The Serrano Succession

by Elizabeth Moon

  "Yes," Heris said. "And the following message will be delayed by the time it takes the ansible to return a 'ready' message to the originator, and the originator's message to arrive."

  "Yes, so we expect a lag, up to about four hours, between the initiation sequence and the message. But I've been waiting almost the whole shift for a message, and nothing's come through. And Commander Denehy said to report anything out of the ordinary. I just don't know if this is."

  "How long, exactly?" Heris asked.

  "Six hours, eighteen minutes. I guess it could be a ship that's farther than three light-hours from the ansible, but most people don't try to raise one until they're a lot closer than that."

  "What's the ID? Why do you think it's a ship?"

  "Well, this is the system—" Hargrove held out a description. "It's got no inhabited worlds, and no permanent settlement, though there's a research station on that eccentric planetoid. I suppose it could be that."

  "I suppose," Heris said absently, looking at the system specs. "One mapped jump point, but only a yellow rating . . . oh, because of the planetoid. What are its backjump stats?"

  "Sorry, Captain—I don't know. Just its com status."

  "Commander de Fries—" The senior navigation officer looked up. "I need a backjump analysis of these coordinates—" Heris flicked them to his screen.

  "Right away, Captain."

  Heris turned back to Jig Hargrove. "Does that ansible have reversible scan capability?"

  "No, Captain. The note on it in the catalog says it's just a single-channel model, for the use of the research station. It's not even very secure; its access code is in all the updated files. Anyone could have tripped it—though I suppose it could have been just damage."

  "Captain—" That was de Fries.

  "Yes?"

  "Backjump analysis: because this isn't considered that stable a jump point, the only mapped one-jump location is CX-42-henry—"

  "That's one of the one-to-go points for Copper Mountain," Heris said.

  "That's right, Captain. Copper Mountain is the nearest two-jump outlet, estimated FTL time eleven days, and that's due to the short leg in from CX-42-henry. There's a notation that successful jumps were made to the vicinity of RG-773-alpha, but there weren't enough to qualify for a mapped route. Estimated FTL time on that one is nineteen days. Some of the scientists considered it a more direct route to their home systems, over in Sector Five."

  "I suppose it would be," Heris said. "Do you have any data on that system which would tell us how far that planetoid is now from the ansible? How long a lag there might be between an initiating signal and the following message?"

  "I'll work on it," he said.

  Heris felt a prickle of excitement down her spine. What could trigger an ansible besides a signal? And why would someone start to signal and then fail to carry it out?

  Because someone stopped them. They changed their minds. Someone stopped them.

  "If a loyalist Fleet vessel . . . or a civilian ship . . . found itself in trouble with mutineers, they might try to signal, and be blown away before they could," Heris said softly.

  "Yes, and a flying rock could have hit it," de Fries said.

  "We need to go look." She was as sure of that as of two plus two.

  "We're on picket duty. The admiral said we're to interdict mutineer travel, watch the jump points—" Seabolt, naturally, would take that view.

  "I am watching a jump point," Heris said. "I'm watching a jump point around which suspicious activity has taken place."

  "I don't think you can call a malfunctioning ansible suspicious activity."

  "Commander, do you have any idea how reliable those things are? How rarely they malfunction? And when they do, it's something like sending a string of gibberish, not turning themselves on for no reason."

  "But—"

  "I say it's suspicious, and I'm the captain . . . and the commodore." And the great panjandrum with the little round button on top, too, she thought to herself. "I'm going to inform HQ, of course—only an idiot rushes off without leaving word behind—and the next question is whether to go in with all the force available—or send in a scout."

  "A scout would be safer," Seabolt said.

  "For us, right now, maybe. But just supposing there is a mutineer force in that system, and someone tried to tell us and failed. All a scout could do is alert them that someone knows their location. Similarly, if I take in one ship and it's not enough to defeat them . . . that's worse than not going at all."

  "You wouldn't take all—everything—" Seabolt sounded like a supply sergeant, she decided.

  "They didn't give me this many ships to just sit here being a target," Heris said. "I want a tightbeam to the ansible and a secure code for transmission to headquarters."

  R.S.S. Bonar Tighe, now mutineer flagship

  Cecelia swallowed against the rise of sour bile in her throat. It had seemed like a good plan; it was a good plan. It was the only plan . . . but she felt more tension than before the start of a big event. Worse than riding down to a huge fence on a headstrong horse.

  It was just the same. She could be hurt, she could die, but she'd rather die doing this than live without doing it—right?

  Talking firmly to her fluttering stomach, she went on mopping the guards' latrine; Miranda was behind her with the brushes, the bottles of spray cleaner. She felt for the bucket with her heel, without looking. On the next forward stroke with the mop, she pushed too hard, stumbled forward, lurched back, and knocked the bucket over.

  "Nooo!" she cried, whirling around and grabbing for it. "No, I didn't mean to—I'm sorry—" The end of the mop almost hit Miranda, who fended it off by grabbing it one-handed; Cecelia scrabbled for the bucket and picked up the bottle of spray cleaner Miranda had dropped.

  "You idiot!" the guard said, starting to laugh. "I knew you were clumsy, but—"

  The end of the mop caught him in the solar plexus; Miranda's lunge with a mop was as perfect as with a foil, and he folded around it with a whoof of outrushing breath. Cecelia gave him a spray of ammonia-based cleaner in the face as he tried to gasp for his next breath. He gasped, choked, wheezed—and she had smashed his trachea with the handle of the glass scraper. Behind her, she heard sounds she interpreted as Miranda taking down the guard in the kiosk—a potent thud, another gasp and gurgle. She grabbed her guard by the arm and dragged him toward the cells—they needed his fingerprint for the cell locks—while Miranda inserted the other guard's keycard and used his fingerprint to hold the brig access open.

  "That was fast," Chief Jones said, as Cecelia panted around the corner, yanking at the dead weight of the guard.

  "Nothing ventured, nothing gained," Cecelia said. She pushed the body up to the bars. "Here, help me lift him—he must be wearing lead." Arms reached through the bars to lift the dead weight up, until she could insert his finger in the ID slot.

  The bolts slid back with a solid clunk, and Cecelia pulled the cell door open.

  "Donaldson, you and Kouras get the other cells open. Tiraki and Dirac, go help Miranda at the kiosk—see if you can set overrides. If not, we're going to have to take their fingers. Send Miranda back to help Markham."

  Cecelia swallowed and tried not to look shocked. She understood the problem but the very thought of cutting parts off the dead revolted her.

  "Cecelia, you brief the other cells on the chemicals stored in this section."

  She almost said "yes, sir." Already, other prisoners were emerging cautiously from the other cells around the corner—men with straggly beards under their shaven heads, women whose hair was just growing out.

  "This is our mission," Chief Jones said. "First, we get word out to Fleet about this ship in this location. Second, we do our best to disable this ship, by going EVA to damage or destroy its scan domes, its communications masts, and its FTL nodes. Third, we try to escape. We need an EVA party, a communications party, and a decoy/distraction party who will run around making as much noise and trouble as p
ossible while heading for plausible targets. I've had EVA experience and so has Petty Major Sifa—who else?" Hands raised, and she nodded.

  "Fine—I'll take all of you. We already have Tiraki, Dirac, and Donaldson on the communications party—any other senior com techs?" No one answered. "I want two or three good scrappers with them—who—good, you and you." She glanced around. "The rest of you, divide into two groups, one with Petty Light Kouras, and the other with Petty Light Hartung. They'll brief you on the run—we don't want to sit here jawing until they figure out something's wrong."

  "What about the civs?" one of the men asked, staring at Cecelia and Miranda.

  "We wouldn't be loose if it weren't for them," Jones said. "They've already chosen which party they'll be in." She grinned at Cecelia. "Cecelia here wants to see the stars from outside, and Miranda's going to keep an eye on Anseli with one of the distraction groups." She paused a moment, but no one asked another question. "All right, people. Let's move."

  The brig area was at one end of the barracks area, with only one exit to the rest of Troop Deck. On their way out, the escapees emptied the shelves of the lockers available: three bottles of spray cleaner, two mops, two brooms, and a squeegee. One stuck the canister of toilet bowl cleaner in his pocket. They had the guards' weapons, the canister of riot spray from the kiosk, and the guards' gas masks and filters—a total of four. They had the little repair kit from under the desk and the damage control locker contents. Hammers, prybars with one end pointed and one flat, tubes of adhesive and dispensers that looked, to Cecelia, very much like something builders used to caulk windows. Chief Jones had explained how they'd use them—and they'd ransack every damage control locker they passed. Rope, wedges . . . soon they looked, Cecelia thought, like a combination of mountain climbers and repairmen.

  At this time of day, the four nearest squad bays were always empty. Cecelia and Miranda went out to scout, carrying mops, buckets, and cleaning supplies as usual, with two of the men pretending to guard them. They made it to the first lavatory, where they could see down another empty corridor and wave the rest forward.

  The men took a few minutes to depilate their faces, making them look more like the beardless mutineers; the women could do nothing about their hair, but—as Chief Jones said—"It's grown out a little, and from a distance we might be taken for men. Some of us, anyway. And you, Cecelia, if we get you into a uniform . . ."

  Uniforms they could find, in the squad bay lockers, along with a variety of other useful objects: personal knives, ration bars, more gas masks, and p-suits. Miranda, in uniform, looked as perfectly groomed as in her usual expensive silks. Cecelia looked rumpled; she glowered at her mirrored image.

  "How do you do it?"

  "Do what?"

  "Look like that. D'you have a spell you put on cloth, so it won't wrinkle when it's on you?"

  "No—I don't know how it works. It just does."

  Once the groups separated, Cecelia quickly lost track of the turns, the ascents and descents, through unmarked passages. She struggled to keep the coil of rope she'd been given from falling off her shoulder, and the several tubes of adhesive tucked into her "uniform" poked her uncomfortably. How did they know they were going the right way? Yet Chief Jones hardly hesitated, moving with swift silence.

  They came out into a little room whose far side curved noticeably. The hull? Cecelia shivered. She had volunteered for this, but now that she saw that curve, the reality of what she was about to do struck her cold. Chief Jones was already slapping squares of stickypatch to the overhead and bulkheads. It made no sense to Cecelia, but she didn't ask—Jones always had a reason, whatever it was. After another two patches, Jones grinned at her. "Blanking the sensors. Buys us some time." One of the men had already carded the suit lockers. These EVA suits were heavy-duty models, intended for hours of use outside, with their size color-coded on the left shoulder. Jones quickly sorted them into a sequence of sizes and started them into their suits, tallest first.

  Cecelia was third; she stepped into the open lower legs, and someone behind her lifted the back of the suit, until she could work her arms into it. Then it wrapped around to overlap the front section. Chief Jones checked the lower seals, helped seal the helmet, and then loaded the dual air tanks which should supply four hours of air. She attached Cecelia's load of rope, tubes, dispenser to the suit exterior, and waved Cecelia to one corner, while the rest suited up, working in pairs. Then came the tedious business of working through the small airlock, one at a time.

  Cecelia had no idea how big a cruiser was, and seeing the outside didn't really help. Its surface, matte black, looked as if it had been cut out of the starry expanse or as if it were a cave, rather than an object that rounded out. Worse than that was the sudden loss of gravity—outside the ship's hull, the artificial gravity had no force. She felt disoriented, and was very glad of the safety line clipped to a ring on a stickypatch outside the hatch. As she'd been told to do, she followed the line from one clip to another, around a dull black plain that fell away from her in all directions. Suddenly she saw something different—something glittery.

  Chief Jones' directions had been clear: if it sticks up, break it off; if there's a hole with something in it, glue it up. Cecelia stared at a transparent flattened dome with what looked like an array of daisies under it. It wasn't exactly sticking up, but she couldn't see how squirting glue at it would damage it. Something tapped her arm, and she jumped. Another figure, pointing at the dome. It held a large hammer in one hand and very slowly leaned over to put a pair of stickypatches on the hull beside the dome. Then it stepped onto the stickypatches and swung the hammer.

  Cecelia had never really paid attention to gravitational effects before, and had certainly never wondered what happened when someone in zero-G performed a violent maneuver. As the person beside her swung down with the hammer and the hammer cracked the dome, its feet tore away from the stickypatches, and it rotated overhead, feet describing a broad arc, and hammer swinging away from the dome toward Cecelia. She grabbed for it automatically, and the other person's momentum rotated around this new center, wrenching her shoulder. Then the person bounced off the hull and rotated back the other way. One foot caught on a stickypatch, and the inertia rotated his body around the long axis this time.

  Finally the wild gyrations damped, and the figure tapped Cecelia's arm. She presumed it was a sort of thanks. Then, very carefully, the figure knelt, and hacked at the cracked dome. This gave access to the delicate floral shapes of the sensor heads themselves. The petal shapes came away easily . . . the other figure went on to another dome, leaving Cecelia to peel them out one by one. It was ridiculous . . . it was like the childhood game of plucking petals from a sunflower and counting out the answer to some childish questions. "They find us . . . they find us not . . . .they kill us . . . they kill us not . . ." Not, according to the last of the petals she tossed away. She took her dispenser of adhesive and squirted globs of it over the ends of the stalks to which the flowers had been attached. According to Chief Jones, this would make repair very difficult indeed.

  Cecelia wondered, if this ship were ever found, what some repair dock would say about the damage they were doing. She, a taxpayer, was costing herself a lot of money, probably. It didn't seem important enough to worry about for long. She decided that if she survived this, she would not prosecute herself for wasting taxpayers' money—she would cheerfully pay more to repair whatever damage she was doing, so long as it kept her alive.

  She looked around and noticed a metallic stick protruding through the hull covering a short distance away. She started to move toward it and her tether caught her short. She almost unclipped before remembering the person she'd caught and saved. Instead of unclipping, she added a length to her tether, carefully, and made her way over to the stick. It seemed shorter, and, as she watched, it crept down past her waist toward her knees. She gave it a whack with her glue tube, and found herself hanging by her tether. That didn't work . . . she pulled herself in
until she was clinging to the last attachment point. Then she thought to squirt more adhesive around the base of the rod; when it slowed, she formed a large glob on the tip. The stick didn't move; she hoped it couldn't.

  Cecelia had no part in the assault on the shuttle bay—Chief Jones had put her around the hull curve and told her to lie flat. She had the pleasant task of watching her oxygen level crawl down as time passed, while she wondered what was going on a meter below her and all through the ship.

  The others of the outside team, she knew, were surrounding the shuttle hatch, where they hoped the mutineers would come out to save the rest of the FTL nodes from gluey destruction. They seemed confident that they could disarm such a group and steal a shuttle of some kind, and Jones had promised to pick her up. It seemed a meagre chance to Cecelia. As she had faced reality in those long months of apparent coma, she faced it now—she would probably be dead in a few hours, her long life over.

  She would like to have known if Ronnie and Raffa were doing all right . . . what Brun was up to . . . if Miranda could possibly get that girl Anseli out safely . . . but life wasn't always cooperative, and she expected to die without knowing. At least they'd had a chance and she'd bought them that. She reflected a moment on the irony of someone widely renowned as selfish having humbled herself for all those weeks just to have a chance at breaking some others out of jail.