Among the Broken Mountains

The Cornuelle glided through an inky deep, a matte-black ghost among invisibly tumbling leviathans. Her main engines were at minimal thrust in an attempt to reduce her sensor profile. The sleek hull was in absorptive mode, darkness against darkness, yielding no hint of comm traffic or EM radiation. On her command deck, Hadeishi was keeping one eye on the ship's heat sump and one on the latest personnel reports when Hayes's terse voice drew his attention.

"Outrider Two has lost particle track," the weapons officer declared, staring intently at his panel.

"Outrider Two, engine full stop," Hadeishi barked, eyes swinging to the glowing depths of the threat-well. Drone Two was their lead dog at the moment, deployed nearly a thousand kilometers "inward" of the cruiser. Outrider One was accelerating back toward the cruiser, on the downside of its duty cycle. Three was outbound, snaking its way through the three-dimensional maze of the asteroid field to catch up with Two. The entire area within sensor range was quiet; the bridge displays showed only thousands of dots colored "navigational hazard" amber. The Cornuelle was a blue spark at the center of the well, with the three drones appearing as miniscule turquoise arrows.

"How long until Three reaches duty station?" The chu-sa leaned back in the shockchair, considering the situation. He wondered if Kosho had gone to sleep yet – she'd gone off-duty an hour ago – and decided not to call her back to the bridge. She needs to sleep sometime.

"Two hundred and thirty minutes, sir." Hayes turned questioningly to Hadeishi. "Shall I back Two out of there?"

"No," Hadeishi said. "Badger the drone with a nearby rock. Reduce outgoing transmissions to locational data. No broadcast, no highband emission. Switch everything else to record." Hayes was already at work on his panel, squirting a new set of commands to the drone. "When Three comes in range, establish a narrow-beam link to Two and relay back to us."

"Pinhole mode, aye," Hayes acknowledged absently, his mind entirely on reconfiguring the drone and dumping a new set of engagement and maneuver parameters to Outrider Three. A moment later he punched two glyphs and took a breath. "Commands away."

Hadeishi nodded, but his attention was now on the main panel, where ship's comp was replaying the particle trail data. Curse my generosity, he thought with a trace of bitterness. I need Isoroku here to advise me, not stuck on a civilian pleasure barge – he knows engine patterns better than anyone. The replay showed a wash of decaying, once-excited particle byproducts of the refinery's main drive meandering through the debris field. "Hayes, come look at this."

The weapons officer was at his side as fast as humanly possible.

"A Tyr-class refinery is almost ten times our size," Hadeishi remarked, contemplating the plot. "Her helmsman is following a path of least density, trying to keep incidental meteoroid impacts to a minimum as she moves through the field. But look, here the refinery suddenly shifts course into close proximity with this cloud of debris."

Hayes nodded. "They must have picked something up." A stylus in his blunt fingers sketched a new trajectory on the panel. "They're cutting through a 'hedge' into another area with less debris. A clear lane between the larger planetesimals."

"And we lose the trail at the edge of the 'lane.'" Hadeishi grimaced. "Could they have picked up the outrider?"

The weapons officer shook his head. "No, Chu-sa. The decay rates indicate we're still days behind them. They must have reacted to something on long-range scan."

Hadeishi settled deeper into his chair, stroking his beard. "Break down those decay rates and all the data we have on their engine plume. If they've badgered and know someone is looking for them, we need to get a solid estimate on how far they might have gone on minimum power."

"Not very far," Hayes said, tapping his stylus on the panel. "Think about how much mass they're moving. Even empty, a Tyr is a behemoth. I think they scooted into this 'lane' so they could coast and gain some distance. Somewhere out here -" the stylus sketched a box in the 'clear' area "- there's a pocket of engine exhaust."

"Because they corrected course," Hadeishi said, "either for distance or vector."

"I could send Outrider Two into the lane," Hayes offered dubiously.

"No." Hadeishi shook his head slightly. "There's no reason to try and hide a course change if you don't drop a sensor relay – or a proximity mine – behind to welcome a pursuer. The refinery captain is not a fool. His cartel wouldn't entrust so much expensive equipment to a novice. He'll pick a random vector, pile on velocity and coast again until he has to maneuver to avoid a collision."

The chu-sa paused, considering the cloud of amber dots for a moment. Then he nodded again, this time to himself. Hayes waited patiently, hands clasped behind his back, shoulders square.

"Hold drone Two on station until Three arrives." Hadeishi's voice had lost its contemplative tone. His mind was made up. "Recycle drone One as quickly as it can be refueled. The Cornuelle will proceed at one-third power to catch up. I want all three drones ready on point when we reach Two's current location. We will advance in a box formation, scanning the surrounding debris clouds for evidence of a third course change."

"Hai, Chu-sa!" Hayes's jaw tightened and a gleam lit in the young officer's eyes.

Hadeishi waved him away and slumped back in the shockchair, staring into the threat-well.

Now we close with the enemy, he thought, troubled. Does he know we're here? Is he reckless? Is he wary?

That was the question. A prudent, patient captain would simply wait for an opportunity to make hyperspace gradient out of the system when no one could see him. But an angry man, or a reckless commander…A ship that large could carry a great deal of mischief in secondary storage. A single proximity mine could cripple the Cornuelle. Two or three might kill her, if the cruiser happened to blunder into a flower-box detonation.

The ceiling lights in Hadeishi's cabin were dark, the only illumination cast from a small table lamp on his desk. Mitsuharu knelt on a cotton mat, facing the wall opposite his bed. Two framed pictures – not modern holos, but yellowed paper, cracking with age – sat within a small alcove. An empty incense burner lay before the photographs; an old man and a middle-aged woman in formal dress. Both seemed grim, their faces composed, though in his memory they were always smiling.

"At dusk, I often climb to the peak of Kugami." Mitsu bent his head, palms pressed together, fingertips against his brow. Stringy black hair fell in a cloud around his shoulders. He rarely let his ponytail go unbound, but certain devotions required an expression of sacrifice. He thought the loss of personal control an adequate offering. "Deer bellow, their voices soaked up by piles of maple leaves…"

The sharp, pungent smell of incense should fill the air around him, but the air recyclers worked overtime already. Mitsu accepted the absence of pine and rose-wood as another sacrifice. His lips barely moved, offering the last of Ryukan's ancient poem to his mother and his father. "…lying undisturbed at the foot of the mountain."

What chant settled the racing hearts of my ancestors, Mitsu wondered, rising from his knees, when they rode into the high grass to fight the Dakota and the Iroquois? A deep bow followed and he closed the alcove with the tip of his finger. A metal plate sealed the little shrine, protecting the contents against a sudden loss of pressure or the g-shock of combat.

Hadeishi ran a hand across the spines of his books. His personal quarters should, by tradition, be spartan and bare. He was sure Sho-sa Kosho's cabin was a perfect example of approved Zen minimalism – all plain gray and white surfaces, perhaps small portraits of the Emperor and the Shogun, her tatami, the door to the closet always closed. Mitsu smoothed his beard, looking around at the terrible mess he'd made of this place. Every wall was covered with bookcases – well-built ones too, Isoroku was a dab hand for structural modifications – and every shelf was packed with storage crystals, audio-sticks, hand-drawn paintings in ink, paper-bound volumes, boxes of letters, Heshtic scrolls and paw-books, even things he'd found in the markets of Baldur, Marduk or New Malta. He was sure some of them held writing, but then again – who knew what they truly were? Laundry lists? Accounts of land disputes from some dead, forgotten world?