Her temper bucked, like one of the green colts in training, and she rode it down, hoping her eyes showed none of the strain.
“I think with a little more experience you won’t either think or say things like that, Jig Callison,” Esmay said in the mildest tone she could manage. Callison turned red, and looked down. Someone snickered; she didn’t spot who.
Conversation, naturally, died, and she pretended to eat the rest of her dinner. When the senior lieutenant tapped on his glass for attention, Esmay felt more relief than curiosity. She found it hard to keep her attention on the announcements of who had the duty, and almost missed her introduction. She stood, off-balance mentally if not physically, and nodded to the faces that seemed only pale and dark blurs.
After the meal, she left for her quarters as soon as she could. She was annoyed with herself for her immediate prickly response to the mention of the Serrano name. And why was she so blurry? Usually she could focus on new people without much trouble.
When she thought about it, she realized that she had actually run about thirty standard hours without sleep. Her transport ship had come in on its own schedule, skewed a full shift and a half from the Koskiusko. Shiplag . . . luckily she never had much trouble with it. One night’s sleep seemed to rearrange her internal timer . . . but right now she wanted that sleep badly. She wasn’t on the watch schedule yet, so she set her personal timer to allow ten hours.
Her compartment filtered out most of the noises . . . she could just hear the bass thump of someone’s music cube, DUM-da-DUM-DUM, over and over. She didn’t like it, but it wouldn’t keep her awake. She logged off the status board, and stretched out on her bunk. She had just time to wonder if she would have nightmares when she fell asleep.
Beside her, Peli leaned out to toss a gasser into the passage. A blue line traced the air just above his head and he jerked back. Esmay pressed the filters snugly into her nostrils and peered through the helmet visor. When the smoke obscured normal vision, her helmet sensors gave her a wiggly false-color view of the corridor. She snaked out into it, hoping that whoever’d been shooting at them didn’t have a similar helmet. They thought they’d gotten to the locker before the traitors, but none of the juniors knew how many helmets were supposed to be in that locker.
Ahead, someone braced into an angle of a hatch, weapon at ready. Esmay couldn’t see the features, but she could hear, with the clarity provided by the helmet external pickups, the words “Get this bunch of little fuckers, and we’ll have only Dovir to worry about—”
She braced her own weapon and fired. The wiggly pink—and-green image blew apart; something wet and warm splashed her arm. She ignored it. Through the dense stinging fog, she slithered on, attention focussed on the helmet’s input . . . aware that behind her Peli and the others followed, that somewhere Major Dovir still led the few other loyalist officers . . . .
The fog lifted in ragged wisps . . . ahead she could see the scorched lines on the bulkheads . . . she did not look at the deck except when she had to, when she would have fallen over the obstructions . . . but even so she saw them. Heaps of old clothes, dirty and stained, scattered here and there . . . she would not think of it now, she would not, later was soon enough . . . .
She woke in a sweat, heart pounding. Later. Later was now, when she was safe. She turned on her bed light, and lay staring at the overhead. They had not been heaps of clothes; she had known it even then. Her father had been all too right—warfare was ugly, no matter where. Guts and blood and flesh stank the same in a spaceship as in the aftermath of a street riot. And she herself had added to that stench, that ugliness. She and the other juniors had fought their way up the ship, onto the bridge, where Dovir, mortally wounded, held the command chair after Hearne was dead. Dovir, his guts slipping out of his hands, had given her that one glazed look . . . his voice, struggling for control, as he gave his last orders . . . .
She blinked, trying not to cry. She had cried; it didn’t do any good. She felt slimy all over, the sweat cold and slick now, the bedclothes damp and tangled around her. It reminded her of her aunt’s description of menopause, waking up sweaty and then having cold chills. Or something like that. She forced her mind back to this place and time. Thinking about home wouldn’t help her at all.
According to the chronometer, she had slept a solid seven hours. She could try for another short nap . . . but experience suggested that she wouldn’t really sleep. Better would be a shower—it was late third shift on this ship—and an early start on the working day.
No one was in the big shower room; she let the hot water warm her and wash away the fear-stink. As she came back down the passage, she heard someone’s alarm go off. Not hers—she had carefully shut hers off. Then, from down the passage, another alarm. She made it into her compartment before those alarms stopped, and when she emerged, it was to find two bleary-eyed ensigns on their way to the showers, and a jig leaning on the bulkhead folding down the top flap of his uniform boot.
“Sir!” they all said, coming to more or less upright posture. Esmay nodded, feeling the momentary glow of virtue that accompanies an early rising, clean teeth, and the evidence that one’s associates are still half-asleep.
She did not let herself dwell on that. She had work to do—not only learning the ship, as Major Pitak had said, but figuring out why the major’s data cube and the ship’s records were so different. All that day, except for hurried meals, Esmay mapped the real ship against two dissimilar records. Major Pitak’s data cube was right except once, far in the bow end of T-1, Deck Thirteen, when neither fit the reality. A hatch had disappeared completely, replaced by a bulkhead painted in garish stripes. As Esmay stood there, wondering what the pattern meant, a bald senior chief bustled out of the nearest cross-passage, and hurried toward her.
“What are you—oh, excuse me, sir. Can I help you find something?”
Esmay had not missed the tension . . . something was clearly going on. But it was not yet her job to find it. She smiled instead. “I’m Lieutenant Suiza,” she said. “Major Pitak told me to familiarize myself with the entire ship by 0800 on the 27th, and I thought there was a hatch up here to the electronics warehouse facility.”
“Oh . . . Major Pitak,” the man said. Evidently Major Pitak was well known outside her own bailiwick. “Well, sir, the ship’s database hasn’t caught up to renovations. The electronics warehouse access is up that way.” He pointed. “I’ll be glad to show you.”
“Thanks,” Esmay said. As they turned away, she said “This bulkhead pattern—is it something they didn’t teach us, or—?”
A red flush went up the back of his neck. “It’s—probably unique to DSR ships, Lieutenant. They’re so big, you see . . . the captain’s permitted some nonreg markings to keep newbies oriented.”
“I see,” Esmay said. “Very sensible—I’ve gotten lost several times already.”
The red flush receded; she could hear relaxation in his voice. “Most people do, Lieutenant. That pattern just lets people know that what the ship’s schematics show isn’t there any more—they haven’t gone the wrong way, exactly, but the way’s changed.”
Something about the intonation of that almost put a capital letter on “way.” Esmay stowed that slight emphasis for later consideration, and followed the chief outboard, then forward again, to a hatch clearly labeled Electronics Warehouse Facility. Under that official label was another.