“Someone might take a look at the communications lines from the forward compartments to the rear in Wraith . . . was it explosive damage or were they cut?”
“Good idea, Suiza. You call my chief and tell him to check—Oh, Chief Barrahide? Listen, about those Wraith crew you took out of sickbay . . .”
Chapter Fourteen
Barin tried not to think about Esmay Suiza; he had enough to do, if only he could concentrate on it. Besides, she was two ranks above him; he was a mere boy to her. He told himself that, but he didn’t believe it. She respected him; after that first disastrous argument, she had treated him as an equal. He felt himself scowling. This wasn’t about respect, exactly. It was about . . . he squirmed, trying to push the thought aside. Planet-born, and higher-ranked . . . he had no good reason to be thinking of her that way, and he was. Her soft brown hair made Serrano black look harsh . . . her height made Serrano compactness look stubby. The back of her neck . . . even her elbows . . . he didn’t want to feel this, and he did.
Serranos, his mother had said, fall hard when they fall. He had taken that as he took most of the things he was told about his inheritance, with far more than one grain of salt. His mother was not a Serrano; her occasional sarcasms might be envy. His adolescent crushes had been obvious even to him as temporary flares of hormonal activity. He had expected to find someone, if he ever did, in the respectable ranks of Fleet’s traditional families. A Livadhi, perhaps. A Damarin—there was one of his year, a sleek green-eyed beauty with the supple Damarin back. If they had been assigned to the same ship . . . but they hadn’t been.
This was unsuitable. He knew that. Grandmother would raise those eyebrows. Mother would sigh that sigh. His distant cousin Heris would . . . he didn’t want to think about her, either. By rumor she had chosen an unsuitable partner, but he didn’t think that would make her sympathetic.
The part of his mind that had not wandered off down this seductive lane prodded him back to alertness. Commander Vorhes would have his head on a platter if he didn’t get those scan components out of inventory and down to the repair bay in a hurry. He shook his head at his own folly, and caught an amused glance from another ensign he knew.
“Heads up, Serrano—you hear about the mysterious intruders?”
“Intruders? What intruders?”
“Some casualties off Wraith who weren’t that badly hurt, so we put ’em to work, and then they disappeared. About that time someone in Hull and Architecture went spacey and started claiming they were Bloodhorde agents or something . . . anyway, nobody can track ’em down, and there’s a sort of alert—”
“Nothing official yet?”
“No—” A loud blat-blat-blat interrupted them. “Unless this is it.”
It was. “All personnel report to nearest lift tube bay on Decks Seven and Eight for identification confirmation . . . All personnel . . .”
Barin and the others in sight drifted toward the nearest lift tube bay. “This is silly, you know,” the other ensign said. “They’ll never find anyone in this maze . . . five arms, the core, eighteen decks, all the dead space here and there, let alone the inventory bays . . . it’s impossible.”
“If it’s really a Bloodhorde assault group, they’d better find ’em,” Barin said. “Anyway, we’ve got internal scan in every compartment.” He remembered what Esmay had told him about the internal scan evidence used in her trials. “They’d have to know how to disable it to escape detection. Shouldn’t be that hard to track ’em, even in a ship this size.”
“What could they do, anyway? If we don’t find them, they’ll just rattle around. It can’t be but a few—” The other ensign slowed as the crowd ahead came in sight.
Barin thought of what Esmay had told him about the mutiny and what he’d heard of Heris Serrano’s capture of Garrivay’s cruiser. “It doesn’t take many to create havoc,” he said. “If they get command of the bridge . . .” All at once the ship which had seemed too large to be a ship, too safe to be interesting, felt fragile in the immensity of space. He tried to tell himself again that internal scan would find the intruders . . . but there were compartments without full pickup. And the volume of data alone would make it easy to miss significant details. That new AI system which had already glitched on keeping up with changes in the layout . . . could it really handle a job like this?
He joined the line forming in front of a Koskiusko crewman wearing Security patches. Ahead of him, others asked the questions he wanted answered, but the answers weren’t coming. “Just look in here,” they were all told. “Handprints there. You’ll feel a prick . . . now move along . . .”
Full ID checks? Barin hadn’t been through a full ID check since he entered the Academy. Did they really think someone could fake a retinal scan or handprint pattern? Could someone fake all that? He shifted from foot to foot. Behind him the line thickened. It was taking at least a minute to process each person and hand out a new ID tag. He occupied his mind with the obvious calculation . . . a max of sixty people an hour through each checkpoint, and they had only ten checkpoints? It would be hours and hours before they’d confirmed and issued new tags to the whole crew . . .
“Look in here, sir . . . and your hands . . . you’ll feel a prick.” He blinked from the flash as the machine checked his retinal pattern; he felt a sharp prick as it drew his blood to check against his record. The machine bleeped, and Barin took the bright pink tag they offered. Unlike his old one, it didn’t have his picture, just the shiny strip that would allow scan to recognize him as legitimate. Even as he walked off, on his way to inventory for the parts Vorhes had wanted, he saw more security personnel arriving with more screening equipment.
He took the tube up to Deck 13, and gave his request to the master chief who was supervising the automated retrieval system. She did not have one of the new pink ID tags, but nodded toward his.
“I expect the captain’ll shut down the automated system soon, and then I can go get my new tags. You’re lucky you got here now.”
Inside, the noise of the shifting racks was only half as loud as usual. Soon enough, one of the little robocarts slid up to the door with his order; the chief checked it off.
“Do you need transport, sir?”
Barin eyed the load and decided he could manage. “No, thank you.”
“Fine, then.”
He picked up the packaged components and decided not to take the tube back down . . . he could walk around the core, clockwise with the traffic, then take the ladder up to Deck Twelve and be in the Tech Schools inventory for the other things Vorhes wanted. And he might see something . . . his pulse quickened. If they were intruders, and if they were Bloodhorde, what would they look like? All he knew about the Bloodhorde was that they favored tall blonds.
As he passed the base of T-5, he could see into the ship security bay, which looked like a kicked anthill. Why couldn’t he have been in the ship’s own crew? He could imagine himself easily as that lieutenant of security, the one scowling at him now as if to wonder what an ensign from the 14th’s remote sensing section was doing here. It would be a lot more interesting than his job . . . he wouldn’t see any intruders, or any enemy on the outside either. He strode on, wishing hives on the person who’d assigned him to scan on a DSR, instead of something suitable to a Serrano.
The schools inventory, when he got there, was empty. He leaned on the counter, tempted to stick his wand in the console and find out where the parts were that he wanted. It wasn’t safe, really . . . if everyone was lined up getting new ID tags, who was making sure the intruders didn’t get into someplace like this? Although why they’d want to . . .