The Serrano Connection (33 page)

She dared a look over her shoulder, even though that twist made her swivel around the safety line like a child's toy.
Koskiusko
's vast bulk blocked out the stars well beyond the banks of searchlights that held the patrol craft in their gaze. She wasn't even sure where the working lights on its exterior became stars against the dark.

Someone punched her shoulder. Right. Get on with the job. She pulled herself along, taking no more sight-seeing looks.
Wraith
's damaged hull inched closer. Now she could see the pale tracks of fragments—of the weapons or the hull itself she didn't know—against the dark normal hull coating beyond. The entry gaped, jagged and unwelcoming. Something whispered against her suit helmet, and she jerked to a halt. A firm tap on her shoulder sent her on. In a moment her brain caught up and she realized it must be minute ejecta from the breached hull: probably ice crystals from the continuing air leak the crew had not been able to seal completely.

She hit the red section of line: only ten meters from the attachment. Ahead of her, someone had already clipped on the first of the branch lines that would frame the working web. But this was Esmay's station for now. She locked the slide on her safety line, clipped on the secondary stabilizing line that would confine her rotation to one plane, and waved the others past.

With the vidscan recorder aimed at the hole and the work going on, she could avoid thinking about where she was. Major Pitak wanted details—more details—even more details. "Don't rush," she'd said. "Take your time—stay at the ten-meter line until you're sure you've shown me everything you can from there. You won't be in the way of the scaffolding crews, but you will be able to see a lot. Every detail can help us. Everything."

So Esmay hung in her harness and worked the recorder's eye along the edge of the hull breach. Everything? Fine, she would spend a few minutes on those pale tracks, on the way the hull peeled back
there
to expose a twisted truss, on the odd bulge forward of the breach. By the time she'd filled half a cube from that location, the scaffolding crew had placed the major grid lines that would define the location of specific damage sites. Esmay signaled her intention to the chief, received permission, and clipped on to one of the cross-lines.

Really, she thought, it wasn't that bad out here. Once the stomach adapted to zero gravity, it was kind of fun, scooting along the line with only an occasional tug . . . a red tie bumped her hand, and she grabbed. Her arm yanked at her shoulder, and she spun dizzily, cursing herself for forgetting that she was supposed to move
slowly.
When she got herself straightened out again, someone's helmet visor was turned her way; she could imagine what they thought. Another dumbass lieutenant learns about inertia. She would have apologized, except that they weren't supposed to use the suit radios unless it was a real emergency.

She was now on the opposite side of the hull breach, nearer the bow. From this angle, she could see into the hole better—or the searchlights had found a better angle. She forced herself to look in . . . but she didn't recognize any bodies. The mess inside all looked mechanical, like a child's toy that had been stepped on. Twisted, broken, shattered . . . all the words she knew for destruction. Slowly, recording, she made sense of it. The forward bulge came from a separation of the forward framing members—they had sprung, like an old-fashioned barrel-ring, under concussive force, and the shattered truss had gone with them.

Pitak would want to know how far forward the bulge extended. It could be mapped from
Koskiusko
, if no one was using the near-scan . . . but someone would be. Esmay looked at the bulge and wished she could ask the major. If she could get on the other side of it with the recorder . . . but there was no scaffolding line there. She thought of asking the scaffolding chief to string one for her, and thought again. They were far too busy to do favors for one curious lieutenant. No, she would either string one herself, or not. Not didn't sound like a good option. She had four additional lines slung to her own suit, just as all the scaffolding crew had . . . so it was only a matter of setting the hooks.

She left the big vidscan behind, without admitting to herself the reason. She didn't intend to come loose and drift away; it was just good sense to leave the vidscan where it would be easily found. The one built into her helmet would do well enough for this short excursion. She clipped the end of one of her long lines into the ten-meter safety ring, then edged along the scaffolding line to the hull itself. Her short safety line slid along the scaffolding line on its ring. The scaffolding line was anchored with a double pin-and-patch. She ran her long line through the ring that attached there, which took longer than simply clipping in, but was more secure.

She put a boot on the hull and tested. Nothing. She had halfway hoped that
Wraith
's internal artificial gravity would give some adhesion, but it might not even be functioning. She could put short-stick patches on her boots, or she could just go on . . . it would be easier to go on, and she could always put the patches on if she couldn't make progress.

She fished a stickpatch out of her toolband with her right hand, positioned it on the end of her gloved middle finger and gave the slightest push with her left hand. She slid to the end of her safety line, slowly. Reaching out cautiously, she touched the stickpatch to the hull; it adhered just as it was supposed to. Now she could stick a pin to the patch . . . she hoped. She left her right hand on the stickpatch, and fumbled for a pin. There it was. When she reached over slowly, her safety line tugged at her waist. She had definitely gone as far as she could go with that on. She got the pin stuck to the stickpatch with its own quick-setting backing, then opened a connecting ring, locked her long line into it, and clipped the ring into the pin's opening.

The next move had a certain finality—when she unhooked her safety line from the scaffolding cable, she was depending on her own ability to set patches and pins. Caution reminded her that she was not a specialist in EVA work . . . that she would not have the right reactions if something went wrong. Esmay grinned at caution, alone inside her helmet. She had listened to caution and what good had it done her? First they thought she was dull, and then they thought she was a wild radical.

It wasn't that different from climbing the rocks at the head of her valley, or the exercise wall in the
Kos
. Reach, place a stickpatch, a pin, clip into the pin, move past that protection to the next. Twenty pins along, and she was beyond the bulge of damage . . . though the bow shield outlet access points, which should have been smooth glossy nubs protruding a few centimeters from the hull surface, were instead jagged-edged holes. Esmay turned up the light on her helmet vidscan to examine them more closely. Something glinted, ahead of her. More debris—and surely Major Pitak would want a picture of it. She placed another pin, clipped in carefully and finger-walked herself nearer.

Then tried to push herself back, and made a move violent enough to fling her off the hull, to hit the end of her line. She tried to swim herself into a position where she could see, where she wouldn't be flung back into the hull . . . what if there were
two
of them?

Was she even sure of what it was? And even if it was, it could be the
Wraith
's own weapons, by chance stuck to its own hull by . . . by some reaction Esmay couldn't begin to understand. She forced herself to breathe slowly. Mine. It was a mine, exactly like the ones in the handbooks of enemy weaponry she'd been looking at in the supply ship on the way to Sierra Station.

Meanwhile, she reeled herself in, hand over hand, coming in too fast to her last clip; she bumped the hull with bruising force, and would have bounced free except that she grabbed the pin and outward line in one hand and the inward line with the other and let her arms take the strain. Now she wished she had stickpatches on her boots—it seemed she hung there a very long time, bouncing back and forth. Finally the oscillations died down. With great care, she reached inward for the next clip, then unclipped from that pin. Twenty . . . twenty-two . . . twenty-seven pins in all, each requiring slow, careful movement to pass. She thought several times of using her suit comunit—but was that mine an emergency now? If no one else approached it before she warned them—and the scaffolding crew was still setting up their workspaces in the hull breach.

When she made it back to the scaffolding cable and clipped on her safety line, she felt it must have taken a half-shift at least. But her chronometer didn't agree. Barely an hour had passed. She retrieved the big vidscan, and looked around for the scaffolding chief. She couldn't go back to the
Koskiusko
without warning someone here. She spotted him at last, and edged from line to line until she could tap his shoulder, and then the message board he carried. His helmet nodded. Quickly, Esmay drew a clumsy sketch of the bow—the bulge, then the location of the mine. MINE she printed in careful letters.

He shook his head. Esmay nodded. He pointed to the big vidscan and drew a question mark. She had to shake her head, and point to the scan lens in her helmet. FOLLOW he signed, and led her along the scaffolding to a com nexus. While she was gone, they'd strung a direct line from ship to ship, and passed a wire into
Wraith
, so that the ships could talk without unshielded transmission. Esmay and the scaffolding chief both hooked their suits to the nexus.

"What do you mean, mine?" the chief asked. "And what were you doing that far up the bow, anyway? Your safety line isn't that long."

"You saw the bulge of damaged frame," Esmay said. "I went to scan it for Major Pitak. I put out stickpatch pins and clipped in. And when I got beyond the bulge, I was scanning damaged shield nodes . . . turned up my suit scan lights . . . and there it was."

"A mine, you say." He sounded unconvinced.

"It looks like the illustrations in the handbooks. Not one of ours, either. A Smettig Series G, is what it looked like to me."

"What kind of fuse, did you see that?"

"No." She didn't want to say it, but she couldn't leave it at that. "I tried to jump back and . . . lost contact with the hull."

"So . . . you don't have full documentation?"

"No." She didn't even know how much of the mine her scan had picked up. How long had she looked at it before panicking?

"If it is a mine . . ." He sighed, the exasperated sigh of someone who does not want one more complication in a day already stuffed with complications. "Well . . . hell. I see you have to report it, and if it
is
a mine we'll have to do something . . ." His voice trailed off, someone who didn't know what to do next. He looked at her, and her intention to say anything vanished. She was an officer; it was her job to make decisions. This is what came of ignoring caution, she thought bitterly, as she tried to think who to report this to, aboard
Koskiusko
. The simple answer was Major Pitak, but an enemy mine stuck aboard a ship under repair wasn't simple.

Pitak's reaction, when Esmay finally got her on the other end of the connection, was hardly reassuring. "You think you saw a mine . . . an enemy mine." Flat, almost monotone. "And you may or may not have gotten it on the vid . . . ?"

"Yes, sir. I . . . pushed off too hard. I was afraid . . ."

"I should hope so." That with more energy. "You know, Suiza, you do have an instinct for drama. An enemy mine. Not everyone would think of that."

"Think?" She wasn't sure if she heard scorn or genuine amusement in the major's voice. Or something else.

"Thinking is good, Suiza. Now the first thing you do, is tell the chief to get his crew the hell away from
Wraith.
Then you get your sorry tail back out there and get some decent vidscan of this putative mine. I hope you have enough air . . ."

"Uh . . . yes, sir," Esmay said, after a quick glance at her gauges.

"That's reassuring." A long pause, during which Esmay wondered if she was supposed to cut the connection and go. But Pitak wasn't quite through. "Now I'll go tell our captain to tell
Wraith
's captain that a totally inexperienced junior officer on her first real EVA thinks she saw an enemy mine stuck to his ship and while she didn't get any good pictures the first time, she is now taking pictures which, if the mine doesn't blow her up, may show us whether she's right. And give us a clue how to do something about it."

"Yes, sir."

"That did not require an acknowledgement, Suiza. Can you think of any mistake you haven't made yet?"

"I didn't set it off," Esmay said, before she could stop herself. A harsh bark of laughter came over the com.

"All right, Suiza . . . send the crew home and go bring me some decent pictures. I'll see what I can do to scare up a bomb squad."

The scaffolding chief was quite willing to take the orders of a junior officer; he scarcely bothered to utter a ritual grumble. Esmay didn't wait for the crew to leave. She fished out stickpatches for her boots, checking twice to be sure she had the kind that would not adhere permanently. She didn't want to be stuck there like an ornament. Then she used one of her safety lines and extra clips to sling the big vidscan on her back.

This time the trip was easier, with the pins already in place, and the grip of her boots on
Wraith
's hull. She could walk part of the way between the pins, paying out line to herself from the clip before . . . it was easy to see, from this position, that she had not laid a straight course in the first place. She had angled across the bulge, rather than taking the shorter route straight forward. She didn't look at anything but the pins, the clips, the line itself, until she was almost at the twentieth pin. Then light flooded over her from behind, washing out the fainter light from her helmet, and she missed the pin. When she turned to look, her helmet visor darkened automatically; she could see that one of
Koskiusko
's big lights had turned away from the hull breach to search along the bows. Evidently Major Pitak had reached the captain. . . .