But most of all, he could see Captain Harrington's reflection in the way Sandler cared for her people. And as he'd seen once, that made all the difference when the excrement hit the fan.
Which, he realized as they eased alongside the darkened, silent hulk that had once been the Manticoran merchant ship Lorelei, might be happening very soon.
"All right," Sandler said as the boarding party finished the checks on their hardsuits. "Jack, you and Jessie keep a close eye on the sensors. If Rafe's analysis is right, they might have someone lying doggo out there waiting to take a crack at us."
Even through his nervousness, Cardones felt a trickle of pleasure at Sandler's mention of his name. It hadn't been his analysis alone—certainly Sandler and Damana had each had a hand in it—but it was typical of her to give her subordinates credit where it was deserved. And Cardones was the one who'd first noticed that the mysterious lad with the super grav lance seemed to be focusing on high-tech cargo shipments.
If that was true, and not just an illusion created by too small a statistical sample, a small ship loaded with top-of-the-line ONI gadgetry might be too good a target for them to pass up. Indeed, Damana had speculated that a ship like the Shadow might actually be the true prize the raiders were going for, and the destroyed merchies merely the bait.
But if Damana was worried about that possibility, it didn't show in his voice. "Don't worry, Skipper, we're on it," he called back from the command deck where he and Jessica Hauptman were standing watch. "We can have the wedge and sidewalls back up in nothing flat if we need to."
"Right." Sandler swept her gaze around the group. "All right, people. Let's go take a look."
She led the way through the hatch, handling her SUT thruster pack like it was something she'd been issued at birth. Pampas followed, with Swofford and Jackson moving up close behind him. Cardones, as the second senior officer of the party, brought up the rear.
It was an eerie passage. Every ship Cardones had ever seen before had been manned by somebody, either its regular personnel or a refitting shipyard team or at least a skeleton crew. Some signs of activity, of a human presence, had always been present.
But the Lorelei had none of that. It was floating dead in space, alone and deserted, like a giant metal corpse.
Like a giant metal tomb.
He felt his flesh creeping beneath his suit. He'd seen dead bodies before, certainly, most recently those of his friends and shipmates aboard the Fearless. But there was something different about a military crew, somehow, with men and women who'd been trained for battle and had gone down fighting against an enemy of the Queen. The Lorelei's crew, in contrast, had had neither the training or the weapons.
And if Hemphill and the ONI analysts were right, by the time their attackers arrived, they hadn't even had the protection of an impeller wedge. Or any way at all to escape.
"Like sitting ducks," someone murmured.
"Yes," Sandler said grimly.
Only then did Cardones realize that the first voice had been his.
The carnage was as bad as he'd expected. To his mild surprise, though, his reaction turned out to be not nearly as bad as he'd feared.
For that, he knew, he had Sandler to thank. Instead of leaving him hanging, with nothing to do but stare at the floating bodies of the merchantman's crew and dwell on how they'd died, she had immediately ordered him to go with Pampas to examine the forward impeller nodes. At the same time, she'd sent Swofford and Jackson to the stern to look at the ones there.
Which, of course, left the grisly task of examining the dead solely to herself. Something else, Cardones thought as he and Pampas headed toward the bow, that Captain Harrington would have done.
The bow nodes looked just about the way impeller nodes always looked.
Pampas obviously saw the same thing. "No obvious damage," he reported as he drifted in front of the first node, fingering its surface like a phrenologist looking for bumps. "Guess we'll have to go deeper. Pop the tool kit, Rafe, and hand me a universal socket."
They stayed aboard the Lorelei for sixteen hours, approximately two hours past the point where Cardones's own brain began to fog over. Pride alone dictated that he hide his fatigue as he continued to assist Pampas, but apparently even ONI's supermen were subject to the same frailties as standard-issue mortals. As the last of those sixteen hours crawled past, the muffled curses at dropped tools or fumbled components grew steadily more frequent, until Sandler finally bowed to the inevitable and ordered everyone back to the Shadow for a hot meal and seven hours of sleep.
Seven hours and fifteen minutes later, they were back aboard the Lorelei.
And after twelve more hours aboard her, they had it all. Or at least as much they were going to get.
"There's not a lot I can tell you yet, Skipper," Pampas said tiredly as they gathered around the wardroom table with their steaming cups of coffee or tea or cocoa. "Not until we finish tapping into the rest of the diagnostic jacks and can build a complete system map. But the one thing that is clear is that all of them went down together."
"The forward and after groups both?" Damana asked.
"All of them," Pampas confirmed. "That alone tells us something new is going on here."
"Unless that's how a grav lance normally affects things," Jackson pointed out.
Sandler looked at Cardones. "Rafe?" she invited.
"It wasn't the way our grav lance behaved," Cardones said, shaking his head. "It didn't affect the Q-ship's impeller nodes at all, for one thing. And even in destroying their sidewall, it only took down the starboard side, the side nearest us."
"As far as you know," Hauptman put in pointedly. "Your sensors were pretty far gone by then, weren't they?"
"Yes, but they weren't so far gone that we couldn't get ranging readings as we pumped out our energy torpedoes," Cardones told her. "And the post-battle analysis of the destruction pattern clearly indicated that her port sidewall was still up when the torpedoes started ripping the guts out of her."
"Makes sense," Swofford murmured. "Just having that much metal between sidewall generators would make it hard for even a concentrated grav pulse to take out everything at once."
"Which makes this all the more ominous," Pampas said. "Something coming from the outside shouldn't be able to knock out every single node at the same time like it did."
"On the other hand, it's not like the nodes are running independently, either," Sandler pointed out. "In fact, aren't they pretty solidly interconnected, at least on a software and control level?"
"Right, but only on a software and control level," Pampas said. "You could bring down all the nodes at once by blowing the computer or frying the control lines, at least theoretically. But that's not what happened here. At least," he added, lifting his eyebrows questioningly at Swofford, "that's not what happened in the forward nodes."
"It's not what happened in the after ones, either," Swofford confirmed. "We took a good look at the control system before we started plugging into the diagnostics. None of the lines were fried."
"There is, of course, one other possibility," Cardones spoke up.
All eyes turned to him. "Yes?" Sandler prompted.
Silently, Cardones cursed the fatigue-driven fogginess that had made him open his mouth. It was such a ridiculous idea... . "It's a really slim possibility," he hedged. "I'm not sure it's even worth bringing up."
"Well, we won't know that until we hear it, will we?" Damana said reasonably. "Come on, we're too tired for Twenty Questions."