Once a Hero

by Elizabeth Moon

  She left the big vidscan behind, without admitting to herself the reason. She didn't intend to come loose and drift away; it was just good sense to leave the vidscan where it would be easily found. The one built into her helmet would do well enough for this short excursion. She clipped the end of one of her long lines into the ten-meter safety ring, then edged along the scaffolding line to the hull itself. Her short safety line slid along the scaffolding line on its ring. The scaffolding line was anchored with a double pin-and-patch. She ran her long line through the ring that attached there, which took longer than simply clipping in, but was more secure.

  She put a boot on the hull and tested. Nothing. She had halfway hoped that Wraith's internal artificial gravity would give some adhesion, but it might not even be functioning. She could put short-stick patches on her boots, or she could just go on . . . it would be easier to go on, and she could always put the patches on if she couldn't make progress.

  She fished a stickpatch out of her toolband with her right hand, positioned it on the end of her gloved middle finger and gave the slightest push with her left hand. She slid to the end of her safety line, slowly. Reaching out cautiously, she touched the stickpatch to the hull; it adhered just as it was supposed to. Now she could stick a pin to the patch . . . she hoped. She left her right hand on the stickpatch, and fumbled for a pin. There it was. When she reached over slowly, her safety line tugged at her waist. She had definitely gone as far as she could go with that on. She got the pin stuck to the stickpatch with its own quick-setting backing, then opened a connecting ring, locked her long line into it, and clipped the ring into the pin's opening.

  The next move had a certain finality—when she unhooked her safety line from the scaffolding cable, she was depending on her own ability to set patches and pins. Caution reminded her that she was not a specialist in EVA work . . . that she would not have the right reactions if something went wrong. Esmay grinned at caution, alone inside her helmet. She had listened to caution and what good had it done her? First they thought she was dull, and then they thought she was a wild radical.

  It wasn't that different from climbing the rocks at the head of her valley, or the exercise wall in the Kos. Reach, place a stickpatch, a pin, clip into the pin, move past that protection to the next. Twenty pins along, and she was beyond the bulge of damage . . . though the bow shield outlet access points, which should have been smooth glossy nubs protruding a few centimeters from the hull surface, were instead jagged-edged holes. Esmay turned up the light on her helmet vidscan to examine them more closely. Something glinted, ahead of her. More debris—and surely Major Pitak would want a picture of it. She placed another pin, clipped in carefully and finger-walked herself nearer.

  Then tried to push herself back, and made a move violent enough to fling her off the hull, to hit the end of her line. She tried to swim herself into a position where she could see, where she wouldn't be flung back into the hull . . . what if there were two of them?

  Was she even sure of what it was? And even if it was, it could be the Wraith's own weapons, by chance stuck to its own hull by . . . by some reaction Esmay couldn't begin to understand. She forced herself to breathe slowly. Mine. It was a mine, exactly like the ones in the handbooks of enemy weaponry she'd been looking at in the supply ship on the way to Sierra Station.

  Meanwhile, she reeled herself in, hand over hand, coming in too fast to her last clip; she bumped the hull with bruising force, and would have bounced free except that she grabbed the pin and outward line in one hand and the inward line with the other and let her arms take the strain. Now she wished she had stickpatches on her boots—it seemed she hung there a very long time, bouncing back and forth. Finally the oscillations died down. With great care, she reached inward for the next clip, then unclipped from that pin. Twenty . . . twenty-two . . . twenty-seven pins in all, each requiring slow, careful movement to pass. She thought several times of using her suit comunit—but was that mine an emergency now? If no one else approached it before she warned them—and the scaffolding crew was still setting up their workspaces in the hull breach.

  When she made it back to the scaffolding cable and clipped on her safety line, she felt it must have taken a half-shift at least. But her chronometer didn't agree. Barely an hour had passed. She retrieved the big vidscan, and looked around for the scaffolding chief. She couldn't go back to the Koskiusko without warning someone here. She spotted him at last, and edged from line to line until she could tap his shoulder, and then the message board he carried. His helmet nodded. Quickly, Esmay drew a clumsy sketch of the bow—the bulge, then the location of the mine. MINE she printed in careful letters.

  He shook his head. Esmay nodded. He pointed to the big vidscan and drew a question mark. She had to shake her head, and point to the scan lens in her helmet. FOLLOW he signed, and led her along the scaffolding to a com nexus. While she was gone, they'd strung a direct line from ship to ship, and passed a wire into Wraith, so that the ships could talk without unshielded transmission. Esmay and the scaffolding chief both hooked their suits to the nexus.

  "What do you mean, mine?" the chief asked. "And what were you doing that far up the bow, anyway? Your safety line isn't that long."

  "You saw the bulge of damaged frame," Esmay said. "I went to scan it for Major Pitak. I put out stickpatch pins and clipped in. And when I got beyond the bulge, I was scanning damaged shield nodes . . . turned up my suit scan lights . . . and there it was."

  "A mine, you say." He sounded unconvinced.

  "It looks like the illustrations in the handbooks. Not one of ours, either. A Smettig Series G, is what it looked like to me."

  "What kind of fuse, did you see that?"

  "No." She didn't want to say it, but she couldn't leave it at that. "I tried to jump back and . . . lost contact with the hull."

  "So . . . you don't have full documentation?"

  "No." She didn't even know how much of the mine her scan had picked up. How long had she looked at it before panicking?

  "If it is a mine . . ." He sighed, the exasperated sigh of someone who does not want one more complication in a day already stuffed with complications. "Well . . . hell. I see you have to report it, and if it is a mine we'll have to do something . . ." His voice trailed off, someone who didn't know what to do next. He looked at her, and her intention to say anything vanished. She was an officer; it was her job to make decisions. This is what came of ignoring caution, she thought bitterly, as she tried to think who to report this to, aboard Koskiusko. The simple answer was Major Pitak, but an enemy mine stuck aboard a ship under repair wasn't simple.

  Pitak's reaction, when Esmay finally got her on the other end of the connection, was hardly reassuring. "You think you saw a mine . . . an enemy mine." Flat, almost monotone. "And you may or may not have gotten it on the vid . . . ?"

  "Yes, sir. I . . . pushed off too hard. I was afraid . . ."

  "I should hope so." That with more energy. "You know, Suiza, you do have an instinct for drama. An enemy mine. Not everyone would think of that."

  "Think?" She wasn't sure if she heard scorn or genuine amusement in the major's voice. Or something else.

  "Thinking is good, Suiza. Now the first thing you do, is tell the chief to get his crew the hell away from Wraith. Then you get your sorry tail back out there and get some decent vidscan of this putative mine. I hope you have enough air . . ."

  "Uh . . . yes, sir," Esmay said, after a quick glance at her gauges.

  "That's reassuring." A long pause, during which Esmay wondered if she was supposed to cut the connection and go. But Pitak wasn't quite through. "Now I'll go tell our captain to tell Wraith's captain that a totally inexperienced junior officer on her first real EVA thinks she saw an enemy mine stuck to his ship and while she didn't get any good pictures the first time, she is now taking pictures which, if the mine doesn't blow her up, may show us whether she's right. And give us a clue how to do something about it."

  "Yes, sir."

 
"That did not require an acknowledgement, Suiza. Can you think of any mistake you haven't made yet?"

  "I didn't set it off," Esmay said, before she could stop herself. A harsh bark of laughter came over the com.

  "All right, Suiza . . . send the crew home and go bring me some decent pictures. I'll see what I can do to scare up a bomb squad."

  The scaffolding chief was quite willing to take the orders of a junior officer; he scarcely bothered to utter a ritual grumble. Esmay didn't wait for the crew to leave. She fished out stickpatches for her boots, checking twice to be sure she had the kind that would not adhere permanently. She didn't want to be stuck there like an ornament. Then she used one of her safety lines and extra clips to sling the big vidscan on her back.

  This time the trip was easier, with the pins already in place, and the grip of her boots on Wraith's hull. She could walk part of the way between the pins, paying out line to herself from the clip before . . . it was easy to see, from this position, that she had not laid a straight course in the first place. She had angled across the bulge, rather than taking the shorter route straight forward. She didn't look at anything but the pins, the clips, the line itself, until she was almost at the twentieth pin. Then light flooded over her from behind, washing out the fainter light from her helmet, and she missed the pin. When she turned to look, her helmet visor darkened automatically; she could see that one of Koskiusko's big lights had turned away from the hull breach to search along the bows. Evidently Major Pitak had reached the captain. . . .

  She reached again for the pin, and clipped into it safely. In the brighter light, the edges of the shattered shield nodes cast jagged shadows that striped the hull's dull black. Things looked different now . . . she couldn't see the mine, but it had to be close. Another pin, and another, and another . . .

  EEEEERRRRP! Esmay jerked to a halt, and slammed her feet into the hull. The whiny, irritable, noise demanded her attention. A light flashed red in front of her . . . emergency . . . oh. She leaned her chin on the comunit switch.

  "Don't move," a voice said in her ear. "Look down, knee level, 10 o'clock . . . but don't move." Esmay looked down, half her gaze cut off by the helmet. Something . . . something moved. Something small, perhaps the size of her ungloved fist, dark and glossy, rising on a thin wire stalk that gleamed in the searchlight . . . she wanted to tip her head and see where it was coming from, though she knew without seeing. "Just don't move," the voice said again. "With any luck it will think you're part of the ship."

  Just as she opened her mouth to ask, the voice added, "And don't talk. We don't know what its sensor characteristics are."

  The little black ovoid on its wire—the programmable sensor pod of a smart mine—rose higher . . . she could see it clearly now, and presumably it could see her. Sweat sprang out on her whole body at once; it tickled abominably as it rolled down her ribs, down her belly . . . she wanted to scratch. Not as bad as she wanted to run.

  She was part of the ship. She was a . . . an automatic repair mechanism. Turned off at the moment, nonfunctional . . . she tried not to breathe as the sensor swayed nearer, sweeping in a conical pattern dictated by the stiffness of its wire stalk and the vibrations induced at its source. She had been in scan herself; she knew what such a small package might contain. It could already have matched her thermal profile to that of "human in EVA suit" if that was part of its programming. It could have recorded her skeletal density, her respiratory rate, even her eye color.

  And if it had done all that, she was already dead, she just hadn't been killed yet.

  The little pod on its stalk continued to revolve . . . but it was lower again. She didn't know what that meant. Would a smart mine bother to retract its sensor array before blowing up? She could barely see it now, above the sight rim of her helmet. Then it was below her vision . . . she was not tempted to bend over and look more closely.

  "Sorry, Lieutenant," came the voice in her ear again. "Our searchlight brought your shadow up past its threshold. But you were dead right—it's definitely a mine, and definitely an enemy weapon."

  Dead right . . . she didn't like that at all.

  "We've got a hazardous equipment assessment team on the way," the voice went on. "Just don't move."

  She had no intention of moving; she wasn't sure she would ever be able to move again. A few moments later, the tremors began, behind her knees; she struggled to control them. How sensitive was the sensor pod? Which little twitch might set it off? Reason suggested that she'd been moving more before, and it hadn't reacted . . . but reason had no control over her hindbrain, where panic danced its jig on her spine.

  She was very bored with being that scared by the time the voice spoke again.

  "You put down a good line, Lieutenant. Don't move . . . we're at the next pin, we can see you clearly."

  She wanted to turn and see them, see something friendly, even if that was the last thing she saw . . . but she did not move.

  "We're afraid if we douse the spotlight, that'll trigger another search sequence, and we don't know how it's programmed."

  The voice didn't have to say more; she remembered that some mines were set to go after a specific number of searches had been triggered, even if they didn't find anything. She might have triggered an earlier search, when she first flung herself away from the thing.

  "If we're lucky, it's looking for a match to something specific, which we don't resemble, but . . ."

  She wished the voice would shut up now . . . what if the mine reacted to minute vibrations carried through someone's suit? Even hers. Surely they had someone watching it . . . surely they had a plan. . . .

  "Wraith's given us an update on what's beyond the hull breach—they're evacuating personnel now." A pause; she tried not to think. Then, "How's your suit air? Give me a one-letter answer: A for ample, S for short, C for critical, then a number for minutes remaining."

  Esmay looked, and was startled to see how far down the gauge had gone. "S," she said. "Sixteen."

  "I'd call that critical, myself," the voice said. "Here's what we'll do. Someone's going to come up behind you, trying to match your profile and cast the same shadow, and pop on an external reserve. Don't move. He'll do all the hooking up from his end."

  "Yes, sir," Esmay said. Her eyes had locked onto the air gauge; the number flicked down to fifteen, and it was definitely in the red zone.

  "Breathe slowly," the voice said. "You're not doing any work; you may have longer than that."

  Fear burns oxygen. She remembered that, along with other pithy sayings. It was amazingly hard to breathe slowly because you needed to save oxygen . . . she tried thinking of other things. Would she feel the vibration of the person coming up behind her? Would the mine's sensor pod notice it? That kind of thought didn't help her take slow breaths. She tried to send her mind back to her valley, that favorite and reliable relaxation exercise, but when the gauge flicked to fourteen, she gasped anyway. Don't gasp. Don't look at the gauge. It will either go down to zero, or it won't.

  She did not feel the vibration; what she felt first was a tiny push that made her sway forward. She stiffened against it. Then something tapped the back of her helmet, and a new voice spoke in her ear.

  "Doin' good, Suiza. Just don't wiggle . . . while I . . . get this tank attached . . ." Random bumps and prods, which she tried to resist so that she wouldn't move enough to trigger the pod's notice. She eyed her oxygen gauge. Nine. Had she really been standing there waiting more than six minutes? Apparently so. The gauge flicked down again, to eight. She could hear clicks and squeaks from her suit as her unseen rescuer tried to hook up the auxiliary tank with the least possible movement.

  "Gauge?" asked the voice.

  She looked. Now it read seven. "Seven," she said.

  "Damn," said the voice. "It's supposed to—oh." She didn't know what that "oh" meant, and it infuriated her. How dare they mean whatever "oh" meant? An irritating scritch, repeated over and over, as she tried not to watch the gauge. It seemed a lon
g time, but it hadn't flicked down to six when the indicator whipped over to the green section.

  "Gauge?" asked the voice again.

  "Green," Esmay said.

  "Number," the voice said, with a bite of disapproval.

  Esmay swallowed the "uh" she wanted to make and blinked to focus on the number. "One four seven."

  "Good. Now I'm going to hook into your telemetry—you've been out more than your suit's rated for—"

  Another set of scritches; Esmay didn't care. She was breathing; she would not run out of oxygen.

  "Your internal temp's low," the voice said. "Turn up your suit heater."

  She complied, and warmth rose from her bootsoles. The tremor she'd been fighting to control eased—had it been only cold, and not panic after all? She wanted to believe that, but the sour smell of her sweat denied it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  "We have a problem, Suiza," said the voice in her ear. Esmay thought they could have said something more helpful. She knew they had a problem—she had a problem. "If that's the only mine, if it blows it will probably damage only those forward compartments, which as far as anyone knows are empty anyway. And you, of course."

  No comment seemed necessary.

  "We haven't spotted any other mines—but we can't figure out why there's only one. If there is only one."

  Did they expect her to figure it out?

  "It's not like the Bloodhorde, but there's no doubt that the ships that attacked were Bloodhorde ships. Came right in for the kill—Wraith got unequivocal scan data—and then broke off when Sting and Justice closed and started raking them."