Free Glory's People by Alfred Coppel

others’ emotional surge.
    Warned by the attack on Duncan and Anya on the surface, Glory ’s people had been preparing the ship for a precipitous departure. Attempts to contact Duncan and Anya by radio had failed. Almost immediately after the ninja’s attempt--witnessed by all aboard Glory on the Yamato Planetary Television Net--there had been an immediate Loss of Signal from Duncan’s and Anya’s communicators. The phenomenon of LOS was as old as orbital flight. Only on planets ringed by relay satellites could it be avoided when the sending transmitter vanished over the horizon. On Yamato the problem was not a lack of relay satellites; Planet Yamato had them to excess. But the satellites did not transmit or receive in the radio bands used by the personal com devices of the Goldenwing’s crewmen.
    Demands sent by the syndics downworld had not immediately produced the geographical coordinates of the Master and Sailing Master’s location. The gaijin’s exact whereabouts was classified because it was also the location of Minamoto no Kami, the planetary daimyo. By ancient tradition the Shogun’s location was a state secret. Shoguns were prime targets for assassins. Except when public duties made it impossible, the Shogun’s whereabouts was kept secret from the ninjas who operated freely on Planet Yamato. Often the attempt at secrecy failed. In the last five hundred years only one hundred Shoguns had died of natural causes.
     
    After a dozen increasingly concerned demands for information, Glory 's syndics were coldly informed that a certain dignified patience was the approved demeanor for visitors to Planet Yamato. “We will soon make contact with your officers,” the Planetary Security Net told the anxious syndics. “They are safe and well protected.”
    Broni Voerster, though excited and upset by what she had seen on the planetary telecast, was nevertheless determined that when Duncan returned aboard he would have nothing whatever to complain of regarding her performance of duty. At this moment she lay in her pod, Wired to Glory , composing the basic astroprogram for Glory 's retreat from the Tau Ceti Star System, maneuver by maneuver.
    When the MD-23 was destroyed within the gravimetric confines of Tau Ceti’s gravity well, Broni had received a jolt of malevolent psycho-empathic energy that made her cry out and pull the drogue from her head. She lay nude in the gel, bathed in a surge of stinging inertia-stripped tachyons. From her shoulders to her knees she felt the pulses from across the system. By this time she was syndic enough to reconnect to Glory swiftly and ask that the ship compute the exact location of the Gateway that had caused the surge. That was the first thing Duncan would want to know.
     
    Mira’s image of the open Gateway was part rathole and part dragon’s lair. She had never seen either a rat or a dragon, but she recognized the vast, searching, hungry malevolence. Not only was the knowledge imprinted in her DNA and present in the lessons learned in purrs from her surrogate mother, the great-queen-who-was-not-alive, but Mira herself had sensed it before. Many times. And she had stalked it time and again, through that night without space or time.
    All this she had passed on to her offspring, so that when the young cats indulged in their savage play, it was not dead or wounded animals they brought as offerings to Mira and to the syndics, but images of creatures from Glory ’s vast database: reptiles, chimerae, phantasms. Recently these images had been reinforced by the memories of the fight at Ross 248 Beta, amplified by kittenish nightmares of teeth and claws and empty eyes burning with a loathing of life.
    The cat floated in free-fall on the ob-deck. Above her the pelagic image of Yamato rolled swiftly by, a gleaming copper-tinged panorama of sea and cloud. Beyond it, far beyond, on the far side of Tau Ceti, the Gateway burned an instant and then was gone, closed, leaving only the star-shot