Chapter Ten
“Looks like you came prepared,” Major Pitak said, as Esmay lugged her carryall of cubes and printouts into the assigned conference room. This was a large hall in the Technical Schools wing, T-1, its raked seating curved around a small stage.
“I hope so, sir,” Esmay said. She could think of two dozen more cubes she might need, if someone asked one of the less likely questions. She had come early, hoping for a few minutes alone to set up, but Pitak, Commander Seveche, and Commander Atarin were already there. Her chain of command, she realized.
“Would you like any help with your displays?” Atarin asked. “The remote changer in this room hangs up sometimes.”
“That would be helpful, yes, sir. The first are all set up on this cube—” she held it out. “But I’ve got additional visuals if the group asks particular questions.”
“Fine, then. I’ve asked Ensign Serrano to make himself available—I’ll call him in.”
Serrano. She hadn’t met him yet, and after what she’d said at dinner, no one had gossiped more about him in her presence. She hadn’t wanted to seek him out. What could she have said? I saved your aunt’s life; your grandmother talked to me; let’s be friends? No. But she had been curious.
Her first thought when he walked in was that he had the look of a Serrano: dark, compact, springy in motion, someone whose entire ancestry was spangled with stars, someone whose family expected their offspring to become admirals, or at least in contention. Her second was that he seemed impossibly young to bear the weight of such ambition. If he had not worn ensign’s insignia, she’d have guessed him to be about sixteen, and in the prep school.
She had known there were young Serranos, of course, even before she got to the Koskiusko. They could not be hatched out full-grown as officers of some intermediate grade. They had to be born, and grow, like anyone else. But she had never seen it happen, and the discovery of a young Serrano—younger than she was—disturbed her.
“Lieutenant Suiza, this is Ensign Serrano.” The glint in his dark eyes looked very familiar.
“Sir,” he said formally, and twitched as if he would have bowed in other circumstances. “I’m supposed to keep your displays straightened out.” Generations of command had seeped into his voice, but it was still expressive.
“Very well,” Esmay said. She handed over the cube with her main displays, and rummaged in the carryall. “That one’s got the displays that I know I’ll need—and here, this is the outline. They’re in order, but in case someone wants to see a previous display, these are the numbers I’ll be calling for. Now these—” she gave him another three cubes, “—these have illustrations I might need if someone brings up particular points. I’m afraid you’ll have to use the cube index . . . I didn’t know I’d have any assistance, so there’s no hardcopy listing. I’ll tell you which cube, and then the index code.”
“Fine, sir. I can handle that.” She had no doubt he could.
Other officers were arriving, greeting each other. Ensign Serrano took her cubes and went off somewhere—Esmay hoped to a projection booth—while she organized the rest of her references. The room filled, but arriving officers left a little group of seats in front as if they’d had stars painted on them. In a way, they did . . . the admirals and the captain came in together, chatting amiably. Admiral Dossignal nodded at her; he seemed even taller next to Captain Hakin. On the captain’s other side, Admiral Livadhi fiddled with his chair controls, and Admiral Uppanos, commander of the branch hospital, leaned toward his own aide with some comment. Atarin stood to introduce Esmay; with the admirals’ arrival, the meeting started.
Esmay began with the same background material. No one made comments, at least not that she could hear. All her displays projected right-side-up and correctly oriented . . . she had checked them repeatedly, but she’d had a nagging fear. This time, her recent research in mind, she added what she had learned about the Benignity’s methods, about the implications of Fleet protocols. Heads nodded; she recognized an alert interest far beyond the ensigns’ hunger for exciting stories.
When the questions began, she found herself exhilarated by the quality of thought they implied. These were people who saw the connections she had only just found, who had been looking for them, who were hungry for more data, more insights. She answered as best she could, referencing everything she said. They nodded, and asked more questions. She called for visuals, trusting that the Serrano ensign would get the right ones in the right order. He did, as if he were reading her mind.
“So the yacht didn’t actually get involved in the battle? Aside from that one killer-escort?”
“No, sir. I have only secondhand knowledge of this, but it’s my understanding that the yacht had only minimal shields. It had been used primarily to suggest the presence of other armed vessels, and would not have fired if the Benignity vessel hadn’t put itself in such a perfect situation.”
“It can only have confused them briefly,” a lieutenant commander mused from near the back. “If they had accurate scans, the mass data would show—”
“But I wanted to ask about that ore-carrier,” someone else interrupted. “Why did Serrano have it leave the . . . what was it? Zalbod?”
“It’s my understanding that she didn’t, sir. The miners themselves decided to join in—”
“And it shouldn’t have got that far, not with the specs you’ve shown. How did they get it moving so fast?”
Esmay had no answer for that, but someone else in Drive & Maneuver did. A brisk debate began between members of the D&M unit . . . Esmay had never been attracted to the theory and practice of space-drive design, but she could follow much of what they said. If this equipment could be reconfigured it would give a 32 percent increase in effective acceleration . . . .
“They’d still arrive too late to do any good, but that’s within the performance you’re reporting. I wonder which of them thought it up . . .”
“If that’s what they did,” another D&M officer said. “For all we know, they cooked up something unique.”
Esmay snorted, surprising herself and startling them all into staring at her. “Sorry, sir,” she said. “Fact is, they cooked up a considerable brew, and I heard about the aftermath.” Scuttlebutt said that Lord Thornbuckle’s daughter had been dumped naked in a two-man rockhopper pod . . . supposedly undamaged . . . and the pod jettisoned by mistake into the weapons-crowded space between the ore-carrier and Xavier. Esmay doubted it was an accident . . . but the girl had survived.
Brows raised, the officer said, “I wonder . . . if they added a chemical rocket component . . . that might have given them a bit of extra push.”
The talk went on. They wanted to know every detail of the damage to Despite from the mutiny: what weapons had been used, and what bulkheads had been damaged? What about fires? What about controls, the environmental system failsafes, the computers? The admirals, who had sat quietly listening to the questions of their subordinates, started asking questions of their own.
Esmay found herself saying “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know that,” more often than she liked. She had not had time to examine the spalling caused by projectile hand weapons . . . to assess the effect of sonics on plumbing connections . . .
“Forensics . . .” she started to say once, and stopped short at their expressions.
“Forensics cares about evidence of wrongdoing,” Major Pitak said, as if that were a moral flaw. “They don’t know diddly about materials . . . they come asking us what it means if something’s lost a millimeter of its surface.”