After the meal, Barin found his mind ticking over more calmly. Why had someone hounded Esmay out of the service now? The first word they’d had back from their families had been disapproving but not explosive. Had more evidence of Suiza perfidy shown up? He didn’t believe it. Serrano tempers blew quickly, and—in the absence of further hostile action—subsided almost as quickly. His grandmother had all the arrogance of flag rank, but she had always been fair.
As far as he knew. And, he had to admit to himself, he didn’t know her as well as he might. And the entry had said Admiral Serrano.
But his grandmother wasn’t the only Admiral Serrano. Hadn’t been, even before the current crisis that brought all the flag ranks back to duty. Had the entry even said which Admiral Serrano? He hadn’t really paid attention . . .
And he couldn’t now. Alarm sirens wailed in what he hoped was another one of the captain’s drills. He double-timed through one corridor, slid down a ladder, and made it to his assigned station well within the time limit. The senior rating handed him the comp, and he started calling out names: “Ackman . . . Averre . . . Betenkin . . .” When the senior lieutenant came around, Barin had his section ready for inspection, lockers open and p-suits in hand. The lieutenant received Barin’s report, and examined the p-suits as if he hadn’t inspected them the day before.
Barin was halfway down the bay when another siren whooped.
Combat, from the bowels of a cruiser, was either boring or fatal. He’d been told that from the Academy on up. He hoped very hard for boring. Barin had a damage-assessment team which he was in nominal charge of, thanks to the shortage of senior NCOs—that due, of course, to the mutiny and the failed rejuvenations. Having been taught from the cradle that junior officers are inevitably less expert than the NCOs they command, he had a good relationship with the petty officer assigned to his section, a man with solid qualifications in damage assessment and damage control.
For the next three hours, his team had no damage to assess. They checked and reported compartment temperatures, flow rates in various pipes, and a host of other readings that Barin knew were important, but which offered no clue at all to what was going on outside. The artificial gravity didn’t fluctuate, the lights didn’t flicker, nothing at all happened.
When the stand-down came, Barin made his final report to the Damage Control Officer and returned to his regular duties. He was trying to read up on damage assessment and damage control—the junior officers’ course for command track had nothing about it, and he found it heavy going.
“It’s not that hard, sir,” one of the few remaining master chiefs told him. “Basically you’ve got stuff in pipes and stuff in wires, plus of course your air and your gravity.”
“It’s all the different kinds of stuff in the pipes,” Barin said. “And it says here that compartments may be filled with smoke or steam or—”
“Most likely’s water vapor condensation, if there’s a pressure loss,” the chief said.
“So how are we supposed to know which pipe is which if we can’t see it?”
“Well, now, that’s why you’re supposed to know your section from the frames out. Of course, if they need you somewhere else—”
“Chief, have you ever been in a ship that was badly damaged?”
“Once from enemy action—back in the first Patchcock mess—and once from an idiot coming back from leave and showing off. He managed to knock a hole in a hydraulic line down in the shuttle bay; he’d have been up for discipline except the leak went right through him.”
“A leak?”
“High-pressure line, son. See, he’d brought back a needler his cousin gave him for some holiday or other—which was against regs, of course. And he hadn’t checked the ammunition that came with it—which was, we found later, the heaviest his cousin could buy. His cousin figured somebody on a cruiser needed something that could make holes in the hull, apparently—well, not quite, but almost. Anyway, this fool had to show it to a buddy of his, and they got to playing around, and sure enough—PING. Right through the lift line. Out came a jet, drilled right through him, down came the shuttle onto the deck a good bit harder than it should, and that popped two tires; a piece of one hit another guy in the head, and another piece hit a fellow holding a torch. Couldn’t blame him for dropping it, when his arm was broke, but the torch caught something—I forget what—on fire. So then we had a fire, and a hydraulic leak, and since the hydraulic fluid was vaporized by coming out at such a pressure, what do you think happened?”
“It blew up,” Barin said.
“That’s right, it did. Old Harkness that was, who’d survived two full-scale engagements with Benignity battle groups, and because of one stupid idiot, she was scrap. Explosion in shuttle maintenance. But that was only the beginning. In those cruisers—and Harkness is one reason they’re built different now—all the maintenance functions were clustered for efficiency. That included a warren of shops and parts storage lockers and so on, and—again for efficiency, as they saw it—the main nexi for electrical. We didn’t just have one fire, or one explosion—captain finally had us cut away the weapons storage—thinkin’ every minute the fire would reach us and we’d go up same as others already had—and jettison the whole thing. We fought it for over twenty-eight hours, and at the end we had barely life-support for the remaining live crew. Over three hundred dead, ship completely disabled—they had to take us off in p-suits, transfer us to another ship . . .”
“Hydraulic fluid,” Barin said. “I didn’t know it would burn.”
“They’ve tried and tried to get something that will work better and be less flammable, but so far—if you vaporize it, and light it, it will go up. And don’t forget, it’ll slice you like a laser scalpel.” The master chief sucked his cheeks for a moment. “Now the other,” he said. “That wasn’t so bad. Hull breach, but a cold one—heavy missile got through, but it misfired. A bit ticklish getting it out, and the poor fellows in there had died, but not nearly as bad. The only real problem was a youngster who wanted a souvenir, and was workin’ away at the fusing access, so’s he could get it off and hide it in his locker before we got there. Old Master Chief Meharry just about took his head off then and there. Could have blown us all up, he could.”
Barin wondered if that Meharry was related to his aunt’s crewmember, Methlin Meharry.
“Here—this is the best data-cube course we have,” the master chief said, handing it to Barin. “You learn most from the trouble you live through, but that cube’ll take you a bit farther than the others.”
“Thanks,” Barin said, and resolved to spend every spare moment with it. He would know everything about Troop Deck, from the hull to the plumbing.
What had actually happened in the battle wasn’t clear until well into the next day, when the captain made an announcement to the crew. “We came out of jump to find a couple of mutineers—the admiral expected that, so we had everything hot. They were mining the jump point, but we blew through the first cordon with no damage, and all enemy ships are destroyed. We’re credited with half a kill.”
Barin wondered how they knew the other ships were mutineers—if they had stopped to ask questions, the battle might have been more even, and far more dangerous for him.
The battle group would stay insystem long enough to pick up the loose mines, then mine the jump point with its own, programmed to accept the changed Fleet IDs which the mutineers shouldn’t have.
Chapter Six
Brun Meager stroked the length of the pool, and splashed water on the woman lounging beside it. “Kate—come on in. You’re being lazy.”