The Serrano Connection (43 page)

"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."

"Just where do you plan to find a close-in Bloodhorde ship with its crew off it?" asked Hakin with some sarcasm. The question hung a moment, as they all considered, then the same idea flickered across several faces. Hakin's turned grim. "No. Absolutely not. I am not going to allow
more
Bloodhorde troops aboard my ship, just for the chance of capturing one of theirs."

"They'd probably like to use one of the repair bays," Dossignal said slowly. "
Wraith
's in one—they know that. The other's empty . . . the best place for a smallish ship to dock, anyway. Full of stuff they want."

"No!" Hakin said, more loudly.

"Do you have any information on Bloodhorde boarding procedures, Commander?" Dossignal asked, ignoring Hakin for the moment.

Nors thought a moment. "All we have is reports from the few civilians who survived a Bloodhorde raid on a large civilian ship. They come in wearing protective gear that functions as both EVA and battle armor . . . they were in that case quite willing to damage the ship they'd captured to gain control of it. None of the civs we talked to could tell one level of weapon from another, but one of them did describe something capable of holing interior bulkheads with one shot. Here, though, we're assuming they want a DSR entire. I expect they'll do as little damage as possible in capturing it . . . but they do have to board."

"Another possibility," said Commander Wyche, "is the weaponry aboard a Bloodhorde ship in a repair bay. Suppose it could be immobilized there. Then its weapons would give us yet another self-destruct capability. They have forward-mounted weapons in every class."

"
If
we were able to get aboard and take control."

"I think we can take that as given, sir. If they just sit there, they aren't accomplishing anything . . . they can't shoot at us without doing the damage they don't want, and besides, they have no reputation for being patient. I think we can count on them coming out, with an intent to take control of key systems."

"Which is why we can't let them do it," Captain Hakin said. "It would take your people some time to get aboard, get control of their ship, and
maybe
be able to use it to defeat their other ships or destroy us . . . and in the meantime, I'd have a shipful of enemy . . . NO."

"So the real problem is getting them off their ship without letting them onto ours," Admiral Livadhi said. He put his fingertips together. "You know . . . there might be a way. If we could shut off the repair bay—that whole wing—"

"We could just take it apart," Admiral Dossignal said.

"Take it apart?" Captain Hakin asked.

"Yes . . . Commander Seveche, review the original construction data and all later modifications . . . there may be a way to cut one of the repair bays loose—unobtrusively, of course—and isolate it from the rest of
Koskiusko
."

In less than an hour, Seveche returned with the data ready to display; he set up the large screen and lit it.

"Here, you see: when they assembled
Kos
, they planned for possible changes by using temporary attachments—"

Hakin turned red. "You mean we've been working in a ship that's not really held together—?"

"No, sir. It is held together, and quite well . . . but it would take only hours, not days, to detach it again. These pressure clamps . . . these connectors here . . ." Seveche pointed to them on the display. "All this can be undone fairly easily. Relatively, I mean. The seal between T-4 and the core cylinder is a large expansion joint of sorts." He switched to another display. "As
Kos
was assembled, before an arm was locked on, the near end of these things were fastened to the core . . . and then the outer end to the arm. As the arms moved in to mate with the core, the corrugations compressed, giving additional safety margin to the join."

"Yes, but—I presume you plan to stretch them out again. Do you really expect them to be sound after all this time?"

"I don't see why not," Seveche said. "We've used the same material over the same span of time, with multiple compressions and extensions, with no failure. Besides, we can have the locks on each side shut. The way the arms are made, there are airlocks on the inner end of each deck."

"I know that, Commander," Hakin said. He sounded annoyed. "But I'm sure they'll notice that the inner hatches are locked, and then they'll blast them—"

"They won't. We can rig temporary cross-dock access . . . they don't know what it's supposed to look like."

"Then when it detaches, it'll depressurize—"

"Not if someone is there to lock the hatches." Seveche looked to Dossignal for help.

"We're going to take casualties, whatever we do," Dossignal said. "To protect us from capture, you're prepared to destroy the ship and crew. I understand that, and it may be necessary. But I believe we have a chance to save both the ship and much of its crew if we can hold out until Admiral Gourache returns. Denying the enemy the use of a ship—using it ourselves—and using what firepower
Wraith
has left—is the only way I see to do that. I'm sure we'll have volunteers enough for the most hazardous of these hazardous missions."

"We'll have to have someone commanding each section that's freed—with the authority to do what they must, whatever that is. Divided command would be disastrous, and we can't be sure that communications will hold."

"Which means we've got to get those people involved in planning right away—"

"I don't like it," Captain Hakin said. "It's scrabble law: the whole ship is my command, and you're proposing to break off pieces and give them an independent command. Separated, they'll be even easier meat to the invaders—"

"Captain, we're offering a suggestion that gets us both off the hook.
Koskiusko
was assembled from previously independent sections in deep space. You know that. T-4 and T-3 even had names—
Piece
and
Meal
may've been stupid names, but names. They might have been commissioned as ships in their own right, if Fleet had not decided to try for a unified DSR. It's reasonable to maintain that they're both directly under the 14th—"

"You'll have to crew them," Hakin said. "You're not taking any of the crew I need to secure
Kos
."

Was it capitulation? Admiral Dossignal looked at Hakin a long time.

"You know, Vladis, if it's really going to stick in your craw, you can write a report."

"I intend to," Hakin looked even grimmer. "Partly to question your authority to nominate a captain for any vessel in this sector: that's Foxworth's job, or, at the lowest level, Gourache's."

"I see your point. But I'm going to do it anyway, and we can all hash it out with a Board, if not a court, later."

Hakin shook his head. "It won't improve the odds, and it just makes my job harder . . ."

"I don't see how, since we're almost certainly ridding you of most of your intruders, and one of the ships trying to attack you. Now as for crew, we have the uninjured survivors of
Wraith
—"

"Which will be needed to serve
Wraith
's weapons," Livadhi said.

"Their weapons crews certainly. Since
Wraith
won't be maneuvering, I don't know about their bridge crew. I hate to waste a captain with combat experience aboard a crippled ship. We're not overburdened with such officers."

Commander Atarin spoke up. "Admiral, I have prepared a list of all officers and enlisted aboard with combat experience in the past three years. They're rank-ordered by specialty and performance—not just experience—in combat."

"Good. Let's see . . . oh, my."

"What?" Hakin craned his neck, trying to see.

"We have ample combat-experienced weapons specialists, because the senior weapons technical course is running. Scan . . . not much problem there. We're short environmental systems specialists, but this should be over fast enough that it won't be critical . . . we can have our people in self-contained gear. Communications is also short, but most scan techs are cross-trained in communications and we have plenty of scan techs. What we don't have is ship commanders. Or rather, we have just enough:
Wraith
's captain for
Wraith
, and Lieutenant Commander Bowry, who's here for a special course, to command the Bloodhorde ship."

"I don't suppose we'd be lucky enough to get more than one of them . . ."

"I doubt it. Why would they bring in more than one ship at a time? If they gifted us with such riches, we'd just have to find someone to take it . . . but that gets us down to fairly junior officers with very little experience of ship command in combat." Dossignal considered telling them who, precisely, but he knew Hakin would have particular objections to Esmay Suiza.

Esmay found what might be a possible cause of the failure of the FTL drives, and took that to Major Pitak, who was overseeing the transport of the long crystal bundles from the Special Materials Fabrication Unit to T-3 and
Wraith
. Even bundled, they were more flexible than Esmay had expected; as she watched the special transport teams eased them along the transport track. She had known, intellectually, that all ships had such framing members . . . she had known that they had a lateral flexibility which was essential to the design. But these shivering, wriggling lengths seemed far too frail to trust lives to in deep space.

Pitak gave her a brief glance and turned back to watch. "Ah, Suiza . . . find something?"

"It's only a possibility."

"Good enough. Have you seen these before?" She went on before Esmay could answer. "Wiggly, aren't they?" She sounded pleased.

"More than I thought," Esmay said honestly. Vidscan screens showed the entire route, from the exit port at the end of the SpecMatFab, up over T-1, the core, and down again between T-3 and T-4. "Why didn't they put the repair bays on the same side of the ship as SpecMat? Wouldn't it have been easier to transfer things like that?"

"Yes, but that turned out to be the least important design consideration. If it really interests you, when this crisis is over, you can look it up in the design archives . . . the whole argument is in there." She punched up the view in one screen, and pointed to the bundles. "Now that's a good set. After awhile, you'll be recognizing good strands from bad by the oscillations alone. If we didn't have this other crisis, I'd send you over to SpecMat to watch them during breakoff."

Esmay was just as glad to miss that. She had heard from others about the more spectacular breakoffs, when the test sequences induced more oscillation than a faulty crystal could withstand, and shards flew with a noise that was said to shake reason.

"Let me see what you've got," Pitak said. She looked at the data Esmay had found and frowned. "I don't think this is it. The shearing force isn't enough to unseat the AG generators, and you're suggesting that it was AG instability which caused the drive failure, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"How does it model?"

"They've bumped everyone below department heads off the big computer . . . the little one said it was possible. That's why I brought it."

"Oh. Well, I don't like the modeling program on the little one for anything but pure structural layups. For this sort of thing we need the Mishnazi series . . . but I imagine they're trying to maximize their data analysis. I don't think this is likely enough to ask for the time ourselves." She looked at Esmay. "You should log off and get some sleep while you can—at least a good meal. Have you kept track of who's been to dinner?"