“Go on,” said Kouras. “I’m senior.”
“Good luck,” said Hartung, struggling into a suit along with the last of her group.
“Vallance, get that suit on,” Hartung directed one of her people. She waved as the others pushed into the lock, and sent four of her group to the other lock, which would cycle next.
“Comm crew coming!” yelled someone from the left-hand corridor. “Open up for ’em.”
But only two remained, dragging one wounded who turned out to be dead. Kouras’s first four suited and exited, then the first lock opened again. She put the comm crew into suits, then—as she turned to point to the next to go—they heard screams from the corridors, hardly understandable but clear enough even without words. “Too many—perimeter’s gone! Go!!”
Kouras’s heartfelt expletive was calmer than that. Then she nodded to the two men who had already volunteered to be rear guard. “Give us every second you can, and thanks.”
That left her, and Anseli, and Miranda. “You and you,” Kouras said. “I’m staying.”
Miranda’s head cleared. “No,” she said. “I’m staying.”
Kouras’s face twisted. “I don’t have time to argue with any idiot civ—get in that suit.”
“I got you out—I earned this,” Miranda said. “You know I can kill—” She wrenched Kouras’s weapon away and shoved her toward the suits. “Take care of that kid.”
“Miranda . . .” That was Anseli. Miranda gave her a look she hoped mirrored the petty officer’s.
“Do what you’re told, Pivot. Don’t waste this.”
She had the weapon, she had the target . . . she had the chance to be someone she had never allowed herself to be. Flattened to the bulkhead, waiting for the enemy, she felt supremely happy, and very much in touch with her lost children and the love of her life.
Cecelia’s luck ran out before she had completely immobilized the patrol. A flechette holed her suit; the automatic setfoam shut off the vacuum leak, but before she could do anything, another mutineer’s riot weapon wrapped her in tangletape. He held the trigger down until she was entirely covered and motionless, then she judged by the nauseating rotation that they were using her for cover as they advanced on the loyalists by the shuttle bay.
The rotation went on and on; she willed herself not to vomit in the suit and tried to pretend she was jumping a series of no-strides with her eyes closed for some reason. It seemed an eternity before the rotation stopped.
Cecelia woke up to find herself being yelled at by someone from a great distance.
“CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
“I can hear you,” she said, not in the mood to shout back.
“She’s awake,” came more quietly. “Get the rest of that stuff off her suit . . .”
“What stuff?” asked Cecelia, then she began to remember. The fall out of FTL, then the capture, then the mutineers’ ship, then the attempt to escape. “I hope you’re the good guys,” she said. Someone chuckled, and it was a nice chuckle.
“Well, we think so.” Definitely Chief Jones. “We’re in a troop shuttle, off the ship . . . but we have a little problem.”
“Oh . . . ? Is Miranda all right?”
A silence that lasted a beat too long, then Jones’ voice again. “No. She refused . . . they were one suit short.”
“She got Anseli out, didn’t she?” asked Cecelia. She could just see a blur of light swiping back and forth across her suit’s faceplate, as if someone were cleaning it of the opaque glue.
“Yes. And told Kouras to get out, and Kouras did.”
“Good decision,” Cecelia said. “Can you get me out of this suit?”
“Once we get the tangle stuff off it.”
Cecelia emerged from the confines of the suit feeling as sweaty and dirty as if she’d just ridden a major event. The troop shuttle’s interior looked stark and unpromising—a long open space with racks along the sides for weapons and suits and other equipment she didn’t recognize.
Several of the survivors of the breakout were wounded, propped on pieces of suit, being tended by their fellows. Chief Jones beckoned Cecelia forward.
“The problem we have, sera, is that not one of us is qualified to pilot this thing. Or any other ship. We were hoping you could, but you were so tangled up when we found you, that we didn’t dare wait. We had one sergeant who had a license for a surface-to-orbit before he joined Fleet, but he hadn’t passed the Fleet aptitude test and hadn’t handled anything like this . . . He got us out the door, but he’s unfamiliar with the navigation system and hasn’t a clue what to do next. You’re qualified, right?”
“For a ship like my own, yes. For this one . . .” Cecelia looked around, and bit back the suggestion that they should have asked her what she could pilot before picking a ship. “I suppose you took the one nearest the hatch,” she said finally.
“Yes. There’s an automatic launch, that sort of throws them out . . . this was sitting on it. So what I was hoping—”
“Was that I had somehow acquired proficiency in flying Fleet combat troop shuttles. Well . . . I suppose I can try.”
“Are you sure you weren’t ever military?” The unspoken sir hovered just off the end of that question. Cecelia grinned.
“Not me. But it wouldn’t do me or any of us any good for me to sit here howling, now would it?”
Chapter Thirteen
Despite Heris’s sense of urgency, she took her flotilla through the intermediate jump points with all due caution, checking ansible activity along the way. Nothing more from the ansible at CX-42-h and the only word from HQ was “Proceed with caution.” Heris would like to have arrived at CX-42-h in an off-axis insertion, but the erratic planetoid made that too risky. So she ordered a textbook insertion and hoped the mutineers—if they were there—hadn’t had time to mine the entrance.
She missed Koutsoudas most at times like these, when insertion blur robbed her of eyes at the moment they were most vulnerable. But the scan finally cleared—it had been only a couple of minutes after all—and the navigation board came up with a perfect match for the chart, except that the erratic planetoid was a degree off from where it should have been.
“Ship?” she asked.
“One . . . masses a cruiser . . . no ID yet.”
“Mutineers could have disabled the ID.” No Fleet cruiser should be here; the last ansible download had given her all cruiser locations in this sector, and this wasn’t one of them. “What’s its course?”
“It’s . . . zero acceleration relative to system, Captain.” A worried note in that voice. “Drives appear to be shut down. They may be trying to lie doggo.”
Thank the gods for small mercies. “Weapons?”
“Nothing lit, Captain.”
“Is that the only vessel insystem?”
“The only thing that size—the search program’s on . . .”
Indefatigable continued its own deceleration, in company with its companions.
“Captain, I have a tentative ID—”
“Go ahead.”
“It’s based on just the mass data—”
“Go ahead!”
“Well . . . it’s the same class as the Bonar Tighe. We have to get a lot closer before I can be sure.”
“Our beacon’s transmitting, isn’t it?”