Esmay didn’t feel insulted at all. She was quite willing to check with Inventory Control on the stock of fasteners, star-slot, 85mm, pitch 1/10, interval 3mm (she patted the boxes with a proprietary hand—those were her fasteners), to ask the chief in Weapons Systems for an estimate of the damage that Wraith might have suffered from its own weaponry exploding when the hull breached, to crawl around the depths of the storage hold full of structural members checking each one with instruments that should detect any dangerous deformities. Everything had been checked before, and would be checked again, but she understood the need. Mistakes happen. The wrong color uniform gets on the person with the . . . no, she didn’t have time to think of that.
She had avoided Medical, in the superstitious belief that any wandering psychnanny would see in her face that she had terrible secrets, and she’d be out on a psych discharge before she could argue. But in the last hours before they closed with Wraith, Pitak sent her there, to coordinate the search and rescue with what was known about the hull and its problems.
Medical occupied a large chunk of T-5, with onboard operating suites, decontamination suites, regen tanks, neural-assisted-growth tanks, isolation chambers for exotic infectious diseases, diagnostic labs . . . the equivalent of a sector hospital. Esmay found it in the same state of bustle as her own department, and was passed from one desk to another until she located Trauma Response.
Esmay handed Pitak’s cube of data—updated since the downjump by direct transmission from Wraith—to the lieutenant in charge of the extrication and trauma transport teams.
“Hang around until I’m sure we understand all this,” he said, stuffing the cube into a reader. The display came up on the wall; the others milling around settled to look at it. “Forward hull breach—that’ll mean decompression injuries in the nearest compartments beyond the breach—” In the breach itself, it meant deaths, the responsibility of Personnel Salvage, not Extrication and Transport.
“Looks like truss failure here—” he pointed. “We’ll have to cut our way around that. Lieutenant, what’ll happen if we cut here and here?” He pointed. Esmay, briefed by Major Pitak, pointed to alternative cuts, already on the cube display in green. He scowled. “That’ll just barely give clearance for our suits—we don’t want to snag on anything—and we’ll have casualties coming out . . . we need more room than this. We’ve told H&A before—we need a solid two-meter clearance . . . why can’t we make this cut?” He pointed again at his first choice.
Esmay thought she knew, but this was a job for someone with seniority. “I’ll get Major Pitak for you,” she said.
“Do that.”
Esmay found Pitak deep in one of the holds stocked with H&A gear, and patched her through to the E&T commander . . . then backed off as the air heated up around her. She’d never actually heard Pitak swear before, but on this occasion the major left curlicue trails of smoke down the bulkheads. After the first explosion, she settled into explanation.
“—And if you want several dozen more casualties and a lot of sharp-edged ejecta floating around, then you go on and cut to your heart’s content—”
“Dammit, Major—”
As abruptly as a mule’s kick, the major calmed. “Now—what do you need for your suits? I’ll get you space, just tell me—”
“Two meters.”
“Mmph. All right. I’ll send Suiza back with a new plan that’ll give you two meters—round section or square?”
“Uh . . . square would be nice, but round will do. If it were only one it wouldn’t matter, but—”
“Yes, well, if the Bloodhorde were recruits on a first mission, Wraith wouldn’t be full of holes. I’ll get back to you.” Pitak turned on Esmay. “And why are you looking so surprised? Didn’t know I could turn the air blue, or didn’t think I could calm down? Either way, it looks bad . . . don’t just stare at me, Lieutenant, you’re making me nervous.”
“Sorry, sir,” Esmay said.
“Two stinking meters they want. Greedy pigs. I suppose they can’t be sure what they’ll find in there, and they need space—but they certainly can’t cut that one. If I lend them a structural tech to do the cutting, that shorts me on the main job—but it might save some lives and shouldn’t cost any. All right—here’s what you tell them.” She rattled off a series of contingent plans, and sent Esmay back to the medical deck. Esmay wanted to ask why she didn’t just call them on the com, but this was no time to ask Pitak anything.
Eight hours before the last jump point, Esmay and all but essential crew went down for a forced rest period, augmented by soporifics in the compartments. Esmay understood the reason for this—exhausted, twitchy people would make unnecessary mistakes—but she hated knowing that her calm repose had been created chemically. What if something happened and those awake forgot—or had no time—to turn on the antidote sprays?
She was still worrying at that when she woke, feeling rested and alert, to the soft chime of the downshift alarm. It had worked, as usual . . . but she didn’t have to like it.
The Koskiusko had emerged at near-zero relative vee to the system it entered, the safest way to dump something of its mass out of jumpspace. Before Esmay could get back to Pitak’s office in H&A, word had come down that Wraith’s tow was within twenty thousand kilometers. That made not only a bull’s-eye, but a potential disaster. “An error of considerably less than a tenth of a percent in exit vee, and we’d have romped right into her and her damnfool escorts,” Pitak growled. “But it does mean we can get to work quickly. Might save a few survivors in the forward compartments.”
Tightbeam comlinks were already up; realtime data poured into Koskiusko’s communications shack, to be decoded and routed to the relevant departments. Esmay spent the first hour or so watching the H&A data, and sending it on to the subspecialists. Then Pitak found another job for her. “Troll the stuff they’re sending Drives and Maneuver, and Special Materials. You’re good at picking up connections—someone upstairs may have misrouted something we need.”
Pitak herself had a model of the SLP Series 30 hull set up in both virtual and wireframe floor versions in the briefing room. Around it clustered the senior H&A engineers, making changes to reflect the peculiarities of Wraith as the data streamed in. Esmay looked up often to peek at the progress. She had seen plenty of computer 3-D displays of ship hulls, but never the scaled-down wireframe that now occupied a five-meter length of the floor. It looked like fun—though the empty space along one forward flank had nothing to do with fun.
She wondered if it was safe to set up for repair so close to the jump point exit lane. What if someone else came through? That wasn’t her problem; she shook her head to clear that worry away and went back to scanning the topics routed to SpecMat. There—that was her concern, a request to schedule the fabrication of four twenty-meter crystal fibers. She checked the origin . . . if it wasn’t someone in H&A, Pitak wanted to know. And it wasn’t—it was a damage assessment specialist aboard Wraith, who wanted them to replace some communications lines. She called Pitak.
“Aha! Good for you. No, dears, you don’t get to pick your own priorities,” Pitak said. She flagged the item, then sent it on to Commander Seveche’s stack. “They always want to, though,” she said, grinning at Esmay. “They think they’re helping us, figuring out what they need, when they don’t realize the sequencing problem. We can’t start anything in the SpecMat until we know everything we need at the structural level. If we get the sausage busy working on things we don’t need yet, so it can’t do what we need immediately, then either we lose that job or sit around like ducks on a pond until it’s done.”