I made my way back to the ready room. I wanted to check the schedule. Lerrys and I would have to cover all the shuttle drops between us. Still hard to believe that Braun was gone. Just like that. We hadn’t had that much in common, but she’d been a good pilot. Wished I’d made an effort to know her better.
Kept walking up the ramp, going up in circles. Hadn’t wanted to take the lift. Might have had to talk to someone, and I wasn’t ready for that.
48
Goodman/Bond
We’d been orbiting Danann for almost two months. So far as I could tell, we were alone in whatever part of the galactic void where the Magellan had ended up. Rather than do make-work, I’d taken on trying to repair and replace a torp power converter I’d salvaged, for my own purposes, although the chief didn’t know that, since he was happy at the idea of getting a spare converter.
After a week, I was almost ready to give up. It was like attempting to weld spider silk with a battle laser. It was one of those things that was theoretically possible, except that very few would ever be successful at it. I didn’t have many options, though, because I needed a converter, and I was running out of time.
Right off, I’d found what amounted to a mech tutorial on the ship’s microtronics—including power converters. The first message was clear enough.
This is an emergency procedure. Do not attempt unless no other alternatives are available…
From there it got more difficult. I didn’t have any choice, though, not the way the major and the chief kept track of the active torps and the spare converters. Still, I’d managed to get the damaged converter disassembled without further damaging anything. Half the time, the problem wasn’t doing something, but figuring how. The tutorial would say that the filament control submodule needed to be removed before working on modulator beta. It even gave detailed directions for repair of the modulator. My problem was that there were no directions—or practical schematics—for the removal of the submodule. That meant working with indirect optical enhancement to determine the method of attachment and attachment points.
It took me half a day to discover the pair of inert attachment pins on the underside, perfectly matched in color, flush with the adjoining surface, each less than half a millimeter in length. Removing them without destroying them took less than fifteen minutes each—after I’d created a special tool to do so. Making the tool took several hours.
When the chief summoned us together late on twoday afternoon, I was more than ready for a break—until he announced that two stewards had smuggled disruptors into the ship and murdered something like six officers. Most of them had been pilots. He’d gone on from there. “… we doa’t know what’s down on that planet, except a lot of towers. Not yet, anyway. What we do know is this. It’s important enough that our enemies would kill every one of us to get what’s there. Our duty is to make sure that they don’t get it, or we’ll be dead and your families and children will be speaking something else—if they even survive.”
That was all fine, but what if that duty turned the Morning Star or the Spear of Iblis over to those who had no concept of their power? From the Garden and the first Fall, from the Tower of Babel, from the Harrowing of Old Earth, there had always been those who placed then-judgment above God’s, and the results had always been devastating.
“Keep your eyes open for anything that looks strange, and let me or the officers know.” Stuval looked at Ciorio, then some of the shield techs, then at me.
I looked him back and gave him a nod.
“That’s all.”
“Chief laid it on pretty thick there,” said Ciorio, as we eased back aft.
“If you were him, wouldn’t you? It’s getting scary.”
“Yeah… you expect crazy stuff from the Sunnis or the Covenanters, but D.S.S. stewards frying officers…” Ciorio paused. “I’ve known one or two that deserved it, but not here.”
“You think we’ll get attacked again?”
“Out here in the middle of nowhere? Doesn’t seem likely.” Ciorio laughed. “None of it seems likely, does it?”
I shook my head. How likely was it that the Morning Star would reappear? If it did, it wouldn’t be by coincidence. Only God or Lucifer could have engineered that, and it would mean great trials—even perhaps the beginning of the end, and the coming of the Final Kingdom.
“How are you coming on that converter?”
“Slowly. They weren’t designed to be repaired and rebuilt.” Of course, the colonel wouldn’t accept that as an excuse. In his book, I should have just stolen a converter from one of the torps in the armory. There were a few problems with that. First, the array was locked. I could get through any lock. Second, there were alarms, and some of them I had yet to figure out, not because I couldn’t, but because I’d have had to take them apart to do so, and the whole area was under continual surveillance. The third problem was that it took time to disassemble the power system to get the converter out.
Now… I could run fake feeds when I had armory duty, and break into the array, and get the converter and put the AG signaler together by the end of the watch. The only problem was that I’d be caught with the goods in hand, with nowhere to go. And when the questioning started, my internal defenses would go to work, and, before long, I’d cease to be. That approach didn’t appeal to me.
If I failed to get the signaler assembled, and the Magellan returned, I’d at least have a fighting chance to go to ground. The Galaxy was a big place. I’d have been a failure, but I’d be a live failure. I suppose that was one of my faults. I believed in living for a cause, not dying for it, at least not needlessly. The colonel would have found that a fault, too.
But I couldn’t dwell on that. I already had recorded the monitor feeds I’d use. I’d done those weeks before on a midwatch, and I’d created hidden bypass ports to override the real visuals. Those had been easy compared to what lay ahead.
49
Barna
When the stewards started firing at the captain’s table, for a moment all I could do was look. I should have ducked under the table, or done something sensible—or heroic like Liam Fitzhugh. I never saw anyone move so fast Big as he was, I’d never have picked him as a martial arts specialist. Nor Lieutenant Chang. Between the two of them, they saved some lives, maybe a lot.
I just looked, and the scenes burned into my brain. I couldn’t describe them in words. I’d have to paint them, too, along with the alien towers and lights of Danann.
Strangely, after the attack, I wanted to get back to work. I knew I had to finish as much as I could, and the pieces had to be good. More than my pride—or credits— was at stake. I couldn’t have made that clear to anyone, even Aeryana, even if she’d been standing at my elbow.
No one said anything except cliched phrases, the kind I’d never mastered, and the rest of twoday passed, and so did most of threeday, with the expedition experts still on the Magellan in a fuguelike shock. The remaining ship’s officers were even more distant, and Commander Morgan seemed to be everywhere. I didn’t see Lieutenant Chang and Lieutenant Lerrys together, just one or the other. The third shuttle pilot—Braun, the small dark-haired one— she’d been one of those killed. Liam was still alive, but no one was saying whether he’d pull through or not.