Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

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.”