The Serrano Connection (36 page)

It blew; the blob of the foam bed burst apart, and something shot out the top, away from
Wraith
.

"All the ejecta went the right way," the sergeant said. "Good design. Reports are that very little blew in the interior. All they have to do now is get all that foam back out, and we can do that in the big bay."

"I don't understand how it works," Esmay said. "I thought if you confined an explosion, that only made it worse."

The sergeant shrugged. "I don't really understand it either, but I had a buddy back in Sector 10 who was in their bomb squad. He said you had a choice—you could try to aim it somewhere, and let all that energy escape in a direction that didn't bother you, or you could put enough padding around it to absorb the force."

"But the foam bed blew apart—"

"Well, maybe it needed to be thicker . . . but it was thick enough to aim the ejecta in a direction that doesn't bother us. Notice where it's going?"

"Away from
Kos
is all I know or care," Esmay said.

"Toward the jump point exit," the sergeant said, grinning. "We can always hope some fool Bloodhorde ship comes roaring in here and gets a mouthful of its own bullet."

"Suiza!" That was Pitak, wanting to know if she could find someone to go into inventory and get the lights and limbs of the idiot who insisted they didn't have any more temporary hull curtains in stock and would have to wait until more were fabricated. "I know what I've used," Pitak said. "And I know what I put into stock, and what was on the inventory when we left Sierra Station. There ought to be sixteen more of 'em, and I want 'em two hours ago."

"Lots of blood," said the nanny at the forward triage station.

"At least they're breathing." The extrication team rolled the slack shape in blood-soaked uniform off the board and onto a gurney with practiced skill, then reached for the next. "They're all unconscious; we did a quick-scan of the first two and found blood levels of slow-oxy . . . probably someone popped the emergency supply when the hull blew."

"So you don't have a survey?"

"No—if they aren't missing limbs, we're just bringing them out with all due precautions." All due precautions to preserve whatever spinal cord integrity was left.

"Number?"

"Thirty or so, I think. I'm not sure yet. We're just now getting access to the most forward compartments."

The extrication team turned away, heading back for another load.

Esmay watched as
Wraith
's damaged bow edged into the repair bay. It was easy to forget how large that bay was, empty, but the ship gave a reference for the eye.

"Suiza!" That bellow had to be Pitak. "Quit looking at the view, and give me a readout."

"Yes, sir." Esmay glanced at her board. Pitak's concern was the change in center of gravity as
Wraith
entered
Koskiusko
's artificial gravity field. Rapid changes could stress the internal structure of
Koskiusko
beyond safe limits. "Is
Wraith
's artificial gravity on in any part of the ship?"

"No, it's not."

"There's a torque force developing in the contralateral midsections . . . only 5.4 dynes right now, but it's increasing in a linear relationship to the mass of
Wraith
within
Kos
's field."

"That's expected . . . not desirable, but expected. Transfer a plot of that to my screen and to Power."

"Yes, sir." Esmay locked in the curve, keyed for the transfers, and continued to watch her board. Her gaze kept twitching upward to the view of
Wraith
's approach, but she yanked it back each time. The strain she'd noticed dipped below the curve; she called Pitak. "It's dropped below line—"

"Good. That means Power is compensating. But watch for that bulge ahead of the damage—that's something we can't really model for the field generator."

Centimeter by centimeter,
Wraith
edged in. When the mooring lines were secured, warning bells rang throughout the DSR. "Cradles shifting in T-minus 15 minutes. Cradles shifting—"

Esmay transferred her final readouts to Major Pitak and Power, then withdrew to a monitoring station behind the double red lines. Only a few essential personnel would ride the cradles during shift.

"I hate to think what that mine would have done to the cradle mechanisms," someone said behind her. She glanced back. Barin Serrano, his dark brows lowered.

"It's taken care of," she said. She wondered what he was doing there; his assignment, in scan, wasn't needed at the moment.

"Lieutenant Bondal sent me down here to see if Major Pitak had decided where to put the new RSV units," he said, anticipating her question.

"She hasn't told me—but I'll check for you. Have you heard anything about Bloodhorde ships coming in?"

"No . . . and I'm sure I would have, because . . . well, anyway, I would have. But I do know that
Sting
and
Justice
have jumped out."

"Why?"

"They delivered
Wraith
 . . . and they're supposed to be patrolling out wherever they were. Maybe they thought they'd spot anyone following
Wraith
's trail in."

Gar-sig (Packleader) Vokrais woke to the bustle of a medical ward; when he turned his head, he saw his pack-second Hoch staring back at him.

"What happened?" he asked, in his best Familias Standard.

"Effing sleepy gas," Hoch said. "We got hauled in as casualties . . . I don't think this is the same ship."

They lay, listening to the chatter around them.

"We're on the DSR," Hoch said finally, with a wolfish grin. "Right inside."

"All two of us," Vokrais said. He lifted his head cautiously since no one seemed to be paying any attention to him. He was wearing a clean pale blue shift of some crinkled fabric, and all up and down the rows of beds were the rest of his assault team dressed the same way. Most of them, anyway. He counted only twenty-five of the original thirty, and Tharjold wasn't there—their technical expert, the one who knew most about Familias technology. Nor Kerai, nor Sij . . . his mind ticked off the missing, and consigned them to either of the two possible eternal destinations. The rest were there, all butt-naked in hospital gowns . . . but all awake now, staring at him in wild surmise.

Before he had time to worry about how he was going to get his team clothed and out of medical, a heavyset man with a scowl worthy of a Bloodhorde senior sergeant bustled down the aisle between the beds.

"All right, sleepyheads," he said. "You're awake, and none of you got worse than a dose of trank. Come with me—I'll get you clean clothes and put you to work . . . we'll need your help to get
Wraith
repaired."

"Our IDs?" Hoch asked. He sounded half-strangled, but it was probably just his attempt to control his accent.

"I've got 'em—already passed on the stats to Supply, so you'll have something close to fitting."

Vokrais rolled out of bed, surprised to find that he wasn't at all dizzy. The others followed; he saw arms twitch as the automatic habit of saluting conflicted with awareness of their position. Their guide didn't notice; he was scowling at a list in his hand.

"Santini?"

Vokrais scrabbled through his memory of the alien vocabulary, and finally remembered that the nametag on the uniform he'd stolen had been something like that, in their misbegotten tongue. "Uh . . . yes, sir?" Someone sniggered, three beds down, to hear him say "sir" to a Familias enemy. Someone would feel the lash for that later.

"Wake UP, Santini. Listen—says here you were a specialist in ventilation?"

"Sir," Vokrais said, wondering which of several meanings he knew for that word mattered here. Ventilation? As in, artificial breathing? As in, perforating?

"That's good—I'll send you over to Support Systems as soon as you've got your gear. Oh, and Camajo?" Silence again. Vokrais prayed to the Heart-Render that someone would have the sense to say something.

After too many heartbeats, Hoch coughed—an obviously fake cough, to Vokrais's ear—and said, "Yes, sir?"

"I guess you're all still a bit dazed—they told me to give you another hour, but we need help now. Camajo, you'll report to Major Pitak, in H&A. Now, let's see . . . Bradinton?"

This time, the others caught on quicker, and someone said "Yes, sir," almost brightly. Vokrais wondered if the others remembered the names on the uniforms they'd stripped from dead men, or if they were just answering blind. It probably didn't matter. Supposedly the Familias ships had a fancy way of figuring out who was really one of their own, but so far he hadn't seen any sign of it.

Eventually all of them had answered to their new names—names which felt uncomfortable even held so lightly, names with no family chant behind them. For a moment Vokrais wondered if the strangers had families . . . if those families had chants of their own . . . but this was not the right kind of thought for the belly of an enemy ship. He pushed it away, and it fell off his mind like a landsman off the deck of a dragonship in rough seas. Instead he thought of the battle to come, the hot blood of enemies that would soak his clothes, not cold and clammy this time but properly steaming. He had not minded stripping the dead and putting on their blood-soaked uniforms . . . not after the rituals of the Blooding . . . but it had been distasteful to feel it already cold.

His pack followed him through the enemy ship; he could feel their amusement even as his own bubbled just beneath the surface. The enemy . . . more like prey than enemy, like sheep leading a wolf into the fold in the mistaken notion that it was a sheepdog. Even as he accepted a folded pile of clothes, he was sure that his pack could have taken this ship bare naked, with only their blood-hunger. Instead . . . he dressed quickly, carefully not meeting anyone's eyes. He had worn Familias clothing before, in his years as a spy . . . the soft cloth, the angled fastenings, felt almost as familiar as his own.

The lack of weapons didn't. He missed the familiar pressure of needler and stunner, knocknab and gutstab. Familias troops carried weapons only into battle . . . and DSRs didn't fight.

The helpful enemy had leapfrogged them over the first two phases of the plan, handing them the chance to disperse throughout the ship. With any luck at all—and the gods definitely seemed to be loading luck upon them—no one from
Wraith
would notice that the men wearing the uniforms of shipmates were not shipmates at all.

Vokrais followed the route displayed on the palm-sized mapcom, sure that he could deal with whatever he found when he arrived.

"No, I'm not going to send anyone from
Wraith
back over there—not after they've been knocked out for a week or so with sleepygas. Their cogs won't be meshing for another two shifts, and we don't want accidents." Vokrais heard the end of that and wondered whether feigning mental illness would do anything useful. Probably not. They might send him back to the medical area, where he could end up in bed with no pants on. Better to seem dutiful but slightly confused—the confusion at least was honest enough.

Familias technology impressed him as it had before—so much of it, and it worked so well. No familiar stench of sweat and gutbreath. Clean air emerged from one grille, and vanished into another; the lights never flickered; the artificial gravity felt as solid as a planet. The little communications device and the data wand he'd been given were smaller and worked better than their analogs on the Bloodhorde ships.

This was what they had come for, after all. The technology they had not been able to buy or steal or (last and least efficient ploy) invent. Bigger ships, better ships, ships that could take on Familias and Compassionate Hand cruisers and win. The technicians to keep the technology working . . . Vokrais eyed the others around him. They didn't look like much, but he had somewhat overcome the prejudice of his upbringing; he knew that smart minds could hide in bodies of all shapes. But hardly one in fifty looked like any kind of warrior.

Meanwhile . . . meanwhile his pack was dispersed throughout the DSR, very handily. Probably several supervisors would decide, as his had, to assign them simple duties. Eventually a meal would come, and they'd have access to eating utensils, so easily converted to effective hand weapons.

An hour . . . two. Vokrais worked on, willing enough to sort parts, package them in trays, stack them on automatic carriers. There was no hurry; they had gained time by being put to sleep and admitted as casualties, an irony he hoped to be able to share at the victory feast with his commander. Once he caught a glimpse of another pack member, carrying something he didn't recognize; for an instant their gazes crossed, then the other man looked away. Yes. Huge as this ship might be, they would locate one another, and their plan would work. And the longer they had to explore it, to learn its capabilities, the easier to slit its guts open when the time came.

Esmay glanced up as a shadow crossed her screen. camajo, the nametag said, clipped to a uniform that fit its wearer like a new saddle . . . technically fitting, but uneasy in some way. The insignia of a petty-light had been applied recently, and not quite straight, to his sleeve.