The Serrano Succession (70 page)

Drizh grinned to himself. Fleet had gone soft, because the government had gone soft. Always seeking peace, always looking for a way out. He'd had hopes of Thornbuckle, when Thornbuckle sent Fleet to rescue his daughter—any excuse for a war was better than no war at all—but then Thornbuckle had died, shot down by a better hunter.
The hunt proves your real nature, whether you are prey or hunter
. And the new Chairman, Hobart Conselline . . . all he cared about was profit and long life.

"He thinks like a cow," Drizh said aloud.

"Sir?" That was his flag captain, Jerard Montague.

"Conselline," Drizh said. "All belly. But he'll learn; they all will." They would bow at last; they would have to, when the loss of civilian lives rose high enough. Then he would command not just the mutineers but all of Fleet, and Fleet would command the government. No more begging humbly for the cheapest supplies: they would have the best, and no arguments.

"They still have some good commanders," Montague said. "And more ships."

"True, but they don't have our edge. Ship for ship we're superior. Survival through victory—it's the only way. Besides, there are only a few to worry about."

"Serrano?"

"Serrano, yes." For a moment, Drizh allowed himself to regret that Heris Serrano wasn't one of his people. She had the right instincts; she would have been a powerful and valuable ally. But she had destroyed his mentor, exposed Lepescu to the world as a vicious killer, denounced those who followed him. She was an enemy, and he would destroy her, rejoicing in her fall.

He looked again at his charts, and cursed the cowards who hadn't yet shown up as they'd promised. He needed more ships, now, before the loyalists had time to organize an effective defense.

In the meantime, waiting the arrival of the others, he could train this nucleus.

"Tightbeam to all ships," he said. "Close in for drill." A few days of precision drill, the ships as close as possible, would sharpen the crews' reactions immensely. Then gunnery drill, then microjump gunnery . . .

Then the war, and the victory.

R.S.S.
Rosa Maior

Barin was in the middle of his midshift meal when the alarms whooped again. The task force was still picking up loose mines—a ticklish task even with the help of the specialty minesweeper. The diners seemed to freeze in place for a moment—waiting, he realized, for the announcement that this was another exercise—and then they all lurched into motion. Lieutenant Marcion picked up his bowl and swigged down the rest of his soup, grabbed two rolls, and bolted for the door. Barin eyed the rest of his stew with regret, grabbed rolls for himself, and a hunk of cake from the dessert table, and followed at the double.

He had almost reached his station when he staggered—the artificial gravity had wavered for an instant. That was not a good sign . . . he came around the corner to find Petty Officer O'Neil already in place. He took the list, and began calling names, glad that his voice wasn't shaky or shrill. Everyone had made it to station; Wahn came jogging up just as he got to that name. Barin reported all present up the tube and got a terse acknowledgement; he wanted to ask what was going on, but knew better.

A shrill whistle: the warning for closing the section seals.

"Must have some shield damage," a pivot said, and grinned nervously.

"Less chatter," O'Neil said.

Barin could hear the shuffle of someone's feet on the deck, the soft whirr of the ventilating fans . . . and the sudden clunk-groan of the section seals as they unlocked and moved in their deep grooves. A final echoing thud cut them off from noises elsewhere in the ship. "Check the seals," Barin said. Petty Officer O'Neil told off two of the team for that task and set the others to taking initial readings of the pressure, temperature, artificial gravity, and other factors. "Suit by pairs," Barin said, when the seals had been reported secure. It seemed to take them forever, though he knew the creeping second hand on the chronometer was actually moving at normal speed, and they were suiting up well within the required time.

At last it was his turn; he stepped into the p-suit and found himself remembering a question he'd asked long, long ago. Why, he'd wanted to know, didn't ships carry escape pods for use in disasters? Everyone knew p-suits weren't really protection, not if you were blown out into a seething maelstrom of broken bits and pieces. The marines had hardened combat suits, but the rest of the crew . . . He went on fastening seals and making attachments as he remembered the instructor's answer. There was no way, on a large ship, to provide escape capsules for everyone, and the bulky space combat suits took up too much room, and besides—you shouldn't be thinking about getting out of the ship, but of saving it—keeping it working.

Barin turned so his partner could check his back—the hang of the air cylinders, the attachments of hose and cable—and then checked his partner's. For now they didn't need the suits' air supply. For now, they had air in the compartment. If all went well, they would come out of this hot, sweaty, smelly, but with fully charged tanks. If it didn't—they'd have this small additional chance. He had them all call off their air supply gauges; the only one below 100% was Pivot Ghormley, who had predictably forgotten that he was not supposed to turn the airflow on until he needed it. Barin let the petty officer chew Ghormley out and tell him to recharge his tank from the outlet.

With the section sealed off, this team was responsible for damage assessment and control in the starboard aft compartments of Troop Deck. Two open squad bays; four cramped and complicated four-man compartments for NCOs, fitted around essential ship equipment; the shower hall; the heads; a crew lounge with battered couches and cube readers; and—taking up almost half the cubage—half the gymnasium, the other half being cut off by a section seal. Barin sent his team off to take readings in each compartment; he stayed by the command console, from which he could report results, or receive orders.

He felt a lurch in his stomach—the gravity generators again?—and glanced at the gauge nearest him. Sure enough, a two percent negative spike . . . the lights dimmed, then brightened. His team reported the first set of numbers, and Barin forwarded them through his console. A vast shudder rumbled through the deck . . . missile launches. Another.

Betenkin said, "Are we taking hits, sir?" in a voice two tones higher than usual.

Barin said, "Missile launchers," almost in concert with Petty Officer O'Neil; their eyes met, and he saw that O'Neil was watching him just as he watched the others. O'Neil gave a short nod. Then the deck bucked beneath them, one great concussive blow. Barin swallowed and said, "
That
was incoming." O'Neil grinned for a moment. "Check the seals first," Barin said. Pressure had to be all right; he would have felt if it hadn't been. He glanced down at his console. Two decks down a red blaze expanded across the ship's schematic. Even as he recognized it, the loud-hailer came on. "Hull breach—hull breach—report all starboard aft teams—"

Barin pressed his code key and read off the current numbers. In his headset, the damage control officer said, "Serrano—get your team to Environmental, go down the portside access; watch the heads-up on the way down in case the aft locks don't hold."

He tried to remember what he'd been told about hull breaches. Everything tried to escape to vacuum: the air and all that could be moved by the explosive decompression. This left the damaged area clear, usually, of the noxious gases and thick smoke that endangered personnel when the ship was still whole but some system had fractured. But the next compartments, where there might be pressure loss, were likely to be cold, dark, and confusing.

In the aft portside passage, Barin and his team met up with the officer on site. The major glanced at his nametag, touched his compad, and said, "Serrano—good. We want you in SE-14. Pressure's dropping, but slow enough it must be fairly small—but big enough nothing's plugged it yet. Your report channel is eleven. Cycle through two at a time, and be careful. The pressure differential's enough to knock you off your feet. You'll go in number four, got that?"

Barin led the way into the lock. When it opened on the far side, he faced the starboard passage, now lit only by emergency lighting, and the long emergency bulkhead that separated the passage from the "plumbing works" of Environmental. Along it, several preformed partial pressure locks showed, each clearly labelled. He located #4, and, as the rest of his team cycled through, he opened the #4 emergency locker and handed out the elements of the single-person pressure lock. This was something they'd drilled in often enough: place the frame to the existing frame and seal, pop open the rest and check that the other side of the lock was closed. The first person through did not actually cycle through, but was pushed by the suction that pulled the lock into the low-pressure chamber and held it extended until the second locked the frame in place.

Barin checked that everything was ready, took another look at his suit readouts—grabbed hold of the safety bar of what would become the low-pressure side of the inner hatch, and popped the bulkhead's preformed opening.

The emergency airlock, sucked through the opening with all the force of the pressure differential, hit him in the back like a truck, and he barely kept his grip on the safety bar. All around was a dark, dense, cold, whirling wind . . . he could see nothing, but he could feel the buffeting of air currents, and the cold now rapidly falling to the freezing point of water. His feet slithered on something incredibly slippery . . . ice already?

Air screamed through the crevices as it escaped, audible even inside the suit. Barin turned on his helmet lamp, and saw swirling fog, streamers of vapor pouring away from left to right. Environmental was the wettest place on the ship, barring the water reserves or a shower in use; here the air was more humid than anywhere else, and decompression chilled it below its ability to hold that water as invisible vapor.

"Lock's up, sir," he heard in his helmet com.

"Come through, but watch it—it's slippery, dark, and windy in here."

"Rig safety lines," O'Neil said.

Now why hadn't he thought of that? His suit had all the attachments ready. Barin managed to get the primary hookup out of its fitting and attached to the lock's safety bar. Now he could move away a little . . . look for other points of attachment. He tried a cautious step away from the hatch and skidded on the wet deck, slithering into something round and hard. A culture tank? His helmet light didn't show him anything identifiable but the fat shiny haunch of a metallic tank of some kind. It looked shinier than it should, and he rubbed it with his gloved hand, then wiped the glove on the chem-patch. A formula he didn't recognize came up on his suit display. Not all water, then. It had a lot of C and H and O and some Cl. Hydrocarbon, his mind reminded him, and he didn't need a laundry list to think of hydraulic fluid.

Slippery, flammable, and—if coming from a high-pressure leak—lethal to get near.

He switched his suit com to channel 11 and reported the presence of hydraulic fluid, then back to his own unit's channel.

"Sir?"

"I'm over here . . ." he rotated his head, sending his helmet light in all directions. "I slid over here—we've got hydraulic fluid as well as water vapor. Show your lamps."

Three feeble glows that could have been any distance. "Right, sir. We have five more to cycle through—three now clipped on the same safety bar. Have you found any other attachment points?"

"No," Barin said. "Not yet." He had only three meters of line on the primary attachment, and they couldn't all clip on to the same bar—there wasn't room. They could clip on each other, but they still needed other attachment points. He edged his way around the metal tank and found a handle of some sort. When he tugged, it held firm; by leaning close with his headlamp, he could see that it opened by turning, with a safety latch holding it closed. Good enough. "Found an attachment. Who's in?"

"Wahn, Telleen, Prestin."

"Wahn, clip onto my line, trail a line to the lock, and come to me."

He felt the vibration in his safety line, as someone moved—and was there beside him.

"It's only about two meters, sir, but you can't see anything in this murk."

"True enough. Let's have that line—" Barin used a running clip to attach the line Wahn had trailed to the attachment he'd found. Now anyone could come that way. "Now you clip in." Wahn did so, keeping a safety grip on Barin's line while unclipping his own and reclipping it onto the tank handle. "Telleen, find my line, and give it a tug." When he felt the tug, he said, "Now—unclip my line and put it on the trailer."

It took a tediously long time to cycle everyone through the lock safely, make sure they were all clipped in, and advance through the greasy murk toward the actual leak. Since the problem was known, at least in part, four of the last in the chain lugged a great awkward roll of bulkhead fabric, which when stretched across a gap and foamed would provide an airtight seal with some structural integrity.

Barin, in the lead, slithered and slid from one obstacle to another, barking his shins and his ribs on things he couldn't see clearly until he fell over them. This was only fair, he knew, since he had less actual experience than most of the team. He knew he was going the right way, because the wisps and tendrils of vapor blew past him—all he had to do was follow. He reported at intervals, when his helmet display prompted him to.