"Any communications we can pick up?"
"No, captain. Not so far. It's probably beaming them to that relay satellite—" He paused as the Communications Watch Officer raised a hand and waved it. Sassinak nodded to her.
"Speaks atrocious Neo-Gaesh," the Com officer said. "I can barely follow it."
"Put it on my set," said Sass. "It's my native tongue—or was." She had kept up practice in Neo-Gaesh, over the years, just in case. If they had even the simplest code, though, she'd be unlikely to follow it.
They didn't. In plain, if accented, Neo-Gaesh, the individual on the escort vessel was reporting their observation of the debris. "—And a steel waste disposal unit, definitely not ours. A . . . a cube reader, I think, and a cube file. Stenciled with Fleet insignia and some numbers." Sassinak could not hear whatever reply had come, but in a few seconds the first speaker said, "Take too long. We've already picked up Fleet items you can check. I'll tag it, though." Another long pause, and then, "Couldn't have been too big—one of their heavily armed scouts, the new ones. They're supposed to be damned near invisible to everything, until they attack, and almost as heavily armed as a cruiser." Another pause, then, "Yes: verified Fleet casualties, some in evac pods, and some in ship clothes, uniforms." That had been hardest, convincing herself to sacrifice their dead with scant honor, their bodies as well as their lives given to the enemy, to make a convincing display of destruction.
When the escort passed from detection range, Sassinak relaxed. They'd done it, so far. The slavers didn't know they were there, alive. Huron and his pitiful cargo were safely away. One lot of slavers were dead—and she didn't regret the death of any of them.
But in the long night watch that followed, when she thought of the Fleet dead snagged by an enemy's robot arm to be "verified" as a casualty, she regretted very much that Huron had gone with the trader, and she had no one to comfort her.
Chapter Twelve
Repairs, as always, ran overtime. Sassinak didn't mind that much: they had time, right then, more than enough of it. Engineers, in her experience, were never satisfied to replace a malfunctioning part: they always wanted to redesign it. So mounting replacement pods involved rebuilding the pod mounts, and changing the conformation of them, all to reconcile the portside pod cluster with the other portside repairs. Hollister quoted centers of mass and acceleration, filling her screen with math that she normally found interesting . . . but at the moment it was a tangle of symbols that would not make sense. Neither did the greater problem of ship sabotage. If someone hadn't blown their cover, they might have gotten away without that great gaping hole in the side of her ship, or the fouled pods. Or the deaths. This was not, by any means, the first time she'd been in combat, or seen death . . . but Abe had been right, all those years ago: it was different when it was her command that sent them, not a command transmitted from above.
Finally they were done, the engineers and their working parties, and as the pressure came up in the damaged sector, and the little leaks whistled until they were patched, Sassinak could see that the ship itself was sound. It needed time in the refitting yards, but it was sound. Marine troops moved back into their quarters when the pressure stabilized, to the great relief of the Fleet crew who'd been double-bunking, and not liking it. Seven days, not three or four or five, but it was done, and they were back to normal.
Currald was out of sick bay, just barely in time to move his troops back into their own territory. Sassinak had visited him daily once he regained consciousness, but he'd been too sick for much talk. He'd lost nearly ten kilos, and looked haggard.
She was in the gym, working out with Gelory in unarmed combat, when Currald came in for the first time. His eyes widened when he saw the shiny pink streak across her shoulder.
"When did that—?"
"One of the pirates nearly got me—the five that got up to Main." She answered without pausing, dodging one of Gelory's standing kicks, and throwing a punch she blocked easily.
"I didn't know you'd been hurt." His expression flickered through surprise, concern, and settled into his normal impassivity. Sassinak handsigned Gelory to break for a moment.
"It wasn't bad," she said. "Are you supposed to be working out yet?"
He reddened. "I'm supposed to be taking it easy, but you know the problem—"
"Yeah, your calcium shifts too readily in low-grav. I could have Engineering rig your quarters for high-grav . . ."
His brows raised; Sassinak gave herself a point for having gotten through his mask again. "You'd do that? It takes power, and we're on stealth—"
"I'd do that rather than have you blow an artery working out here before you're ready. I know you're tough, Major, but poisoning doesn't favor your kind of strength."
"They said I could use the treadmill, but not the weight harness yet." That was an admission; the treadmill wasn't even in the gym proper. Currald gave her the most human look she'd had yet, and finally grinned. "I guess you aren't going to think I'm a weakling even when I look like one . . ."
"Weaklings don't survive that kind of poisoning, and weaklings aren't majors in the marines." She delivered that crisply, almost barked it, and was glad to see the respectful glint in his eye. "Now—if you and Med think that a high-grav environment would help you get back to normal, tell me. We can't take the power to do more than your quarters, without risking exposure, but we can do that much, I have no idea if that's enough to do any good. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you'd follow Med's advice—you don't want them telling you how to handle troops, and they know a bit more about poisoning than either of us."
"Yes, captain," he said. This time with neither resentment, defensiveness, nor guilt.
"I'll expect you for the staff conference at 1500," Sassinak went on. "Now, I've got another fifteen minutes of Gelory's expertise to absorb."
"May I watch?"
"If you want to see your captain dumped on the gym floor a dozen times, certainly." She nodded to Gelory, who instantly attacked, a move so fast she was sure it must have been half shapechange. Something that felt almost boneless at first stiffened into a leg over which she was flipped—but she coiled in midair, managed to hang onto a wrist, and flipped Gelory in her turn. But this was the only change that Gelory pulled on her for the rest of the session. Instead they sparred as near-equals, and she hit the floor only once. She could not ask, in front of Currald, but suspected the Weft of making her look good in front of the heavyworlder.
* * *
Staff meeting that day found almost the same group in her office as on the day of the poisoning. Sassinak noted with amusement that suddenly no one went near the coffee service—although until Currald's return, the coffee fiends had been drinking at their normal rate.
"I'm fairly sure this coffee is safe," she said, and watched their faces as they realized their unconscious behaviors. When everyone was settled, and had taken the first cautious sips, she brought Currald up to date, outlining the repairs, the few changes necessary for the marines on Troop Deck, and the discreet hunt for the poisoner. The chief medical officer had already told him the poison was from Diplo, she knew, and she outlined what they had discovered since.
"It's obvious that any saboteur, as we discussed before, would want to foment trouble between factions. My first thought was that having a heavyworld poison pointed to someone who wanted to put heavyworlders in a bind, and knew that I had a reputation for trusting them. But we had to take a look at the possibility that a heavyworlder had, in fact, done the poisoning. It had to be someone with access to the galleys—preferably both, although it's just barely possible that some of the coffee from Main made it down to Troop Deck. Since we were serving all over the ship, it's hard to trace the source of everyone's drink . . . particularly if one or more of the stewards was involved."
"You no longer believe that the intruders poisoned open canisters?"
"No. There'd have been no reason for them to do so: they thought they were taking the ship. They'd have used our suppli
es. And remember, we have that other sabotage to consider, the missile."
"Have you figured it out, captain?"
"No. Frankly, Major, I wanted you well before we went further. I do have a list of suspects . . . and one of them is a young woman from an ambiguous background." She paused; no one said anything, and Sassinak went on. "She was a medical evacuee from Diplo—an unadapted infant who did not respond to treatment. Reared on Palun—"
"That's an intermediate world," said Currald slowly. Sassinak nodded.
"Right. She lived there until she was thirteen, with a heavyworlder family related to her birth family. Applied for light-G transfer on her own, as soon as she could, and joined Fleet as a recruit after finishing school."
"But you're not sure—"
"No, if I were sure she'd be in the brig. She had access, but so did at least four other stewards and the cooks. Thing is, she's the only one with a close link to Diplo—not just any heavy-world planet, but Diplo. She's actually visited twice, as an adult, in protective gear. We don't know anything about it, of course. And anyone who wanted to incriminate a heavyworlder could hardly have found a better way than to use a Diplo poison."
"Could she have popped the missile?" Currald glanced at Arly, who quickly shook her head.
"No—we checked that, of course, right away. Particularly when both my techs in that quadrant came up sick. But they were well when the missile went off, and unless they're in it together they clear each other. I think myself it was a handheld pulse shot, probably from a service hatch down the corridor, that triggered the missile."
"You remember that Fleet Intelligence warned each captain to expect at least one agent . . . they didn't say only one," said Sass. "I think the character of the missile launch and the poisoning are so different as to point to two different individuals with two different goals. But what I can't figure out for sure is what someone hoped to gain by random poisoning. Unless the poisoner had a group of supporters to take over the ship . . ."
Currald sighed, and laced his fingers together. Even gaunt from his illness, he outweighed everyone else at the table, and his somber face looked dangerous. "Captain, you have the reputation of being fair . . ." He stopped, clearly unhappy with that beginning and started over. "Look: I'm just the marine commander; I don't mingle with your ship's crew that much. But I know you all believe heavyworlders clump together, and to some extent that's true. I think I'd know if you had any sort of conspiracy among them on your side of the ship, and I hope you'll believe that I'd have told you."
Sassinak smiled at his attempt to avoid the usual heavyworlder paranoia, but gave him a serious response. "I told you before, Major, that I trust you completely. I don't think there was a conspiracy, because nothing happened while the poisonings were being discovered. But I am concerned that if this steward is the source, and if I arrest her, you and other heavyworlders will see that as a hasty and unthinking response to the Dipio poison. And I'd be very interested in what you thought such a person could hope to gain by it. What I know of heavyworlder politics and religion doesn't suggest that poisoning would be the usual approach."
"No, it's not." Currald sighed again. "Though if I had to guess, I'd bet her birth family—and her relations on Palun—were strict Separationists. She couldn't be, because she couldn't handle the physical strain. Some of those Separationists are pretty harsh on throwback babies. A few even kill them outright—unfit, they say." He ignored the sharp intakes of breath, the sidelong glances, and went on. "If she's been unable to adjust to being a lightweight, or if she thinks she has to make up for being unadapted, she might do something rash just to make the point." He glanced around, then looked back at Sass. "You don't have any heavyworlder officers, then?"
"I did, but I sent them with Huron on the prize ship." At his sharp look, Sassinak shrugged. "It just worked out that way: they had the right skills, and the seniority."
Something in that had pleased him, for he had relaxed a little. "So you might like a heavyworlder officer to have a few words with this young woman?"
"If you think you might find out whether she did it, and why."
"And you do trust me for that." It was not a question, but a statement tinged with surprise. "All right, captain; I'll see what I can do."
The rest of the meeting involved the results of their surveillance. For the first few days after the landing, they'd recorded no traffic in the system except for a shuttle from the planet to the occupied moon. But only a few hours before, a fast ship had lifted, headed outsystem by its trajectory.
"Going to tell the boss what happened," said Bures.
"So why'd they wait this long?" asked Sass. She could think of several reasons, none of them pleasant. No one answered her; she hadn't expected them to. She wondered how long it would be before the big transports came, to dismantle the base and move it. The enemy would know the specs on the ship Huron had taken; they'd know how long they had before Fleet could return. A more dangerous possibility involved the enemy attempting to defend the base, trapping a skimpy Fleet expedition with more overweaponed ships like the little escort she had fought.
"So what we can do," she summed up for them at the end of the meeting, "is trail one of the ships that leaves, and hope we're following one that goes somewhere informative, or sit where we are and monitor everything that goes on, to report it to Fleet later, or try to disrupt the evacuation once it starts. I wish we knew where that scumbucket was headed."
* * *
Two hours later, Currald called and asked for a conference. Sassinak agreed, and although he'd said nothing over the intercom, she was not surprised to see the steward under suspicion precede him into her office.
The story was much as Currald had suggested. Seles, born without the heavyworlder's adaptations to high-G, had nearly died in the first month of life. Her grandfather, she said, had told her mother to kill her, but her mother had lost two children in a habitat accident, and wanted to give her a chance. The medical postbirth treatments hadn't worked, and she'd been evacuated as a two-month-old infant, sent to her mother's younger sister on Palun. Even there, she had been the weakling, teased by her cousins when she broke an ankle falling from a tree, when she couldn't climb and run as well as they could. At ten, on her only childhood visit to Diplo, she had needed the adaptive suits that lightweights wore . . . and she had had to listen to her grandfather's ranting. She had ruined them, he said: not only the cost of her treatment, and her travel to Palun, but the simple fact that a throwback had been born in their family. They had lost honor; it would have been better if she had died at birth. Her father had glanced past her and refused to speak; her mother now had two "normal" children, husky boys who knocked her down and sat on the chest of her pressure suit until her mother called them away—clearly annoyed that Seles was such a problem.
In school on Palun, she had been taught by several active Separationists, who used her weakness as an example of why the heavyworlders should avoid contact with lightweights and the FSP. One of them, though, had told her of the only way in which throwbacks could justify their existence . . . by proving themselves true to heavyworlder interests, and serving as a spy within the dominant lightweight culture.
In that hope she had requested medical evacuation to a normal-G world, a request quickly granted. She'd been declared a ward of the state, and put into boarding school on Casey's World.
Sassinak realized that Seles must have gone to that strange boarding school at about the same age she herself had come to the Fleet prep school—within a year or so anyway. But Seles had had no Abe, no mentor to guide her. Bigger than average, stronger than usual (though weak to heavyworlders), she already believed she was an outcast. Had anyone tried to befriend her? Sassinak couldn't tell; certainly Seles would not have noticed. Even now her slightly heavy-featured face was not ugly—it was her expression, the fixed, stolid, slightly sullen expression, that made her look more the heavyworlder, and more stupid, than she was. She had been in trouble once or twice for figh
ting, she admitted, but it wasn't her fault. People picked on her; they hated heavyworlders and they hadn't trusted her. Sassinak heard the self-pitying whine in her voice and mentally shook her head, though she made no answer. No one likes the whiner, no one trusts the sullen.
So Seles had come from school still convinced that the world was unfair, and still burning to justify herself to her heavyworld relatives. In that mood, she had joined Fleet—and in her first leave after basic training, had gone back to Diplo. Her family had been contemptuous, refused to believe that she really meant to be an agent for the heavyworlders. If she'd had any ability, they told her, she'd have been recruited by one of the regular intelligence services. What could she do alone? Useless weakling, her grandfather stormed, and this time even her mother nodded, as her younger brothers smirked. Prove yourself first, he said, and then come asking favors.
On her way back to the spaceport, she had bought a kilo of poison—since its use on Diplo was unregulated, she had assumed that the heavyworlders were immune to it. She was going to kill all the lightweight crew of whatever ship she was on, turn the whole thing over to heavyworlders, and that would prove—
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