by David Weber
“I doubt he’d have accepted, considering some of the feelings he left behind when he took early retirement,” Metzger said. “My point is that he’s likely to see a lot more on this first pass through Péridot than I will.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Eigen said. “Fine—I’ll take him tomorrow. We’ll see about talking Henderson into a more leisurely tour later, after the Havenites have finished their training and gone back to Saintonge.”
“He may try to bargain a tour against Manticoran help with their pirate hunt,” Metzger warned.
Eigen snorted. “I’m sure he will. And I’d bet my pension that Breakwater’s going to be absolutely thrilled about this one.”
“Yes,” Metzger said. “Still, that might be one way to get the BCs out of mothballs.”
“That it would,” Eigen agreed. “Silver linings, XO. Silver linings.”
“Yes, Sir,” Metzger murmured. Assuming, of course, that the battlecruisers could be made ready for flight quickly enough. And that crews could be found for them. And that whoever might be sponsoring the pirates didn’t turn out to be more than a match for the inexperienced fighting force the RMN had become.
Silver linings, maybe. But it was a good idea to remember that the saying also assumed there would be a cloud.
And that sometimes that cloud turned out to be hellishly big.
* * *
“Sorry,” Donnelly apologized as she finally floated back over to where Travis had spent the last hour in a hopefully unobtrusive vigil. “The reassembly was trickier than any of us expected. A bit of metal grit had gotten into one of the components and was shorting out a pair of pins.”
“Not a problem, Ma’am,” Travis assured her. It wasn’t like he had any claim on her time, after all.
Besides, he was finding it surprisingly restful to float all alone in a corner of Laser One, with no studies silently clamoring for his attention and none of the other off-duty petty officers wanting him to do something for or with them. It was almost like actual solitude.
Except that, unlike solitude, here he had the bonus of being able to watch Lieutenant Donnelly at work.
She wasn’t beautiful, not in the way holo-stars were beautiful. But paradoxically, her lack of physical perfection actually made her more attractive. It freed Travis’s mind to focus on her graceful movements in the zero-gee, and the melodic ring that somehow permeated her voice even when she was giving orders or discussing the care and feeding of laser tracking feedback moderators. Her intelligence and attention to detail came through, too, as she improvised solutions and short-cuts that her techs had missed.
And wrapped around all of it was her dedication to her job, her ship, and the entire Royal Manticoran Navy. Every free moment she could spare from her work with the module was spent at her terminal as she tried to track down the answer to Travis’s question. To see if Guardian might indeed be facing a disguised warship.
“Anyway, I hope you weren’t too bored,” Donnelly continued, half-turning to settle into the corner beside him and holding up her tablet where they could both see it. “Okay; good news and bad news. The bad news is that I’m guessing there are two, possibly three, very nasty missiles that use the 9-R control module. The good news is they’re so advanced that the League has them on a Class-AA restriction. That means that they’re not only forbidden to be sold or shipped anywhere outside the League’s own battlecruisers, but there are actually little men with tablets who periodically go around the League counting the things and making sure none of them has walked off.” She considered. “It could be little women. The files don’t specify.”
“And none of them is missing?”
“Not as of my last data, which is admittedly over a year old,” Donnelly said. “But if they’re that paranoid about the things, I think it’s likely they’re all still accounted for.” She twitched a mischievous smile. “If you’re still concerned, you can always give Saintonge a call. I’d guess Commodore Flanders is back from Péridot by now, and it’s possible the RHN has some actual specs to work from.”
“I think I’ll save that conversation for another day, Ma’am,” Travis said, daring to joke a little. “If I may ask, though: if you don’t have the missile specs, how do you know they have 9-Rs?”
“Pure, unadulterated guesswork,” Donnelly said. “The Navy bought a few of the previous model for the Casey refit, and extrapolating upward from those gets us to 9-Rs. Again, it’s just a guess, but it does follow the League’s usual upgrade pattern.”
“I see,” Travis said, trying to think. “So you’re saying it’s as likely that they got an impeller upgrade as that they’ve got missiles hidden away somewhere?”
“More likely, actually,” Donnelly said. “At least missiles that use 9-Rs.”
Travis sighed. “Understood, Ma’am. Thank you for your time.”
“No problem,” she assured him. “Nice to see that brain of yours is still chugging away.”
Travis looked sideways at her. Was she mocking him?
But if she was, she hadn’t stayed to see the reaction. Her attention was on her tablet, switching it back to an exploded view of the still partially unassembled module. “Anyway, back to work,” she added. “See you later.” Kicking off the wall behind them, she headed back to the table.
No, Travis told himself firmly as he swam his way down the passageway toward the spin section and his quarters. Back at Casey-Rosewood, he’d had a small stirring of feelings for his classmate Elaine Dunharrow. He’d subsequently been transferred to gravitics, and had never again been closer to her than twenty meters. Aboard Vanguard he’d risked his life for Bonnie Esterle. She’d left without even a hug, and he’d never seen her again. Shortly after that, Donnelly herself had grabbed Travis and thrown him together with communications tech Suzanne Marx for that junction box problem. Marx had sounded mildly interested in getting together again someday, but that had never happened. Whatever it was that made up the package that was Travis Uriah Long, women clearly didn’t find it attractive.
And on top of that, Lisa Donnelly was an officer, and Travis was enlisted, and RMN rules forbade fraternization between ranks. Strictly speaking, he couldn’t even be Donnelly’s friend, let alone anything more. No, it would be best if he just forgot the whole thing and focused his attention on his job.
His job, and why something still felt wrong about Wanderer and her purported need for exotic control modules.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“This is the Number Two-Four escape pod cluster,” Flanders said, pointing to the set of glow-yellow rings painted around the pods’ access hatches. “Vac suit storage there and there; emergency bubble suit lockers there. You’ll notice that they flank both sides of the forward lift pylon. That way, if spacers are coming up from Alpha Spin, either via the lift or the ladder that runs alongside the lift shaft, they’ll be able to spread out to the suits and pods without crowding.”
“Question?”
Gill Massingill gave himself a little twist around his handhold and turned toward the speaker. It was the Ueshiban representative, Guzarwan, floating beside a red-rimmed opening that marked one of Péridot’s emergency pressure hatches. “Yes?” Flanders asked.
“You say if they’re coming up from Alpha Spin,” Guzarwan said. “Where else would they go if they didn’t go here?”
“There are other escape pods and suit lockers on Spin Five,” Flanders said. “That’s the outer part of the spin section.”
“Alpha and Beta both,” Henderson added.
“Right,” Flanders said, nodding. “Those would be the primary escape route for spacers who were in there at the time.”
“Though there probably wouldn’t be many,” Henderson said. “The only time the ship would be in that kind of danger would be in battle, and the spin sections would be locked into their vertical positions and the crew already distributed to battle stations.”
“Ah,” Guzarwan said. “Another question, if I may.” He gestured over his should
er at the pressure hatch opening and the hatch itself just visible inside its bulkhead pocket. “This is a pressure hatch, correct, designed to close in case of depressurization? Yet all the suits and escape pods are on that side.” He pointed to the pod hatches beside Flanders and Henderson. “What happens to crew members who are forward of here if the section loses pressure and the hatch closes?”
“They’ll have access to one of the pods farther forward,” Henderson said. “This cluster is mostly backup for anyone in Alpha Spin or moving between forward missiles and the hyper generator section.”
“There were more pod clusters forward?” Guzarwan asked, frowning. “I don’t remember seeing anything like this along the way.”
Gill looked over at Captain Eigen, resisting the impulse to roll his eyes. Guzarwan was obviously a complete prat when it came to ships—the earlier escape pod and suit locker markings had been about as blatant as it was possible for such things to be. Yet somehow the Ueshiban had managed to miss them. If he was really this ignorant, he should have brought Wanderer’s captain with him on the tour to answer some of these basic questions instead of wasting everyone else’s time.
Because the man he had brought, his hatchet-faced, pot-bellied assistant Kichloo, certainly wasn’t offering any running footnotes. Kichloo had hardly said a word the whole trip, in fact, but the way he looked wide-eyed at everything around him tagged him as the same level of amateur as Guzarwan. Right now, in fact, he was floating behind his boss, his hands and face pressed against the pressure hatch opening as if he was hoping the royal coronet would be in there.
Though come to think of it, comparing Kichloo’s face to a hatchet was being rather unfair to hatchets. Maybe an ancient stone hatchet. Kichloo’s expression was about as warm and mobile as a granite cliff face, but without the cliff face’s natural charm.
It was just as well he was an advisor and not a regular politician, Gill decided. Winning any kind of popular election with a face and cold-fish demeanor like that would be a pretty steep uphill run.
“The pods and suit lockers were more spread out elsewhere on the ship,” Flanders said, with a tactful calmness Gill had trouble achieving even on his best days. “They’re clustered here because, as I said, this area serves the spin sections.”
“Oh,” Guzarwan said, sounding a bit deflated, as if he’d hoped he’d caught the commodore in a mistake. “I see,” he added, looking around the passageway as if seeing it for the first time.
At the other end of the group, hovering together behind Flanders and Péridot’s new Cascan captain, Henderson, Gill spotted the Yaltan and Ramonian representatives exchanging looks of strained patience. Even they knew more about the ship than Guzarwan did. In a perfect world, he decided, Guzarwan would simply die of embarrassment right here and now.
“Commodore Flanders, how has this type of split spin section worked for you?” Captain Eigen spoke up, probably trying to move the conversation away from Guzarwan and his ignorance.
“Not as well as we’d hoped,” Flanders said, clearly relieved at the change of subject. “Being able to lock the spin section vertically inside the compensator field translates into a few extra gees’ acceleration in n-space. But of course, once you lock it down you in essence no longer have a spin section, which means zero-gee throughout the ship. Not especially desirable for anything long term. And of course, the shape means you have less useable space to begin with than you have in a standard toroidal section.”
“That’s more or less what I thought,” Eigen said. “I’d heard that some of the League navies were playing with this design for awhile, but I never heard what the outcome was.”
“Oh, it went on for a while,” Flanders told him. “Various shipyards built everything from destroyers all the way up to battlecruisers.” He waved a hand around them. “Obviously, that’s where we got our inspiration for the Améthyste-class cruisers.”
Gill smiled cynically. Inspiration, hell—from what he’d seen so far, a lot of Péridot was a straight, unashamed rip-copy of Solarian designs, right down to the layout of the ductwork and the service accessways.
Still, given that Haven was selling the ship at a substantial loss, it sounded like they’d already written off the dumbbell spin section as a dead-end design. Under the circumstances, he doubted anyone in the League would squawk about copyright infringement. At least the downsides of the arrangement were now abundantly clear.
The grav-plated habitation and command modules on the Havenites’ battlecruiser, on the other hand, was an entirely different kettle of fish. That approach had some interesting possibilities, and it would be highly interesting to see what other innovations they’d come up with since moving on from straight League designs. Hopefully, Captain Eigen could cadge an invitation over there later so he could have a closer look.
But whether he could or not, Guardian’s secret mission was already a success. From what Gill had seen of Péridot and the other Havenite ships, he was sure Manticore could compete with the Republic in the ship-building business.
Assuming, of course, that King Michael could get the Exchequer to loosen up the necessary funds for fusion plant and impeller manufacturing facilities.
Gill hoped so. He really hoped so. It would be so gratifying to work with brand-new ships again, instead of the RMN’s collection of mechanical fossils.
“Make a hole!” someone shouted from one of the hatchways leading inward. A pair of men in Cascan uniforms and a woman wearing Havenite ensign’s insignia floated through the hatchway. The woman caught sight of Flanders and winced. “Excuse me, Sir,” she amended in a more subdued voice.
Flanders waved silent acceptance of the apology and pressed close to the side of the passageway as she led the two Cascans aft. “We did warn you all it was going to be a zoo here today,” Henderson said dryly.
“That’s all right,” Eigen said for all of them. “Please; lead on.”
Henderson gestured to Flanders. “Commodore?”
Flanders nodded and pushed off his handhold, sending himself floating aft after the three spacers. “Down past the lifts to the spin section modules we have another escape-pod cluster,” he said over his shoulder. “Aft of that is the hyper generator and its associated workshops.”
The group followed. Settling in behind Eigen, Gill continued studying the design and equipment as they went, making mental notes of every detail.
And idly dreaming of the shipyard he would someday be in charge of.
* * *
“The shuttle from Saintonge has docked with Péridot,” Wanderer’s chief engineer called through the open bridge door. “Jalla? You get that?”
“I got it,” Jalla called back, his own voice uncomfortably loud as it echoed from the clamp enclosure he had his face pressed against. Somewhere back there something was jammed.
There it was. “Six centimeters further back,” he ordered the man at the other end of the long crate. The other nodded and inserted the probe gingerly into the nearest gap.
And with a click loud enough for Jalla to hear all the way at his end the clamp popped free. “That’s it,” Jalla said, pushing back from the enclosure with relief. Wanderer had just the one missile, and Guzarwan was pretty sure they would have to use it sometime tonight. It would be highly embarrassing, not to say probably fatal, if they couldn’t even get it out of its packing crate. “What are you all floating around for?” he growled at the other crewmen hovering around the cargo bay. “Get this thing out of its crate and into the launcher.” He craned his neck. “The launcher is ready, right?” he called.
“Mostly, Chief,” a distant voice called back.
“What the hell is mostly?” Jalla snarled. “Get it ready, or I’ll mostly kick your butt into next month. Move it.”
He turned back to the crewmen scrambling over the crate. One single missile, paid for in blood, jealously hoarded for nearly six years against any temptation to spend it.
Tonight that self-denial would end. Tonight, they would get to s
pend that missile.
And in return, they would be leaving Secour with warships. Warships loaded with all the missiles anyone could ever want.
There was a loud thud as one of the men’s wrenches slipped off a bolt and bounced off the deck. “Watch it,” Jalla snapped. “You break it, I break you. Now, move it.”
* * *
The disguised false-front compartments in the aft section of Wanderer’s shuttle were cramped and hot, with only a little ventilation and no light at all.
Vachali hardly noticed. He was a professional, and he did whatever was necessary. Besides, he’d been in far worse settings throughout his violent life, facing far nastier enemies, and with far less reward beckoning from the other end of the tunnel.
The wait was almost over. He was convinced of that. True, it had been over five hours since he and the others had closed themselves in their hidey-holes, just before the shuttle docked with Péridot and their great leader and pompous chatterjay Guzarwan headed in for the grand tour. And true, Vachali had been expecting to get the signal for the past hour. But it was surely almost time.
And then, there it was: a small vibration on his wrist, silent and invisible.
Time to go.
The first step was to make sure that no one was loitering nearby in the shuttle’s cargo area. Vachali accomplished that with a slender fiber-op cable through an innocent-looking scratch in the door’s corner. It was barely possible that one of Péridot’s crewmen had wandered in, given that Guzarwan had deliberately left the shuttle’s hatch open to the docking port to show that he had nothing to hide. Unlikely, but still possible. And part of Vachali’s job was to ward off even unlikely events that could get him and his team killed.
The area was clear. With Péridot’s transfer of ownership to the Cascans still going on, everyone aboard clearly had better things to do than poke around someone else’s shuttle.
They would be regretting that lack of curiosity before the night was out.
The hidden door was designed to open silently, and it did its job perfectly. Vachali floated out, making sure his concealed handgun was close at hand, and made his way to within view of the open hatch. From the passageways and compartments on the other side came the muted murmur of voices and machinery, but no one appeared to be nearby. Getting a grip on one of the handholds, he keyed his viber with the activation signal.