Once a Hero

Chapter Fourteen

Barin tried not to think about Esmay Suiza; he had enough to do, if only he could concentrate on it. Besides, she was two ranks above him; he was a mere boy to her. He told himself that, but he didn’t believe it. She respected him; after that first disastrous argument, she had treated him as an equal. He felt himself scowling. This wasn’t about respect, exactly. It was about . . . he squirmed, trying to push the thought aside. Planet-born, and higher-ranked . . . he had no good reason to be thinking of her that way, and he was. Her soft brown hair made Serrano black look harsh . . . her height made Serrano compactness look stubby. The back of her neck . . . even her elbows . . . he didn’t want to feel this, and he did.

Serranos, his mother had said, fall hard when they fall. He had taken that as he took most of the things he was told about his inheritance, with far more than one grain of salt. His mother was not a Serrano; her occasional sarcasms might be envy. His adolescent crushes had been obvious even to him as temporary flares of hormonal activity. He had expected to find someone, if he ever did, in the respectable ranks of Fleet’s traditional families. A Livadhi, perhaps. A Damarin—there was one of his year, a sleek green-eyed beauty with the supple Damarin back. If they had been assigned to the same ship . . . but they hadn’t been.

This was unsuitable. He knew that. Grandmother would raise those eyebrows. Mother would sigh that sigh. His distant cousin Heris would . . . he didn’t want to think about her, either. By rumor she had chosen an unsuitable partner, but he didn’t think that would make her sympathetic.

The part of his mind that had not wandered off down this seductive lane prodded him back to alertness. Commander Vorhes would have his head on a platter if he didn’t get those scan components out of inventory and down to the repair bay in a hurry. He shook his head at his own folly, and caught an amused glance from another ensign he knew.

“Heads up, Serrano—you hear about the mysterious intruders?”

“Intruders? What intruders?”

“Some casualties off Wraith who weren’t that badly hurt, so we put ’em to work, and then they disappeared. About that time someone in Hull and Architecture went spacey and started claiming they were Bloodhorde agents or something . . . anyway, nobody can track ’em down, and there’s a sort of alert—”

“Nothing official yet?”

“No—” A loud blat-blat-blat interrupted them. “Unless this is it.”

It was. “All personnel report to nearest lift tube bay on Decks Seven and Eight for identification confirmation . . . All personnel . . .”

Barin and the others in sight drifted toward the nearest lift tube bay. “This is silly, you know,” the other ensign said. “They’ll never find anyone in this maze . . . five arms, the core, eighteen decks, all the dead space here and there, let alone the inventory bays . . . it’s impossible.”

“If it’s really a Bloodhorde assault group, they’d better find ’em,” Barin said. “Anyway, we’ve got internal scan in every compartment.” He remembered what Esmay had told him about the internal scan evidence used in her trials. “They’d have to know how to disable it to escape detection. Shouldn’t be that hard to track ’em, even in a ship this size.”

“What could they do, anyway? If we don’t find them, they’ll just rattle around. It can’t be but a few—” The other ensign slowed as the crowd ahead came in sight.

Barin thought of what Esmay had told him about the mutiny and what he’d heard of Heris Serrano’s capture of Garrivay’s cruiser. “It doesn’t take many to create havoc,” he said. “If they get command of the bridge . . .” All at once the ship which had seemed too large to be a ship, too safe to be interesting, felt fragile in the immensity of space. He tried to tell himself again that internal scan would find the intruders . . . but there were compartments without full pickup. And the volume of data alone would make it easy to miss significant details. That new AI system which had already glitched on keeping up with changes in the layout . . . could it really handle a job like this?

He joined the line forming in front of a Koskiusko crewman wearing Security patches. Ahead of him, others asked the questions he wanted answered, but the answers weren’t coming. “Just look in here,” they were all told. “Handprints there. You’ll feel a prick . . . now move along . . .”

Full ID checks? Barin hadn’t been through a full ID check since he entered the Academy. Did they really think someone could fake a retinal scan or handprint pattern? Could someone fake all that? He shifted from foot to foot. Behind him the line thickened. It was taking at least a minute to process each person and hand out a new ID tag. He occupied his mind with the obvious calculation . . . a max of sixty people an hour through each checkpoint, and they had only ten checkpoints? It would be hours and hours before they’d confirmed and issued new tags to the whole crew . . .

“Look in here, sir . . . and your hands . . . you’ll feel a prick.” He blinked from the flash as the machine checked his retinal pattern; he felt a sharp prick as it drew his blood to check against his record. The machine bleeped, and Barin took the bright pink tag they offered. Unlike his old one, it didn’t have his picture, just the shiny strip that would allow scan to recognize him as legitimate. Even as he walked off, on his way to inventory for the parts Vorhes had wanted, he saw more security personnel arriving with more screening equipment.

He took the tube up to Deck 13, and gave his request to the master chief who was supervising the automated retrieval system. She did not have one of the new pink ID tags, but nodded toward his.

“I expect the captain’ll shut down the automated system soon, and then I can go get my new tags. You’re lucky you got here now.”

Inside, the noise of the shifting racks was only half as loud as usual. Soon enough, one of the little robocarts slid up to the door with his order; the chief checked it off.

“Do you need transport, sir?”

Barin eyed the load and decided he could manage. “No, thank you.”

“Fine, then.”

He picked up the packaged components and decided not to take the tube back down . . . he could walk around the core, clockwise with the traffic, then take the ladder up to Deck Twelve and be in the Tech Schools inventory for the other things Vorhes wanted. And he might see something . . . his pulse quickened. If they were intruders, and if they were Bloodhorde, what would they look like? All he knew about the Bloodhorde was that they favored tall blonds.

As he passed the base of T-5, he could see into the ship security bay, which looked like a kicked anthill. Why couldn’t he have been in the ship’s own crew? He could imagine himself easily as that lieutenant of security, the one scowling at him now as if to wonder what an ensign from the 14th’s remote sensing section was doing here. It would be a lot more interesting than his job . . . he wouldn’t see any intruders, or any enemy on the outside either. He strode on, wishing hives on the person who’d assigned him to scan on a DSR, instead of something suitable to a Serrano.

The schools inventory, when he got there, was empty. He leaned on the counter, tempted to stick his wand in the console and find out where the parts were that he wanted. It wasn’t safe, really . . . if everyone was lined up getting new ID tags, who was making sure the intruders didn’t get into someplace like this? Although why they’d want to . . .

He heard footsteps coming, and felt his pulse quicken again. What if it was intruders? He glanced around and saw nothing useful as a weapon . . . but the plump sergeant who puffed into view wore a new pink ID tag.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, his cheeks scarlet with exertion. “I had to run up all the ladders . . . they’ve turned off the lift tubes, just in case, which is ridiculous . . . it only makes more work for the rest of us.”

Barin handed over his list. “Perhaps they’re concerned that the intruders might cut the power to the lift tubes.”

“You don’t think they would!” The sergeant paused in the act of entering the access codes.

“I don’t know what they’d do,” Barin said. “But if someone wanted to cause trouble, that’s one way to do it.”

“Stupid,” the man said, and completed the entry. “Let’s see . . . aisle 8, level 2, tray 13. Just a moment, then.” The schools inventory had never been automated, and Barin waited while the sergeant found his items and handed them over. Barin signed the terminal and headed back. Should he use the ladders here . . . T-1 was probably less crowded . . . or go on around and straight down in T-3?

He split the decision, dropping to Deck Six, then going around core to T-3 for the final descent to Deck Four.

Vokrais had found the place, one of the maintenance shafts for the lift tube clusters, this one at the inboard junction of T-3 and T-2 on Deck Six, on his way to the meal at which he’d picked up the disgustingly dull knife and fork now hidden under his jumpsuit. He’d found Metris again, and passed the word. Metris would pass it on, as he would. How long did they have? His blood sang with excitement, clearing away the dregs of the sleepygas. This was nothing like the usual ship boarding, when they blasted their way in, weapons in hand, to take swift control of some fat, lazy trader. This was a real challenge.

He wondered if anyone had noticed their weapons and equipment, back on Wraith. They’d found the mine—that was common gossip, which they were glad to tell a presumed Wraith crewman.

“Would have blown you to hell and back,” someone had said to him. “If our people hadn’t found it and foamed it down.”

But had they foamed the inner compartments too? If so, his favorite knives and tools might be safely embedded in the foam, and he could retrieve them later. It had been his grandfather’s battle knife too . . . he wanted it back.

They needed weapons. He knew he could take any two or three of these effete technicians barehanded, but there were thousands of them. His whole team together could kill dozens, but it would not be enough. Somewhere on this monster ship were weapons of all sorts, hand weapons and ship weapons, ammunition, powerpacks . . . everything. He just had to find it.

His supposed supervisor wasn’t watching him closely; he walked off casually in the direction of the dumps . . . no, they called them “heads” for reasons he’d never figured out. He was willing to call any of these fools shithead, but it still seemed an odd name for the receptacle. He felt eyes on him, and glanced back to see his supervisor, looking annoyed. The man shrugged as Vokrais went on through the door.

Inside were three others, a man and two women. Vokrais eyed the women. The Bloodhorde hired some female mercenaries, but they fought in all-female units. That was the natural way, otherwise men would think of nothing but rut, day in and day out. He was thinking of it now, as the tall redhaired one was washing her hands. She looked into the mirror, met his gaze, and scowled at him. Scowl all you wish, Vokrais thought. You will be tossed on my spear before morning. Or another one would; it didn’t really matter.

When they left, he explored the echoing space with its seamless hard floor, its shiny walls. He found two other doors; one opened into a storage closet, and one into a different corridor. He tested the top of the closet—he could get out that way, if he had to—but chose to walk out the other door as if he had come in that way. Here he would have no pesky supervisor watching his every move. He tried to remember where his pack-second had been sent, and thought of using the data wand.

He pushed it into one of the dataports, and flicked through the controls coding queries.

“Need some help?” someone asked at his elbow. Vokrais managed not to strike, but his move was sudden enough that the man—older, gray-haired—stepped back, startled.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Timing still off . . .” and he gestured to his ID tag, which had the Wraith shipcode on it.

“Oh—I thought perhaps you were lost or something. That’s a slow-stream dataport; if you want a quick answer to anything, there’s a fast-stream down there.”

“I would like to find the other survivors,” Vokrais said. He struggled to remember the names on the uniform tags. “Camajo, Bremerton . . .”

“Ah . . . you know their numbers?”

No, he didn’t know their mythical numbers that went with their mythical names. He shook his head, not trusting his voice.

“A search on Wraith should get ’em,” the man said, and put his own wand into a port a few meters away. Vokrais noticed that this one had a double ring around it, blue and green. The one he had been using had a double band of yellow and green. “Here you are,” the man said then. “I’ll transfer it to yours . . .” He reached for Vokrais’s data wand, then snugged it next to his for a moment, and handed the wand back.

“Thanks,” Vokrais remembered to say; the man nodded and strode off. He looked at the display options, and walked down the corridor as if thinking, looking at the names and duty assignments coming up. Would that man remember him? Report him? Would anyone be expected to know about the color codings on the dataports? He’d felt smug that he’d recognized a dataport at all.

Hoch was indeed in Hull and Architecture, in wing T-3 and on Deck Four. Vokrais considered the distance and cursed to himself. What misbegotten brain-dead fool of an engineer had designed this ship . . . it made no sense. A space station with an oversized drive, that’s what it was, not a ship at all. He was wasting too much time hunting people, but he could hardly get on the shipspeaker (surely they had a shipspeaker) and call.

He spotted another of his people lounging along looking the picture of a lazy incompetent, and signaled him. Sramet wandered over, and Vokrais told him where to meet, and that he would find Hoch. “And don’t slouch like that,” he said, as he finished. “At least look like you’re on business.” Sramet nodded, and put on the character of earnest, hardworking dullness as if he had pulled a mask over his head.

And that was another thing lost in Wraith . . . not only their technical expert and their weapons, but their tools, and their special gear that included disguises and camouflage.

Hoch, when he found him, was being chewed out by one of the Familias NCOs, who finished a scathing description of his abilities with a couple of ethnic slurs aimed at his presumed planet of origin. “And you can take your sorry tail back to Commander Atarin’s clerk, and explain that Petty-major Dorian won’t have you on the crew, is that clear?”

Hoch caught Vokrais’s eye, but his expression of sullen incompetence did not change. “Yes, sir,” he said, in a strangled voice.

“Get on with it, then.” The NCO, suppressed fury in every line of his body, stalked off down the passage. Hoch looked straight at Vokrais, this time with the expression of his mind: he would kill that one, when he found him again.

“We have a place,” Vokrais said, as they walked back the other way. He gave the location, then said, “I need to find more—only two others so far . . . this thing is too big.”

“I’ll go too . . . do you know where they are?”

Vokrais was able to repeat the trick, as he thought it, of mating his data wand with Hoch’s to transfer the list of personnel locations. “We’re going to be discovered soon,” he said. “I can feel it. We don’t fit in with these . . . people.”

“Slaves,” Hoch said, in their tongue, and Vokrais looked at him sharply.

“Careful. We still have to do it.”

“In my sleep, packleader.” That in a lower voice still, but still in their tongue.

“Soon, then,” said Vokrais, in the Familias. “Make one sweep clockwise—they all seem to go clockwise on the big passage around the core—and then meet. I want to make one trip as far upship as I can get before they realize we’re aboard.”

“Why should they? They’re half-asleep, sheep ready for shearing.”

“Go, packbrother,” Vokrais said. Hoch’s eyes gleamed, and his arm twitched; he moved off to the left. Vokrais went across to the nearest cluster of lift/drop tubes and shot upward. He had enjoyed the swift ride many times on his visits to Familias space stations; the Bloodhorde had sufficient trouble with the technology of gravity control that they used lift tubes rarely, never for such distances. He didn’t suppose it would take him all the way to the top, but there it was: Deck Seventeen.

He stepped out into the same wide curving corridor, here less busy than down on Deck Four. He walked along briskly, as if he knew where he was going. A bored guard stood at an opening that might lead to the bridge, on the core side; Vokrais didn’t try to look in. His shoulders itched; he knew he was being watched. He walked on, most of the way around the core, surprised to find no other lift tube clusters, as there had been on the lower decks. Did only one set come this far? He didn’t want to go back past the first guard, like someone who had lost his way.

He came to another guarded opening. Here the guard looked more alert, eyes shifting back and forth. Vokrais could see the bulge of lift tubes ahead, but before that was a wide opening into T-2 . . . it had the label above . . . and he remembered that the dining hall had also been in T-2. He looked in and almost stumbled in amazement. The place was full of plants, green plants.

He turned in through the door as if this was what he’d intended all along, and felt the guard’s attention drop from him like a heavy load. Beneath his feet, something that almost felt like soil cushioned his steps; on either side were the plants, from ankle to waist-high, some with colorful flowers on them. He ambled along a path, seeing no one. Paths met the one he was on, diverged, wound around taller plants that made screens so that he could not tell how large this place was.

Water pricked his face; when he looked up, he could see a foggy halo around the lights far overhead. The path ended abruptly in a waist-high wall of fake stone—he felt it, and was sure it was molded. A path ran beside the wall to rustic fake-stone steps to his left. Below . . . below was more garden, and one enormous tree rising up past him to end fifteen meters over his head. Behind it, a rough-looking gray wall with patches of blurred white, on which someone was splayed out as if for sacrifice: arms wide, legs stretched apart. As he watched, someone laughed, far below, and the figure heaved upward, lost its grip, and fell.

Vokrais watched the fall, waiting for the satisfying thunk, but instead the climber jerked to a halt in midair, and hung swinging. Now he could see the thin line, looped far above and coming back to the hand of someone standing beside the wall.

He started down the steps. Were the Fleet planners finally schooling their troops in hostile boarding techniques? But if so, why not have them in the gear they’d need? Why practice in thin short pants and little raglike shirts?

From the garden on Deck 16, he ran down one of the sets of stairs—stairs in stairwells, as in a building, not ladders as in a real ship—to Deck 14, then went out on the main curved passage again to catch the drop tube down to Deck 6. He could have used the access shaft itself, checking it out as he came, but he was eager to see how many people Hoch had collected.

When he came through the hatch, he saw nothing at first, which was what he expected to see. Above and below, the shaft seemed empty, a smudged gray tube with a spiral ladder curling around bundled cables and pipes in the middle. Vokrais grinned, noting where lights had burnt out in helpful places, and whistled a few notes.

His pack reappeared, one after another moving out of the shadows, out of hatches that opened into other access tunnels, out of whatever cover they’d found. One by one they came up or down the ladder to cluster near him. One, three, four, six, ten . . . plus himself and Hoch. Twelve only, and not enough. He scowled at Hoch.

“Is this all?”

“No . . . but all who could come safely right now. Three more coming, when they can slip away. Sramet saw Pilan and Vrodik, but couldn’t speak to them long enough. Geller is the only one nobody’s seen or reported on.”

“Who has weapons?” he asked, pulling out the knife and fork he’d taken.

“They don’t carry weapons,” Sramet said, sounding disgusted. “Not even the ones with Weapons Systems patches.”

Two others had stolen dinner knives; Brolt had already started to sharpen his to a stabbing point.

“The contractors?”

“They’re here,” Hoch said. “But we haven’t contacted them yet.”

“So we don’t know about the mechanism.” Vokrais thought a moment. “It would be better to find out for ourselves, without asking them. I don’t trust them.” His distrust had brought them all here; he had argued, successfully, that even if the scum were honest, they might panic and undo the job once they realized their own necks were in danger. Later his plan had expanded; if they were quick enough, his warband would have the entire glory to themselves, the richest capture in the history of the Bloodhorde.

“We could take them . . . we could make sure they did it right.”

Vokrais grinned. “We do need a few hostages.”

“They won’t care—” Hoch said. The Bloodhorde didn’t. Anyone careless enough to get caught was worthless; even if he escaped later, he wouldn’t be trusted again for a long time.

“Familias is different. Besides, we need some of their technical tricks. We’re supposed to know how to do things we don’t understand.” They nodded; they’d all found that out in only the few hours. Astounding that a warship crew, even down to the fewest of stripes, would be expected to understand all the gadgetry . . . but so it had proved. Only the fact that they’d been gassed, and assumed to have residual problems from that, had kept them from being discovered simply by their ignorance. “If we get one of the right family, it’ll slow ’em down. They’ll stop to think about it; they’ll try a rescue. Then we get more.”

“So you want us to pick certain needles out of a stack of thousands?”

“If they come handy. Here—shove that wand into the ’port and let’s get a crew list.” It was a blue—and-green ringed port, he noticed. Hoch put his wand in, and information appeared in little glowing letters, projected on the air itself.

At first, the long list of names meant nothing. Then Vokrais remembered the Familias habit of putting organizational charts on the system, and figured out the right code to ask for. “We want someone in scan, so they can tell us how to disable their miserable systems without blowing them away,” Hoch said.

“The question is, do we want someone on the ship’s crew, someone from the schools division, or the heavy maintenance division?”

“Heavy maintenance,” Vokrais decided. “From what I heard, they’ve made all sorts of modifications to the original ship’s architecture . . . the crew may not know about it, but those in maintenance will.”

In a few minutes, they had a list of personnel assigned to Remote Sensing, 14th Heavy Maintenance Yard. “Commander Vorhes,” Vokrais muttered. “That won’t work—he’ll be surrounded by people all the time. Lieutenant Bondal . . . Ensign Serrano . . .” He looked up, grinning. “Serrano. Wasn’t that the bitch who caused us trouble at Xavier?”

“And an important Fleet family. Even though he’s only an ensign, that’ll make them take notice.”

“If he knows enough,” Hoch said. “He’s only an ensign. The lieutenant I found in Hull and Architecture isn’t an expert . . . the junior officers can be sent here for short runs.”

“If he doesn’t know enough, we can snatch another from scan—the family connection alone will be useful.”

“Hostage or vengeance?”

“Well . . . we tell them it’s a hostage.” Another low chuckle; they understood that. This Serrano cub would go back to his family—if he did—toothless and tamed, a warning not to interfere with Bloodhorde nobles. “Now—have you all used the mapping function on these things?”

Heads shook, and Vokrais glared at them. They’d come for the technology; they should be learning to use it. The data wands weren’t difficult. He put his own in the port this time, telling them about the fast and slow ports as if he’d known all along. Then he switched to the open display, and the ship graphics glowed before them.

“We need a higher access probe to find everything we want,” he said. “So we need to kill someone in ship security—with lots of stripes—and use theirs. But here you can see . . .” He pointed out the bridge, the secondary command center tucked in between the two FTL drives, the medical decks and the ship security offices on T-5. “They’ll have weapons in security—even these sheep must run amok sometimes—and if we knock out their security personnel, we’ve eliminated resistance.” All that counted, all that knew how to fight in any organized way. “In medical, they’ll have more of that sleepygas, and the antidotes—”

“Eye for eye,” murmured Hoch, grinning. Bloodhorde tradition, to return insults as exactly as possible, before the final bloodletting.

The loud blat-blat-blat of some alarm made them all look around. Then the muffled voice that must be a transmitted announcement. Hoch stuck his data wand back in the ’port, this time choosing the faster display, which only the user could see.

“They caught on,” he said after a moment. “They’re pulling everyone in for identification checks, full-scale . . . whatever that means.” Vokrais was impressed. After that sloppy beginning, he’d expected to have days to wander around unnoticed before being found out. But this was better. He grinned at his pack.

“They know something’s wrong, but they don’t know where we are. It’ll take them awhile to do the checks and issue new ID tags. Hours, probably. In the meantime, they won’t even know how many of us there are. Vanter, Pormuk—” These were not their Fleet names, but their own. “You’ll get us new tags. Try to dispose of the bodies where it’ll take awhile to find them. Get the data wands, too. If you see any more of our people, sweep them up. Hoch, take two—three if you must—and get those contractors; we need to know where the self-destruct is, and be sure the captain can’t use it. The rest of you, come with me. We need weapons, especially as we’re shorthanded right now.”

“We come back here . . . ?”

“No. They have gardens on this ship, if you can believe it. Maybe more than one, but at the top of T-2, Decks 16 and 17. Lots of places to hide, and many ways in and out. There’s a big tree—you can’t mistake it—and an assault wall.”

“If we’re seen . . . ?”

“Capture or kill, and don’t capture more than you can handle on the move. They know they’ve got trouble; we’ll show them how much.” Low growls answered him; they liked this much better than pretending to be softbellied Fleet techs. “Go.”

Captain Hakin, wearing his own new ID tag, looked as grim as expected when he met with the other senior officers aboard. He had called them to the officers’ lounge nearest the bridge, where officers just going off or coming on duty met informally. Now the room was guarded by security personnel, their wary eyes watching everyone in sight.

“The Wraith crew members who came aboard as casualties from the forward compartments have not appeared for ID checks,” he said. “We have forwarded what little videoscan we have to Captain Seska aboard Wraith, and he is sure that at least eight of those were never his personnel. He is showing every image to his remaining crew, to check on the ones he said he wasn’t sure of. But we must assume that all twenty-five Wraith casualties who were not injured, and who were sent to work assignments by Chief Barrahide, are actually impostors. We do not know where they came from; I understand that Lieutenant Suiza had a notion that they might be Bloodhorde intruders. If so, this ship is in even more peril than we thought.”

“Any sign of a Bloodhorde ship?” asked Admiral Dossignal.

“No, Admiral. However, the situation with regard to our escort is . . . tenuous.”

“Tenuous?” asked Admiral Livadhi.

“Yes . . . Sting and Justice, as the admiral recalls, were assigned to patrol the same area as Wraith. Their captains insisted on returning to that patrol area, arguing that they could then guard the exit jump point there if the Bloodhorde tried to use it. That made sense, before we knew about the mine on Wraith; they’d been long gone by the time we suspected that intruders had come aboard.”

“And our present escort?”

“Is useless if the intruders gain control of this ship—they could destroy Koskiusko, of course, if they were ordered to do so, but who is to give the order? I have made it clear to both captains that they should do precisely this, if they think the ship has been captured, but they have not yet agreed. Captain Plethys said he did not feel certain he could know that the ship had been irrevocably lost, even if he could not make positive identification of an officer on the crew list on a comlink. He argued that communications capacity might be interdicted by the intruders without their actually gaining control—”

“Which is quite possible,” Admiral Livadhi put in.

“Quite so. In fact, any type of signal which I tried to imagine could, in theory, be interdicted by the intruders before they gained control. Captain Martin agreed with Captain Plethys, and added that he did not wish to be responsible for the considerable destruction of life and materiel, even if the intruders did appear to control this ship. He argued that the rest of the wave will no doubt return to guard us, and offered his ship to go and explain the situation. I insisted that he stay, but I’m not sure he will.”

“You think he’ll desert us in the face of enemy attack? That’s treason!”

“There are no enemy ships on scan,” Livadhi pointed out, hands steepled. “And he knows he can do nothing about the intruders already aboard. He probably thinks that will clear him with a Board.”

“Not if I’m around to argue it,” Dossignal growled.

“I agree . . . but if I remember Captain Martin, and I believe this is the same Arlen Martin I once attempted to teach Military Justice to, he’s got a mind like an eel. Twisting and slithering away is his nature. I never did understand why he was given a ship.”

“So you think he’ll go,” Captain Hakin said.

“Probably. Certainly, if his scan techs can locate an enemy ship at a distance where he thinks we can’t . . . and then he’ll claim he didn’t know it was there. He doesn’t make mistakes, you see.”

Hakin looked even grimmer. “Then, sirs, I’m faced with a dilemma which you have probably already anticipated . . . when do I throw the switch?”

“The switch?”

Hakin sighed. “The admiral will recall that this ship, unlike vessels intended for combat, carries a self-destruct device and my orders are unequivocal. If I believe that the Koskiusko is in imminent danger of capture by a hostile force, I am to prevent such capture and appropriation by the enemy . . . by destroying the ship and—if necessary—her entire complement of personnel.”

“But . . . are you serious?”

“Quite.” Hakin looked ten years older at the word. “We’ve talked about how useful this ship would be to the Bloodhorde—their own private shipyard capable of manufacturing two or three fully-armed cruisers just with the materiel in inventory, and with resupply of the most basic type, capable of building a battle group. Right now it’s full of the very people who know how to use it—some of whom, faced with torture or death, would cooperate with the Bloodhorde, at least long enough to train replacements.”

“Nobody would—!” began Livadhi.

“Begging the admiral’s pardon, but no military organization in the history of man has had zero failure rate in any system, including the human system. The recent action at Xavier—and for that matter Captain Martin—shows that Fleet is no exception. Besides, even if every person now aboard this vessel chose death, the Bloodhorde can hire civilians from all over the galaxy to operate what they can’t figure out.”

“But surely—we’re not at that point yet. There are only a few Bloodhorde aboard; security will no doubt pick them up in a few hours—”

“The point at which I should push the button is before the Bloodhorde have a chance to prevent it working. Do you think they haven’t assumed such a device exists? Do you think they’re not looking for it right now, disarming it if they’ve found it? They don’t want to lose this ship any more than we do—but the only way I can ensure that we don’t lose it is to destroy it.”

Dossignal looked at him compassionately. “You’re right, Captain, that’s a tough decision. Are you asking for advice?”

Hakin grimaced. “It’s my decision . . . my responsibility . . . but I’ll be glad to hear your ideas on choosing the right time. Only realize that I know the right time must be too soon rather than too late.”

“How do you test the device integrity?” asked Livadhi. “And what’s your normal test cycle?”

“It’s tested weekly, by partially arming the device—it has its own control board, with the usual sensor array and so on. I have a vidscan of it, so I can see the attached status lights, and I also have scan that reports whether the circuits are functioning correctly.”

“So . . . have you tested it since the intruders came aboard?”

“Not yet. My concern, though, is that even if it tests out now, they could find and disable it at any time.”

“You’ve put a guard on it?”

“Yes . . . but as you know we need security personnel in other areas, including searching for the intruders. They might overpower the guard.”

“Still, that should give you some warning. If the guard doesn’t report . . . if the vidscan changes. You can test the system while the guard is there, can’t you?”

“Yeees . . .”

“Would you like a witness to the test?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Then my suggestion is that you test it now—immediately. And my second suggestion is that you jump back out of this system, which would make it harder for the Bloodhorde group we expect to find us.”

“And for our ships as well,” Captain Hakin said.

“Yes, that’s true. But avoiding a Bloodhorde assault group seems more important at this juncture . . . I’m convinced that with over 25,000 loyal personnel on board, we can deal with the intruders—be they Bloodhorde commandos or any other hostile group—as long they aren’t reinforced by outside forces.”

“Very well.” Hakin spoke to the guard at the door, and led them across to the bridge.