Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

“They don’t,” Esmay said confidently. “There were only twenty-five of them in sickbay.”

“Not a complete team: they usually send a threefold pack, three tens.”

“You mean we missed some?”

“No . . . some may have died aboard Wraith . We haven’t had time to get into the foamed compartments and look. That’ll be where their weapons and gear are, too.”

“But the thing is, they’re not going to be able to watch every place we can get through. So where will they be?”

“Where they’re still in contact with each other, for backup,” Bowry said. “If they were after the bridge—and I would be, if I were trying this trick—that means they’ll be watching on Deck 11, where we might be trying to get to weapons stored in the security weapons lockers, and Deck 17.”

“So . . . let’s try Deck 8,” Dossignal said. “Commander Takkis can get into the core, to the secondary command center, and make sure that the FTL drive isn’t working under their command. The rest of us—”

“What d’you mean ‘us’—you aren’t going out there.”

“I certainly am. I belong over there in the 14th, with my people.”

On the way down to Deck 8, they saw no sign of the intruders. Most of the people here were staff or students of the Training Command, Senior Technical Schools Division. Scattered among them were elements of the ship’s crew, mostly security, and researchers from the SpecMat Research Facility. They watched, wide-eyed, as the group passed, masked and armed.

Deck 8 seemed especially quiet when they came out of the stairwell. Esmay, in the lead, stopped short when she saw the first body lying sprawled in the corridor.

“Trouble,” murmured Seveche, behind her.

“And we don’t know if it’s gas or something else,” Esmay said. There was no other way from here to the firewall doors; she took a breath and edged forward, as quietly as she could.

“Dead some hours,” Seska said as they came up to the body. The man had ship security patches on his shoulder, loose on one corner where someone had hacked at them but given up.

“Maybe that was one of the first,” Dossignal said. “And the attacker then went on to meet the others . . .”

Esmay wished they would all shut up. She could hear nothing, see nothing. At the first compartment, she looked in. Five corpses lay sprawled on the floor, sagging from chairs onto work surfaces . . . her stomach turned; she swallowed with an effort. Whoever had come here was quick to kill.

Nearer to the core, they could see the solid wall that cut them off from the rest of the ship. Esmay knew now that this was no simple bulkhead, but instead a section of the hull itself, capable of sustaining pressure if the wing detached. It lay against a similar section of the core: two thicknesses of hull. Once these barriers came down, the only way across was by means of the override codes, which could open small airlock hatches.

Admiral Dossignal entered the code, while the others guarded. The hatch did not move. He tried again; again it would not open. “Commander Seveche,” he said. “Did you hear the captain give the code?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you try it; perhaps I misremembered.”

Seveche also entered the number, but again the hatch did not open.

“Either the captain didn’t remember the right sequence, or they’ve found a way to change it,” Dossignal said.

“Or someone in the crew changed it, perhaps thinking the intruders had it,” Seveche said.

“Amounts to the same thing,” Dossignal said. “Now . . . There’s got to be another way to get through this.”

Seveche grunted. “Not without the equipment that’s over in our section, sir. Two thicknesses of hull—we might manage one, with the tools in SpecMat Research, but not two.”

“What’s our communications situation?”

“We can reach Admiral Livadhi on the headsets; so far I’ve picked up nothing from the rest of the ship. That’s what I’d expect with the wings closed off; we’d need higher power.”

“If we can’t go inside, how about outside?” asked Captain Seska.

“Same problem, getting through the hull.”

“Over on T-3 and T-4, there are airlocks on every deck,” Seveche said. He had projected a map of T-1 on the bulkhead and was going through it deck by deck. “This one certainly isn’t over provided with airlocks. There’s one out at the end of the Special Materials Fabrication Unit, of course, but—”

“T-1 was designed to be secure from casual interference,” said Dossignal.

“So we have to go all the way through SpecMatFab and hope no one flips the switch. Right. When I design a DSR, it’s going to have some add-ons.”

“This one has add-ons; that’s part of the problem.” Dossignal looked around at his group. “We’d better get out there, then. I think we can assume that all the intruders are somewhere else, probably in the core section. Come on—” He strode off, startling them with his haste. Esmay caught a look between Captain Seska and his exec which suggested they weren’t any happier than she was with the admiral’s assumption that they needn’t worry about the intruders. “Luckily it’s on this deck,” Dossignal said. Esmay wished he’d slow down and let some of his escort get ahead of him.

“Admiral—” Seveche said after a few meters. “Sir—let us catch up—”

Dossignal slowed and turned. “Mari, there’s—” He gasped, and staggered. Esmay realized she’d gone for the deck just as her body smacked into it. So had Seska, Frees, and Bowry; the others stood where they’d stopped, looking around.

“DOWN!” yelled Seska, and the rest of them went down. “Admiral?”

“Alive,” grunted Dossignal. “And lucky.”

Esmay looked past Dossignal, up the passage, trying to guess where the shot had come from, and what kind of weapon it was. She’d heard nothing until the impact.

“Very lucky,” Seveche agreed, crawling forward.

“Not for long,” said a quiet voice; the figure that stepped out was a lot closer than Esmay had anticipated, and loaded with weapons. “Drop—”

She had fired almost before she knew it; the intruder’s shot ricocheted off the bulkhead as her burst took him apart from neck to hip. Someone—not that intruder—screamed.

She ignored that, made herself get up and move forward, past Admiral Dossignal, through the mess of splattered blood and tissue, to check the opening from which the intruder had come. It was a small compartment lined with shelves of office supplies, and empty now.

“—Two casualties,” Seveche was saying into his headset. “Deck 8, main passage—”

“You’re the one who was in the mutiny,” Captain Seska said to Esmay.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good reaction time. My guess is this one was cut off when the doors went down; if he’d had a partner, we’d already know it.”

Esmay thought about it. “Makes sense, sir.” She could see nothing, and hear nothing, but the sounds their own party made. “We could get the admiral into cover in this closet. Just in case.”

By the time help arrived, they had both casualties in the closet, with Esmay and the Wraith exec, Commander Frees, watching for more trouble. Dossignal kept insisting that he was all right, that they should go on without him, and once others had arrived, he put it as a direct order.

“I’m not fool enough to think I should go—I’d only slow you down—but you can do nothing useful here, and over there you might save the ship. I’ve dictated orders for the 14th—Lieutenant Suiza, take this to whatever officer is senior when you arrive. Now go.”

Nothing hindered their movement until they reached the access area for the Special Materials Fabrication Unit.