Against the Odds

Chapter Seven

Heris Serrano came aboard her new command, the R.S.S. cruiser Indefatigable, and made her way to the bridge with only half her mind on the rituals of honor and response. She slid her command wand into the captain’s slot and entered her codes. The computer flashed a green response, code accepted, and an array of function pads came alight. The computer, at least, was still responsive to the Fleet master codes. Now to see about the humans.

As she read herself in, the humans on the bridge looked as crew usually did during a change of command. The juniors stood stiffly at attention, focussed on her; the seniors kept one eye for the ship.

She’d had no time to check the files on her new personnel, and none of them looked familiar. Without her own crew, she felt exposed . . . but this was her crew now. And wherever Petris was, wherever Oblo and Meharry and the rest were, they would be doing their duty as she was doing hers.

When she’d read herself in, she called up the status reports on her console. Ship systems all came up as nominal, but supplies were limited. Not surprising, in the chaos of the mutiny; Indefatigable had been in for a major overhaul, her usual crew on long leave.

“Captain, there’s a stack of messages from HQ; should I route them to your office or here?” That was a major . . . Suspiro, she read from his nametag.

“Here, please,” Heris said. She would stay on the bridge, she’d decided, where she would be visible to more of the crew in this critical transition period.

“Yes, sir. The eyes-only messages will require your H-scale decryption keys, one through seven.”

Heris inserted the command wand again, and reentered her authorization codes, unlocking the keys stored in her wand. From the console in front of her, a screen rose, its security wings extending to block the view of anyone else on the bridge. Eyes-only messages were a nuisance on ships like this, which didn’t mount full-spec privacy booths. Heris fished in the drawer under the screen’s lower edge for the visual filters that would complete the decryption for her alone and punched for the first message.

That message was time-limited; the limit had passed. Heris deleted it after a brief scan of a proposed command structure pending investigations. The second message firmed up the new command structure, and the third informed her that she would be commanding not only Indefatigable but a small task force: two cruisers, four patrols, three escorts, and the usual supply and service ships. The fourth gave her personnel summaries, with the most recent security information; she saved that to a secure file for later consideration. Finally she had time to meet her new officers and find out more about them.

Indefatigable had been assigned crew on the basis of first-come, first-assigned; as the designated flagship of the ships then in port, her commodore could trade off a few hands with others if necessary, but that was all. She had to have at least a few people who knew how to find their way around, or they’d have to spend a week in port.

Heris called the senior officers to a meeting in her office. Commander Seabolt, who looked as if he’d been razor-cut from a recruiting poster, folded himself carefully into the chair to her left, and Heris immediately catalogued him as a regulator. Lt. Commander Winsloe, senior Weapons officer, could have been cut from the same mold, though she had a twinkle in her eye. Major Suspiro, Communications, had the slightly rumpled, twitchy look that Heris associated with really good commtech personnel. Major Vondon, Scan, was much the same, but taller. In Engineering, she had Major Foxson, quiet and gray-haired. Her chief Environmental officer, Lt. Commander Donnehy, was a cheerful chunky woman who arrived minutes later than everyone else, to a disapproving look from Seabolt.

“Sorry, Captain,” Donnehy said. “They just sent another batch of potential moles down, and I was trying to sort them out—”

“Take a seat,” Heris said. She turned to Seabolt.

“Commander Seabolt, tell me about your previous assignment.”

He drew himself up even stiffer if possible. “I was aide-de-camp to Admiral Markham; the admiral has been second in command of Sector Four HQ for the past four years.”

“And your last ship assignment?”

“That would be eight years ago, Captain. I was on the Picardy Rose with Captain Graham.” The names meant nothing to Heris, though she was fairly sure Picardy Rose was a patrol craft. “Command track? Technical?”

“Command track; I was fourth officer.” Then, finally realizing what information might be most useful to her, he added, “Picardy Rose was a patrol craft on picket duty on the frontier.”

“See any action?”

“No, sir. But Captain Graham ran a very tight ship, and we were always commended for our standards at the annual inspections.”

She would much rather have had a messy combat veteran, but she nodded her thanks, and transferred her gaze to Eugenie Winsloe. “And you, Commander?”

“I was en route from the Gunnery School, where I did a round as instructor, to my new ship assignment—it would have been Summerwine. My last ship assignment was on Rose of Glory, and before that Alerte. We saw no action, though Rose did win the sector gunnery medal. I haven’t been on a cruiser since I was a jig, but I assure the Captain that I’m quite familiar with cruiser weaponry.”

“Very good.” It wasn’t good at all, but at least Winsloe seemed willing and a bit sharper than Seabolt. “Are you satisfied with your juniors’ competence, Commander?”

She shook her head. “Captain, I couldn’t fill a single watch with experienced weapons personnel. It’s as if they just grabbed everyone within reach to fill out the numbers. However, the most experienced NCO tells me that if we’re granted a few weeks for training, we should do reasonably well.”

As if time would just hold still until they were ready.

“Kick ’em along faster,” Heris told her. “We may not have a few weeks. And if you find someone else aboard with more weapons training, who was misassigned, come tell me about it. We may have to shift people around.”

“We’re short of replacement parts, too,” Winsloe said. “We’d be shorter if I hadn’t spotted the last load departing just as I came aboard. Contractor claimed it was his, but I took the liberty of requisitioning it.”

“Good work, Commander,” Heris said.

She let her gaze move on, to Lt. Commander deFries, the senior navigator.

“I’ve been on cruisers, most recently Royal Reef. But the last time I saw action was in Clarion, during the Patchcock mess.”

“Have you had microjump weapons-track drills recently?”

“No, sir. And I was only third nav officer at Patchcock. However, I did bring aboard a full set of training sims, and four of my enlisted personnel have more recent combat experience than I have.”

That was something, and he had showed initiative in the right direction. “Good . . . I’ll be ordering some dry drills with other ships. Have you contacted their navigation officers?”

“No, sir. We hadn’t been told that we would be traveling with other ships.”

Damn secrecy. “We’re to take a small group out—the ship names are now on the command board, so you’ll want to liase with their navigation officers when we’re done here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Major Foxson . . . let’s hear about you.”

“Captain, all my service has been on cruisers of this class; I was on Imperator last and was transferred here because I’d been through the drives refitting on Imp, and they thought I’d be good to take over Indy’s new drives.”

Heris had never liked the fashion of truncating ships’ names, but that wasn’t enough to set her against her senior engineering officer. “So what do you think of them?”

“A definite improvement over the old, Captain, but they rushed the last part of the job, what with the mutiny. Your insystem’s fine, but the FTL drive isn’t quite balanced. It’ll get us there, but it’ll leave a marked signature. And my guess is, it’s going to degrade over time. We should have quite a flutter after a dozen long jumps or so.”

“Why’d you accept it, then?”

“Sir, I came aboard two days after the refit crew signed off on it, or I wouldn’t have. And I can’t say it’s not safe—there was the same modification to Imp, and while the trials showed our scan trace looking like a skip-jumper, the ship herself was steady as a rock, and it never failed. That was two years ago, Standard—they did take it back in and fix it, but now, with the mutiny and all, I imagine they’ll refuse to delay.”

He was probably right. And after all, he was coming along; if the drive failed and stranded them in some strange corner of the universe, he’d be there too.

That left Elise Donnehy, who had had cruiser duty six years before, but since then had worked with environmental systems design for deepspace repair ships. She cheerfully admitted to having forgotten which pipes ran where, though she insisted she could pick it up again fast.

Heris wanted to bang her head on the desk in sheer frustration, but she knew better. The lives of her little flotilla depended on her ability to tolerate frustration and make silk purses out of very crooked sows’ ears. She could have done it with her old crew, or for that matter with any capable crew used to working together. She shook her head. No use thinking what might have been, she had the resources she had, pitiful as they were.

The other ships in the group seemed less disorganized than her own. At least that meant she had the worst problems closest at hand, where she could work on them directly.

An hour before mid-third shift, Heris’s alarm went off, waking her from a pleasant dream in which she and Petris chased each other along a beach, in and out of warm, clear wavelets . . . the whole setting looked like a travel poster, in shades of blue and turquoise and white. She groaned and pushed her face back into the pillow for a moment. But she was awake . . . and now that she was awake, she remembered why she’d set the alarm. The environmental parameters at the start of first shift were always off, though the record books had been neatly initialled beside a record of perfect values all through third shift.

Heris splashed cold water on her face from the carafe of ice water she kept beside her bunk and put on a clean uniform. If one was going to appear like the wrath of gods to a slacking third-shift crew, a clean uniform enhanced the effect. Seabolt’s natural knife-crease style would have worked, but Seabolt was convinced the initialled log sheets meant something was wrong with the machinery.

Heris clipped on her tagger and comunit—bridge had to know where the captain was—and pulled a pair of softies over her uniform boots. Most third-shift crew wore softies, to reduce noise, and it certainly made sneaking up on wrongdoers easier. She went aft, meeting—as she expected—no one at that hour in officer country. Down the nearest personnel ladder, one deck . . . two . . . and out into the port passage of Environmental, where the distant rhythmic thump of the pumps became audible.

She stood a moment, listening, feeling it through the soles of her feet and with one finger on the bulkhead, a trick she’d been taught as a jig by a grizzled master chief. Open the mouth . . . turn the head from side to side . . . and irregularities in the pump could be diagnosed from here. It all sounded normal, though.

She turned to her left, and saw that the hatch to the personnel lock separating the main port passage from the main starboard passage was open. She looked at the status telltales: all four green. Not good; someone had left the whole lock open, as a convenience . . . and a very definite danger. She looked at the hatch mechanisms—they should have closed the hatches automatically, but someone had stuck a stylus in the mechanism to hold them open. And . . . someone had put a stickypatch over the sensor that should have picked up the telltale lights.

Seabolt would assume sabotage and conspiracy, but Heris knew laziness was far more likely. Someone didn’t want to wait while the locks cycled properly to give access from one side to the other—she’d find the forward lock jammed open too, no doubt. Instead of walking the complete round to make the required checks, someone was darting through to sign off the log at the other side.

Heris stepped back through to the port passage, pulled out the roll of tactape and laid a strip on each of the five bottom rungs of the ladder and along the underside of the handholds, just where fingers would grip. Then she went back in the lock, removed the stylus from that hatch, swung it closed, and dogged it behind her. She put a line of tactape on the wheel, very carefully. She left the stickypatch alone, went into the lock itself, closed and dogged that hatch and marked its wheel with tactape.

Coming out the starboard side of the lock, she couldn’t dog the hatches behind her, but she put a line of tactape under each pull, shutting the hatches so the next user would have to pull them open.

It was pure guess which corridor the slack Environmental crew would be in, but in either case she should be able to find them before the midshift bell . . . and if she didn’t, they’d respond to that with the usual report. She opened the service hatch at the end of the starboard compartment and found—as she should—nothing but the great rounded haunch of one of the settling tanks. She closed the hatch carefully, and headed back forward as quietly as possible, listening for anything but the heavy heartbeat of the pumps, the whoosh and gurgle of liquids, the hiss and bubble of gas exchange.

Outboard, on her right, were transparent tubes and containers glowing green or blue or amber with the various cultures in them . . . brightly backlit by the lights that optimized their growth. Beyond, the gleaming curves of more pipes, pumps, countercurrent exchange chambers. Beyond—invisible from here—were the honeycomb tricklebeds. Settling tanks aft, mixing tanks forward.

Inboard, the space from deck to overhead was filled with the secondary atmospheric system . . . canisters, pipes . . . and the food processing sections, neat rectangles of hydroponic beds.

Heris sniffed. Environmental was, arguably, the smelliest place on a ship. A healthy system smelled like a spring day in the country on a well-terraformed planet: a rich mix of odors from musky to astringent, but nothing actually unpleasant. The best environmental techs she’d known could diagnose a problem with just a quick sniff, recognizing at once which sludge chamber or bacterial strain was out of kilter.

Here—her nose wrinkled involuntarily—among all the yeasty, earthy, pungent odors that belonged here was an acrid one . . . a scorched smell, as if a cook had singed not just a steak, but his beard. She sniffed her way toward it, reminded incongruously of Bunny Thornbuckle’s foxhounds—was this how they felt, tracking a fox?

Acrid, yes . . . and faintly metallic. Now she could hear a different sound, a hissing followed by a soft roar. Her mind rummaged through a library of smells and sounds; she could almost see it at work . . . then it came to her. Brazing? Soldering? Something with a little blowtorch and lengths of tubing. Something that was never done here on Environmental, because . . . she strained for the memory of a text she’d read . . .

Voices, now: “But, sir, the manual says—”

“Corporal, do you see these stripes?”

“Yes, sir.” A very unhappy corporal. A corporal who knew the manual. “But, sir, if the metal vapor comes in contact with—”

“Just do it!” said the angry older voice.

Heris moved fast, and saw them, a cluster of figures around one of the pipes connecting two chambers. “STOP!” she said. “Don’t move,” she added in a quieter voice.

“Who’s that?” asked the older voice. “What are you doing down here? This is a restricted area!”

“Not to me, it’s not,” Heris said. She had the satisfaction of seeing the man’s eyes widen and his face go pale. A petty major . . . Dorson, by his nametag.

“Comman—er . . . Captain. Sorry, sir. I thought it was one of the ratings sneaking about . . .”

“Turn off that torch, Corporal Acer,” Heris said, to the equally pale-faced young man. He complied, with a quick glance at the petty major.

“Now suppose you explain to me why you were about to use that torch on this equipment,” Heris said to Dorson.

“Well . . .” with a poisonous glance at the corporal. “This man found a drip in the line. It dripped last shift, too, and I’d had him put some glub on it, but it was dripping again. So I told him to get the torch out and put a proper patch.”

“I see. Corporal, explain your objection.”

“Captain, this is a new joint, just installed at the refit. There’s always a bit of a problem with new installations, a little drip, but the way Chief Kostans taught me to handle it was to glub it until the sediment has a chance to build in. That cushions it against pump surge, too, where a rigid fix wouldn’t. But more than that, you don’t want to put metal vapor onto this stuff—it eventually corrodes the line, and then you’re in worse trouble.”

“Petty Major Dorson, how long have you been in shipboard Environmental?”

“Shipboard, Captain? Never, really. My main speciality is administration, records division; I guess they put me on this list because I’ve been keeping the regional headquarters files on environmental issues up to date.”

That figured. “And on the basis of that lack of experience, you saw fit to overrule a man who’s actually been doing this job?”

Dorson flushed. “I didn’t see where it could do any harm . . .”

“Petty Major Dorson, can you explain why the aft personnel lock hatches were jammed open, and the sensor blanked?”

His jaw dropped. “I—I—what’s wrong with that? As long as both the aft and forward locks are fully open, then the pressure equalizes . . .”

Out of the corner of her eye, Heris could see the corporal’s not quite successful attempt to hide his reaction to this.

“The point of the locks,” Heris said, “is so the pressure won’t equalize—so that a problem on one side does not get to the other.”

“But we’re not in combat—they only close the section hatches in combat—”

Heris took a deep breath, and turned to Acer. “Corporal, rack that torch where it belongs and go secure the forward personnel lock; I’ve secured the aft already. If you see other personnel, say nothing to them. Pick up the forward log book. Then come back.”

“Yes, sir.” He practically scampered away, exuding virtue.

Heris turned to the hapless petty officer. “Petty Major Dorson, you know nothing about a real environmental system. You will have to learn. But since you nearly caused a major breakdown which could have had fatal consequences, you are relieved from your duties here. You will begin studying environmental systems with the introductory course, and you will have completed the first two chapters by the end of this shift—I’ll expect to see your exam scores above ninety percent, if you want to retain your stripes.”

“Yes, sir.” He looked more stunned than contrite, but at least he wasn’t arguing.

“When you finish the introductory course, you will report to Environmental as an apprentice tech—only because we are short-handed with real techs—and you will obey the orders of anyone who has more experience. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” She looked up to see Corporal Acer approaching. “Corporal, what are the most recent readings?”

Now he looked embarrassed. “Most recent? I guess that would be—”

“I don’t want guesses, Corporal. Let’s see that log book.” She glanced at the last page. “Is that your signature, Corporal?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“I see that you’ve recorded all values as nominal—I presume that means you checked every gauge and every readout . . .”

“Er . . . no, sir. Not all of them.”

“In other words, you falsified the log?” He shot a quick glance at the petty officer, then gulped and answered. “Yes, sir; I initialled that entry, and yes, sir, I signed off on checks I hadn’t made.”

Heris folded the log book and tapped it against her leg. They both looked as if they would much rather be facing an open airlock than her, and that’s exactly how she wanted them to feel.

“We have two problems here,” she said finally. “We have incompetence attempting to rest on rank alone for authority, and we have competence choosing to be dishonest. Frankly, I have no use for either, but this is a war, and I’m stuck with you. We can deal with this at Captain’s Mast, or we can deal with this here and now. It’s up to you.”

“Now, if the Captain wishes.” That was the corporal; the petty officer just nodded.

Heris cocked her head at him. “Corporal, I don’t know why you zanged that log. You may think you had a good reason—” She paused, to see if he would try to produce an excuse, but he said nothing. All the better. “But in my books, nothing—nothing at all—justifies lying to your captain, and that’s what you did. I’m extremely displeased, and your competence in your specialty does not in any way change that. I’m reducing you to pivot; you’ll report to the Exec at first shift and get your records changed.” Again she waited.

“Yes, sir,” he finally said.

“Petty Major Dorson, I will not tolerate the use of formal rank to cover up ignorance and incompetence. It is not your fault that you were assigned a job you didn’t know how to do. It is your fault that you didn’t listen to someone who did know. It is a form of dishonesty only slightly less flagrant than the corporal’s—pivot’s—when you pretend to know what you don’t know. I’m reducing you to sergeant; you will also report at the start of first shift to change your records.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will find that I promote as readily as I demote, if performance warrants,” Heris said. “Don’t throw your stripes away. Now, Dorson, go up and get busy on your lessons—use the midships ladder. Pivot, you come with me.”

They passed through the forward lock in silence, and in silence walked back aft, Heris watching for the rest of the shift’s crew. She found them in a circle, playing cards: three pivots, a pivot major, and another corporal. In one searing blast, she reduced everyone to pivot who wasn’t already, and put them all on extra duty—which, for the ones who had no prior Environmental experience, meant shifts spent at the cube reader, getting qualified. When she was through, she turned to Pivot Acer. “You’re now in command of this shift. You will see to it that first shift finds all values nominal—and you will keep an accurate log. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir!” His eyes had light in them again.

“If I can find another qualified person, I’ll send ’em down; in the meantime, it’s up to you to whip this bunch into shape. I believe you can do it.”

She was back in her own quarters before she remembered that she hadn’t taken off the tactape which would enable her to tell if anyone had sneaked away. She looked at her chronometer . . . only two hours to sleep before she had to be bright and energetic for first-shift business. Sleepy commanders make bad decisions, she told herself, diving under the covers again. After all, tomorrow night, it was the turn of Drives to have a roaming captain in their midst. She could remove the tactape then.

Solomon Drizh, once an admiral minor in the Regular Space Service and now commander in chief of the mutineer fleet, plotted the newest arrival on his chart. They had been unlucky at Copper Mountain; if they’d had the three weeks he’d planned for, all the mutineer ships could have assembled, with sufficient manpower to gain control of the planet and its resources. Luck of war, no use complaining. Here, at least, no accidental passerby should find them. Here he could assemble his fellow mutineers, train them, and create a force that the government could not ignore.

We are hunters, and we hunt the most dangerous of all game—others like ourselves. Lepescu had said that. War is the best test of man, and hunting men is the next best. That, too.

Drizh grinned to himself. Fleet had gone soft, because the government had gone soft. Always seeking peace, always looking for a way out. He’d had hopes of Thornbuckle, when Thornbuckle sent Fleet to rescue his daughter—any excuse for a war was better than no war at all—but then Thornbuckle had died, shot down by a better hunter. The hunt proves your real nature, whether you are prey or hunter. And the new Chairman, Hobart Conselline . . . all he cared about was profit and long life.

“He thinks like a cow,” Drizh said aloud.

“Sir?” That was his flag captain, Jerard Montague.

“Conselline,” Drizh said. “All belly. But he’ll learn; they all will.” They would bow at last; they would have to, when the loss of civilian lives rose high enough. Then he would command not just the mutineers but all of Fleet, and Fleet would command the government. No more begging humbly for the cheapest supplies: they would have the best, and no arguments.

“They still have some good commanders,” Montague said. “And more ships.”

“True, but they don’t have our edge. Ship for ship we’re superior. Survival through victory—it’s the only way. Besides, there are only a few to worry about.”

“Serrano?”

“Serrano, yes.” For a moment, Drizh allowed himself to regret that Heris Serrano wasn’t one of his people. She had the right instincts; she would have been a powerful and valuable ally. But she had destroyed his mentor, exposed Lepescu to the world as a vicious killer, denounced those who followed him. She was an enemy, and he would destroy her, rejoicing in her fall.

He looked again at his charts, and cursed the cowards who hadn’t yet shown up as they’d promised. He needed more ships, now, before the loyalists had time to organize an effective defense.

In the meantime, waiting the arrival of the others, he could train this nucleus.

“Tightbeam to all ships,” he said. “Close in for drill.” A few days of precision drill, the ships as close as possible, would sharpen the crews’ reactions immensely. Then gunnery drill, then microjump gunnery . . .

Then the war, and the victory.