Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

His supposed supervisor wasn’t watching him closely; he walked off casually in the direction of the dumps . . . no, they called them “heads” for reasons he’d never figured out. He was willing to call any of these fools shithead, but it still seemed an odd name for the receptacle. He felt eyes on him, and glanced back to see his supervisor, looking annoyed. The man shrugged as Vokrais went on through the door.

Inside were three others, a man and two women. Vokrais eyed the women. The Bloodhorde hired some female mercenaries, but they fought in all-female units. That was the natural way, otherwise men would think of nothing but rut, day in and day out. He was thinking of it now, as the tall redhaired one was washing her hands. She looked into the mirror, met his gaze, and scowled at him. Scowl all you wish, Vokrais thought. You will be tossed on my spear before morning. Or another one would; it didn’t really matter.

When they left, he explored the echoing space with its seamless hard floor, its shiny walls. He found two other doors; one opened into a storage closet, and one into a different corridor. He tested the top of the closet—he could get out that way, if he had to—but chose to walk out the other door as if he had come in that way. Here he would have no pesky supervisor watching his every move. He tried to remember where his pack-second had been sent, and thought of using the data wand.

He pushed it into one of the dataports, and flicked through the controls coding queries.

“Need some help?” someone asked at his elbow. Vokrais managed not to strike, but his move was sudden enough that the man—older, gray-haired—stepped back, startled.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Timing still off . . .” and he gestured to his ID tag, which had the Wraith shipcode on it.

“Oh—I thought perhaps you were lost or something. That’s a slow-stream dataport; if you want a quick answer to anything, there’s a fast-stream down there.”

“I would like to find the other survivors,” Vokrais said. He struggled to remember the names on the uniform tags. “Camajo, Bremerton . . .”

“Ah . . . you know their numbers?”

No, he didn’t know their mythical numbers that went with their mythical names. He shook his head, not trusting his voice.

“A search on Wraith should get ’em,” the man said, and put his own wand into a port a few meters away. Vokrais noticed that this one had a double ring around it, blue and green. The one he had been using had a double band of yellow and green. “Here you are,” the man said then. “I’ll transfer it to yours . . .” He reached for Vokrais’s data wand, then snugged it next to his for a moment, and handed the wand back.

“Thanks,” Vokrais remembered to say; the man nodded and strode off. He looked at the display options, and walked down the corridor as if thinking, looking at the names and duty assignments coming up. Would that man remember him? Report him? Would anyone be expected to know about the color codings on the dataports? He’d felt smug that he’d recognized a dataport at all.

Hoch was indeed in Hull and Architecture, in wing T-3 and on Deck Four. Vokrais considered the distance and cursed to himself. What misbegotten brain-dead fool of an engineer had designed this ship . . . it made no sense. A space station with an oversized drive, that’s what it was, not a ship at all. He was wasting too much time hunting people, but he could hardly get on the shipspeaker (surely they had a shipspeaker) and call.

He spotted another of his people lounging along looking the picture of a lazy incompetent, and signaled him. Sramet wandered over, and Vokrais told him where to meet, and that he would find Hoch. “And don’t slouch like that,” he said, as he finished. “At least look like you’re on business.” Sramet nodded, and put on the character of earnest, hardworking dullness as if he had pulled a mask over his head.

And that was another thing lost in Wraith . . . not only their technical expert and their weapons, but their tools, and their special gear that included disguises and camouflage.

Hoch, when he found him, was being chewed out by one of the Familias NCOs, who finished a scathing description of his abilities with a couple of ethnic slurs aimed at his presumed planet of origin. “And you can take your sorry tail back to Commander Atarin’s clerk, and explain that Petty-major Dorian won’t have you on the crew, is that clear?”

Hoch caught Vokrais’s eye, but his expression of sullen incompetence did not change. “Yes, sir,” he said, in a strangled voice.

“Get on with it, then.” The NCO, suppressed fury in every line of his body, stalked off down the passage. Hoch looked straight at Vokrais, this time with the expression of his mind: he would kill that one, when he found him again.

“We have a place,” Vokrais said, as they walked back the other way. He gave the location, then said, “I need to find more—only two others so far . . . this thing is too big.”

“I’ll go too . . . do you know where they are?”

Vokrais was able to repeat the trick, as he thought it, of mating his data wand with Hoch’s to transfer the list of personnel locations. “We’re going to be discovered soon,” he said. “I can feel it. We don’t fit in with these . . . people.”

“Slaves,” Hoch said, in their tongue, and Vokrais looked at him sharply.

“Careful. We still have to do it.”

“In my sleep, packleader.” That in a lower voice still, but still in their tongue.

“Soon, then,” said Vokrais, in the Familias. “Make one sweep clockwise—they all seem to go clockwise on the big passage around the core—and then meet. I want to make one trip as far upship as I can get before they realize we’re aboard.”

“Why should they? They’re half-asleep, sheep ready for shearing.”

“Go, packbrother,” Vokrais said. Hoch’s eyes gleamed, and his arm twitched; he moved off to the left. Vokrais went across to the nearest cluster of lift/drop tubes and shot upward. He had enjoyed the swift ride many times on his visits to Familias space stations; the Bloodhorde had sufficient trouble with the technology of gravity control that they used lift tubes rarely, never for such distances. He didn’t suppose it would take him all the way to the top, but there it was: Deck Seventeen.

He stepped out into the same wide curving corridor, here less busy than down on Deck Four. He walked along briskly, as if he knew where he was going. A bored guard stood at an opening that might lead to the bridge, on the core side; Vokrais didn’t try to look in. His shoulders itched; he knew he was being watched. He walked on, most of the way around the core, surprised to find no other lift tube clusters, as there had been on the lower decks. Did only one set come this far? He didn’t want to go back past the first guard, like someone who had lost his way.

He came to another guarded opening. Here the guard looked more alert, eyes shifting back and forth. Vokrais could see the bulge of lift tubes ahead, but before that was a wide opening into T-2 . . . it had the label above . . . and he remembered that the dining hall had also been in T-2. He looked in and almost stumbled in amazement. The place was full of plants, green plants.

He turned in through the door as if this was what he’d intended all along, and felt the guard’s attention drop from him like a heavy load. Beneath his feet, something that almost felt like soil cushioned his steps; on either side were the plants, from ankle to waist-high, some with colorful flowers on them. He ambled along a path, seeing no one. Paths met the one he was on, diverged, wound around taller plants that made screens so that he could not tell how large this place was.