Once a Hero

Chapter Fifteen

“The Captain asketh, and the Admiral respondeth,” said Lieutenant Bondal, staring at his status board.

“Sir?” Barin pulled himself away from another daydream, this one of himself rescuing Esmay Suiza from faceless Bloodhorde goons.

“All that vidscan that’s supposed to be watching every square centimeter of this ship . . . which in theory could find the intruders?”

“Mmm?”

“Isn’t there, or isn’t working, and the captain has quite reasonably asked the 14th to come to his aid. So we—you and I, for example—replace, install . . . and somehow I suspect the intruders, whoever they are, will manage to undo what we did, right after us.”

“I hope not,” Barin said. “Why doesn’t the captain seal off the different wings? He could do that, couldn’t he?”

“He could blow us all to glory if he wanted to, or turn off the artificial gravity, or . . . I don’t know why he’s done what he’s done, or why he’ll do what he’s doing, and it’s not my problem. Scan is my problem.” He sighed, heavily, and began to make notes. “I know you went to inventory only an hour or so ago, Ensign, but you’ll have to go back.”

“It’s what ensigns are for,” Barin said cheerfully. “That’s what you said yesterday: scutwork, gofering . . .”

“And making smart remarks. Yes, well, you’re on your way to a successful career as an ensign, laddy-o.”

Barin winced dramatically. Lieutenant Bondal had a freakish sense of humor, but was easy to work with if he thought it was appreciated. And he knew his business, which made the teasing worthwhile.

Traffic in the corridors was down except for the line still backed up at the ID station. Barin flashed his pink pass at the guard before entering the lift tube. It was like being back at school, where you’d had to have a hall slip to use the toilet. He decided not to make that remark to the grim-faced guard watching him. In the aftermath of the shipwide identification verifications, Barin understood why the automatic inventory racks had been disabled. With hostiles aboard, the captain didn’t want anyone confused by the sudden shift of a rack . . . if it shifted now, they’d know it was enemy action. Still, that made retrieving a component stored on the second-to-top rack, at the rear, a time-consuming procedure. He looked up, checking the rack numbers. Yes, 58GD4 was up there, and what he needed should be on it. He looked at the maintenance ladder with its warning signs and tangle of safety harness . . . danger: vibration from moving racks. clip in before using. But the racks wouldn’t be moving, and putting on the harness would slow him down. On the other hand, he’d look pretty stupid if he slipped for some reason and broke an arm. Lieutenant Bondal would be furious; they were shorthanded already, what with the intruder scare.

Sighing, he got himself into the harness. It felt awkward; he was three-quarters sure he didn’t need it. The safety clip fit around a rod beside the ladder steps, but had to be unclipped and reclipped every five or six rungs. He glanced around; he hoped no one was watching his clumsy caution. Up the first level, then the second. It was annoying to stop and unclip and clip every single time, even though he was getting faster at it. Somewhere across the compartment, he heard a clang and a muffled curse. His heart raced a moment, then quieted. It had to be a crewmate; the last reported sighting of the hostiles had been two decks down and over on the starboard side . . . a kilometer away, and only five minutes before. Should he call out and identify himself? Probably.

“Yo,” he said. A distant voice replied with an indistinct bellow that seemed to be a familiar grade and name, with a questioning intonation on the end. He heard the rhythmic sound of footsteps coming nearer.

“—You all right?”

“Fine,” Barin said, from his perch now eight racks off the deck. He could see a brown head moving along an aisle, a familiar uniform, though the angle was wrong to see insignia. “Up here,” he said.

The person looked up, and grinned. “See you. You hear me trip over the vent hatch someone left undogged?”

“Vent hatch undogged?” Barin didn’t like the sound of that. “Where?”

“Back there.” Closer now, the man pointed back toward the compartment entrance. Barin saw by his stripes that he was a sergeant minor. “Inboard ventilation access hatch . . . probably some idiot guardsman went through looking for the bad guys and forgot to close it behind him.”

“We can hope,” muttered Barin. He felt cold, and he wasn’t sure why. He glanced around. The inventory racks ran up to the overhead, fifteen meters from the deck, divided by aisles and cross-aisles usually humming with robotic carriers. He couldn’t see far in any direction but along that one aisle. The racks he climbed beside were a half-meter high, but the ones across from him were a full meter . . . some full, and some partly empty. Plenty of room for someone to hide, even in the half-meter racks.

“What were you looking for?” he asked the other man.

“57GD11, code number 3362F-3B,” the other said promptly. “Scrubber port covers. Should be around here somewhere.”

“I’m on 58GD4,” Barin said. “If that’s any help.” He watched as the other man peered at one rack after another.

“Ah—here it is.” The other man started up the ladder of a stack two down from Barin without putting on the harness. Barin started to say something to him, but shrugged. He hadn’t needed his own harness so far. He turned back to his own ladder; he had a long way to go.

By the time he was up ten more levels, he was breathing hard. A vertical fifteen meters wasn’t like the short 3-meter ladders he was used to. The climbing wall was only ten meters. Still . . . he was over halfway. He looked up; the remaining racks seemed to loom over him. He glanced around for the other climber.

No sign of him. Had he found his items and gone away? Barin leaned out against the safety belt, trying to see . . . nothing. When he looked down, nothing but deck showing in the aisle. Odd. He’d have expected the other man to say something when he left. Barin shrugged, finally, and climbed up another rack level, reaching up over his head to clip in the safety line.

As his eyes came level with the rack edge, he had just time to think “How odd” before the cold round muzzle of a riot gun prodded him under the chin. It looked exactly like the ones that ship security carried.

“Don’t move.” The voice had no expression. Barin stiffened for a moment he would later realize was critical, and then someone grabbed his ankles. He arched back, trying to kick loose; the barrel of the gun slammed into the side of his head hard enough to stun. He struggled, but now something had caught his safety harness and pulled him hard against the ladder—his feet—then his arms—and finally another blow to the head that dropped him into a dark hole where he was only vaguely aware of being dragged off the ladder and onto the chill metal mesh of the inventory rack.

He felt too many things to sort out easily. His feet, bumping over some surface with regular obstructions. His shoulders, painfully cramped from the traction on his arms. His head throbbed, with occasional flashes of brighter pain that left ghostly spikes across his vision. Other things hurt too—his ribs, his left hip, his wrists—but where was he?

He tried to ask this, but choked on the gag in his mouth. Something soft—cloth or another soft material, that he could not spit out, though he tried. The part of his brain that could think suggested caution . . . waiting to see what happened . . . but between the choking and the dark his body’s instincts opted for action. He flared his nostrils, trying to suck in more air, and twisted as hard as he could. Someone laughed. Blows crashed into him, from all sides; he tried to curl up defensively, but someone yanked his legs out full-length, and the beating didn’t stop until he had passed out again.

“You’re a Serrano,” the voice said.

Barin concentrated on breathing. His nose felt like a pillow-sized mass of pain, and no air went that way; his captors had loosened the gag so he could breathe through his mouth. It had been made clear that this was a privilege they could revoke at any moment. He could barely see through his eyelashes, which seemed to be glued together. When he tried to blink, his eyelids hurt, and his vision didn’t clear.

“We don’t like Serranos,” the voice went on. “But we do recognize your value as a hostage . . . for now.”

He wanted to say something scathing, but the noise in his head didn’t allow for creative endeavors. He wanted to know where he was, who his captors were, what was happening.

“You might even be valuable enough to let live past the capture of this vessel,” the voice said. “It’s possible that you’d even make it to Aethar’s World . . . a Serrano in the arena would be a profitable attraction.”

His remaining intelligence smugly pointed out that these must be Bloodhorde soldiers . . . the hostiles that everyone was searching for . . . and wasn’t there something about the arena combats on Aethar’s World? Slowly, grudgingly, his memory struggled through the haze of pain and confusion to find the right category and index . . . and offered a precis of what Fleet Intelligence knew about the arena.

Barin threw up, noisily.

“Well, that’s one reaction,” his captor said, running something cold and metallic up and down his spine. Barin couldn’t tell if it was a firearm or the hilt of a knife. “I always look forward to Fight Week. But then I’ve never been on the sand myself.”

“It could be that knock on the head,” said another.

“No. He’s a Serrano, and I have it on good authority that they are solid granite all the way through.”

It was not a good sign that his captors were talking so much. Barin struggled to think what it meant, in all permutations. It meant they felt safe. They must be somewhere they did not expect to be found . . . or overheard, which meant they’d done something to the ship’s sensors. The stench of vomit made him gag again; it didn’t seem to bother his captors, who kept on chatting, now in a language he didn’t understand.

They left the gag loose, which argued that they didn’t want him to choke on his vomit if he heaved again. He blinked, and one eye cleared suddenly, giving him a view of uniforms that looked exactly like his own, only cleaner. A Wraith ship patch on the arm nearest him, with the stripes of a corporal. He couldn’t see the nametag. Another beyond . . . he blinked again, and his other eye came unstuck.

Now he could see that one was watching him closely, cool gray eyes in a broad face. The nametag read Santini; the stripes indicated a pivot-major. The expression said killer, and proud of it.

Barin struggled to regain the moral high ground. He knew what was expected of a Serrano in a tight fix: triumph, despite all odds. Escape, certainly. Capture the bad guys, ideally. All it took was brains, which he had, and courage, and physical fitness—both of which he was supposed to have. His grandmother could do it in her sleep. Any of the great Serranos could.

He didn’t feel like a great Serrano. He felt like a boy with no experience, whose nose was at least as big as a parpaun ball, who hurt all over, who was surrounded by big dangerous men who intended to kill him: helpless, that is. He hated feeling helpless, but even that resentment couldn’t wake the surge of defiant anger he needed.

Do it anyway, he told himself. If he couldn’t feel brave, he could still use his brain. He let his eyelids sag almost shut again. That man was not a pivot-major named Santini, but he had a name . . . and perhaps his companions would use it. He might learn what it was even though he didn’t know their language. At least he should be able to figure out the command structure of this group, just by observation.

The man he was watching said something, and Barin felt a sharp tug at his hair. He stifled a groan, and opened his eyes again.

“You don’t need to sleep, boy,” said the man. His accent was no stronger than others Barin had heard within the Familias, but it had a hard contemptuous edge that even his first Academy instructors had not used. They had not cared if he passed or failed; this man did not care if he lived or died. “You need to learn what you are.” A few words in that other tongue—Barin didn’t even know what to call the language the Bloodhorde used—and someone behind him laid something cold and hard along the side of his neck.

From behind, another gabble of the strange tongue; the man across from him grinned. Pain exploded in his neck, down his arm; he felt as if it were bursting, as if his fingers had disintegrated into shards of pain flung meters away from him and still hurting. Before he could scream, the filthy gag was back in his mouth. Tears streamed from his eyes; his whole body shuddered. Then it was over.

“That’s what you are,” the man said. “Entertainment. Keep it in mind.” He said something else, and they all stood. Barin was yanked to his unsteady feet, and dragged along with them as they moved off down a passageway he had never seen before. And not a single vidscan pickup in sight.

“Bad news,” Major Pitak said as she came in from a briefing. Esmay looked up. “Security’s found a body stuffed in a utility closet on Deck 8, T-2, and it was someone who’d had a pink tag. Neck broken, neatly and professionally. Also, they’ve got a hostage—maybe. Ensign Serrano.”

“Barin!” That got out past her guard; she told herself it was no time for silly embarrassments.

“He was sent to get something out of inventory—none of the automated systems are running—and never came back. When his unit went looking for him, they found a harness tucked into the rack he’d have been on, and a smear of blood—as if there’d been more and someone had been careless wiping it up.”

“They’d have had to knock him out to take him,” Esmay said.

“So you’d think. Commander Jarles and Commander Vorhes are both furious, and nearly got into a flaming row right there at the briefing. Why was he sent alone, and why didn’t someone raise the alarm sooner, and so on. The admiral was not happy with them, to put it mildly. The captain . . . I don’t even want to discuss. Scuttlebutt has it that he got crosswise of a Serrano twenty-odd years ago. If that kid gets killed aboard his ship, he’s going to have the whole family down on him.”

“But Bar—Ensign Serrano is surely more important than any feud.” Even as she said that, she knew it was wrong. Family was family, but a family would not jeopardize its standing for a single individual. Hers hadn’t.

Pitak shrugged. “He’s one ensign, on a ship with over 25,000 personnel. The captain can’t let concerns about Serrano affect his primary concern: the safety of his ship.” Her gaze sharpened. “You’ve spent some time with him recently, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mmm. Something going on there?”

Esmay felt her face heating up. “Not really . . . we’re just friends.” It sounded as lame and false as it felt. What had she been feeling, around Barin? She hadn’t done any of the things that regulations prohibited between senior and junior officers in a chain of command, even though they weren’t in the same chain of command. But she had . . . if she was honest . . . wanted to do some of those things. If he did. He had never indicated that he did. She forced herself to look Pitak in the eye. “After he helped me at that briefing for the senior tactical discussion group, we talked a few times. I liked him, and he knew a lot of things about Fleet which they never taught us in school.”

“I’d noticed some changes,” Pitak said, without specifying their nature. “Coaching you, was he?”

“Yes,” Esmay said. “Admiral Serrano and others had mentioned that I . . . confused, I think was their term . . . people because of mannerisms which are normal on Altiplano. Barin was able to define what I was doing wrong—”

“I wouldn’t say exactly wrong,” Pitak murmured.

“And show me what the Fleet customs were.”

“I see.” Pitak rocked back and forth in her chair for a long moment, staring past Esmay’s elbow. “Suiza, everything in your record says you’re level-headed and not a troublemaker. But you’ve never had a partner, that anyone knows about. Have you?”

“No.” Direct challenge had gotten the answer out of her before she realized she was giving it. The blush came afterwards. “No, I . . . I just didn’t.”

“Umm. And you’re not on any medication that would explain it. Are you?”

“No, sir.”

Pitak sighed heavily. “Suiza, you’re ten years too old for this advice, but in some ways, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were ten years younger. So try to take it as well-meant. You’re ripe for a fall, and Barin’s the only male you’ve spent more than a work-shift with. Whether you know it or not, you’re on the slide now . . .”

“No.” That came out in a low whisper. “I won’t . . .”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, Suiza,” Pitak said sharply. “You’re only a lieutenant; he’s an ensign—that’s a fairly common level of difference. You’re not his commander. The only problem is . . . he’s now in enemy hands, and we’ve got an emergency. I need your brain clear, your emotions steady. No racing off to do useless heroics and try to rescue your lover.”

Lover? Her heart pounded; her stomach was doing freefall into her boots. “He’s not . . .”

Pitak snorted, so like a lead mare that Esmay was startled into a grin. “Young woman, whether you have actually been skin to skin or not, he is the first man you’ve cared about since you were grown. That’s clear enough. Admit it, and you’ll deal with it better.”

Could she admit it? Was it true? She had had those vague wishes, those inchoate fantasies . . . Barin’s hands would not be like those other hands. The uniform was different. She dragged herself away from all that, and fought down the flutter in her diaphragm. “I . . . do care . . . a lot . . . what happens to him. I—we hadn’t talked about—anything else.” She almost said “yet” and saw that Major Pitak had added it without hearing it.

“All right. Now you’ve faced it, and now you have to face this: you and I have nothing to do with the search for Barin, for the intruders, for anything else. It’s our job to get Wraith back in service before a Bloodhorde battle group pops out here and blows us all away—or worse, captures us. Whatever happens to Barin Serrano cannot be as bad as the capture of this ship by the enemy. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” It was clear, in the part of her mind that was free to think clearly. The word “capture” rang in her mind with the finality of steel on stone. If they did not do their work, they might all be captives . . . and she knew she could not handle that. The vision sparkled in her mind—the quiet, competent, ordinary Lieutenant Suiza going completely and irrevocably crazy, the moment she became a captive again. However much she cared for Barin . . . she could not let that happen.

“Good. I didn’t think you’d do anything foolish, but the little I know about Altiplano suggests that you might have triggers set which would push you into some stupid rescue attempt.”

“They are going to try one, though, aren’t they?” Esmay asked.

“I don’t know.” Pitak looked away. “The most critical thing is to find the intruders before they do any significant damage. Rescuing one ensign has to be a lower priority. What’s really twisting the captain’s tail is the fear that they’ll disable the self-destruct.”

“The self-destruct?”

“Yes. The captain is not about to let us be captured by the Bloodhorde—they could build cruisers with this facility and the expertise of our people. He’s told the admirals that he’ll blow us up first.”

“Good,” Esmay said, before she thought. Pitak looked at her oddly.

“Most of us aren’t happy about that,” Pitak said. “We admit the necessity but . . . you like it?”

“Better than captivity,” Esmay said. The tremors were gone; the fear receded.

“Well. You never cease to amaze, Suiza. Since your brain seems to be working well enough, I’ll answer some questions you’ll no doubt ask in five minutes if I don’t. We aren’t jumping out of this system, because we can’t. I don’t know why. It might be that the intruders sabotaged the FTL drive . . . it might be that the fast-sequence jumps we did coming in shook something loose. Drives and Maneuver is on it. I need you to do a search, since you’re good at that: if we assume that the fast-sequence jumps caused some structural damage or shift, what would it be?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you come up with anything, buzz me. We’ve got those Wraith structural supports coming over the line, and I need to be there for the installation.” She started out the door, and then turned back. “Oh yes: the new procedures are that no one goes anywhere alone, and that includes the head. We know that at least one of the intruders now has a current ID badge—no doubt they’d like more. The captain may decide to firewall the ship, but right now there’s not enough security personnel to man the access points. We’re supposed to be alert for any strangers, anyone we’re not used to seeing around, though on a ship this size that’s not much use. I certainly wouldn’t know half the instructors over in T-1 by sight, let alone the students.” She sighed. “This is going to be a real bitch to implement. Rekeying thousands of IDs every day, and rechecking all personnel they’re given to. All of us wearing tagtales, all of us going around in bunches.”

“Are we all going to move into open bays for sleeping?”

“I hope not.” Pitak scrubbed at her head. “I can’t sleep like that anymore; I’m old enough to be wakened by snorers. But it may come to that, though it means leaving a lot of compartments vacant—which can only help the intruders. Anyway, the captain’s asked the flags for more personnel for security—and I understand there were words exchanged about that between our admiral and Livadhi. But we’ve got to get Wraith back in action. If, as we suspect, there’s a Bloodhorde battle group coming here to pick us off, we’ll need every bit of help we can get.”

“Is that possible—I mean, you said it would take—”

“Longer than we have. I know. Hull repairs alone should run sixty to seventy days . . . then there’s refitting the internal systems, installing the weapons, testing. But there’s nothing else to do. Maybe they’ll be late—maybe they’ll get lost. Maybe our fleet will come back. Or maybe they’ll get the self-destruct fixed and we won’t have to worry about anything . . . at least those of us who don’t believe in an afterlife. Do you? Is that why you think it’s a good idea?”

“Not . . . exactly.” She didn’t believe in the afterlife her great-grandmother had taught her about, where the dead were placed on the level they’d earned like pots of flowers on a stand. But she found it hard to imagine nothingness, an absolute end.

“Mmm.” Pitak looked as if she’d like to say something more, but someone called her from the passage and she left without another word. Esmay looked at her screen a moment, and then at the bulkhead. Barin a hostage . . . Barin dead? She could not imagine either of those . . . not Barin, so brimful of energy, so much a Serrano. It was not her assignment. Pitak had warned her. But . . . of all the people on this ship, she was the one who had actually fought on shipboard.

There must be others. Security personnel had experience; that’s what they trained for. She wasn’t trained. She had no weapons.

She was thinking the wrong things. She wasn’t thinking at all. Memory splashed her mind with the images of battle in Despite . . . she could imagine that behind the partition between her cubicle and the rest of the offices, someone lurked with a weapon.

Ridiculous. Yet she could not just sit there; she itched to be . . . somewhere, doing . . . something. She scolded herself for letting a brief experience of command turn her head. With a shipful of admirals on down, they weren’t going to let a lieutenant in Hull and Architecture do anything but look up statistics in computer files.

Barin had dozed off, but woke when he heard an approaching noise. Help, maybe? Instead it was another of the intruders, with two men and a woman in civilian clothes. Barin knew, in a general way, who they were: civilian technical advisors, experts, contractors hired to do something in weapons systems. He’d never actually met any of them, though he’d seen them in the corridors and lift tubes occasionally. Ordinary middle-aged civilians, he’d thought. Of no interest to him, since they weren’t working in his area. Now they stared at him as if he were a monster too. He supposed he looked pretty bad, with his swollen nose and bruised face, but they didn’t have to look as if they thought it was all his fault.

“You lied to us,” one of the Bloodhorde said. “You were paid to fix this, and you didn’t. When we looked, the lights were green.”

“But we did fix it,” said the taller man earnestly. “We fixed it so that it wouldn’t work, but the captain would think it did work. That’s why all the telltales are green. He could run his system test, and it would come up—”

“They’re not green now,” his captor said.

“What happened?” The man leaned past his captor to look, and turned an interesting shade of pale green. “You—did you tear those wires out?”

“To make sure it wouldn’t work, yes. Because you lied to us.”

“But I didn’t lie. Now he knows it doesn’t work—and he could have a backup—”

“You were supposed to disable all self-destruct devices.” That with a series of shoves that ended when the man bumped into the bulkhead. “You were paid to do that!” Another, harder shove; the man staggered. “So if you left one, then you have broken your word to us, and . . . we take that very seriously.”

“But—we don’t know—we did what you said—” The man looked as if he couldn’t quite believe the situation; he kept glancing at Barin and away again.

“Fix it again so that it looks to the captain as if it’s working,” the Bloodhorde leader said.

“But the captain will know it’s been tampered with—fixing it now won’t convince him. Someone would have to tell him . . . I could go tell him I could fix it, they know we’re experts in weapons systems, and then I could—” The man didn’t have time to flinch away before he was dying, the blade deep in his throat and a hard hand squeezing his mouth, stifling his last bubbling scream. Blood spurted, then flowed, then stopped, filling the compartment with the smell of blood so strong it almost covered the stench of death itself.

The woman screamed, a short cry cut off in terror as one of the others slapped her. The killer let the dead man fall, and then wiped his bloody hand across his own mouth, then the woman’s. “They don’t call us the Bloodhorde for nothing,” he said, grinning. With the same knife—and it seemed even worse to Barin that he didn’t wipe it clean between the killing and the mutilation—he sliced off the dead man’s left ear, bit it hard once, and then tucked it away in his uniform. “Now,” he said to the second civilian. “You will fix this so it looks as if it’s working.”

The second man, shorter and darker-haired than the other, hurried to comply. When he had done, the telltales showed green again.

“That’s got it,” he said.

“Is this right?” the killer asked the woman.

“Yes . . . yes it is right,” she said.

“If you know that, we don’t need him,” the killer said, and caught the smaller man by the collar, half-choking him. “We’d rather . . . work . . . with you.”

“No!” The woman lunged, but one of the others caught her. She tried to fight free, but she had no skill, and no strength to make up its lack. “No, let him—please—”

The killer laughed. “We heard what you said about the Bloodhorde . . . how you taunted our agent.”

She turned even whiter.

“You dared to bind him . . .” He twisted the man’s collar until the man’s face purpled. “You threatened. You had a noose around his neck . . . and now you have a noose around your neck. Even barbarians, as you call us, understand poetic justice.”

Barin could not look away; there was a fascination in this that disgusted him with himself. The killer twisted . . . twisted . . . and horribly, slowly, the dapper little man about whom Barin knew nothing died, his struggles weaker and weaker until they ceased.

“We pay our debts,” the killer said to the woman. “All of them, the ones you know about and the ones you don’t. Do we think size is everything? I believe that was your complaint, was it not? Then I believe you should have a chance to experience size in a way suitable to you in particular.”

The woman gave Barin a frantic glance, and the killer laughed. “You think he could help you? This boy with a broken nose, that we captured as easily as we took you?”

He had to do something. He couldn’t just lie here doing nothing . . . but no matter how he struggled, he couldn’t loosen the very efficient bindings they’d taken from ship security. Through all that followed, he struggled, rasping his wrists raw, earning a random cuff now and then from men more amused than concerned with his efforts. The woman struggled too, but it did her no good; one after another they took her, in ways that Barin’s inexperience had not imagined. Finally her struggles, her gasps and moans, died away, and she lay still. He couldn’t tell if she was dead, or just unconscious. She had been some kind of traitor apparently . . . he had gotten that much from what they’d all said . . . but no one deserved what had happened to her.

One of the men spoke to the other in their language, something Barin could tell was meant as a joke. The one on her pushed himself up, laughing, and then turned to Barin. He grinned even wider.

“The boy’s upset,” he said. “Maybe she was his girl?”

“Too old,” said one of the others. “A nice boy like him wouldn’t have a woman like that.”

“I’m sure he has a girl somewhere on this ship,” the first one said. “We’ll have to be sure we find her.”

He would have heaved again if he’d had anything left.

“What I don’t understand is how they found the self-destruct so fast,” Captain Hakin said. “Not that many people know where it is . . .”

“They grabbed those civilian contractors,” Admiral Dossignal said.

“But how would they know? They’re weapons specialists; they’ve been busy recalibrating the guidance systems . . . oh.”

“If someone suborned the civilians, then they could have disabled the self-destruct—they could have found it while appearing to be working on weapons in inventory. I see . . .”

“What I don’t understand is why they were snatched, if they’d already done their job.”

“They hadn’t,” the captain said. “Remember—until an hour ago, all the signals were secure.”

“Considering the quality of work they did on the weapons, if they’d done it, I’d expect it to be undetectable,” said Commander Wyche. “I’d bet they were snatched simply for their weapons expertise . . . with the data wands the intruders got from the three we know they killed, they’d have high enough access to find that out.”

“So now the self-destruct is out of my control.” Hakin glared at the admirals. “I should have used it.”

“No,” Dossignal said. “It was the handiest way, the easiest and least obvious way, for you to have the power of destruction, but it wasn’t the only. On this ship, with what we’ve got in inventory, and the expertise in the 14th alone, we can prevent capture. We will.”

“I hope so,” the captain said. “I sincerely hope so, because if you don’t we are not the only ones who will suffer for it.”

“Wraith gives us another possibility,” Commander Wyche said.

“Wraith?”

“She still has a third of her weapons, all in portside mountings. And she still has ample firepower to blow Kos. Not from the repair bay—the way she’s locked into the cradles, even if she blew herself, there’s a 72 percent chance that most of Kos would survive. We’d have to reposition her mounts, which would take days. But if we can get her into a position to fire on the core area—”

“She can’t maneuver!” Commander Takkis, head of Drives and Maneuver. “We dismounted the drives when she first came in, and it would take days to remount them. Besides, I have everyone working on the FTL drive for this ship.”

“I was thinking of the drives test cradle. She doesn’t have to maneuver to be slung on there and then towed into position . . . even, if you wish, at the extremity of the lines. The test cradle’s own drive would be sufficient, if necessary, to move her into the best firing position for Kos . . . or she could get some shots off at the Bloodhorde.”

A moment of silence, as they thought it over. Dossignal and Livadhi both nodded. “It could work—certainly, as far as destroying Kos is concerned, and quite probably she could do a fair bit of damage to the Bloodhorde ships.”

Captain Hakin was nodding too. “If those weapons have not been taken off Wraith, and we’re absolutely sure they haven’t been tampered with, then we’ve got our fail-safe back . . . as long as they’re not depleted taking potshots at the enemy.”

“No . . . I can see that there’d have to be strict limits of use, but that should leave enough to do some damage. Especially if we had something else. One of the shuttles, maybe. In the Xavier action, the planetary defense used a couple of shuttles to good effect.”

“They used them for mine-laying . . . I don’t think that would work here.”

“If only we could Trojan-horse them, the way they did to us.” Livadhi smiled briefly. “It would be so satisfying.”

“Get aboard a Bloodhorde ship? I don’t see how. Since they do it, they know it can be done—they’d be watching. And our people would be trying a hostile boarding, against resistance.”

“I was thinking . . . if we had any native speakers of their language, if we could locate one of these intruders and sweat some recognition codes out of him, then our people could pretend to be their own team coming back.”

“Won’t work.” Admiral Livadhi scowled in surprise at the lieutenant commander two seats down. “Sorry, sir, but—we shouldn’t waste time with schemes bound to fail. The Bloodhorde special operations teams—which is what we have aboard—are all members of one lineage. Each team is, I mean. They train together for years, and develop their own distinctive argot. Commander Coston, who went back to Rockhouse recently, had been doing a special study on Bloodhorde special ops. Our people can’t imitate a Bloodhorde pack—not without a lot of training we don’t have time to give. As well, we have only thirteen people aboard who speak the language with anything like sufficient fluency, and their accents indicate different origins.”

“We don’t need negativism now, Commander Nors,” Livadhi said. “We’re at the stage of thinking up possibilities.”

“Sorry, sir. Well . . . suppose one of the Bloodhorde ships were close in . . . and empty or nearly empty of its crew. We’ve developed a fairly good model of a Bloodhorde ship’s control systems, working from the commercial models they’re built on, and information from scavenge. It wouldn’t take long to train our experienced warship crews to use it—or for that matter, import our own scan equipment.”

“Just where do you plan to find a close-in Bloodhorde ship with its crew off it?” asked Hakin with some sarcasm. The question hung a moment, as they all considered, then the same idea flickered across several faces. Hakin’s turned grim. “No. Absolutely not. I am not going to allow more Bloodhorde troops aboard my ship, just for the chance of capturing one of theirs.”

“They’d probably like to use one of the repair bays,” Dossignal said slowly. “Wraith’s in one—they know that. The other’s empty . . . the best place for a smallish ship to dock, anyway. Full of stuff they want.”

“No!” Hakin said, more loudly.

“Do you have any information on Bloodhorde boarding procedures, Commander?” Dossignal asked, ignoring Hakin for the moment.

Nors thought a moment. “All we have is reports from the few civilians who survived a Bloodhorde raid on a large civilian ship. They come in wearing protective gear that functions as both EVA and battle armor . . . they were in that case quite willing to damage the ship they’d captured to gain control of it. None of the civs we talked to could tell one level of weapon from another, but one of them did describe something capable of holing interior bulkheads with one shot. Here, though, we’re assuming they want a DSR entire. I expect they’ll do as little damage as possible in capturing it . . . but they do have to board.”

“Another possibility,” said Commander Wyche, “is the weaponry aboard a Bloodhorde ship in a repair bay. Suppose it could be immobilized there. Then its weapons would give us yet another self-destruct capability. They have forward-mounted weapons in every class.”

“If we were able to get aboard and take control.”

“I think we can take that as given, sir. If they just sit there, they aren’t accomplishing anything . . . they can’t shoot at us without doing the damage they don’t want, and besides, they have no reputation for being patient. I think we can count on them coming out, with an intent to take control of key systems.”

“Which is why we can’t let them do it,” Captain Hakin said. “It would take your people some time to get aboard, get control of their ship, and maybe be able to use it to defeat their other ships or destroy us . . . and in the meantime, I’d have a shipful of enemy . . . NO.”

“So the real problem is getting them off their ship without letting them onto ours,” Admiral Livadhi said. He put his fingertips together. “You know . . . there might be a way. If we could shut off the repair bay—that whole wing—”

“We could just take it apart,” Admiral Dossignal said.

“Take it apart?” Captain Hakin asked.

“Yes . . . Commander Seveche, review the original construction data and all later modifications . . . there may be a way to cut one of the repair bays loose—unobtrusively, of course—and isolate it from the rest of Koskiusko.”

In less than an hour, Seveche returned with the data ready to display; he set up the large screen and lit it.

“Here, you see: when they assembled Kos, they planned for possible changes by using temporary attachments—”

Hakin turned red. “You mean we’ve been working in a ship that’s not really held together—?”

“No, sir. It is held together, and quite well . . . but it would take only hours, not days, to detach it again. These pressure clamps . . . these connectors here . . .” Seveche pointed to them on the display. “All this can be undone fairly easily. Relatively, I mean. The seal between T-4 and the core cylinder is a large expansion joint of sorts.” He switched to another display. “As Kos was assembled, before an arm was locked on, the near end of these things were fastened to the core . . . and then the outer end to the arm. As the arms moved in to mate with the core, the corrugations compressed, giving additional safety margin to the join.”

“Yes, but—I presume you plan to stretch them out again. Do you really expect them to be sound after all this time?”

“I don’t see why not,” Seveche said. “We’ve used the same material over the same span of time, with multiple compressions and extensions, with no failure. Besides, we can have the locks on each side shut. The way the arms are made, there are airlocks on the inner end of each deck.”

“I know that, Commander,” Hakin said. He sounded annoyed. “But I’m sure they’ll notice that the inner hatches are locked, and then they’ll blast them—”

“They won’t. We can rig temporary cross-dock access . . . they don’t know what it’s supposed to look like.”

“Then when it detaches, it’ll depressurize—”

“Not if someone is there to lock the hatches.” Seveche looked to Dossignal for help.

“We’re going to take casualties, whatever we do,” Dossignal said. “To protect us from capture, you’re prepared to destroy the ship and crew. I understand that, and it may be necessary. But I believe we have a chance to save both the ship and much of its crew if we can hold out until Admiral Gourache returns. Denying the enemy the use of a ship—using it ourselves—and using what firepower Wraith has left—is the only way I see to do that. I’m sure we’ll have volunteers enough for the most hazardous of these hazardous missions.”

“We’ll have to have someone commanding each section that’s freed—with the authority to do what they must, whatever that is. Divided command would be disastrous, and we can’t be sure that communications will hold.”

“Which means we’ve got to get those people involved in planning right away—”

“I don’t like it,” Captain Hakin said. “It’s scrabble law: the whole ship is my command, and you’re proposing to break off pieces and give them an independent command. Separated, they’ll be even easier meat to the invaders—”

“Captain, we’re offering a suggestion that gets us both off the hook. Koskiusko was assembled from previously independent sections in deep space. You know that. T-4 and T-3 even had names—Piece and Meal may’ve been stupid names, but names. They might have been commissioned as ships in their own right, if Fleet had not decided to try for a unified DSR. It’s reasonable to maintain that they’re both directly under the 14th—”

“You’ll have to crew them,” Hakin said. “You’re not taking any of the crew I need to secure Kos.”

Was it capitulation? Admiral Dossignal looked at Hakin a long time.

“You know, Vladis, if it’s really going to stick in your craw, you can write a report.”

“I intend to,” Hakin looked even grimmer. “Partly to question your authority to nominate a captain for any vessel in this sector: that’s Foxworth’s job, or, at the lowest level, Gourache’s.”

“I see your point. But I’m going to do it anyway, and we can all hash it out with a Board, if not a court, later.”

Hakin shook his head. “It won’t improve the odds, and it just makes my job harder . . .”

“I don’t see how, since we’re almost certainly ridding you of most of your intruders, and one of the ships trying to attack you. Now as for crew, we have the uninjured survivors of Wraith—”

“Which will be needed to serve Wraith’s weapons,” Livadhi said.

“Their weapons crews certainly. Since Wraith won’t be maneuvering, I don’t know about their bridge crew. I hate to waste a captain with combat experience aboard a crippled ship. We’re not overburdened with such officers.”

Commander Atarin spoke up. “Admiral, I have prepared a list of all officers and enlisted aboard with combat experience in the past three years. They’re rank-ordered by specialty and performance—not just experience—in combat.”

“Good. Let’s see . . . oh, my.”

“What?” Hakin craned his neck, trying to see.

“We have ample combat-experienced weapons specialists, because the senior weapons technical course is running. Scan . . . not much problem there. We’re short environmental systems specialists, but this should be over fast enough that it won’t be critical . . . we can have our people in self-contained gear. Communications is also short, but most scan techs are cross-trained in communications and we have plenty of scan techs. What we don’t have is ship commanders. Or rather, we have just enough: Wraith’s captain for Wraith, and Lieutenant Commander Bowry, who’s here for a special course, to command the Bloodhorde ship.”

“I don’t suppose we’d be lucky enough to get more than one of them . . .”

“I doubt it. Why would they bring in more than one ship at a time? If they gifted us with such riches, we’d just have to find someone to take it . . . but that gets us down to fairly junior officers with very little experience of ship command in combat.” Dossignal considered telling them who, precisely, but he knew Hakin would have particular objections to Esmay Suiza.