The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (57 page)

She made it sound like everything he had told her was old hat, which it most decidedly was not. But she didn’t want him to know that her superiors had treated her as poorly as he had assumed they had.

“Good,” Vilhauser said. “I trust you have enough here to keep the crew entertained.”

Entertained
. A military unit did not need entertainment. It did need action, though, and she had already discussed that with her superiors before the mission. She would be running some simulations, just to keep her people “entertained,” as Vilhauser put it. She preferred to think of it as maintaining the crew’s readiness.

“We are prepared to serve as long as we have to,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “Then you’re dismissed.”

She didn’t move. He had finally gone too far.

“
Mister
Vilhauser,” she said.

“Doctor,” he corrected.

She nodded an acknowledgement but didn’t repeat the honorific.

“I run this mission,” she said. “When you are on the
Discovery
, you are under
my
command. Is that clear?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I run the mission. You run the ship.”

“I run the squadron,” she said. “You determine how long the scientific part of the mission will last. You handle the science and the scientists. I make sure you are all safe. If I believe there’s a threat, you will listen to me, and you will leave.”

“That’s not my understanding, ma’am.”

“Then clarify your understanding with your superiors, Vilhauser,” she said, deciding to forgo the honorific entirely. “Because I have my orders and I plan to follow them. Are we clear?”

He remained silent for several minutes. When she didn’t try to fill that silence, he said, “Are we going to have a problem, ma’am?”

She gave him what Rustin called her nasty smile. “I don’t know, Vilhauser. But you should know this: If we have a problem, I will settle it in the way that is best for the crew.”

“And if you harm this mission, Commander,” he said, “I will report you to your superiors.”

“Of course you will,” she said. “You’ll be within your rights.”

“You sound like you don’t care about my rights, Commander.”

This time, she let her emotions into her voice. “You got it,
Doctor
. I don’t care about your rights. I care about the lives of the crews on my ships, and you just made it very clear that you don’t. If you truly worried about those with the marker, you would have done more than review files. You would have spoken to me before we launched, and you certainly wouldn’t have risked my life.”

“You’re paid to risk your life, ma’am,” he said.

“I am paid to protect and serve the Empire,
Doctor
,” she said. “I am not paid to be at the whim of a scientist who has no concept of right or wrong. Now are we clear?”

He studied her for a long moment. “You don’t seem to like me, ma’am.”

“I’m not supposed to like you,” she said. “I’m just supposed to ensure that you complete your scientific mission without interference from others. I will do that. And you will do your best not to accidentally kill my people.”

He let out a snort. “They said you were tough. I had no idea how tough.”

“No,” she said. “You have no idea who I am or what I’m capable of. Keep that in mind as you proceed, Vilhauser. My people come first.”

“If that were true, you’d be commanding all of this mission.”

“That’s what you don’t understand, Vilhauser,” she said as she let herself out of the lab. “I
am
commanding all of this mission. And you will listen to me, whether you want to or not.”

7

THE CREW WAS USED to working in zero-g, but they were used to working in zero-g while lights were on. They hadn’t had drills for working in near-darkness since she had taken over, and maybe some of them never had.

One of Elissa’s officer training instructors had run the class through darkness drills. Elissa had found them disconcerting. Several talented officer recruits actually washed out because of those drills. Those recruits had hated working in those conditions, and one of them even demanded that the instructor guarantee they would never encounter such a thing.

He had laughed.
Clearly,
he said,
you’ve never been in battle.

Elissa had been in battle many times, and she’d even commanded disabled ships, but nothing like this.

She had to squint to locate what she believed to be the ship’s consoles. The light coming through the portals was fading, and soon they would only have starlight to work from, and not much at that.

She had learned a zero-g trick as a child. She closed her eyes and mentally erased any effect of gravity. In other words, she wiped out the so-called rule that the console had to be on the floor, the portals on the wall, and nothing on the ceiling.

She got rid of concepts like floor and ceiling altogether.

That ability had made her stand out when the officer training had moved from zero-g with a ship whose attitude controls were working to a ship whose attitude controls had malfunctioned.

She used those skills now, while the rest of her crew probably struggled with attempting to mentally map the actual layout of the slowly rotating ship.

She let go of the jutting thing and floated toward what she believed were the consoles. She grabbed a rounded edge and pulled herself in. Yep, these were the consoles. They had always had a slight vibration as power thrummed through them.

They had no vibration now.

She used one hand to hold herself above the consoles, and then she counted the edges from her spot.

The console wasn’t one big piece of equipment, but several pieces, and if she knew where she was among those pieces, then she knew what faced her on those dark boards.

Lieutenant Nisha Lee joined her. Elissa knew it was Lee, not because of her small size—several of the bridge crew were small—but because of the faint jasmine perfume she always wore. The scent was mixed with sweat now, and probably a hint of anxiety, but Lee said nothing.

She was using both arms, so that dislocated shoulder truly had gone back into its socket.

Two other crew members floated down from various positions and found a place beside Elissa. She cared less about who they were than what they could do.

She was in front of navigation.

“Lieutenant,” she said to Lee, “I believe you have the environmental systems.”

“I know, ma’am.” Lee held her position with one hand and moved the other on the console. She sounded distracted, but Elissa wasn’t sure if that was because she was ignoring the radiating pain in her shoulder or because she had other problems.

Elissa could orient the ship with this part of the console. She moved her fingers up, searching for the raised controls. They should have popped up the moment the lights went out.

But they hadn’t. The console felt flat and useless under her hands.

“Commander,” said Trombino. He was the person who ended up beside her on the left. “Nothing raised up here. This console still is on standard control.”

“This one too,” Lee said.

“And this one,” said Gatson. She was one console over from Trombino. “I’m already under—if that’s the word—trying to manually activate. Nothing wants to work, ma’am.”

Nothing wants to work
. Of course not. They weren’t going to catch a break.

“Do what you can,” Elissa said. “The same with the rest of you. I’ll move to the door controls.”

A small back-up control unit was built into the wall beside the door. To the untrained observer, the back-up control didn’t do much. But everyone on the bridge knew that the cover plate could be removed and with a passcode typed into a keypad, an override system could be activated. The keypad was manual, meaning that it operated on a spring rather than a computer.

Only ten members of the crew had that passcode. Two of those people had to be on the bridge at all times. It was an order that most ship commanders ignored, and indeed, had the explosion happened while Elissa was coming back from the Room, only Calthorpe would have had that code.

Elissa moved to the door. Beyond it, she heard more groaning from the ship herself. She didn’t like it. Nothing out on the other side of that door should’ve been subjected to the kind of stress that caused that noise.

She made herself focus. Her fingers found the ridge in the wall beside the door. She dug her nails under the edge, then pulled. The control panel opened easily.

Just for the heck of it, she tried to turn on the lights from here. She pressed the familiar depression on the panel, and—nothing happened. She let out a small sigh, as silently as she could. She wasn’t frustrated, not really, but she was growing worried.

She removed the panel, holding it in one hand as she typed on the keypad with the other. The controls eased out of their holder, and her shaky heart sped up. She recognized the feeling for what it was: a surge of adrenaline mixed with hope.

Her fingers slid along the raised control panel. The pattern was familiar. Every commander had been taught to do this one blind. Someone figured that a commander might have to do this behind her back or sideways or upside down, often without seeing what she was doing.

Sometimes the in-the-field experience
did
make it to training.

She activated the panel, worried slightly that the internal lights on the panel itself didn’t come on, then decided to ignore that. She didn’t care as long as she managed to get the systems working inside the bridge again.

She hit the switches, then looked over her shoulder.

The twilight seemed dimmer—she had been right; that flare was fading—but she could see her crew, staring at her.

“Well?” she asked, and her voice had a bit more edge than she wanted it to.

She saw Lee swivel slightly, focus on the console in front of her, and move her arms just a little.

“The controls didn’t raise,” she said.

That would have been a first step. So would the lights coming back on.

Neither happened.

No response meant that this panel, too, was damaged.

Someone sighed on the other side of the bridge. The sound echoed in the silence.

Elissa couldn’t think of anything to say. She didn’t know how to reassure her crew.

“How do you think they’re doing in the rear of the ship?” Trombino asked. He sounded desperate.

Or maybe she just heard desperation. She understood it. She was trying to fend it off herself.

“I think whatever happened hit all of us,” she said. “Even if there were power elsewhere in the ship, we’d have to wait until they restore it here before we dare venture out of the bridge.”

She didn’t tell them about the groaning, but she suspected they’d all heard it. And if they thought about it, they knew what it meant.

“Can we open up a console and see if we can repair it inside?” Binek asked.

“It won’t matter,” she said. “Something disabled all of our systems.”

“How can you know that?” Binek asked, and she wasn’t guessing here. He
did
sound desperate.

Elissa lowered her head, then realized she had a piece of information none of the rest of them did.

“The gravity in my boots doesn’t work,” she said. “I would wager if I put on the helmet for the environmental suit that the oxygen isn’t working. I’m convinced all systems are down.”

“How is that possible?” Trombino asked.

“Did those strangers have some kind of weird weapon?” Ryder asked.

Apparently, she had one other piece of information that her crew didn’t have.

“The weapons’ fire from the strange transport ship didn’t hit us,” Elissa said. “It hit the device that Vilhauser wanted off the Room.”

“You’re kidding me,” Binek said. “That thing he was so excited about? It killed him?”

“Yeah,” Elissa said softly. And there was a good possibility that it would kill all of them too.

8

THE FIRST BIG FIGHT with Vilhauser came over the location of the
Discovery
. He didn’t want the ship anywhere near the Room of Lost Souls, unless researchers were actually on the Room.

Elissa wanted the ship to remain in a stable pattern around the Room, so that the other ships in her squadron would know where the
Discovery
was at any one time.

Besides, she figured the only time the Room was dangerous was when Vilhauser and his science team messed with the site itself.

But Vilhauser was insistent, and rather than fight him over something like this, she decided to reserve her true firepower for something that she felt
was
important, like the way that Vilhauser treated her soldiers when they were actually on a mission.