The person looked up, and grinned. “See you. You hear me trip over the vent hatch someone left undogged?”
“Vent hatch undogged?” Barin didn’t like the sound of that. “Where?”
“Back there.” Closer now, the man pointed back toward the compartment entrance. Barin saw by his stripes that he was a sergeant minor. “Inboard ventilation access hatch . . . probably some idiot guardsman went through looking for the bad guys and forgot to close it behind him.”
“We can hope,” muttered Barin. He felt cold, and he wasn’t sure why. He glanced around. The inventory racks ran up to the overhead, fifteen meters from the deck, divided by aisles and cross-aisles usually humming with robotic carriers. He couldn’t see far in any direction but along that one aisle. The racks he climbed beside were a half-meter high, but the ones across from him were a full meter . . . some full, and some partly empty. Plenty of room for someone to hide, even in the half-meter racks.
“What were you looking for?” he asked the other man.
“57GD11, code number 3362F-3B,” the other said promptly. “Scrubber port covers. Should be around here somewhere.”
“I’m on 58GD4,” Barin said. “If that’s any help.” He watched as the other man peered at one rack after another.
“Ah—here it is.” The other man started up the ladder of a stack two down from Barin without putting on the harness. Barin started to say something to him, but shrugged. He hadn’t needed his own harness so far. He turned back to his own ladder; he had a long way to go.
By the time he was up ten more levels, he was breathing hard. A vertical fifteen meters wasn’t like the short 3-meter ladders he was used to. The climbing wall was only ten meters. Still . . . he was over halfway. He looked up; the remaining racks seemed to loom over him. He glanced around for the other climber.
No sign of him. Had he found his items and gone away? Barin leaned out against the safety belt, trying to see . . . nothing. When he looked down, nothing but deck showing in the aisle. Odd. He’d have expected the other man to say something when he left. Barin shrugged, finally, and climbed up another rack level, reaching up over his head to clip in the safety line.
As his eyes came level with the rack edge, he had just time to think “How odd” before the cold round muzzle of a riot gun prodded him under the chin. It looked exactly like the ones that ship security carried.
“Don’t move.” The voice had no expression. Barin stiffened for a moment he would later realize was critical, and then someone grabbed his ankles. He arched back, trying to kick loose; the barrel of the gun slammed into the side of his head hard enough to stun. He struggled, but now something had caught his safety harness and pulled him hard against the ladder—his feet—then his arms—and finally another blow to the head that dropped him into a dark hole where he was only vaguely aware of being dragged off the ladder and onto the chill metal mesh of the inventory rack.
He felt too many things to sort out easily. His feet, bumping over some surface with regular obstructions. His shoulders, painfully cramped from the traction on his arms. His head throbbed, with occasional flashes of brighter pain that left ghostly spikes across his vision. Other things hurt too—his ribs, his left hip, his wrists—but where was he?
He tried to ask this, but choked on the gag in his mouth. Something soft—cloth or another soft material, that he could not spit out, though he tried. The part of his brain that could think suggested caution . . . waiting to see what happened . . . but between the choking and the dark his body’s instincts opted for action. He flared his nostrils, trying to suck in more air, and twisted as hard as he could. Someone laughed. Blows crashed into him, from all sides; he tried to curl up defensively, but someone yanked his legs out full-length, and the beating didn’t stop until he had passed out again.
“You’re a Serrano,” the voice said.
Barin concentrated on breathing. His nose felt like a pillow-sized mass of pain, and no air went that way; his captors had loosened the gag so he could breathe through his mouth. It had been made clear that this was a privilege they could revoke at any moment. He could barely see through his eyelashes, which seemed to be glued together. When he tried to blink, his eyelids hurt, and his vision didn’t clear.
“We don’t like Serranos,” the voice went on. “But we do recognize your value as a hostage . . . for now.”
He wanted to say something scathing, but the noise in his head didn’t allow for creative endeavors. He wanted to know where he was, who his captors were, what was happening.
“You might even be valuable enough to let live past the capture of this vessel,” the voice said. “It’s possible that you’d even make it to Aethar’s World . . . a Serrano in the arena would be a profitable attraction.”
His remaining intelligence smugly pointed out that these must be Bloodhorde soldiers . . . the hostiles that everyone was searching for . . . and wasn’t there something about the arena combats on Aethar’s World? Slowly, grudgingly, his memory struggled through the haze of pain and confusion to find the right category and index . . . and offered a precis of what Fleet Intelligence knew about the arena.
Barin threw up, noisily.
“Well, that’s one reaction,” his captor said, running something cold and metallic up and down his spine. Barin couldn’t tell if it was a firearm or the hilt of a knife. “I always look forward to Fight Week. But then I’ve never been on the sand myself.”
“It could be that knock on the head,” said another.
“No. He’s a Serrano, and I have it on good authority that they are solid granite all the way through.”
It was not a good sign that his captors were talking so much. Barin struggled to think what it meant, in all permutations. It meant they felt safe. They must be somewhere they did not expect to be found . . . or overheard, which meant they’d done something to the ship’s sensors. The stench of vomit made him gag again; it didn’t seem to bother his captors, who kept on chatting, now in a language he didn’t understand.
They left the gag loose, which argued that they didn’t want him to choke on his vomit if he heaved again. He blinked, and one eye cleared suddenly, giving him a view of uniforms that looked exactly like his own, only cleaner. A Wraith ship patch on the arm nearest him, with the stripes of a corporal. He couldn’t see the nametag. Another beyond . . . he blinked again, and his other eye came unstuck.
Now he could see that one was watching him closely, cool gray eyes in a broad face. The nametag read Santini; the stripes indicated a pivot-major. The expression said killer, and proud of it.
Barin struggled to regain the moral high ground. He knew what was expected of a Serrano in a tight fix: triumph, despite all odds. Escape, certainly. Capture the bad guys, ideally. All it took was brains, which he had, and courage, and physical fitness—both of which he was supposed to have. His grandmother could do it in her sleep. Any of the great Serranos could.
He didn’t feel like a great Serrano. He felt like a boy with no experience, whose nose was at least as big as a parpaun ball, who hurt all over, who was surrounded by big dangerous men who intended to kill him: helpless, that is. He hated feeling helpless, but even that resentment couldn’t wake the surge of defiant anger he needed.
Do it anyway, he told himself. If he couldn’t feel brave, he could still use his brain. He let his eyelids sag almost shut again. That man was not a pivot-major named Santini, but he had a name . . . and perhaps his companions would use it. He might learn what it was even though he didn’t know their language. At least he should be able to figure out the command structure of this group, just by observation.