Once a Hero

Chapter Twelve

Esmay was asleep, having a different dream for once, when the alarm bleeped, bringing her upright even before she woke. All down the passage she could hear voices; her heart stammered and she felt cold sweat break out. But when even as she dressed, the nature of the emergency became clear: ships coming in for repair. Not a mutiny. Not combat. Not—she told herself firmly—as bad. For her.

Even as she dressed and scampered along the passage and up ladders to her section, she felt the gut-twisting lurch of a ship overpowering its way through a jump point. Fear crawled back up her spine, vertebra by vertebra. DSRs were not built for racing and jumping; DSRs moved at the leisurely pace appropriate to their mass and internal architecture. She understood now, after the time in Hull & Architecture, why it wasn’t a matter of adding more power—what the trade-offs were, in making Koskiusko so big and so massive. What had happened? Where were they going? And more important, were they fleeing with trouble on their tail, or running toward it?

Hull & Architecture, like every other section, swarmed like a kicked anthill. In the departmental briefing room, Commander Seveche was putting a cube in the display. “Ah . . . Suiza. Hook up your compad, this is going to be interesting.” Esmay plugged in her compad, and made sure it was set to record the display directly. Most of H&A was in the room when Seveche started his briefing; the rest straggled in within a few minutes.

“This is what we know—and we all know that it will be worse. Wraith is a patrol ship, commissioned ten years ago, out of the Dalverie Yards—one of the SLP Series 30 hulls—” A couple of low groans, which Esmay now understood. The SLP Series 30 had well earned the nickname “slippery,” meaning its architecture lent itself to unauthorized and possibly damaging revisions. “She’s been in combat against the Bloodhorde, and despite their technological inferiority, they managed to wipe most of her scan systems and then bludgeon her with heavy explosive. There was shield failure of the starboard arc, forward of frame 19—” Esmay now knew exactly where frame 19 was on that class and series. “—with resulting damage to the forward weapons pods, and a hull breach here—” Seveche’s pointer circled the intersection of frame 19 with truss 7.

“And she’s coming in?” Someone less inhibited than Esmay had voiced her surprise exactly.

“She was lucky,” Seveche said. “They knocked out her scans, but not the scans of her hunting partners. Sting and Justice were in the system, and they blindsided the Bloodhorde ships, drove them off. Wraith had heavy casualties of course, but they were able to patch things up enough to make it through one jump point. They couldn’t manage two: the hull patch was leaking again, and they had nothing more to use on it. So—as you all no doubt felt—we’re jumping out to meet them.”

No one said it this time, but the tense faces around Esmay revealed their thoughts. DSRs stayed well behind any line of war for a very good reason . . . they couldn’t fight, maneuver, or get away. If they were attacked . . .

“I did remind our captain that old Kos isn’t an escort,” Seveche said wryly. “But we should be fine. Half our protection jumped ahead of us, and the rest with us. We’ll have Sting and Justice as well. And it looks like all the experimental stuff on Justice worked.”

“How long do we have?” asked Pitak.

“We expect to come into the same system in—” Seveche looked at the chronometer. “Seventy-eight hours and eighteen minutes. We’ll be making a series of fast-insertion jumps, coming out of the last at a slow relative vee; they’ll tow Wraith out to us.”

Seveche went on with the briefing. “We won’t know more about the hull damage until we come out of the last jump: we’re pushing this ship to its max, and not hanging around anywhere to pick up messages. For all we know, Wraith won’t make it until we arrive.”

By the time Koskiusko came out of its last jump, Esmay had been all over the ship on errands for Major Pitak. “Don’t be insulted, but you still don’t know enough to be really useful—and I need someone to keep up with all the other departments. Ship’s comm is overloaded, or will be.”

Esmay didn’t feel insulted at all. She was quite willing to check with Inventory Control on the stock of fasteners, star-slot, 85mm, pitch 1/10, interval 3mm (she patted the boxes with a proprietary hand—those were her fasteners), to ask the chief in Weapons Systems for an estimate of the damage that Wraith might have suffered from its own weaponry exploding when the hull breached, to crawl around the depths of the storage hold full of structural members checking each one with instruments that should detect any dangerous deformities. Everything had been checked before, and would be checked again, but she understood the need. Mistakes happen. The wrong color uniform gets on the person with the . . . no, she didn’t have time to think of that.

She had avoided Medical, in the superstitious belief that any wandering psychnanny would see in her face that she had terrible secrets, and she’d be out on a psych discharge before she could argue. But in the last hours before they closed with Wraith, Pitak sent her there, to coordinate the search and rescue with what was known about the hull and its problems.

Medical occupied a large chunk of T-5, with onboard operating suites, decontamination suites, regen tanks, neural-assisted-growth tanks, isolation chambers for exotic infectious diseases, diagnostic labs . . . the equivalent of a sector hospital. Esmay found it in the same state of bustle as her own department, and was passed from one desk to another until she located Trauma Response.

Esmay handed Pitak’s cube of data—updated since the downjump by direct transmission from Wraith—to the lieutenant in charge of the extrication and trauma transport teams.

“Hang around until I’m sure we understand all this,” he said, stuffing the cube into a reader. The display came up on the wall; the others milling around settled to look at it. “Forward hull breach—that’ll mean decompression injuries in the nearest compartments beyond the breach—” In the breach itself, it meant deaths, the responsibility of Personnel Salvage, not Extrication and Transport.

“Looks like truss failure here—” he pointed. “We’ll have to cut our way around that. Lieutenant, what’ll happen if we cut here and here?” He pointed. Esmay, briefed by Major Pitak, pointed to alternative cuts, already on the cube display in green. He scowled. “That’ll just barely give clearance for our suits—we don’t want to snag on anything—and we’ll have casualties coming out . . . we need more room than this. We’ve told H&A before—we need a solid two-meter clearance . . . why can’t we make this cut?” He pointed again at his first choice.

Esmay thought she knew, but this was a job for someone with seniority. “I’ll get Major Pitak for you,” she said.

“Do that.”

Esmay found Pitak deep in one of the holds stocked with H&A gear, and patched her through to the E&T commander . . . then backed off as the air heated up around her. She’d never actually heard Pitak swear before, but on this occasion the major left curlicue trails of smoke down the bulkheads. After the first explosion, she settled into explanation.

“—And if you want several dozen more casualties and a lot of sharp-edged ejecta floating around, then you go on and cut to your heart’s content—”

“Dammit, Major—”

As abruptly as a mule’s kick, the major calmed. “Now—what do you need for your suits? I’ll get you space, just tell me—”

“Two meters.”

“Mmph. All right. I’ll send Suiza back with a new plan that’ll give you two meters—round section or square?”

“Uh . . . square would be nice, but round will do. If it were only one it wouldn’t matter, but—”

“Yes, well, if the Bloodhorde were recruits on a first mission, Wraith wouldn’t be full of holes. I’ll get back to you.” Pitak turned on Esmay. “And why are you looking so surprised? Didn’t know I could turn the air blue, or didn’t think I could calm down? Either way, it looks bad . . . don’t just stare at me, Lieutenant, you’re making me nervous.”

“Sorry, sir,” Esmay said.

“Two stinking meters they want. Greedy pigs. I suppose they can’t be sure what they’ll find in there, and they need space—but they certainly can’t cut that one. If I lend them a structural tech to do the cutting, that shorts me on the main job—but it might save some lives and shouldn’t cost any. All right—here’s what you tell them.” She rattled off a series of contingent plans, and sent Esmay back to the medical deck. Esmay wanted to ask why she didn’t just call them on the com, but this was no time to ask Pitak anything.

Eight hours before the last jump point, Esmay and all but essential crew went down for a forced rest period, augmented by soporifics in the compartments. Esmay understood the reason for this—exhausted, twitchy people would make unnecessary mistakes—but she hated knowing that her calm repose had been created chemically. What if something happened and those awake forgot—or had no time—to turn on the antidote sprays?

She was still worrying at that when she woke, feeling rested and alert, to the soft chime of the downshift alarm. It had worked, as usual . . . but she didn’t have to like it.

The Koskiusko had emerged at near-zero relative vee to the system it entered, the safest way to dump something of its mass out of jumpspace. Before Esmay could get back to Pitak’s office in H&A, word had come down that Wraith’s tow was within twenty thousand kilometers. That made not only a bull’s-eye, but a potential disaster. “An error of considerably less than a tenth of a percent in exit vee, and we’d have romped right into her and her damnfool escorts,” Pitak growled. “But it does mean we can get to work quickly. Might save a few survivors in the forward compartments.”

Tightbeam comlinks were already up; realtime data poured into Koskiusko’s communications shack, to be decoded and routed to the relevant departments. Esmay spent the first hour or so watching the H&A data, and sending it on to the subspecialists. Then Pitak found another job for her. “Troll the stuff they’re sending Drives and Maneuver, and Special Materials. You’re good at picking up connections—someone upstairs may have misrouted something we need.”

Pitak herself had a model of the SLP Series 30 hull set up in both virtual and wireframe floor versions in the briefing room. Around it clustered the senior H&A engineers, making changes to reflect the peculiarities of Wraith as the data streamed in. Esmay looked up often to peek at the progress. She had seen plenty of computer 3-D displays of ship hulls, but never the scaled-down wireframe that now occupied a five-meter length of the floor. It looked like fun—though the empty space along one forward flank had nothing to do with fun.

She wondered if it was safe to set up for repair so close to the jump point exit lane. What if someone else came through? That wasn’t her problem; she shook her head to clear that worry away and went back to scanning the topics routed to SpecMat. There—that was her concern, a request to schedule the fabrication of four twenty-meter crystal fibers. She checked the origin . . . if it wasn’t someone in H&A, Pitak wanted to know. And it wasn’t—it was a damage assessment specialist aboard Wraith, who wanted them to replace some communications lines. She called Pitak.

“Aha! Good for you. No, dears, you don’t get to pick your own priorities,” Pitak said. She flagged the item, then sent it on to Commander Seveche’s stack. “They always want to, though,” she said, grinning at Esmay. “They think they’re helping us, figuring out what they need, when they don’t realize the sequencing problem. We can’t start anything in the SpecMat until we know everything we need at the structural level. If we get the sausage busy working on things we don’t need yet, so it can’t do what we need immediately, then either we lose that job or sit around like ducks on a pond until it’s done.”

“What will come first?” Esmay asked, since Pitak didn’t seem in a hurry to get back to the floor model.

“After assessment and evacuation, we have to clear away the old damage—there’s always something you can’t see until you get the skin off and expose at least ten meters you think is undamaged. I don’t care what they say about diagnostic equipment, nothing beats cutting into a carcass to find out what the bones look like. Anything this badly damaged requires rebuilding from the main structure on out, just as if it were new. It’s harder, because we do try to save some of the old . . . we save time and material, but it’s not as efficient as building it whole. My guess is that the first things we’ll want out of SpecMat are much longer crystals, grown in clusters and resin-bonded in the zero-G compartment. These will be stabilizing scaffolds for the real repair later. Then we’ll want the big framing members . . . and it can take weeks to do those. No one’s yet figured out how to grow the long ones and the ring ones in the same batch. Meanwhile, the die—and-mold sections can be working on little stuff like hatch frames and hatches. But the communications linear crystals come much later.”

“I . . . see.” Esmay felt she understood much better why Pitak had her doing this apparently unimportant job. She knew a lot more about hulls than she had, but this matter of sequencing repairs had never occurred to her. It made sense, now she thought of it.

“How’d you like a little adventure?” Pitak asked.

“Adventure?”

“I need someone to do a visual survey of the hull breach, and everyone I’ve got is busy. You’d need EVA gear—go over with the first teams, carry a vidcam and transmitter, and record everything for me.”

“Yes, sir.” Esmay wasn’t sure if she was more excited or scared.

“It’ll be about six hours, they think, when they’re in position.

Esmay had never done EVA since the Academy—and that was from a training shuttle hanging just a kilometer from a large station, in sight of a habitable planet. Out here, even the local star was far away, hardly a disk at all and giving minimal light. Koskiusko’s brilliant lights flooded the near flank of the Wraith, casting sharp black shadows. Esmay tried not to think of the nothing around her, and the way her stomach wanted to crawl out her ears, and looked instead at the damaged ship. She hadn’t seen the outside of a ship with her own eyes, rather than vidscan . . . and it was instructive.

Like most Familias warships, Wraith had a long rounded profile that could have been confused with airstreaming—but was instead the result of a compromise of engineering constraints. Shield technology dictated the smooth curves: the most efficient hull shape for maximum shield efficiency was spherical. But spherical ships had not proven themselves in battle; it had been impossible to mount drives—either insystem or FTL—to provide the kind of reliable maneuverability needed. The only spherical ships now in service were large commercial freight haulers, where the gain in interior volume and ease of shielding from normal space debris was worth the decreased maneuverability.

So a patrol craft like Wraith had a more ovoid shape, giving it a distinct longitudinal axis. Forward, its bow should have been a blunt rounded end, only slightly pointier than the stern. What Esmay saw instead was a crumpled mess, the shiny glint of fused and melted skin where it should have been (as the undamaged hull was) matte black. Aft, the smooth curves of the drive pods appeared to have suffered no damage, though she’d heard that Drives and Maneuver were worried about the effect of jumping with an unbalanced hull.

She dared a look over her shoulder, even though that twist made her swivel around the safety line like a child’s toy. Koskiusko’s vast bulk blocked out the stars well beyond the banks of searchlights that held the patrol craft in their gaze. She wasn’t even sure where the working lights on its exterior became stars against the dark.

Someone punched her shoulder. Right. Get on with the job. She pulled herself along, taking no more sight-seeing looks. Wraith’s damaged hull inched closer. Now she could see the pale tracks of fragments—of the weapons or the hull itself she didn’t know—against the dark normal hull coating beyond. The entry gaped, jagged and unwelcoming. Something whispered against her suit helmet, and she jerked to a halt. A firm tap on her shoulder sent her on. In a moment her brain caught up and she realized it must be minute ejecta from the breached hull: probably ice crystals from the continuing air leak the crew had not been able to seal completely.

She hit the red section of line: only ten meters from the attachment. Ahead of her, someone had already clipped on the first of the branch lines that would frame the working web. But this was Esmay’s station for now. She locked the slide on her safety line, clipped on the secondary stabilizing line that would confine her rotation to one plane, and waved the others past.

With the vidscan recorder aimed at the hole and the work going on, she could avoid thinking about where she was. Major Pitak wanted details—more details—even more details. “Don’t rush,” she’d said. “Take your time—stay at the ten-meter line until you’re sure you’ve shown me everything you can from there. You won’t be in the way of the scaffolding crews, but you will be able to see a lot. Every detail can help us. Everything.”

So Esmay hung in her harness and worked the recorder’s eye along the edge of the hull breach. Everything? Fine, she would spend a few minutes on those pale tracks, on the way the hull peeled back there to expose a twisted truss, on the odd bulge forward of the breach. By the time she’d filled half a cube from that location, the scaffolding crew had placed the major grid lines that would define the location of specific damage sites. Esmay signaled her intention to the chief, received permission, and clipped on to one of the cross-lines.

Really, she thought, it wasn’t that bad out here. Once the stomach adapted to zero gravity, it was kind of fun, scooting along the line with only an occasional tug . . . a red tie bumped her hand, and she grabbed. Her arm yanked at her shoulder, and she spun dizzily, cursing herself for forgetting that she was supposed to move slowly. When she got herself straightened out again, someone’s helmet visor was turned her way; she could imagine what they thought. Another dumbass lieutenant learns about inertia. She would have apologized, except that they weren’t supposed to use the suit radios unless it was a real emergency.

She was now on the opposite side of the hull breach, nearer the bow. From this angle, she could see into the hole better—or the searchlights had found a better angle. She forced herself to look in . . . but she didn’t recognize any bodies. The mess inside all looked mechanical, like a child’s toy that had been stepped on. Twisted, broken, shattered . . . all the words she knew for destruction. Slowly, recording, she made sense of it. The forward bulge came from a separation of the forward framing members—they had sprung, like an old-fashioned barrel-ring, under concussive force, and the shattered truss had gone with them.

Pitak would want to know how far forward the bulge extended. It could be mapped from Koskiusko, if no one was using the near-scan . . . but someone would be. Esmay looked at the bulge and wished she could ask the major. If she could get on the other side of it with the recorder . . . but there was no scaffolding line there. She thought of asking the scaffolding chief to string one for her, and thought again. They were far too busy to do favors for one curious lieutenant. No, she would either string one herself, or not. Not didn’t sound like a good option. She had four additional lines slung to her own suit, just as all the scaffolding crew had . . . so it was only a matter of setting the hooks.

She left the big vidscan behind, without admitting to herself the reason. She didn’t intend to come loose and drift away; it was just good sense to leave the vidscan where it would be easily found. The one built into her helmet would do well enough for this short excursion. She clipped the end of one of her long lines into the ten-meter safety ring, then edged along the scaffolding line to the hull itself. Her short safety line slid along the scaffolding line on its ring. The scaffolding line was anchored with a double pin—and-patch. She ran her long line through the ring that attached there, which took longer than simply clipping in, but was more secure.

She put a boot on the hull and tested. Nothing. She had halfway hoped that Wraith’s internal artificial gravity would give some adhesion, but it might not even be functioning. She could put short-stick patches on her boots, or she could just go on . . . it would be easier to go on, and she could always put the patches on if she couldn’t make progress.

She fished a stickpatch out of her toolband with her right hand, positioned it on the end of her gloved middle finger and gave the slightest push with her left hand. She slid to the end of her safety line, slowly. Reaching out cautiously, she touched the stickpatch to the hull; it adhered just as it was supposed to. Now she could stick a pin to the patch . . . she hoped. She left her right hand on the stickpatch, and fumbled for a pin. There it was. When she reached over slowly, her safety line tugged at her waist. She had definitely gone as far as she could go with that on. She got the pin stuck to the stickpatch with its own quick-setting backing, then opened a connecting ring, locked her long line into it, and clipped the ring into the pin’s opening.

The next move had a certain finality—when she unhooked her safety line from the scaffolding cable, she was depending on her own ability to set patches and pins. Caution reminded her that she was not a specialist in EVA work . . . that she would not have the right reactions if something went wrong. Esmay grinned at caution, alone inside her helmet. She had listened to caution and what good had it done her? First they thought she was dull, and then they thought she was a wild radical.

It wasn’t that different from climbing the rocks at the head of her valley, or the exercise wall in the Kos. Reach, place a stickpatch, a pin, clip into the pin, move past that protection to the next. Twenty pins along, and she was beyond the bulge of damage . . . though the bow shield outlet access points, which should have been smooth glossy nubs protruding a few centimeters from the hull surface, were instead jagged-edged holes. Esmay turned up the light on her helmet vidscan to examine them more closely. Something glinted, ahead of her. More debris—and surely Major Pitak would want a picture of it. She placed another pin, clipped in carefully and finger-walked herself nearer.

Then tried to push herself back, and made a move violent enough to fling her off the hull, to hit the end of her line. She tried to swim herself into a position where she could see, where she wouldn’t be flung back into the hull . . . what if there were two of them?

Was she even sure of what it was? And even if it was, it could be the Wraith’s own weapons, by chance stuck to its own hull by . . . by some reaction Esmay couldn’t begin to understand. She forced herself to breathe slowly. Mine. It was a mine, exactly like the ones in the handbooks of enemy weaponry she’d been looking at in the supply ship on the way to Sierra Station.

Meanwhile, she reeled herself in, hand over hand, coming in too fast to her last clip; she bumped the hull with bruising force, and would have bounced free except that she grabbed the pin and outward line in one hand and the inward line with the other and let her arms take the strain. Now she wished she had stickpatches on her boots—it seemed she hung there a very long time, bouncing back and forth. Finally the oscillations died down. With great care, she reached inward for the next clip, then unclipped from that pin. Twenty . . . twenty-two . . . twenty-seven pins in all, each requiring slow, careful movement to pass. She thought several times of using her suit comunit—but was that mine an emergency now? If no one else approached it before she warned them—and the scaffolding crew was still setting up their workspaces in the hull breach.

When she made it back to the scaffolding cable and clipped on her safety line, she felt it must have taken a half-shift at least. But her chronometer didn’t agree. Barely an hour had passed. She retrieved the big vidscan, and looked around for the scaffolding chief. She couldn’t go back to the Koskiusko without warning someone here. She spotted him at last, and edged from line to line until she could tap his shoulder, and then the message board he carried. His helmet nodded. Quickly, Esmay drew a clumsy sketch of the bow—the bulge, then the location of the mine. MINE she printed in careful letters.

He shook his head. Esmay nodded. He pointed to the big vidscan and drew a question mark. She had to shake her head, and point to the scan lens in her helmet. FOLLOW he signed, and led her along the scaffolding to a com nexus. While she was gone, they’d strung a direct line from ship to ship, and passed a wire into Wraith, so that the ships could talk without unshielded transmission. Esmay and the scaffolding chief both hooked their suits to the nexus.

“What do you mean, mine?” the chief asked. “And what were you doing that far up the bow, anyway? Your safety line isn’t that long.”

“You saw the bulge of damaged frame,” Esmay said. “I went to scan it for Major Pitak. I put out stickpatch pins and clipped in. And when I got beyond the bulge, I was scanning damaged shield nodes . . . turned up my suit scan lights . . . and there it was.”

“A mine, you say.” He sounded unconvinced.

“It looks like the illustrations in the handbooks. Not one of ours, either. A Smettig Series G, is what it looked like to me.”

“What kind of fuse, did you see that?”

“No.” She didn’t want to say it, but she couldn’t leave it at that. “I tried to jump back and . . . lost contact with the hull.”

“So . . . you don’t have full documentation?”

“No.” She didn’t even know how much of the mine her scan had picked up. How long had she looked at it before panicking?

“If it is a mine . . .” He sighed, the exasperated sigh of someone who does not want one more complication in a day already stuffed with complications. “Well . . . hell. I see you have to report it, and if it is a mine we’ll have to do something . . .” His voice trailed off, someone who didn’t know what to do next. He looked at her, and her intention to say anything vanished. She was an officer; it was her job to make decisions. This is what came of ignoring caution, she thought bitterly, as she tried to think who to report this to, aboard Koskiusko. The simple answer was Major Pitak, but an enemy mine stuck aboard a ship under repair wasn’t simple.

Pitak’s reaction, when Esmay finally got her on the other end of the connection, was hardly reassuring. “You think you saw a mine . . . an enemy mine.” Flat, almost monotone. “And you may or may not have gotten it on the vid . . . ?”

“Yes, sir. I . . . pushed off too hard. I was afraid . . .”

“I should hope so.” That with more energy. “You know, Suiza, you do have an instinct for drama. An enemy mine. Not everyone would think of that.”

“Think?” She wasn’t sure if she heard scorn or genuine amusement in the major’s voice. Or something else.

“Thinking is good, Suiza. Now the first thing you do, is tell the chief to get his crew the hell away from Wraith. Then you get your sorry tail back out there and get some decent vidscan of this putative mine. I hope you have enough air . . .”

“Uh . . . yes, sir,” Esmay said, after a quick glance at her gauges.

“That’s reassuring.” A long pause, during which Esmay wondered if she was supposed to cut the connection and go. But Pitak wasn’t quite through. “Now I’ll go tell our captain to tell Wraith’s captain that a totally inexperienced junior officer on her first real EVA thinks she saw an enemy mine stuck to his ship and while she didn’t get any good pictures the first time, she is now taking pictures which, if the mine doesn’t blow her up, may show us whether she’s right. And give us a clue how to do something about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That did not require an acknowledgement, Suiza. Can you think of any mistake you haven’t made yet?”

“I didn’t set it off,” Esmay said, before she could stop herself. A harsh bark of laughter came over the com.

“All right, Suiza . . . send the crew home and go bring me some decent pictures. I’ll see what I can do to scare up a bomb squad.”

The scaffolding chief was quite willing to take the orders of a junior officer; he scarcely bothered to utter a ritual grumble. Esmay didn’t wait for the crew to leave. She fished out stickpatches for her boots, checking twice to be sure she had the kind that would not adhere permanently. She didn’t want to be stuck there like an ornament. Then she used one of her safety lines and extra clips to sling the big vidscan on her back.

This time the trip was easier, with the pins already in place, and the grip of her boots on Wraith’s hull. She could walk part of the way between the pins, paying out line to herself from the clip before . . . it was easy to see, from this position, that she had not laid a straight course in the first place. She had angled across the bulge, rather than taking the shorter route straight forward. She didn’t look at anything but the pins, the clips, the line itself, until she was almost at the twentieth pin. Then light flooded over her from behind, washing out the fainter light from her helmet, and she missed the pin. When she turned to look, her helmet visor darkened automatically; she could see that one of Koskiusko’s big lights had turned away from the hull breach to search along the bows. Evidently Major Pitak had reached the captain. . . .

She reached again for the pin, and clipped into it safely. In the brighter light, the edges of the shattered shield nodes cast jagged shadows that striped the hull’s dull black. Things looked different now . . . she couldn’t see the mine, but it had to be close. Another pin, and another, and another . . .

EEEEERRRRP! Esmay jerked to a halt, and slammed her feet into the hull. The whiny, irritable, noise demanded her attention. A light flashed red in front of her . . . emergency . . . oh. She leaned her chin on the comunit switch.

“Don’t move,” a voice said in her ear. “Look down, knee level, 10 o’clock . . . but don’t move.” Esmay looked down, half her gaze cut off by the helmet. Something . . . something moved. Something small, perhaps the size of her ungloved fist, dark and glossy, rising on a thin wire stalk that gleamed in the searchlight . . . she wanted to tip her head and see where it was coming from, though she knew without seeing. “Just don’t move,” the voice said again. “With any luck it will think you’re part of the ship.”

Just as she opened her mouth to ask, the voice added, “And don’t talk. We don’t know what its sensor characteristics are.”

The little black ovoid on its wire—the programmable sensor pod of a smart mine—rose higher . . . she could see it clearly now, and presumably it could see her. Sweat sprang out on her whole body at once; it tickled abominably as it rolled down her ribs, down her belly . . . she wanted to scratch. Not as bad as she wanted to run.

She was part of the ship. She was a . . . an automatic repair mechanism. Turned off at the moment, nonfunctional . . . she tried not to breathe as the sensor swayed nearer, sweeping in a conical pattern dictated by the stiffness of its wire stalk and the vibrations induced at its source. She had been in scan herself; she knew what such a small package might contain. It could already have matched her thermal profile to that of “human in EVA suit” if that was part of its programming. It could have recorded her skeletal density, her respiratory rate, even her eye color.

And if it had done all that, she was already dead, she just hadn’t been killed yet.

The little pod on its stalk continued to revolve . . . but it was lower again. She didn’t know what that meant. Would a smart mine bother to retract its sensor array before blowing up? She could barely see it now, above the sight rim of her helmet. Then it was below her vision . . . she was not tempted to bend over and look more closely.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” came the voice in her ear again. “Our searchlight brought your shadow up past its threshold. But you were dead right—it’s definitely a mine, and definitely an enemy weapon.”

Dead right . . . she didn’t like that at all.

“We’ve got a hazardous equipment assessment team on the way,” the voice went on. “Just don’t move.”

She had no intention of moving; she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to move again. A few moments later, the tremors began, behind her knees; she struggled to control them. How sensitive was the sensor pod? Which little twitch might set it off? Reason suggested that she’d been moving more before, and it hadn’t reacted . . . but reason had no control over her hindbrain, where panic danced its jig on her spine.

She was very bored with being that scared by the time the voice spoke again.

“You put down a good line, Lieutenant. Don’t move . . . we’re at the next pin, we can see you clearly.”

She wanted to turn and see them, see something friendly, even if that was the last thing she saw . . . but she did not move.

“We’re afraid if we douse the spotlight, that’ll trigger another search sequence, and we don’t know how it’s programmed.”

The voice didn’t have to say more; she remembered that some mines were set to go after a specific number of searches had been triggered, even if they didn’t find anything. She might have triggered an earlier search, when she first flung herself away from the thing.

“If we’re lucky, it’s looking for a match to something specific, which we don’t resemble, but . . .”

She wished the voice would shut up now . . . what if the mine reacted to minute vibrations carried through someone’s suit? Even hers. Surely they had someone watching it . . . surely they had a plan. . . .

“Wraith’s given us an update on what’s beyond the hull breach—they’re evacuating personnel now.” A pause; she tried not to think. Then, “How’s your suit air? Give me a one-letter answer: A for ample, S for short, C for critical, then a number for minutes remaining.”

Esmay looked, and was startled to see how far down the gauge had gone. “S,” she said. “Sixteen.”

“I’d call that critical, myself,” the voice said. “Here’s what we’ll do. Someone’s going to come up behind you, trying to match your profile and cast the same shadow, and pop on an external reserve. Don’t move. He’ll do all the hooking up from his end.”

“Yes, sir,” Esmay said. Her eyes had locked onto the air gauge; the number flicked down to fifteen, and it was definitely in the red zone.

“Breathe slowly,” the voice said. “You’re not doing any work; you may have longer than that.”

Fear burns oxygen. She remembered that, along with other pithy sayings. It was amazingly hard to breathe slowly because you needed to save oxygen . . . she tried thinking of other things. Would she feel the vibration of the person coming up behind her? Would the mine’s sensor pod notice it? That kind of thought didn’t help her take slow breaths. She tried to send her mind back to her valley, that favorite and reliable relaxation exercise, but when the gauge flicked to fourteen, she gasped anyway. Don’t gasp. Don’t look at the gauge. It will either go down to zero, or it won’t.

She did not feel the vibration; what she felt first was a tiny push that made her sway forward. She stiffened against it. Then something tapped the back of her helmet, and a new voice spoke in her ear.

“Doin’ good, Suiza. Just don’t wiggle . . . while I . . . get this tank attached . . .” Random bumps and prods, which she tried to resist so that she wouldn’t move enough to trigger the pod’s notice. She eyed her oxygen gauge. Nine. Had she really been standing there waiting more than six minutes? Apparently so. The gauge flicked down again, to eight. She could hear clicks and squeaks from her suit as her unseen rescuer tried to hook up the auxiliary tank with the least possible movement.

“Gauge?” asked the voice.

She looked. Now it read seven. “Seven,” she said.

“Damn,” said the voice. “It’s supposed to—oh.” She didn’t know what that “oh” meant, and it infuriated her. How dare they mean whatever “oh” meant? An irritating scritch, repeated over and over, as she tried not to watch the gauge. It seemed a long time, but it hadn’t flicked down to six when the indicator whipped over to the green section.

“Gauge?” asked the voice again.

“Green,” Esmay said.

“Number,” the voice said, with a bite of disapproval.

Esmay swallowed the “uh” she wanted to make and blinked to focus on the number. “One four seven.”

“Good. Now I’m going to hook into your telemetry—you’ve been out more than your suit’s rated for—”

Another set of scritches; Esmay didn’t care. She was breathing; she would not run out of oxygen.

“Your internal temp’s low,” the voice said. “Turn up your suit heater.”

She complied, and warmth rose from her bootsoles. The tremor she’d been fighting to control eased—had it been only cold, and not panic after all? She wanted to believe that, but the sour smell of her sweat denied it.