Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 00:05:21 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Anabasis
From: Pablo Sanchez
To: rpd@daltonator.net



Anabasis
Chapter One
Across the Distance



The bridge of the USS Jutland was cramped, as on most of the Akira-class vessels 
operated by Starfleet.  Akiras were tough little ships, small but with shields and 
firepower disproportionate to their size.

Captain Putzkammer would almost have preferred to have remained the first officer 
of a larger ship.  He had been on the Tercio, a Galaxy Class, and everything was 
much more spacious, and luxurious.  For the purposes of the sort of long patrol the 
Jutland was taking, all the way along the borders with the Klingons and Romulans, 
things got cramped.  The poor Tercio didn't even have a holodeck.

For all the military utility and necessity of his mission, Putzkammer was not a 
military officer.  He was an astronaut, explorer, and adventurer, and he resented 
to the turn that Starfleet had been taking after the Dominion War.  San Francisco 
was beginning to see space as a frontier, not to be explored but to be defended.  
So there he was a little pocket cruiser patrolling a border, instead of explored 
the unknown fringes of space in a long-endurance Galaxy Class. 

Now he was feeling his oats and had the sense of a little bit of superiority over 
those admirals back in 'Frisco.  Even if he couldn't go work the unknown fringes, 
they would come to him.  He leaned close to the sensor station, squinting at the 
faint contacts.

Ensign Pauley tapped at one of them, "The others are just static.  I had the gain 
all the way up to see this one.  Notice how the others go in and out and move a 
bit--"

"--while that one stays still," Putzkammer finished for her, "that's got to be the 
contact that the border sensors detected.  Any idea what it is?"

Pauley shrugged.  "From the looks of it, a starship of some kind.  It isn't 
Romulan.  If they were trying to sneak across the border they'd just use their 
cloaking devices.  This ship isn't behaving like anything I've ever seen or heard 
of.  I'm not getting a lot of energy or transmission scatter.  It's mostly 
infrared.  That ship has a lot of heat to bleed off, otherwise I don't think we 
would have ever spotted it."

"Hm," the Captain grunted, stepping back from the station and straightening to his 
full two meters of height.  If he wasn't at station in the center of the bridge, 
Putzkammer had to bend low.  Doorways were a bother as well.  He missed the Tercio 
and her high cielings dearly.

"Helm, close the range to 10,000 kilometers, but slowly.  I want a better look at 
this flying saucer," Putzkammer ordered.


----


Lieutenant Hitotsugi oversaw his station with intensity, interpretting the 
multicolored holographic sphere that floated weightlessly just in front of his 
face.

"Contact is moving toward the Maikaze, acceleration one-five-zero meters per 
second.  Range 70,000 kilometers and closing," Hitotsugi said, glancing at his 
other displays.

Captain Saegusa frowned, "They've seen her."

"Unavoidable.  She had a great deal of heat to bleed away and we could not risk 
further damage to her systems," Admiral Yamashita replied, "at any rate it does not 
appear that they have seen the rest of the task force.  We will cover the Maikaze 
from attack, if they intend to attack."

"If they are even capable of attack," Saegusa pointed out.

Yamashita glanced at the holo-display and the single bright point of red light 
moving slowly towards the destroyer Maikaze.  At least he now knew for certain that 
these unknown aliens had some method of masking acceleration stress, unless they 
were somehow accustomed to living under fifteen gravities of acceleration.

The question was whether the contact was actually a warship or not.  It was giving 
off an amount of heat and light that Hitotsugi had likened to the New Year's 
celebration in Kyoto when he had first spotted it, tearing at faster-than-light 
speeds on some kind of modified Cochrane drive and dropping out of warp only 70,000 
kilometers away.  If it was a warship, it felt no need to be stealthy.

The picture from the telescopic cameras was even more confusing.  The unidentified 
vessel was disc-shaped, with two cylinders joined to the main hull with spars.  
From the copious emmissions it was easy to guess that the cylinders were engines of 
some sort.  It was obvious in any case that it would be impossible for the 
designers of that vessel to have armored the outriggers in any adequate fashion.  
This ship looked like no warship Admiral Yamashita had ever seen, but it did behave 
according to tactics with which he was familiar.

Yamashita stroked the right side of his mustache, then the left.  Not even the 
least pretension of stealth, inadequate sensor searches, and unimaginative direct 
maneuvers.  Yes, he knew those characteristics well.  He had not been appointed 
Admiral merely because he came from an important family.

The unknown vessel had locked onto the Maikaze, because the Maikaze had suffered a 
minor containment loss of her starboard reactor just a few minutes before the 
anomaly had interrupted Yamashita's set piece engagement.  The emergency fields had 
snapped on and most of the imperiled antimatter had been safely spaced, but there 
had been a  few seconds of runaway reaction before the safeties cut in.  The 
Maikaze had had to get rid of that excess heat somehow, and after the anomaly it 
had seemed safe enough.  The German and American fleets had disappeared and task 
force Hiei had found itself deep within the safety of Imperial Territory.  There 
was no guessing what had triggered the wormhole, at least not in any sane terms, so 
the immediate concern was keeping the destroyer from burning out any delicate 
electronics or other systems.  She had already lost her subspace transceiver, and 
there was no sense in risking her sensors as well.

But then this new contact had just sprung on them from nowhere, right in the middle 
of Imperial territory.  It was damned peculiar, so peculiar that Yamashita's first 
and most obvious order of a hail demanding that the vessel identify itself had died 
in his throat.  Something was wrong.

"I want a continuous firing solution on the spar on which their starboard engine is 
attached," the Admiral ordered.


----


"Image is resolving," Lieutenant Commander Stanley called from the tactical 
station.

"On screen," Putzkammer ordered.

The tactical screen zoomed from a wide-angle shot showing a tiny point of light to 
show a closer image of the vessel that had been detected.  It was a boxy 
arrangement two hundred-fifty meters in length, and it's cross-section was eighty 
by eighty.  It wasn't Klingon or Romulan, or any other nation that the Federation 
had contact with.

"What's that charring on the side there?" the captain asked.  "Can you get a better 
shot of that?"

Stanley pressed a few images on his touchscreen panel, and the screen snapped to a 
closeup of the area Putzkammer had asked about.  There was a crater on one side of 
the object, surrounded by black scoring on the grey hull.

"Battle damage," he said, a touch nervously.

Putzkammer frowned and said sternly, "Or an asteroid impact.  Get me that shot of 
the whole ship again."

Stanley tapped the appropriate sections of his console, and the whole length of the 
ship filled the screen again.  The captain bit his lower lip and considered the 
image.  There were various lumps and protrusions projecting from the hull of the 
vessel, and there were no windows that he could see.  The little irregularities 
almost reminded him of a Borg cube, though it was much less extreme.

"Any activity, Ensign Pauley?"

She shook her head.  "No sir.  I'll need to do an active scan to see anything."

"Well, if it's crewed they must have seen us by now.  Lieutenant French, standard 
hail for identification," Putzkammer ordered, then he raised a hand, "Wait, cancel 
that.  I want you to make it a tight beam transmission.  We don't need to tell 
everyone in the neighborhood that we're in the midst of a first contact situation."

The communications officer got on the subspace transmitter and sent the message as 
ordered.  Then the bridge crew waited.

After a full two minutes, the lieutenant looked up with a shake of his head, "No 
response, Captain."

Putzkammer bit his lip again.  "Ensign Pauley, let's try that active scan."


----


Hitotsugi's eyes shot up from his viewer, "Admiral, they are painting the Maikaze 
with targetting sensors."

Yamashita nodded with decision to Lieutenant Kawashima at the weapons station.


----


Pauley turned in her seat, suddenly.  She had just enough time to blurt out, 
"Captain!"

Then Putzkammer felt the deck lurch under his feet and his head hit the ceiling 
above to the sensor station, hard.  Then there was a sickening moment of blackness 
behind his eyes.  He heard muffled sounds of chaos that slowly increased in volume 
until it was back to normal, or as normal as shrieking klaxons could be.  He opened 
his eyes and wiped the blood out of them.  He was on his back on the deck.  Judging 
from the bedlam still raging it had only been a second or two.  He sat up and 
ignored the pounding pain coming from his forehead.  He looked at the viewscreen 
and almost fell again.

The starfield was turning crazily as the Jutland engaged in a dizzying spin to 
starboard.  Putzkammer understood in an instant what had happened.  He pressed one 
hand to his head to stop his bleeding and staggered into his seat.  He keyed for 
engineering.  The chief engineer was speaking before Putzkammer could even begin, 
his speech coming rapid and uncontrolled in a Gujarati accent highlighted by 
alarms.  The captain didn't even bother trying to interpret it.  He gripped the 
arms of his chair tightly and bellowed, "Eject the warp core!"

"As ordered!" was the reply.

Half a second later every light on the bridge went out and the klaxons died.  
Another half second later, the entire ship rocked violently once again.  The 
blackness was chased away for an instant as the helm console exploded in a shower 
of plasma and liquid metal, and the pilot screamed in th deeper darkness that 
followed.  Then everything was quiet.  Putzkammer took a deep breath to calm 
himself and licked his lips nervously.

"Emergency power," he ordered quietly.

The dim emergency lights came on, together with the flashers for red alert.  The 
spinning starfield reappeared as well.

"Lieutenant Commander Stanley, patch emergency thrusters to your station and 
stabilize that spin."

Stanley stared at the captain, wild-eyed and with sweat running down his face.  
"Captain, what about shields--and weapons?"

Putzkammer blinked away the blood that was again threatening to blind his left eye.  
"I haven't got the damage report yet, but I'm certain that that ship knocked our 
starboard nacelle clean away.  We've ejected the warp core as well, and furthermore 
it's vapor.  We're dead in space."

"It wasn't that ship, sir," Ensign Pauley correct him, "something to starboard hit 
us, but I can't see what it could have been."

The captain nodded, which set his head to throbbing even more painfully, 
"Understood.  It doesn't seem as though they're looking to finish us off."  He 
keyed for engineering, "Mister Patel, I want a damage report as soon as possible."

"The Chief Engineer fell and broke his arm, sir.  This is Chief Petty Officer 
Graham."

"Mister Graham, you are promoted to Chief Engineer for the duration of Patel's 
convalescence.  Damage report.  ASAP."  Without waiting for confirmation, 
Putzkammer clicked over to sickbay.  "Two medical officers to the bridge, we've got 
one man needs treatment for plasma burns and some minor--."

"Sir?" Lieutenant French interrupted him.

The captain looked over.

"We're getting a subspace transmission," French explained.

"Origin?" Putzkammer barked.

Pauley checked her console.  "18,000 kilometers to starboard.  And closing."

"Put the transmission on screen," the captain ordered, turning his chair to face 
the main viewscreen.

French hesitated.  "Sir."

"What is it?" Putzkammer growled impatiently.

"The transmission.  It's in Japanese."  French coughed nervously.  "And... ah... 
audio only."

Putzkammer licked his lips.  "Let's hear it, then."

The speakers cracked with a burst of static, causing everyone to jump.  The 
subspace receiver had probably been damaged when the warp core let go.  But the 
voice came through in plain English, the universal translator retaining the 
authority of the deep voice that rumbled through the static.

It said:  "Unknown vessel, this is Admiral Ichiro Yamashita of the Imperial 
Japanese Navy.  You are in violation of imperial space.  Surrender immediately or 
be destroyed."

The captain glanced around the bridge as if making sure that he had heard the same 
message as everyone else.  The two medical corpsmen entered through the doors at 
the far left of the bridge and moved to treat the helmsman's burns.

"Admiral Yamashita, this--this is Captain Leopold Putzkammer of the USS Jutland, 
United Federation of Planets.  We surrender."

Stanley's whirled around and fixed Putzkammer with a glare, "Captain--"

Putzkammer gestured sharply for silence.  The comm channel was still open.

The voice came back, sounding slightly different this time, "Acknowledged, Jutland.  
Stand to and prepare to be boarded."

The comm squawked off, and Stanley spoke instantly.  "Captain, we cannot surrender 
this ship so lightly!"

"Do you suggest we fight them?" the captain asked, "An enemy who sheared the 
starboard nacelle clean away from the ship with one shot from 18,000 kilometers 
downrange, without us even having a glimmer of a sensor contact with them?  And the 
Jutland crippled?"

Stanley set his jaw but did not reply.

"French, that last transmission sounded different," Putzkammer said.

The lieutenant nodded, "It didn't go through the UT, the enemy replied in English."

Putzkammer nodded.  Why not?


----


"An English speaking German, in command of a 'United States Ship' named after a 
British battle," Captain Saegusa said suspiciously, "claiming to be from a non-
existent nation."

Yamashita stroked his mustache idly, "Nothing seems impossible.  The task force 
fell into a wormhole, did it not?"

"We can't say definitively that it was a wormhole," the captain replied.

Yamashita nodded, "But there is nothing else to explain what happened.  Perhaps the 
same wormhole transported these people here.  A lost colony?  Order the marines to 
prepare a prize crew and bring the Hiei to within one thousand kilometers."



Anabasis 
Chapter Two 
Prize Crew 


"The computer is finished evaluating our sensor data, Captain," Ensign Pauley 
announced, "but you aren't going to like this." 

Putzkammer smiled sadly, "It's been that kind of day. Run it down for me." 

A picture of the first vessel sighted appeared on the viewscreen. "There are 
twenty-four ships, not counting the initial vessel sighted. Thirteen of them match 
our first example in all characteristics apparent to passive sensors, minus the 
battle damage and thermal radiation. Those would be the smallest ships in their 
little armada. I believe those bumps and protrusions on the hull to be clumsy 
weaponry mountings, shield emitters, and sensor packages. The next ships in order 
of size look like these--" 

Another image of a ship replaced the first, this one similar in shape but with the 
front end rounded off instead of squared, and the sides featuring a set of what 
looked like giant-size stair steps on the four sides, with quite large lumps 
affixed to each step. "--which is 400 meters long, and about 125 meters in the 
other two dimensions. They've got five of those." 

Another image, this one almost identical to the last but more slender. "Three of 
these. 600 by 150 meters." 

The next image reassumed the boxlike shape of the very first vessel, but was 
apparently much larger, "There are two of these fellows, about six hundred meters 
long and two hundred wide. They don't have as many protrusions and surface 
variation as the other ship classes. If my hunch is correct about those protrusions 
these ships might be transports of some sort." 

"Now the last one," Pauley said, bringing up the final image in her slideshow. It 
was a final repeat of the rounded box with steps. "This must be the flagship. It's 
a full kilometer in length by 250 meters across." 

Captain Putzkammer gently fingered the bandage on his forehead. "Rather impressive. 
Their combined tonnage is probably better than any three task forces in all of 
Starfleet. I don't know how to weigh them pound for pound, but I'm not optimistic. 
Any idea on the yield of the weapons in those... turrets?" 

Pauley threw up her hands. "What hit us was a beam of coherent x-rays with enough 
power to tear the starboard nacelle away in one shot as easily as slicing bread. 
Its exact gigawattage, I just can't say for certain." 

"Guesstimate, then." 

Pauley shrugged, "A lot more than anything they told us about at the academy." 

"Still want to fight them, Stanley?" Putzkammer asked ironically. 

"No sir," Stanley said with a scowl. 

Putzkammer considered the image of the massive battlewagon and scowled himself. 
"Strange design philosophy. It almost looks like old images of ancient surface 
warships, like the ones that fought at the actual _battle_ of Jutland." 

"They look primitive," Stanley interjected. 

The captain shook his head, "Looks are deceiving. I think they must be using turret 
mounts for their weapons because of all that power behind them. I don't think an 
omnidirectional array could handle that much output. And those steps--they must be 
designed to prevent the forward turrets from obstructing the rear. The heavier 
ships can fire all their guns forward, and probably three quarters of them to port, 
starboard, dorsal, and ventral. Not much on the rear arc. A design oversight?" 

Lieutenant Commander Stanley smirked, "They probably just aren't used to running 
away." 

The enemy ships to which the Jutland had surrendered were within a thousand 
kilometers now, and decelerating relative to her. 

Lieutenant French signalled with a wave of his hand. "Another message, sir." 

"On screen," Putzkammer ordered. 

French coughed, "Audio only, sir." 

"You know what I meant, Lieutenant," the captain replied with a hint of pique. 

The voice from before came back over the bridge speakers, "USS Jutland, this is 
Admiral Yamashita. We will be sending a boarding craft with marines to secure your 
vessel, under the command of Major Uchida; he will enter at your docking bay. 
Assemble all crew and officers except for bridge staff in your ship's mess; you and 
your bridge crew are to remain at your stations. Follow any commands issued by 
Major Ushida precisely and promptly and violence will not be necessary. Do you 
understand?" 

"Ah--I understand, but the Jutland does not possess a mess hall." 

"What?" Yamashita asked.

"We don't have a mess hall.  There's a cafè where we can eat in groups, but most 
everyone takes meals in his or her cabin," Putzkammer explained.

There was a pause of several seconds, as if the Japanese admiral was weighing his 
response.  "Then assemble them in your 'cafe.'  Yamashita out."

The comm clicked as the connection was severed once again.


----


"Have we attacked some sort of cruise liner?" Captain Saegusa asked the admiral, 
checking over the sensor data with renewed interest, "everyone has his own personal 
cabin and there is no mess but there is a cafè."

"His or _her_ own cabin," Yamashita emphasized, "evidently they have female 
crewers.  And it definitely possesses weapon emplacements and has stardrives far in 
excess of what any passenger vessel should legitimately require."

"The yacht of some baron, then?"

"He would have to be spectacularly wealthy," Yamashita said after consideration, 
"and it would not have identified itself as it did.  The captain would have said 
that he was a yachtsman, rather than risking misintepretation.  I would say it was 
a merchant tender, except that it lacks cargo space.  It is like nothing I have 
ever seen."  He turned to Hitotsugi.  "Do you have any thoughts, Lieutenant?"

As a sensor operator Hitotsugi had been trained to recognize many different types 
of vessels.  He mulled it over carefully, "It appears similar in some respects to 
the old Romulan and Klingon starships of the twenty-second and twenty-third 
centuries; there are also the vessels which were reported to have been destroyed by 
the United States Navy at the Bajoran Wormhole, though our information on those 
ships is incomplete.  I could also detect some characteristics which are often 
found in Borg ships."

Yamashita nodded.  "I was reminded of that myself.  The lack of sensor stealthing 
and the simple straight-line approach to contact are classic Borg, though their 
greeting message was absent and the crew is apparently human."

Captain Saegusa scratched at the back of his head.  "Major Uchida is reporting that 
he has docked with the Jutland.  We'll find out what they are presently, sir."


----


Lieutenant Commander Stanley had been delegated to greet the boarding party at the 
docking bay, and he stood with some apprehension.  Much more than Captain 
Putzkammer he was a military-minded man, and he had come face to face with an enemy 
who had bested his ship as easily as one breaks a child's toy.  Of course, there 
was the small consolation that the Jutland had been taken by surprise.  Perhaps 
things might have gone differently if they had been better prepared.

The enemy shuttle was quite large.  It dominated the whole of a docking bay which 
had been designed to hold multiple Federation shuttles and runabouts.  Stanley 
stood bolt upright as the ramp descended with a hiss of pressurized air.  Five men 
immediately stomped down it and the commander's jaw became very slightly slackened.  
The men were shorter than him by 10 or 15 centimeters on average, and they were 
covered from head to toe in black uniforms--Stanley guessed that they were combat 
pressure suits.  They featured what looked like plates of composite armor in key 
areas, sturdy-looking boots and vests festooned with all manner of objects totally 
foreign to Stanley--even more odd was the rectangular patch that rode their right 
upper arms: a yellow flower on a red field.  The ensemble was topped by a helmet 
that hugged the head tightly and hid the eyes behind two large, dark lenses, the 
jawline sprouting an air-filtering snout that reminded the lieutenant commander of 
illustrations from his history classes.  They looked, in short, even more inhuman 
and mechanical then Borg drones.  Their weapons were harsh amalgams of blocky 
mechanical parts, chunky, black, and threatening; utterly unlike phasers. 

The first five men stomped past Stanley as if he wasn't even there.  As did the 
next.  He watched nervously as they methodically cleared the entire docking, 
sweeping their weapons this way and that, until finally they stopped and apparently 
gave the all-clear signal to their shuttle.  Then a full fifty men turned out in a 
clatter of boots striking deck to organize into groups with antlike efficiency.  
Some of them had extra symbols on their arms; as to the provenance of these, 
Stanley had no idea whatsoever.  Finally one of them, not carrying a weapon in his 
hands, walked directly to the lieutenant commander and stopped in front of him.

The voice came out from the snout of the helmet, harshly filtered through the 
external speaker. "I am Major Uchida.  Your name and rank, immediately."

"Lieutenant Commander Stanley.  I'm here to lead you through the ship," he replied.

"You will take us to the galley.  If any member of the crew resists, they will be 
killed without mercy and you will follow them.  Do you understood?"

Stanley gulped as he looked down at the squat, cyborg-looking man.  "Yes."

He led them quickly out of the docking bay and into the corridors until they 
reached the turbolift.

"The cafè--the galley--is a few decks above us.  We'll need to take the 
turbolift," Stanley explained, looking back down the corridor at the sixty-some men 
filling the hall.  Some of them were entering rooms along the way in the same 
systematic manner that they had used to clear the docking bay.  It seemed as though 
they were very concerned about the possibility of ambush.

Uchida spoke again, drawing the lieutenant commander's attention back down to him.  
"Stairs."

Stanley started to explain.  "There aren't any stairs, there's just--"

Major Uchida struck him hard across the jaw with the back of one gloved fist.  
Stanley reeled and caught himself against one of the bulkheads, barely avoiding an 
ignominous spill to the carpet.  A little rivulet of blood mixed with saliva 
spilled out of the right corner of his mouth.

"Don't tell stupid lies.  This lift cannot be the only access between decks," 
Uchida growled.

Stanley wiped the blood away with one hand.  "I'm not lying.  There's only the lift 
and some access ladders through that door."  He pointed.  For a moment he thought 
the little man would hit him again, but he didn't.

"Summon the lift," he ordered, then he turned back towards the other men and 
uttered a rapid stream of Japanese.  The soldiers began to pour through the door 
that Stanley had indicated, taking the ladder to the other decks of the ship.

The lift car arrived momentarily, because no one was using it.  When it arrived, 
Stanley was shoved roughly through the doors.  Uchida and six others crowded in 
with him, fairly crushing him against the wall.  He took the opportunity to examine 
their uniforms more closely.  There were precisely sixteen petals to the flower 
that the soldiers wore on their right shoulders.

"Take us to the galley," Uchida demanded.

Stanley looked up and said, "Deck ten."

The turbolift hummed as it rose, only taking a few moments to reach the 
destination, and easily beating the men that had been sent by the ladder.  Stanley 
led them out and down the corridor to the cafè, or Ten-Forward as it was called on 
most Starfleet vessels.  When the doors opened, he saw that it was greatly 
overcrowed.  All the furniture had been pushed to the walls but still there was 
scarcely room to sit.

Uchida slowly examined the room and turned back to Stanley.  His face was 
completely hidden and his voiced modulated by the speaker system, but his shock 
carried through in the movements of his head and body.

He asked, "Why are there women and children on your ship?"

"It's the families of the crew," Stanley replied matter-of-factly.

"What?  Is this not a warship?" Uchida asked.

Stanley drew himself up proudly, "The Jutland is an Akira-class heavy cruiser; she 
was at Chin'Toka and Cardassia.  She is most definitely a warship."

In sequence the Japanese officer looked at Stanley, back at the terrified non-
combatants, the cafè tables and bar, the soft red carpet, and finally back at 
Stanley.

"Is there another room of size where the women and children can be placed to 
relieve their crowding?" Uchida asked.

Stanley pointed down the corridor, "The nursery is the third door on the right."

Uchida issued a rapid burst of commands to the six soldiers, then turned back to 
the crowd.  "All non-combatants and children will go to the nursery immediately."

He stood back away from the door to let them pass, but grabbed one of the women by 
the arm.  She quaked with terror despite her height advantage.  Uchida said, "Give 
the children treats and have them sing songs or something."

The woman nodded quickly and all but ran away when Uchida released her.  Stanley 
ran his tongue over loosened teeth and looked ironically at Major Uchida.  They 
waited until the crowd had moved into the nursery, by which time soldiers had begun 
emerging from the access ladder to clear this deck as well.  Stanley trooped into 
the elevator ahead of the the major, and again the honor guard ate up the space.

"Bridge," Major Uchida said.

The turbolift obediently began to move.


----


Major Kazuo Uchida walked onto the apparent bridge of the Jutland behind Lieutenant 
Commander Stanley, quickly assessing the room.  It looked like some kind of 
ergonomically designed entertainment center, built around a single large flatscreen 
at the front of the room.  The floor was red carpet, the console a calm beige, and 
everywhere was a pronounced lack of any hard angles.  It was also quite spacious.  
Aboard the Hiei the bridge crew was packed into a small room near the center of the 
ship, just barely large enough to be comfortable.  This ship struck him as 
incredibly wasteful of space from the moment he exited the docking bay, corridors 
with a meter of headspace and room to walk three men abreast, deck after deck of 
personal cabins.  

One of the consoles had apparently exploded.  Odd.

He examined the personnel last.  There was at least one woman off against the wall, 
dressed in their strange uniforms, like a cross between pajamas and a bellhop's 
outfit.  The most standout figure was definitely the man in red who stood at the 
center of the bridge, fully two meters tall with a crisply cut head of blond hair 
just slightly marred by a bandage on his forehead.  Thanks to his starving youth as 
a cadet the Imperial Marines academy, Kazuo was only 165 centimeters tall.  Of 
course, this man looked soft, and it would be hard to say whose adolescent diet had 
better served him.

"I'm Captain Putzkammer, and you must be Major Uchida.  Ah... welcome aboard," the 
man said, extending a massive hand towards Uchida.

Uchida had been given to understand that occidentals shook hands in preference to 
bowing; because the Jutland and her crew had surrendered ignominiously Putzkammer 
was scarcely worthy of such a greeting.  The major turned away from the man without 
responding.

"Inform Admiral Yamashita that we have secured the vessel," he ordered his second-
in-command, Captain Aida.  Then he reached up to the place near his jawline where 
the helmet's seal met the neck of the pressure suit and trigger the release.  The 
heads-up-display in the lenses winked off and the helmet hissed with pressure 
release, and then he was holding it lightly in one hand.  It felt good to have a 
little space around one's head.

Putzkammer looked down warily at the major.  With the helmet off he was at least 
assured of the other man's humanity, which had most definitely been unclear before.  
Of course, humanity had it's degrees.  Uchida had the typical features of the Asian 
man with the addition of an age-faded scar running from his earlobe all the way 
along his left jawline.  As for his age, if their geriatrics were anything like the 
Federation's, he would have been somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five.  
There was a leanness to his features, in the way one thought of a wolf as being 
lean.

And then there the darkening bruise on Lieutenant Commander Stanley's jaw, and the 
hint of blood at the corner of his mouth.  Someone had struck him, and Captain 
Putzkammer could guess who.  If that was the way their officers behaved, this was 
going to be a difficult process.

Uchida looked at the helm console for a long time, then spoke, "You have suffered 
damage here?"

"Yes," Putzkammer replied tonelessly, "when you fired on us, the plasma conduits in 
the helm console were damaged.  My pilot was burned rather badly."

"Plasma conduits in the console?" Kazuo asked, "surely you joke."

Putzkammer shook his head with slight confusion, "No.  How else would we power 
them?"

Major Uchida looked at him a long time, then snorted and allowed his eyes to 
continue roving the bridge.

Captain Aida said in Japanese, "Major Uchida, Admiral Yamashita replies that he 
will be coming aboard this ship presently."

"Confirmed.  I await him on the bridge," Kazuo replied.

"The Admiral is coming aboard?" Putzkammer asked.

Uchida narrowed his eyes at the other man.  "Yes.  You speak Japanese?"

"Ah, no.  We have universal translators incorporated into our communicator 
badges," Putzkammer expounded, "which interface with the ship's computer in order 
to make use of its exhaustive catalogue of human and alien languages.  In case of a 
true first contact situation the computer can interpret and translate a wholly 
undiscovered language in a matter of minutes using its advanced--"

Kazuo interrupted him.  "Are you trying to explain yourself, or to compell me to 
purchase your device?"

Putzkammer gave a confused little cough.  "To explain it."

"Then be silent.  You had finished explaining it with your first eight words, the 
remainder of your speech was dross.  Give me your communicator."  Kazuo extended 
one hand.

Putzkammer hesitated.  "But--"

"Now."

The captain reluctantly took his comm badge and dropped it into Major Uchida's 
hand.  The Japanese officer formed a fist around it, and without any warning aimed 
a strong uppercut into the pit of Putzkammer's stomach.  The big man doubled over 
and dropped to his knees, gasping for breath.

"As a prisoner of war you must comply immediately to orders in the same obedient 
and unquestioning manner as a dog, or you will be punished in the same manner as an 
unruly cur.  Do you understand?" Kazuo growled.  Putzkammer did not--could not--
respond immediately.

Uchida took a step closer to the prostrate captain.  "I will strike you again if 
you do not answer me."

Putzkammer nodded and wheezed, "I understand.  I understand."

"Good."  Uchida opened his hand and looked down at the communicator badge.  It 
would be something good for the technicians aboard the Hiei to examine, though he 
did not hold out much hope for it's usefulness.

Nearer the door Stanley rubbed at the corner of his mouth where his flesh had been 
torn earlier.  Observing it this time from outside the violence, he could not help 
but note the dispassionate manner with which Uchida had delivered the punch.  There 
was no emotion in it, just a precise movement to create the desired effect.  
Putzkammer might as well have not even been there, for all it affected Uchida to 
have knocked the captain breathless to the deck in front of his crew.  Lieutenant 
Commander Stanley had never really liked his commanding officer, but it still 
rankled to have a Starfleet officer humiliated like that.



Anabasis
Chapter Three
Mistaken Identity


Admiral Yamashita retired to his cabin while his shuttle was prepared for the trip 
over to the Jutland.  It was standard naval practice to drain the Hiei's small 
craft of fuel before battle to prevent sympathetic explosions, and it was also 
standard naval practice never to launch a shuttle without a full load of fuel; it 
would be a good few minutes before everything was ready.  For Yamashita to be 
impatient at this minor delay would be hypocritical, as he had been a member of the 
board which the admiralty had charged with updating the naval regulations.  Anyway, 
he wasn't the sort to get impatient and couldn't actually recall a time when he had 
been.  His philosophy was that time could only be wasted if one allowed it to be 
so; he decided to have a bit of a wash in the few moments that he had.

He wrapped a towel around his neck to shield his uniform and bent over the sink, 
splashing cascades of cold water onto his face.  He rubbed synthetic naval soap, 
with its reeking disinfectant, between his hands until it had worked up a fine 
lather, and he put that on his face and rinsed it off as well.  And with that, he 
felt like a new man.  Yamashita sometimes marvelled at the ability of simple 
hygeine to refresh one after even the greatest exertions.  Until this brief break, 
he had been on the bridge for about fifteen hours straight, had not slept in 
thirty-one hours.  Before the mysterious event that had transported his task force 
across hundreds of light years he had supervised a raid on the Neues München naval 
yards and commanded the subsequent pursuit battle against the US-German fleet that 
had tried to defend the yards, but had been put the flight instead.  

He would have run them down, as well, if he had had the time, but he had been 
interrupted by a wormhole or some other spatial anomaly.  Known space was full of 
such things, but he had never heard of one with such proportions as to transport an 
entire battlegroup.

Yamashita stood at the mirror above the sink, pulling the towel from his throat and 
drying his face and hair.  Then he hummed a tune to himself as he brushed the stray 
hairs of his mustache back into place.

A voice with a light American accent came from the other room, "What tuneless 
warbling Japanese song might that be?"

The admiral straightened and stopped humming.  "A song my wife taught me, years 
ago.  It's about fish," he said.

"You are an exceedingly strange man," the voice said, "I don't know why I bother 
with you."

Yamashita ran one hand over his close cropped hair and scratched at the back of his 
head before stepping into his cabin proper.  "Neither do I," he replied, "but I 
should have known, Q."

The man was reclining on Yamashita's bed, one eyebrow raised at him.  He was 
wearing a queer sort of uniform, black pants and a shirt that was also black but 
for the top quarter of it, which was red.  There was some sort of lavender 
turtleneck under that.  It looked almost like a suit of pajamas converted into a 
naval uniform, but Yamashita supposed it meshed well with Q's general style, which 
was odd.  The tall being with his curly hair and round occidental eyes was always 
playing dressup.  The first time he had mocked Yamashita with his presence, he had 
been wearing a full set of ancient samurai regalia.

"Indeed, you should have, Ichiro-chan.  And I think you did," Q said, sitting up 
and turning to let his legs hang over the edge of the bed, "but I wonder you didn't 
just tell your crew precisely what--or rather who--had happened."

Yamashita ignored the being's insulting use of the diminutive form in addressing 
him.  "I should tell my crew that they had been snatched into another dimension by 
a nearly omnipotent being?"

Q's eyebrows shot up, "Only 'nearly onmipotent?'  I'm hurt by your lack of 
confidence.  Anyway, your men have great faith in you, no doubt they would believe 
whatever you told them.  You _are_ Admiral Ichiro Yamashita, the victor of a 
hundred battles, after all."

"The ability to do something without repercussion is not reason to do that thing," 
Ichiro said.

"Ah, an unsubtle barb.  Need I remind you that you are a cockroach compared to me, 
and I could easily make you into one simply for the purpose of stomping on you?" Q 
asked.

Yamashita shook his head, "No, I recall the many times that you have said that, I 
need not be reminded.  But of course you have a continued interest in my 
activities, else you would not be harassing me and transporting my fleet about as 
you have, so I doubt that you will carry through your threat at this juncture.  
Now, what is it you want?"

"Hmph," the being grunted, "you're being very rude today.  You haven't even asked 
me about my new clothes."

There was a long pause before Yamashita took a deep breath and spoke, deadpan, 
"There is no doubt a story associated with your current ensemble.  Would you please 
regale me with it?"

Q smirked.  "Have I told you that you're an exceedingly strange man?  All the 
things you've done, and still you putter about your bathroom humming children's 
songs, and then you mock a godlike being repeatedly out of mere petulence.  You're 
right, I simply couldn't turn you into a cockroach and stamp you out.  You're too 
interesting to destroy."

Yamashita said, "I have tried in previous meetings to persuade you to convert to 
Zen--"

Q rolled his eyes.

Yamashita continued, "--and you have proven resistant, even though it is that very 
philosophy which gives me the power you find so interesting, that of finding 
perfection no matter where I find myself.  But no matter.  The story of your 
clothing, please."

"Ah, yes.  You said earlier that I was harassing you, but it's an unwarranted 
assumption to say that it's all about you this time.  No, I'm testing a larger 
group this time," Q explained, "and this happens to be the uniform of those poor 
fellows whose ship you largely destroyed.  Your guess was good, you are in a 
parallel dimension.  I've been cultivating you and these people both, for a long 
time, and I'm taking the opportunity to throw you into collision and see what 
happens."

"When you've seen it, please be so good as to tell me what happened."

"Don't you want to ask me how you're going to get home?" Q asked with another 
smirk.

Yamashita picked up his cap from his desk.  He said, "No.  For all your vast 
intelligence, or perhaps because of it, you are a predictable creature.  You are 
teasing me.  Now I must go to the shuttle.  Poof, disappear, and return to mock me 
later."

"Hmph," Q grunted again, "you silly insect.  Look at me, brain the size of a planet 
and I'm wasting time on a mean-spirited cicada."

"If I am so beastly and you are so omnipotent, then create yourself another 
diversion."  Yamashita put his cap on.

The Q disappeared in a flash of white light, and Ichiro walked out his door, bound 
for his shuttle.


----


The woman from the side console had risen to offer Captain Putzkammer aid and 
consolation after his brief beating, and now the two of them were standing against 
the wall near her console, murmuring softly in English.  Perhaps that was her 
purpose, Major Uchida thought, a sort of camp follower offering comfort to the 
crew.  Putzkammer himself appeared to be in some stage of shock, as if he hadn't 
expected to be struck.  How odd.  When one dishonored himself by surrendering, he 
could expect punishment.  The Germans had always understood that, the Americans to 
a lesser extent.  Perhaps these people came from a nation of soft-skinned cowards.  
Uchida frowned at the thought.  The essence of the warrior was his ability to 
annihilate himself, to erase all that was extraneous leaving only his spirit of 
battle, so that he could make the right decision instantly and without hesitation, 
even if the right decision was death.

If Uchida was to fight these whelps, the battles would probably be far too easy and 
he would be unable to achieve that level of commitment.  Like most samurai, he 
never felt himself except in the depths of a pitched battle.  He ran his thumb 
along the line of his facial scar.  Years ago, when he had been nothing but a 
twenty year old raw second lieutenant learning the trade as a supernumerary to a 
marine platoon, he had participated in an assault against a German moonbase.  The 
112th and 204th Imperial Marine divisions against the 25th SS, a battle in perfect 
vacuum, silent but for the chatter over the helmet radios.  That had been a battle.  
His platoon pouring through the cracked hull, watching as the cracked hull of the 
base poured oxygen into open space.

One of those hulking genetically engineered ubermenschen had slammed the butt of a 
rifle into the side of Uchida's face, cracking the helmet and driving a sharp edge 
of metal into his jaw as his rifle tumbled away.  Uchida had ignored the hiss of 
escaping oxygen and fought through the yawning blackness of the concussion and 
drawn his combat knife, reaching up to the tall German's throat and stabbing 
through the armored synthetic fiber at the SS man's throat just before he lost 
consciousness, almost certainly to die of hypoxia as his helmet leaked out.  But he 
had been lucky, his own blood had flash frozen on contact with the vacuum and 
formed a primitive but airtight seal around the breach, and he made it out alive.  
Unlike his enemy.

That had been a high point.  He had felt immortality in the realization of his own 
imminent death and his own cool acceptance of it; the sensation of everything he 
had ever been being reduced to one stab of his knife.  But these people were 
unlikely to supply him with such a catharsis.

He watched the lieutenant commander that had welcomed him aboard the ship walk over 
to speak with Putzkammer.  No.  They were not sufficient to his pride.


----


"He's been staring at me for an uncomfortably long time," Ensign Pauley whispered, 
glancing up at Major Uchida as Stanley stopped next to them.

Stanley shrugged, "Just don't make eye contact.  And stop whispering, it attracts 
attention.  Just talk quietly, sotto voice."

"What are you, playing the spy now?" Pauley asked sarcastically, though still 
following his instruction.

"Maybe," Stanley said, "but in any case it's a good idea to be cautious.  That 
Major is not a man to trifle with."

Putzkammer, stooping next to the wall, licked his lips nervously.  "That Admiral 
will be coming over soon.  I think he'll be easier to deal with."

"We can only hope," Stanley said, "but you're doing alright?"

"Yes, I'm fine," Putzkammer said, "but... you were right, Commander.  When you said 
we shouldn't have surrendered."

"I'm not sure we had much other choice," Stanley said tonelessly.

The captain shook his head, "I misread the situation.  I should have done 
_something_ instead of just rolling over for them.  But..."

He trailed off.  Ensign Pauley asked, "But what?"

"When French said that they were communicating in Japanese, that they were humans, 
I thought... maybe it had just been a misunderstanding.  I've always believed in 
the the human race as a team, I guess.  I mean, there hasn't been a war between 
humans for centuries.  I guess I couldn't believe they had actually meant to attack 
us," Putzkammer said lamely.

"It's alright, sir, you had no way of knowing," Pauley comforted him.

Idiot, Stanley thought.  It was people like him that had dragged the Federation 
down for centuries.  Humans were pack predators by nature, it was just that they 
had found external threats grave enough to force them to redefine the dimensions of 
their pack.  These new enemies had come from no place anyone had ever heard of, and 
it was unsafe and stupid to assume that an unknown quantity would behave the way 
one wanted them to.

"The naval command is going to take notice when we don't make rendezvous at Wertham 
V tomorrow," Stanley murmured.

"That's good," Pauley replied.  When neither man replied, she asked, "Isn't it?"

"Not exactly," Captain Putzkammer explained, "they'd have no idea what they were up 
against.  Standard procedure is to investigate incidents like this with one Galaxy 
class or equivalent, and after that maybe a task force of five to ten ships at 
most.  This so-called Imperial Japanese Navy would eat them alive.  If they knew 
that there was a battle fleet sitting here, they might be able to round up fifty 
ships by stripping the surrounding sectors.  But they don't know, so we're on a 
time limit.  If my guess is right we've got less than thirty hours to either send a 
warning out or convince these people to do this peacefully."

Pauley paled, "I had no idea we were spread so thin."

"Believe it," Lieutenant Commander Stanley said, "we're still recovering from the 
Dominion War, and we will be for a good decade.  Too many ships, too many men lost.  
If these people aren't limited to just the twenty ships we've seen, the Federation 
might be in serious trouble.  We need a quick response or--"

The Japanese soldier nearest the door shouted something in his own language, and 
all of the soldiers straightened, followed by the bridge crew.  Putzkammer followed 
suit, looking around nervously.  His translator had been confiscated.

"What happened?" he whispered.

Stanley leaned over and whispered back, "'Admiral on deck.'"

A group of Japanese men in dark blue uniforms much like those seen in historical 
documentaries of surface navies walked through the main doors, one of them carrying 
some sort of suitcase.  Four of them surrounded one with a substantially more 
impressive set of decorations on his uniform, probably the Admiral that Putzkammer 
had spoken with over the comm.  The naval officers were a few centimeters taller 
than the soldiers on average, and the apparent Admiral himself was a slim man of 
about 175 centimeters.  His hair was close cropped and just beginning to go to 
gray, and he wore a well-groomed mustache on his upper lip.


----


"Your report, Major Uchida," Admiral Yamashita demanded.

Uchida snapped a salute at full attention.  "Sir.  The ship is secured.  The 
remainder of the prisoners are under guard in the mess and nursery, and the bridge 
crew is here."

"Nursery?" Yamashita asked.

Uchida nodded sharply, "There are a number of civilians among the prisoners taken, 
including children.  They are evidently the families of the crew."

"How odd," the admiral replied, then he spoke in English to the crew of the 
Jutland, "Which of you is the navigator?"

Captain Putzkammer spoke up, "Our pilot was injured when you fired on us."

"Ah.  You are Captain Putzkammer, yes?" Yamashita looked over at him, "Lieutenant 
Takashi will need to retrieve information from your computers.  Star maps, 
especially.  We would prefer it if you made this process easy by offering your 
assistance."

Putzkammer straightened, "We're under no obligation to do that.  We've surrendered, 
not agreed to become your allies."

Major Uchida took a step forward and growled, "Didn't I teach you earlier?  You 
cannot speak to the Admiral like that!"

"Please, Major Uchida," Yamashita said, laying a hand on the marine's shoulder to 
calm him, "he has refused to help willingly.  No doubt he believes he would be 
doing his nation a disservice by revealing his maps to us."

The admiral stared directly into Putzkammer's eyes and continued, "But there will 
be opportunity to convince him otherwise.  Lieutenant Takashi will make do on his 
own for the moment.  Do you have a ready room adjoining this bridge, Captain 
Putzkammer?"

"Yes," the captain replied, "it's just a bit down the hall."

"We will go there, then.  Major Uchida, you will remain here."  Yamashita turned on 
his heel and marched out the door, followed by two of the other naval officers.  
The officer with the briefcase opened it, revealing that it was actually a large 
portable computer, and seated himself at the science station.

A pair of soldiers seized Putzkammer by the arms and pulled him towards the door as 
well.  It looked somewhat comic, the tall captain being led around by men who came 
up only to the region around his armpits.  But Putzkammer felt their iron grip, and 
whatever there size he was sure these men were far more dangerous than he.  He 
allowed himself to be dragged along to the ready room.

When he entered, Yamashita had already seated himself in the chair at the head of 
the table that Putzkammer had normally occupied as captain, flanked on right and 
left by his two officers.  The soldiers pushed him into the seat at the foot of the 
table, and took up similar positions around him.  Two more marines stood 
immediately behind him.  Yamashita took off his cap and set it on the table in 
front of him.

"You said in your transmission that your name is Leopold Putzkammer," the admiral 
asked, "this is a German name?"

"Yes, my name is Leopold Joseph Putzkammer, but I'm actually Austrian, from 
Innsbruck in the Tirol," Putzkammer replied.

"Innsbruck?  That city was destroyed by nuclear attack in 2190."

"That would have been news to me.  I grew up there, and it's 2380 right now," 
Leopold replied.

"Indeed, this is most strange," Yamashita said.  "I would suppose that Berlin, 
Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt... those cities are also intact?  And there remain 
German people living on Earth?"

Putzkammer nodded, "Yes, of course."

"Not 'of course,'" the admiral replied, "not in this case.  Evidently your version 
of the Earth does not coincide with mine.  Germany-on-Earth was entirely destroyed 
by nuclear weapons and ethnic revolt in the War of 2190, all that remains are their 
space colonies."

"That... that never happened," Putzkammer said.

"Not to you.  I believe that our task force fell into a wormhole, and that it has 
transported us into an entirely different dimension from our home," Yamashita said.  

The other men in the room, Putzkammer thought, seemed remarkably calm at this 
announcement.

Ichiro continued, "Please.  Explain to me the status of Earth as you know it."

Leopold leaned back.  "Well--" he said, then he proceeded into a brief description 
of human history since first contact with the Vulcans.  Through the entire 
truncated lesson, Yamashita stroked his mustache thoughtfully.  When Putzkammer had 
finally run down and finished, the admiral considered it silently for a few 
moments.

"So, you are saying that the entire human race is under a single unified 
government?" Yamashita asked.

Putzkammer considered going into an explanation of independent former colonies and 
the Maquis, but he decided against it.  "More or less."

Ichiro grunted thoughtfully, "And how did you achieve the agreement of the Third 
Reich and the Empire of Japan to this scheme?"

"Well, there wasn't any Third Reich or Empire of Japan.  Not after 1945, anyway."

"You no doubt have a history in your ship's library, Lieutenant Takashi will be 
instructed to retrieve it.  But there are more pressing matters than ancient 
history.  Am I to understand that the Romulan and Klingon Empires are still 
extant?"

"Why, yes.  Don't you have them in your, ah... _universe_?"

The admiral shook his head, "Effectively, the whole of the Beta Quadrant is under 
the rule of his Majesty the Emperor and has been so since 2230."

"You conquered the Romulans and Klingons?" Putzkammer asked incredulously.

"More or less.  In fact, it was my ancestor Montaro Yamashita who commanded the 
invasion of Qo'Nos," Yamashita replied, "but we are now on your border with the 
Romulans and Klingons?"

"Uh, yes."

"It would then be reasonable to infer that you were patrolling this border." The 
admiral frowned in disapproval.  "When are you expected to next report in?"

Putzkammer said nothing.

"A pity.  You had been most talkative," Ichiro said with a sigh.  "I find torture 
distasteful, but it is sometimes necessary.  Sergeant Kanagashi, on your right, is 
most experienced, and given time he could use artful measures to force your tongue.  
But we may be short of time, and finesse is a luxury."

Yamashita said something in Japanese, in the very same tone of voice in which he 
had carried the entire previous conversation.  The two marines behind Putzkammer 
grabbed his arms and pinned them to the table.

Yamashita continued calmly, "If you refuse to answer my question, Sergeant 
Kanagashi will cut off your small finger.  A second refusal will cost you your 
thumb."

"What?" the other asked incredulously.  Putzkammer's eyes widened as he looked down 
at his hand.

The sergeant still seated at his right drew a wicked-looking knife from a sheath on 
his vest webbing, and he took hold of Leopold's right hand.  He carefully separated 
the pinkie finger from the others and laid the blade at the first knuckle.  Leopold 
felt himself breaking out in a cold sweat, and he looked up at the sergeant.  Aside 
from Major Uchida, none of the soldiers had removed their helmets, so the captain 
found himself looking into inhuman lenses instead of eyes, his own dim reflection 
staring back at him in fear.

"Wait!" he tried to jerk his arms free, but he might as well have been trying to 
break through steel manacles.  Even if the marines were thirty centimeters shorter 
than him, they were more than strong enough to hold him down.  All he succeeded in 
doing was jerking his arms a few centimeters in either direction, and the combat 
knife slid slightly against his finger.  It cut a few millimeters into his flesh 
and drew a tiny drop of blood.  It was evidently razor sharp.

Yamashita said, "Do not struggle.  I have no wish to mutilate you needlessly.  Only 
answer my questions truthfully, and you will not be harmed.  Now, when are you 
expected to report?"

Putzkammer took a few gasping breaths and stared at the knife.

"You refuse?  Sergeant Kanagashi, you may--"

"About thirty hours from now," Putzkammer interrupted quickly.

"'About'?" Ichiro asked doubtfully, "I would have preferred an exact answer.  But 
that will do well enough."

He said something further in Japanese, and the soldiers released him and reassumed 
their former positions.  Leopold wiped sweat from his forehead.

"I'm glad that we understand eachother," Admiral Yamashita said.

Putzkammer gulped and exhaled a quavering breath.



Anabasis
Chapter Four
Mutineer


The interrogation was winding down.  Yamashita could not say that he was 
disappointed with the results, as he was most certainly not a sadist.  His feelings 
were more or less mixed.  He was glad that he had not been forced to torture 
Captain Putzkammer, but he felt more than a little disgusted at the ease with which 
the man had been broken.  There was no iron in him, he was a doll made from rice 
paper.  He had barely had the courage to lie about the size of his Starfleet.  
Yamashita had known the captain was lying, for he had always been an excellent 
judge of such things.  But he hadn't called Putzkammer on it.  There would be time 
for that later.  

"So, your ship has no first officer?" Ichiro asked.

Putzkammer shook his head, eyes downcast.  "No.  He was killed in a transporter 
accident just before we left on patrol.  There was no possibility of a replacement 
in time for our departure.  Lieutenant Commander Stanley has been acting in that 
capacity."

"Transporter?  What is that?"

"A device for transferring matter from place to place.  It scans an object and 
records every detail of its composition, then dismantles it to be recreated at a 
point of our choosing.  It can move anything below a certain size.  We use it 
mainly for moving people," Leopold explained.

Yamashita nodded thoughtfully, "And your first officer?  What happened to him?"

"There was an error in the transmission and he materialized inside a rock," the 
captain said.

"Fascinating.  Are such accidents common?" Yamashita asked.

"Not really.  Every once in a while."

"I see," Yamashita said, glancing down at his wristwatch.  It was still too soon 
for Lieutenant Takashi to have made much progress with his efforts.  He was an 
experienced intelligence officer working with an advanced data-extracting computer, 
but it still took time to crack unknown technology.  It would do to kill a few more 
minutes.

"Which of your crewmen can tell me more about these transporters?" he asked.

Putzkammer pursed his lips, "Chief Engineer Patel should be in the cafè, he knows 
everything about how the ship works."

Yamashita nodded to Sergeant Kanagashi, who stood quickly and walked out the door.  
Ichiro looked back down at Putzkammer, slouching in his chair with sweat running 
down his face.  Pathetic.


----


Meanwhile on the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Stanley was leaning against one wall 
and considering his options.  He fidgeted slightly.  If his guess was right, and he 
was sure it was, the admiral would be interrogating Putzkammer with all necessary 
force.  Knowing his captain, Stanley didn't think very much force would be 
necessary.  He had been with Putzkammer since the Dominion War, and he knew that 
man had the spine of a noodle.  If Starfleet had any balls at all, men like that 
would be kept out of command and given more appropriate work, like day care.

He pushed off of the wall and turned to the nearest soldier.  Stanley said, "I have 
to urinate."

The soldier shrugged and turned to Major Uchida.  "Major, this man says he has to 
use the toilet."

Uchida laughed harshly, "Weak bladder?  Corporal Kumaki, accompany him."

The marine that Stanley had spoken to had his rifle hanging from his shoulder on 
its sling, and rather than raising it he simply drew a pistol from a holster on his 
hip.  Kumaki gestured towards the door with a jerk of his head, and kept his pistol 
aimed low and out of the way, but still in action.

The main restroom for the bridge level was just past the ready room.  Stanley 
walked down the corridor slowly, and looked back at the man following him.  Kumaki 
growled, "Eyes front."

Lieutenant Commander Stanley shrugged and faced forward again as he triggered the 
door and walked into the restroom.  It was a unisex facility, like everything 
aboard Federation starships, and was simply a row of walled stalls with toilets in 
them.  He walked directly to the first stall and unzipped the fly on his uniform 
pants.  Then he paused for a few seconds and turned his upper body around to look 
at the corporal again.  The other man was standing about a yard behind him in the 
stall door, his gun arm hanging at his side.

"I can't go with you watching me," Stanley said.

"Then you'll have to try harded," the soldier replied.

Stanley shrugged again and turned back to the front.  Then, flat-footed, he kicked 
out horizontally behind him, driving his right heel hard into Kumaki's groin.  The 
corporal grunted in surprise and pain and started to raise his gun even as he 
staggered back.  Stanley spun and grabbed the smaller man's right arm.  They were 
both in peak physical condition,  but Stanley was much larger.  The weapon 
discharged once with a report magnified by the tile surfaces and tight space, then 
Stanley muscled Kumaki's arm out of line, so that the muzzle of his pistol was 
under his jaw.  Stanley shoved one thumb into the trigger guard and yanked down.  
The pistol cracked again, and there was an explosion of blood down the soldier's 
neck.  He went limp.  Stanley pulled the pistol out of the lifeless hand and 
examined it quickly.  It was a chunky slab of black metal, from the sound of it and 
the hole it had blasted in the wall, it must have been some sort of chemically 
powered projectile thrower.  Stanley bent down and pulled the first objects he 
could identify from the dead man's vest: a knife, a handful of grenades, and a 
flashlight.  He left everything else, and the rifle.  It would take too long to 
figure them out.

Stanley hopped up onto the toilet and hit a glowing touch-panel button that was 
mounted on the ceiling.  A portion of the ceiling a meter square moved aside and a 
short ladder dropped down.  He pulled himself up into the opening just as some 
other Japanese burst into the bathroom, and a few projectiles smacked into the wall 
just below him as he shut the door and triggered the override lock.  Safer now, he 
exhaled and zipped up his pants.  In the dim light of the jeffries tube, he 
examined his weapon more thoroughly.  It was a mean looking thing.  Aside from the 
trigger there were two additional buttons on it.  Since it was a projectile weapon, 
one of them would have to be the magazine release, but he couldn't guess what the 
other was.  He decided not to risk an experiment.  He stucked the knife and 
grenades in his pockets and crawled down the tube, pistol in hand.

The first thing was to get to the bridge computer override station and hit his 
panic button, then he could go to the communications maintenance room and override 
the subspace transmitter from there, to warn Starfleet of what had happened.  He 
knew the tubes like the back of his hand, the enemy knew them not at all.  He would 
have to bank on that advantage.

The computer station was only a few meters down the tube.  It was a cramped room 
with just enough room for two people to crouch next to eachother.  Stanley knelt in 
front of the terminal and tapped the touchscreen to bring it online.  The computer 
asked, "Password?"

Stanley responded, "Stanley, Patrick Connor.  Section 31 override command."

The datum raced through the computer's guts, opening up circuits and closing 
others.  A set of new commands popped up on the touchscreen.  "What are your 
orders, Commander?"

Patrick's fingers raced over the screen as he cut the bridge and engineering out of 
the ship's controls.  Then he hit his panic button.


----


They had heard the gunshots in the ready room, and the guards at his sides had 
quickly sprung to cover Putzkammer, while the other two raced out the door to 
investigate.  Yamashita did not look particularly shocked.

"Hmm.  What might that be?" he asked quietly, raising his eyebrows at Leopold.  The 
captain had no answer for him.  A few seconds passed, then there was a staccato 
burst of fire.  The two guards returned, reporting to the admiral with a quick 
burst of Japanese.  Putzkammer could hear a multitide of boots stomping back and 
forth in the corridor.

Yamashita stood and looked down at him across the table.  "I suppose I will be 
unable to have my hoped-for discussion with your engineer.  Your man Stanley has 
chosen to fight us rather than cooperate."

Just then, the lights cut out in the ready room, and through the open door it was 
evident that the lights there had gone as well.  A quiet rumbling came from the 
walls and slowly built to a roar.  Then the computer terminal next to the door 
exploded violently as the plasma conduit supplying power to it overloaded.  A 
moment later, the lights flashed brilliantly for an instant before exploding in a 
cascade of glass.  Purple blindspots danced in his vision and Putzkammer's ears 
rang.

"Tell me," he heard Yamashita asking, "do your ships always explode spontaneously?"


----


On the bridge the mayhem was even more pronounced.  The main viewscreen burst just 
after the lights went out, shooting bits of itself all over the bridge.  The 
Japanese marines in their armor pressure suits proved largely immune.  The only 
ones injured at first were Lieutenant French and the ship's science officer, who 
had been standing near the screen.  The glass cut through their uniforms and flesh.  
Then the consoles began to explode, first the tactical station, then 
communications.  Ensign Pauley threw herself to the floor near the bridge railing 
just in time to avoid the explosion of her sensor terminal.  Lieutenant Takashi 
dropped to the floor on top of his computer, interposing himself between it at the 
science station as the plasma conduit there let go.

His uniform was made of fairly tough material and he was struck by no significant 
shrapnel, though he had to brush burning bits of plastic from his back.  It could 
not be said that the bridge had been reduced to chaos, fortunately.  In the light 
provided by the burning carpet and guttering flames issuing from the broken 
conduits, Major Uchida put his helmet back on and bellowed orders.  The soldiers 
seized the remaining Federation officers and began leading them towards the door.

Takashi himself stumbled through the darkness to the ready room.  He didn't have 
the benefit of the light amplification goggles built into the marine's helmet 
lenses, but he could guide himself well enough.  He burst into the room.  "Admiral!  
I retrieved their starmaps and a technical overview of this vessel, as well as 
historical records, as you ordered.  But I was unable to retrieve the other data 
you requested."

Yamashita walked towards the door.  "No matter, I have the feeling that this ship 
will not be a current concern for very long.  Captain Putzkammer, you will come 
with us."

Major Uchida burst through the door.  "Admiral, we must evacuate you to the Hiei!"

"Yes.  But a moment, first.  Give me the captain's communication device," Yamashita 
ordered, then recieved the badge and handed it to Putzkammer.  "What is your 
subordinate doing?"

"I don't know.  He's not acting under my orders," Putzkammer said defensively, 
affixing his communicator to his shirt.

Ichiro waved a hand dismissively, "I did think he was.  Please, use your device to 
contact him."

The captain tapped his badge twice, finding the frequency.  "Stanley, this is the 
captain speaking.  What are you doing?"

There was a pause, then the reply came back, "What you lacked the courage to do, 
Leopold.  I'm in the communications maintenance room right now, sending a warning 
to Wertham V.  They'll relay it to San Francisco, and your new friends will have 
half of starfleet down their throats inside a week."

"Stanley, be reasonable!"

"The time for that is past.  I'm smashing my communicator."

The signal cut off.  Putzkammer looked helplessly at Yamashita.

"Your vessel has escape pods?" the admiral asked.

Putzkammer nodded.

Yamashita considered.  "Is their endurance sufficient for them to await rescue by 
your fleet?"

"Yes."

"Major Uchida," Ichiro ordered, "evacuate the civilians from the nursery to the 
escape pods immediately.  I will be leaving aboard my shuttle in the interests of 
safety.  There is still information aboard this ship which could still be useful to 
us.  You must make efforts to salvage this situation.  Captain Putzkammer, how can 
we intercept this saboteur?"

"He's--he's in the jeffries tubes.  They're a maze.  Even if you had a map, it 
would take hours to become familiar with all the passages on this ship," Leopold 
replied.

Admiral Yamashita stroked his mustache, "He will scuttle this ship if we do not 
stop him."

"You think he's going to self-destruct?  But without my authorization, he'll have 
to do it manually." 

"Where can we intercept him?" Ichiro asked.

"I don't... I don't know if I want to help you kill him," Captain Putzkammer 
responded.

"You picked a difficult time to find your principle," Yamashita said, then turned 
to Kazuo.  "Major Uchida."

Uchida nodded sharply, then drew his pistol.  Captain Leopold Joseph Putzkammer had 
just enough time to blink in surprise before he was shot through the head.  

"I leave the Jutland in your hands, Major," Ichiro said and turned away.  Admiral 
Yamashita stepped over the body and walked down the hall towards the access 
ladders.  The turbolifts were no doubt out of service, but there would be time to 
reach his shuttle.  Uchida would have to figure things out on his own, but he was 
fairly good at such things.

As Yamashita walked away down the hall, Major Uchida's mind raced.  He had about 
sixty men aboard the Jutland, but according to what the captain had said the 
maintenance tunnels curved mazelike through every part of the ship.  Of course, the 
most obvious places to put the manual trigger for the scuttling charges were the 
engineering section and ammunition magazines, where secondary explosions could 
assist the demolition process.

He began issuing orders to his men over his helmet comm.  There wasn't much time.


----


Stanley scrambled down a ladder to the jeffries tube that accessed the engineer 
decks and dropped prone there, resting for a moment.  It was tiring to move in the 
half-crouch that the tubes forced on him.  He took several deep breaths and laid 
his head down on the deck.  In a few minutes, he would be dead.  With any luck, 
that was.  He pulled himself back up to his knees.  When they had recruited him for 
Section 31, they had said he had to be ready to kill himself at any time, or to 
kill others.  When he thought the first officer might have caught him programming 
his bypasses into the computer systems, that had been an easy decision.  But 
Patrick guessed he just didn't have the self-destructive urge.  Blowing up the ship 
and dying in the process did not appeal to him, though he would do it anyway.

He started moving again, and he soon came to the exit that opened into catwalk 
above the engineering deck.  It was empty and dark, the firefighting systems here 
had multiple backups and had managed to survive the plasma conduits detonating, so 
the fires had been put out.  He shone his flashlight around, looking for the proper 
panel.  The housing that had formerly held the warp core was empty, and the section 
looked very odd without it, like an unfinished house.

Presently he had found what he was looking for.  He walked quickly to the wall 
panel marked "Danger: Explosives" and traded his pistol for the borrowed knife in 
his pocket.  He used it as a prybar, jamming it under the edge of the metal sheet 
and pulling hard.  The panel fell away, and behind it was his goal.  He focused the 
flashlight down on it.

It was a shaped charged bomb massing about 50 kilograms, pointed through a 
retaining bulkhead at one of the two primary fuel cells for the Jutland.  Inside 
the cell was quite a lot of antimatter.  When the self-destruct command was issued 
from the bridge, it was this explosives that detonated, forcing the fuel cells into 
a secondary explosion that would all but vaporize the entire ship.  Of course, it 
would be impossible for him to trigger it normally.  He didn't have the 
authorization, and anyway he had blown the bridge consoles to bits.  Stanley leaned 
close to the explosive's casing, shining the light close.  He hammered the hilt of 
his knife down onto part of the casing, denting it with the first blow and popping 
it off with the second.  Underneath was the detonator.  He gently removed it.

There were a large number of wires coming out of it, but he had been trained for 
this, and he knew precisely what to do.  He sliced the blue one away with his 
knife, stripped the insulation from the free end, and wound it around a different 
contact point from the one it had first occupied.  Then he slipped the detonator 
back into his housing.  Now he had to do the same to the other bomb, on the other 
side of the room.  He walked around the catwalk as quietly as he could, and stopped 
at the appropriate section of wall.

He heard a clattering noise from the hall, slightly muffled.  Stanley turned.  The 
engineering section had reacted to the overloading plasma conduits by sealing the 
airtight emergency doors.  The only thing that could get through those was an 
overloading phaser, and the only other way in was through the jeffries tubes.  And 
right on cue, they banged at the doors several times.  Stanley ignored them.

He cracked open the wall and retrieved the detonator, as before.  Then he began to 
bypass the safeties.  There was another clatter of boots on metal from the other 
side of the door.  He glanced back at the door.  Apparently they had given up.

A moment later the whole room erupted in a floor-shaking explosion.  When Patrick 
recovered from the disorientation he looked back at the floor.  The door was in 
pieces and a ragged circular hole about a meter and half across had been blasted 
through it.  Stanley quickly twisted the blue wire into place and drew his pistol, 
just as the marines began pouring through the breach.  He opened fire on them, not 
hitting much of anything as he was totally unfamiliar with the weapon.

They returned fire quickly with their rifles.  They certainly weren't phasers, for 
there was no visible beam or bolt, but they didn't sound like gas-expansion weapons 
either.  It was less a crack and more of a yawp.  Whatever they were, the shots 
half-ripped, half-burned gaping holes in the catwalk and walls very near him.  
Stanley was terribly exposed where he was.

He grabbed the railing with his free hand and jumped over, towards a row of 
computer consoles that had formerly surrounded the warp core.  He landed behind 
them, badly twisting his right ankle.  He crouched behind the cover as the rifle 
fire began chewing it up.

"Shit!" he said to himself.  He pulled a grenade out of his pocket, yanked the pin 
free, and tossed it blindly towards the door.  When it went off, he fired his 
pistol wildly at them and ran for the nearest jeffries tube entrance, just a few 
meters away at the wall.  A shot struck him in the right tricep, and his pistol 
tumbled out of his grasp, but he made it to the tube anyway.  Gasping with exertion 
and pain, Stanley scrambled down the tube.  His arm was useless and reeked of 
burned meat.  He raced around a corner, followed closely by another burst of 
gunfire.  But it didn't matter, he had made it.

He laid down in the tube, just out of sight around the corner from main 
engineering.  Off-handed and clumsily, he pulled away the access panel set into the 
ceiling.  There was a simple lever underneath, which was labelled "Manual Self 
Destruct."  He grabbed it and pulled.

Nothing happened.


----


Sergeant Kanagashi scrambled up a ladder onto the catwalk just as the Stanley 
disappeared into the jeffries tube.  He had been doing _something_ here, he spotted 
the bomb, and the exposed detonator.  He turned around.  There was another bomb on 
the other end of the catwalk.

He turned and pointed.  "Bomb!  Someone defuse that!"

For his part, Kanagashi pulled the wire cutters from his vest webbing and examined 
the detonator.  In the green night vision provided by his helmet, he couldn't see 
any of the colors.  Still, it was a remarkably simple device for something as 
important as the ship's scuttling charge.  After scarcely a moment's consideration, 
he snipped one wire, then another.

"Disarmed!" he announced.

The soldier who had gotten to the other bomb confirmed as well.  Kanagashi sighed 
with relief.


----


Stanley pulled the lever twice more, with the same result: Nothing.  He slammed the 
back of his head against the deck in frustration.  He groaned, "Fuck."

Patrick never even saw the grenade that rolled down the tube to stop just 
centimeters from his feet.


----


"Target neutralized, situation under control," Major Uchida's voice crackled across 
to the Hiei.

Yamashita was back on the bridge.  "Excellent work, Major.  I want you to locate 
whatever equipment and hard data you can carry with you, then get the remaining 
crew of that ship into their escape pods.  When that's finished, bring the prize 
crew back to the Hiei."

"Yes, sir," Kazuo acknowledged, then broke the connection.

Captain Saegusa frowned, "We're letting them go?"

"We don't have the space to take prisoners and we are most certainly not murderers.  
We're going to turn then out in their escape pods as per Treaty of Johannesburg 
regulations, even if they aren't signatories.  Anyway, there's very little they can 
tell their superiors that that transmission didn't already tell them," Ichiro said, 
tapping the transcript of Stanley's distress call with two fingers.

"Indeed," Saegusa replied.

Yamashita ordered, "Now, Captain.  Once the marines are safely back aboard, I want 
you to destroy that ship.  When that's finished, plot the fleet an evasive course 
into the Beta Quadrant and stop somewhere well away from any inhabitable systems.  
Their reinforcements won't follow us there."

"Why not?" Saegusa asked.

"It's complicated," Yamashita said and checked his watch.  "There will be a command 
meeting on the Hiei at 0800 hours tomorrow concerning what has happened to us.  
Until then, I'm going to get some rest, and I suggest you try to do the same."

"Sir."  Captain Saegusa saluted smartly, and Yamashita exited the bridge.



Anabasis 
Chapter Five
Travellers


Yamashita finished his briefing, which had taken the better part of two hours. The 
basics of the situation had been gone through, including most importantly the 
revelation that the task force had been transported to an entirely foreign 
universe. Fortunately they were not without resources. Ichiro had summarized the 
starmaps and historical information that had been seized from the USS Jutland, 
whose scattered remains had been left glowing a few score of lightyears behind the 
fleet. 

In the fleet, Yamashita was naturally supreme, but he was not a pedant and so had 
to weigh the reactions and thoughts of his subordinates most carefully. Though his 
modesty typically prevented him from acknowledging it, he was widely regarded as 
the best commander in the fleet. One of the most important factors in his skill at 
command was his judgement of people and their character. Above a certain level, the 
primary concern of a leader ceased to be tactics or even strategy and became the 
management of his subordinates and delegation of his authority. 

General Fuyutsuki was the commander in charge of the infantry corps attached to 
task force Hiei, about 64,000 men in two landing and assault transports. They were 
divided into four divisions each under a lieutenant general, and another lieutenant 
general was in overall command of their organic air support. The five subordinates 
were all but irrelevent. They would follow Fuyutsuki's lead to the letter. 

The general himself was the important element in the equation. He was a solid man 
of seventy-five years, twenty years Yamashita's senior, though really only middle-
aged in modern terms. With the quality of medical care available to Japanese people 
throughout the empire, the average man lived for between 120 and 130 years, and was 
really only a truly old man at ninety or one-hundred. For officers in the military, 
who entered training for their respective services at fourteen or sixteen, this 
meant a rather long commitment. Fuyutsuki was a career army man, dedicated first to 
his duty to the Emperor, second to his duty to his men, and third to his dislike 
for the navy. 

Admiral Yamashita got slight benefit from the fact that his family had provided 
top-notch officers to the army for 450 years, and for his career of unbroken 
success (perhaps also for the fact that he had been interservice kendo champion in 
his academy days). So he was identified as being marginally better than the typical 
navy weakling. Though institutional contempt would not be overcome by individuals 
Yamashita believed that Fuyutsuki would be no problem. 

Colonel Sawada was a much more difficult proposition. He was a slim weasel-looking 
man, appropriate for his position in the fleet, as he was the Kampeitai chief. The 
security service had been installed by the Emperor after an attempted coup in the 
early 20th century (which had actually been put down by Yamashita's ancestor). 
Though it was much weaker now than it once had been, the Kampeitai was still 
definitely something to be reckoned with. It was invested with the personal 
authority of the Emperor himself, not something to be disregarded. 

The Kempeitai, it was said, had attached "advisory brigades" to most of the 
insurgent armies that had risen up to overthrow the Reich on Earth in 2190. The 
actual function of these brigades was extermination of ethnic Germans, though 
considering the records recovered during that triumph over that portion of the Nazi 
administration that had been Earthbound, some people questioned whether they had 
deserved it. In America there was no question about it, the Kempeitai was vilified 
in much the same way that the Gestapo had been just a few years earlier. 

Looking at Sawada, it was probably a deserved reputation for villainy. There was a 
colonel most definitely in search of his promotion, and he would bear watching. 

That made up the side of the table facing Ichiro, the army side. On his flanks were 
his own subordinates. Commodore Sagong, who was a Korean and commanded the 
cruisers, technically also being second in the chain of command should the Hiei be 
destroyed. Racial prejudice against Koreans had faded into insignificance; after 
all, they had been part of the Japanese Empire for nearly 800 years and were 
Japanese by language and manners with only minor variations--and after the empire 
had added billions of non-humans to its ranks, it would have been more than a 
little foolish to discriminate against a people whose main difference was a slight 
stoutness about the face and body. 

Sagong was older than Yamashita by a few years, but respected him as an officer of 
exceptional quality. He was solid. On the other side of Yamashita was Captain 
Saegusa, whose ship was the Hiei. They were on friendly terms. 

The most questionable person in the navy contingent was Commodore Hara, who was the 
commander of the destroyer group. He was rather young for his rank, only around 
thirty-five, and had got his rank from a combination of youthful genius and family 
connections. He was an admittedly brilliant tactician, of course, but he had a 
tendency for hero-worship that Yamashita found disconcerting, and his experience 
was not all that it could have been. It was honestly and without taint of pride 
that Admiral Yamashita considered that his plan of attack on Neues München had been 
nearly perfect. The Hiei had smashed the USS Texas and the German Prinz Eugen with 
the first few volleys and the surviving enemy vessels had been put to flight. There 
had been no reason for the poor Maikaze to be damaged as severely as she had, 
except for the aggression and hubris of Commodore Hara. 

All the same, he would definitely follow Yamashita's lead. That was comforting, at 
least. 

"Now then, the first problem which must be solved is that of logistics," the 
admiral continued after the pause to examine his men, "we are without our supply 
train and there is no way of knowing when we will be able to reestablish it, if 
indeed we will be able to do so at all." 

He gestured now at the starmap which was laying unfolded on the table. 
"Fortunately, there is a solution to our problem. We will simply take what we need 
from the so-called Klingon Empire. Their capital system of Qo'Nos will more than 
likely have everything we need." 

The men around the table stirred. Sagong said, "Would it not be unwise, Admiral, to 
launch an attack into an enemy state of this magnitude? They would no doubt have a 
defensive fleet of great proportions." 

"You have seen the same technical data as I," Ichiro replied. 

Sagong smiled sardonically, "Yes, and I scarcely believe it. But your point is well 
taken." 

"I believe that the most efficient course of action will be to attack directly at 
the primary planet of the system, striking their fleet with our superior firepower 
and range. Once this is done, General Fuyutsuki's corps will make immediate 
assaults against their command centers on the planet itself while our marines seize 
whatever supply vessels can be located in their orbital yards," Yamashita 
explained. 

"A plan that is simple in its audacity," Fuyutsuki replied with a twinkle in his 
eye, "but I must protest this. Four divisions cannot hold against a planet." 

"Gentlemen," Hara interjected, "you are thinking of our situation in terms of what 
you have experienced of warfare. But it appears that those native to this galaxy 
are a good deal weaker than ourselves. Recall the invasions of Romulus and Remus, 
or of Qo'Nos in our own time. Only the weakest and most limited forces were 
encountered, and easily defeated. I have no doubt that the Admiral's plan will be 
successful."

"Thank you, Commodore," Admiral Yamashita said.  "This meeting is concluded.  The 
plans for the assault will be sent to your ships, and we will embark in 24 hours."


----


Some time later, Lieutenant Takashi received the marines' evaluations of the 
personal weapons captured from the USS Jutland.  A few examples had been seized 
from that ship's armory and tested by those most qualified to assess them, though 
the facilities onboard the ship were minimally suited to that purpose.  No firing 
range of any size (they kept in practice with hologram-based computer simulations) 
could be fit on board the ship, there simply was no room.  As he had been ordered 
to do with any new data collected, Takashi brought the information directly to the 
Admiral, who was in his quarters.

Takashi pressed the button on the intercom affixed next to the door, and a buzzer 
sounded inside.  He spoke into the microphone, "Sir.  This is Lieutenant Takashi 
with the evaluations of the enemy weapons captured, as ordered."

There was a long pause before the reply, "Enter."

The door was unlocked, as was typical for Yamashita.  He had sufficient trust in 
his subordinate's respect for him that he disdained to bar them entrance.  No one 
had evered entered without permission, anyway.  The door disappeared smoothly into 
the wall and the lieutenant stepped through.  The room was large by shipboard 
standards, with plenty of headroom and enough space for a sleeping area, working 
area, bathroom, and a small dining table in the traditional style (traditional in 
this case meaning "on the floor") with sufficient space for four, though typically 
it was used only for important dinners.  The final piece of the cabin, behind a 
paper screen, was the small shrine.  The floor of the dining area and shrine was, 
incidentally, tatami matting over actual wood.  All areas were comfortably but not 
ostentatiously large, and the net effect was to believably simulate a piece of the 
home islands on board a space battleship.

The admiral's shadow was visible within the screened-off shrine.  Takashi 
respectfully removed his shoes to set them on the appropriate space just inside the 
door, and stepped gingerly across the floor to the screen.  He slid the door aside 
and looked in.  Yamashita was sitting in the lotus position in front of a shrine 
which featured a small stone statue of the bodhisattva Jizo, mirroring the 
admiral's meditative position.  There was incense burning.

Like most modern Japanese, Takashi was quasi-religious, not generally practicing 
his supposed beliefs nor subscribing to any foolish superstitions, but honoring in 
his own way the Zen and Shinto faiths.  He was slightly embarrassed in a way he 
could not explain at the sight of Admiral Yamashita in meditation before his 
shrine.

Yamashita spoke quietly. "Jizo," he said, "is the patron of travellers, and I 
believe this to be most important.  Everyone is travelling in some way, even if 
they believe they are standing still.  In our case it is more obvious."

He bowed once to the shrine, then carefully disentangled his legs to stand.  The 
admiral was wearing a black kimono of simple design rather than his uniform.  He 
turned, very slowly, and exited the shrine, shutting the door behind him.

"Your report, Lieutenant Takashi?" he finally asked.

Takashi briefly considered the casual dress of his superior officer, then snapped 
to attention and saluted anyway.  "Sir.  The Marines have reported that the enemy 
weapons appear to be particle-based, like our own rifles.  However, they do not 
seem to work on principles of direct energy transfer, but rather on the objective 
of disrupting the nuclear bonds of the target.  Beyond that, the results are 
inconclusive as we have insufficient... laboratory facilities to discover more."

Yamashita nodded, "Anything else, Lieutenant?"

"Only that the weapons appeared to be quite poor for combat purposes.  Some of them 
lack any sighting attachments and are clumsily designed.  They have a significant 
power output all the same, and could be dangerous to personnel at close range."

"Thank you.  You may leave your report on my desk," Yamashita said, and then he 
reentered his shrine and shut the sliding door.

Lieutenant Takashi crossed quickly to the desk and laid the papers down, sparing a 
moment's glance at the sword rack that displayed Yamashita's daisho.  Most noble 
naval officers had their family's long and short swords with them aboard ship, 
though many of them also brought the ancient armor that their ancestors had worn.  
Yamashita had no such thing, first because his family had only been elevated to 
status in 1930s, and second because his father would not have passed on the 
ancestral panoply.  Takashi remembered that Admiral Yamashita's father had been on 
quite poor terms with his son and had all but disowned him in favor of his younger 
brother, and in fact the swords in his cabin were only about 30 years old, though 
they were said to be very high quality.  It had been a minor scandal not long ago 
when the elder Yamashita had died and bequeathed all his property and titles to his 
younger son, and the Emperor had replied by transferring a portion of those to the 
Admiral.  

There were various other details and personages involved, and details about the 
empress and so on, but Takashi had a poor mind for such things.  His father had 
been a famous successful chef rather than a count or baron, and he did not regret 
the narrowing of his mental dimensions this brought about.  The noble classes, such 
as they were, had some advantage in advancement in the military, but not to the 
exclusion of those more capable but lacking in bloodline.  This was especially true 
in the navy, part of the reason that he had selected this service.  The other 
criterion had been the food--he had inherited a love of food and tolerated the lack 
of it poorly, though he did not overeat.

His report disposed of, Lieutenant Takashi crossed the floor quietly and put his 
shoes back on, disengaging from the cabin stealthily.


----


The quarters aboard the transport Tokaido Maru were not as well appointed.  While 
theoretically the vessel would have plenty of room for its some thirty-two thousand 
passengers, it was actually merely comfortable in practice.  The task of simply 
carrying the vehicles, equipment, and men of the two Imperial Japanese Army 
divisions on the ship was only one of the demands placed on her; there were also 
the matters of shields to defend them from attack, engines to move through space, 
and, most onerous, more engines to land safely on a class-M world and take off 
again with a full complement.  A great deal of the Tokaido Maru's internal space 
was devoted to engines, though there was still sufficient room to live with a 
reasonable level of humanity.

Each platoon recieved an individual barracks, and use of common spaces was 
carefully scheduled to ensure that each man had opportunity to use them.  
Lieutenant Sato's platoon was in the exercise room at that particular moment.

Sergeant Tuan Van Le was doing pullups on the bar provided while two privates first 
class watched him and talked.  The sergeant, in point of fact, was not Japanese but 
Vietnamese.  The three primary nations of the Indochina region had been annexed 
into the Japanese Empire late in the 1860s, and the Vietnamese had fought long and 
hard for independence--futily.  They had settled down eventually, like the other 
unwilling additions to the empire, but the Vietnamese had never become quite so 
Japanese as the Koreans, Manchurians, and Filipinos.  That did not stop them from 
joining the army, of course, and numbers of them could be found in most formations 
of any sized.

In the three-quarters Earth gravity, Sergeant Le could do a great many pullups 
before getting too tired to continue.  He listened to his young men chatter.

"We're going to fight Klingons," PFC Sato said, "I don't like anything about this.  
I heard from one of the navy files that we're in a parallel universe, or something.  
I don't know what's going on, but I don't want to fight Klingons, they're very 
strong."

PFC Morioka snorted, "I heard that they're going to be pushovers.  You remember 
history class, when they talked about the conquest of Qo'Nos?"

"I joined the army so I could _make_ history," Sato replied.

"Hah.  They'll probably be a bunch of screaming idiots with knives.  Remember I 
said that when we land, because I want you to acknowledge that I was right."

"If you're right, then I'll be too glad to remember."

Le dropped from the bar to the deck and checked his wristwatch.  He said in lightly 
accented Japanese, "20 hours until dustoff, kids.  Are you going to get tired of 
this before then or will you keep repeating yourselves?"

"We will repeat ourselves, probably.  Why stop when we're doing so well?" Sato 
said.

"I guess you should continue, then.  What about the status of your weapons?  If I 
go and check on them, would they be up to standards?" the sergeant asked.

"Military specifications, yes.  Your standards, probably not," Morioka answered for 
the two of them, "you are obsessive.  My rifle--"

"It isn't yours.  It is the emperor's.  He is allowing you to borrow it; what do 
you think the mark of the chrysanthemum on the butt means?"

"A Vietnamese who venerates the Emperor?  How odd!" Morioka spat back.

Le shook his head happily, "I venerate anything that makes things harder for you.  
Now, unless you're going to do some exercise I suggest you two break those weapons 
down, clean them, and put them back together.  Make me proud."

He turned on his heel and marched to a rack of free weights.  Sato stuck his tongue 
out at Le's retreating back and pulled his lower eyelid down with one finger.

"Blah!" he groaned.

Morioka clicked his tongue at his friend.  "If you had kept your dumb mouth 
shut..."


----

Anabasis
Chapter Six
Turkey Shoot

"Two minutes, Admiral.  They've definitely detected us by now."

Yamashita nodded to the helmsman.  It was difficult to get any element of surprise 
when making a clean entry into a key system; they were typically surrounded by 
subspace sensor nets that could spot a ship under Cochrane Drive from light-years 
away.  Warp drive was so-called because of the way it twisted the space-time 
continuum to achieve faster-than-light travel, and as it did so it spewed streams of 
tachyons that could be easily detected over very great distances.  It was rumored 
that the newest Raumkriegsmarine ships had a modernized drive that was virtually 
emissionless, but there had also once been rumors that they had developed transwarp 
drives and bombs that could stop fusion in stars.  Accuracy was not the strong point 
of the rumor network.

Yamashita was somewhat proud of his battle plan for this engagement.  In Japanese 
art, one of the most respected traits was precision, the ideal was a painting that 
reduced the image to its very essence with the fewest number of strokes.  Yamashita's 
wife was a famous artist, he was a famous admiral, and he wryly estimated that he had 
wrought his masterpiece here.  The essence of the battle plan was to enter the system 
and hijack some freighters, meanwhile blowing up anything that looked a likely 
target.  The admiral felt almost superfluous, this was a tactical engagement that 
would not require any tactical management by him.  Yamashita would merely be 
supervising Captain Saegusa and offering basic commands at the right moments.

"Thirty seconds."

Saegusa started into action.  "Shields up, weapons and targeting on line.  I want a 
volley the moment we're in, but no torpedoes."

The captain was only reiterating what the battle plan had already told the fleet.  
There was no supply of torpedoes to be had in this universe, so the fleet had to be 
conservative with them.  This order had greatly disappointed Commodore Hara, as the 
greatest part of his destroyer's offensive firepower was tied up in their torpedoes.  
More than likely he would have "accidentally" launched a few, if Yamashita had no 
explicitly ordered that they would not even be loaded into their launching tubes.

"Deactivating Cochrane drive," the helmsmen announced.

The stretched out starfield retracted into individual points of light, and there was 
the gray-green planet Qo'Nos, about 400,000 kilometers away.  The sensors of the 
fleet reached out.

Lieutenant Hitotsugi reported calmly, "Estimate one-hundred fifty enemy vessels of 
various sizes and configuration.  I do not detect any sign of the moon Praxis."

Astronomical oddities aside, the course of action was clear.

Admiral Yamashita barked, "Weapons free."

"Fire volley," Saegusa ordered.

The main guns of the battleship Hiei were sixteen cannons mounted in eight turrets.  
They had a nominal firepower of about 200 megatons per shot, and like most direct 
fire weapons their effective range was limited more by sensors and targeting than by 
anything else.  In optimum conditions they could hit from several light seconds out.  
They were now one and a third light seconds away from their potential targets, and 
sensor conditions were more than optimum.  The energy from the guns' independent 
anti-matter batteries streamed into the firing mechanisms, to be converted into x-
rays and shot down the barrel, where the beam was collimated for its long journey.

One and a third seconds later, eight different ships in the distance were torn in 
two.  The cruisers then fired their own volleys, destroying scores more.

"Fire at will," Saegusa ordered.

The ships of the fleet hammered out blast after blast as the Klingon ships scrambled 
into motion.  More of them went down, and then abruptly they all disappeared.

Hitotsugi examined his scopes.  "Sensor contact with the remaining enemy ships lost."

"Cease fire.  Do you suspect cloaking devices, Admiral?" Saegusa asked.

Yamashita replied, "Perhaps.  At this range we won't be able to detect their 
emissions.  Move the fleet toward the planet, flank speed."

The engines of the fleet fired and the various warships began to move in unison.  The 
destroyers spread out ahead, and at the center of the whole formation the Hiei and 
the two transports were very well protected by the guns of the rest of the task 
force.  There was a space of several thousand kilometers between each ship, but with 
the range of weapons and sensors, ever ship was adequately covered.  As the fleet 
accelerated, the marble that was Qo'Nos steadily grew.   The sensors of the fleet 
stretched out, combing the blackness for any sign of cloaked ships.  Then, at about 
100,000 kilometers out, the passive sensors began to pick up evidence of the 
invisible adversary.  The trails of ions released by their engines allowed their 
location to be determined with near pinpoint accuracy.

"Fire at will."

The combined firepower of the fleet traced out across the heavens again, this time 
supplemented by the lighter, shorter-ranged secondary cannons, as well as the 
addition of the destroyers' guns.  In less than a minute, the field had been cleared 
of any detectable enemies.  Liquid-hot debris twisted in space, congealing rapidly 
into nearly perfect spheres.

"Excellent.  Bring the task force into orbit of the main planet, the army will make 
its landing and we will find a suitable target for our marines," Yamashita ordered.

Temporarily discharged of his duties, Saegusa approached Hitotsugi's console and 
examined the sensor hologram closely.  There were a number of large stations in 
orbit, including at least one that appeared to be a major logistical base.  
Freighters of an unfamiliar configuration were docked there.  Its shields were weak, 
as apparently had been so for all the destroyed vessels.  Captain Saegusa had trusted 
the admiral going into the battle, but in the back of his mind he still hadn't quite 
believed that it could be so easy.  The enemy had not even had the opportunity to 
fire a single shot.

----

"Captain!  Should we not attempt to attack the enemy, or at least summon 
reinforcements?" the tactical officer asked, too loudly.

Captain Dhulkrang growled back, "Have you a death wish, lieutenant?  The entire home 
fleet is debris!  If we so much as maneuver, their guns will lock onto us and destroy 
us as well."

"There must be something we can do!  Ram them, perhaps."

"We will sit here," Dhulkrang ordered, "with the engines offline, the reactor at 
idle, and the cloak active.  We will watch them with our passive sensors for as long 
as they are here.  That is _all_ we can do without committing suicide."

The tactical officer growled and rocked back in his chair, impatiently.  It was 
almost as if he would have preferred death.

----

The Tokaido Maru and her sister ship, the Goleyte Maru, slowly descended into the 
upper atmosphere of Qo'Nos.  Sensor imaging had selected a landing site just outside 
the capital city of the planet.  For General Fuyutsuki, it was like landing in 
history.  It was the very same plain that Montaro Yamashita had landed on in his 
invasion of Qo'Nos centuries ago.  But for reasons that the general could not fathom 
and did not choose to consider too deeply, he was in an alternate reality that had 
never been conquered by humans.  Very likely he would be the first man ever to land 
an invasion force on these fields, at least in this universe, and that sat reasonably 
well with him.

The two transports rapidly picked up speed as they plunged into the gravity well of 
the planet.  As contact was made with the upper atmosphere, the massive vessels were 
slightly buffeted.  The passengers were four elite IJA divisions, and almost all of 
them had made at least one combat drop prior to this.  No one was particularly 
worried about the descent, with the main fleet overhead suppressing ground fire and 
experienced pilots at the helm, there wasn't really much to worry about.  Even if 
something did go wrong, they would be dead before they knew about it, so there was no 
sense in thinking too much about it.

Sergeant Le and his squad were sitting in an armored personnel carrier, waiting for 
the transport's doors to open up.  Once the Tokaido Maru had touched ground, they 
would roll towards the city with all deliberate speed, terminating any enemies 
encountered along the way.  The sergeant was a tawny-skinned statue strapped into his 
seat.  The other soldiers chattered avidly, but not Le.  He was not exactly beloved 
of his men, but they at least feared him, and that was enough.  Nobody spoke to him, 
so he considered the possibilities of the mission.  It was to be a battle against 
unknown but probably weak forces in close urban terrain.  There were a great many 
unknown variables in the equation the IJA was trying to solve, and there was no doubt 
whose fault that was.

"Those damn navy bastards," Le thought.

The officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy all but considered themselves the lords of 
creation, which for all that it was reasonably accurate was an infuriating philosophy 
to deal with.  Admiral Yamashita had flung 60,000 men into mortal combat with an 
enemy he couldn't even pretend to have properly reconnoitered.  The fact that he had 
done much the same to his own fleet was small consolation.  The APC rocked gently as 
the Tokaido Maru set down on the planet.  Debarkation ramps were dropping, the shield 
bubble was shifting into a wide ceiling to deflect bombardment by artillery and 
orbiting enemy warships, and the artillery mounted on the transport itself fired 
away.  Le couldn't see or hear any of this, but he understood the mechanics of the 
aggressive landing and could only assume that things were going along according to 
the book.

The APC jolted into motion, and by the shifting of his weight, Le could surmise that 
they were descending the ramp onto Qo'Nos itself.

"Get ready," he said aloud, "they might try to hit us right at the landing."

The men of his squad steeled themselves for battle; the mechanized infantry and tanks 
that formed the spearhead of the corps raced across the plain towards the capital 
city of the Klingon Empire.  The enemy might appear and ambush them at any time.

But nothing happened.  The vehicles rattled on over hills, and then joined the major 
roads, drawing ever nearer the city.  No great force arrived to oppose them.  It was, 
in a word, unbelievable.

"It's some kind of trick.  It must be," Morioka said, his face pressed against the 
periscope.  It was the only way for the men within the APC to see what was going on 
outside the vehicle, and they were using the narrow view to try to divine the 
intentions of the klingons.

Sato grunted.  "I want to see.  It's my turn."

"Shut up, you ass.  I'm trying to figure out what's happening out there," Morioka 
growled.

"If you let me see, I would be able to figure it out in a couple of seconds, maybe 
less!" Sato replied.

"You couldn't figure out a silk finger trap, you stone-headed ape."

Sato whined, "Sergeant, Private Morioka is taking up my turn!"

Tuan Van Le toyed idly with his helmet, which was lying in his lap.  Like the rest of 
his uniform, it was nearly identical to that issued to the Imperial Marines, only a 
different color and some other minor differences.  He sighed and shook his head 
sadly.

"Private Morioka, you will share the time on the periscope like a good boy," the 
sergeant ordered.

The younger man scowled at his friend as he flopped back into his seat.  "You would 
bring him into this, tattler."

Sato stepped up to the scope and swiveled it back and forth.  "Wow.  This was 
completely not worth the effort, Sergeant Le."

"What do you see?" Sergeant Le asked.

"Well.  The city is a few miles ahead.  We're on a road.  There are some hills and 
random houses.  Clouds as well," Sato reported tersely.

Morioka scratched the back of his head and laughed nervously, "We're only one part of 
the corps.  Maybe the enemy is attacking someplace else and we just don't know about 
it."

"Doesn't make sense," Sato said, still looking in the periscope, "we're the hammer of 
the division.  If there were trouble they'd call us there, and anyway this is the 
main road into that city.  If there's any place for the enemy to defend, this is--
ooh, now that's pretty."

"What?" Morioka asked.

"One of the anti-matter shells from the transports just landed in some poor suburb.  
Looks like six kilotons.  We're getting close now; I hope they remember to stop the 
shelling."

The shockwave from the blast rolled over the APC and it rocked slightly as it 
continued to roll onward.

"They're only navy boys.  They do the best they can," Sergeant Le said.

----

In a boarding operation, it was usually a bad idea to enter through the docking bays 
or airlocks unless the enemy had already surrendered the ship.  Those points were 
constricted and easily defended.  It was better to make your own hole and surprise 
the enemy.  Marine transports mounted breaching rigs for just that purpose.  The 
magnetic anchors bound the transport to the target hull, and the depressurization 
alarm sounded in the passenger compartment.  The sixty IJN Marines aboard the command 
transport sealed their uniforms for vacuum.  The alarm faded as the air hissed out.

Beneath their feet, the array of plasma torches was slicing a neat two-meter hole in 
the hull of the Klingon space station.  The air would be rushing out of the small 
holes already opened and the inner airlocks of the station would be clanging shut.  
In about a quarter the time that was usually required, the green light went on and 
the airtight door in the bottom of the floor opened.

"Go!" Major Uchida ordered.  The platoon began to move through the hole by pairs.  
The gravity was still active in the station, so they dropped heavily to the deck 
before scrambling to their positions.  The place was cramped and poorly lit, with a 
definite emphasis on earth-tones in its decoration.  The marines switched on their 
night vision.  The major was one of the last aboard, and by the time he had hit the 
floor, his men had already moved to the nearest internal airlocks and were placing 
breaching charges.  Before the boarding had commenced, the Hiei had gotten a deep 
subspace scan of the station.  The enemy had made no effort to jam, so he had a solid 
three dimensional map of the entire complex, which he called up onto his head's-up-
display with a verbal command.  There were twelve companies of sixty fighting men 
each, all under his command for this operation.  They showed up at various points on 
the map, and all had made it aboard uneventfully.

A few men moved in behind him, unfolding a sheet of electrostatic plastic to its full 
expanse of three by three meters.  They placed it against the breaching hole and used 
a portable plasma torch to weld it securely onto the hull.  Then they jabbed it with 
an electric prod, and the current caused the plastic to set, hard enough to contain a 
vacuum.

"Hole patched," one of them reported.

"Prepare to breach!" he ordered his platoon.  Everyone checked his proximity to the 
charges and braced himself down on one knee.

Uchida barked, "Detonate!"

The actual explosions were felt through the deck plates rather than heard because of 
the vacuum, but a moment later air rushed into their little compartment through the 
ruined emergency doors, and sounds could be heard again.

"Go!" Kazuo ordered again.

The men charged through the breaches, rifles at the ready.  Major Uchida carried no 
real weapons except for his pistol, because his role was scarcely more than 
ceremonial.  It was impossible to command or coordinate an operation like this, with 
so many different groups moving in so many directions, checking rooms and blasting 
through doors.  It was done automatically and by the numbers.

Something that sounded almost like a primitive battle cry rose in the next room, 
followed by a flurry of automatic fire from the marines' rifles.

"Uh... room is clear," the point-man reported.

Major Uchida stepped though the hole in the emergency door to see what had happened.  
There was a pile of nine or ten klingons lying in a heap covered with thick purplish 
blood, all carrying knives and pistols.  They were wearing some kind of ridiculous 
leather armor.  Kazuo surveyed them silently for a few moments, and then looked 
meaningfully at the corporal who had been on point.

"They came around that corner screaming at me and waving weapons, so we shot them," 
the young man explained.

Uchida looked over at the bend in the hall just ten meters away, and then another 
scream echoed around the corner.  He jerked his pistol from its holster just as 
another party of screaming klingons rounded the bend.  He fired over the corporal's 
shoulder as the other men at the front let loose a storm of particle bolts.  The 
klingons did not retreat, did not even seem to register the fact that they were being 
killed.  The rifles tore fist-sized holes in their bodies and hurled them to the 
deck.  In half a moment all were dead.

Kazuo mechanically swapped out the magazine in his pistol and checked his three-
dimensional map again.  "Report in, by platoons!" he ordered.

The responses came back, starting with his own First platoon and on through Twelfth 
platoon.  Everyone was encountering uncoordinated charges by klingons armed with 
knives and pistols.  No casualties among the marines.

"Right!" Uchida barked, "This is nothing to worry about.  Keep moving to the 
objectives."

----

Once the APC entered the city Sergeant Le chased everyone away from the periscope and 
took up position there.   He scanned carefully.  The convoy was rattling down a wide 
boulevard towards the place that was transmitting most of the enemy's battle 
communications.  The tanks were in front, the APCs just behind that, and then came 
the softer-skinned trucks.  The division had encountered no resistance in the drive 
from the LZ to the city limits, which had only made Le progressively more nervous.  
Maybe the enemy was aware that they could not hope to face the firepower of the IJA 
in the open and was preparing a vigorous defense of their urban areas.

He turned to his squad, "Get ready to dismount in a hurry if I say the word.  Sato, 
where's your helmet?"

"Um," the private scratched his head and looked around.

"Find your cover and get it on or I will murder you.  This is war," Le growled, 
turning back to the periscope.

"You're not wearing your helmet either," Sato mumbled petulantly.

Le didn't even turn around, "But it's hanging from my belt where I can get at it 
quickly, stupid."

Suddenly the commander of the vehicle commanded, "Driver, stop!"

The driver slammed on the brakes.  Most of the squad was seated and still strapped 
in, but Sato was standing and tumbled into the laps of several other soldiers, and Le 
only avoided an embarrassing spill by hanging on tight to the periscope.

"Maneuver us around to the left so we have a straight shot down the boulevard," the 
commander continued.

Le checked the periscope again, aiming it far down the road.  He saw a mob of 
klingons marching down the street, and triggered the zoom on the 'scope to get a 
better view.  There were so many civilians that they covered the wide street from one 
side to the other, at a depth of many blocks.  They were carrying a wide assortment 
of weapons, from wicked-looking knives and swords to pistols and short rifles.  They 
did not look happy.

"Wow," Le said.  He twisted around so he could look at the crew of the vehicle.  The 
driver sat in the far front at the controls, the gunner and commander just behind 
him, in front of a bank of monitors that showed external camera views, status 
reports, and so on.

"Why aren't you shooting?" he asked.

The commander continued studying his screens.  "They're civilians.  The ROE are 
unclear on this."

Sergeant Le sneered, "This is the Imperial Japanese Army."

The commander looked at the gunner and shrugged.  "Go for it."

The gunner flicked some switches on his console, activating the robotic turret 
mounted on top of the APC.  It featured a small-bore particle cannon which was 
suitable for use against aircraft and light vehicles and a smaller particle 
machinegun for antipersonnel work.  In practice, however, both were often used 
against personnel.  The cannon began to fire bursts at about 400 rounds per minute 
cyclic, the machinegun rattling away beside it.  The enemy crowd was five-hundred 
meters downrange, no trouble for the weapons or their advanced optics.  The shots hit 
them like a wall of death, and they broke into a run.  At five hundred meters.

"They're not even taking cover," Le said in disbelief.

Then the other APCs, and more importantly the tanks joined in the firing.  The crowd 
finally broke and sought cover in the buildings to either side of the road, leaving 
great heaps of mangled corpses.  The main guns on the tanks fairly disintegrated 
bodies, and the APC cannons tore head-sized holes through entire rows of klingons.  
The mob was clearing itself out of the freeway, however, and were no doubt advancing 
by side streets and alleys.

"They're going to try to flank us, we'd better dismount," Le ordered.  He donned and 
sealed his helmet, then moved to the exit ramp and checked his squad for readiness.  
Everyone, including Sato, had his helmet on and his weapon ready.  Le triggered the 
door and it descended quickly; the squad stomped out onto the concrete, moving 
automatically to one side of the street to find cover.  The tanks began hammering 
away at the buildings on either side of the boulevard as Le's squad entered a side 
street.  They kept to either sidewalk, hugging the walls for whatever protection they 
could provide.  Almost immediately, klingons began to boil out of the buildings and 
around the corners.

Sergeant Le knew from his high-school days that klingons had a great love of weapons, 
and that they typically wore them whenever possible.  Apparently every bumpy forehead 
in the city had gone to work carrying a weapon of some kind, and was turning out for 
a piece of their enemy.

"Fire!" he ordered, leveling his own rifle as he dropped to one knee.  He clicked the 
weapon to full-automatic and fired five fast rounds into the crowd.  He was the first 
to fire, but definitely not the last.  The others loosed a fusillade into the front 
ranks of the mob, cutting many of them down, but they surged forward all the same, 
heedless of the danger.  But then one of the other squads from the platoon joined and 
added its firepower, and the crowd finally broke and retreated only a few meters 
short of the Japanese soldiers, leaving scores of riddled casualties.

Tuan Van Le clicked to his lieutenant's frequency.  "Sir, there's millions of angry 
klingons in this city and not so many of us.  Something needs to be done, fast."

"What do you want /me/ to do about it?" the lieutenant asked sharply, "for now we'll 
chase them and try to keep them from consolidating into another tidal wave."

Le swapped out his rifle's power pack and got back to his feet.  He pumped his right 
fist in the air, "Let's go, kids, keep them bouncing!"

The platoon started off at a brisk pace, keeping up a steady fire on the fleeing 
rioters.

----

The operation was proceeding nicely in space and on the ground, Yamashita thought.  
The klingons were being utterly massacred at every level, and though some trouble was 
being reported on the ground, things looked fine.  The marines reported that they had 
secured the entire enemy space station, and were preparing to move on the individual 
vessels docked there.  The task force itself had had very little to do for several 
hours.  The admiral wanted to hum a tune, but he restrained himself.  He had to be 
the picture of officerly comportment, which was the way things were done.  He stood 
ramrod straight in the middle of the bridge, moving nothing but his eyes.  He glanced 
at Captain Saegusa, who was rubbing his jaw as he looked at one of the monitors.

"Your thoughts, Captain?" he asked.

Saegusa cleared his throat.  "Just looking over reports from the ground.  There's a 
lot of klingons turned out to fight, the general is thinking about using a nerve 
agent bombardment."

"That ought to be fine," Ichiro replied, "he probably should have done it from the 
first."

"What are you thinking about, Admiral?" Saegusa asked.

Yamashita considered carefully and took a few steps over to Saegusa, taking in the 
display on the monitor for a few moments.  He leaned close to the junior officer and 
whispered conspiratorially, "Thinking about my wife."

"Ah," the captain replied.  Yamashita knew that, silently, Saegusa was adding the 
phrase 'the artist' to the end of that sentence.  Everyone knew who Aiko Yamashita 
was--the great landscape artist and composer of songs and poetry.  They were a 
celebrated couple, though she was probably better known to the populace at large.  
After all, Ichiro was merely the Emperor's favorite Admiral, whereas everyone could 
appreciate his wife's work.

But in an ordinary working relationship, Yamashita would never have mentioned sparing 
a moment's thought for his wife.  It was shameful to show undue emotional attachment 
to a female while in public, even worse on the bridge of a space-going warship.  But 
he considered Saegusa his friend (in fact one of his only friends), which allowed him 
to be somewhat more open.

"Are you worried?" Saegusa asked.

"Naturally.  It is conceivable that we will never find our way home," the admiral 
said quietly.

"That is true of our every voyage."

"Yes, and the possibility is in my thoughts during our every voyage," Yamashita said, 
"but I do not worry."

There was a distinction in the way he phrased that.  He did not say that he was not 
worried; he said that he /did not/ worry.  In most cases, this was true.  But his 
family was a special case; it was in fact the only thing that affected him so.  He 
worried about himself not at all, reserving that for his wife and daughters.  He 
wondered what would happen to them if he never made it home.

"Admiral!" the communications officer called, "I'm receiving a message from Major 
Uchida.  There's a problem on the station."

Admiral Yamashita shook away the cobwebs.  He had allowed himself to drift during the 
long idle like a stupid recruit.  He cursed himself an idiot, but silently.  "Report, 
Major Uchida."

Kazuo's voice crackled over the speaker, "Admiral, the crews of the klingon 
freighters have sealed themselves inside their ships.  They say that if we set foot 
on their decks they will self destruct their ships and cargo."

"Do nothing," Yamashita said instantly, "I will handle the situation."

He signaled sharply to cut the connection.  This was the time for immediate action.  
He understood the Klingon mentality.  Among his titles as a nobleman, he had 
inherited a barony on Qo'Nos from his ancestor Montaro, who had conquered the planet 
for the Empire.  The course of action was clear.

"Open a channel to those freighters.  I will speak to them," he ordered.  The 
communications officer did as he was told.

The translated klingon voice barked at him, "This is Captain Kuchluk of the Klingon 
Empire; I command this station and the freighters in it.  What do you want, cowardly 
invader?  There will be no negotiation!"

Yamashita threw out his chest, for his own benefit as it was an audio-only channel, 
and replied, "I am Admiral Yamashita, commander of the force which has annihilated 
your home fleet.  It is you who is the coward, an honorless son of a derelict and 
shameful clan.  You hide in your paltry vessel in terror of the strength of my men, 
like a burrowing rodent faced with ferocious predators.  Do you have the courage to 
face me in single combat?"

"Human!  I would crush your bones and drink from your skull, had you the gall to 
challenge me!" the voice came back.

"The challenge is given!  I will match your bat'leth with my sword.  When I am 
victorious, your men will surrender your vessels without fight or protest.  But if by 
some impossible fluke you are able to defeat me, my fleet and army will leave the 
system.  Those are my terms!" Yamashita shouted.

"They are accepted!" the voice replied.

The bridge crew stared at him in some amazement, including Captain Saegusa, who said, 
"Sir, you can't be serious."

"I am.  This is the best way to defuse those self-destruct devices," Ichiro 
explained.

Saegusa shook his head, "At least allow someone else to duel in your place."

"No.  If I do not show personally, they will detonate the ships.  I had to impress 
them with my rank for them to even listen, and honor demands that this Klingon 
captain fight no one else.  Moreover, I cannot back down from this challenge with my 
own honor intact," Yamashita said.

"This is madness, Admiral."

"This entire operation has been madness, has it not?" the admiral replied wryly. "Do 
not worry.  I'm rather good with a sword, and I know how to deal with klingons.  Now 
then, I must retrieve my daisho and board my shuttle.  Ensure that the shuttle is 
ready for me."

He turned on his heel and exited the bridge smartly, followed by the eyes of everyone 
in the room.  Moments before, in the calm idleness, his mind had been abuzz with 
anxious worries.  Now that he was faced with a challenging task, he was an empty 
vessel.



Anabasis
Chapter Seven
A Question of Honor

"The Hiei reports no objection to the deployment of nerve agents, sir," General 
Fuyutsuki's aide reported.

The command center for the corps was, shamefully enough, located in the belly of the 
Tokaido Maru, a naval vessel.  This operation was too brief and fast-moving for it to 
make moving the headquarters off the ship worthwhile.  It was annoying for a general 
in the universe's greatest army to work from within a transport, but it was 
convenient in that it allowed him to liaise quickly with his overall commander and 
his fire support.  He stood before a console that allowed him instant communication 
with the fire control room of the transport.  He flipped the appropriate switch.

"Tokaido Maru fire control, you are ordered to fire a Type Six chemical agent barrage 
on grid reference--" he glanced at the holographic map floating serenely in the 
center of his command room, then read off a stream of coordinates, "--standard 
airburst pattern."

"Understood," the naval officer replied.

There were a number of types of chemical agent barrages, ranging from non-lethal 
incapacitating gases and hallucinogens, through blistering and pulmonary agents.  
Type Six represented the standard military issue nerve agent, and as this was the 
most effective of all the chemical weapons available (Type Seven was more lethal but 
also more persistent; it lingered in the environment for weeks while Type Six would 
neutralize itself in about three hours), military vessels seldom carried any others.  
Anyway, in the vast majority of conflicts the IJA faced forces from the United States 
or Third Reich, which meant that the opposition would be NBC protected and the 
weapons were just wasted space.  They were only kept in case of the rare crowd-
control problem, like the one currently facing Fuyutsuki's corps.

The problem with deploying advanced nerve agents was their volatility.  Although a 
very small dose--in the case of Type Six, about 5 milligrams was sufficient to kill a 
human--could be lethal, the agents were typically dispersed too quickly to be useful 
in open areas.  It had taken decades of study to perfect a nerve agent that could be 
delivered by missile or shell and then distributed over a large area, but it had been 
accomplished, and the basic formula had not changed since the late 20th century.

Fuyutsuki did not know exactly how it worked, except that it was something to do with 
aerosols, but he did know that a Type Six barrage with standard airburst pattern 
could clear out a city's worth of unprotected personnel.  In all his seventy-five 
years he had not yet had the opportunity to deploy such a barrage, and he was happy 
for the opportunity.

----

"Sergeant Le," the lieutenant's voice came over the radio, "make sure every soldier 
in your squad keeps his suit sealed tight, command is sending some gas over."

"Received," the sergeant said.  The order was nearly an insult; what kind of soldier 
would doff his uniform in the middle of a battle?  Not any of the men under Le's 
command.  It was probably just because Le was Vietnamese that the officer had chosen 
to ask such an obvious question.

"Kids," Tuan switched over to his squad frequency, "the lieutenant wants to be sure 
that all of you are tucked into your uniforms tightly.  Double-check your seals."

Everyone did as told, and everyone found that his suit was fully sealed and rated to 
withstand whatever chemical miasma the higher-ups were planning to distribute over 
the city.  The Tokaido Maru was miles away, but it would not take long for the fire 
mission to arrive overhead.  Le kept his sights on the street ahead, snapping off 
occasional shots at whatever lumpy heads presented themselves.  The klingons had 
clued into the fact that they were outgunned and were sticking to the buildings.  If 
the corps was actually required to go in and root them out, casualties would probably 
be heavy.  As useless as a knife was in the open, at indoor ranges with the kind of 
numerical superiority that the klingons enjoyed, it was sufficiently effective.  
Fortunately, it didn't appear as though command was going to waste time and lives on 
room-to-room fighting.

At first the barrage was visible only briefly as it gained altitude.  Qo'Nos was 
possessed of perpetually cloudy skies, so there was simply a single thin line of 
smoke disappearing into the cloud cover.  The Tokaido Maru was miles away, and it 
took a few seconds for the warheads to get to their targets.  Ballistic missiles were 
used instead of cruise missiles despite the fact that they were less efficient for 
the purpose of distributing gas, because the weapons normally had to be deployed 
against enemies who had fairly advanced weaponry and stood a fair chance of knocking 
a relatively slow moving cruise missile from the sky.  So the missiles dropped out of 
the clouds, moving quickly but just visible to the men on the ground.  A hundred feet 
or so above the rooftops of the city, they exploded into thick white clouds they 
rapidly dissipated into invisibility.  One of them had detonated just above Le's 
platoon, and the fragments of the delivery vehicle rained down around them.

Sergeant Le glanced at his chronometer display.  It wouldn't take more than a few 
minutes.  Most of the buildings around didn't appear to have any sort of 
environmental seals, so the nerve agent would be able to find its way in.  There 
would probably be millions of dead, but it didn't really bother him in the least.  It 
wouldn't be the first time he'd been through a ghost city.

The synthesized chemicals entered the body through the respiratory system, or through 
physical contact.  Once inside the victim, they interfered with the nervous system 
such that the muscles of the body fired randomly and incessantly.  Death was 
excruciatingly painful and messy, as the victim evacuated its stomach and bowels and 
succumbed to convulsive spasms.  The only redeeming factor was that it took only a 
matter of seconds and most people blacked out early on.  Klingons, however, had a 
remarkable tolerance for pain.  They would probably stay conscious until the very 
end.  After an interval of about five minutes, Le stood upright and let his rifle 
dangle by the strap.  

"Alright," the lieutenant's voice came over the comm, "everybody load back up.  We're 
moving on"

----

Admiral Yamashita stepped down the shuttle ramp with the long sword held lightly in 
his left hand.  He had left the short sword in his chambers, as there was no need to 
carry them both around for a duel.  The docking bay of the Klingon station had been 
opened for his access, and Uchida had assembled his command platoon.  Facing them was 
a crowd of klingons, carrying their own weapons but careful not to point them at 
anything in particular.  There was an empty space between them that had been cleared 
of any obstructions, a circle about 15 across.  Yamashita walked directly to Major 
Uchida, who had removed his helmet as was his habit whenever possible.

"Admiral," the marine said tautly, "this is madness.  You cannot--"

Ichiro waved his right hand dismissively.  "I have been informed of my madness 
already and am in no mood to hear it repeated.  You have trusted my judgment in the 
past and must do so again."

Kazuo's jaw clicked shut as he swallowed his protest.  After a moment, he replied, 
"Yes, sir."

"Now then, which of them will be my opponent?" Yamashita asked.

Uchida indicated him with a nod.  "The big one."

The admiral turned to look.  The klingon was close to two meters tall, and it was 
impossible to say how much he massed, because klingons tended to be much denser than 
humans of a similar size.  It was likely to be a tremendous weight.  The bat'leth 
hung easily in his hands.  It appeared that he was one of those klingon officers who 
had ascended to position by challenging his superiors to duels, as the klingon 
tradition went.  No such foolishness was tolerating in the klingon formations of the 
Imperial Japanese Army, of course, but Yamashita guessed that since this universe's 
Klingons had not had the benefit of the Emperor's guiding hand, they had stuck to 
that particular stupidity.

"Major Uchida," Yamashita began, "if I am to fail, your men will storm the ships."

Kazuo considered this for a moment before speaking, "They must have left sentries 
ready to trigger the self destructs, sir."

"They are klingons," Ichiro said, "it is a distinct possibility that they were too 
stupid to take such a precaution."

Uchida nodded.  Yamashita took his cap off and handed it to the major for 
safekeeping.  He loosened his belt slightly, and tucked his sword into it.  

Admiral Yamashita stepped into the circle.  He called in klingon, "Come face your 
death, Kuchluk!"

His opposite number entered the ring.  "What weapon is that you carry, human?  It is 
no bat'leth.  It is trickery."

"This is a human weapon," Ichiro replied, "surely a klingon warrior such as you is 
not dismayed by it.  Are you afraid to try the superiority of your people's weapons?"

Kuchluk, whose integrity as a warrior and a klingon had been impugned, could do 
nothing but advance.  But he did it properly, not recklessly as most klingons did.  
In most cases, they simply charged and made a direct attack with their bat'leths, 
trusting their great strength to overcome their opponents.  That would have been easy 
to defeat.  But he stepped forward carefully, leading with his weapon at guard.  
Ichiro drew his own weapon, wielding it in a low guard.  He moved a few steps towards 
Kuchluk.

Bat'leth fighting was fairly effective on the defensive, provided that the wielder 
actually knew what the defensive was.  A skilled duelist could use the two spikes on 
the inside of the crescent to trap his opponent's blade and tear it from his grip.  
Moreover, with the way that it was gripped, the weapon could be maneuvered quickly to 
block.  It would have been rather hard on a human's wrists to use it in that fashion, 
but it was no problem for a klingon.  The main problem with the bat'leth was, 
ironically enough for a klingon weapon, that it was absolute shit for attacking with.  
Because of the way it was wielded it had no more reach than a knife and rather less 
flexibility.  Moreover, one had to throw the entire body out of line to actually 
strike with it, leaving one wide open to a counterstrike.  Yamashita had read about 
ancient klingon warriors who greatest talent had been in their ability to switch to a 
single-handed grip to surprise their opponents, but the bat'leth was not designed for 
such work and its balance was poor for one-hand wielding.  It was best used against 
another bat'leth, and the duelist was to overwhelm his opponent with main strength.

Kuchluk apparently realized that he was at some disadvantage, because he was smart 
enough not to try this.  He advanced to within a few paces of Yamashita and began 
circling to the admiral's left.  Yamashita's eyes narrowed.  He wasn't going to join 
that game.  He took a few steps back and to his left, keeping the klingon in front of 
him.  Kuchluk stopped then, facing Yamashita from about six meters.  The klingon's 
strong will showed in his face, he was no doubt a fairly expert duelist.  After the 
fashion of his people, at least.  Ichiro regarded him calmly.  The Japanese officer 
no longer saw the crowd at all, his world had narrowed and his only concern was his 
enemy.

The klingon officer darted forward with impressive speed for his size.  Admiral 
Yamashita read his opponent's eyes and the carriage of his body so that when the 
moment came, he was already moving through it.  Kuchluk raised his weapon and slashed 
with one end, a diagonal cut designed to cut Ichiro from right shoulder to left hip; 
the powerful warrior would have no doubt battered through the entire ribcage and laid 
the whole front of the admiral's corpse open.  But Ichiro had known what was coming 
with the first few steps that his opponent had taken.  The bat'leth was a weapon that 
telegraphed one's intentions, and badly.

Ichiro hopped back and to his right, moving his sword up towards his right shoulder 
as he moved.  The admiral kept his feet and rhythm perfectly, and Kuchluk's strike 
fell well short.  Then Yamashita's precise cut intersected Kuchluk's exposed left 
wrist, and the hand fell away.  There was a splash of purple blood as Ichiro took a 
few steps back.  Kuchluk was as good as beaten, but the wound was not mortal and 
there was likely fight left in him.  It would be a fool's death to lose a duel to a 
one-armed opponent.

The klingon officer turned a deeper black with rage as he regarded his bleeding 
stump.  He roared inarticulately and raised his bat'leth over his head with his one 
hand, no doubt hoping to carry the fight with a final mad rush.  Yamashita maneuvered 
his sword low and to his own left, and rushed towards the klingon.  He moved through 
Kuchluk's undefended left side, making another surgical cut as he went, just 
underneath the klingon's ribcage.  This one ended the fight.  The defeated alien's 
entrails spilled out of him, and he managed one final gurgle before he pitched 
backwards to the deck, still clutching his weapon.

Yamashita pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the thick purple blood 
from his blade before he sheathed it.  He stepped around the pool of blood 
surrounding his opponent, and dropped his soiled handkerchief onto the klingon's face 
to hide the staring eyes and frozen expression of rage and hate.

"Major Uchida," the admiral ordered, "take possession of those ships."

"Your cap, sir."  Kazuo handed him the hat, then affixed his own helmet and trotted 
past, towards the docking rings that lead to the freighters.  The klingon crewmen 
parted to let the marines pass, as they were honor-bound to do.  Yamashita was 
standing over the corpse of their commanding officer.  He took in a deep breath and 
let it out slowly.  Then he wiped the sweat from his brow, put on his cap, and 
carefully straightened his uniform.  He ought to get back to the Hiei.  He walked 
back to his shuttle.

"That looked rather one sided," his pilot said, standing by the ramp.

"Today has been a day for one-sided contests," Ichiro replied.

----

"The enemy command centers are environmentally sealed, preserving large numbers of 
our foes, and combat will be at short range and fierce," the lieutenant said, "so the 
major has sent down orders to fix bayonets."

The convoy had halted in front of a squat brown concrete structure that was purported 
to be the primary command center for the enemy forces in the capital.  Most of the 
infantry had dismounted and were waiting for the engineers to finish setting up their 
breaching charges.  The command center was a hermetically sealed bunker and would 
have to be blasted open rather violently.  The old men in command wanted documents, 
and that meant going over to the assault.

Private Morioka grumbled as he drew his blade from the sheath on his vest webbing.  
"What the hell is the use of these things, honestly?  This isn't the nineteenth 
century; we're not conquering China with muzzle-loaded rifles."

"You'll be happy you had it when one of these lumpy foreheads comes at you with a 
knife," Private Sato said.

"If one of them does that," Morioka retorted, "I'll just damn well shoot him in the 
face."

"That's actually a brilliant plan," Sato replied as if he would have never thought of 
that.

Le clipped his own bayonet onto the lugs on his rifle.  It was a rather ornate sword 
style piece about 50 centimeters in length, nearly 40 centimeters of that devoted to 
the blade itself, with a hooked quillon.  It altered the balance of the rifle, but 
not enough to changing its aiming characteristics in room-to-room fighting.  For 
sharpshooting it would have been a handicap, but for this kind of work it was no 
problem.  The sergeant's platoon would again be the spearhead.

"Detonating explosives!" the all-bands radio crackled.  The engineers touched off 
their charges.  The soldiers' helmets shielded them from the worst of the noise, but 
they could still feel it in their teeth and in the shaking of the street beneath 
their feet.  The main blast doors of the command center disappeared in a cloud of 
dust and smoke.  Most of the fragments were thrown inward.

"Banzai!" the lieutenant shouted as he charged into the smoke.  A proper Japanese 
officer led from the front.  Le allowed a few men to take off behind the officer 
before he moved ahead himself.  He was neither an officer nor Japanese, so he was 
prepared to act sensibly.

The inside of the command center was composed of claustrophobic and unadorned 
concrete corridors.  The klingon defenders had apparently been concussed and 
otherwise disoriented by the explosion.  For the first few moments, Le saw nothing 
but corpses dead from bayonet wounds.  As he came to a T-shaped junction in the 
corridor, the lieutenant took a left turn.  Le went right.  Immediately upon turning 
the corner, he spotted enemies advancing on him, finally armed with relatively 
effective looking weapons--stubby rifles as well as the omnipresent pistols.  He 
fired a long burst into them from the hip, mowing them down.  There were doors set on 
either side of the hall.  The sergeant went to the first one and pointed the way 
further down the hall.

Morioka and Sato stacked up with him next to the door, preparing their grenades.  Le 
stood to one side of the portal, tapping the release carefully.  It snapped open 
hydraulically, and the two other soldiers threw their bombs in.  Le hit the key 
again, shutting the door long enough to contain the explosion.  Then Le opened it 
against and Morioka charged in.  There were several dead klingons lying on the floor.  
Or nearly dead.

One of them, riddled with shrapnel but still animate, lurched to his feet and charged 
at Morioka.  The soldier had already written the enemy off as a corpse, and it was 
too close to get a shot off.  Morioka struck the klingon across the face with the 
butt of his rifle, sending it reeling back, then jumped forward and plunged his 
bayonet through its chest.  The alien growled and let loose a stream of blood-tinged 
spittle from its mouth before expiring.

"Scary shit," Morioka said as he yanked his weapon back out of its flesh.

The sergeant snorted.  "Next room."

With hand grenades, flamethrowers, and bayonet, the Japanese soldiers cleared room 
after room.  Le was almost sorry for the klingons, horribly outclassed as they were.  
Almost.  If he was going to have an enemy, it was best for them to be as incompetent 
as possible.  He'd fought battles with the Schutzstaffel and the United States Marine 
Corps, and if it was his fate to fight mentally challenged aliens instead, Tuan Van 
Le would be more than happy.

----

"The enemy command center has been taken.  The kampeitai are recovering the 
intelligence," said Fuyutsuki's aide.

The old general nodded.  "As soon as they're finished, order the withdrawal back to 
the transports.  We'll get our feet off the ground and rejoin the fleet as soon as 
possible.  Were the marines successful in their mission?"

His aide spoke back and forth with the comm for a bit.  "Yes, they recovered the 
freighters and their cargo intact."

General Fuyutsuki nodded and exhaled calmly.  The slight tension that had been 
building between his shoulder blades loosened, and the future looked a little 
brighter.  The task force would be able to survive long enough, perhaps, to figure 
out what had happened to it, and how to get back to where it belonged.



Anabasis
Chapter Eight
Geosynchronous Orbit

The standard practice for entry into a hostile system with the Raumkriegsmarine was 
to use the terrain to maximum advantage.  Electronic warfare was one of the most 
important factors in a naval engagement, the side that spotted the enemy first got to 
fire the first shot, an advantage which was self-evident.  A ship clicking along at 
superluminal velocities did not have very precise sensors and put out a massive 
signal to any subspace radar in the area.  An enemy lying in wait had a brilliant few 
moments of advantage.

The Reich got around this by dropping in behind planetoids to use them as cover.  
Either the enemy maneuvered around the obstruction, probably revealing himself in the 
process, or he waited and gave up the time and the initial advantage.  It was a good 
tactic, and often utilized by both the US Navy and the Japanese.  But the RKM 
invariably used it.  So much so that a smart commander, like Ichiro Yamashita, had 
them pigeonholed.

The Allied task force, led by the battleships Prinz Eugen and USS Texas, had dropped 
out right into Yamashita's lap, and he had replied by ramming a Musashi-class 
battleship right up into the middle of their battle plan.

Captain Bergman sat in his darkened quarters and watched the sensor replay over and 
over again.  His trained mind translated the dots and lines of the holographic 
display into a concrete image of the battle.  German ships were friendly blue motes, 
and American and British vessels were green.  The Japanese, naturally, were red.  
Right as the playback started, the blue dot that represented the RKM Prinz Eugen 
winked out.

"First volley," Bergman said to no one in particular.

The little sea of green and blue dots started to wheel around.  The fleet had dropped 
to sublight speeds with their bows pointed directly at the moon of Neues München.  
There was a space of seconds before they could turn about and flee into warp.  Even 
before she had a chance of maneuvering, the USS Texas disappeared out of existence.

With the fifth consecutive viewing, the sight finally began to lose the sensation of 
a physical blow.  "Second volley."

With that, the allied fleet was stripped of its heaviest guns and had more or less 
lost the capability to even scratch the paint on the IJN Hiei, at least at long 
range.  The heaviest ships left in the American group were Bergman's own cruiser, the 
USS Rochester, and the HMS Cumberland, an older British model.  Captain Bergman was 
in nominal command of the task force and he gave the order to bug out.  The Germans 
went one way, the Anglo-Americans the other, and the Japanese had evidently chosen to 
run the Germans down.  Not a bad decision, considering that the RKM force still had a 
pocket battleship in operation, a much more valuable target than either of Bergman's 
cruisers.

The next thing he knew... well.  

He reached up to the controls and clicked the projector over to an external camera.  
It was a flatscreen shot, a bit of waste for the capabilities of the projector, but 
he still liked the image.  The Earth cut a very serene picture.  The Federation had 
given his fleet a geosynchronous orbit over the South China Sea.  The Rochester 
herself hung in space above the Gulf of Tonkin, and it was now about three o'clock, 
Hong Kong time.  Bergman smirked and shut one eye, forming his hand into a pistol and 
aiming it at Japan.

"Bang."

He would have liked nothing better than to drop a few hundred megatons on those 
islands, but that wasn't really Japan--at least not the one he knew.  Back home, it 
was the nerve center of a colossal expansionist empire.  Here, Bergman didn't really 
know what the hell it was.  Maybe a rice farm.

Someone rapped sharply on the door to Bergman's cabin.  

"Watching that sensor record again, are you?" the visitor's voice came through the 
door.  "Probably talking to yourself as well.  Shall I come back later?"

Bergman smiled.  "No, you're welcome to enter now."

"I've given you sufficient time to get yourself decently dressed, I suppose," the 
other man said as the door slid into the wall.  He entered and flipped the light 
switch.  It was Commander Stephen Vaughn, Bergman's executive officer and a member of 
the officer exchange program than the United States Navy and Royal Navy had been 
running for some decades.

"What's the news, Commander?" Bergman asked.

Vaughn smiled.  "Two things.  First, you're a strange young man to be watching movies 
alone in the dark; you should find a healthy resort like handball or something.  
Second, the men from down there--" he pointed at the deck "--want to come up for 
another meeting."

"About what?" Bergman asked.

"I wouldn't presume to know their minds.  I suppose they might be sending a minor 
functionary to tell us about the glories of their social system again, or the very 
president of the United Federation of Planets wishes to present me a medal.  It could 
be anything, Michael.  They could be casing your cabin to steal your music 
collection," Stephen replied.

Captain Bergman smirked.  "No doubt you've already sent my permission for their envoy 
to come up."

"No doubt.  They're our meal ticket for the duration and it wouldn't do to refuse, if 
case you've forgotten."  Vaughn adjusted his cap over his head of red hair.  "Perhaps 
this time the good Admiral will bring up another of those phenomenal-looking ladies.  
The uniforms a bit blah but I could see getting a young bird for myself."

Michael stood up from his chair and smoothed his uniform down.  "You're married, 
Stephen."

"So I am.  Here's a bit of advice, my son, if and when you get into an obligation 
with a lady try and get what they call an 'open' relationship.  That way, if you're 
on tour and see a young chippy that momentarily strikes your fancy, you can exercise 
your options for a tick and still have a safe berth at home.  It's the only way of 
life for a navy man," Vaughn replied said.

"If you're willing to allow her the same freedom while you're away."

"Win some; lose some, I always say."

"Well, it's hard enough for a navy man to meet any sort of lady for a long term 
commitment, let alone the kind you're recommending.  Especially with these damn 
wars--and double-damned spatial anomalies," Bergman said, walking out his door into 
the corridor.

Vaughn scrambled after him.  "We should go down to the docking bay.  They'll be up at 
any moment."

"Good idea," Michael replied, still walking, "we shall go immediately."

The Rochester was only a cruiser, so it didn't have a lot of space.  There wasn't 
quite enough room in the corridor for an average man to stretch his arms side-to-
side, and the ceiling was only about seven feet.  The navy had no use for 
claustrophobics, and only a little more for the exceptionally tall.  There was a 
personnel elevator just a few meters down the hall, and the two officers went 
directly to it and found it unoccupied.  Most of the crew was on reduced duty because 
of the lull, and really the only people working were the skeleton crews on the bridge 
and the engineering decks.  In any normal circumstance of this kind, some members of 
the crew would be given shore leave on a rotating basis--but in this circumstance 
that was clearly impossible.  Bergman keyed the elevator to the docking bay.

"Do you think the envoy will lecture us about communism again?" Commander Vaughn 
asked.

Bergman shrugged, watching the deck numbers tick down on the digital display.  "Is it 
even the same guy?"

"Come to think of it, no," Stephen replied, "that's a good sign, innit?"

The lift came to the shuttle deck, and the doors slid open.  The two officers walked 
down a short corridor into the ready room just outside the shuttle bay.  Four marines 
in their dark blue combat uniforms stood at the ready, flanking both the door that 
Bergman had entered and the other, a thick blast door leading to the bay airlock.

"Officer on deck!" one of the marines barked, and all snapped perfect salutes.

Bergman returned the salute.  "As you were.  Has the Federation shuttle arrived?"

At his order, the marines relaxed slightly.  One replied.  "Yes sir, they are waiting 
on the other side of the door."

The captain nodded, and the marine keyed the door.  It slid heavily into the floor, 
revealing the occupants of the lock.  There was a portly man in the red uniform of 
Federation command staff, and behind him was a slim woman in a yellow uniform.

"I'm Commander Silas Monaghan, United Federation of Planets.  Permission to come 
aboard, Captain?" the officer in front asked.

"Granted," Captain Bergman said.  "And she is?"

The woman took a step forward, extending her right hand.  "Ensign Margaret Pauley."

"I suppose we had better get to the meeting room," Vaughn said.

Down a corridor, and back up an elevator again, and the group was shortly at the 
conference room near the bridge.  

"Sit," Bergman said, waving the two Federation citizens to their chairs.  He slipped 
into his own seat.  "So, what's this about?"

"I'll get right to it.  We've received some troubling news from the Klingon 
frontier," Monaghan reported, "some ships similar to yours launched an attack on 
Qo'Nos.  They're being rather closemouthed about it--it happened a good week ago and 
we only heard about it this morning--so we still don't know exactly what transpired.  
But we're pretty sure they're hurting.  Bad."

Bergman had been briefed on the history of the United Federation of Planets, so he 
was aware of the existence of the Klingon Empire as an independent entity.  "What do 
you mean, 'similar to my ships?

"Just that they don't correspond to any design we know, but that they do have a 
certain family resemblance to yours.  Just a few days before the Klingons were hit we 
lost a patrol ship near the border.  Ensign Pauley here was the sensor officer.  She 
can tell you more," Monaghan replied.

Pauley began to tell her story, starting with the Jutland's first sensor contact.

----

After the young ensign finally finished, Bergman considered it quietly for a few 
moments.  The first thing that stuck out in the tale was the military ineptitude of 
Starfleet.  It wasn't as though a ship the size of the one Pauley described could 
have survived against the IJN Hiei, but the ship had gone down like a punk.  But that 
just jibed with what they'd learned about the Federation so far.  But there was 
something far more important going on in the story.  Bergman massaged his sinuses.  
He felt a headache coming on.

"He's here," he said.

Monaghan leaned forward. "Eh?"

"Taisho Yamashita Ichiro, commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy Task Force Hiei," 
Bergman answered, "that big ship you saw... that's the IJN Hiei.  It's a Musashi 
class super battleship.  Ordinarily they're supposed to be named after provinces in 
Japan, but they named that one after a mountain.  It confused intelligence for a 
bit."

"What's that mean, then?" Silas asked.

Vaughn sighed, "It means that the toughest battleship under the command of the 
sharpest admiral is here.  We have to start guessing what he's going to do next."

"He probably raided your Klingons for supply ships.  Yamashita doesn't have a 
friendly source of materiel like we were lucky enough to get," Captain Bergman 
continued, "and if you think your pals are hurting bad, revise the estimate upward.  
With the kind of firepower Yamashita can throw around, it's possible that he blasted 
every city on the planet."

Pauley paled, "Would he really do that?"

Bergman shrugged, "If he thought it needed doing he wouldn't hesitate.  There are 
stories about him.  What's certain is that whatever defenses the Klingons used to 
have in that system aren't there now.  And, depending on what kind of assets he 
managed to seize, he could be set up with supplies for months.  He has your star 
maps.  If he wanted to, he could come right here and there wouldn't be a thing to 
stop him."

"What about your fleet?" Monaghan asked.

Bergman snorted.  "Vaughn?"

"We've two heavy cruisers, one getting long in the tooth; five light cruisers; a 
dozen destroyers.  If we were lucky--and with Yamashita in command, we wouldn't be--
Task Force Hiei might notice a crunch underneath its collective boots as it marched 
to Earth," Vaughn explained.

"That battleship is a monster.  The Musashi class has more protection, more 
firepower, and more speed than any two others I can think of.  Barring divine 
intervention..." Captain Bergman trailed off.  He didn't need to repeat himself.  
"The only question is what he wants to do with it.  He's probably thinking the same 
thing as me.  'How do I get my men home?'"

"We're working on it," Monaghan said quietly, "it's a difficult process.  We just 
thought you should be advised as to this situation, Captain Bergman."

Michael didn't quite look at him.  He was running over things in his head.  "Thank 
you, Commander Monaghan.  If there's nothing else..."

"I'll have the ground command send the complete reports up to you.  Other than that, 
I'm finished," the commander said.

"Very well."  The captain tugged at his collar slightly, and spoke into it, "This is 
Captain Bergman.  I'll need a guard to come to the conference room and direct our 
visitors back to the shuttle bay."

"Thank you," the Federation commander said, standing and exiting the room.  After a 
short glance back, Ensign Pauley followed.

Vaughn and Bergman remained seated.  Bergman looked over at his XO.  "Thoughts?"

"That bird was into you.  Looked at you with the bedroom eyes the whole time," 
Stephen answered.

"Was she?" Bergman replied acidly, "I didn't notice.  I was thinking about my job and 
my men."

"My thoughts on that?  There's nothing we can do but wait for his move, if he makes 
one.  Other than that, I'll have to wait on that report to make any final judgments.  
But I'm pretty sure we're still screwed."

Michael nodded wearily.  "I thought that all I had to worry about was finding a way 
home.  It was even a little comforting, knowing that Yamashita was as far away as he 
could possibly be.  Now... he could be on his way here, right now."

"Yes, but until he gets here, we'll gather flowers while we may."  Vaughn checked his 
wristwatch.  "Knowing when to worry is an important part of life, sir.  And there's 
no sense worrying about something you can't do a thing about.  Our sleep cycle starts 
in a half-hour, says the ship's time."

Bergman rubbed his eyes.  He was getting tired, come to think of it.  "Yeah."

"That bird.  She liked what she saw," Vaughn said.

"Yeah."