The Serrano Connection

by Elizabeth Moon

  But now . . . she thought it over, while appearing to cower away from the leader's rough bloodstained hands. "You will be good, won't you?" he asked. "You wouldn't think of giving any of us trouble . . ." She gave a little moan, and trembled, and told herself that it would be over soon, one way or the other.

  She was sitting the wrong board, though the Bloodhorde hadn't figured that out. They'd come in screaming and shooting, and by the time they'd done, what with bodies all over the floor and the noise everyone was making . . . they hadn't noticed her changing nametags with a dead woman. At that point, she wasn't sure why she'd done it. Some instinct had urged her, and when they left the communications board empty, and she moved to environmental, where Corporal Ascoff usually sat, she began to think what she could do. None of her shipmates had commented, though she'd gotten some looks . . . but after what happened to Sergeant Blanders they didn't look anywhere but at their own work.

  The environmental systems board cross-linked to ship security, another board the Bloodhorde had left empty after they changed the override codes. Possibly they didn't know that; she wouldn't have known it, sitting comm as she usually did, but she and Alis Ascoff had been working the same bridge shift long enough to share details of their work. Either Security or Environmental might have reason to close off the wings from the core, or take control of life support.

  If they were watching too closely—as they had with ten of them always alert, always stalking around behind people—she could do nothing. But if they left only three . . . at some point, she would not be observed for a moment, and . . . what would be the best thing to do? If she opened all the wings, would the sleepygas simply spread to the core and put everyone there to sleep?

  The captain had gone to T-1 to confer with the admirals. She knew that; she'd seen the captain on the bridge shortly before the Bloodhorde commandos burst in and took over. So if the captain was still alive, he was in T-1, and maybe the admirals too. If he wasn't gassed. If he wasn't dead.

  If you can't make up your mind, her mother always said, do something anyway. Luckily, the core environmental system needed frequent adjustment when it was cut off from the wings. She had explained this, earnestly, when she first needed to touch the board. The Bloodhorde had leaned over, far too close for comfort, and stared at the display a long time before giving her permission to touch it. After the tenth or eleventh change, they'd paid less attention, only asking now and then when the display showed a yellow band instead of green just how long she proposed to let it go?

  The three left behind would be nervous. She listened as the others left, and did not turn around. Someone else did; she heard the blow and the angry command to get back to work. They would be watching . . . but would they understand? A yellow flicker on her board, just as before. The core, unlike the wings, did not have a large hydroponic/garden area for oxygen production and carbon dioxide uptake; oxygen was supplied from electrolysis of the water in the Deck 1 pool, and she had to keep the hydrogen collectors from overfilling. As well, she needed to put new CO2 scrubbers online. She started to enter these commands, and as she expected one of the three came up behind her.

  "What now?"

  "The hydrogen, sir." She pointed. "It needs a new collector unit. And I need to put another ten CO2 packs online."

  "No tricks, understand?" The muzzle of his weapon stroked her cheek. She shuddered, nodded, and her fingers trembled as she entered the values. She heard him walk away.

  The question now was, how long did she have, and how could she do the most the quickest? She would open the T-1 access, she'd decided, but not T-5, because she knew T-5 had been gassed. If she had time, she'd reset the override codes for all the wings, so that the captain or any of ship's security who were still alive and awake could use them.

  "Sir!"

  Admiral Livadhi looked up; one of the security guards stood panting in the doorway. "Yes?"

  "Sir, the hatches are open . . . we're not cut off from the core . . ."

  "All the hatches? All decks?"

  "Yes, sir—at least, that's what the system says."

  Livadhi looked over at Dossignal, who was hunched awkwardly in his chair. "I don't think this is their doing."

  "No—I'd say go for the bridge, with everything we have." They had planned an assault on the bridge, but had not been able to breach the barrier.

  "You can handle this end?"

  "I can hardly run yours," Dossignal said, grimacing. "Having been stupid enough to get shot." Then he grinned. "Confusion to our enemies," he said.

  "I intend a good deal worse than confusion," Livadhi said, and spoke into his headset. "Bridge team: go ahead."

  "You stupid—!" The snarl came just before the blow that knocked her to the deck. Corporal Ginese would have been furious with herself for not remembering that the barrier status lights showed clearly on the board, if she'd been able to think. A savage kick in the ribs curled her around the pain. She said nothing. She thought, with all the intensity of her being, Please, please, please . . . let it work. Let someone be alive there, awake . . . .

  Now two of them were on her; she heard bones snap as one of them kicked savagely at her arms, her ribs. It hurt more than she'd expected . . . and more noise . . . she couldn't think why it should be so noisy, all that clatter and roar and shouting. If they were going to make that much noise, why not just shoot her?

  She hardly noticed the blows had ceased . . . then it was quiet again. Someone wept in the distance. Nearer, footsteps . . . she wanted to flinch away, but couldn't move.

  "I think . . . she's alive," someone said.

  Not one of them. Not someone from the bridge. She opened the eye that would open, and saw what she had hoped to see: shipmates, armed, and just beyond them, a Bloodhorde corpse. She smiled.

  "They're trying to get through the barrier up on Deck 17," the sergeant minor said. "They've got the core-side barrier open, but the interlock we put on the wingside barrier's holding."

  "Are they really committed?"

  "It sounds like it."

  "Then I think it's time for Brother Ass and the Cactus Patch," Esmay said.

  "What!"

  "Folk tale from my home planet, slightly revised. As long as we provide enough resistance, they'll be sure we didn't want them there. Only we do want them there, because it's our trap."

  "How long do we make 'em wait?"

  "Long enough to—" A shout from down the passage.

  "Suiza!"

  "Yes?"

  "Our people have the bridge! The barriers are operable on the old override codes!"

  Esmay swung back to her comunit. "Now—let them in now." If they knew they'd lost the bridge, they might not come into the trap. "Be sure to lock the gate behind them, once they're onto another deck." By all combat logic, they should be hoping to clear T-4 from the top down . . . if they found the top deck empty, they should go looking for resistance.

  The scan techs had installed additional surveillance near the hatch and in the passages beyond. Esmay watched as the hatch slid aside . . . the Bloodhorde commandos still wore their Fleet uniforms, now bloodstained and filthy, under light armor they'd stolen from the ship security. Helmets and respirators . . . they couldn't be gassed, but the respirators were noisy enough to affect their hearing. The helmets were supposed to compensate with boosted sensitivity . . . but that had its shortcomings. They each carried several weapons, the light arms intended to suppress shipboard violence.

  "They're outnumbered, but we're still outgunned," said the petty-chief looking over her shoulder.

  "Guns aren't the ultimate weapon," Esmay said. Would they choose the well-lit passage ahead, or the dim one to the left, among the garden rows? They'd had only a few concussion shells, taken from Wraith's damaged starboard battery, and she hadn't been able to seed every possible route.

  As she'd hoped, they headed down the dimmer passage. They moved as she remembered her father's troops moving, cautious but swift. It was on the basis of that trained
advance that she'd planted the shells where she had . . . and when they passed the marked point, the shells burst around them. Esmay had the sound turned down . . . but they hadn't. They were flat on the deck, firing at nothing, and unable to hear anything but the racket they made and their own ringing ears . . . she was sure of that.

  The top level of T-4 was too big for them to check thoroughly; she had counted on that, and on their reaction to resistance. From one position to another, they followed what seemed to be a retreating force of slightly lesser strength. They would be trying to pick up its communications through their helmets . . . surely they would change channels until they found it. And what they heard would sound authentic . . . Esmay had discovered that the 14th had its own Drama Club, its members eager to create and record a script full of dramatic conflict. It had multiple branches, just in case the enemy didn't follow the main plotline, and one of the communications techs cued the different segments while watching the vidscan to see what the intruders were really doing.

  She keyed to listen herself for a moment.

  "Hold 'em at Deck 15—we can hold 'em if they don't come down that inboard ladder—"

  "Corporal Grandall, cut off that ladder—"

  "—Here's the ammo, sir, but we're running—"

  Sure enough, on the vidscan, the Bloodhorde had turned back, looking for, and finding, the inboard ladder. Poppers wired into sensors blew off as they started down. Smoke swirled . . . Fleet uniforms wrapped around bundles of insulation moved, fell, were dragged backwards.

  "Whiteout! Whiteout! They're on the ladder—"

  "HOLD them—"

  "We're TRYING—NO! They got Pete!"

  "—More gas masks! They're using more . . ."

  It would have been fun to watch, like being behind the scenes when an adventure cube was being taped, except that more than half the sites needed someone live, on the scene, to produce a realistic effect. The enemy didn't know which targets were live, but Esmay did. She had argued at first for a less risky approach—dousing the intruders with that adhesive, if nothing else—but the capture of an enemy warship would be easier if it thought it was coming into a ship controlled by its own people.

  Ideally, they'd get to the base of the repair bay just as the ship came out of FTL flight. They'd find the lockers of EVA suits; they'd open the repair bay—it was all set up for automatic use, with new—and newly aged and scuffed—control panels and instructional labels.

  Esmay switched to the secure link to the bridge: they had opened a T-3 access hatch and fed an optical link through it. She knew the captain was alive, but in critical condition, now in a regen tank in Medical, which had been purged of the sleepygas. The casualty count was rising, as search teams found more and more bodies . . . most were bodies, but a few had been wounded. Barin hadn't been found yet.

  A jolt like stepping off a ledge in the dark bumped her spine on the chair. She glanced at the clock. An hour early?

  "Jump point exit," said someone unnecessarily. Moments later: "Caskadian System, low-vee exit."

  So they were where they'd expected to be, and in one piece. A low-vee exit meant scan would clear soon, and they'd know how much trouble they were in. Esmay wondered what jump exit would have looked like from outside and shuddered. They could not have survived the whole trip outside, she was sure.

  "Prelim scan: six, repeat six Bloodhorde ships. Weapons analysis follows . . ."

  Now where were the Bloodhorde intruders? She looked back at the vidscan . . . at Deck 10. Too far up; she wanted them able to contact their own ships, and for that they had to be at Deck 4.

  "Release, release!" she said. The communications tech nodded, and switched to the final segment: anguish, terror, harsh breathing . . . resistance melting away in panic. Predictably, the Bloodhorde team followed, and although they came out into the repair bay control compartment with some remnant caution, they didn't hesitate long.

  They had made good use of their data wands . . . one pair went straight to the control centers, and the others to the EVA lockers. The communications tech put on the post-battle tape—if they kept listening, they'd hear individuals trying to find each other, trying to decide what to do, where to take the wounded.

  The two who could speak—or at least understand—the Bloodhorde dialect tuned in the output of the communications desk in the repair bay. What would they say to their ships?

  The Bloodhorde ship looked nothing like the sleek blackovoids of the Fleet.

  "Damn converted tramp hauler," someone muttered through the comlink. Esmay wished they'd shut up, but she agreed. Slightly larger than a Fleet escort, and perhaps a third shorter than a patrol craft, its hull had a more angular outline suggesting its origin as a civilian freight carrier.

  "Part of that's bare metal," someone else said. Esmay spotted the oblong patch, glinting dully in the repair bay's spotlights. The rest was probably the same organoceramic material that most ships used, its scarred uneven coloring suggesting patches of different ages and origins. Along the flank, bright-painted symbols that must mean something to the Bloodhorde. Near the nose, rows of stylized eyes and jagged teeth. She shivered.

  The ship edged in, still untethered but now in easy reach of the grapples. Someone nudged her; she followed the gesture to see tiny figures in EVA gear moving on the plates of Deck One. That would be the Bloodhorde intruders, come out to welcome their friends and let them aboard. One of them moved to the control board for the grapples on her side; another stood at the controls for the other set of grapples.

  She could not see their hands on the controls, but she could see the result, the shift of the grapple heads as they moved into position, and the sharp pings in her helmet as the grapples released from the heads and then impacted the ship. The sling buffer at the inboard end of the repair bay deployed, as if released by the grapples . . . they hoped the Bloodhorde would think that. She watched the intruder at the grapple controls spin around, and imagined his surprise. But nothing more happened. He made some hand signal to another of his team, out of her sight, then turned back to the controls.

  The Bloodhorde ship barely moved, drawn by the retracting grapples. Esmay boosted the magnification on her helmet scan, and watched as the intruder pushed the grapple controls to maximum. She grinned through her tension. She'd thought they would do that . . . the plan would work anyway, but this was a bonus.

  The ship moved faster, as all the grapples exerted full power. They must think the sling buffer would halt it if it moved too fast . . . and it would . . . after jolting the passengers a bit.

  She watched in fascination as the ship moved slowly, inexorably, past the marked safety point . . . stretching out the grapples again, swinging like a ball on an elastic line. As if in automatic response, another buffer sling deployed—and another. The enemy ship rammed into them, nose first, stretching the first to its limit—one . . . two . . . bands ruptured and flung back across the bay with an indescribable noise. The impact shook the entire bay. Now . . . would they notice anything? The second held, and the third, barely deformed. The enemy ship shuddered, held by the buffer slings' adhesive coating and the taut grapples behind.

  "We did it," she said aloud. "We got ourselves a warship!"

  Chapter Nineteen

  "And two problems," said the woman on scan in the bridge. "Take a look—"

  The second and third Bloodhorde ships kept coming, now obviously aiming for the drives test cradles.

  They should have thought of that. They'd assumed the Bloodhorde would be cautious, would test with one ship until they were sure it was safe. Not their style . . . of course they'd get in close with as many as possible, and with those small ships it was not hard to maneuver in close.

  "Now what, genius?" murmured Major Pitak. Esmay stared, her mind watching possibilities that flickered past more rapidly than the turning dials of a biabek game.

  "We won't be able to get Wraith out now," someone else said. "We should have done that first—"

  Wraith,
trapped in the repair bay, immobile, capable of blowing itself, but probably not the rest . . . unless its self-immolation ignited the others' weaponry. Would it? Was that good enough, the best she could hope for?

  No. She wasn't playing for any outcome but victory. Her terms.

  "We take them both," she said. "The ones on the test cradles. Then we get Wraith out . . . and the other Bloodhorde ship, if we can. It's actually better—evens the odds—"

  "But we don't have crews for that many—and they're not even our ships."

  After the first panic had come a surge of exhilaration; she felt as if her mind was working at double speed. "Oh, yes, we do. We have thousands of the top experts on every ship system right here—right now."

  "Who?"

  Esmay waved her hand, indicating both wings. "Think about it. D'you really think our people can't figure out the controls on Bloodhorde ships? They're simple. D'you think our people can't offer effective resistance to Bloodhorde troops, if we turn them loose? I think they CAN. I think they WILL."

  They had to. And it was better. Even if they just got two, the odds were almost even . . .

  Bowry had seen it too. "We'll have to scramble, though, to get two—no, three—crews ready to board. They'll be down in less than an hour." He grinned at her. "Well, Lieutenant, I think I'll have to find another exec—you're going to have to take one of those ships yourself."

  "Me?" But of course, her mind insisted. Who else? The most terrifying thing about it was that she didn't feel as scared as she should be. "Right," she said, before he could say anything else. "Which one?"

  "The T-3 cradle—because I've already got a crew assembled here. Maybe Captain Seska can free some of his crew for you."