Once a Hero

  Even as she dressed and scampered along the passage and up ladders to her section, she felt the gut-twisting lurch of a ship overpowering its way through a jump point. Fear crawled back up her spine, vertebra by vertebra. DSRs were not built for racing and jumping; DSRs moved at the leisurely pace appropriate to their mass and internal architecture. She understood now, after the time in Hull & Architecture, why it wasn't a matter of adding more power—what the trade-offs were, in making Koskiusko so big and so massive. What had happened? Where were they going? And more important, were they fleeing with trouble on their tail, or running toward it?

  Hull & Architecture, like every other section, swarmed like a kicked anthill. In the departmental briefing room, Commander Seveche was putting a cube in the display. "Ah . . . Suiza. Hook up your compad, this is going to be interesting." Esmay plugged in her compad, and made sure it was set to record the display directly. Most of H&A was in the room when Seveche started his briefing; the rest straggled in within a few minutes.

  "This is what we know—and we all know that it will be worse. Wraith is a patrol ship, commissioned ten years ago, out of the Dalverie Yards—one of the SLP Series 30 hulls—" A couple of low groans, which Esmay now understood. The SLP Series 30 had well earned the nickname "slippery," meaning its architecture lent itself to unauthorized and possibly damaging revisions. "She's been in combat against the Bloodhorde, and despite their technological inferiority, they managed to wipe most of her scan systems and then bludgeon her with heavy explosive. There was shield failure of the starboard arc, forward of frame 19—" Esmay now knew exactly where frame 19 was on that class and series. "—with resulting damage to the forward weapons pods, and a hull breach here—" Seveche's pointer circled the intersection of frame 19 with truss 7.

  "And she's coming in?" Someone less inhibited than Esmay had voiced her surprise exactly.

  "She was lucky," Seveche said. "They knocked out her scans, but not the scans of her hunting partners. Sting and Justice were in the system, and they blindsided the Bloodhorde ships, drove them off. Wraith had heavy casualties of course, but they were able to patch things up enough to make it through one jump point. They couldn't manage two: the hull patch was leaking again, and they had nothing more to use on it. So—as you all no doubt felt—we're jumping out to meet them."

  No one said it this time, but the tense faces around Esmay revealed their thoughts. DSRs stayed well behind any line of war for a very good reason . . . they couldn't fight, maneuver, or get away. If they were attacked . . .

  "I did remind our captain that old Kos isn't an escort," Seveche said wryly. "But we should be fine. Half our protection jumped ahead of us, and the rest with us. We'll have Sting and Justice as well. And it looks like all the experimental stuff on Justice worked."

  "How long do we have?" asked Pitak.

  "We expect to come into the same system in—" Seveche looked at the chronometer. "Seventy-eight hours and eighteen minutes. We'll be making a series of fast-insertion jumps, coming out of the last at a slow relative vee; they'll tow Wraith out to us."

  Seveche went on with the briefing. "We won't know more about the hull damage until we come out of the last jump: we're pushing this ship to its max, and not hanging around anywhere to pick up messages. For all we know, Wraith won't make it until we arrive."

  By the time Koskiusko came out of its last jump, Esmay had been all over the ship on errands for Major Pitak. "Don't be insulted, but you still don't know enough to be really useful—and I need someone to keep up with all the other departments. Ship's comm is overloaded, or will be."

  Esmay didn't feel insulted at all. She was quite willing to check with Inventory Control on the stock of fasteners, star-slot, 85mm, pitch 1/10, interval 3mm (she patted the boxes with a proprietary hand—those were her fasteners), to ask the chief in Weapons Systems for an estimate of the damage that Wraith might have suffered from its own weaponry exploding when the hull breached, to crawl around the depths of the storage hold full of structural members checking each one with instruments that should detect any dangerous deformities. Everything had been checked before, and would be checked again, but she understood the need. Mistakes happen. The wrong color uniform gets on the person with the . . . no, she didn't have time to think of that.

  She had avoided Medical, in the superstitious belief that any wandering psychnanny would see in her face that she had terrible secrets, and she'd be out on a psych discharge before she could argue. But in the last hours before they closed with Wraith, Pitak sent her there, to coordinate the search and rescue with what was known about the hull and its problems.

  Medical occupied a large chunk of T-5, with onboard operating suites, decontamination suites, regen tanks, neural-assisted-growth tanks, isolation chambers for exotic infectious diseases, diagnostic labs . . . the equivalent of a sector hospital. Esmay found it in the same state of bustle as her own department, and was passed from one desk to another until she located Trauma Response.

  Esmay handed Pitak's cube of data—updated since the downjump by direct transmission from Wraith—to the lieutenant in charge of the extrication and trauma transport teams.

  "Hang around until I'm sure we understand all this," he said, stuffing the cube into a reader. The display came up on the wall; the others milling around settled to look at it. "Forward hull breach—that'll mean decompression injuries in the nearest compartments beyond the breach—" In the breach itself, it meant deaths, the responsibility of Personnel Salvage, not Extrication and Transport.

  "Looks like truss failure here—" he pointed. "We'll have to cut our way around that. Lieutenant, what'll happen if we cut here and here?" He pointed. Esmay, briefed by Major Pitak, pointed to alternative cuts, already on the cube display in green. He scowled. "That'll just barely give clearance for our suits—we don't want to snag on anything—and we'll have casualties coming out . . . we need more room than this. We've told H&A before—we need a solid two-meter clearance . . . why can't we make this cut?" He pointed again at his first choice.

  Esmay thought she knew, but this was a job for someone with seniority. "I'll get Major Pitak for you," she said.

  "Do that."

  Esmay found Pitak deep in one of the holds stocked with H&A gear, and patched her through to the E&T commander . . . then backed off as the air heated up around her. She'd never actually heard Pitak swear before, but on this occasion the major left curlicue trails of smoke down the bulkheads. After the first explosion, she settled into explanation.

  "—And if you want several dozen more casualties and a lot of sharp-edged ejecta floating around, then you go on and cut to your heart's content—"

  "Dammit, Major—"

  As abruptly as a mule's kick, the major calmed. "Now—what do you need for your suits? I'll get you space, just tell me—"

  "Two meters."

  "Mmph. All right. I'll send Suiza back with a new plan that'll give you two meters—round section or square?"

  "Uh . . . square would be nice, but round will do. If it were only one it wouldn't matter, but—"

  "Yes, well, if the Bloodhorde were recruits on a first mission, Wraith wouldn't be full of holes. I'll get back to you." Pitak turned on Esmay. "And why are you looking so surprised? Didn't know I could turn the air blue, or didn't think I could calm down? Either way, it looks bad . . . don't just stare at me, Lieutenant, you're making me nervous."

  "Sorry, sir," Esmay said.

  "Two stinking meters they want. Greedy pigs. I suppose they can't be sure what they'll find in there, and they need space—but they certainly can't cut that one. If I lend them a structural tech to do the cutting, that shorts me on the main job—but it might save some lives and shouldn't cost any. All right—here's what you tell them." She rattled off a series of contingent plans, and sent Esmay back to the medical deck. Esmay wanted to ask why she didn't just call them on the com, but this was no time to ask Pitak anything.

  Eight hours before the last jump point, Esmay and all but essen
tial crew went down for a forced rest period, augmented by soporifics in the compartments. Esmay understood the reason for this—exhausted, twitchy people would make unnecessary mistakes—but she hated knowing that her calm repose had been created chemically. What if something happened and those awake forgot—or had no time—to turn on the antidote sprays?

  She was still worrying at that when she woke, feeling rested and alert, to the soft chime of the downshift alarm. It had worked, as usual . . . but she didn't have to like it.

  The Koskiusko had emerged at near-zero relative vee to the system it entered, the safest way to dump something of its mass out of jumpspace. Before Esmay could get back to Pitak's office in H&A, word had come down that Wraith's tow was within twenty thousand kilometers. That made not only a bull's-eye, but a potential disaster. "An error of considerably less than a tenth of a percent in exit vee, and we'd have romped right into her and her damnfool escorts," Pitak growled. "But it does mean we can get to work quickly. Might save a few survivors in the forward compartments."

  Tightbeam comlinks were already up; realtime data poured into Koskiusko's communications shack, to be decoded and routed to the relevant departments. Esmay spent the first hour or so watching the H&A data, and sending it on to the subspecialists. Then Pitak found another job for her. "Troll the stuff they're sending Drives and Maneuver, and Special Materials. You're good at picking up connections—someone upstairs may have misrouted something we need."

  Pitak herself had a model of the SLP Series 30 hull set up in both virtual and wireframe floor versions in the briefing room. Around it clustered the senior H&A engineers, making changes to reflect the peculiarities of Wraith as the data streamed in. Esmay looked up often to peek at the progress. She had seen plenty of computer 3-D displays of ship hulls, but never the scaled-down wireframe that now occupied a five-meter length of the floor. It looked like fun—though the empty space along one forward flank had nothing to do with fun.

  She wondered if it was safe to set up for repair so close to the jump point exit lane. What if someone else came through? That wasn't her problem; she shook her head to clear that worry away and went back to scanning the topics routed to SpecMat. There—that was her concern, a request to schedule the fabrication of four twenty-meter crystal fibers. She checked the origin . . . if it wasn't someone in H&A, Pitak wanted to know. And it wasn't—it was a damage assessment specialist aboard Wraith, who wanted them to replace some communications lines. She called Pitak.

  "Aha! Good for you. No, dears, you don't get to pick your own priorities," Pitak said. She flagged the item, then sent it on to Commander Seveche's stack. "They always want to, though," she said, grinning at Esmay. "They think they're helping us, figuring out what they need, when they don't realize the sequencing problem. We can't start anything in the SpecMat until we know everything we need at the structural level. If we get the sausage busy working on things we don't need yet, so it can't do what we need immediately, then either we lose that job or sit around like ducks on a pond until it's done."

  "What will come first?" Esmay asked, since Pitak didn't seem in a hurry to get back to the floor model.

  "After assessment and evacuation, we have to clear away the old damage—there's always something you can't see until you get the skin off and expose at least ten meters you think is undamaged. I don't care what they say about diagnostic equipment, nothing beats cutting into a carcass to find out what the bones look like. Anything this badly damaged requires rebuilding from the main structure on out, just as if it were new. It's harder, because we do try to save some of the old . . . we save time and material, but it's not as efficient as building it whole. My guess is that the first things we'll want out of SpecMat are much longer crystals, grown in clusters and resin-bonded in the zero-G compartment. These will be stabilizing scaffolds for the real repair later. Then we'll want the big framing members . . . and it can take weeks to do those. No one's yet figured out how to grow the long ones and the ring ones in the same batch. Meanwhile, the die-and-mold sections can be working on little stuff like hatch frames and hatches. But the communications linear crystals come much later."

  "I . . . see." Esmay felt she understood much better why Pitak had her doing this apparently unimportant job. She knew a lot more about hulls than she had, but this matter of sequencing repairs had never occurred to her. It made sense, now she thought of it.

  "How'd you like a little adventure?" Pitak asked.

  "Adventure?"

  "I need someone to do a visual survey of the hull breach, and everyone I've got is busy. You'd need EVA gear—go over with the first teams, carry a vidcam and transmitter, and record everything for me."

  "Yes, sir." Esmay wasn't sure if she was more excited or scared.

  "It'll be about six hours, they think, when they're in position.

  Esmay had never done EVA since the Academy—and that was from a training shuttle hanging just a kilometer from a large station, in sight of a habitable planet. Out here, even the local star was far away, hardly a disk at all and giving minimal light. Koskiusko's brilliant lights flooded the near flank of the Wraith, casting sharp black shadows. Esmay tried not to think of the nothing around her, and the way her stomach wanted to crawl out her ears, and looked instead at the damaged ship. She hadn't seen the outside of a ship with her own eyes, rather than vidscan . . . and it was instructive.

  Like most Familias warships, Wraith had a long rounded profile that could have been confused with airstreaming—but was instead the result of a compromise of engineering constraints. Shield technology dictated the smooth curves: the most efficient hull shape for maximum shield efficiency was spherical. But spherical ships had not proven themselves in battle; it had been impossible to mount drives—either insystem or FTL—to provide the kind of reliable maneuverability needed. The only spherical ships now in service were large commercial freight haulers, where the gain in interior volume and ease of shielding from normal space debris was worth the decreased maneuverability.

  So a patrol craft like Wraith had a more ovoid shape, giving it a distinct longitudinal axis. Forward, its bow should have been a blunt rounded end, only slightly pointier than the stern. What Esmay saw instead was a crumpled mess, the shiny glint of fused and melted skin where it should have been (as the undamaged hull was) matte black. Aft, the smooth curves of the drive pods appeared to have suffered no damage, though she'd heard that Drives and Maneuver were worried about the effect of jumping with an unbalanced hull.

  She dared a look over her shoulder, even though that twist made her swivel around the safety line like a child's toy. Koskiusko's vast bulk blocked out the stars well beyond the banks of searchlights that held the patrol craft in their gaze. She wasn't even sure where the working lights on its exterior became stars against the dark.

  Someone punched her shoulder. Right. Get on with the job. She pulled herself along, taking no more sight-seeing looks. Wraith's damaged hull inched closer. Now she could see the pale tracks of fragments—of the weapons or the hull itself she didn't know—against the dark normal hull coating beyond. The entry gaped, jagged and unwelcoming. Something whispered against her suit helmet, and she jerked to a halt. A firm tap on her shoulder sent her on. In a moment her brain caught up and she realized it must be minute ejecta from the breached hull: probably ice crystals from the continuing air leak the crew had not been able to seal completely.

  She hit the red section of line: only ten meters from the attachment. Ahead of her, someone had already clipped on the first of the branch lines that would frame the working web. But this was Esmay's station for now. She locked the slide on her safety line, clipped on the secondary stabilizing line that would confine her rotation to one plane, and waved the others past.

  With the vidscan recorder aimed at the hole and the work going on, she could avoid thinking about where she was. Major Pitak wanted details—more details—even more details. "Don't rush," she'd said. "Take your time—stay at the ten-meter line until you're sure you
've shown me everything you can from there. You won't be in the way of the scaffolding crews, but you will be able to see a lot. Every detail can help us. Everything."

  So Esmay hung in her harness and worked the recorder's eye along the edge of the hull breach. Everything? Fine, she would spend a few minutes on those pale tracks, on the way the hull peeled back there to expose a twisted truss, on the odd bulge forward of the breach. By the time she'd filled half a cube from that location, the scaffolding crew had placed the major grid lines that would define the location of specific damage sites. Esmay signaled her intention to the chief, received permission, and clipped on to one of the cross-lines.

  Really, she thought, it wasn't that bad out here. Once the stomach adapted to zero gravity, it was kind of fun, scooting along the line with only an occasional tug . . . a red tie bumped her hand, and she grabbed. Her arm yanked at her shoulder, and she spun dizzily, cursing herself for forgetting that she was supposed to move slowly. When she got herself straightened out again, someone's helmet visor was turned her way; she could imagine what they thought. Another dumbass lieutenant learns about inertia. She would have apologized, except that they weren't supposed to use the suit radios unless it was a real emergency.

  She was now on the opposite side of the hull breach, nearer the bow. From this angle, she could see into the hole better—or the searchlights had found a better angle. She forced herself to look in . . . but she didn't recognize any bodies. The mess inside all looked mechanical, like a child's toy that had been stepped on. Twisted, broken, shattered . . . all the words she knew for destruction. Slowly, recording, she made sense of it. The forward bulge came from a separation of the forward framing members—they had sprung, like an old-fashioned barrel-ring, under concussive force, and the shattered truss had gone with them.

  Pitak would want to know how far forward the bulge extended. It could be mapped from Koskiusko, if no one was using the near-scan . . . but someone would be. Esmay looked at the bulge and wished she could ask the major. If she could get on the other side of it with the recorder . . . but there was no scaffolding line there. She thought of asking the scaffolding chief to string one for her, and thought again. They were far too busy to do favors for one curious lieutenant. No, she would either string one herself, or not. Not didn't sound like a good option. She had four additional lines slung to her own suit, just as all the scaffolding crew had . . . so it was only a matter of setting the hooks.