Once a Hero

Chapter Seventeen

Nothing hindered their movement until they reached the access area for the Special Materials Fabrication Unit.

“You can’t do that! It’s in use . . . there’s ninety meters of whisker in the drum now . . .” The shift supervisor for the Special Materials Fabrication Facility was a solid, graying petty-chief, who was not intimidated by a mere four officers. “You’d have to have permission from Commander Dorse, and he wouldn’t—”

“Stand aside, or there’ll be ninety meters of whisker and . . . I estimate 1.7 meters of you.” Seska, intent on getting back to his ship, furious with more than the Bloodhorde, was past making polite requests, although he’d started with one.

“Admiral Dossignal will kill me if you get in there and destroy an entire batch—”

“No . . . the Bloodhorde will kill you. The admiral will only break you to pivot and then give you twenty years hard time if you don’t get—out—of—the—way.”

“Bloodhorde? What does the Bloodhorde have to do with it?”

“Haven’t you heard anything?” Esmay stepped forward, trying to project harmlessness and a pure heart.

“No, I haven’t. I’ve been monitoring a startup whisker for the past five hours and my relief hasn’t shown up and—”

Esmay lowered her voice. “Bloodhorde commandos are loose on the ship, and your relief is probably dead. The only way we can fight them is to get out of T-1 and the only way out of T-1 is through here. I suggest you let us pass, and when we’re safely out, let the Bloodhorde in, if they show up. Then do a breakoff early.”

“But that’d be ninety meters wasted . . .”

“Excuse me,” said Frees, to one side. The man’s head turned, and Esmay hit him as hard as she could with her weapon. She might have killed him; at that moment she didn’t care.

They barricaded the hatch to the passage as well as they could, and climbed quickly into the EVA suits in the nearby locker. They checked each others’ suits before opening the first of the lockout hatches that isolated the Special Materials Fabrication Unit from the ship’s artificial gravity. Inside was a metal-grid walkway ten meters long, ending in another lockout hatch. Rails ran along either bulkhead, with rings set every half-meter. They went in, closed the hatch behind them, and punched for Airless Entry. The light ahead of them turned green, and they started down the walkway.

Esmay felt herself lifting with each step, as if she were walking in deepening water. In the last meter, her steps pushed her off the walkway completely, and her feet trailed back, lured by the weak attraction of Koskiusko’s real mass. She grabbed for a rail, and hoped her stomach would crawl back into her midsection.

“I hate zero-G,” Bowry said.

“I hate the Bloodhorde,” Seska said. “Zero-G is just a nuisance.”

They cycled through the second lockout hatch into a long dark tube lit by the eerie purple and green glow of the growth tank. It seemed to go on and on, narrowing to a dark point far away. Here Esmay could feel no slightest hint of attraction to any mass. Her stomach slid greasily up into her throat when she moved one way, and back down her spine when she turned the other way. She tried to concentrate on her surroundings. Along one side was a narrow catwalk with a rail above it.

“Remind me again what happens if we disturb the growing whiskers,” Seska said.

“They shatter and impale us with the shards,” Bowry said. “So we don’t disturb them,” Seska said. “Minimal vibration, minimal temperature variance—we slide on the rail. Not thrashing around, not trying to look. Just relaxed . . . like this.” Esmay watched as he made a circle of his suit glove loosely around the rail, and pushed off from the lockout hatch. He slid away . . . and away . . . and vanished into the darkness. Esmay noticed that he’d pushed off precisely in the axis of motion he wanted; his legs simply trailed behind him.

“I hope there’s a bracket on the end of this thing,” Frees said, and did the same thing.

“Lieutenant, it’s my turn to be rear guard,” Bowry said. Esmay wrapped her glove around the rail, loosened it in what she hoped was the right amount, then kicked off. It was a strange feeling. She was drawn along effortlessly, as if the rail itself were moving, and she could see nothing but the faint reflection of the greenish purple glow on the bulkhead, a long vague blur of not-quite-color.

When she slowed, she didn’t at first realize it. Then the blur steadied . . . she thought it was motionless. Now what? If she moved around too vigorously she could bang into the bulkhead and disturb the whiskers. She moved very slowly, bringing up her other hand to steady herself, then turning to look back the way she’d come. Far away now she could see the little cluster of lights at the lockout hatch. Nearer—something was coming, sliding along . . . too fast. If Bowry hit her, they’d both hit the bulkhead, if not worse. She gripped the rail and pulled herself along hand over hand, trying to let her body trail without twisting.

She couldn’t watch and move at the same time, not without twisting. And she didn’t want to go too fast; she didn’t know how much farther she had to go. She glanced up from time to time, matching speed with Bowry . . . and as he slowed in his turn, she also slowed. Somewhere ahead of her were the others; she didn’t want to slam into them, either.

“Slow now,” she heard. She hoped Bowry heard it too; but she didn’t look, just put out her arm to brake against her movement. Her legs slewed sideways, but she was able to stiffen her torso and keep them off the bulkhead.

When she turned to look forward, she saw the narrowing rounded end of the fabrication unit, and the big round lock that allowed completed jobs to be taken out. To one side was a smaller personnel lock. Why did they even have locks at this end, when the point of SpecMatFab was its hard vacuum and zero-G? She thought of the answer almost as soon as the question. Of course they didn’t want all the debris in space getting into the unit.

The personnel lock was manual, a simple hatch control that required only strength to turn. Then they were outside, clinging to the grabons and loops that Esmay thought were misnamed as “safety” features. Beside it were a row of communications and oxygen jacks.

“Top up your tanks,” Seska said. Esmay had almost forgotten that standard procedure. She glanced at her readouts; it hardly seemed reasonable to spend the time now for just a few percents. But the others were all plugged in; she shrugged mentally as she pushed her own auxiliary tube into place. Her suit pinged a signal when tank pressure reached its maximum, and she pulled the connection free.

Seska clipped his safety line to the first loop and started pulling himself along, up the rounded end of the fabrication unit alongside the arching supports for the whisker transport system. Esmay followed Frees again, with Bowry behind her, stopping to unclip and reclip her line every time it ran out. When they got to the upper surface—upper as defined by the whisker track—Seska paused.

From here, the size of Koskiusko surprised Esmay all over again. The fabrication unit alone was larger than most warships, coated like them with matte black, and studded with the shiny knobs of the shield generators. Beyond it rose the angular outer face of T-1, black against the starfield, with the faint gleam of the transport track rising over its edge.

“Check,” Seska said.

“Two.”

“Three.”

“Four.”

Esmay shivered. Only four of them, out here alone on a ship so big she couldn’t see most of it . . . .

“We’ll take the transport line,” Seska said. “It’ll save us time.” Nobody mentioned how much air was left; no one had to.

Esmay could see on her own suit gauges that they had spent twenty minutes cycling through locks, traversing the long tunnel of the fabrication unit, climbing up this far. And now they had to go back the same distance they’d come, cross the entire ship, find a way down to one of the locks opening into T-3’s repair bay. Inside, walking along the decks, even running up and down ladders, they could have done it within the limits of a suit tank. Out here? It didn’t matter—they had to. Seska clipped his line onto one of the rails of the transport line and pushed off. They followed.

Esmay had wondered how far beyond the ship’s surface artificial gravity projected. As they came over the edge of T-1, with the dome of the bridge ahead of them, she could feel nothing . . . but when she looked, her legs had drifted toward its surface.

The transport track led directly over the domed core of Koskiusko, and Esmay thought that if she had not been both rushed and frightened, she would have enjoyed the view. The five blunt-ended wings splayed out around them, the dome itself studded with shield generator points and an array of retractable masts for communications and remote sensing. She looked for, but could not see, any other ship shapes against the stars. The escorts were out there somewhere . . . but too far to occlude a noticeable patch of the starfield.

It was easy to lose track of time in that long traverse of darkness. The glowing numerals inside her helmet flicked through the tenths of seconds, then seconds, then minutes. She did not look at her oxygen gauge; if it went too low, too fast, there would be no helpful bomb disposal team to hook up a new one for her.

“Trouble.” That was Seska; Esmay looked his way. Beyond him, the starfield shifted suddenly. Her mind froze up, but even as Seska said, “They’re maneuvering,” she had figured it out. Someone had decided to rotate the ship . . . and that someone could not be the captain.

But it could very well be the Bloodhorde commandos, in control of the bridge.

She told herself not to panic. She told herself that despite the seeming solidity and immobility of Koskiusko, the ship had never been really immobile: all ships moved, all the time, and she was no more likely to lose her grip and fall off when it was under drive than when it was moved only by the old laws of physics. Kos wasn’t a warship; it couldn’t develop the acceleration of the most anemic civilian cargo vessel on insystem drive.

Bowry’s voice, elaborately casual, broke into her thoughts. “Lieutenant—I don’t suppose you know whether the FTL drive is irretrievably broken?”

The FTL drive. At once she knew what the Bloodhorde was going to do, and kicked herself mentally for not seeing it before. Of course they were going to take their prize away from possible rescue before trying to open it, like a jay with a sweetnut. “No, sir,” she said to Bowry. “Drives and Maneuver seemed to think it was most likely sabotage, but the sequenced jumps out could have knocked something loose.”

“Those escorts ought to be doing something useful,” Seska said. “Like blowing us away, when they see us moving under power.”

Esmay had forgotten about the escorts, too. Her mouth went dry. Here she was, clinging to the outside of a spaceship under power, which was likely to come under fire . . . her EVA suit felt about as protective as facial tissue.

“Unless our crew’s doing it, and they’re talking to them.” Bowry didn’t sound really hopeful. “I suppose they could be moving away from the jump point and closer to the escorts.”

“No . . .” That was Frees. “Looks to me like we’re heading for it, but on a different vector . . . without the nav computer, I can’t be sure, but—didn’t this jump point have four outbound vectors?”

“Yes,” Seska said. “I can’t judge the approach, but you’re probably right, Lin. We’re less than a half hour from jump, I’d guess, and a lot more than a half hour from any place we can get into the ship. This should be interesting . . . pity we have no way to record the experience of the first people to die going through unprotected jump.”

“The commandos survived,” Esmay said, not knowing she was going to say it. Silence followed; she assumed the others were watching the wheeling starfield that proved Kos was moving under power.

“They were in Wraith,” Seska said.

“But there was a hull breach and forward shield failure. There’s nothing wrong with Kos’s FTL shields.” She didn’t know anything about shield technology, except that all FTL-capable ships had FTL shields. “If we get off this thing and down onto the hull . . .”

“Good idea, Suiza.”

It took almost the entire half hour to clamber down, carefully clipping and unclipping and reclipping safety lines, from the high smooth arch of the materials transport track to the hull. Here, for the first time, Esmay could feel through her bootsoles a faint lateral tug, another proof that Kos was moving on her own, arguing with the inertia of her former path.

They were perhaps two-thirds of the way across the bridge dome from the Special Materials Fabrication Unit, its bulge hiding from them T-1 and all but the tip of SpecMat. Suddenly, light behind them, a flare that spread into a glow overhead. Esmay ducked instinctively, and looked up. The materials transport track flared into blinding vapor at its highest point, and shed flaming pieces that streamed along a track revealing their progress.

“Let’s see,” Seska said. “Now we’re on the outside of a ship headed for jump and someone’s shooting at us. I wonder where the adventure cube camera crew is?”

“On the other escort, of course,” Frees said. “That’s why they’re not shooting at us yet.”

“I would wonder what else could go wrong, but I don’t want to give the universe ideas,” Bowry said.

Esmay grinned. She suddenly realized one other thing she’d been missing . . . humor that felt right to her.

“If they’re at standard distance, they can’t get mass weapons to us before we go through jump,” Seska said. “And that’s only an escort, isn’t it? Two more LOS shots ought to wipe them out for recharge, and then we’ll be gone.”

“Assuming the other one doesn’t fry us,” Bowry said. Light flared again, and this time the haze thickened. The rest of the transport track peeled away. “Good tracking, but they’ll burn out their power supply if they don’t let it go.” Abrupt darkness; Esmay blinked, and the stars showed again.

“If the other one wanted to, they’d have done it already. What I heard in the first conference was that one of the escorts was waffling and probably would jump out pretending to go for help.”

“Desertion . . .” mused Frees.

“Butt-covering,” Bowry said. “How I hate the prudent ones.”

“Doing all right, Lieutenant?” Seska asked, not as if he were worried, just checking.

“Fine, sir,” Esmay said. “Just trying to remember if there’s an airlock access around here somewhere.” Because even if they could survive jump on the outside of the ship, they’d run out of air before they finished . . . even a short jump lasted days longer than the air supply in an EVA suit.

“That’s an idea,” Seska said. “Get back in and go for ’em?”

“No, sir . . . not just the four of us, with only four light weapons. I was thinking, just stay in the airlock, with the outer hatch cracked so no one can get into it from inside, until we drop out of jump. Then go on.”

“Might work,” Seska said. “We can use suit—”

Koskiusko bulled its way into the jump transition with an uncanny slithering lurch and a vibration that ground its way through Esmay’s boots into her sinuses. The stars were gone. She could see nothing beyond the readouts in her helmet and they looked very strange indeed. Her com was silent, as dark a silence as the visible dark around her. Under her, the vibration went on and on, unhealthy for the ship, for the connection of wing to core, for the stability of the drives themselves. If the drives failed, if they dropped out of FTL at some unmapped point . . .

She clung to her handholds, and tried to talk herself out of the panic she felt. Of course it was dark; they’d outrun the light. If her readouts looked strange, she could still see them. Oxygen, for instance, gave her two hours more . . . but as she watched none of the values clicked over. The time-in-suit display was frozen in place, unmoving.

She had never been that good in theory, and she knew little about FTL flight, except that there was no way to define where and when ships were when they vanished from one jump point and reappeared (later, if there had been such a thing as absolute time, which there wasn’t.) FTL flight wasn’t instantaneous, like ansible transmission; the onboard reckoning might be anywhere from hours to days to—for the longest flight ever recorded—a quarter-standard year. Onboard, inside the hull and the FTL shielding, the clocks worked. Here . . . she forced a breath, which was not reassuring. She was breathing; she could feel the warm movement of her expiration on her cheeks. But the suit timekeeper wasn’t keeping time, which meant it wasn’t logging the oxygen she breathed, which meant she could run out without even knowing it.

And was it better to know when your oxygen was out? She shied away from that to a consideration of the suit comm failure. Lights and comm worked fine inside ships in FTL flight . . . why not here, if they were inside the shields?

If they weren’t inside the shields . . .

A low moan came through the suit earphones, dragging on and on like a lost cow on a spring night. Esmay couldn’t figure out what it was, until it ended in a long hiss. Her mind put the sounds together like pieces of a puzzle: it could have been a word, slowed down. She struggled, trying to imagine what word it could have been, but a piercing jitter followed. She nudged the suit controls, damping the sound—at least that worked. But if the suit coms didn’t work, they could all get lost . . .

Something bumped the back of her helmet; she turned cautiously. It had to be one of the others. It bumped again. Now she could hear someone’s voice—Seska’s—as well as a faint gritty noise where their helmets rubbed together.

“Radios don’t work. Have to touch heads. Hook in.” He tapped her arm, and she remembered her safety line. Of course.

Esmay switched on her helmet light, and watched in amazement as the light reached slowly—slowly—down like the extrusion of a semisolid adhesive from its tube. When it reached the hull, the edges of the shape it made rippled uneasily, the edges a moire pattern of odd colors. Unfortunately, it illuminated no helpful markers, nothing to suggest which way an airlock might be.

“—Suiza?”

If the light moved slowly, so might comm, the radio waves distorted by whatever the FTL drive did to space and time. Esmay had a sense of waking up from some kindred slowness, as if part of her body were keyed to the velocity of light itself, and lagged far behind them.

“Here,” she said to Seska. She dipped her head; the bar of light from her helmet bent slowly, undulating with the movement. She handed the end of her line to the gloved hand that appeared in the light.

“—know someone who would take one look at that and spend the next month in a trance of math, trying to explain it.” That was another voice, fainter, and she worked out that it must be transmitted helmet to helmet, from the other side of Seska. “Frees linked. Bowry linked.”

“—airlock? Clock’s not working.” Of course they had figured out the implications of that for themselves. Where was the nearest airlock? She stared into the darkness, trying to picture this part of the ship, to build up the model from her first days aboard when she studied Kos. There was an airlock for the emergency evacuation of bridge crew at the base of the dome, across from T-1, which meant on their present path and perhaps a quarter hour’s careful traverse. In the dark she was not sure what their former path had been, but the leakage of the gravity unit helped her find downslope.

“Follow me,” she said, and pointed her helmet downslope. The light beam bent, kinked like water from a moving hose, and rippled off in the approximate direction. Esmay started after it, uneasily aware that she could catch up with her own light source. Just like the idiot captains they taught about in the Academy, who had microjumped their ships out in front of their own beam weapons, and fried themselves. She glanced sideways without moving her head, and saw other streams of light like her own but slightly different in color . . . felt a touch on her back.

“—Follow you,” Seska said. “Stay in direct contact.”

She felt her way cautiously from one grabbable protuberance to another. It was like climbing boulders in the dark, which she’d done only that one time because it was such a stupid way to get hurt, hanging out over a dark place feeling for nubs and not knowing how far down . . . .

Here down was a meaningless concept, and she had no idea what would happen if she lost contact with the hull. There was no sensation of external pressure, as there would be from speed in an atmosphere, with wind battering. No, but from deep inside came another pressure, as one body cavity after another insisted that things were wrong, were bad, and shouldn’t be moving this way. The worst of the vibration had evened out, it should have been better. Instead, she felt growing pressure in her skull; she could feel the roots of her teeth tickling her sinuses; her eyes wanted to pop out to escape the swelling.

She paused as she felt a tug on the line connecting her to the others. A helmet tapped hers, then steadied.

“—think maybe we’re not inside the FTL shielding,” Frees said. “Just the collision shields.”

Of course. Her memory unreeled the correct reference this time, showing the FTL shield generators affecting a network of spacers set just under the hull covering. Of course the outer hull could not be shielded from FTL influences—it had to travel there.

It was hard not to overrun her light, but she finally figured out just how to position her head and move, so that she could see possible handholds and clip points coming up just out of reach. She passed a communications array, and remembered that it was only a few meters from the airlock entrance. But which way? And exactly how many? She paused there, wrapped her line around the base of the array (and why hadn’t it snapped off when they went through the jump point?)

“It’s nearby,” she told the others when they’d caught up and touched helmets, for all the world like cows touching noses. “Wait—I’m going to look.”

A pause. “—Shine in different directions. Might help.” It would. She watched as the two beams she could see looped out on either side of hers. She gave herself five or six meters of line, and scooted out to the end of it, then began circling.

The airlock, when she found it, had a viewport beside the control panel. She clipped in to the bar meant for that purpose, peeked through, and saw only more dark. She didn’t want to try turning on the interior lights—why announce to the Bloodhorde commandos where they were?

She tugged a signal on her line, and wrestled with the control panel as she waited for them to catch up. She had trouble making her light stay on the controls while she tried to operate them. The safety panel slid at last, and she looked at the directions. It had been designed for emergency exit, not entrance, so the entrance instructions were full of cautions and sequences intended to keep some idiot from blowing the pressure in neighboring compartments.

She punched the sequence that should work. Nothing happened. She looked at the instructions again. First lock the inner hatch, the button marked inner hatch, then the close switch. Then check the pressurization, test pressure. She went that far then read and completed the rest of the sequence. But the lights did not turn green, and the airlock did not open.

“—Have a manual override?” Seska asked. She had not even noticed his approach, or the touch of the helmet.

She looked, and saw nothing she recognized. “Didn’t find one—I tried the auto sequence twice.” She moved aside.

Frees found the override, beneath a separate cover panel, with its own instructions. It was mechanical, requiring a hard shove clockwise, which freed a set of dials that had to be rotated into the number sequence printed on the inside of the cover. Seska and Frees struggled with the lever. She could imagine what they were saying. Fighting with the lever would use oxygen fast.

Esmay stared at the instructions for the automatic sequence, wondering why it wasn’t working. Lock inner hatch, test pressurization, enter number of personnel coming in, key in opening sequence for outer lock. She’d done that. She went on reading, past the warnings against unauthorized use, down to the fine print, hoping to find something she’d missed that would get it open.

In that fine print, down at the bottom, the final word was no: note: external airlocks cannot be used during ftl flight. In even finer print: This constraint poses no risk to personnel as personnel are not engaged in EVA activities during FTL flight.

She leaned over and put her helmet against Seska’s. “Some fool must have painted this thing shut,” he was saying.

“No,” Esmay said. “It won’t work in FTL flight. It says that at the bottom.” The others stopped struggling.

“So it does,” Frees said, leaning into her helmet. “On this panel too. Says we don’t need it because of course we aren’t out here in FTL. Silly us, being impossible.”

“Wish they were right,” Bowry said. “All right, Suiza—now what?”

Esmay opened her mouth to protest that—they outranked her; they were supposed to make the decisions—and shut it again, thinking. The oxygen running out, at a rate they could not determine. Time passing . . . somewhere, at least inside the ship, time was passing. Could they make it to their original goal before the oxygen ran out? Could they get in if they did? If all the airlocks were inoperable in FTL flight, they could at least use the air outlets in the repair bays . . . if those worked.

Then it occurred to her that maybe this airlock had an external oxygen feed too . . . some airlocks did, for the use of personnel stacked up waiting to use the lock. She turned back to the control panel and looked. There: traditional green nipple fitting, though only one at this lock. Would it work or was it too automatically shut off because no one would use it during FTL flight?

“Oxygen outlet,” she said, and tapped Bowry, next to her, on the shoulder. He looked, nodded, and turned. She found the recharge hose on the back of his suit, and unclipped it for him.

The oxygen flowlight came on when he plugged in, so at least the ship’s system thought it was supplying oxygen.

“Gauge still stuck,” Bowry said. Which was going to make it hard, if not impossible to figure out when the suit tanks were recharged. “Counting pulse,” he said then. “Don’t interrupt.”

Esmay had no faith that her own pulse was anything like normal, nor did she know how long it would take to replace an unknown consumption, even if she could use her pulse to determine duration. They crouched what seemed like a long time in silence, until Bowry said, “There. Should do it.” He unplugged from the access, and said, “Your turn. If you know your heart rate, give it three minutes. Otherwise I can count for you.”

“Others first,” Esmay said. “They were wrestling with that lever.”

“Don’t be too noble, Lieutenant; we might think you were bucking for promotion.” Seska moved over and plugged in, then Frees, and finally Esmay.

“Why three minutes?” Frees asked, while Esmay was still hooked up.

“Because—if I can just get it out—I’ve got a test that doesn’t depend on the suit’s internal clock. We’ll need more, but I figured three minutes would give us a margin of fifteen, at least. My suit stopped registering at 1 hour, 58.3 minutes. Is that in the range for the rest of you?” It was, and just as Esmay had counted not her pulse but seconds, Bowry said “Aha!” in a pleased voice.

“It works?”

“I think so. It would help if we could rig some way of getting us all hooked up at once, though, because calculating the differentials for the waiting periods is a bit tricky.”

“Give us an estimate; it’d take too long and we don’t have tools—”

“All right. Suiza, you’re still hooked up—you’ll need the longest time on, then it goes down. I’ll count it off for you.”

Esmay wondered what kind of gauge Bowry thought he’d worked out, and how long it was going to be, but she didn’t want to interrupt his count. She felt vaguely silly, hanging there in the dark and silence, waiting to be told it was time to unhook herself from the oxygen supply, but tried to tell herself it was better than being dead. Finally—she could not guess how long it had been—Bowry said, “Time’s up. Next?”

When they had all tanked up by Bowry’s count, which Esmay could only hope bore some relation to reality, they still had to decide what to do next.

Seska took the lead. “Suiza—do you know where all the airlocks are?”

“I studied it for Major Pitak’s exam when I first came aboard, but I don’t really know . . . there are some I do remember. On each deck, between T-3 and T-4, for instance. Once we’re on T-3, there are airlocks both inside the repair bay, and opening on the outer face toward T-4.”

“We could just stay here,” Frees said. “We know where this oxygen is.”

“If we knew how long the jump transit was . . . if it’s anything more than a day or so, we’ve got other suit limitations.”

“I don’t suppose you know a handy external source of snacks, water, and powerpacks?”

“And toilets?”

Esmay surprised herself with a snort of laughter. “Sorry,” she said. “I believe all those substances are restricted to the interior of the ship during FTL flight.”

“Then we’d better head toward the next oxygen access, and hope that we find a way inside before . . . we have to.”

Navigation was going to be their worst problem. Although Kos’s hull was studded with more protuberances than Esmay had expected, it was still mostly matte black and unmarked. Creeping, feeling her way, across that great black expanse, she felt like a deep-sea creature, one of those her aunt had shown her pictures of. Some of those, she recalled, clustered around deep-ocean vents that provided warmth and nutrients. How did they find their way? Chemotaxis . . . however that worked. She couldn’t figure out an equivalent for it on the hull of a ship in hyperspace, so just kept moving.

An abrupt change in the topography she could see signaled the dropoff, as it were, into the gulf between T-3 and T-4. Esmay struggled to think which direction to move next. Down toward the lower decks in the crease between T-3 and the core? Along the top of T-3? She didn’t even know if the great clamshell gantry supports were closed around Wraith, or if they’d gone into jump with the repair bay open to the dark.

As if in answer to her question, light reappeared in the outer dark. At least, she supposed it was light, because her eyes reacted to it, and her brain, trying to make what she saw into the shapes she expected. It looked strange, and more like pale smoke blowing than light, thick streams fraying to looser strands as she watched, but it gave an impression of some angular bulk just off to her left, with towering plumes above. Far away, a tumbled trail of light, a badly ploughed furrow, receded redly into the distance.

They had all paused, and moved into the helmet-touching huddle. “If I were a physicist,” Seska said, “I just might go crazy. Most of what we’ve seen since jump hasn’t fit most of what I learned about FTL flight. But since I’m a mere ship’s captain, I say it’s beautiful.”

“The gantries are up,” Esmay said. “Repair bay’s unsealed. If it doesn’t have some kind of barrier I don’t know about, we should be able to get in that way.”

“Why’d they turn the lights on now?” asked Frees.

“Just got the separate power supply hooked up,” Esmay said. “The Bloodhorde’s got the bridge—they probably cut power to the wings, maybe even life support, but each wing actually has its own ship support capability.”

“So we just walk over and hop down one of those openings?”

“Only if we want to hit sixteen or seventeen decks down after a 1-G acceleration. We might be able to climb down the gantry legs . . .” She’d never actually been on the gantries, but she’d seen others up there. The problem was . . . would their friends shoot them first, or give them time to explain who they were?

“Our suitcoms should work in there,” Seska said. “And maybe they won’t see us right away.”

The walk along the topside of T-3 to the first of the openings was easier than the final traverse of the dome, but fraught with its own difficulties. The unhappy light streaming away from the openings illuminated nothing in their path, and a lot was in their path. The sheared roots of the materials transport track supports . . . cables set to brace the clamshells, counterweights for the mechanisms that raised and lowered them . . . at least something was always near at hand to clip the lines to.

Personnel access in normal operations was on the center of curved openings, now clearly downlight of the arching supports themselves. They edged along the opening, and the light changed color as they moved beside it. Even those few tens of meters of uplight . . . were too blue, and a turn of the head made it red.

The personnel lift shaft was where Esmay had remembered it should be. Far, far below, its controls locked down. She could see a section of Wraith with her skin off and a crowd of workers in EVA gear clustered around a bundle of crystals that ran out of sight fore and aft.

There was, at least, the comfort of a niche below the hull line, a platform large enough for twenty or more workers to stand waiting for the personnel lift. Esmay started down the ten mesh steps that led down to it. On the second step, ship’s gravity caught her feet; she felt glued to the step. By the time she got to the platform, she felt the drag of gravity through every bone, but her head felt clearer. Inside, the light looked normal, if less bright than usual. She glanced around. Only some of the lights were on, spotlighting the workers. Of course—on internal power, they’d conserve where they could.

The others came down, one by one, carefully; none spoke until they reached the platform. Esmay glanced around. Oxy supply lines in the bulkhead . . . a real bulkhead, with the green triangle for oxygen access painted on it. A water tap. Even a suit relief valve . . . suit maintenance really hated people who turned in soiled suits. A movement in her helmet caught her attention—her suit’s internal clock was working again, and the oxygen gauge squirted up, then dropped, then rose again slowly to indicate that she had 35 percent of her supply left, one hour and eighteen minutes at current usage.

She started to speak, then realized that if the suitcoms were working properly they could be overheard. And why wasn’t she hearing the others. Different circuits?

She found the controls in her suit and switched around the dial.

“—Gimme one—just one—now half . . .”

Back to the other channel, the one they’d used into the jump into FTL. “They’re on a different setting, at least some of ’em are.”

“Makes sense.” Seska was peering over the rail at his ship. “How do we get down?”

“Carefully,” said Frees, eyeing the emergency ladder which led down to the first horizontal gangway on this side of the repair bay, five decks below. “If we try to get the lift up, they’ll know we’re here.”

“Better report now,” Esmay said. “If we hail them on their own frequency, it might be someone I know. They can get Major Pitak to identify me, anyway.”

“You’re right, but—in the grand tradition, it seems a bit tame to let them know. Adventurers who’ve survived unprotected FTL flight ought to do something more dramatic . . . why weren’t we provided with those little invisible wire things that spies and thieves are always using to lower themselves from heights?”

“Blame the props department,” Esmay said, surprising herself. They all chuckled.

“Suiza, if you ever get tired of maintenance, I’d be glad to have you on my ship,” Seska said. “I wondered at first, but now I can see why the admiral wanted you on the operational end of this.”

Esmay’s ears burned. “Thank you, sir. Now—I’ll just let them know we’re here.” She switched channels, and found herself listening to the end of the previous set of directions.

“ . . . Now back a tenth . . . just right . . . there.”

“Lieutenant Suiza here,” she said, hoping she wasn’t cutting across another transmission.

“What! Who? Where are you?”

“I’m up at the top of the bay, on the personnel platform by lift one. With three other officers: Captain Seska and Lt. Commander Frees of Wraith, and Commander Bowry from the Schools. I have an urgent message from Admiral Dossignal for the senior officer in T-3.”