Seeing that Desjani wasn’t about to abandon her line of attack, and knowing that she indeed had a point, Geary played his last card. “Tanya, there are sailors and Marines aboard that ship by my command. I sent them there. Are you saying that I should avoid doing something I am willing to order those under my command to do?”
This time she gave him an aggravated look under a furrowed brow. “Using good leadership principles against me? That’s low.”
“If you really want me to be a bad leader…”
“Oh, knock it off!” She tapped some commands. “You’ll be using one of Dauntless’s shuttles.” That came out as a statement of fact rather than a question.
“Of course.” He knew better than to point out that she had given in. “Do you want any souvenirs?”
“From that thing?” Desjani’s shudder didn’t seem to be feigned. “No thanks.”
Admiral Lagemann met him at the main air lock into the occupied area aboard Invincible. Lagemann saluted briskly, grinning at Geary. Next to him, a Marine major saluted as well, the Marine’s gesture far more polished and precise. “Welcome aboard Invincible, Admiral Geary,” Lagemann said. “This is the commander of my Marine detachment, Major Dietz. I have to confess the ship is not quite ready for inspection. There are a few discrepancies.”
“Oh? Discrepancies?” Geary asked, picking up on Lagemann’s joking tone of voice and trying himself to sound like certain self-important inspectors he had dealt with in the past.
“All ship systems are nonfunctional,” Lagemann explained cheerfully. “There is extensive unrepaired battle damage in most areas. The ship cannot move under her own power, and in fact has no power except for portable emergency systems. Most of the ship is uninhabitable and requires survival suits or combat armor for access. The crew is a tiny fraction of that necessary for safety, security, and operation. As you can tell, there’s no working gravity. And, um, the brightwork hasn’t been shined.”
“I can understand the rest,” Geary said with mock severity, “but unshined brightwork? Where are your priorities?”
“My priorities have always been misplaced,” Lagemann confessed. “I volunteered for duty on this ship when I could have stayed comfortable on Mistral. I did spend quite a few years in a Syndic prisoner-of-war camp, though, which wasn’t all that comfortable, and at least Invincible doesn’t have Syndic thugs watching my every move.”
Geary finally smiled. “How are your crew holding up?”
“Could be worse. They volunteered, too, which I remind them of if the complaints get too loud.”
“What about the Marines, Major Dietz?” Geary asked.
The Major made a gesture of nonchalance. “They’ve been in worse places, and they all volunteered, too, Admiral. Of course, the Marines did that volunteering the day they joined, so we didn’t ask regarding this particular assignment.”
Admiral Lagemann and Major Dietz led Geary through the compartments occupied by the human sailors and Marines, everyone pulling themselves along through zero gravity by means of handholds either put into place by the Kicks or fastened on by humans since they had moved in here. Temporary cable runs carrying power, communications relays, and sensor data were strung everywhere, as were larger tubes that provided ventilation, heating, cooling, and recycling of the air inside this small part of Invincible, so that the atmosphere remained breathable. As Lagemann had warned, there were a lot of places where overheads came down too far and threatened to dent skulls. Geary also found numerous spots where the accesses narrowed enough that he had to move through them with care, scraping slowly past the life-support tubes and cable runs that made the openings even tighter. “This brings home more than anything how much smaller the bear-cows are than us,” Geary commented.
“Fortunately,” Lagemann replied, “it’s actually a little easier for us to get around without gravity. We can wriggle through some places up high that would be a pain to reach if we were walking. And the Kicks may be small, but this is a damned big ship. I’ve been on my share of human battleships and battle cruisers, including a Syndic battle cruiser that picked me up when I was captured by them. You know some passages on those seem to go on forever. But Invincible… I swear that sometimes it feels as if the bow is in one star system and the stern is in another.”
The small group had paused at one of the temporary air locks leading into the rest of the ship. “How are you keeping an eye on things outside this area?” Geary asked.
“We’ve got sensors strung into some portions of the ship,” Lagemann replied. “For the rest, patrols.”
“That is,” Major Dietz continued, “security patrols that follow paths worked out by our systems to cover every compartment and passageway at least every few days. Some of the patrols take more than half a day.”
“How big are the patrol teams?”
“Full squads, plus one or two sailors. They do full safety and security scans.”
Geary felt his eyebrows rising in surprise. “That’s a lot of people for patrols of empty spaces. Has there been trouble?” One thing he had learned early on as a junior officer was that sailors could be counted on to seek out compartments where they could find privacy for various activities prohibited by rules and regulations. On most ships, compartments like that were hard to find, but on Invincible there was a remarkable number of them.
Major Dietz and Admiral Lagemann exchanged glances. “There hasn’t been any problem with people wandering off on their own,” Lagemann explained. “Not after the first few days.”
“Why not? Even if people didn’t plan doing something they didn’t want to be caught at, I’d think there’d be an urge to explore.”
“Not on this ship,” the Major said. “They’re out there. In the passageways.”
“Who’s out there?” Geary asked, feeling a slight chill.
“The Kicks,” Lagemann said. “I don’t think I’m particularly sensitive or superstitious, but I can feel them. Thousands of them died on this ship, and if you go out there in the rest of the ship, you can sense them crowding around you. They know we took their ship, and they don’t like it.”
Major Dietz nodded. “I’ve been in abandoned enemy installations before, the kinds of places where you keep feeling like whoever left will come back at any moment and be really unhappy to find you there. That’s a little spooky. This ship is a lot worse. We send out squad-strength patrols because that’s the smallest group that can keep from going buggy while they’re out there. We tried fire teams for a while. A couple of Marines. They ended up firing randomly, running back to the occupied area with stories of hundreds of Kicks still aboard and alive, that sort of thing.”
“Was it worse in jump space?” Geary asked.
“Now that you mention it, yes, sir. But even here, in normal space near a star, it’s spooky. Nobody goes off on their own. Not more than once.”
“That’s strange. We’ll get this ship back home and let the scientists and techs dispute control of it with whatever remains of the Kicks.”
“We’ve speculated,” Admiral Lagemann said, “that it might be some sort of side effect of some Kick equipment that’s still running somehow. Like the way a high-pitched whistle can make a dog unhappy, only it’s something that works on human nerves in an unpleasant way. Like virtual fingernails scraping on an imaginary chalkboard. Or it could be ghosts. Damned if I know.”
“Be sure you put your speculation about Kick equipment into your report when you leave the ship,” Geary directed. “Could it be some sort of last-ditch defense? Some means the Kicks could activate that would make occupancy of this ship untenable for their enemies?”