The Six Directions of Space

For all that, when we did emerge into the Gansu nexus, my first thought was that Muhu

And yet, it only took a second glimpse to see that I was wrong.

This was no part of the Mongol Expansion. The ships were wrong; the shuttles were wrong: cruder and clumsier even than our most antiquated ships. The city down below had a haphazard, ramshackle look to it, its structures ugly and square-faced. The message on the spokes were spelled out in the angular letters of that pre-Mongol language, Latin. I could not tell if they were advertisements, news reports, or political slogans.

We slowed down, coming to a hovering standstill relative to the golden spokes and the building-choked core. The Mandate of Heaven had only just cleared the portal entrance, with the door still open behind it. I presumed that some automatic system would not permit it to close with a ship still so close.

Qilian was a model of patience, by his standards. He gave Muhu

“Well, pilot?” he asked, when that interval had elapsed. “Do you recognize this place?”

“Yes,” Muhu

“Why so nervous? I’ve seen those ships. They look even more pathetic and fragile than ours must have seemed to you.”

“They are. But there is no such thing as a harmless interstellar culture. These people have only been in space for a couple of hundred years, barely a hundred and fifty since they stumbled on the Infrastructure, but they still have weapons that could hurt us. Worse, they are aggressors.”

“Who are they?” I whispered.

“The culture I mentioned to you back on the Qing Shui moon: the ones who are now in their twenty-third century. You would call them Christians, I suppose.”

“Nestorians?” Qilian asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Another offshoot of the same cult, if one wishes to split hairs. Not that many of them are believers now.

There are even some Islamists among them, although there is little about the Shining Caliphate that they would find familiar.”

“Perhaps we can do business with them,” Qilian mused.

“I doubt it. They would find you repulsive, and they would loathe you for what you did to them in your history.”

It was as if Muhu

When Muhu

“I am sorry,” I whispered. “I know you only want to do what’s best for us.”

“I am sorry as well,” he said, when Qilian was out of earshot. “Sorry for being so weak, that I do what he asks of me, even when I know it is wrong.”

“No one blames you,” I replied.

We had crossed five hundred li without drawing any visible attention from the other vessels, which continued to move through the sphere as if going about their normal business. We even observed several ships emerge and depart through portals. But then, quite suddenly, it was as if a great shoal of fish had become aware of the presence of two sleek, hungry predators nosing through their midst. All around us, from one minute to the next, the various craft began to dart away, abandoning whatever course or errand they had been on before. Some of them ducked into portals or lost themselves in the thicket of spokes, while others fled for the cover of the core.

I tensed. Whatever response we were due was surely on its way by now.

As it happened, we did not have long to wait. In contrast to the civilian vessels attempting to get as far away from us as possible, three ships were converging on us. We studied them on high magnification, on one of the display screens in the River Volga’s bridge. They were shaped like arrowheads, painted with black and white stripes and the odd markings of the Christians. Their blade-sharp leading edges bristled with what could have been sensors, refueling probes, or weapons.

From his couch, Muhu

Would you like to see it?”

“Put it on,” Qilian said.

We were looking at a woman who was wearing a heavy black uniform, shiny like waxed leather. She was pi

What was clear was that the woman was not happy; that her tone was becoming ever more strident. At last, she muttered something that, had she been speaking Mongol, might have been some dismissive invitation to go to hell.

“Perhaps we should turn after all,” Qilian said, or started to say. But by then, the three ships had loosed their missiles: four apiece, grouping into two packs of six, one for the Mandate of Heaven and one for us.

Muhu

Because we had turned around, the Mandate of Heaven was the first to reach the portal. By then, the door had begun to close, but it only took a brief assault from the Mandate’s chaser guns to snip a hole in it. Muhu