"But surely—we're not at that point yet. There are only a few Bloodhorde aboard; security will no doubt pick them up in a few hours—"
"The point at which I should push the button is before the Bloodhorde have a chance to prevent it working. Do you think they haven't assumed such a device exists? Do you think they're not looking for it right now, disarming it if they've found it? They don't want to lose this ship any more than we do—but the only way I can ensure that we don't lose it is to destroy it."
Dossignal looked at him compassionately. "You're right, Captain, that's a tough decision. Are you asking for advice?"
Hakin grimaced. "It's my decision . . . my responsibility . . . but I'll be glad to hear your ideas on choosing the right time. Only realize that I know the right time must be too soon rather than too late."
"How do you test the device integrity?" asked Livadhi. "And what's your normal test cycle?"
"It's tested weekly, by partially arming the device—it has its own control board, with the usual sensor array and so on. I have a vidscan of it, so I can see the attached status lights, and I also have scan that reports whether the circuits are functioning correctly."
"So . . . have you tested it since the intruders came aboard?"
"Not yet. My concern, though, is that even if it tests out now, they could find and disable it at any time."
"You've put a guard on it?"
"Yes . . . but as you know we need security personnel in other areas, including searching for the intruders. They might overpower the guard."
"Still, that should give you some warning. If the guard doesn't report . . . if the vidscan changes. You can test the system while the guard is there, can't you?"
"Yeees . . ."
"Would you like a witness to the test?"
"Yes, I would."
"Then my suggestion is that you test it now—immediately. And my second suggestion is that you jump back out of this system, which would make it harder for the Bloodhorde group we expect to find us."
"And for our ships as well," Captain Hakin said.
"Yes, that's true. But avoiding a Bloodhorde assault group seems more important at this juncture . . . I'm convinced that with over 25,000 loyal personnel on board, we can deal with the intruders—be they Bloodhorde commandos or any other hostile group—as long they aren't reinforced by outside forces."
"Very well." Hakin spoke to the guard at the door, and led them across to the bridge.
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 ev
en 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?"