"No." Direct challenge had gotten the answer out of her before she realized she was giving it. The blush came afterwards. "No, I . . . I just didn't."
"Umm. And you're not on any medication that would explain it. Are you?"
"No, sir."
Pitak sighed heavily. "Suiza, you're ten years too old for this advice, but in some ways, if I didn't know better, I'd think you were ten years younger. So try to take it as well-meant. You're ripe for a fall, and Barin's the only male you've spent more than a work-shift with. Whether you know it or not, you're on the slide now . . ."
"No." That came out in a low whisper. "I won't . . ."
"There's nothing wrong with it, Suiza," Pitak said sharply. "You're only a lieutenant; he's an ensign—that's a fairly common level of difference. You're not his commander. The only problem is . . . he's now in enemy hands, and we've got an emergency. I need your brain clear, your emotions steady. No racing off to do useless heroics and try to rescue your lover."
Lover? Her heart pounded; her stomach was doing freefall into her boots. "He's not . . ."
Pitak snorted, so like a lead mare that Esmay was startled into a grin. "Young woman, whether you have actually been skin to skin or not, he is the first man you've cared about since you were grown. That's clear enough. Admit it, and you'll deal with it better."
Could she admit it? Was it true? She had had those vague wishes, those inchoate fantasies . . . Barin's hands would not be like those other hands. The uniform was different. She dragged herself away from all that, and fought down the flutter in her diaphragm. "I . . . do care . . . a lot . . . what happens to him. I—we hadn't talked about—anything else." She almost said "yet" and saw that Major Pitak had added it without hearing it.
"All right. Now you've faced it, and now you have to face this: you and I have nothing to do with the search for Barin, for the intruders, for anything else. It's our job to get Wraith back in service before a Bloodhorde battle group pops out here and blows us all away—or worse, captures us. Whatever happens to Barin Serrano cannot be as bad as the capture of this ship by the enemy. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir." It was clear, in the part of her mind that was free to think clearly. The word "capture" rang in her mind with the finality of steel on stone. If they did not do their work, they might all be captives . . . and she knew she could not handle that. The vision sparkled in her mind—the quiet, competent, ordinary Lieutenant Suiza going completely and irrevocably crazy, the moment she became a captive again. However much she cared for Barin . . . she could not let that happen.
"Good. I didn't think you'd do anything foolish, but the little I know about Altiplano suggests that you might have triggers set which would push you into some stupid rescue attempt."
"They are going to try one, though, aren't they?" Esmay asked.
"I don't know." Pitak looked away. "The most critical thing is to find the intruders before they do any significant damage. Rescuing one ensign has to be a lower priority. What's really twisting the captain's tail is the fear that they'll disable the self-destruct."
"The self-destruct?"
"Yes. The captain is not about to let us be captured by the Bloodhorde—they could build cruisers with this facility and the expertise of our people. He's told the admirals that he'll blow us up first."
"Good," Esmay said, before she thought. Pitak looked at her oddly.
"Most of us aren't happy about that," Pitak said. "We admit the necessity but . . . you like it?"
"Better than captivity," Esmay said. The tremors were gone; the fear receded.
"Well. You never cease to amaze, Suiza. Since your brain seems to be working well enough, I'll answer some questions you'll no doubt ask in five minutes if I don't. We aren't jumping out of this system, because we can't. I don't know why. It might be that the intruders sabotaged the FTL drive . . . it might be that the fast-sequence jumps we did coming in shook something loose. Drives and Maneuver is on it. I need you to do a search, since you're good at that: if we assume that the fast-sequence jumps caused some structural damage or shift, what would it be?"
"Yes, sir."
"If you come up with anything, buzz me. We've got those Wraith structural supports coming over the line, and I need to be there for the installation." She started out the door, and then turned back. "Oh yes: the new procedures are that no one goes anywhere alone, and that includes the head. We know that at least one of the intruders now has a current ID badge—no doubt they'd like more. The captain may decide to firewall the ship, but right now there's not enough security personnel to man the access points. We're supposed to be alert for any strangers, anyone we're not used to seeing around, though on a ship this size that's not much use. I certainly wouldn't know half the instructors over in T-1 by sight, let alone the students." She sighed. "This is going to be a real bitch to implement. Rekeying thousands of IDs every day, and rechecking all personnel they're given to. All of us wearing tagtales, all of us going around in bunches."
"Are we all going to move into open bays for sleeping?"
"I hope not." Pitak scrubbed at her head. "I can't sleep like that anymore; I'm old enough to be wakened by snorers. But it may come to that, though it means leaving a lot of compartments vacant—which can only help the intruders. Anyway, the captain's asked the flags for more personnel for security—and I understand there were words exchanged about that between our admiral and Livadhi. But we've got to get Wraith back in action. If, as we suspect, there's a Bloodhorde battle group coming here to pick us off, we'll need every bit of help we can get."
"Is that possible—I mean, you said it would take—"
"Longer than we have. I know. Hull repairs alone should run sixty to seventy days . . . then there's refitting the internal systems, installing the weapons, testing. But there's nothing else to do. Maybe they'll be late—maybe they'll get lost. Maybe our fleet will come back. Or maybe they'll get the self-destruct fixed and we won't have to worry about anything . . . at least those of us who don't believe in an afterlife. Do you? Is that why you think it's a good idea?"
"Not . . . exactly." She didn't believe in the afterlife her great-grandmother had taught her about, where the dead were placed on the level they'd earned like pots of flowers on a stand. But she found it hard to imagine nothingness, an absolute end.
"Mmm." Pitak looked as if she'd like to say something more, but someone called her from the passage and she left without another word. Esmay looked at her screen a moment, and then at the bulkhead. Barin a hostage . . . Barin dead? She could not imagine either of those . . . not Barin, so brimful of energy, so much a Serrano. It was not her assignment. Pitak had warned her. But . . . of all the people on this ship, she was the one who had actually fought on shipboard.
There must be others. Security personnel had experience; that's what they trained for. She wasn't trained. She had no weapons.
She was thinking the wrong things. She wasn't thinking at all. Memory splashed her mind with the images of battle in Despite . . . she could imagine that behind the partition between her cubicle and the rest of the offices, someone lurked with a weapon.
Ridiculous. Yet she could not just sit there; she itched to be . . . somewhere, doing . . . something. She scolded herself for letting a brief experience of command turn her head. With a shipful of admirals on down, they weren't going to let a lieutenant in Hull and Architecture do anything but look up statistics in computer files.
Barin had dozed off, but woke when he heard an approaching noise. Help, maybe? Instead it was another of the intruders, with two men and a woman in civilian clothes. Barin knew, in a general way, who they were: civilian technical advisors, experts, contractors hired to do something in weapons systems. He'd never actually met any of them, though he'd seen them in the corridors and lift tubes occasionally. Ordinary middle-aged civilians, he'd thought. Of no interest to him, since they weren't working in his area. Now they stared at him as if he were a monster too. He supposed he looked pretty bad, with his swol
len nose and bruised face, but they didn't have to look as if they thought it was all his fault.
"You lied to us," one of the Bloodhorde said. "You were paid to fix this, and you didn't. When we looked, the lights were green."
"But we did fix it," said the taller man earnestly. "We fixed it so that it wouldn't work, but the captain would think it did work. That's why all the telltales are green. He could run his system test, and it would come up—"
"They're not green now," his captor said.
"What happened?" The man leaned past his captor to look, and turned an interesting shade of pale green. "You—did you tear those wires out?"
"To make sure it wouldn't work, yes. Because you lied to us."
"But I didn't lie. Now he knows it doesn't work—and he could have a backup—"
"You were supposed to disable all self-destruct devices." That with a series of shoves that ended when the man bumped into the bulkhead. "You were paid to do that!" Another, harder shove; the man staggered. "So if you left one, then you have broken your word to us, and . . . we take that very seriously."
"But—we don't know—we did what you said—" The man looked as if he couldn't quite believe the situation; he kept glancing at Barin and away again.
"Fix it again so that it looks to the captain as if it's working," the Bloodhorde leader said.
"But the captain will know it's been tampered with—fixing it now won't convince him. Someone would have to tell him . . . I could go tell him I could fix it, they know we're experts in weapons systems, and then I could—" The man didn't have time to flinch away before he was dying, the blade deep in his throat and a hard hand squeezing his mouth, stifling his last bubbling scream. Blood spurted, then flowed, then stopped, filling the compartment with the smell of blood so strong it almost covered the stench of death itself.
The woman screamed, a short cry cut off in terror as one of the others slapped her. The killer let the dead man fall, and then wiped his bloody hand across his own mouth, then the woman's. "They don't call us the Bloodhorde for nothing," he said, grinning. With the same knife—and it seemed even worse to Barin that he didn't wipe it clean between the killing and the mutilation—he sliced off the dead man's left ear, bit it hard once, and then tucked it away in his uniform. "Now," he said to the second civilian. "You will fix this so it looks as if it's working."
The second man, shorter and darker-haired than the other, hurried to comply. When he had done, the telltales showed green again.
"That's got it," he said.
"Is this right?" the killer asked the woman.
"Yes . . . yes it is right," she said.
"If you know that, we don't need him," the killer said, and caught the smaller man by the collar, half-choking him. "We'd rather . . . work . . . with you."
"No!" The woman lunged, but one of the others caught her. She tried to fight free, but she had no skill, and no strength to make up its lack. "No, let him—please—"
The killer laughed. "We heard what you said about the Bloodhorde . . . how you taunted our agent."
She turned even whiter.
"You dared to bind him . . ." He twisted the man's collar until the man's face purpled. "You threatened. You had a noose around his neck . . . and now you have a noose around your neck. Even barbarians, as you call us, understand poetic justice."
Barin could not look away; there was a fascination in this that disgusted him with himself. The killer twisted . . . twisted . . . and horribly, slowly, the dapper little man about whom Barin knew nothing died, his struggles weaker and weaker until they ceased.
"We pay our debts," the killer said to the woman. "All of them, the ones you know about and the ones you don't. Do we think size is everything? I believe that was your complaint, was it not? Then I believe you should have a chance to experience size in a way suitable to you in particular."
The woman gave Barin a frantic glance, and the killer laughed. "You think he could help you? This boy with a broken nose, that we captured as easily as we took you?"
He had to do something. He couldn't just lie here doing nothing . . . but no matter how he struggled, he couldn't loosen the very efficient bindings they'd taken from ship security. Through all that followed, he struggled, rasping his wrists raw, earning a random cuff now and then from men more amused than concerned with his efforts. The woman struggled too, but it did her no good; one after another they took her, in ways that Barin's inexperience had not imagined. Finally her struggles, her gasps and moans, died away, and she lay still. He couldn't tell if she was dead, or just unconscious. She had been some kind of traitor apparently . . . he had gotten that much from what they'd all said . . . but no one deserved what had happened to her.
One of the men spoke to the other in their language, something Barin could tell was meant as a joke. The one on her pushed himself up, laughing, and then turned to Barin. He grinned even wider.
"The boy's upset," he said. "Maybe she was his girl?"
"Too old," said one of the others. "A nice boy like him wouldn't have a woman like that."
"I'm sure he has a girl somewhere on this ship," the first one said. "We'll have to be sure we find her."
He would have heaved again if he'd had anything left.
"What I don't understand is how they found the self-destruct so fast," Captain Hakin said. "Not that many people know where it is . . ."
"They grabbed those civilian contractors," Admiral Dossignal said.
"But how would they know? They're weapons specialists; they've been busy recalibrating the guidance systems . . . oh."
"If someone suborned the civilians, then they could have disabled the self-destruct—they could have found it while appearing to be working on weapons in inventory. I see . . ."
"What I don't understand is why they were snatched, if they'd already done their job."
"They hadn't," the captain said. "Remember—until an hour ago, all the signals were secure."
"Considering the quality of work they did on the weapons, if they'd done it, I'd expect it to be undetectable," said Commander Wyche. "I'd bet they were snatched simply for their weapons expertise . . . with the data wands the intruders got from the three we know they killed, they'd have high enough access to find that out."
"So now the self-destruct is out of my control." Hakin glared at the admirals. "I should have used it."
"No," Dossignal said. "It was the handiest way, the easiest and least obvious way, for you to have the power of destruction, but it wasn't the only. On this ship, with what we've got in inventory, and the expertise in the 14th alone, we can prevent capture. We will."
"I hope so," the captain said. "I sincerely hope so, because if you don't we are not the only ones who will suffer for it."
"Wraith gives us another possibility," Commander Wyche said.
"Wraith?"
"She still has a third of her weapons, all in portside mountings. And she still has ample firepower to blow Kos. Not from the repair bay—the way she's locked into the cradles, even if she blew herself, there's a 72 percent chance that most of Kos would survive. We'd have to reposition her mounts, which would take days. But if we can get her into a position to fire on the core area—"
"She can't maneuver!" Commander Takkis, head of Drives and Maneuver. "We dismounted the drives when she first came in, and it would take days to remount them. Besides, I have everyone working on the FTL drive for this ship."
"I was thinking of the drives test cradle. She doesn't have to maneuver to be slung on there and then towed into position . . . even, if you wish, at the extremity of the lines. The test cradle's own drive would be sufficient, if necessary, to move her into the best firing position for Kos . . . or she could get some shots off at the Bloodhorde."
A moment of silence, as they thought it over. Dossignal and Livadhi both nodded. "It could work—certainly, as far as destroying Kos is concerned, and quite probably she could do a fair bit of damage to the Bloodhorde ships."
Captain Hakin was
nodding too. "If those weapons have not been taken off Wraith, and we're absolutely sure they haven't been tampered with, then we've got our fail-safe back . . . as long as they're not depleted taking potshots at the enemy."
"No . . . I can see that there'd have to be strict limits of use, but that should leave enough to do some damage. Especially if we had something else. One of the shuttles, maybe. In the Xavier action, the planetary defense used a couple of shuttles to good effect."
"They used them for mine-laying . . . I don't think that would work here."
"If only we could Trojan-horse them, the way they did to us." Livadhi smiled briefly. "It would be so satisfying."
"Get aboard a Bloodhorde ship? I don't see how. Since they do it, they know it can be done—they'd be watching. And our people would be trying a hostile boarding, against resistance."
"I was thinking . . . if we had any native speakers of their language, if we could locate one of these intruders and sweat some recognition codes out of him, then our people could pretend to be their own team coming back."
"Won't work." Admiral Livadhi scowled in surprise at the lieutenant commander two seats down. "Sorry, sir, but—we shouldn't waste time with schemes bound to fail. The Bloodhorde special operations teams—which is what we have aboard—are all members of one lineage. Each team is, I mean. They train together for years, and develop their own distinctive argot. Commander Coston, who went back to Rockhouse recently, had been doing a special study on Bloodhorde special ops. Our people can't imitate a Bloodhorde pack—not without a lot of training we don't have time to give. As well, we have only thirteen people aboard who speak the language with anything like sufficient fluency, and their accents indicate different origins."
"We don't need negativism now, Commander Nors," Livadhi said. "We're at the stage of thinking up possibilities."
"Sorry, sir. Well . . . suppose one of the Bloodhorde ships were close in . . . and empty or nearly empty of its crew. We've developed a fairly good model of a Bloodhorde ship's control systems, working from the commercial models they're built on, and information from scavenge. It wouldn't take long to train our experienced warship crews to use it—or for that matter, import our own scan equipment."