The Serrano Connection (19 page)

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?"