Once a Hero Read online

  "No problem. Is there someplace to get a drink, meanwhile?"

  "Not really—there's a food machine just down the corridor there, between the toilets, but nothing really good."

  "Nothing edible" grumbled another guard. "Station food service's supposed to replace those snacks before they turn green but—"

  "We could call in for something," the first guard said. "They deliver from civ-side, but there's a fee—"

  "That would be great," Arhos said. "The ship we came in on was skewed five hours off Station time by the last jump, and I for one would enjoy something. And if it's near a break for you—"

  "No, thank you, sir. Here's the order list . . ."

  "Ever been aboard a DSR before?" asked the bright-eyed young man who escorted them from the docking bay.

  "No . . . main station yards, a couple of cruisers, but no DSR."

  "Let me get you a shipchip," the youngster said. He touched a control panel, entering a sequence so fast that Arhos couldn't figure out the placement of sensors on the unmarked surface. Something bleeped, and tiny disks rattled into a bin below the panel.

  Arhos looked at his and wondered how to activate it.

  "Voice," the young man said promptly. "It'll project a route from your position to the location you name—for the low-security areas, that is. If you need access to the high-security areas, you'll have to get it reset. That'll be in ship admin, which it'll guide you to. I mean, I will, that's where you're going first, but any other time—"

  "Thank you," Arhos said. Behind him, the rest of the team murmured appropriate thanks as well.

  They were passed from desk to desk in the admin bay, collecting ship's ID tags, access cards for a variety of spaces, and a new set of shipchips. Then someone came to fetch them to the admin offices of the 14th Heavy Maintenance Yard.

  "We don't have slideways, but we do have lift tubes," they were told. "Don't try to hitch a ride on the robocarts—they're programmed to stop if they sense extra mass."

  They spent the first several days looking over the inventory, and discussing their plan with the senior technician, a balding master chief named Furlow.

  "I think Headquarters has its nose up its tail again," Furlow said at the first meeting. "Rekeying all the weapons guidance codes? That assumes the people doing the job are competent and loyal." He gave Arhos a sideways look. "Not that I'm saying you aren't, but it's too big a job to go without hitches."

  "You're probably right," Arhos said. "But I'm not going to pass up a contract . . . it's how we make a living."

  "Yes, well . . ." A heavy sigh. "I know you've got clearances from transcendent deities or something, but on my watch, these weapons are my responsibility and I'll have one of my people with you."

  "Of course," Arhos said. "We don't want any misunderstandings either. This is the protocol we were sent—I'm assuming you have the other part—"

  "Yes, sir, I do." The chief took Arhos's version and peered at it. "Scuzzing waste of time, but it'll work. How long did you tell 'em it'd take?"

  "Five minutes per weapon, an hour to retool between types. That's what it took on the racks they mocked up for us to bid on." Arhos allowed himself to smile. "We were one minute faster than the next fastest on each, and a solid ten minutes faster in retooling. Then when they had us work on a patrol craft, we were able to work that fast even in tight situations. We weren't told what your inventory was, of course. We're just supposed to do it until it's done. Then when the other ships return from deployment, we'll do theirs as well."

  "I imagine," the chief said, "that there weren't many people that wanted to spend a standard year or more out here in Sector 14."

  "Not that many," Arhos admitted. "Fleet had a lot of contracts to hand out for this work, and most of 'em were either bigger, smaller, or in more popular places. We happened to fit the profile for this one—and we performed well in the test series."

  "Umph." The chief didn't look any happier, but at least seemed slightly less hostile. "Well, you have your work cut out. We store the weaponry for all of Sector 14. There's no rear supply depot out here, because of security concerns—Sierra Station gets a fair bit of civilian traffic, and we know some of it's Bloodhorde agents."

  "We'd better get started, then, hadn't we?"

  The chief still didn't move. "It's not going to be that easy. This thing is big, but not big enough to hold inventory like that in convenient arrays. Weapons and guidance systems are stored separately, and since the guidance systems are compact, we've squirreled them away wherever they'd fit. It's not anything like the way you worked on that patrol ship. At least we have an automated system. Let me show you some video." He ran his hand over the control panel on his desk, and a display came up on the wall. "That's one of the inventory bays in which guidance systems are stored." Racks rose from the deck to the overhead, the familiar pattern of automated inventory systems controls along the vertical rails. "Because the guidance systems are small, and most of the time we're not restocking the warships, we fit them in by size, not by type."

  "So we're going to have to go through there and pull them out one at a time?"

  "Not quite that bad. One rack at a time, though. This bay, right now, has . . ." The chief flicked another control that brought up a display on his desk. "Eight thousand two hundred sixty-four ASAC-32 modules. But they're on at least eight different stacks, and I'd bet that someone has moved at least a few of them when restocking other goods, and hasn't bothered to update the file."

  "Won't your automated system do that?"

  "So-so." The chief wobbled his hand in the age-old gesture. "High-security items have a tracer that sounds off if they're removed from that hold, but not if they're moved a few meters. We'd have spent all our time rekeying the tracers—we're always having to move things in and out."

  "So you know they're in there, and you probably know where most of them are, but . . ."

  "But not all. Which is why it's a stupid idea, thought up by someone who's never seen a big repair inventory." The chief grinned. "I hope they're paying you a daily allowance, and not by piece, or you'll be here forever and earn nothing."

  Arhos wasn't sure that prospect would bother the chief, but it certainly bothered him. He had worried that the job wouldn't take long enough—that he'd have to stretch it out—that they wouldn't need to wander over enough of the ship to find the self-destruct. Instead . . . they would be here far too long, and although they'd have wide access they might be too busy to use it.

  "I wonder if someone leaked this problem to Burrahn, Hing & Co., and that's why they didn't bid on this job," he said, and watched the chief's face. No flicker, but . . . but someone had to have leaked it. Damn the Bloodhorde! "At least we are getting a per diem . . . but it's going to be a bitch."

  Arhos eyed his partners and gave a meaningful glance at the gray cylinder on the table between them. Fleet would expect them to disable the simpler scans of their compartment; Arhos had not concealed the device. Now he turned it on. Telltales blinked hotly: it had detected signals it could not fog. He'd expected that. Right now, it was important for Fleet to think its more delicate scans worked here. What lay concealed within the familiar cylinder, under the Morin Co. seal, was for later use, and more private conversations. His partners would know that, and would interpret what he said in the light of the caution now necessary.

  "We have a problem," Arhos began, when the team had assembled. Quickly he repeated the chief's explanation of the way weapons guidance systems were stored on Koskiusko. "It's going to take a lot longer than we thought. It might be better to start with the weapons on the warships, since they're in the arrays we know—"

  "But our contract states that we should begin with the DSR," Losa said, playing up beautifully.

  "Yes, but they didn't tell us the whole story. With this arrangement, there'll be a lot of dead time—we'll be waiting around while they figure out where some of the weapons are. I'm considering whether to discuss a restructuring of the whole job." I
t would be difficult, with a signed contract; he would have to prove that Fleet had not provided necessary information. He wasn't sure he could trust that Chief Furlow to give evidence, if it came to that.

  "A suggestion . . ." Gori said.

  "Go ahead."

  "Why not split the team, and send some of 'em over to the larger warships? That way, the manhours lost in dead time won't be as great."

  "Possibly . . . in fact, that's a good idea. We won't have to worry about them . . ." Noticing anything, he didn't say, but Gori's upward twitch of eyebrow meant he'd understood exactly what Arhos didn't say.

  "We don't look like whiners, we get the job done faster . . . and we're here to show that our top people cope with the unexpected." Losa sounded enthusiastic; her eyes sparkled. Arhos thought it over, liking the idea better every moment. The one thing they'd worried about was having one of their own people notice something. Yet the Fleet contract had required a larger team. This way—this way he got rid of those bright, inquisitive minds, in a way that could cast no suspicion on the partners.

  "Good, then. I'll speak to the admiral's office. If we're sending people off, we need to do that before we leave Sierra."

  From Altiplano to Comus Station, Esmay traveled by civilian carrier, a regularly scheduled passenger ship. In the thirty days of her leave, other news had come to dominate the screens. No one seemed to recognize her in her civilian clothes, for which she was grateful. She divided her time between her own quarters and the ship's palatial fitness equipment. It felt odd to be aboard a ship and have no duties, but she was not about to call attention to herself by hanging around the crew looking wistful. Better to sweat on the exercise machines, and then cool off in the pool. She was vaguely aware that some of the other passengers who regularly used the fitness equipment might have wanted to chat, but swimming steady laps made that difficult. In her quarters, she worked her way through one teaching cube after another, everything in the ship's library that seemed relevant.

  At Comus, she chose to walk the distance from the liner's docking bay to Fleetgate rather than taking a slideway. She needed to do a bit of shopping; she wanted to replace every bit of clothing she'd brought from Altiplano. It was wasteful, she admitted, to throw away perfectly good garments . . . but she wanted nothing to connect her to her past. When she found a Space Relief outlet store, she emptied her cases, and then handed over the cases, all but her Fleet duffel.

  She needed little, really. A few comfortable things for lounging, one good dress outfit. She found all that in the first store she entered, picking the things hastily. It didn't really matter what she wore when she was off-duty. She was eager to get back to Fleet territory. When she arrived at the Fleetgate, the sentry's cheerful "Welcome home, Lieutenant!" sent her mood up three notches.

  Esmay found her new assignment posted to her private mail when she checked in. She had expected a tour on Comus itself—else why send her out here in the first place?—but her orders directed her to Sierra Station, there to take up her duties with the Fourteenth Heavy Maintenance Yard aboard the Koskiusko. She'd never heard of that ship; when she looked it up in the Table of Ships, she discovered that it was a DSR, a deepspace repair ship, part of the second-wave deployment out of Sierra Station.

  Someone must be seriously annoyed with her. Repair ships were huge, ungainly, complicated, and totally unglamorous. Worse, DSR ships were a logistics nightmare, the natural and lawful prey of every inspector general: it was impossible to keep them in perfect order, up to nominal inventory, because they were always losing parts to some other vessel. Legitimately, but inevitably, the paperwork lagged reality.

  For this, among other reasons, very few people—except the specialists who actually did the repairs on other vessels—wanted assignment to a DSR. Young officers considered such an assignment proof that someone was down on them; Esmay followed the herd in this, if nothing else, and took it as evidence that exoneration by the official court hadn't convinced someone of her innocence. She looked up the next available transfer to Sierra Station. Because she had arrived on Comus almost 24 hours before her leave was up, she could just catch a Fleet supply run to Sierra . . . and she had no good excuse not to catch it, since her duty status went active the moment she logged on to pick up her orders.

  Esmay checked—the supply ship had space available, and she had two hours to report aboard. A bored clerk stamped and validated her original and amended orders, updated her hardcopy ID and her files. She dashed in and out of the tiny PX to pick up her new insignia—the clerk told her that her promotion to lieutenant had come through while she was on leave—and get a Koskiusko shiptag for her duffel. That wasn't required, since she hadn't signed aboard, but her duffel was more likely to arrive there if it had a shiptag than a name-and-number. When she got to the docking bay for the supply ship, she found herself in a queue with half a dozen other Fleet personnel making a transfer. No one stared at her; no one seemed to know who she was or care. Most of the talk was about a parpaun match played recently between the crews of two ships in dock—apparently someone had kicked all three of the possible goals in one play—but Esmay had never really understood parpaun. Why two balls? Why three differently colored goals? Why—she often thought to herself, but would not say—bother? Now she was glad to hear the others full of enthusiasm for something that banal, and she hoped that her moment of fame had already vanished.

  The supply ship was hauling parts that would resupply Koskiusko; its exec had noticed her orders, and put her to work checking the inventory. Sixteen days of counting impellers, gaskets, lengths of tubing, fasteners of all kinds, tubes of adhesive, updates to repair manuals (both hardcopy and cubes). . . . Esmay decided that someone at Headquarters really hated her.

  She was good at this kind of thing; she didn't find it difficult to keep her concentration. On the fourth day, she noticed that of the 562 boxes supposed to contain 85mm star-slot fasteners with threads of pitch 1/10 and interval 3mm, one was labeled for 85mm star-slot fasteners with threads of pitch 1/12 and interval 4mm instead. Two days later she found three leaky tubes of adhesive, which had glued themselves to neighboring tubes in a container; it was clear from the discoloration of the labels that they had been flawed from the beginning; she noted that. She could see why this was necessary—someone would find the errors and better now than in the midst of an emergency repair—but it wasn't the glamorous sort of job she'd thought of when she had dreamed of leaving Altiplano. Either time she'd left Altiplano.

  She wondered if she'd spend her entire time aboard Koskiusko doing the same thing. That would make a very long two years. She didn't want notoriety, exactly, but she would like something more interesting than bean-counting.

  In her off-shift, she listened to the sports fans, hoping for a change in topic, but they seemed to have no other interests. Apparently, they had all played on a parpaun team at one time or another, and after they'd rehashed the recent match they were happy to tell each other in detail about every match they'd played. Esmay listened long enough to understand at last what the rules were, and why two balls (each team had its own ball, and scores could be made with the opponent's ball only on the third, "neutral" goal. It still seemed an unreasonably complex game, and as boring as any other for nonplayers to listen to.

  She finally gave up and started reading the supply ship's tech support cubes. Inventory control, principles and practice. The design of automated inventory systems. Even an article on "static munitions recognition systems"—which she couldn't imagine needing—was better than the eighty-eighth rehash of a game she hadn't seen and didn't care about anyway. She was sure she'd never come face to face with a Barasci V-845 mine or its nastier cousin, the Smettig Series G, but she stared at the display until she was sure she would know them again if she were unlucky enough to see one.

  Sierra Station served both Fleet and civilian interests, but Fleet predominated. Two long arms docked only military vessels; Esmay watched the names scroll past on the wardroom screen. Pachyd
erm, the oldest active cruiser, and Fleet's largest. Plenitude, Savage, and Vengeance, cruisers much like Heris Serrano's Vigilance. Plenitude had a star by its name—it was the flagship of some combat group. A gaggle of patrol craft: Consummate, Pterophil, Singularity, Autarch, Rascal, Runagate, Vixen, Despite . . . Despite? What was Despite doing here?

  Esmay felt cold all over. She had left that very lucky (in one way) and unlucky (in another) ship almost the full length of Familias space away . . . she had not expected to see Despite again unless she was transferred to its sector. Why had they moved it at all? And why, of all places, here?

  She didn't want to know. She didn't want to see that ship again; the memory of victory could not erase the memory of what had gone before, that bloody mutiny, and the mistakes she had made later.

  She shook that off. She couldn't afford to be upset by it, and it was unlikely she'd have anything to do with Despite and her new captain.

  Koskiusko, the screen read, blinking now because she had put a tracer on the name. She noted the concourse and docking number in her personal compad. One corner of the screen turned yellow, then flashed their arrival dock number in blue. Esmay referred to the station map . . . Koskiusko was out at the far end of the longest arm, but she could get there without going past Despite.

  When she made it to the gate area, a pair of Fleet security personnel checked her orders again. To her surprise, they made no move to open the access hatch. "It'll be a few minutes, Lieutenant," one of them said. He had sergeant's stripes on his uniform, and his unit patch read Sierra Station, not Koskiusko. Esmay noticed that nowhere on the deck of the gate area were the traditional stripes defining ship space from station space. "They've sent a pod but it's not here yet."

  "A pod?"

  "DSRs don't actually dock at stations." The tone was carefully respectful, though Esmay had the feeling she had just asked a stupid question. "They're too big—the relative masses would play hob with each other's artificial gravity." A pause, then a neutral, "Would you like to see Koskiusko, Lieutenant?"