Wasteland of Flint

The Cornuelle

Deep in shipnight, Hadeishi surrendered to futility and opened his eyes. The cabin was dark, only furtively lit by the soft glow of a chrono panel beside his desk. In the dim green light, shelves of books and papers loomed enormous against the walls. Hadeishi threw back the coverlet and swung out of bed. Sleep had eluded him, weary mind filled with a constant stream of images — phantoms of the day's events, wild imaginings of what would come, a nightmare of being dragged before a court of inquiry — and he felt worse than when he'd gone to bed.

"A fine hell awaits Hummingbird and Anderssen for inflicting this upon me," Mitsuharu grumbled as he found a robe. Silk and velvet slid across wiry, muscled shoulders and he glared at the comp. Late in third watch, he saw. Four o'clock. "What a wretched hour to be awake."

His stomach grumbled, making the captain think of tea and hot soup. Breakfast was still hours away, but the act of waking had convinced his body it was time to eat. Shuffling his feet into a pair of shipshoes, Hadeishi tucked long, loose hair behind his ears and went out, kimono cinched tight. Shipsnight always felt cold, though environmental maintained a constant temperature at all times and the corridors were brightly illuminated.

He was not surprised, however, to find Sho-sa Kosho in the tiny rectangular space of the officer's informal mess. Hadeishi was amused to see the young woman was dressed informally — no jacket, the collar of her duty uniform unsealed, the sleeves of an oatmeal-colored shirt rolled back. The exec was removing a cup from the automat as he shuffled into the room.

"Hello, Susan," Mitsu nodded at her, feeling stubbled, unshaven and out of sorts. Kosho, for her part, looked entirely composed. "Are you up early or out late?"

"Late, Chu-sa," she replied, studiously avoiding looking directly at him. "Hayes has been running navigational scans of the asteroid belt. I was considering the data and time elapsed."

Mitsu grunted, punching up a cup of bancha-grade yamacha. He waited, hands in the pockets of his robe, while a cup descended from the machine and filled with hot, black liquid. Cradling the tea, he shuffled to the table where Susan was sitting. She raised an eyebrow as he approached, nostrils flaring at the sharp, distinct odor wafting from his cup.

"With respect, Chu-sa, how can you drink such a cheap, bitter grade of tea?" Kosho seemed to shrink away from the harsh smell. "It's barely cured at all!"

"This?" Mitsu swirled the liquid, watching grayish foam twist into a corkscrew pattern. "My father used to make this for us every morning when I was little, before we went to school. If I rise early, I can't drink anything else. There is one thing missing, though."

"Which is?" Susan put her own cup — filled with a delicate golden broth of steaming water, boiled rice and finely rolled leaves — aside with a grimace.

Hadeishi smiled fondly. "The smell of diesel and wet pavement. In Shinedo there's rain almost every night, or fog…that's what I remember best. Sharp black tea and the sound of my shoes in the mist as I walk to school, hearing the heavy trucks on the old highway, bringing goods into the market district."

Kosho's grimace eased a little, but her head tilted questioningly. "What is a truck?"

Mitsu hid a smile. His executive officer's family background was not included in her service record, but no one who had spent more than a day in her company would classify her as anything less than a daughter of the nobility. In comparison to his own relatively low birth, Hadeishi was sure a great social gulf existed between them. His own family at the feet of an invisible mountain, hers somewhere in the clouds. Outside of the Fleet, he doubted they would have met, or even been allowed in proximity to one another.

"A truck is like an aircar, but it runs on wheels, on the ground. They burn petroleum distillate for fuel, which is cheap and efficient, though there is a distinctive smell from the combustion process. Very noticeable on a damp, cold morning."

"Are they still used today?" Susan's tone implied such devices were remnants of some ancient, time-shrouded age of barbarism and chaos. "On Anбhuac?" Or relegated to the colonies, where men struggled to carve a life from howling wilderness, only a single step from hunting with knapped-flint spears and knives of sharpened bone.

Mitsu nodded, eyes crinkling with a smile over the lip of his cup. "I believe so. The markets of the lower city deal in bulk goods — agricultural products, raw materials, metal, ceramacrete, goods delivered in lots of thousands — in such circumstances the cost of freight is an important consideration. Shuttles, aircars, lifters — they are reserved for luxury items, not for bundles of steel pipe and casks of beer."

"I suppose." Susan's expression settled from a grimace to a tight mask. "Efficiency must be profit in such an enterprise."

"Yes," Mitsu said in an equitable voice. I am surprised to hear the filthy, dishonorable word profit from your lips, lady Kosho. Again he suppressed amusement at her reaction. Hadeishi knew he'd never had a better second officer. Kosho was tenacious and hardworking and faultlessly competent, but there was a constant nagging tension between them. A divide which could not be crossed, though they had served together for the better part of three years. For his part, Mitsu was convinced his subordinate was aware of the division between them, but he was equally sure she did not know exactly why. Susan will think this is the isolation of command; my role as captain drawing such a distinct line between us. Yet, Hadeishi was certain the true gulf lay in the abyss of their respective births and upbringing. Their futures would be different as well, and therein lay the seed of bitter separation.

In time — in two years, or four, as Fleet decided in its infinite wisdom — Susan Kosho would leave the Cornuelle and be posted to a larger ship — a sleek battle cruiser or a light carrier — as captain and commander. Mitsuharu Hadeishi, of such low birth, would remain aboard the little cruiser, perhaps for the rest of his career. In twenty years, should luck favor him, he might become a flotilla commander, responsible for screening some larger battle group. In twenty years, Kosho would be an admiral and her inflectionless voice would descend to him from on high, ordering his ship into the raging maw of battle.

Fate, he thought and found solace there. But for now, my duty is to guide her, to make her better, by such means protecting myself and my crew on some later day.

"What did you find in Hayes's data?" Mitsu took another sip from his cup.

"Well, sir," Susan settled back in her chair. The tension in her face and shoulders eased, her thoughts turning away from the disreputable mysteries of trade and back to the mission at hand. "Young Smith-tzin had been reviewing our navigational data and found something he did not understand. He brought the data to me, expecting he'd made a mistake or an error." The exec's lips quirked into the ghost of a smile. "He did not make a mistake."

Susan leaned over and tapped the nearest wall panel awake. The Imperial crest appeared briefly, accompanied by the tinny blare of flutes and drums. She accessed an astronomy module from among a dizzying array of choices. A black field appeared, anchored by a dim yellow disc surrounded by gleaming motes.

"This is the Ephesian solar system." Kosho's well-manicured forefinger indicated a reddish disk. "The third planet. And here is the asteroid belt which hides our 'wildcat' refinery ship. Hayes has been building a navigational map of the belt, searching for anomalies or radiation spikes — anything that might help us pinpoint the enemy. He became concerned today when — after the first pass of the map was complete — it seemed the belt was too small."

Hadeishi nodded slightly and motioned for her to continue. Susan tapped up a new screen filled with figures and graphs.

"Our dutiful sho-i ko-hosei then undertook a review of the projected initial system mass, local stellar formation density and the current distribution of planetesimals throughout the observed volume. He wondered if some quirk of orbital mechanics had distributed the non-aggregated mass into two or three belts, rather than just one." A glitter entered Kosho's eyes and her lips curled back from dazzlingly white teeth. "This was not the case. Indeed, the analysis of the system as a whole shows the total mass to be slightly higher than expected for this type of sun and this area of space."

"How much so?" Hadeishi had already formed a tentative conclusion. An obvious answer, he thought, feeling cold again. Even the cup in his hands had suddenly lost its comforting warmth. But…

"There should not be a noticeable asteroid belt here at all. Yet there is. The system mass is higher than astronav projects." Susan's fingertip drifted over the dull red disk of Ephesus III. All traces of humor had vanished. "This extra mass came from somewhere. I have spent the last eight hours considering the source of this unexpected belt. I believe the cloud of planetesimals we are racing toward consists of the inner core and mantle of the third planet."

Hadeishi did not respond. He took another sip of cold tea. Kosho continued to stare at the screen. Her fingertip moved over a control glyph and the disc of the planet rushed closer, swelling to fill the display like a sullen red eye.

"We will know for sure when we enter the belt. Our sensors are sensitive enough to determine the densities and types of stone, rock and minerals in the asteroids. But I believe we will find materials which can only be produced in the molten core of a planet, or compressed aggregates drawn from the friction zones between the planetary crust and mantle."

She turned to face Hadeishi with a cold, tight expression. "The First Sun people destroyed the third planet and dumped the remains in an opportune, gravitationally stable orbit. Then," and Kosho took a deep breath, "they reconstructed the surface."

"But they did not finish the job," Hadeishi said quietly, placing his cup in the disposal at the end of the table. "The scientists in the 'cloud house' say they fled, leaving behind a ruin; a rushed, incomplete work."

"Perhaps." Susan tapped a new command on the wall panel. "Doctor Russovsky filed a report with her superior soon after arriving on Ephesus Three, declaring the planetary geology so mangled by the efforts of the ancients that her planned georesonance survey of the crust was impossible. My understanding of the politics within the exploration crew indicates Doctor Clarkson was only too happy to reassign Russovsky to another task."

Hadeishi frowned. "He did not review her preliminary findings?"

"No." Kosho's dry tone expressed both her opinion of the late Clarkson and the equally late Russovsky in a single word. "He did not. Doctor Smalls, however, is very meticulous and he saved all Russovsky's work, including the geosensing readings she continued to make after declaring the effort was impossible."

"I see." Hadeishi felt a twinge of disgust. Academics! Hiding data from each other, falsifying results to obscure their conclusions, scrounging and grubbing for advantage…bah! "What do the data reveal?"

"This." Susan keyed a different glyph. "Shipside comp worked up these density readings in the past three hours."

The image of the surface of the third planet disappeared and was replaced by a mottled plot of tiny points, some brighter, some dimmer. There was the familiar ripple of the comp interpolating results and a new image began to build, shaded and colored by depth, describing an ovoid shape surrounded by a jumbled, chaotic shell. Hadeishi watched the display build — then interp again — then build — then interp. Section by section, kilometer by kilometer.

"The world is hollow," he said at last as the panel chimed to indicate a completed task.

"Like a bare ball," Susan said in a subdued voice. "With something massive nestled inside. The geodetic sensors cannot penetrate the inner shell, but the mass readings are conclusive. At least part of it is hollow, or at the least very diffuse. I think — no, I fear it is a ship. A massive, unimaginably large ship. An entire hidden world. Something which can only be out of the time of the First Sun."

Hadeishi found himself unable to speak. An image impressed itself upon his waking mind: two tiny figures in z-suits struggling across the curve of an impossibly huge egg. Minute, miniscule in comparison to the surface of the…the vessel they were slowly toiling across. Is something inside? Something alive? Something which might…notice us? Part of his mind began to gibber in fear and he struggled to keep such thoughts from overwhelming his consciousness.

"I understand," he said at last, not to Kosho — though she nodded in acknowledgement — but to the memory of Hummingbird speaking tersely over a high-security comm channel.

You must go quietly, echoed the memory of the tlamatinime's voice. Quietly.

Hadeishi smoothed down his beard and fixed the exec with a stare. "Have Smith or Hayes seen this? No? Good. Sequester this data — you and I will know, but no one else. In particular, mention nothing of your speculation that this is a ship to anyone. We do not know that. Not in truth."

Susan almost saluted in response, but nodded her head jerkily. Hadeshi's face was grim and his thoughts were already far away. What is inside? Does Hummingbird know? He must. Why else fling himself into such a reckless attempt to wipe away our tracks?