Heris Serrano (149 page)

Slowly, carefully, she worked her way around checking the lockers. Two plastic flasks with zero G nipples full of clear liquid—the first she tried gave her a fiery drop of the same stuff drunk at the party. She grimaced and pinched the nipple shut. The other was water, pleasantly cool. The next locker was half full of concentrate bars, sticky-taped to the racks. Better and better: food as well as water. Brun alternated sips of water with bites of concentrate.

She still didn't know why she was in a pod in zero G. Was it someone's idea of a joke? A political move, an attempt to use her as a pawn in play against her father, or Heris?

"I don't think so," muttered Brun. She felt much better even without clothes on, now that a bar of concentrate was doing its work in her belly. She looked at the exterior scans again. The miners had explained their reference system; she could locate Xavier, Oreson, Blueyes, Zadoc. Rock-blips were supposed to be one color, and ship-blips another, which meant—if she was right about it—that there were a lot of ships out there. One of them would be the
Sweet Delight
, and one would be
Vigilance
, with Koutsoudas on scan. Somebody should be able to see the pod—if they bothered to look, with the battle over. And there were lots of little blips going by, some of them marked by the scans as thermally active. Thermally active rocks? Brun frowned. Weren't thermally active rocks found in volcanoes? She'd never heard of volcanoes on anything smaller than a planet.

Ahead, a drift of blips slid across the screen, thickening. She was moving too fast, she realized, relative to those rocks. Pods were tough, but not that tough. It took her a few moments to locate the thruster controls, and confirm the full fuel tanks. Then she began maneuvering, using short bursts, as she remembered someone telling her, trying to work away from the thickest clumps of blips.

"She's
what
!" Heris struggled to keep her voice under control. Faroe looked miserable enough, and he wasn't the one who'd done it.

"She volunteered to go talk to the miners aboard the ore-hauler, to convince them to go back into hiding. I was going to pick her up before our final jump out. When we—you—won, I sent word . . . and apparently they had this party."

Heris could imagine. An ore-hauler full of drunken miners who had just learned that they weren't going to commit suicide by attacking warships with pods . . . they'd have been crazy to start with, and the party hadn't helped.

"—And apparently she passed out, and someone threw up on her, and they cleaned her up and put her in a pod to sleep it off, only someone hit the jettison control by mistake hours later—"

And now Brun was out there in a little personnel pod, unconscious or sicker than sin if she was awake, in space thoroughly contaminated with spent weapons from days of fighting.

"Why didn't they go after her?" Heris asked.

"They
said
that whoever hit the jettison control was so drunk he didn't realize he'd done it—they only realized the pod was gone when they went to give her some clean clothes."

Great. She was not only unconscious, but naked. Heris could imagine explaining this to Lord Thornbuckle: sorry, sir, but I let your daughter experience war in the company of drunken miners and they dumped her into a pod, unconscious and naked, and shoved her out into the debris of battle. . . . No. Not a good plan. Something had to be done. "Do they have any kind of location on the pod?" she asked.

"No, sir." Faroe looked miserable, as well he might. "I've had our scan techs on it since I heard, of course, but there's so much—"

"Captain, you won't believe this." It was Koutsoudas, from across the bridge. Heris looked up. "Some idiot rockjumper is trying to collect weaponry with a personnel pod." He pointed to an icon that darted into a drift and then back out. "At least he's got some sense, but—"

" 'Steban, put a lock on that pod. Can you do a retro analysis—could that have come from the ore-hauler four or five hours ago?"

"It only turned its beacon on a few minutes ago, but let's see if I can get any kind of trace on the recordings. Hmm. Yes, it could've. Why?"

"Because it's Brun," Heris said. Only Brun could be that lucky, although her luck could run out any moment. "You're going to have to guide
Sweet Delight
to it for a pickup. Faroe, are you getting this?"

"Yes . . ." He sounded less confident than she felt. He hadn't been around Brun that long. "It's pretty thick stuff to take the yacht in. . . ."

"You're right." Heris thought a moment. "What we need is in the incoming formations. If we can help her stay alive that long . . . I need a tightbeam to the
Harrier
," she said.

* * *

Brun had forgotten everything but the scans that told her where the rocks were thickest. She had once thought it must be fun to pilot a pod like this in the rings of a gas giant; now she understood the look she'd gotten when she said so to the miners. And although she'd read that rocks usually drifted along together, all moving about the same vector and velocity, these rocks didn't act that way at all. She was constantly having to dodge rocks coming in at different angles, different speeds. She was almost glad she hadn't found any clothes, since she was dripping with sweat.

When the control panel suddenly spoke to her, in a scratchy simulation of a voice she knew, she didn't notice until it repeated her name the third or fourth time. "Brun! Brun! Can you hear us? Brun!"

Communications. Now where was that switch? She groped around until she found it and another little screen lit up to say that her transmitter had full power. "I hear you, but I'm busy," she said, flicking the starboard thruster on again. One thing about it, she was getting better at this all the time.

"Brun, is that you?"

"Yes, it's Brun. There's a lot of rocks out here." Then curiosity got past her concentration. "Who is this?" she asked.

"Koutsoudas," she heard. "Brun, you need to let me give you some guidance; someone's going to pick you up."

"Why can't you just give me a vector over to
Sweet Delight
?"

"Won't work," Koutsoudas said. "And I doubt you've the fuel for it." Brun glanced at the fuel display and was shocked at how much she'd already used. She'd been trying to do short adjustments but— "Give me a tenth-second burp starboard," Koutsoudas said, before she could think about it. "Now port." Something slid by in the scan, long and narrow with a thermally active tip.

"I don't understand all these thermally active rocks," she said to Koutsoudas. "I thought volcanoes had to be on planets."

"They aren't rocks," he said. While she was thinking about that, he gave her more directions. Now the scan blips thinned out.

"But they're not ships . . ." Brun said. She could see the ships clearly. These things were a lot closer.

"No," Koutsoudas said. "They're weapons."

"You mean—someone was shooting at me? Why?"

"No, you were crossing drifts of misses—missiles that didn't hit their target. You're almost out of it now—"

Brun realized she was shaking. It was stupid; she was almost out of it now.

"Is there a suit aboard?" Koutsoudas asked. "You've got ten minutes before your next drift, if you can find a suit—"

She found an EVA suit, a drab utilitarian model nothing like her custom suit. Its owner had been shorter; Brun felt the pressure all along her spinal column once she'd struggled into it. But the locks did fasten, and the internal gauges did turn green. It was fully charged with air, water, and power. Best of all, the suit boots had gripper feet; she now had a solid
down
.

She worked her way back to the control panel and discovered that it was just possible to handle the switches in gloves. She plugged in the suit com to the pod's com, and told Koutsoudas she was suited.

"Just in case," he said, in the same calm voice he'd used all along. "Now—what's your fuel situation?"

"Down to ten percent." And she didn't know what ten percent was, in terms of use. She didn't even know how long she'd been using it.

"Then give me one-half second, thrusters seven and four." She could see the fuel display sag at that, and she said so.

"Not much longer," Koutsoudas said.

When the blow came, it took her by surprise, and slammed her against the adjacent lockers. The suit's padding protected her, but the boots came unstuck from the deck, and she tumbled. Another blow to the pod sent her tumbling in another direction. The pod rang with noise: clangs, scrapes, piercing squeals. Finally it was still. Brun put out a cautious foot and it stuck. She could hear nothing; the end of the communication cable waved around, making it clear that she'd come unplugged. She moved slowly back to the control panel, and plugged it in. A patient voice was calling her, not Koutsoudas but someone else.

"Brun—Brun—Brun—"

"I'm here," she said. "Just shaken up."

"Good," the voice said. "You're now locked onto the R.S.S. minesweeper
Bulldog
, en route to the
Harrier
. Remain in your spacesuit; do not attempt to leave your vessel until docking is complete and you have received notification." And that was the end of that; her comlink cut off and would not reopen.

It seemed like a long time later that a gentler series of bumps woke her from a nap. The comlink hissed gently, live again, then another voice spoke to her.

"Brun?"

"Yes," she said, feeling grumpy. "I'm here." Where else would she be?

"Your pod is aboard our ship—it's the R.S.S.
Julian Child
—"

"I thought I was going to something called
Harrier
," Brun said.

A chuckle. "Oh, you are. But
Harrier
has no facilities for docking like this, and the admiral thought it would be safer to transport you by shuttle, not make you swim tubes."

"Oh. Thanks." Admiral. What admiral? Where was Heris? Where, for that matter, was Lady Cecelia?

"We understand you're in a vacuum-capable suit . . . if you'll open your hatch—it's the left-hand flat button—"

"That says exterior hatch, caution. Yes, I know."

"That will put you in our number six docking bay. It's not aired up—if you have any concerns about your suit air, please tell me now. There's an airlock to ship-normal air about six meters to your left, as you exit, and suited personnel will be there to help you."

Outside the pod, Brun saw a vast cargo bay open to space; craft she had no name for were parked along the sides, and her pod filled the open middle. Beyond the lip of the bay, she could see the hull of another ship, a shape so odd she wasn't at first sure it
was
a ship. She stared until someone touched her suited arm, took the dangling cable of her comunit, and plugged it into his own suit.

"It's a minesweeper," she heard. "Odd beast, isn't it? Nothing else could go in after you."

Then they guided her to the airlock, and on into the ship, where she had a chance to change into a gray Fleet shipsuit before her shuttle flight left for the
Harrier
.

* * *

"Some party," the admiral said, without preamble, when Brun had arrived in her office.

"I—don't remember most of it," Brun said. The admiral looked familiar, though she didn't think she'd met admirals before. Not this one, anyway.

"My niece tells me you once wanted to run away and join the service," the admiral said. Niece. Aunt. Brun looked at the admiral again. Graying hair, but the same evenly chiseled dark features, the same compact body, the same confidence.

"You're Heris's aunt," she blurted.

"Yes. And you're Lord Thornbuckle's daughter. Tell me—are you cured of your desire for adventure?"

Brun thought a moment, even though she didn't need to think. "Not really," she said. "I mean, I'm still alive."

The admiral nodded, as if she'd expected that answer. "Do you now understand why my niece and her crew insisted that you learn all those boring bits you complained about?"

Brun laughed, which startled the admiral, then she smiled too. "I always understood," Brun said. "I didn't realize the complaining bothered them. Doesn't everyone gripe?"

Admiral Serrano—she supposed they had the same surname as well as the same genes—tipped her head as if to inspect Brun more closely. "You are a remarkable young woman," she said. "My niece thought so, and you just proved it again. Will you eat with me?"

Brun had no idea what meal might show up, but her stomach was ready for any of them. Any two or three of them. "Thank you," she said, hoping that the admiral would ignore the far less mannerly answer her stomach gave at the thought of food. "I'd be honored."

"She's safe aboard the
Harrier
," Koutsoudas said. "If that's safe . . . they won't let me talk to her."

"I don't think my aunt eats girls for breakfast," Heris said. "Not even that one. Who, I'm sure, is cheerful and bright-eyed and ready to tell an admiral everything she thinks she knows about everything she's heard."