The Serrano Connection (34 page)

She reached again for the pin, and clipped into it safely. In the brighter light, the edges of the shattered shield nodes cast jagged shadows that striped the hull's dull black. Things looked different now . . . she couldn't see the mine, but it had to be close. Another pin, and another, and another . . .

EEEEERRRRP! Esmay jerked to a halt, and slammed her feet into the hull. The whiny, irritable, noise demanded her attention. A light flashed red in front of her . . . emergency . . . oh. She leaned her chin on the comunit switch.

"Don't move," a voice said in her ear. "Look down, knee level, 10 o'clock . . . but don't move." Esmay looked down, half her gaze cut off by the helmet. Something . . . something
moved.
Something small, perhaps the size of her ungloved fist, dark and glossy, rising on a thin wire stalk that gleamed in the searchlight . . . she wanted to tip her head and see where it was coming from, though she knew without seeing. "Just don't move," the voice said again. "With any luck it will think you're part of the ship."

Just as she opened her mouth to ask, the voice added, "And don't talk. We don't know what its sensor characteristics are."

The little black ovoid on its wire—the programmable sensor pod of a smart mine—rose higher . . . she could see it clearly now, and presumably it could see her. Sweat sprang out on her whole body at once; it tickled abominably as it rolled down her ribs, down her belly . . . she wanted to scratch. Not as bad as she wanted to run.

She was part of the ship. She was a . . . an automatic repair mechanism. Turned off at the moment, nonfunctional . . . she tried not to breathe as the sensor swayed nearer, sweeping in a conical pattern dictated by the stiffness of its wire stalk and the vibrations induced at its source. She had been in scan herself; she knew what such a small package might contain. It could already have matched her thermal profile to that of "human in EVA suit" if that was part of its programming. It could have recorded her skeletal density, her respiratory rate, even her eye color.

And if it had done all that, she was already dead, she just hadn't been killed yet.

The little pod on its stalk continued to revolve . . . but it was lower again. She didn't know what that meant. Would a smart mine bother to retract its sensor array before blowing up? She could barely see it now, above the sight rim of her helmet. Then it was below her vision . . . she was not tempted to bend over and look more closely.

"Sorry, Lieutenant," came the voice in her ear again. "Our searchlight brought your shadow up past its threshold. But you were dead right—it's definitely a mine, and definitely an enemy weapon."

Dead right . . . she didn't like that at all.

"We've got a hazardous equipment assessment team on the way," the voice went on. "Just don't move."

She had no intention of moving; she wasn't sure she would ever be able to move again. A few moments later, the tremors began, behind her knees; she struggled to control them. How sensitive was the sensor pod? Which little twitch might set it off? Reason suggested that she'd been moving more before, and it hadn't reacted . . . but reason had no control over her hindbrain, where panic danced its jig on her spine.

She was very bored with being that scared by the time the voice spoke again.

"You put down a good line, Lieutenant. Don't move . . . we're at the next pin, we can see you clearly."

She wanted to turn and see them, see something friendly, even if that was the last thing she saw . . . but she did not move.

"We're afraid if we douse the spotlight, that'll trigger another search sequence, and we don't know how it's programmed."

The voice didn't have to say more; she remembered that some mines were set to go after a specific number of searches had been triggered, even if they didn't find anything. She might have triggered an earlier search, when she first flung herself away from the thing.

"If we're lucky, it's looking for a match to something specific, which we don't resemble, but . . ."

She wished the voice would shut up now . . . what if the mine reacted to minute vibrations carried through someone's suit? Even hers. Surely they had someone watching it . . . surely they had a plan. . . .

"
Wraith
's given us an update on what's beyond the hull breach—they're evacuating personnel now." A pause; she tried not to think. Then, "How's your suit air? Give me a one-letter answer: A for ample, S for short, C for critical, then a number for minutes remaining."

Esmay looked, and was startled to see how far down the gauge had gone. "S," she said. "Sixteen."

"I'd call that critical, myself," the voice said. "Here's what we'll do. Someone's going to come up behind you, trying to match your profile and cast the same shadow, and pop on an external reserve. Don't move. He'll do all the hooking up from his end."

"Yes, sir," Esmay said. Her eyes had locked onto the air gauge; the number flicked down to fifteen, and it was definitely in the red zone.

"Breathe slowly," the voice said. "You're not doing any work; you may have longer than that."

Fear burns oxygen. She remembered that, along with other pithy sayings. It was amazingly hard to breathe slowly because you needed to save oxygen . . . she tried thinking of other things. Would she feel the vibration of the person coming up behind her? Would the mine's sensor pod notice it? That kind of thought didn't help her take slow breaths. She tried to send her mind back to her valley, that favorite and reliable relaxation exercise, but when the gauge flicked to fourteen, she gasped anyway. Don't gasp. Don't look at the gauge. It will either go down to zero, or it won't.

She did not feel the vibration; what she felt first was a tiny push that made her sway forward. She stiffened against it. Then something tapped the back of her helmet, and a new voice spoke in her ear.

"Doin' good, Suiza. Just don't wiggle . . . while I . . . get this tank attached . . ." Random bumps and prods, which she tried to resist so that she wouldn't move enough to trigger the pod's notice. She eyed her oxygen gauge. Nine. Had she really been standing there waiting more than six minutes? Apparently so. The gauge flicked down again, to eight. She could hear clicks and squeaks from her suit as her unseen rescuer tried to hook up the auxiliary tank with the least possible movement.

"Gauge?" asked the voice.

She looked. Now it read seven. "Seven," she said.

"Damn," said the voice. "It's supposed to—oh." She didn't know what that "oh" meant, and it infuriated her. How dare they mean whatever "oh" meant? An irritating scritch, repeated over and over, as she tried not to watch the gauge. It seemed a long time, but it hadn't flicked down to six when the indicator whipped over to the green section.

"Gauge?" asked the voice again.

"Green," Esmay said.

"Number," the voice said, with a bite of disapproval.

Esmay swallowed the "uh" she wanted to make and blinked to focus on the number. "One four seven."

"Good. Now I'm going to hook into your telemetry—you've been out more than your suit's rated for—"

Another set of scritches; Esmay didn't care. She was breathing; she would not run out of oxygen.

"Your internal temp's low," the voice said. "Turn up your suit heater."

She complied, and warmth rose from her bootsoles. The tremor she'd been fighting to control eased—had it been only cold, and not panic after all? She wanted to believe that, but the sour smell of her sweat denied it.

"We have a problem, Suiza," said the voice in her ear. Esmay thought they could have said something more helpful. She knew they had a problem—
she
had a problem. "If that's the only mine, if it blows it will probably damage only those forward compartments, which as far as anyone knows are empty anyway. And you, of course."

No comment seemed necessary.

"We haven't spotted any other mines—but we can't figure out why there's only one. If there is only one."

Did they expect her to figure it out?

"It's not like the Bloodhorde, but there's no doubt that the ships that attacked
were
Bloodhorde ships. Came right in for the kill—
Wraith
got unequivocal scan data—and then broke off when
Sting
and
Justice
closed and started raking them."

Esmay wondered about that. By rumor, if a Bloodhorde group closed with prospect of a kill, it would not break off just to avoid contact with another ship. Unless its ships were having trouble . . . she wished she could see the scan data herself. Not likely, if the mine blew. But . . . she dared a transmission. "Were they close enough to plant the mine by hand?" she asked.

"Don't transmit," the voice said. "If it hears you—"

"You wanted to know why," she said. "Is
Wraith
's scan tech available?"

"Wait."

She could imagine the scene in
Koskiusko
's communications shack—perhaps Major Pitak was there; certainly the captain was. A different voice came with a tiny physical tap on her EVA suit. "You're going to upset 'em, Lieutenant." That voice sounded amused; she wasn't sure what it meant. She shrugged enough to move the shoulders of the suit; a chuckle came through the link. "You got an idea, huh? Good for you. I can't figure out why that thing hasn't blown us both—but I'm willing to live with that." Another chuckle. Esmay felt her own stiff face relaxing into a grin.

"Suiza, just in case you've got an idea, we've patched you through to the
Wraith
senior scan tech. Just try to keep your transmissions short, do you understand?"

"Yes, sir. Did the Bloodhorde ships come close enough for an EVA team to plant the mine by hand, or by pod?"

A pause. Then yet another voice. "Uh . . . yes . . . I suppose. We were trying to rotate, because of the damage to the starboard shields and hull. They got pretty close . . ."

Esmay wanted to yell "NUMBERS, dammit!" but she could hear a roar in the background that might be the scan tech's supervisor saying the same thing, for the next transmission gave her the figures she wanted. Close enough indeed; her mind raced through the equations for both EVA and pod movement . . . yes. "How soon after that did the Bloodhorde ships pull away?"

"As soon as
Sting
and
Justice
came back," the tech said. Esmay waited, confident in that background bellow. Sure enough, the tech came back on with the precise interval. Esmay felt as if someone had run a current down her spine. Maybe they'd spotted the Fleet ships before they were fired on, or maybe they hadn't. They'd planted a smart mine, programmed for a specific task, and then they'd gone away, leaving
Wraith
damaged but not killed. And why?

What did the Bloodhorde expect to happen next? A damaged Familias military vessel would not be abandoned, so they couldn't have hoped to capture it—in fact, if they had, why mine it? Damaged Familias vessels . . . went to repair facilities. Either dockyards, in this case too far away for a cripple like
Wraith
to reach, or the mobile dockyards called DSRs . . .
Koskiusko
. What would the Bloodhorde know about DSRs? Whatever was in the public domain, certainly—and Esmay knew that the public knew DSRs were capable of taking the smaller Fleet ships into the DSR's vast central repair bay.

That made sense. She thought it all through, then transmitted it. "The Bloodhorde chose a small ship to disable, planted a smart mine, then withdrew, so that
Wraith
would lead the way to a DSR. The mine's programmed to go off when
Wraith
enters the repair dock—disabling the DSR. It's not strong enough to destroy it, but it would probably be unable to make jump—"

"Certainly unable to make jump," came Pitak's voice in her ear.

"And thus would be immobilized for attack." Esmay paused, but no one said anything. "Either they followed
Wraith
and her escort to this system, or the mine will also have a homing module to lead them here. They want the DSR, almost certainly for capture, since they could have covered
Wraith
with enough mines to blow the whole DSR if they'd wanted."

Another long pause, during which the contact hissed gently in her ear. Then: "It makes sense. Never thought the Bloodhorde were that sneaky . . . and what they want a DSR for, unless they've got significant battle damage somewhere . . ."

Esmay rode the wave of her confident intuition. "They lack technical skills they need; they don't have a military-grade shipyard. They want a DSR to upgrade their entire space effort. In one blow they get manufacturing facilities, parts, and expert technicians. Given a DSR, they could upgrade any of their ships to Fleet equivalency—or quickly learn to manufacture their own cruisers."

The long hiss that followed conveyed both horror and respect. "Of course," someone said softly.

"Which means," Esmay said, "that this thing won't go off until the parameters match whatever they think the inside of a repair bay looks like, or until someone tries to remove it. It doesn't know it's been detected until we try to do something about it." Relief weakened her knees; she leaned back against the unseen person behind her. "Which means we can walk away and it won't blow—as long as we don't put
Wraith
in the repair bay."