The Serrano Succession

by Elizabeth Moon

  She lay trying to rest easy and conserve her oxygen, as Chief Jones had recommended, and almost dozed off in the peaceful dark silence, when a faint vibration in the cushiony hull covering roused her. Was it over? Had they already extracted a shuttle, and was someone coming to retrieve her?

  She opened her eyes to look without moving, and saw dark shapes against the starfield moving toward her. Odd. They were coming from the wrong direction. She lay very still, reviewing in her mind the exact sequence of movements that had brought her here . . . yes, that way lay the shortest route to the shuttle bay, and this way led around the circumference of the ship . . . but no one was supposed to be coming that way. All the other personnel hatches had been glued shut. Hadn't they?

  The cutouts enlarged, changed shape, and finally her eyes adjusted to the perspective and she realized they were almost on her. They held weapons . . . real weapons . . . they had to be the mutineers, and they'd come up behind her friends . . .

  Without even thinking, she pumped the glue gun and took careful aim at one target, then another. First the leader's rearmost foot, a half meter from her head, adhering to the hull so that he lurched forward, off balance . . . she got another's arm as it brushed past his side.

  Inside the ship, Miranda watched Anseli with a satisfaction limited by the knowledge that they'd both probably be dead in a few hours. She had been able to help the girl, to bring her out of that listless, terrified submission that was worse than death . . . it was satisfying to be able to do for Anseli what she had not been able to do for Brun. Compensation, and she knew it, was fully conscious of it. That didn't make it less real, or less valuable to Anseli.

  But the girl was nothing like Brun. Now that she was too far away to explain to Brun, or apologize, she saw that the daily irritations of living with a young genius had blinded her to what Brun really was. Anseli, so different, brought it home.

  Brun had that reservoir of vigor, of sheer vitality . . . Anseli needed to feed on the vitality of others. Brun's mind sparkled, raced, with a thousand bright ideas—most of them impractical, many of them foolish or dangerous, but the dazzling coruscation was, in itself, entertaining and struck sparks off other people.

  Anseli was not exactly stupid, but she was so rule-bound that Miranda even had to argue that it was all right for them to escape—and she had not relaxed and been truly willing until one of the petty officers reminded her of the regulation which made attempts to escape from an enemy a duty, and had led her, step by laborious step, through the reasons why the mutineers were lawful enemies.

  Miranda rued all the times she had wished Brun were more down-to-earth, more persistent. When she got home—if she ever got home—she promised herself that she would take her wild, insouciant daughter into her arms and admit she'd been wrong, from the beginning. How had she ever been so stupid as to think that Brun could be put in such a harness as would suit Anseli perfectly? Why hadn't she realized where Brun's genius lay—and that it was a genius, not an aberration?

  And why had she let herself ignore, for all those decades, the same genius in herself—why had she pretended to be the sedate, serene Miranda, the beautiful wife and consort, and not admitted even to herself the piratical nature, the crackling energy, which she'd inherited in full measure from her own family.

  At least Brun was free to run her own life now. At least that much had been saved. She glanced at Anseli's taut, anxious little face and sighed inwardly. And she would save this one, too, if she could, to live out her own much more limited destiny. Poor thing. Free and cosseted, she would never be a tenth what Brun was . . . she taunted herself inside for that maternal burst of pride, then pushed both pride and taunt away. Her own children were fine people—she let herself linger just a moment on the memory of each face, as a child and as an adult, then locked those memories deep. In the next hour or so would come her last chance, it might be, of mothering anyone, and Anseli deserved the same fierce loyalty.

  Their distraction group was headed for the engines, as if they intended to sabotage them. Miranda had no idea how that might be accomplished even if they got that far; she didn't even know what FTL and insystem engines looked like. She followed the others blindly, with a rear guard behind her, noticing that the crew—even Anseli—seemed to know how to do things that set alarms ringing and lights flashing almost every place they went. They had left a trail of broken glass, smashed cabinetry, locks pried open, lighting units darkened. They had been attacked twice, but by gluing shut the doors behind them, their pursuers had been slowed and finally foiled.

  Now they were in a maintenance passage of some sort. The crewmen had done nothing for the last ten minutes but now paused where another passage joined theirs. One of them had opened a hatch in the overhead, and pulled down a folding ladder.

  "Where is this?" Miranda asked.

  "Aft communications nexus," Petty Light Kouras said. "Another one of those things they could rebuild to communicate with, if we left it untouched. Pivot, pass up that tool kit." Anseli passed it forward. Kouras led the way up the ladder into a dark crowded space full of more incomprehensible shapes. When they were all jammed in, she turned on her headlight. "Miranda—glue us up." Miranda and Anseli pulled up the ladder, then the hatch, and sealed its edges with a glue gun.

  Under Kouras's direction, they clipped lengths out of all wires and cables, making them too short to rejoin, and then turned the ends back and glued them into knobbly masses. "Some of this is probably also navigation stuff," Kouras said. "Doesn't matter . . . whack it all out." A few minutes later, she led them between long cylindrical shapes to another folded ladder. But when she tried to open the hatch, it wouldn't move.

  "Locked?" asked one of the men.

  "No." Kouras pointed her headlamp at the seam between hatch and deck, where the telltale bubbles of yellow sealant were still glistening. "They're using our tricks now."

  "We have solvent," one of the others reminded her.

  "Sure. And we can walk right into a trap that way. Let me think a minute."

  Miranda sat back against one of the long shapes—rejuv or no rejuv, her back was aching from the crawling and stooping and she would like to have had a long nap. Suddenly Kouras moved again.

  "They've got the shuttle bay open . . . let's go!" Kouras urged them faster. Miranda wondered if the mutineers knew that the groups aboard would try to get to the shuttle bay—surely they would—and where they might try to intercept them. She still didn't understand the ship's layout well enough to predict that, but she trusted that Kouras took that into account. Certainly their route seemed circuitous enough. In this hatch and out of that, up into the space between decks, then back down . . . she was completely confused, and would not have been overly surprised to find herself dropping cleverly back into their cell in the brig.

  But at last she saw the warning signs on the bulkheads: shuttle bay airlocks: extreme caution topped by a row of red status lights. To either side were personnel airlocks, one with a green light and one with red.

  Then she saw the bodies lying sprawled like piles of old clothes being sorted for the wash . . . except for the blood, bright as Pedar's blood, on the polished deck. And the men and women in uniform, with weapons, across the compartment from them . . . but surely that was Hartung . . . ?

  "Hurry up, we've got to get suited up!" It was Hartung; Miranda's heartbeat steadied again.

  "Perimeter?"

  "Holding for now. Come on!"

  The EVA suit lockers inside the shuttle bay held most of the suits; normally anyone using the shuttles would be aboard before the hatch opened to vacuum. Three of Hartung's people had suited up in the only suits left inside, and gone through the locks to bring back enough for the others. Each could fit only four of the bulky suits at a time through the personnel locks, and fewer than half of Hartung's group were now out in the shuttle bay helping the outside group break into and activate a shuttle. The red light on one lock turned green, as the one on the other turned red, the hatch open
ed, and four more pressure suits tumbled out, to be grabbed and donned as fast as possible by the crew nearest the lock. Then they crammed into the lock and cycled through. The second lock disgorged another four suits.

  "Go on," said Kouras. "I'm senior."

  "Good luck," said Hartung, struggling into a suit along with the last of her group.

  "Vallance, get that suit on," Hartung directed one of her people. She waved as the others pushed into the lock, and sent four of her group to the other lock, which would cycle next.

  "Comm crew coming!" yelled someone from the left-hand corridor. "Open up for 'em."

  But only two remained, dragging one wounded who turned out to be dead. Kouras's first four suited and exited, then the first lock opened again. She put the comm crew into suits, then—as she turned to point to the next to go—they heard screams from the corridors, hardly understandable but clear enough even without words. "Too many—perimeter's gone! Go!!"

  Kouras's heartfelt expletive was calmer than that. Then she nodded to the two men who had already volunteered to be rear guard. "Give us every second you can, and thanks."

  That left her, and Anseli, and Miranda. "You and you," Kouras said. "I'm staying."

  Miranda's head cleared. "No," she said. "I'm staying."

  Kouras's face twisted. "I don't have time to argue with any idiot civ—get in that suit."

  "I got you out—I earned this," Miranda said. "You know I can kill—" She wrenched Kouras's weapon away and shoved her toward the suits. "Take care of that kid."

  "Miranda . . ." That was Anseli. Miranda gave her a look she hoped mirrored the petty officer's.

  "Do what you're told, Pivot. Don't waste this."

  She had the weapon, she had the target . . . she had the chance to be someone she had never allowed herself to be. Flattened to the bulkhead, waiting for the enemy, she felt supremely happy, and very much in touch with her lost children and the love of her life.

  Cecelia's luck ran out before she had completely immobilized the patrol. A flechette holed her suit; the automatic setfoam shut off the vacuum leak, but before she could do anything, another mutineer's riot weapon wrapped her in tangletape. He held the trigger down until she was entirely covered and motionless, then she judged by the nauseating rotation that they were using her for cover as they advanced on the loyalists by the shuttle bay.

  The rotation went on and on; she willed herself not to vomit in the suit and tried to pretend she was jumping a series of no-strides with her eyes closed for some reason. It seemed an eternity before the rotation stopped.

  Cecelia woke up to find herself being yelled at by someone from a great distance.

  "CAN YOU HEAR ME?"

  "I can hear you," she said, not in the mood to shout back.

  "She's awake," came more quietly. "Get the rest of that stuff off her suit . . ."

  "What stuff?" asked Cecelia, then she began to remember. The fall out of FTL, then the capture, then the mutineers' ship, then the attempt to escape. "I hope you're the good guys," she said. Someone chuckled, and it was a nice chuckle.

  "Well, we think so." Definitely Chief Jones. "We're in a troop shuttle, off the ship . . . but we have a little problem."

  "Oh . . . ? Is Miranda all right?"

  A silence that lasted a beat too long, then Jones' voice again. "No. She refused . . . they were one suit short."

  "She got Anseli out, didn't she?" asked Cecelia. She could just see a blur of light swiping back and forth across her suit's faceplate, as if someone were cleaning it of the opaque glue.

  "Yes. And told Kouras to get out, and Kouras did."

  "Good decision," Cecelia said. "Can you get me out of this suit?"

  "Once we get the tangle stuff off it."

  Cecelia emerged from the confines of the suit feeling as sweaty and dirty as if she'd just ridden a major event. The troop shuttle's interior looked stark and unpromising—a long open space with racks along the sides for weapons and suits and other equipment she didn't recognize.

  Several of the survivors of the breakout were wounded, propped on pieces of suit, being tended by their fellows. Chief Jones beckoned Cecelia forward.

  "The problem we have, sera, is that not one of us is qualified to pilot this thing. Or any other ship. We were hoping you could, but you were so tangled up when we found you, that we didn't dare wait. We had one sergeant who had a license for a surface-to-orbit before he joined Fleet, but he hadn't passed the Fleet aptitude test and hadn't handled anything like this . . . He got us out the door, but he's unfamiliar with the navigation system and hasn't a clue what to do next. You're qualified, right?"

  "For a ship like my own, yes. For this one . . ." Cecelia looked around, and bit back the suggestion that they should have asked her what she could pilot before picking a ship. "I suppose you took the one nearest the hatch," she said finally.

  "Yes. There's an automatic launch, that sort of throws them out . . . this was sitting on it. So what I was hoping—"

  "Was that I had somehow acquired proficiency in flying Fleet combat troop shuttles. Well . . . I suppose I can try."

  "Are you sure you weren't ever military?" The unspoken sir hovered just off the end of that question. Cecelia grinned.

  "Not me. But it wouldn't do me or any of us any good for me to sit here howling, now would it?"

  Chapter Thirteen

  R.S.S. Indefatigable

  Despite Heris's sense of urgency, she took her flotilla through the intermediate jump points with all due caution, checking ansible activity along the way. Nothing more from the ansible at CX-42-h and the only word from HQ was "Proceed with caution." Heris would like to have arrived at CX-42-h in an off-axis insertion, but the erratic planetoid made that too risky. So she ordered a textbook insertion and hoped the mutineers—if they were there—hadn't had time to mine the entrance.

  She missed Koutsoudas most at times like these, when insertion blur robbed her of eyes at the moment they were most vulnerable. But the scan finally cleared—it had been only a couple of minutes after all—and the navigation board came up with a perfect match for the chart, except that the erratic planetoid was a degree off from where it should have been.

  "Ship?" she asked.

  "One . . . masses a cruiser . . . no ID yet."

  "Mutineers could have disabled the ID." No Fleet cruiser should be here; the last ansible download had given her all cruiser locations in this sector, and this wasn't one of them. "What's its course?"

  "It's . . . zero acceleration relative to system, Captain." A worried note in that voice. "Drives appear to be shut down. They may be trying to lie doggo."

  Thank the gods for small mercies. "Weapons?"

  "Nothing lit, Captain."

  "Is that the only vessel insystem?"

  "The only thing that size—the search program's on . . ."

  Indefatigable continued its own deceleration, in company with its companions.

  "Captain, I have a tentative ID—"

  "Go ahead."

  "It's based on just the mass data—"

  "Go ahead!"

  "Well . . . it's the same class as the Bonar Tighe. We have to get a lot closer before I can be sure."

  "Our beacon's transmitting, isn't it?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "So unless they're all dead over there, they know we're here, and who we are."

  "If their scan's working . . ."

  "Why wouldn't it be? You want to bet our lives on the notion that they have even their passive scan shut down for some reason? I don't. When will we be in tightbeam distance, Chief?"

  "Forty minutes, Captain. There'll still be lightlag, of course."

  "That's all right." Heris considered. If she blew them away without hailing them—which she was inclined to do—she would have to pick up debris proving they were a mutineer ship, or she'd be in worse trouble. Officially at least; being caught by surprise would be the worst. If she hailed them by tightbeam . . .

  "Captain! Ansible flash!"


  Here? Now what had happened at HQ?

  "What is it?"

  "Local origin—this ansible—and it's . . . omigod!"

  "The message, please."

  "Sorry—yes, Captain. It's to be transmitted to any Fleet unit querying any ansible . . . it's on a two-hour repeat. Danger Blue, Danger Blue, Danger Blue, mutineer fleet this location on 23/4—that's today, Captain—ship names include Bonar Tighe, Wingate, Metai, Saracen, Endeavor . . . attempting to disable mutineer flagship, execute code zero, repeat execute code zero."