Free Land of the Dead by Thomas Harlan

his bones. We cannot afford the loss of a ship like the Firearrow  … not now. I can spare a son, but not her … curse the Mirror, the Judges, and all meddlers!
    He tapped the channel closed, an old song coming to mind—something he’d heard long ago, in his innocence, from one of the elders at Chapultepec:
     
Oh youths, here there are skilled men with shield-reeds,
In the flowers of the pendant eagle plume,
The yellow flowers they grasp; they pour forth noble songs,
Noble flowers;
They make payment with their blood,
With their bare breasts
They seek the bloody field of war.
And you, O friends, put on your black paint
For war, for the path of victory;
Let us lay hands on our shields,
Raise aloft our strength and courage.

THE AKBAL YARDS
    O FF E UROPA , THE J OVIAN S YSTEM
     
    Kosh ō entered the temporary officer’s mess on the Naniwa balancing a tray of tea, rice pudding, and sliced fruit on her right hand, while a heavy set of construction binders were tucked under her left arm. The room seemed enormous to her after the cramped quarters on the Cornuelle . Due to the rush of work underway to complete fitting out the ship, there were sections of wall panel missing, and several ceiling tiles were pulled up, exposing bundles of comm and power conduit.
    Two long tables ran the length of the room and both were crowded with officers of all stripes, busily digging into bowls of rice, fried egg, picken, and chillis. As soon as she’d stepped across the threshold, the nearest ensign shot up out of his place on the tatami and bawled, “ Chu-sa on deck!”
    Everyone paused, chopsticks in midair, and the veterans cast amused looks at the clean-shaven young man, so fresh from Academy. No one else stood up, though everyone was paying close attention to the new commander’s response.
    “As you were,” Susan announced to the room, which brought a rustling sound as everyone relaxed. Then she nodded politely to the ensign, saying: “We are not so formal at mealtimes, Sho-i Deskae. A well-fed crew is a hardworking crew. Please continue with your breakfast.”
    The boy was back at his bowl of noodles faster than the eye could follow, bronzed skin darkening in embarrassment. Susan hid a smile as she paced along the tables towards her place at the far end. After a dozen paces she slowed, noting an empty zabuton between two senior petty officers from Engineering—but there was a little, mahogany-skinned man sitting cross-legged on the floor in just such a way as to block anyone else from sitting on the cushion.
    Kosh ō stopped, looking down at his bald head and was dismayed to glimpse her own reflection. Ay, I look haggard as a fishwife, she thought. Three months of sixteen-hour days wears … that it does.
    Her initial postings to the destroyer Ceatl , and then the Cornuelle , had begun nearly a decade after the light cruiser’s commissioning, and though they’d been in dry dock or offlined for repairs many times, Hadeishi had always been in the middle of the actual repair work, leaving her to manage the local authorities and run security while he crawled around in the engines with Isoroku and the grease-monkeys. Under normal conditions, she’d have had the option to task her XO with the engineering review or take it herself—but Sho-sa MacMillan had not yet arrived from his previous command—and that left her very shorthanded.
    Now she was the one in the conduits, banging her head and shuffling around after the construction foremen and Kikan-cho Hennig while the engineers talked nonstop about kinetic absorption rates in the between-frame armor and the spalling tendencies of the new model g-decking.
    She had never felt better in her entire life, or more exhausted. Every cell in her brain had been stretched in three or four directions, and then snapped back into place. But she’s my ship, and I have—at last—my own command.
    It had not really occurred to her, until now, how long she’d spent on the Cornuelle , banging