She shook her head. “Captain, I couldn’t fill a single watch with experienced weapons personnel. It’s as if they just grabbed everyone within reach to fill out the numbers. However, the most experienced NCO tells me that if we’re granted a few weeks for training, we should do reasonably well.”
As if time would just hold still until they were ready.
“Kick ’em along faster,” Heris told her. “We may not have a few weeks. And if you find someone else aboard with more weapons training, who was misassigned, come tell me about it. We may have to shift people around.”
“We’re short of replacement parts, too,” Winsloe said. “We’d be shorter if I hadn’t spotted the last load departing just as I came aboard. Contractor claimed it was his, but I took the liberty of requisitioning it.”
“Good work, Commander,” Heris said.
She let her gaze move on, to Lt. Commander deFries, the senior navigator.
“I’ve been on cruisers, most recently Royal Reef. But the last time I saw action was in Clarion, during the Patchcock mess.”
“Have you had microjump weapons-track drills recently?”
“No, sir. And I was only third nav officer at Patchcock. However, I did bring aboard a full set of training sims, and four of my enlisted personnel have more recent combat experience than I have.”
That was something, and he had showed initiative in the right direction. “Good . . . I’ll be ordering some dry drills with other ships. Have you contacted their navigation officers?”
“No, sir. We hadn’t been told that we would be traveling with other ships.”
Damn secrecy. “We’re to take a small group out—the ship names are now on the command board, so you’ll want to liase with their navigation officers when we’re done here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Major Foxson . . . let’s hear about you.”
“Captain, all my service has been on cruisers of this class; I was on Imperator last and was transferred here because I’d been through the drives refitting on Imp, and they thought I’d be good to take over Indy’s new drives.”
Heris had never liked the fashion of truncating ships’ names, but that wasn’t enough to set her against her senior engineering officer. “So what do you think of them?”
“A definite improvement over the old, Captain, but they rushed the last part of the job, what with the mutiny. Your insystem’s fine, but the FTL drive isn’t quite balanced. It’ll get us there, but it’ll leave a marked signature. And my guess is, it’s going to degrade over time. We should have quite a flutter after a dozen long jumps or so.”
“Why’d you accept it, then?”
“Sir, I came aboard two days after the refit crew signed off on it, or I wouldn’t have. And I can’t say it’s not safe—there was the same modification to Imp, and while the trials showed our scan trace looking like a skip-jumper, the ship herself was steady as a rock, and it never failed. That was two years ago, Standard—they did take it back in and fix it, but now, with the mutiny and all, I imagine they’ll refuse to delay.”
He was probably right. And after all, he was coming along; if the drive failed and stranded them in some strange corner of the universe, he’d be there too.
That left Elise Donnehy, who had had cruiser duty six years before, but since then had worked with environmental systems design for deepspace repair ships. She cheerfully admitted to having forgotten which pipes ran where, though she insisted she could pick it up again fast.
Heris wanted to bang her head on the desk in sheer frustration, but she knew better. The lives of her little flotilla depended on her ability to tolerate frustration and make silk purses out of very crooked sows’ ears. She could have done it with her old crew, or for that matter with any capable crew used to working together. She shook her head. No use thinking what might have been, she had the resources she had, pitiful as they were.
The other ships in the group seemed less disorganized than her own. At least that meant she had the worst problems closest at hand, where she could work on them directly.
An hour before mid-third shift, Heris’s alarm went off, waking her from a pleasant dream in which she and Petris chased each other along a beach, in and out of warm, clear wavelets . . . the whole setting looked like a travel poster, in shades of blue and turquoise and white. She groaned and pushed her face back into the pillow for a moment. But she was awake . . . and now that she was awake, she remembered why she’d set the alarm. The environmental parameters at the start of first shift were always off, though the record books had been neatly initialled beside a record of perfect values all through third shift.
Heris splashed cold water on her face from the carafe of ice water she kept beside her bunk and put on a clean uniform. If one was going to appear like the wrath of gods to a slacking third-shift crew, a clean uniform enhanced the effect. Seabolt’s natural knife-crease style would have worked, but Seabolt was convinced the initialled log sheets meant something was wrong with the machinery.
Heris clipped on her tagger and comunit—bridge had to know where the captain was—and pulled a pair of softies over her uniform boots. Most third-shift crew wore softies, to reduce noise, and it certainly made sneaking up on wrongdoers easier. She went aft, meeting—as she expected—no one at that hour in officer country. Down the nearest personnel ladder, one deck . . . two . . . and out into the port passage of Environmental, where the distant rhythmic thump of the pumps became audible.
She stood a moment, listening, feeling it through the soles of her feet and with one finger on the bulkhead, a trick she’d been taught as a jig by a grizzled master chief. Open the mouth . . . turn the head from side to side . . . and irregularities in the pump could be diagnosed from here. It all sounded normal, though.
She turned to her left, and saw that the hatch to the personnel lock separating the main port passage from the main starboard passage was open. She looked at the status telltales: all four green. Not good; someone had left the whole lock open, as a convenience . . . and a very definite danger. She looked at the hatch mechanisms—they should have closed the hatches automatically, but someone had stuck a stylus in the mechanism to hold them open. And . . . someone had put a stickypatch over the sensor that should have picked up the telltale lights.
Seabolt would assume sabotage and conspiracy, but Heris knew laziness was far more likely. Someone didn’t want to wait while the locks cycled properly to give access from one side to the other—she’d find the forward lock jammed open too, no doubt. Instead of walking the complete round to make the required checks, someone was darting through to sign off the log at the other side.
Heris stepped back through to the port passage, pulled out the roll of tactape and laid a strip on each of the five bottom rungs of the ladder and along the underside of the handholds, just where fingers would grip. Then she went back in the lock, removed the stylus from that hatch, swung it closed, and dogged it behind her. She put a line of tactape on the wheel, very carefully. She left the stickypatch alone, went into the lock itself, closed and dogged that hatch and marked its wheel with tactape.
Coming out the starboard side of the lock, she couldn’t dog the hatches behind her, but she put a line of tactape under each pull, shutting the hatches so the next user would have to pull them open.
It was pure guess which corridor the slack Environmental crew would be in, but in either case she should be able to find them before the midshift bell . . . and if she didn’t, they’d respond to that with the usual report. She opened the service hatch at the end of the starboard compartment and found—as she should—nothing but the great rounded haunch of one of the settling tanks. She closed the hatch carefully, and headed back forward as quietly as possible, listening for anything but the heavy heartbeat of the pumps, the whoosh and gurgle of liquids, the hiss and bubble of gas exchange.