Once a Hero

Chapter Seven

The team from Special Materials Analysis came off the commercial line at Comus along with all the other passengers, some hundred and thirty. Here, in the interior of the Familias, the customs checks were perfunctory. A glance at the ID, a glance at the luggage . . . their matching briefcases, matching duffels, all with the company logo.

“Consultants, eh?” said the customs inspector, clearly proud of his guess.

“That’s right.” Gori smiled at the man, that friendly open smile which was just a bit too memorable sometimes. Arhos wondered if he should have let Gori come—but Gori was the best with such devices, faster by thirty seconds than anyone else. He would edge their profit up on the Fleet contract, too—thirty seconds a hundred times a day was fifty minutes off the top.

“What a life,” the customs man said. “Wish I could be a consultant—” He passed them through.

“They always think it’s glamorous,” Losa grumbled, audibly enough. “If they had to be on the road all the time, hear the complaints at home—”

“You didn’t have to marry that loser,” Pratt said. This was an old script, one they could improvise around for an hour.

“He’s not a loser, he’s just . . . sensitive.”

“Artists,” Gori said. “I don’t know why intelligent women always fall for losers who claim they’re creative—”

Losa huffed, something she did well. “He’s not a loser! He’s sold three works—”

“In how long?” asked Gori.

“Stop it,” Arhos said, as any manager would. “It’s not important—Gori, let her alone. She’s right; people think our job is glamorous, and if they knew what it’s really like, on the road all the time, working long hours for people who are already angry they had to hire us, they’d know better. But no more personal problems on this trip, all right? We’re going to be stuck out here long enough without making it seem longer.”

“All right,” Gori said, with a sidelong look at Losa.

“I need to stop in here,” Losa said, ducking into a ladies’ without looking at Gori at all. Arhos glared at Gori, who shrugged. Pratt shook his head. The two junior women, technicians newly hired from a large firm which hadn’t offered them enough challenge, glanced at each other, and made a tentative move toward the ladies’.

“Go on,” Arhos said. “We’ve got enough time.”

“She’s the sensitive one,” Pratt said, continuing the argument even without Losa.

“Stop it. It doesn’t help, and we can’t run her life.” The rest of the team caught up with them, and formed a clot in the passage until Losa and the other women reappeared. Then, not speaking, they moved on to the gate that divided Fleet space from civilian space. Here, instead of a bored civilian customs inspector, they faced a cluster of alert, edgy, military guards.

“Arhos Asperson, Special Materials Analysis Consulting,” Arhos said, handing over his ID case. “And this is the contract—” A data cube, embossed with Fleet’s own insignia on one side, and an elaborate marbled etching on the others. It had taken them two years to develop a duplicate of Fleet’s equipment, so that they could fabricate their own cubes rather than having to steal and reprogram them. Then they’d gotten this perfectly legitimate contract, and hadn’t needed to use their fake.

“Yes, sir,” the first guard said. “And how many in your group?”

“Seven,” Arhos said. He stood aside, while the second guard collected everyone’s ID cases. He would have worried, on Sierra Station, even with a real Fleet cube. . . . though they had used the faked Fleet cubes before, and faked ID before, Fleet was unusually alert, thanks to the repercussions from Xavier. Here, he expected no trouble—and in fact the cube reader had already accepted, then spat out, the fake cube.

“All clear, sir,” the guard said. “We’ll have to check all the luggage, of course.”

“Of course.” He handed over his own duffel and briefcase. Standard civilian electronics: datapads, cube reader, cubes, portable computers in all sizes from pocket to briefing, communications access sets, data probe wands . . .

“You can’t use this shipboard, sir,” the guard said, holding up the comm access set and the data wand.

“No, I understand. Last time out, your people provided a shielded locker.”

“We can do that, sir,” the guard said, with obvious relief. Inexperienced consultants sometimes insisted that they would not give up any of their equipment . . . they got no more contracts. The other guard, Arhos noticed, was calling someone in Fleet territory, and soon a lowly pivot appeared with a luggage truck and a lockable container for the restricted electronics.

“You don’t have to lock it up now,” the guard said. “If you want to place calls from the Fleet areas, that’s permissible from any blue-coded booth. But before boarding—”

“We understand,” Arhos said. He knew there would be another search before they boarded.

The Fleet area of Comus Station had its own eating places, its own bars, its own entertainment and shopping outlets and even public-rental sleeping. They had plenty of time before their ship left.

“What exactly is your area of expertise, Dr. Asperson?”

Arhos allowed his mouth to quirk up at one corner, restrained amusement at the naivete of the question. “My degrees are in logical systems and substrate analysis.”

The young officer blinked. “ . . . Substrate?”

“Classified, I’m afraid,” Arhos said, with a little dip of the head to take the edge off.

“Lieutenant, I believe you have duties forward,” said the lieutenant commander at the head of the table.

“Oh . . . of course, sir.” He scurried out.

“I’m sorry,” the lieutenant commander said. He wore no name tag; none of the officers aboard such a small ship wore them. “Please forgive us—we’re not usually carrying civilians—”

“Of course,” Arhos said. “But you understand our situation—?”

“Certainly. Only—I didn’t recognize your firm’s name.”

“Subcontractors,” Gori said, grinning. “You know how it is—we used to work for the big firms, one and another of us, and then we struck out on our own. Got our first jobs as sub-subs, and now we’re all the way up to subcontractors.”

“It must be hard, going out on your own after working for a big company,” the officer said. Arhos thought he was buying the whole story.

“It has been,” Arhos said. “But we’re past wondering how we’re going to pay the rent.”

“I imagine you are,” the officer said, with a knowing smile for the quality of the clothes they wore, the expensive cases they carried.

“Not that it’s easy profit,” Arhos said, putting in the earnest emphasis that impressed the military so well. “We’re working harder than we used to—but it’s for ourselves. And you, of course.”

“Of course.”

At Sierra Station, they had no customs to pass, nothing but a long walk down one arm of the station and out another. An escort, ostensibly to ensure that they didn’t get lost; civilians did not wander the Fleet sections of stations—especially stations this near the borders—without an escort. In the comfortable ease of someone who had not intended mischief anyway, the team ambled along, chatting aimlessly about the food they’d had, and the food they hoped to have.

Koskiusko’s docking bay was actually a shuttle bay. Here, Arhos handed the contract cube to the ranking guard, who fed it into a cube reader.

“I’ll call over, sir, but it’ll be at least two hours before a shuttle comes in. The little pod’s halfway over with an arriving officer, and the shuttle’s already loaded with cargo—no room for you, and it’s down at Orange 17 anyway.”

“No problem. Is there someplace to get a drink, meanwhile?”

“Not really—there’s a food machine just down the corridor there, between the toilets, but nothing really good.”

“Nothing edible” grumbled another guard. “Station food service’s supposed to replace those snacks before they turn green but—”

“We could call in for something,” the first guard said. “They deliver from civ-side, but there’s a fee—”

“That would be great,” Arhos said. “The ship we came in on was skewed five hours off Station time by the last jump, and I for one would enjoy something. And if it’s near a break for you—”

“No, thank you, sir. Here’s the order list . . .”

“Ever been aboard a DSR before?” asked the bright-eyed young man who escorted them from the docking bay.

“No . . . main station yards, a couple of cruisers, but no DSR.”

“Let me get you a shipchip,” the youngster said. He touched a control panel, entering a sequence so fast that Arhos couldn’t figure out the placement of sensors on the unmarked surface. Something bleeped, and tiny disks rattled into a bin below the panel.

Arhos looked at his and wondered how to activate it.

“Voice,” the young man said promptly. “It’ll project a route from your position to the location you name—for the low-security areas, that is. If you need access to the high-security areas, you’ll have to get it reset. That’ll be in ship admin, which it’ll guide you to. I mean, I will, that’s where you’re going first, but any other time—”

“Thank you,” Arhos said. Behind him, the rest of the team murmured appropriate thanks as well.

They were passed from desk to desk in the admin bay, collecting ship’s ID tags, access cards for a variety of spaces, and a new set of shipchips. Then someone came to fetch them to the admin offices of the 14th Heavy Maintenance Yard.

“We don’t have slideways, but we do have lift tubes,” they were told. “Don’t try to hitch a ride on the robocarts—they’re programmed to stop if they sense extra mass.”

They spent the first several days looking over the inventory, and discussing their plan with the senior technician, a balding master chief named Furlow.

“I think Headquarters has its nose up its tail again,” Furlow said at the first meeting. “Rekeying all the weapons guidance codes? That assumes the people doing the job are competent and loyal.” He gave Arhos a sideways look. “Not that I’m saying you aren’t, but it’s too big a job to go without hitches.”

“You’re probably right,” Arhos said. “But I’m not going to pass up a contract . . . it’s how we make a living.”

“Yes, well . . .” A heavy sigh. “I know you’ve got clearances from transcendent deities or something, but on my watch, these weapons are my responsibility and I’ll have one of my people with you.”

“Of course,” Arhos said. “We don’t want any misunderstandings either. This is the protocol we were sent—I’m assuming you have the other part—”

“Yes, sir, I do.” The chief took Arhos’s version and peered at it. “Scuzzing waste of time, but it’ll work. How long did you tell ’em it’d take?”

“Five minutes per weapon, an hour to retool between types. That’s what it took on the racks they mocked up for us to bid on.” Arhos allowed himself to smile. “We were one minute faster than the next fastest on each, and a solid ten minutes faster in retooling. Then when they had us work on a patrol craft, we were able to work that fast even in tight situations. We weren’t told what your inventory was, of course. We’re just supposed to do it until it’s done. Then when the other ships return from deployment, we’ll do theirs as well.”

“I imagine,” the chief said, “that there weren’t many people that wanted to spend a standard year or more out here in Sector 14.”

“Not that many,” Arhos admitted. “Fleet had a lot of contracts to hand out for this work, and most of ’em were either bigger, smaller, or in more popular places. We happened to fit the profile for this one—and we performed well in the test series.”

“Umph.” The chief didn’t look any happier, but at least seemed slightly less hostile. “Well, you have your work cut out. We store the weaponry for all of Sector 14. There’s no rear supply depot out here, because of security concerns—Sierra Station gets a fair bit of civilian traffic, and we know some of it’s Bloodhorde agents.”

“We’d better get started, then, hadn’t we?”

The chief still didn’t move. “It’s not going to be that easy. This thing is big, but not big enough to hold inventory like that in convenient arrays. Weapons and guidance systems are stored separately, and since the guidance systems are compact, we’ve squirreled them away wherever they’d fit. It’s not anything like the way you worked on that patrol ship. At least we have an automated system. Let me show you some video.” He ran his hand over the control panel on his desk, and a display came up on the wall. “That’s one of the inventory bays in which guidance systems are stored.” Racks rose from the deck to the overhead, the familiar pattern of automated inventory systems controls along the vertical rails. “Because the guidance systems are small, and most of the time we’re not restocking the warships, we fit them in by size, not by type.”

“So we’re going to have to go through there and pull them out one at a time?”

“Not quite that bad. One rack at a time, though. This bay, right now, has . . .” The chief flicked another control that brought up a display on his desk. “Eight thousand two hundred sixty-four ASAC-32 modules. But they’re on at least eight different stacks, and I’d bet that someone has moved at least a few of them when restocking other goods, and hasn’t bothered to update the file.”

“Won’t your automated system do that?”

“So-so.” The chief wobbled his hand in the age-old gesture. “High-security items have a tracer that sounds off if they’re removed from that hold, but not if they’re moved a few meters. We’d have spent all our time rekeying the tracers—we’re always having to move things in and out.”

“So you know they’re in there, and you probably know where most of them are, but . . .”

“But not all. Which is why it’s a stupid idea, thought up by someone who’s never seen a big repair inventory.” The chief grinned. “I hope they’re paying you a daily allowance, and not by piece, or you’ll be here forever and earn nothing.”

Arhos wasn’t sure that prospect would bother the chief, but it certainly bothered him. He had worried that the job wouldn’t take long enough—that he’d have to stretch it out—that they wouldn’t need to wander over enough of the ship to find the self-destruct. Instead . . . they would be here far too long, and although they’d have wide access they might be too busy to use it.

“I wonder if someone leaked this problem to Burrahn, Hing & Co., and that’s why they didn’t bid on this job,” he said, and watched the chief’s face. No flicker, but . . . but someone had to have leaked it. Damn the Bloodhorde! “At least we are getting a per diem . . . but it’s going to be a bitch.”

Arhos eyed his partners and gave a meaningful glance at the gray cylinder on the table between them. Fleet would expect them to disable the simpler scans of their compartment; Arhos had not concealed the device. Now he turned it on. Telltales blinked hotly: it had detected signals it could not fog. He’d expected that. Right now, it was important for Fleet to think its more delicate scans worked here. What lay concealed within the familiar cylinder, under the Morin Co. seal, was for later use, and more private conversations. His partners would know that, and would interpret what he said in the light of the caution now necessary.

“We have a problem,” Arhos began, when the team had assembled. Quickly he repeated the chief’s explanation of the way weapons guidance systems were stored on Koskiusko. “It’s going to take a lot longer than we thought. It might be better to start with the weapons on the warships, since they’re in the arrays we know—”

“But our contract states that we should begin with the DSR,” Losa said, playing up beautifully.

“Yes, but they didn’t tell us the whole story. With this arrangement, there’ll be a lot of dead time—we’ll be waiting around while they figure out where some of the weapons are. I’m considering whether to discuss a restructuring of the whole job.” It would be difficult, with a signed contract; he would have to prove that Fleet had not provided necessary information. He wasn’t sure he could trust that Chief Furlow to give evidence, if it came to that.

“A suggestion . . .” Gori said.

“Go ahead.”

“Why not split the team, and send some of ’em over to the larger warships? That way, the manhours lost in dead time won’t be as great.”

“Possibly . . . in fact, that’s a good idea. We won’t have to worry about them . . .” Noticing anything, he didn’t say, but Gori’s upward twitch of eyebrow meant he’d understood exactly what Arhos didn’t say.

“We don’t look like whiners, we get the job done faster . . . and we’re here to show that our top people cope with the unexpected.” Losa sounded enthusiastic; her eyes sparkled. Arhos thought it over, liking the idea better every moment. The one thing they’d worried about was having one of their own people notice something. Yet the Fleet contract had required a larger team. This way—this way he got rid of those bright, inquisitive minds, in a way that could cast no suspicion on the partners.

“Good, then. I’ll speak to the admiral’s office. If we’re sending people off, we need to do that before we leave Sierra.”

From Altiplano to Comus Station, Esmay traveled by civilian carrier, a regularly scheduled passenger ship. In the thirty days of her leave, other news had come to dominate the screens. No one seemed to recognize her in her civilian clothes, for which she was grateful. She divided her time between her own quarters and the ship’s palatial fitness equipment. It felt odd to be aboard a ship and have no duties, but she was not about to call attention to herself by hanging around the crew looking wistful. Better to sweat on the exercise machines, and then cool off in the pool. She was vaguely aware that some of the other passengers who regularly used the fitness equipment might have wanted to chat, but swimming steady laps made that difficult. In her quarters, she worked her way through one teaching cube after another, everything in the ship’s library that seemed relevant.

At Comus, she chose to walk the distance from the liner’s docking bay to Fleetgate rather than taking a slideway. She needed to do a bit of shopping; she wanted to replace every bit of clothing she’d brought from Altiplano. It was wasteful, she admitted, to throw away perfectly good garments . . . but she wanted nothing to connect her to her past. When she found a Space Relief outlet store, she emptied her cases, and then handed over the cases, all but her Fleet duffel.

She needed little, really. A few comfortable things for lounging, one good dress outfit. She found all that in the first store she entered, picking the things hastily. It didn’t really matter what she wore when she was off-duty. She was eager to get back to Fleet territory. When she arrived at the Fleetgate, the sentry’s cheerful “Welcome home, Lieutenant!” sent her mood up three notches.

Esmay found her new assignment posted to her private mail when she checked in. She had expected a tour on Comus itself—else why send her out here in the first place?—but her orders directed her to Sierra Station, there to take up her duties with the Fourteenth Heavy Maintenance Yard aboard the Koskiusko. She’d never heard of that ship; when she looked it up in the Table of Ships, she discovered that it was a DSR, a deepspace repair ship, part of the second-wave deployment out of Sierra Station.

Someone must be seriously annoyed with her. Repair ships were huge, ungainly, complicated, and totally unglamorous. Worse, DSR ships were a logistics nightmare, the natural and lawful prey of every inspector general: it was impossible to keep them in perfect order, up to nominal inventory, because they were always losing parts to some other vessel. Legitimately, but inevitably, the paperwork lagged reality.

For this, among other reasons, very few people—except the specialists who actually did the repairs on other vessels—wanted assignment to a DSR. Young officers considered such an assignment proof that someone was down on them; Esmay followed the herd in this, if nothing else, and took it as evidence that exoneration by the official court hadn’t convinced someone of her innocence. She looked up the next available transfer to Sierra Station. Because she had arrived on Comus almost 24 hours before her leave was up, she could just catch a Fleet supply run to Sierra . . . and she had no good excuse not to catch it, since her duty status went active the moment she logged on to pick up her orders.

Esmay checked—the supply ship had space available, and she had two hours to report aboard. A bored clerk stamped and validated her original and amended orders, updated her hardcopy ID and her files. She dashed in and out of the tiny PX to pick up her new insignia—the clerk told her that her promotion to lieutenant had come through while she was on leave—and get a Koskiusko shiptag for her duffel. That wasn’t required, since she hadn’t signed aboard, but her duffel was more likely to arrive there if it had a shiptag than a name—and-number. When she got to the docking bay for the supply ship, she found herself in a queue with half a dozen other Fleet personnel making a transfer. No one stared at her; no one seemed to know who she was or care. Most of the talk was about a parpaun match played recently between the crews of two ships in dock—apparently someone had kicked all three of the possible goals in one play—but Esmay had never really understood parpaun. Why two balls? Why three differently colored goals? Why—she often thought to herself, but would not say—bother? Now she was glad to hear the others full of enthusiasm for something that banal, and she hoped that her moment of fame had already vanished.

The supply ship was hauling parts that would resupply Koskiusko; its exec had noticed her orders, and put her to work checking the inventory. Sixteen days of counting impellers, gaskets, lengths of tubing, fasteners of all kinds, tubes of adhesive, updates to repair manuals (both hardcopy and cubes). . . . Esmay decided that someone at Headquarters really hated her.

She was good at this kind of thing; she didn’t find it difficult to keep her concentration. On the fourth day, she noticed that of the 562 boxes supposed to contain 85mm star-slot fasteners with threads of pitch 1/10 and interval 3mm, one was labeled for 85mm star-slot fasteners with threads of pitch 1/12 and interval 4mm instead. Two days later she found three leaky tubes of adhesive, which had glued themselves to neighboring tubes in a container; it was clear from the discoloration of the labels that they had been flawed from the beginning; she noted that. She could see why this was necessary—someone would find the errors and better now than in the midst of an emergency repair—but it wasn’t the glamorous sort of job she’d thought of when she had dreamed of leaving Altiplano. Either time she’d left Altiplano.

She wondered if she’d spend her entire time aboard Koskiusko doing the same thing. That would make a very long two years. She didn’t want notoriety, exactly, but she would like something more interesting than bean-counting.

In her off-shift, she listened to the sports fans, hoping for a change in topic, but they seemed to have no other interests. Apparently, they had all played on a parpaun team at one time or another, and after they’d rehashed the recent match they were happy to tell each other in detail about every match they’d played. Esmay listened long enough to understand at last what the rules were, and why two balls (each team had its own ball, and scores could be made with the opponent’s ball only on the third, “neutral” goal. It still seemed an unreasonably complex game, and as boring as any other for nonplayers to listen to.

She finally gave up and started reading the supply ship’s tech support cubes. Inventory control, principles and practice. The design of automated inventory systems. Even an article on “static munitions recognition systems”—which she couldn’t imagine needing—was better than the eighty-eighth rehash of a game she hadn’t seen and didn’t care about anyway. She was sure she’d never come face to face with a Barasci V-845 mine or its nastier cousin, the Smettig Series G, but she stared at the display until she was sure she would know them again if she were unlucky enough to see one.

Sierra Station served both Fleet and civilian interests, but Fleet predominated. Two long arms docked only military vessels; Esmay watched the names scroll past on the wardroom screen. Pachyderm, the oldest active cruiser, and Fleet’s largest. Plenitude, Savage, and Vengeance, cruisers much like Heris Serrano’s Vigilance. Plenitude had a star by its name—it was the flagship of some combat group. A gaggle of patrol craft: Consummate, Pterophil, Singularity, Autarch, Rascal, Runagate, Vixen, Despite . . . Despite? What was Despite doing here?

Esmay felt cold all over. She had left that very lucky (in one way) and unlucky (in another) ship almost the full length of Familias space away . . . she had not expected to see Despite again unless she was transferred to its sector. Why had they moved it at all? And why, of all places, here?

She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to see that ship again; the memory of victory could not erase the memory of what had gone before, that bloody mutiny, and the mistakes she had made later.

She shook that off. She couldn’t afford to be upset by it, and it was unlikely she’d have anything to do with Despite and her new captain.

Koskiusko, the screen read, blinking now because she had put a tracer on the name. She noted the concourse and docking number in her personal compad. One corner of the screen turned yellow, then flashed their arrival dock number in blue. Esmay referred to the station map . . . Koskiusko was out at the far end of the longest arm, but she could get there without going past Despite.

When she made it to the gate area, a pair of Fleet security personnel checked her orders again. To her surprise, they made no move to open the access hatch. “It’ll be a few minutes, Lieutenant,” one of them said. He had sergeant’s stripes on his uniform, and his unit patch read Sierra Station, not Koskiusko. Esmay noticed that nowhere on the deck of the gate area were the traditional stripes defining ship space from station space. “They’ve sent a pod but it’s not here yet.”

“A pod?”

“DSRs don’t actually dock at stations.” The tone was carefully respectful, though Esmay had the feeling she had just asked a stupid question. “They’re too big—the relative masses would play hob with each other’s artificial gravity.” A pause, then a neutral, “Would you like to see Koskiusko, Lieutenant?”

“Yes,” Esmay said. She’d already shown she was ignorant; she might as well learn what she could.

“Here, then.” Up on the gate display came a blurry view of something large; the view sharpened, leaped nearer, and finally stabilized as the biggest and most unlikely excuse for a ship Esmay had ever seen. It looked like the unfortunate mating of an office building with a bulk-cargo tank and some sort of clamshell array. “Those funny-looking things are on the main repair bays,” the sergeant said helpfully. “They’ve got ’em open now, testing. As you can see, an escort can fit all the way in, and even most patrols . . . then the ports swing down . . .”

That opening was the size of an escort? Esmay revised her assumptions about size upward steeply. Not just an office building, but—she realized that the array of lights beyond a rounded bulge was another “office building.” It looked nothing like the DSR stats she’d seen at the Academy six years before. The two DSRs they’d been shown designs of had been built like clusters of grapes, with a single cylindrical repair bay running through the cluster. When she said that, the sergeant grinned.

“Koskiusko wasn’t commissioned then,” the sergeant said. “She’s new—and she’s not the same as she was, either. Here—I’ll show you a design plot.”

This came up in the three standard views, plus an angled one similar to that Esmay had seen. In design, the DSR still looked like several disparate (but large) components had been squashed together. Five blunt arms ran out from a central core: that was the “office building” part. Two adjacent arms had the clamshell arrangements on them. Behind those trailed great oblong shapes labeled “drive test cradle.” The arm adjacent to neither “main repair bay” had the tanklike object—larger, Esmay realized, than any tank she’d seen—stuck on its end like a bulbous nose. Without the tank, it would have looked like an orbital station specialized for some industrial process.

“What is that tank?” she asked, fascinated by this impossible oddity.

“Dunno, sir. That was added about three years ago, maybe two years after she was commissioned. Ah—here’s your pod.” The display blinked out, then reappeared as a status line; Esmay heard the clunk as the pod docked, then the whistling of an airlock cycling. Finally the status light turned green, and the sergeant opened the hatch. “Good luck, sir. Hope you enjoy your tour.”

Esmay found the pod unsettling. It had no artificial gravity; she had to strap into the passenger racks and hang there facing a ring of ports. The pilot wore an EVA suit; his helmet hung on a drop-ring just above him, suggesting that the EVA suit was more sense than worry. Through the pod’s wide ports she could see entirely too much of Sierra Station and its docked vessels, barnacles on a floating wheel. Station navigation beacons and standing lights played over them, glittering from the faceted hulls of pressurized bulk cargo tanks, gleaming from brightly colored commercial liners, and scarcely revealing the matte-dark hulls of Fleet vessels, except for pricks of light reflected from shield and weapons fittings. Beyond, a starfield with no planets distinguishable. Sierra System had them, but not out here, where the station served primarily outsystem transport. Sudden acceleration bumped Esmay against the rack, and then ceased; her stomach lagged behind, then lurched forward.

“Bag’s on the overhead, if you need it,” the pilot said. Esmay gulped and kept her last meal firmly in place. “We’re over there—” The pod pilot nodded to the forward port. A tangle of lights that diverged as they came nearer. Suddenly a glare as a searchlight from one arm flared across another, revealing the hull surface to be lumpy and dark . . . and big. Esmay could not get used to the scale.

“Passenger pod docking access is near the hub,” the pilot said. “That gives passengers the easiest access to personnel lifts and most admin offices. Cargo shuttles and special cargo pods dock near the inventory bays for the specific cargo. Minimizes interior traffic.” He leaned forward and prodded the control panel; deceleration shoved Esmay against the straps. Closer . . . closer . . . she glanced up to the overhead port, and saw the vast bulk of the DSR blocking out most of the starfield—then all of it.

Exiting the pod into the passenger bay, Esmay stepped across the red stripes that signaled where the ship formally began (something that had no relation to its architecture) and saluted the colors painted on the opposite bulkhead.

“Ah . . . Lieutenant Suiza.” The sergeant at the dock entry looked back and forth from her ID to her face several times. “Uh . . . welcome home, sir. The captain left word he wanted to see you when you came aboard . . . shall I call ahead?”

Esmay had thought she’d have time to put her duffel away first, but captains had their perks. “Thank you,” she said. “Can you tell me my bunk assignment?”

“Yes, sir. You’ve got number 14 in the junior officers section of T-2, ’cross ship from where we are now. This is the base of T-4. Do you want someone to take your duffel down?”

She didn’t want anyone messing with her things. “No, thanks. I’ll just stick it in a temp locker for now.”

“It’s no trouble, Lieutenant. The temp lockers are out of your way to the captain’s office anyway . . .”

She also didn’t want to start with a reputation for being difficult. “Thanks, then.” She handed over the duffel, and accepted the sergeant’s directions to the captain’s office . . . turn left out that hatch, take the second lift up five levels to Deck Nine, then left out of the lift and follow the signs.

The wide curving corridor matched the size of the ship; it belonged on an orbital station, not a warship. Esmay passed the first bank of lift tubes; the signs made it clear she was on Deck Four, which on an ordinary ship would be Main, not that any ordinary ship would have signs. At the second bank of tubes, she stepped in and watched the numbers flash by. Eighteen decks . . . what could they find to put on eighteen decks?

She stepped out of the lift tube on Deck Nine. Here the wide curving corridor that went around the core had the gray tile she associated with Main Deck in ordinary ships. Across from the lift tube openings a corridor led away, she supposed down one of the arms . . . T-5, said the sign on the overhead. A clerk sat at a desk in an open bay to one side. Esmay introduced herself.

“Ah. Lieutenant Suiza. Yes, sir, the captain wanted to see you right away. Captain Vladis Julian Hakin, sir. Just let me buzz the captain . . .” Esmay could not hear any signal, but the clerk nodded. “Go along in, sir. Third on your left.”

This captain had had a wooden door substituted for the standard steel hatch; this was not unusual. It was somewhat unusual for it to be closed when a visitor had been announced. Esmay knocked.

“Come in,” came a growl from the other side. She opened the door and entered, to find herself facing the top of a gray head. The captain’s office had been carpeted in deep green, and paneled in wood veneer. The Familias seal hung on the bulkhead behind the captain’s desk on one side, and a framed copy of some document—probably his commission, though she couldn’t see it—on the other.

“Ah . . . Lieutenant Suiza.” That seemed to be the greeting of the day. In Captain Hakin’s tone of voice, it sounded more like a curse than a greeting. “I hear they consider you quite the hero on Altiplano.” Definitely a curse. The distinction between on Altiplano and here in the real world might have been printed in red with less emphasis.

“Local interest, sir,” Esmay said. “That’s all.”

“I’m glad you realize that,” Captain Hakin said. He looked up suddenly, as if hoping to catch her in some incriminating expression. Esmay met his gaze calmly; she had expected repercussions from the awards ceremony, that was only natural. His glance flicked down to her uniform, where the silver and gold ribbon was not on the row allotted to non-Fleet decorations. By law, she was entitled to wear major awards from any political system within the Familias Regnant; by custom, no one did unless on a diplomatic assignment where failure to wear a locally awarded decoration might insult the giver. Junior officers, in particular, wore no personal awards except when in full dress uniform. So Esmay had the S&S, the ships—and-service ribbons appropriate to her past service, including the two decorations awarded Despite’s crew for the recent engagement—and, incongruously, the Ship Efficiency Award won under the late Captain Hearne. Traitor Hearne might have been, but her ship had topped the sector in the IG’s inspection.

“Yes, sir,” Esmay said, when his gaze flicked back to hers.

“Some captains would be concerned about a junior officer who had been involved in a mutiny, no matter how . . . er . . . warranted the action was later shown to be.”

“I’m sure that’s true, sir,” Esmay said, unruffled. She had dealt with this sort of thing all her life. “There must be some officers who remain concerned even after a court has considered the matter in detail. I can assure the captain that I will not overreact to such concern, if anyone expresses it.”

Hakin stared. What had he thought, that she’d turn red and bluster, trying to justify herself? She had stood before a court; she had been exonerated of all charges; she need do nothing but live out her innocence.

“You seem very sure of yourself, Lieutenant,” Hakin said finally. “How do you know that I am not one of those so concerned?”

Idiot, thought Esmay. His determination to prick her had overcome his good sense. No answer she could give would entirely ease the tension he had created. She chose bluntness. “Is the captain concerned?”

A long sigh, through pursed lips. “About many things, Lieutenant, of which your potential for mutiny is only one minute particle. I have been assured, by those who are supposed to know, that the public reports of your court-martial were in fact accurate . . . that there is no suspicion of your having conspired to mutiny ahead of your captain’s treacherous act.” He waited; Esmay could think of nothing helpful to say, and kept quiet. “I shall expect your loyalty, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir,” Esmay said. That she could do.

“And have you no corresponding concern that your next captain might also be a traitor? That I might be in the pay of some enemy?”

She had not let herself think about that; the effort pushed her response into exclamation. “No, sir! Captain Hearne must have been an aberration—”

“And the others as well? You’re happier than I, if you can believe that, Lieutenant.”

Now what was he getting at?

“We’ve had investigators all over every ship in the Fleet—and that’s reassuring only to those who think the investigators can’t be bent. A mess of trouble that Serrano woman caused.”

Esmay opened her mouth to defend Heris Serrano, and realized it would do no good. If Hakin seriously believed that Serrano had “caused trouble” by unmasking traitors and saving the Familias from invasion, she couldn’t change his mind. She could only ruin her own reputation.

“Not that she isn’t a brilliant commander,” Hakin went on, as if she had said something. “I suppose Fleet must count itself lucky to have her back on active status . . . if we do get into a war.” He looked at Esmay again. “I’m told Admiral Vida Serrano is pleased with you . . . I suppose she would be, since you saved her niece’s neck.”

That, too, was unanswerable. Esmay wished he would get to the point, if his point was not merely to needle her, trying to get some sort of reaction.

“I hope you don’t have a swelled head from all the attention, Lieutenant. Or some kind of psychological trauma from the strain of the court-martial, which I’ve been warned is sometimes the case, even with a favorable verdict.” From his expression, he would want some kind of answer this time.

“No, sir.” Esmay said.

“Good. I’m sure you’re aware that this is a time of crisis for both the Fleet and the Familias. No one knows quite what to expect . . . except that on this ship, I expect everyone to attend to duty. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very good, Lieutenant; I’ll see you from time to time as the mess rotations come around.” He dismissed her with a nod, and Esmay went out trying to suppress a resentment that she knew would do her no good. No one lasted long in any service with a “why me?” attitude; she wasn’t to blame for the things held against her, but what was new about that? In the history of the universe, Papa Stefan had taught them all, life was unfair more often than not . . . life wasn’t about fair. What it was about had filled more than one evening with explosive argument . . . Esmay tried not to think about it more than necessary.

She handed her order chip to the clerk in the front office. “What’s my duty assignment, do you know?” He glanced at it and shook his head. “That’s the 14th Heavy Maintenance Yard, Lieutenant: Admiral Dossignal’s command. You’ll need to report to his Admin section . . . here—” He sketched out a route on her compad. “Just keep going clockwise around the core, and you’ll come to it at the base of T-3.”

“Is the bridge on this deck?” asked Esmay, gesturing to the color-coded deck tiles.

“No, sir. The bridge is up on 17; this ship’s too big for the usual color-codes. There is a system, but it’s not standard. We call this command deck because all the commands have their headquarters units here. That’s just for convenience, really; it cuts down the transit time.” Esmay could imagine that in a ship this size any hand-carried message could take awhile to arrive. She had never been on a ship where the captain’s office and the bridge were not near each other.

On her way around the core, she passed another obvious headquarters, this one with a neat sign informing her that it was the Sector 14 Training Command, Admiral Livadhi commanding. Underneath were smaller signs: Senior Technical Schools Admin Office, Senior Technical Schools Assessment, Support Systems. She walked on, past the base of another wing, this one labeled T-2. That was where she would be living, but she didn’t have time to explore it now. On and on . . . and there ahead she saw a large banner proclaiming Fourteenth Heavy Maintenance Yard: The Scrap Will Rise Again. Below that, smaller signs directed the ignorant to the administrative offices. There, a bright-eyed pivot-major sent her directly to the admiral’s chief of staff, Commander Atarin. He greeted Esmay’s appearance in a matter-of-fact way she found reassuring. He had already read her report on the inventory aboard the supply ship, and seemed far more interested in that than her past.

“We’ve been trying to nail our supplier on these leaky adhesive tubes for a couple of years,” he said. “But we couldn’t prove that the supplies were damaged before we got here. I’m glad old Scorry—the XO on that supply ship—thought of having you go over the stock on your way here. We may finally get some leverage on them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How much experience do you have with inventory control?”

“None, sir,” Esmay said. Her record cube, she knew, was on the XO’s desk, but he might not have had time to look at it.

“I’m impressed, then, especially that you caught those fasteners. Most people give up after fifty or sixty items. Or assume the computer will catch it. It’s supposed to, of course—there’s supposed to be automatic labeling, right from the manufacturing machinery. Zero-error, they keep claiming. Never have seen zero errors, though.” He grinned at her. “Of course, it could be someone from the IG’s office, putting little tests in our path, to see if we’re alert.”

That possibility hadn’t occurred to Esmay, though sabotage had. But he hadn’t been on Despite.

“Of course, it could also be enemy action,” he said. She hoped he hadn’t seen that on her face. “But I’d rather believe in stupidity than malice.” He looked down at his desk display. “Now let’s see . . . your last duty was on a patrol craft—your emphasis on your last few cruises was scan technology. Frankly, we have plenty of scan tech experts aboard now, all more experienced than you in the field. It would do you good to branch out, get some expertise in other ship systems—” He looked up as if expecting her to disagree.

“Fine, sir,” Esmay said. She hoped it was fine. She knew she needed to learn about other systems, but was he just determined to keep her away from scan, because scan was political?

“Good.” He smiled again, and nodded. “I expect most of you juniors think DSR is a bad assignment, but you’ll discover that there’s no better way to learn what really keeps ships operational. No ordinary ship deals with as many problems as we do, from hull to electronics. If you take advantage of it, this tour can teach you a lot.”

Esmay relaxed. She recognized someone happily astride his favorite hobby horse. “Yes, sir,” she said, and wondered if he would go on.

“Personally, I think every officer should have a tour on a DSR. Then we wouldn’t have people coming up with bright ideas—even installing bright ideas—that they should know wouldn’t work.” He reined himself in with a visible effort. “Well. I’m going to assign you to H&A first—Hull and Architecture, that is. You’ll find it a lot more complicated than your basic course at the academy.”

“I expect so, sir,” Esmay said.

“You’ll be working with Major Pitak; she’s on Deck Eight, portside main, aft third of T-4 . . . you can ask someone from there. Had time to stow your gear yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Mmm. Well, technically you’re not on duty until tomorrow, but—”

“I’ll go see Major Pitak, sir.”

“Good. Now, the admiral will want to meet you, but he’s tied up right now in a meeting, and I don’t expect he’ll be free until tomorrow or the next day. Check back with me, and I’ll set it up. You might want to take a look at the command structure here—it’s more complex than you’d find in most assignments.”

“Yes, sir.”

Not only the command structure was complex, Esmay discovered. She headed clockwise from T-3, where the 14th Heavy Maintenance had its administrative offices, to T-4, sure that she had now caught on to the Koskiusko’s peculiar structure. At the hub end of T-4, she found an array of personnel and cargo transport tubes, and took the personnel lift down to the eighth deck. There she faced an axial passage wide enough for three horsemen abreast, and plunged into it, looking for the third crosswise passage. She passed one administrative office after another, each occupied by busy clerks: Communications Systems, Weapons Systems, Remote Imaging Systems . . . but nothing labeled Hull and Architecture. Finally she stopped and asked.

“Hull and Architecture? That’s on the portside main passage, sir. You’ll have to go back to hub and clockwise to it—”

Esmay suspected a joke at her expense. “Surely there are cross-passages?”

A quickly-suppressed laugh. “No, sir . . . T-4 has one of the main repair bays . . . nothing goes straight across at this level, from Deck Three up to Deck Fifteen.”

She had forgotten the repair bays. She felt annoyed with herself and the clerk both. “Oh yes. Sorry.”

“No problem, sir. It takes awhile for anyone to get used to this place. Just take this passage back, turn left—” The civilian term seemed right for something this size, Esmay realized. “Then look for the P- designations on the bulkheads. That’s portside main—if you keep going, you’ll get to portside secondary, which you don’t want. Hull and Architecture is about as far down portside main as we are down starboard, so . . .”

So she had given herself a lot more walk than she wanted. “Thank you,” she said, with what courtesy she could muster past her annoyance. This ship shouldn’t need any fitness equipment, if everyone got lost occasionally.

Although she felt the length of the hike in her legs, she had no more trouble finding Pitak’s office. The portside main passage was easy enough, and at the third passage aft she found a pivot who directed her the rest of the way.

Major Pitak wasn’t in that office. The pivot had said something about “the major’s on a bit about something” but Esmay didn’t know what that meant. She glanced up and down the passage. Crewmen moving along as if they knew what they were doing, and no major. She thought of going to look, and decided not to play that game. She would simply park here until Pitak came back.

She glanced around. On the bulkhead facing the entrance was a display of metal pieces. Esmay wondered what it was, and moved closer to read the label below. Common Welding Errors it said. Esmay could see the big lopsided blob at the one joint, and the failure of another blob to cover the joint . . . but what was wrong with the rest of them?

“So you’re my new assistant,” someone said behind her. Esmay turned around. Major Pitak looked like her name sounded: a short, angular woman with a narrow face that reminded Esmay uneasily of a mule.

“Sir,” Esmay said. Pitak scowled at her.

“And no background at all in naval architecture or heavy engineering, I notice.”

“No, sir.”

“Do you at least have some background in construction of anything? Even a chicken house?” It was clear that Pitak was furious about something; Esmay hoped it wasn’t her own presence.

“Not unless helping put a roof back on a stable after a windstorm counts,” Esmay said.

Pitak glared a moment longer, then softened. “No . . . it doesn’t. Someone must be mad at both of us, Lieutenant. Sector HQ stole three of my best H&A specialists, promoted my assistant off this ship, and left me short . . . and now they’ve sent you, whatever your background is.”

“Scan, mostly,” Esmay said.

“If I were religious, I would consign their sorry tails to some strenuous afterlife,” Major Pitak said. The corner of her mouth twitched. “Blast it. I never can stay mad long enough to singe them properly, and they know it. All right, Lieutenant, let’s see what you do know. Whatever it is, it’s not enough, but at least you haven’t done anything stupid yet.”

“I’ve hardly had time, sir,” Esmay said. She was beginning to like the major, against all expectation.

“There’s a naive statement,” Pitak said. She had moved to her desk, where she yanked at a drawer without effect. “I’ve been sent idiots who managed to screw up before I’d met them.” Another yank, this one hard enough to shift the desk itself. “For instance, this drawer . . . it never has worked right since your predecessor times two thought it would be clever to rekey the lock. We still don’t know what he did, but none of the command wands work on it, nor does anything else but brute force and profanity.” Without changing expression, Pitak launched a blistering stream of the latter at the drawer, which finally yielded with a squawk.

Esmay wanted to ask why anyone would use such a pesky drawer—why not clean it out and leave it empty?—but this was not the time. She watched Pitak rummage through the contents, coming up with a couple of data cubes.

“You probably wonder why I put anything in here,” Pitak said. “Frankly so do I, but there’s little enough secured storage down here—not with all the specialists we have aboard, people who know all the tricks of every security device since the latch. They sent some background on you, but I haven’t looked at it yet, which I hope you won’t hold against me.”

“No, sir.”

“For pity’s sake, Lieutenant, loosen up. Find a seat somewhere. Let’s see here . . .” She inserted the cube in a cube reader as Esmay looked around for something to sit on. Every horizontal surface was crusted in clutter; the two chairs had piles of hardcopy that looked like inventory lists. Pitak glanced up. “Just shove some of that onto the floor. Danton was supposed to clean it up yesterday, but he’s in sickbay with some crud he caught . . . I think we’d do better to let them brew their nasty chemicals on board; they always get sick ashore.”

Esmay set a pile of paper carefully on the floor, and sat down. Pitak was scowling at the cube reader’s display.

“Well. For a mutineer and a hero, you’re awfully quiet, Lieutenant Suiza. Trying to cover your tracks?”

Esmay couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Hmm. The strong, silent type. Not mine, as you’ve already discovered. Planetary militia family . . . ye gods, one of those Suizas!” Esmay hadn’t had that reaction from anyone in Fleet before; she could feel her eyebrows going up. Pitak stared at her. “Do they know?”

“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”

A disgusted look, which Esmay felt she deserved. “Don’t play your games with me, Lieutenant Suiza. I mean, does Fleet understand that ‘planetary militia’ is an understatement when applied to the Suiza family of Altiplano?”

“I had assumed they did,” Esmay said cautiously. “At least, when I applied, there was a background check, and surely they found out.”

“You’re a careful pup,” Pitak said. “I noticed that ‘had’—what do you think now?”

“Uh . . . most don’t realize it, but I presume someone must.” Esmay wanted to know how Pitak knew—surely she wasn’t from Altiplano herself. Esmay had thought she was the first.

“I see.” Pitak scrolled through the cube contents; Esmay presumed it was a precis of her record. “Interesting place, Altiplano, but I wouldn’t want to live there. Ah—at least you were on the science branch at the Academy . . . interesting. You didn’t take the usual courses for someone going command track. What did you think, technical?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And then you end up the most junior officer ever to command a patrol vessel in combat—and win. I’ll bet someone’s looking into your background again. Well, I’ll tell you what, Lieutenant—the most important thing you can do right now is learn your way around this ship, because when I have something for you to do, I don’t want you to spend an hour finding out where it is. So—next three days, while we’re docked, go everywhere and see everything and be ready for an orientation exam when you come back. That’s 0800 on the 27th—clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Esmay said. Curiosity burned away the last shreds of her caution. “If the major doesn’t mind—how did you know about Altiplano?”

“Good for you,” Pitak said, grinning now. She had a strange grin, in that narrow face, all teeth somewhat bigger than seemed possible to fit in it. “I was wondering if you’d get up the nerve to ask. Met a fellow one time I thought of hitching up with, back when I was a jig and things weren’t going too well. Spent a leave on Altiplano, with his family. Heard all about the Suizas and their relations, and the local politics, but the whole time he was extolling the beauties of those big rolling plains and snow-capped mountains, I was wishing for a nice tight spaceship. Especially after a gallop over the plains in a rainstorm—I was sure I’d be fried by lightning, and I was so sore I couldn’t walk for days. I suppose you ride?”

“When I have to,” Esmay said. This was not the time to mention her own herd, which she hadn’t wanted anyway. “It’s—expected, riding. But I chose space.”

“My kind of woman. Now—get out of here and start learning where things are. I warn you, my exams are no joke. Here—this is what you need.” She tossed over a data cube. “That and good legs.”

“Thank you, sir,” Esmay said.

“0800 on the 27th.”

“Yes, sir.” Esmay paused, but the major didn’t look up. She retraced her way back to the hub corridors, then looked up her assigned quarters and figured out a route to that compartment. T-2 should be back the way she’d come, counterclockwise . . . then up the personnel lift, and . . . she paid close attention to the axial passage designation, even though T-2 wasn’t split by a repair bay . . . somewhere around here . . . .