Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

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.

“I was told to report here,” the man said. “To Major . . . Major Pitak.” His eyes roved the compartment as if scanning it for hidden weapons; his glance at Esmay had been dismissive. Her skin prickled. He reminded her of something—someone—her mind, suddenly alert, scrabbled frantically in memory to figure out what. She looked back at the screen before she answered.

“She’s in with Commander Seveche. Are you from Wraith ?” She couldn’t imagine anyone from Koskiusko giving her quite that look. It wasn’t the “you’re not really Fleet are you?” look, or the “you’re that kid who commanded Despite , aren’t you?” look, or any of the others she’d have recognized.

“Yes . . . sir.” The pause snagged her attention away from the screen graphics again. “We were . . . in the forward compartment . . . the sleepygas . . .”

“You’re lucky to be alive,” Esmay said, instantly forgiving the man’s odd behavior. If he’d been through all that, he could still be affected by the drug. “We’ve got Wraith in now; work’s already started. You can wait here for Major Pitak, or at Commander Seveche’s office.”

“Where’s Commander Seveche’s office?” the man asked. The shipchip in his pocket bleeped, and he peered cross-eyed at a space between him and Esmay. She knew what that meant—the shipchip was projecting a route.

“Just follow your shipchip,” she said. He turned, without the proper acknowledgement; Esmay started to say something, but . . . he had been gassed, and might be still a bit hazy. Something wasn’t quite right . . .

“Petty-light . . .” she said. He stopped in mid-stride, then turned jerkily. Something not right at all. His eyes were not the eyes of someone dazed by drugs . . . his eyes had a bright gleam half-hidden behind lowered lids.

“Yes . . . Lieutenant?”

She could not define what was wrong . . . it was not anything so positive as disrespect, which she had experienced often enough. Respect and disrespect occurred in a relationship, a connection. Here she felt no connection at all, as if Petty-light Camajo were not Fleet at all, but a civilian.

“When you do see Major Pitak, tell her that the simulations for fabrication have arrived from SpecMat.”

“The simulations have arrived . . . yes . . . m . . . sir.” Camajo turned, moving more decisively than someone fogged on sleepygas, and was gone before Esmay could say more. She scowled at the screen. Yes . . . m . . . sir? What had he been about to say?

She felt uneasy. Had Wraith had traitors on its crew? Was that why it had suffered such damage? Why was Camajo alive, uninjured, after such a hull breach between him and the rest of the ship?

This was ridiculous. She had not noticed anything amiss in Despite , had not recognized that any of the traitors were traitors. She had not been uneasy this way then. Perhaps that experience had made her paranoid, willing to interpret every discrepancy as ominous. Camajo had been lucky, that was all, and now he was disoriented, on a strange ship with none of his familiar companions.

That didn’t work out. The casualties on Despite , traitor or loyal, had none of them stumbled over the familiar Fleet greetings and honorifics. With blood in his mouth, as he died, Chief Major Barscott had answered “Yes, sir . . .” to Esmay. How many of the survivors in those forward compartments had been lucky? How lucky? And was it luck?

Camajo’s eyes . . . his gaze . . . reminded her of her father’s soldiers. Groundpounders’ eyes . . . commandos’ eyes . . . roving, assessing, looking for the weaknesses in a position, thinking how to take over . . . Take over what?

Scolding herself, Esmay flicked to the next screen, but her mind wandered anyway. In the civil wars—she called it that now, though to her family it was still the Califer Uprising—both sides had tried infiltrating the others’ defensive positions with troops wearing stolen uniforms, using stolen ID. It had worked a few times, even though both knew it was possible. She’d never heard of such a thing happening in Fleet. Ships weren’t infiltrated by individuals . . . they were attacked by ships. Very rarely in Fleet history were attempts at hostile boarding mentioned; battle zones were too dangerous for EVA maneuvers. Pirates sometimes boarded individual commercial vessels . . . but that wasn’t the military. It would take . . . it would take a single badly damaged Fleet ship, one that could not detect the movement of individuals in EVA gear . . . a hull breach that let them in . . . a way to get the right uniforms . . . no. She was being silly.

Major Pitak came in while she was still arguing with herself. “That Camajo fellow from Wraith must be still half-tranked,” she said, dropping a half-dozen cubes onto her desk. “I couldn’t get out of him which simulations were in . . . sent him on down to E-12; they can use him for a runner if nothing else. Can’t cause much trouble that way.”

Esmay lost her argument with prudence. “Major, I was wondering about a security breach . . .”

“Security breach! What are you talking about?”

“Camajo. I’m not sure, but . . . something wasn’t right.”

“He’d been out for a week; that scrambles anyone’s brain. How could he be a security breach?”

“He just didn’t react the way he should,” Esmay said. “The way he looked at me—it wasn’t a tranked-out sort of expression.”

Pitak looked at her, alert. “You’ve been through one mutiny; if it hasn’t made you paranoid, maybe you would notice something wrong. So you think he might be a traitor, like Hearne and Garrivay?”

“No, sir. I was thinking . . . what if someone infiltrated Wraith . Through the hull breach maybe. Couldn’t Bloodhorde troops have gotten in there, before Wraith jumped out?”

“You mean like boarding a watership in a pirate story? Nobody does that, Suiza, not in real life in deep space. Even pirates send people over in pods. Besides, how would they survive through jump?”

“Well . . . there were survivors in the forward compartments.”

“But those were Wraith crew, in Wraith uniforms, with their names on the crew list. I was there myself, Suiza. I didn’t see anything that looked like Bloodhorde commandos, just wounded who’d been knocked out by sleepygas to conserve oxygen.”

“You’re sure.”

Pitak looked at her with a combination of exhaustion and irritation. “Unless you’re suggesting that the Bloodhorde cleverly dressed their soldiers in our uniforms—uniforms that just happened to have the right ID patterns in the cloth, and the right nametags on the pockets—and wounded them, drenched them in their own blood, then left them there to jump in a damaged ship—?”