Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

“The gantries are up,” Esmay said. “Repair bay’s unsealed. If it doesn’t have some kind of barrier I don’t know about, we should be able to get in that way.”

“Why’d they turn the lights on now ?” asked Frees.

“Just got the separate power supply hooked up,” Esmay said. “The Bloodhorde’s got the bridge—they probably cut power to the wings, maybe even life support, but each wing actually has its own ship support capability.”

“So we just walk over and hop down one of those openings?”

“Only if we want to hit sixteen or seventeen decks down after a 1-G acceleration. We might be able to climb down the gantry legs . . .” She’d never actually been on the gantries, but she’d seen others up there. The problem was . . . would their friends shoot them first, or give them time to explain who they were?

“Our suitcoms should work in there,” Seska said. “And maybe they won’t see us right away.”

The walk along the topside of T-3 to the first of the openings was easier than the final traverse of the dome, but fraught with its own difficulties. The unhappy light streaming away from the openings illuminated nothing in their path, and a lot was in their path. The sheared roots of the materials transport track supports . . . cables set to brace the clamshells, counterweights for the mechanisms that raised and lowered them . . . at least something was always near at hand to clip the lines to.

Personnel access in normal operations was on the center of curved openings, now clearly downlight of the arching supports themselves. They edged along the opening, and the light changed color as they moved beside it. Even those few tens of meters of uplight . . . were too blue, and a turn of the head made it red.

The personnel lift shaft was where Esmay had remembered it should be. Far, far below, its controls locked down. She could see a section of Wraith with her skin off and a crowd of workers in EVA gear clustered around a bundle of crystals that ran out of sight fore and aft.

There was, at least, the comfort of a niche below the hull line, a platform large enough for twenty or more workers to stand waiting for the personnel lift. Esmay started down the ten mesh steps that led down to it. On the second step, ship’s gravity caught her feet; she felt glued to the step. By the time she got to the platform, she felt the drag of gravity through every bone, but her head felt clearer. Inside, the light looked normal, if less bright than usual. She glanced around. Only some of the lights were on, spotlighting the workers. Of course—on internal power, they’d conserve where they could.

The others came down, one by one, carefully; none spoke until they reached the platform. Esmay glanced around. Oxy supply lines in the bulkhead . . . a real bulkhead, with the green triangle for oxygen access painted on it. A water tap. Even a suit relief valve . . . suit maintenance really hated people who turned in soiled suits. A movement in her helmet caught her attention—her suit’s internal clock was working again, and the oxygen gauge squirted up, then dropped, then rose again slowly to indicate that she had 35 percent of her supply left, one hour and eighteen minutes at current usage.

She started to speak, then realized that if the suitcoms were working properly they could be overheard. And why wasn’t she hearing the others. Different circuits?

She found the controls in her suit and switched around the dial.

“—Gimme one —just one —now half . . .”

Back to the other channel, the one they’d used into the jump into FTL. “They’re on a different setting, at least some of ’em are.”

“Makes sense.” Seska was peering over the rail at his ship. “How do we get down?”

“Carefully,” said Frees, eyeing the emergency ladder which led down to the first horizontal gangway on this side of the repair bay, five decks below. “If we try to get the lift up, they’ll know we’re here.”

“Better report now,” Esmay said. “If we hail them on their own frequency, it might be someone I know. They can get Major Pitak to identify me, anyway.”

“You’re right, but—in the grand tradition, it seems a bit tame to let them know. Adventurers who’ve survived unprotected FTL flight ought to do something more dramatic . . . why weren’t we provided with those little invisible wire things that spies and thieves are always using to lower themselves from heights?”

“Blame the props department,” Esmay said, surprising herself. They all chuckled.

“Suiza, if you ever get tired of maintenance, I’d be glad to have you on my ship,” Seska said. “I wondered at first, but now I can see why the admiral wanted you on the operational end of this.”

Esmay’s ears burned. “Thank you, sir. Now—I’ll just let them know we’re here.” She switched channels, and found herself listening to the end of the previous set of directions.

“ . . . Now back a tenth . . . just right . . . there .”

“Lieutenant Suiza here,” she said, hoping she wasn’t cutting across another transmission.

“What! Who? Where are you?”

“I’m up at the top of the bay, on the personnel platform by lift one. With three other officers: Captain Seska and Lt. Commander Frees of Wraith , and Commander Bowry from the Schools. I have an urgent message from Admiral Dossignal for the senior officer in T-3.”

“What did you think you were doing hiding out up in the rafters all this time? I was told you were going over to T-1 to some kind of conference with the admiral and Commander Seveche and other important brass.” Commander Jarles, head of Inventory Control, was the senior commander aboard T-3. Esmay had met him briefly, at one of the officers’ socials, but she did not know him well. Now he was angry, his stocky body thrust forward in his chair, his cheeks flushed.

“I did, sir.”

“And with everything else going on, you just lazed your way the long way round? You can’t tell me you got past the blast doors, or that you didn’t hear the allcall telling everyone in this wing to get their tails to assembly points!”

Esmay interpreted the emphasis on “important brass” to mean that Commander Jarles of Inventory Control had had his nose put out of joint because he wasn’t invited to that conference. Now he was feeling very much on his dignity.

“Sir, if I may ask—how is communication with the rest of the ship, especially T-1?”

“We’ve got a link to T-4, thanks to the access tunnel, but no one else. Why?”

“Then you might not be aware that the captain was gassed and in critical condition; Admiral Dossignal was injured in a firefight, and that’s why the admiral didn’t come along. I have his orders here.” Esmay fished them out of her pocket and handed them over. Jarles pursed his lips, and gave her a nod that clearly meant Tell the rest .

“We couldn’t get past the blast doors out of T-1,” she said. “The captain gave us the override codes, but they didn’t work. The admirals felt it was imperative to get Captain Seska and his exec back to Wraith —the reasoning’s in that order cube, sir. So we got out the SpecMatFab far end, and followed the transport track partway over the ship.”

His eyes widened. “You crossed the whole ship?”

“Yes, sir. I don’t know if the scans here picked it up, but the ship took hostile fire from beam weapons—the shields held, but the transport track was destroyed.” She waited a moment for any questions, then sprang the big one. “Then it went into jump. That’s why it took us so long to get back.”

“You’re telling me . . . you were on the outside of this ship . . . during jump insertion?”