Gingerly, she unplugged the cable and padded across the room to try the outlet on the far wall. This time she watched the telltale on the transformer: red. All the outlets should have been the same, standard voltage for the standard items an officer might carry and use, including a cable to recharge implant batteries if necessary.
For an outlet to provide a dangerous over-current—enough to defeat the built-in transformer—could mean only one thing. It had been sabotaged with intent to injure or kill anyone who plugged an implant power cable into that outlet. And she was the only one who should use these outlets.
Her skin prickled; she felt the same hyperalertness as before a battle. Who had done this? When? Was she the only intended victim? How many outlets were compromised? She would have to find out without getting killed in the process. First, test other outlets that were supposed to supply normal voltage. She unplugged her cable again and made her way back up the passage. Marek still wasn’t back from his rounds, but he’d probably gone up to check the outside door. No one was in the kitchen; the breakfast crew wouldn’t be up for another several hours. The long steel tables and counters, the racks of utensils, the pots overturned in the drying rack gleamed under dim nightlights. The room smelled of soap and disinfectant.
She could see well enough without turning on the bright work lights, and walked to the far end, where a row of electrical outlets backed the work counter and smaller machines stood ready for the breakfast crew. Mixers, one with a dough hook and one with beaters, a bread slicer, toasters…she unplugged a mixer and plugged her cable into the same socket. Green light. So whoever had sabotaged her outlet hadn’t intended harm to everyone. Just her. She had an enemy.
She unplugged the cable, coiled it around her neck under her uniform again, and plugged the mixer back into the wall outlet. She didn’t want to contact Rafe now—not in this exposed place. First she had to find out when and how the sockets in her quarters had been altered. She had recharged her pin-light battery using the outlet near the bedside table herself, only a few days before. It would have burned out, if the current had been too high. So it had been all right then. Someone must have altered it since. Easy enough, as she was out of her quarters most of the time.
“Somebody in here?” Marek’s voice, a sudden flare of light as he turned the kitchen lights on full, startled her.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Ky said. Her heart was racing; she made an effort to keep her voice steady. “I was about to rummage around and make a cup of tea. Would you like one?” Even as she lied, she wondered why. She would have to tell him about the outlets; someone else might be hurt by plugging anything into one.
“Admiral.” His voice had an edge to it. “You’re the last person I expected to find sneaking around in a dark kitchen.” In her heightened alertness, she felt his words as a threat.
“That’s reassuring,” she said, putting a touch of humor in her voice. “I should have turned the lights on, but I thought the dims were bright enough. Since I haven’t found the tea tins, and ended up over here with the mixing machines—”
“A sergeant never forgets where the hot drinks and the kettle are,” he said. His voice seemed completely relaxed now, without the edge of suspicion she’d heard at first. But why suspicion? She was duty officer that night, with a perfect right to be anywhere. He walked over to one of the cabinets, opened it, and pulled out a square tin. “Here. And I’ll put the kettle on. And bring mugs.”
Ky took the tin and opened it. It held single-serving packets of several different tea varieties, including tik in packets carrying the Vatta brand logo. She hadn’t seen one of those for years; her gaze blurred for a moment and she almost plucked one out. Then she chose instead the green-marked packet of a competing brand. Two of those? Three? He might like his stouter than she did. She carried the open tin over to the counter beside the stove.
The kettle hissed as it heated. Marek came back with two mugs. “You don’t drink your own family’s tea?”
“I grew up on it,” Ky said. “By the time I went to the Academy, I was sneaking cups of other kinds, just for variety.”
“I can understand that,” he said. He rummaged in the tin, extracting a red packet with a yellow triangle on it. “Since you’re up, I can give you the latest report: nominal readings on all the gauges for power, water, ventilation. Nobody awake but you and me and Corporal Riyahn who’s on the outer door. I went up and looked out—it’s blowing a gale and I couldn’t see two meters, so nobody’s going to sneak up on us tonight. I told Riyahn he could barricade the door and move down to the first turn below, where it’s warmer. I checked the rooms again on my way down to this end, then heard an unexpected noise in the kitchen—”
“And came to check, as of course you should. Finding an admiral lurking in the dimness, wishing she didn’t have to fumble her way back to the main light switches to find tea.”
“You may be closer to sleep than you think. Unless tea keeps you awake.”
“Not me,” Ky said. “I grew up next to a tik plantation. Another reason to drink another kind. Tik tea can keep me awake; nothing else does.”
“And yet you couldn’t sleep. Want to talk about it?”
His voice was warm, calm, the voice of someone who could be trusted. Similar in tone to that of the many good senior NCOs who had been so important in her career. Or…the voice of someone who could seem trustworthy, the voice of a betrayer. Ky thought about the implications of the brand of tea he’d chosen. Did he know she knew that San Kreslan was a Miznarii corporation? She certainly knew Marek had no implant, though given the scars on his head that might be a medical issue. She’d assumed from the scars that was the reason Marek didn’t have one, but…maybe not.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a headache. It could be the weather; I used to get headaches at home when a storm was coming in. One reason to prefer life in a spaceship.” Her mind began throwing up scraps of memory, of Marek’s interactions from the shuttle crash on. Was he what he had seemed? Or something else? She couldn’t be sure. Precisely because he was the senior NCO, she had relied on him to act independently; he saw more of Jen Bentik than he did of her.
“You don’t use your implant to regulate your sleep?”
“Only before combat,” she said. “Then I set it to wake me up an hour and a half before we come out of FTL, and it makes sure I’ve had the sleep I need.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know as I’d trust something like that. All those electrics inside your head. But—you haven’t had any problems with it? Or could the headache be caused by it?”
“No,” Ky said. “As far as I know, implants can’t cause a headache. As for sleep, I need that function rarely. Most of the time, natural sleep works well enough. I don’t want to be overly dependent on it, after all.”
“Wise,” he said, and took another sip of his tea. “So at the Academy, it didn’t bother you not to have an implant?”
“No…well, a bit at first, like all those who’d had them. But I’d had only a child’s model. My parents wanted to upgrade mine at sixteen, but I knew by then the Academy required us to train without, so I refused. Thought it would be easier for me, and I think it was.”
“You probably don’t know this,” he said, “but I’m Miznarii. We don’t use any artificial aids.”
His voice was relaxed, but Ky noticed the little muscles around his eyes tightening.
“I noticed you didn’t have an implant,” she said, trying for the same relaxation of voice and posture. “But some people just don’t, one reason or another. A friend’s father had neurological damage from trauma and couldn’t use one.”
“It’s true Miznarii aren’t the only ones without implants,” Marek said. He seemed completely relaxed now. “I suppose, as much as you’ve traveled in space, you’ve met some?”
“Yes,” Ky said. “Though more who are opposed to more advanced humodification techniques, as well as those who use them.” She took another sip of her tea. “I’m sur
e you know about my departure from the Academy; I can assure you that I do not blame all Miznarii for the actions of one or a few.”
“I’m glad to know that,” he said. “I didn’t think you would, but—it’s reassuring.”
So was the unease she’d felt a reflection of his concern that she might distrust him for being Miznarii? Or something else? She wasn’t sure. She needed to be sure.
Ky left the kitchen ahead of Marek and went to the women’s section of the toilets. He went to the men’s section; she heard a flush and then his steps moving back out. She sat there, her thoughts running in circles to no useful conclusion, and then went back to her own quarters, nodding at Marek who was in the watch office entering something on the computer. She was even more awake now. It could not be—could not be—that a senior NCO in Slotter Key Spaceforce was a traitor. Someone in a lower grade, maybe, but Marek was so completely the good NCO, the responsible, competent senior on whom young officers and junior enlisted could depend. She could not believe he was anything else.
And yet. Facts, not belief, were needed here. She reviewed everything she knew and had observed of him from the moment she’d met him, pulling up details from her implant yet again. Nothing, no clue at all, in his demeanor when she met him first, or in the way he acted after the passenger module landed in the ocean. He hadn’t objected to her taking command, though he’d questioned it briefly. He’d been competent with the hatch and the slide, with the launch of the first and second rafts. Nothing at all to show he had been involved in the sabotage of the shuttle. Nothing in those first days in the rafts…a few times he’d disagreed, suggested something she hadn’t approved, but he’d accepted her decisions, and such single incidents weren’t unusual between an officer and a trusted senior NCO. And there her memory snagged on a detail.
The puffer fish and its spines…yes, it had come up under the other raft, the one with Marek and Jen in it. But in all the chaos that followed, why hadn’t he launched the spare raft until she yelled at him, and why had he inflated it inside the raft, where it blocked those who needed to get supplies and themselves into it before their own raft fell apart? He’d been talking to Jen—but once it was clear they were in danger, why didn’t he go on and act? Why didn’t he push the spare over the side before pulling the inflation ring?
The inflated spare and its canopy had cut off her view of most of the other raft; she’d heard Marek calling orders from the other side of it, but until Chok was able to drop the canopy, none of the wild throws at the spare raft accomplished anything. Surely Marek hadn’t intended that. Unless he wanted them to fail in the end. And that would include him; it would be murder and suicide.
And the secret of this base would have been secure.
Her implant brought up that one brief view she had of the gap in the raft’s floor, before the inflating spare raft blocked it. The outer layer hung down from a ragged tear that might have been the shark’s attack on the puffer; the inner layer showed a long, clean cut, as if made with a very sharp knife by an experienced hand. Had Marek or someone else panicked and cut the floor to let the fish free before it took the raft down? Who had actually made that cut? Why hadn’t Jen said anything?
Assume for the moment it was Marek. Why would he do that? And later—she went over the whole thing again, more slowly than before, querying her implant for details. That first narrow gash in the cliff wall, where he’d suggested they land: the rocks guarding the entrance to it had been clearly visible, the danger obvious. Granted he wasn’t from a sailing family, he’d said, but—he had been competent with knots, throwing hitches as fast as she could. Particularly in the aftermath of losing a raft and some supplies to—supposedly—the puffer-fish spines, why would he suggest trying to land there? Did he want them all to die?
He had argued briefly for continuing north, but had cooperated when she’d insisted on landing in that wider bay. He had not been the one pilfering rations—the evidence was clear that Vispersen and Lanca were to blame. Though—they’d had only three ration packets with them, and ten more had been missing. Yet she could not see Marek deliberately hastening the death by starvation of others.
But he’d been opposed to her exploration inland, even though it was clear they would run out of food where they were. Yes, dividing their forces to look for something better would have been foolish if they hadn’t already exhausted the resources they had. And yet…suppose he had known about the base. It would mean he was involved in some conspiracy within Spaceforce. If he’d been coerced into it, it could mean he—even his family—was at risk of retaliation if he didn’t prevent its discovery by others.
And since she’d told him about using the Rector’s code to get into the huts, he could have changed the code to keep them out of the main base. It could explain his stated concerns about the dangers of entering an unknown facility; it could explain his repeated suggestions that he—as an experienced hunter—should take her sidearm to go hunting one of the animals they’d seen. For that matter, how had he known she had one? Jen could have told him, maybe. His treatment of her aide, which had led Jen to praise him so often, could be an attempt to divide the two remaining officers.
But this was still all speculation. That he was a Miznarii didn’t disturb her; her family had no real bias against them. Saphiric Cyclans, whose beliefs were considered “weak” even by Modulans, regarded other religions as cultural elements, not threats. Vatta had Miznarii employees, both on ships and planetside. She had never blamed all Miznarii for that Miznarii cadet’s request or the trouble it caused her, even after learning he had been acting on orders from other Miznarii.
Every religion, she’d been taught, had some bad people in it. Even in Saphiric Cyclans, the religion of her childhood. Some distant cousin of her mother’s had made a fortune selling harmless but also useless extracts of a particular fungus as a cure for a half dozen conditions, all the while performing the Cyclans’ minimal rites with great devotion and precision.
But having met some violent anti-humods now, she had to admit concern about a Miznarii NCO whose behavior was more than possibly…odd. Troubling. Suppose this was a secret installation, and he was in on it. Suppose he was willing to breach it, or let others breach it, to save some of them…but not all. Who would be in the not all but the officers, especially the foreign, offworld officers, over whom he had no real influence?
Once she began thinking like this, she could not stop. Detail after detail came to her, and each one seemed as damning as the last. Particularly whatever had been done to the power sockets in her quarters…no one overpowered a socket unless they intended harm to a device or a person. His specialty code was E&C; he had to know the importance of delivering the right voltage to different parts of various devices. He knew electronics; he knew implants used low-power connections and probably knew that implant cables were never used in high-voltage sockets. And he might well assume that she would top up the battery for her implant once she was near a source of electricity.
Who else might have the right skill sets? She ran through the roster. Several of the others had some knowledge of communications, or some experience with electronics, but how could they get in and out of her quarters without Marek’s knowledge and connivance? He, like she and Jen, could go anywhere; the others would be noticed if they were out of place.
Only Marek had the skills and the opportunity. He had set a lethal trap; her avoidance of it wouldn’t stop him. And he had fooled her before; for her own sake and that of the others, she must not be fooled again. So a confrontation would come, inevitably, and best that it come when she was ready for it.
She took out her pistol and looked at it. She had cleaned it as best she could when alone in the hut up above; she had not yet, in the few days they’d been here, used the armory. Her ammunition clips still held a choice of rounds; she stared at them, thinking hard. She had no qualms about killing in general—she had killed before, in close quarters as well as at a distance, in space combat. But she had always
killed those she knew were enemies, those who openly attacked her first.
Her stomach roiled as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice. Killing in the moment of danger—facing a declared enemy—that was different. Now…she contemplated planning a killing, creating a situation in which she would have the advantage. And what if she was wrong? What if it was someone else? Even if right, how would she explain what she had done to the others? How could she expect them to accept it, with no proof at all? Yes, the outlets were delivering a high voltage, but as far as they knew, it might have been anyone, or it might have been high-voltage all along, for some special piece of equipment used by those who came seasonally.
And if she didn’t take the initiative, and he killed her? What then? Command was responsibility—she could not leave the others to whatever he decided to do with them. To what his bosses chose to do. She had to act to protect them as well as herself, to protect Slotter Key itself from whoever would intentionally crash a shuttle like that.
How would Marek analyze the threat she posed? Would he realize, from anything she’d said tonight, from her appearance in the kitchen, that she now suspected him? She must not walk into a trap; she must anticipate what he might do. The rewiring of outlets had been subtle, indirect, and if she had died, it very likely would not have been traced to him. Would his next attempt be something similar? A drug in her food or drink—or in everyone’s but his? Would he turn to direct violence? She wished she had his service record.
She looked down at her ammunition clips again and considered which was best to use, most effective, safest for anyone else who happened to be near. Chemstuns, frangibles, spudders, each with advantages and disadvantages. She made her choice.
With that choice, she felt relaxed enough to sleep. She padded over to her outer door in her socks and set the lock. He could break in, of course, but she set her implant’s security level to high. Any touch on either the door or the lock would wake her without revealing that to the person outside her door.
Cold Welcome Page 25
