He heard footsteps coming, and felt his pulse quicken again. What if it was intruders? He glanced around and saw nothing useful as a weapon . . . but the plump sergeant who puffed into view wore a new pink ID tag.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, his cheeks scarlet with exertion. “I had to run up all the ladders . . . they’ve turned off the lift tubes, just in case, which is ridiculous . . . it only makes more work for the rest of us.”
Barin handed over his list. “Perhaps they’re concerned that the intruders might cut the power to the lift tubes.”
“You don’t think they would!” The sergeant paused in the act of entering the access codes.
“I don’t know what they’d do,” Barin said. “But if someone wanted to cause trouble, that’s one way to do it.”
“Stupid,” the man said, and completed the entry. “Let’s see . . . aisle 8, level 2, tray 13. Just a moment, then.” The schools inventory had never been automated, and Barin waited while the sergeant found his items and handed them over. Barin signed the terminal and headed back. Should he use the ladders here . . . T-1 was probably less crowded . . . or go on around and straight down in T-3?
He split the decision, dropping to Deck Six, then going around core to T-3 for the final descent to Deck Four.
Vokrais had found the place, one of the maintenance shafts for the lift tube clusters, this one at the inboard junction of T-3 and T-2 on Deck Six, on his way to the meal at which he’d picked up the disgustingly dull knife and fork now hidden under his jumpsuit. He’d found Metris again, and passed the word. Metris would pass it on, as he would. How long did they have? His blood sang with excitement, clearing away the dregs of the sleepygas. This was nothing like the usual ship boarding, when they blasted their way in, weapons in hand, to take swift control of some fat, lazy trader. This was a real challenge.
He wondered if anyone had noticed their weapons and equipment, back on Wraith. They’d found the mine—that was common gossip, which they were glad to tell a presumed Wraith crewman.
“Would have blown you to hell and back,” someone had said to him. “If our people hadn’t found it and foamed it down.”
But had they foamed the inner compartments too? If so, his favorite knives and tools might be safely embedded in the foam, and he could retrieve them later. It had been his grandfather’s battle knife too . . . he wanted it back.
They needed weapons. He knew he could take any two or three of these effete technicians barehanded, but there were thousands of them. His whole team together could kill dozens, but it would not be enough. Somewhere on this monster ship were weapons of all sorts, hand weapons and ship weapons, ammunition, powerpacks . . . everything. He just had to find it.
His supposed supervisor wasn’t watching him closely; he walked off casually in the direction of the dumps . . . no, they called them “heads” for reasons he’d never figured out. He was willing to call any of these fools shithead, but it still seemed an odd name for the receptacle. He felt eyes on him, and glanced back to see his supervisor, looking annoyed. The man shrugged as Vokrais went on through the door.
Inside were three others, a man and two women. Vokrais eyed the women. The Bloodhorde hired some female mercenaries, but they fought in all-female units. That was the natural way, otherwise men would think of nothing but rut, day in and day out. He was thinking of it now, as the tall redhaired one was washing her hands. She looked into the mirror, met his gaze, and scowled at him. Scowl all you wish, Vokrais thought. You will be tossed on my spear before morning. Or another one would; it didn’t really matter.
When they left, he explored the echoing space with its seamless hard floor, its shiny walls. He found two other doors; one opened into a storage closet, and one into a different corridor. He tested the top of the closet—he could get out that way, if he had to—but chose to walk out the other door as if he had come in that way. Here he would have no pesky supervisor watching his every move. He tried to remember where his pack-second had been sent, and thought of using the data wand.
He pushed it into one of the dataports, and flicked through the controls coding queries.
“Need some help?” someone asked at his elbow. Vokrais managed not to strike, but his move was sudden enough that the man—older, gray-haired—stepped back, startled.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Timing still off . . .” and he gestured to his ID tag, which had the Wraith shipcode on it.
“Oh—I thought perhaps you were lost or something. That’s a slow-stream dataport; if you want a quick answer to anything, there’s a fast-stream down there.”
“I would like to find the other survivors,” Vokrais said. He struggled to remember the names on the uniform tags. “Camajo, Bremerton . . .”
“Ah . . . you know their numbers?”
No, he didn’t know their mythical numbers that went with their mythical names. He shook his head, not trusting his voice.
“A search on Wraith should get ’em,” the man said, and put his own wand into a port a few meters away. Vokrais noticed that this one had a double ring around it, blue and green. The one he had been using had a double band of yellow and green. “Here you are,” the man said then. “I’ll transfer it to yours . . .” He reached for Vokrais’s data wand, then snugged it next to his for a moment, and handed the wand back.
“Thanks,” Vokrais remembered to say; the man nodded and strode off. He looked at the display options, and walked down the corridor as if thinking, looking at the names and duty assignments coming up. Would that man remember him? Report him? Would anyone be expected to know about the color codings on the dataports? He’d felt smug that he’d recognized a dataport at all.
Hoch was indeed in Hull and Architecture, in wing T-3 and on Deck Four. Vokrais considered the distance and cursed to himself. What misbegotten brain-dead fool of an engineer had designed this ship . . . it made no sense. A space station with an oversized drive, that’s what it was, not a ship at all. He was wasting too much time hunting people, but he could hardly get on the shipspeaker (surely they had a shipspeaker) and call.
He spotted another of his people lounging along looking the picture of a lazy incompetent, and signaled him. Sramet wandered over, and Vokrais told him where to meet, and that he would find Hoch. “And don’t slouch like that,” he said, as he finished. “At least look like you’re on business.” Sramet nodded, and put on the character of earnest, hardworking dullness as if he had pulled a mask over his head.
And that was another thing lost in Wraith . . . not only their technical expert and their weapons, but their tools, and their special gear that included disguises and camouflage.
Hoch, when he found him, was being chewed out by one of the Familias NCOs, who finished a scathing description of his abilities with a couple of ethnic slurs aimed at his presumed planet of origin. “And you can take your sorry tail back to Commander Atarin’s clerk, and explain that Petty-major Dorian won’t have you on the crew, is that clear?”
Hoch caught Vokrais’s eye, but his expression of sullen incompetence did not change. “Yes, sir,” he said, in a strangled voice.
“Get on with it, then.” The NCO, suppressed fury in every line of his body, stalked off down the passage. Hoch looked straight at Vokrais, this time with the expression of his mind: he would kill that one, when he found him again.
“We have a place,” Vokrais said, as they walked back the other way. He gave the location, then said, “I need to find more—only two others so far . . . this thing is too big.”