“Gone hunting in supposedly secure legal files, and possibly altered data, sir.” That last was his own guess; Dockery hadn’t been impressed by it, but he was sure that if Ferradi would lie verbally, she would not be above fudging the records. Why else risk tinkering with those files at all?
“Ah. Well . . . tell you what. You can have a couple of hours of Koutsoudas’ time—but I get the whole story afterwards.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And your captain owes me dinner.”
Now how was he going to explain that one? He returned thoughtfully to Gyrfalcon’s berth, and reported his success to Dockery. “Koutsoudas will be along after lunch, sir,” he said at last.
“Good. In the meantime, I want you to go destroy property and get yourself chewed out.”
“Sir?”
“Go find Lieutenant Ferradi—which shouldn’t be hard, as you say she’s been adherent—and figure out some way to damage her datawand. I want her to have to initialize another. I don’t care how you do it, as long as you don’t damage the lieutenant—but I will mention that just dropping one in an alcoholic beverage is not sufficient. On the other hand, the application of sufficient point pressure is.”
Barin set out on this mission with the uneasy feeling that Dockery’s past might be more interesting than he had thought. When—and why—had Dockery discovered that dropping a datawand in alcohol wouldn’t damage it?
Ferradi found him just as he was turning into the junior officers’ mess and recreation area. “Lunch, Ensign?” she asked brightly.
“Oh—yes. Excuse me, Lieutenant—” He made a show of patting his pockets. “Drat!”
“What?”
“I was supposed to check on something for Commander Dockery, and then Major Carmody asked me something else, and—I forgot my datawand. It’s back aboard. I’ll have to go back—unless I could borrow yours, sir?”
“You should carry it with you all the time,” Ferradi said, pulling out hers. “What did Dockery want?”
“Spares delivery schedule,” Barin said promptly. “He says they’ve shorted on pre-dets the last four times. You probably know all about it.”
“Oh—yeah. Everyone’s complaining.” She handed over the wand, and Barin looked around. The nearest high-speed dataport was out in the corridor.
“I’ll just be moment,” he said. “I heard they have Lassaferan snailfish chowder today—” Sure enough, she went on to the serving tables. Snailfish chowder was a rare treat.
Barin found the high-speed port and jammed the datawand in. Nothing happened; it lit up normally. He pulled it back out, looked around, and shoved it in as hard as he could. Its telltales came up normal again. He pulled it out and looked at the tip. Someone had designed it to withstand normal carelessness . . . and he realized that a high-speed dataport probably had internal cushions to protect the port side of the contact as well. Fine. Now what? She’d be looking for him any moment.
A thought occurred. He went back into the lounge, waved to Lieutenant Ferradi, who had found a seat at a small table facing the entrance, and pointed at the head, then strode quickly in that direction, as if in urgent need.
Heads were full of hard surfaces; Barin tried one after another, between flushes, until he’d produced a crumple at the datawand’s tip by catching it between the door and its jamb, and then squashing it with the door as a lever. He’d had no idea datawands were that tough.
“Sorry, sir,” he said to Lieutenant Ferradi, as he seated himself and handed her the wand. “Some kind of bug, I expect.”
She had tucked it away without looking at it. “So—you’re not having chowder?”
“No, sir. In fact, I think I’ll just sit here, if that’s all right.”
“Of course.” She gave him one of her looks from under long eyelashes. Despite his opinion of her, he felt a stir . . . and she knew it. He could have strangled her for that alone. He hoped very much he’d done enough damage to that datawand.
Esmay changed into her uniform aboard the ship that had brought her, and took the tram over to the Fleet side.
“Lieutenant Suiza,” she said to the security posted at the entrance to the Fleet side of the station.
“Welcome home, Lieutenant.” The greeting was merely ritual, but she felt welcomed nonetheless. Beyond the checkpoint, the corridors were busy. No one seemed to notice her—and no reason why they should.
She paused to check the status boards. The task force was still here; her ship was still docked at the station. She entered her name and codes, and found that she was still on the crewlist, though coded for “leave status: away.” All other leaves had been cancelled.
“Well, if it isn’t Lieutenant Suiza,” came a voice from behind her. She turned, to find herself face to face with Admiral Hornan. He was looking at her with considerably less than pleasure. “I thought you had indefinite leave.”
“I did, sir,” she said. “But we got everything taken care of back home, and I came back at once.”
“Couldn’t leave it alone, could you? Think you’ll have a chance to gloat over the Speaker’s daughter, if we get her out?”
“No, sir.” Esmay managed to keep her voice level. “Gloating was never my intention.”
“You did not think she richly deserved what she got? That’s not what I heard.”
“Sir, I neither said, nor thought, that Brun deserved being kidnapped and raped.”
“I see. You did, however, say that she wasn’t worth going to war over.”
“Sir, I said that no one makes war over one person, not that she wasn’t worth it. That is what others have said, as well.”
The admiral made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a growl. “That may be, Lieutenant, but the fact remains that what is on the record is your statement that she wasn’t worth a war.”
Before she could answer—if she could have thought of an answer—the admiral turned away. So much for making allies. She couldn’t think of anything she might have said to change his mind.
Esmay had never really thought about the people who might be annoyed, or envious, because of her success. That first triumph had felt so fragile: she had not planned to be the senior survivor of a mutiny, and her struggle to bring her ship back to Xavier, and help Commander Serrano, had been a desperate struggle, one she did not expect—even at the last moment—to win. How could anyone resent it when it was clearly more luck than skill? As for the Koskiusko affair . . . again, it was pure luck that she had been there, that she had not been snatched, like Barin, by the Bloodhorde intruders.
But now, thinking about it, she realized that her peers were used to thinking of her as a nonentity, no threat to their own career plans. They had kept a closer eye on more credible rivals. The very suddenness of her success must have made her seem even more dangerous—to those inclined to think that way—than she really was. They would doubt her real ability, or fear it.
So she had . . . enemies, perhaps . . . in Fleet. Competitors, anyway. Some would want to frustrate her goals; others would want to ride her coattails to their own.
Once she’d thought of it, she felt stupid for not thinking of it before. Just as people had interacted with her without knowing what her internal thoughts and feelings were—seeing only the Lieutenant Suiza who was quiet, formal, unambitious—so she had interacted with the others without knowing, or caring much, what their internal motivations and goals were. She had been concerned what those senior to her thought of her performance, of course . . . she paused to consider that “of course,” then set that aside for later. The problem was, until recently she had been just existing alongside others, unaware of them except where interaction was required. So she had no idea which of them thought of her as a rival, and which as a potential friend. Except for Barin.