The Serrano Succession

by Elizabeth Moon

  "What's he like?" the professor asked, in a lower voice.

  "A worrier. The only good thing about him is that he's technically trained, so at least he's understood some of what we're doing. He's actually got an advanced degree, studied with Bruno at the Gradus Institute. But he's got a serious addiction to regulations, and he claims regulations won't let him make any independent decisions about what we have here."

  "We don't have time to waste. What's his name?"

  "Alcandor Vinet."

  The two officers were glowering at each other now. Margiu looked from one to the other.

  "Excuse me," the professor said. "Commander Vinet? I'm Professor Aidersson; you were expecting me this morning—"

  "You're late, Professor," Vinet said. "But I suppose, under the circumstances, this is understandable."

  "Yes," the professor said. "Now that I'm here, I'm taking charge of the research unit. We'll need to start clearing away files before the mutineers can capture—"

  "You can't do that," Vinet said. "It's out of the question. I've had no orders from Headquarters—"

  "Under the circumstances—" the professor began.

  "He's got the highest level clearance and authorization," Garson said. "And I've got orders cut at Dark Harbor, directing you to give your complete cooperation."

  "Dark Harbor's not in my chain of command," Vinet said. "And you don't have the rank, Major. How do I know you're not all mutineers, anyway?"

  "All of us?" the professor's eyebrows rose steeply. "That's an interesting hypothesis, but do you have any data to support it? Why would mutineers want to deny other mutineers highly effective weaponry? I'm more inclined to suspect someone who tries to preserve it intact for capture."

  Vinet turned red. "Are you accusing me of being a mutineer?"

  "Not at all," the professor said. "I'm merely pointing out that your refusal to carry through on the very reasonable suggestions of my colleagues, or the orders I'm giving you, could be misunderstood in case of later investigation."

  "That's ridiculous! This installation is extremely valuable; the equipment alone is worth—"

  "Worthless to the Familias if it gets into the wrong hands. Worse than worthless. Don't you understand that?"

  "Well . . . of course, but there's no proof the mutineers are after it. They may not even know about it."

  "You're assuming they're stupid? That's not a good position to take. Commander, I'm afraid I must insist on your cooperation."

  Margiu noticed Garson's signal to his troops. So, she saw, did Vinet. He sagged a little.

  "Very well. But it's over my protest, and I will log this. If you had not barged in here with overwhelming force, you'd find yourself in the brig for such nonsense."

  "Thank you," the professor said, with perfect courtesy. "I appreciate your position, and your assistance."

  He led Margiu back to the cluster of civilians.

  "Gussie, we had an idea—" one of them said. "Maybe we could mount the—" he lowered his voice, and Margiu heard only a mumble. "And then attack the mutineers."

  "Mount it on a planet?" The professor pursed his lips. "That's interesting—that might actually work, if we have time. Do we have the supplies for adequate shielding?"

  "Yes, if we dismantle a couple of other things. Oh, and Ty was working on breaking into their communications before Vinet snatched him out of the communications shack and stuck him in here with us."

  The professor glanced at Margiu. "Ensign, you're going to be hearing many things you should not hear, and which I advise you to forget as quickly as possible. Do you have any specialty background in technical fields?"

  "Aside from growing up making what we needed from scrap, no. Basic electronics and carpentry."

  "Well, that may be useful. Come along; we're going to the labs . . ."

  They began with a short meeting in what looked like a snack lounge, with a row of programmable food processors on one wall and battered chairs and couches around the others. A half-finished child's model of a space station cluttered the low table. Margiu had not suspected scientists of playing with such toys, and someone quickly moved it to a far corner.

  "What have we got for communications?" the professor asked. "Ty?"

  A skinny man with a bush of black hair came forward. "They've got the sats, but we can reach mainland with something I cobbled together. I want to send the specs for it over there, so they can build their own quickly. Getting into the mutineers' lines is going to be harder; they've got tight-link capability up there. But they've transmitted some outside that—I suspect to downside confederates—and that I can grab, if I have access to the equipment. I can tight-link if you give me an hour or so—it only takes reconfiguring some modules from one of the labs—but we don't have anyone to send to."

  "What about scan? Can we detect anything beyond atmosphere?"

  "Well—only for whatever's in our horizon. The problem's going to be tracking, not to mention what's below horizon. Knurri had a telescope with a motorized equatorial mount we could've used, but he took it with him when he went on leave. We can point something up, but we won't have an accurate fix if we do find a ship."

  "Do you need anyone else to help you?"

  "No, not really. There's a pretty decent enlisted tech I could use, but I'm a little worried that the mutineers had one or more agents on this base—and he'd be the logical one."

  "Fine—Ensign, get Ty an escort from our group to the communications shack, would you?"

  She was supposed to guard his back, but this required only going to the door. Lieutenant Lightfoot was outside, waiting; he called over two NEMs who went off with Ty.

  "Now—Cole, you said you had an idea?"

  "Yeah—Jen and I think it might be possible to rig the big guy for planet-to-space work. We've been trying to come up with the best way to acquire and track the target—"

  "Which target?"

  "Well . . . we're pretty sure we can take out the orbital station, and any ships docked there. Distant stuff, without the use of satellite-based scans, is going to be harder—"

  "But I think we could do it," a woman said. "If we take out the station, then get the satellites linked to us—"

  "How many hours?" the professor asked.

  "Six or seven to mount the weapon, and it'll take a lot of personnel."

  "We may not have six or seven hours," the professor said. "We need to know if they're coming, and how soon. Jen, what about scan within atmosphere? Is there any way to get access to the satellite data?"

  "Not right now. What we have here is basically old-style radar, for spotting and guiding air traffic, and a little local-weather scanner. The range is so short that we couldn't spot incoming LACs in time to do anything useful. We haven't needed more than that; we had the satellite data for longscan. We really need those satellites, and for that we'll need to break their lock. It's not going to be easy, and it's going to take time."

  "Which, again, we may not have. Bob, what about Project Zed?"

  "Operational. And we really don't want them to have it."

  "It actually works?"

  "Oh yeah. If this were a ship, and not an island, I could flip the switch and they'd never find us. A big improvement over the earlier models. Unfortunately, as it is an island, it's easily located no matter what cloud we wrap around ourselves."

  Margiu realized with a start that they were talking about new stealth gear.

  "Could it be used to cover a retreat in the aircraft? If we took the data and ran for the mainland?"

  "I suppose." The other man looked thoughtful. "We haven't tried it on aircraft . . . how much can those planes lift?"

  "I'll ask," the professor said. He glanced at Margiu, who headed for the door again. She passed the question off to Lightfoot, and went back to the professor. In that brief interval, the discussion had already turned too technical for her understanding, but it came to an abrupt end when someone pounded on the door.

  "Come in," the professor calle
d.

  Ty came in. "I've found two things—one's a datalog showing transmissions to this station from Stack Three five days ago. From Bacarion. I think someone here's on their payroll."

  "Most likely," the professor said. "And?"

  "And a transmission from orbit to this station, just now. Personal for Lieutenant Commander Vinet."

  "For Vinet! I'd never have guessed he was part of it," Swearingen said. "He's such a fusspot. Did you answer it?"

  "No, just acknowledged receipt, using the same sig code that was logged for reply to the others. But I did take a look—"

  "Wasn't it encrypted?" someone asked.

  "Yah, but a simple one. Not hard to break. Thing is, he's not only part of it, they were telling him they'd be coming down in a day or so, and not to worry—that they'd prevented anyone from sending word from the station. So here we are, nobody else knows what's going on."

  Margiu spoke up. "We have to get word out somehow!"

  The professor looked at her. "You're quite right, Ensign. And we have to keep them upstairs from finding out that we're here, if possible, to give ourselves time to work—to get word out somehow, to destroy what we can't protect."

  Margiu noticed that he didn't say "to get away safely."

  "We'll need the troops that came with you, Gussie, to keep the baddies out of our hair."

  "Right. Ty, did your guard come back with you?"

  "No, I left him there to guard the equipment."

  "Ensign, we'll need Major Garson." Margiu told Lightfoot, who hurried off, and in a minute or two Garson appeared.

  He listened to Ty's report, scowling. "I'll put Vinet under arrest, then. I wonder how many baddies were with him."

  "And I wonder how many are with you, sir," the professor said.

  "None, I hope," Garson said. "Can you people take care of the rest of it?"

  "Building a tightbeam with the power to a ship insystem, yes. Building a scan to locate such a ship, yes. Destroy the more delicate research, and the records, yes. But it will take time, Major. There are only fourteen of us, and some of the work is specialized enough that only one person can do it. So we'd best get at it." He nodded to Garson, and the major withdrew. The professor turned to the group. "One thing worries me."

  "Only one?" Swearingen asked, grinning.

  "If they don't know we're here, they won't be in as big a hurry to get down here . . . but when the cloud cover goes, they'll be bound to take a look. And they'll see our transports sitting there like a sign in capital letters: TROUBLE HERE."

  "We could send them back," Swearingen said. "But then we'd be stuck here. Besides, the latent heat would still show on a fine-grain IR scan."

  "If you just want to hide the planes from scan," Bob said, "we can do that with Zed. Set it for just those parameters. It'd be a good test—"

  "And if it fails, they'd not only know we were here, but they'd also know about Zed."

  "It's a lot quicker to dismantle and destroy than the big guy," Bob said.

  "How many more hours of darkness? And does anyone have a clue about the weather?" The professor looked around the group.

  "Local sunrise is at 8:13 tomorrow; it'll be light before that, of course, if it's clear."

  "And we have no weathersats . . . but we can always go outside and look."

  When they opened the door, a squad waited to accompany them. The professor told Ty to get back to the communications shack; half the squad went with him. With the others he went outside to look at the weather. Outside, a cold wet wind scoured the ground. Margiu stayed close to the professor, looking up only once to see that no stars showed.

  "I can't tell," the professor said finally. "Bob, go on and rig Zed to cover the planes. We'll start dismantling the other stuff—"

  "Professor—" That was Major Garson. "We can't find Vinet, or several others. I want all of you back inside, until we find him."

  "That could take days," Swearingen said. "Some of the labs are underground, connected by tunnels."

  "Ty's at the communications shack," the professor said. "He has guards, but—"

  A flare of light, followed in moments by a whoomp. Down the runway, one of the planes was blazing, the flames shooting up to glow on the underside of the clouds.

  "Great," Garson said. "They can spot that right through the cloud cover. Go on now—get inside, get under cover."

  "Where's Lieutenant Lightfoot?" Margiu asked.

  "I don't know—he's not answering the com." Another, brighter flare of light painted one side of the major's face, and another explosion rolled through the night. The second plane. "Ensign, switch your PPU mask to enhanced, and get these civilians back under cover. That yellow jacket makes a fine target."

  Margiu fumbled for the mask controls, and hit suit reflectivity by mistake. Her suit turned silver, then back to dark blue as she turned it off. Then she found the right set of buttons, and instead of dark clouds and a distant fire, she was looking at a scene painted by someone with a passion for shades of amber and orange. She could see little orange figures moving around, some with green triangles for heads; the blazing fire looked black. As her eyes adjusted, she noticed that the professor had a green triangle, and so did the NEMs around them.

  Then a turquoise line stabbed across her vision, to crawl up the professor's sleeve toward his head. Margiu threw herself at him, hooked a leg behind his, and they fell together as a shot whined past and smacked into the armor of the NEM on the other side. He staggered, then all of the NEMs dropped as one.

  "Target acquired," the one beside Margiu said. "Mark hostile—" Margiu turned her head and saw that one orange figure now had a red square on top. Another of the NEMs fired, and the distant figure went down. She lifted her head, and the NEM shoved it back down. "Not yet, Ensign. May not be dead, and may be others."

  "Casualties?" That was Garson, on the com.

  "No, sir. Small arms fire only; didn't penetrate armor. Civilians all unharmed."

  "Who's on high guard?"

  "Turak and Benits—report!"

  "No activity on the roof—nothing, sir."

  "Let's get them inside."

  The NEMs formed a double row of armor, and the civilians crawled carefully between them into the building, but no more shots were fired. Margiu took a last look through her enhanced mask, and the orange figure still lay where it had fallen. Then a network of turquoise lines appeared, coming from several angles to converge on the antenna cover of the communications building. She leaned out to see, and a NEM yanked her back.

  "Are you trying to get killed?" a woman's voice asked.

  "No, I just—"

  "Get inside, stay inside, take care of your professor!"

  Margiu followed the others into the windowless break room; the professor was looking at her in a way that made her uncomfortable.

  "What are they doing?" Swearingen asked.

  "I think they're trying to destroy the antenna array," Margiu said. "It's under that dome on the communications building, isn't it?"

  "Yes. And if they succeed, we're not going to be able to use a tightbeam, even if we construct one."

  "Why a tightbeam?" Margiu asked.

  "Goes farther, carries more data. We might even be able to reach the system ansible, if we can get a fix on it. That would get word out."

  "But—wouldn't a regular broadcast disperse more widely, giving you more chance to warn any incoming ship that wasn't part of the mutiny?"

  The professor looked thoughtful. "You mean—like old-fashioned broadcasting?"

  "Yes. If you have enough power—"

  "And the antenna is much easier to make. You may have saved more than my life, Ensign."

  The R.S.S. Vigor came through the jump point in textbook fashion. Just because they knew they were coming into a secure system, just because nothing could possibly be wrong, was no reason to be careless. Captain Satir would not have paid attention if anyone had complained, and no one did: Satir was a good captain, and his fussy adherence
to every little jot and tittle of the rules had saved lives before.

  Now Vigor slowed to scan the system defenses and monitor system message traffic before proceeding insystem, even as her beacon automatically informed the system who she was. As she dumped velocity, the communications officer stripped one message after another, hardly glancing at them as they came off the printer—Captain Satir demanded hardcopy, even if that did mean plenty of recycling. He handed them to the captain's runner, who took them to Satir. Satir was already alert, peering at the system scan.