full, but the takings are likely rich, enough to warrant the risk of remaining in-system. Have you laid in an intercept course?"

"Hai, Chu-sa." Kosho stiffened fractionally. "Would you like to review the plot?"

"Not now." Hadeishi's thoughts were already leaping ahead to the next task. In any case, he had full confidence in Kosho's ability to maneuver the ship through this debris field. "I want to be in Outrider camera range as quickly as possible — while remaining hidden!" His tone turned serious. "If they bolt, we will have to catch them and we cannot risk a weapons exchange in open space."

Kosho frowned. Mitsu made a "go-ahead" motion with his hand.

"Hadeishi-san," she said, rather tentatively, "why not just spook them into making gradient? Then they'll be gone and the debris field will probably mask their departure from any…one who might be watching from Three."

"True." Hadeishi scratched at his beard in irritation. "I have considered this. Unfortunately, we know at least one shuttle from this refinery ship was operating in the atmosphere of Three — and what if they picked up someone or something? Though our tlamatinime is not currently aboard, I know he would be…ah…apoplectic if we allowed a gang of landless miners to make off with a First Sun artifact. Even a small one."

"I see." Kosho nodded. "I will arrange to approach under cover and in full stealth."

"Good." Mitsu cleared the comm channel and punched up Thai-i HuГ©mac's quarters on the barracks deck. There was a brief delay and the v-pane cleared, revealing the bronzed face of the Marine commander.

"Hai, Chu-sa?" Half of the Zapotec's face was glistening with shaving gel.

"We have found our quarry," Hadeishi said, shrugging into his uniform jacket. "Are Heicho Felix and her squad ready to go?"

HuГ©mac tensed, lips compressing into a tight line to admit anything less than perfect readiness to his commander. "Almost. They need some more time in the simulators — if we have time to spare, kyo."

Hadeishi nodded to himself and checked the navigational plot Kosho had seconded to his comp display. "Two, perhaps three ship-days, Thai-i. And then we will need to move quickly." He looked back to the Marine. "Is there a problem with the personnel assigned? Should Heicho Felix be replaced as team leader?"

HuГ©mac shook his head slowly, though Mitsu thought he could see a tinge of concern behind the impassive, southern-highlands face. A near-open struggle flickered behind the flint-dark eyes. "No. Felix and her men have done very well. It's just…"

"What is it?" Hadeishi kept his voice conversational and polite. For the Marine to say anything less than "Can do, kyo. Done, kyo." indicated a serious problem. Not for the first time, Hadeishi wished his subordinates would not drink quite so deeply of Fleet tradition and doctrine.

"The simulations, kyo." HuГ©mac actually glanced over his shoulder, though there was no one in his tiny cabin, before meeting Hadeishi's quizzical look. "They're monstrous — vicious — almost unbeatable. The assault team's been vaporized, holed, shot, incinerated, decompressed, blasted, and cut to bits every day. It's hard on the men to keep their heads up when they lose so often."

"And Felix?" Hadeishi cocked his head a little to the side. "How is she holding up?"

"She's still game," HuГ©mac allowed, his expression brightening. "She gets knocked down, she gets back up…but she must be near worn out, too. The sho-sa has just been after her with a flint club, kyo. Relentless."

"I understand." In fact, Mitsu felt genuinely touched by Susan's efforts on his behalf. "Tell Felix to stand her men down for a day — all members of the assault team on shipside leave, no duties — and get some sleep. Tomorrow have them run through a full prep equipment check. They'll be on round-the-clock call starting in two days, so make sure they remember to eat. If anyone has trouble sleeping, override their medbands."

"Hai!" HuГ©mac signed off, vastly relieved by the commander's temperate reaction. Hadeishi made a desultory effort at combing his beard and washing his face, but his thoughts were far away. His attendant fussed around, straightening up the cabin and brushing lint from his jacket. Mitsu let the old man go about his business, thinking of the future.

Now, I'll be the one having trouble sleeping, he thought as a tubecar whisked him toward the bridge. And Susan will be nagging me. The prospect of facing the massive cutting beam on a Tyr-class in a shooting fight did not calm his stomach. There would be little room to maneuver among the asteroids, which took away the Cornuelle's advantages of speed and agility.

As the car slowed, Hadeishi felt an air of melancholy dropping away like leaves from the great oak in his father's courtyard, replaced by a surety of purpose he hadn't even realized was missing.

The Cornuelle held station in the radar shadow of a mountain-sized chunk of nickel-iron, skin mesh at full absorption, engines cold, every ship's system dialed down to minimal levels. On the bridge, where even normal lighting seemed unaccountably dimmed by standing to battle stations, Hadeishi leaned back into the embrace of his shockchair, entirely calm, and watched a v-feed from Outrider One.

Hayes was driving the drone from his Weapons station, broad shoulders hunched over the controls. Both Kosho and Smith were hanging on every flicker of data from their passive sensors and the point-defense network. On the v-pane, Hadeishi saw acres of jagged rock slide past as the Outrider inched its way around the nearer asteroid. The drone had been stripped down — more work for the engineers, he thought in amusement — to little more than a brace of cameras and a compressed air jet for maneuvering. Yoyontzin had claimed the modified skin-mesh on the Outrider would let it avoid detection on radar if the miniature ship did not betray itself with an exhaust signature.

So a machinist's crew — Hadeishi presumed that meant Master's Mate Helsdon and his wrench monkeys, who seemed to get all the tricky jobs — had dismounted the reactor core and plasma thrust drive and jimmied in a hand-built propulsion unit straight out of the "Firetower" era of space exploration on Anбhuac.

"Saw this on a 3v about the race to the moon," Helsdon confided to Smith, while Hadeishi happened to be in hearing. "Simple. Reliable. Not too fast — which is good. Don't want a missilelike velocity signature to pop up on someone's passive scan."

The Outrider crossed a range of spikelike peaks and emerged from shadow. The cameras adjusted to the faint sunlight, though Hayes did not make any course corrections. He was flying almost blind, letting the stream of telemetry returning from the drone via a laser-whisker guide him along a plot derived from the g-array scan data. Somewhere ahead, still out of sight, the refinery was lurking, hidden between the screening mass of two mammoth asteroids.

"Three minutes," Kosho announced, eyeing her navigation display. "You should have visual by now."

Hadeishi steepled his fingers and continued to watch quietly. Young Smith-tzin was sweating hard, eyes flickering back and forth between the confusing array of scan data. A problem with the software running the "consolidated" display had left him to reconcile the regular passive scan and the g-array by hand. The wildcatters did not seem to have deployed their own sentry drones, but…

The camera view changed again. The Outrider had passed into the shadow of the two asteroids. Now — dead ahead — there was a half-familiar outline floating in the ebon void. Points of light gleamed against a greater darkness, and they were not stars.

"Contact," Hayes announced in a whisper. "Stabilizing platform."

The Outrider slowed to a halt, hanging in the abyss, both cameras cycling through a variety of wave- and focal lengths. Shipside comp gobbled up the data and began building an enhanced image on the main display. Hadeishi sat up in his chair.

The keglike shapes of ore carrels became visible, the lights now revealed as EVA lamps strung along supports surrounding the massive containers. A cluster of circular exhausts came into view, the flaring nacelles blackened by plasma flux. A scale indicator appeared beside the screen. One of the Cornuelle's shuttles would fit into the maw of a single thruster. The cruiser itself would fill only three of the dozens of ore carrels now visible.

"Drone hold position," Hadeishi said quietly, his eyes traveling along the bulky, mammoth lines of the refinery. Mazes of pipe filled the spaces between the ore containers. The actual ship itself was entirely hidden, save for the massive engines protruding from the globular mass. "Shift the Outrider so the asteroid backdrops the drone. We need a full scan workup of the refinery before we move to phase two. No sense risking a star or planet silhouette by accident."

He tapped a builder's schematic on a secondary v-pane. "Update the plans we have. I want to know about anything out of the ordinary, no matter how small. And see if you can get a registry number from a side-stencil or something."

Hayes and Kosho nodded before turning back to their panels. Mitsuharu opened a downship channel. "Engineering? This is Hadeishi. I would like hourly updates on refitting progress."

Engineer Second Yoyontzin hurried into the service bay at clockwise two on the engine ring. The high-vaulted space was crowded with machinery, men and the hiss of welding torches. A sharp, metallic tang of heated metal and plastic permeated the air. The atmosphere recyclers in Engineering had been operating over capacity since the Cornuelle had launched from the Teotihuacбn Fleet contract yards sixteen years ago. A packet of schematics were crammed under his left arm, while his right fumbled for a fresh tabac. Spying Master's Mate Helsdon and his crew swarming over a box-shaped structure in the middle of the bay, the engineer turned their way, scowling furiously.

"Helsdon — come down here." Yoyontzin ignored the other machinists, most of whom were packing up their tool bags or doing fine finishing work on the sheets of hull fabric plated onto a big open framework of hexacarbon pipe. The Nбhuatl lit the tabac and puffed furiously, feeling his nerves settle slightly, while the master's mate pushed up his work goggles and shut off a sealing torch.

"There's an addition to this platform," Yoyontzin said when Helsdon had climbed down, rubbing his face clean with a very dirty cloth. The engineer opened the packet on a nearby work table. Like every other square meter of the engineering ring, the metal surface was discolored, scored, chipped and pitted. It was also antiseptically clean. "Chu-sa Hadeishi just called down. He says to disable the broadband and laser comm on the platform. He wants a wire-spool instead."

Helsdon knuckled his chin, looking over the schematics. "How far from the ship to the refinery? Ah — six k — that's a bit of wire. Do we have that much comm wire?"

Yoyontzin nodded, his nervousness fading a little bit. "Of course — first thing he asked me. I've got a crew bringing it up from stores. So — you'll need to mount it underside, I think, keep the spool out of the way of the gas exhaust."

"And a patch to local comm. Wait — how is the assault team going to interface with a wire-based comm system?"

Yoyontzin grunted, exasperation plain on his face. "One of the Marines," he said in a rather disparaging tone, "is going to run a second wire roll from the platform into the refinery. We have…" He dug a glossy sheet covered with cutaway views and a picture of a combat trooper standing in a field out of the bottom of the stack. "…a field relay unit, Marine code 'Snorkel', which runs off the wire and handles short-range, scrambled comm. Backpack-sized unit."

"Sure." Helsdon shrugged. He didn't have the time or energy to worry about what the Marine assault squad was going to do once they were inside the refinery ship. His concern was refitting a maintenance platform to get them there and back again. "Do you have the unspool speed for the wire? Oh, good. Yeah, we can mount this — take a couple hours."

"Get on it." Yoyontzin's brief moment of good humor faded, remembering the rest of his discussion with the chu-sa. "There are some other…things."

Helsdon made a questioning motion with his hands. The engineer stubbed out his tabac on the edge of the table and then ground the rest out under his boot. The master's mate said nothing, but his mustache twitched in surprise.

"The platform needs to be ready to go at a moment's notice. We have the refinery ship on visual now, so as soon as the Marines are ready and command has double-checked their scan data, we'll be standing by for the order from Hadeishi-tzin."

"Right," nodded Helsdon, separating out the diagrams he would need for mounting the wire spool. "We're going to move the EVA platform up to boat bay two. The Marines usually assemble there and the lock doors are facing the right direction. What else?"

"Double-check everything." Yoyontzin's fingers were trembling and the look on his face made Helsdon stare in mounting concern. He'd never seen the engineer second in such a nervous state. "I mean it. The chu-sa is going in with the Marines."

"What?" Helsdon rubbed his ear, refusing to believe what he'd heard. "You're drunk."

"Wish I was." Yoyontzin tapped another tabac out of the pack and jammed it into his mouth. Pinching the lighting paper from the end and taking a deep drag seemed to steady him. His deep-set eyes narrowed in amusement. "I'll bet Heicho Felix is going to faint when she hears."

"I'll take that bet," Helsdon said, rather sharply.

Yoyontzin was surprised. "You're on — how does five quills sound?"

"Twenty." Helsdon crossed his arms, squinting at Yoyontzin. "If you're giving money away."

The pressure door to Hadeishi's office recessed with a hiss and then slid out of sight into the bulkhead. Susan Kosho stepped down into the comfortably-cluttered space. Her white duty uniform glowed in the dim light, sharply distinct from the dark-hued books and paintings covering the walls. Both of her hands were tightly clenched into fists.

"Chu-sa?" She looked around with a compressed, mostly-hidden expression of distaste. The untidiness of the commander's personal space always made her nervous, though the old man in charge of Hadeishi's quarters kept them scrupulously clean. There were just too many things here.

"Over here," Mitsuharu's voice came from a side compartment.

Susan trod gently across deep-piled rugs and paused in the inner doorway. Hadeishi had folded a table down from the wall of a narrow room lined with cupboards. The exec glanced around, puzzled, and then recognized the area as a servant's laundry station. The clever table was an ironing and mending board.

"What are you doing?" Susan stared at the combat suit laid out on the table with something like despair in her almond-shaped eyes. Hadeishi failed to suppress a small, polite smile. He was in an old, rather worn-looking short-sleeved kimono of dark blue silk. The back and shoulders were covered with a delicately stitched wading crane and cattails in golden thread. He turned his attention back to checking the suit seals with a microscanner.

"Prepping my suit," Hadeishi said. "Heicho Felix reports her squad has finished gear-check and is now ready to go, so I would be holding things up but Engineering is still mounting our hardline comm system."

Susan looked around for a seat, found nothing apparent — though she suspected some of the cupboards might slide out or fold down to make one: they had in her grandmother's house — and settled into parade rest instead. "You are determined to carry through with your…plan."

Hadeishi nodded, turning over one of the black, metallic sleeves of the suit. The surface was formed of overlapping, flexible ceramic plates. "Those skilled in war subdue the enemy without battle. If I go myself there is a chance of such success."

"Or you may be killed. This is a very risky maneuver."

Mitsuharu looked up, his narrow face grave. "I know. The art of maneuver is the most difficult — but in this tiny moment of opportunity, we do have some room to move. We hold a positional advantage. Given such an opening, I will risk myself for the best outcome. If we are killed or captured, you know what to do."

Susan nodded, staring at the combat suit with ill-disguised disgust. "You should not have loaned Fitzsimmons and Deckard to the civilians. They are our most experienced assault troopers."

"Water flows." Hadeishi replaced the sleeve and took up the other. "Felix will do."

Susan made a grunting sound and her pale, smooth forehead gained a sharp vertical crease. "Her performance in the combat sims has only been marginal. If there is resistance — "

Mitsu raised a hand and the sho-sa fell silent. "If you," he said quietly, trying to catch her eye, "are commanding the defense of the refinery with the vigor you showed in the sims, then I expect we will all die. But you are here, not there. Felix will be fine."

"Very well." Susan clasped both hands behind her back. Her gaze was fixed on a point somewhere over his head. "Navigation informs me our best-path return course to the planet will now take eleven days. I believe the tlamatinime Hummingbird requested we retrieve him from the surface in only ten days."

"We will not be returning to the third planet until our business here is concluded, Sho-sa. But I appreciate your diligence in bringing this matter to my attention."

"Kyo, the tlamatinime and the archaeologist could easily have encountered — "

"They are in some danger, true," Mitsuharu interrupted gently. "But they will be fine. Hummingbird will be fine. He always is. Our business is here, with the refinery. And it will be resolved very soon, one way or another."

"Hai, Chu-sa." Susan's face settled into a cool, lifeless mask. "Do you require any assistance with your equipment?"

Mitsu put down the right-hand sleeve of the suit and rested his hands on his knees. He considered his exec for a long moment, then shook his head slightly. "I should do this myself, Susan. Such things are traditional. If you have a moment, please check with Engineering and make sure they've rigged something to keep the comm-wire from fouling."

Susan nodded sharply, turned and walked quickly out of the laundry room. Mitsu watched her go with a pensive expression. When the outer door hissed closed, he sighed and turned his attention back to the seals on the inner sheath of the armor. They always became stiff in storage, no matter what the armorer said. Sometimes they split, if not carefully looked after, reducing the wearer's flexibility.