The False Admiral (6 page)

I stopped myself. It was a sign of the depth of my exasperation that those words had come out. She was staring at me again.

“By order? By order of whom?”

“By order of the guy you need to be listening to,” I told her sharply, and she flinched. “I'm good here,” I said, tugging at the strap. It was tight. Seeing that, Deilani swallowed and backed out of the room.

I took a couple of deep breaths, then settled back and closed my eyes. If Deilani was determined to force me to slack off, who
was I to argue? Besides, whatever she'd given me had sapped my energy, and not in a good way.

I did what I could over the com to help them find their way through the dark ship; or rather, I helped Nils. Salmagard was silent, and Deilani would run herself ragged before asking me for anything. At least they were all in shape.

“It's going to be ugly,” Nils said of the recycler he was working to extract from an escape craft. “I don't have any tools. Do you know where I can find some?”

“Tremma's maintenance supply. But where that is, I don't know. Just break whatever you have to. Stuff on the inside of a Ganraen EC can't be all that sturdy. And if you can get that running in a timely fashion, you should see about a combiner.”

“Really, sir?”

“Unless you want the last thing you ever eat to be field rations.” The food produced by a molecular protein combiner was never anything to get excited about, but it was still a step up from field rations.

“You really think this is it, sir?” Nils sounded shaken. He still wasn't over the exploding shuttle. My hearing was still a little dull too.

Until a few weeks ago these trainees must have believed that they were going to war. The conflict with Ganrae hadn't been going one way or the other too decisively. Things had been leaning in the Empire's favor, but it hadn't been such a one-sided conflict that the Empire would be feeling invincible.

Maybe Nils had thought that nothing would happen to him on the
Julian
. That was reasonable, and the cease-fire had come abruptly with the destruction of the space station that served as
the center of the Ganraen Commonwealth's government. He must've felt even safer knowing the fighting was over.

But now he had no choice but to think about his own mortality, a subject that his service training had probably glossed over.

“It's not outside the realm of possibility,” I told him.

“Yes, sir.”

Even in my suit, I could feel the temperature dropping. It wouldn't be long before our EV suits were the only things keeping us from freezing.

Salmagard returned, her grav cart stacked with survival packs. Enough to hold us for a while, even without a combiner. The meals in the packs came in numerous varieties, but the selection wasn't infinite. I did some quick mental math, and decided we'd be sick of all of them depressingly soon. Though when it came to rations like this, imperial ones were probably the best you could ask for.

I hoped Nils had the technical prowess to get a combiner running. We'd also need protein gel for it—and that would need to be kept at a certain temperature. Well, that would be easy. We could just leave it in the corridor and thaw it as needed. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd eaten food from a combiner. Ages ago.

I was too spoiled, and I needed to get over myself. I was going to be eating that sort of humble food three meals a day for the foreseeable future, and that was only if I lived through this.

Salmagard finished unloading her cart.

“Private,” I said, and she went to parade rest. I looked down at my bound wrist. “You know I can't actually put you at ease.”

“You're saying it would be wrong for me to follow your orders, sir?”

That surprised me. Her voice was perfectly even. I almost couldn't tell she was joking. She
was
joking, right? She had to be.

So she did have a sense of humor.

“You're sure?” I asked. “You might be better off on Deilani's good side. I don't have much to offer you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.” I cleared my throat. “Lieutenant?” I said into the com.

“Yes?” Deilani sounded a little out of breath. She was trying to compensate for not having a clue where she was going by running the whole way. Her pride couldn't be blamed on the Service. They hadn't taught her that. This was all her.

“Where are you?” I asked.

There was enough of a pause to indicate mild panic.

“You aren't lost, are you?” I stopped myself there. Only minutes ago I'd been praying that Deilani could let go of her personal feelings about me and focus on reality. Making fun of her at a time like this would be hypocritical. “Relax, Lieutenant. We're on a private channel. Where are you?”

She'd just taken a wrong turn on the way back to the airlock. I guided her back on track. I wouldn't have bothered her, but her cargo of O
2
and EV charges was a safety net that we needed to have as soon as possible.

Nils returned. He was right; the crippled recycler on his grav cart was not pretty. I didn't care, but it bothered him. He liked to take pride in his work, and his mental state was fragile at the moment.

“We're going to heat this room with a fuel cell,” I announced. Salmagard's brows rose. Nils' jaw dropped.

“You'll bake us alive,” he said. “We have no way to regulate it. Even with power, EVs can't balance those temperatures.”

“Not once we lose the rest of our residual heat,” I said. “It's going to be cold. And we'll put it in an isolation unit and quarantine it. That'll contain some of the heat.” If we couldn't get usable power out of an energy source, why not at least benefit from the heat? There would be cells in the shuttle bay.

Nils didn't like it, but he didn't have a better idea. I sent Salmagard with him; it would take them both to get a cell onto a lift cart. They'd barely left when Deilani arrived. It was an enormous relief to see the supplies she brought. As the temperature dropped, these EV suits would be our last line of defense against the cold; we'd need to keep them charged. Freezing to death did not appeal to me.

“What now?” she asked, giving me a look. It was a new look. I wasn't sure what it meant, but it seemed encouraging.

I considered the question. Deilani didn't have the technical know-how to handle a protein combiner. That would have to be Nils. A lot of this would have to be Nils or myself. But I was tied to an examination table.

“I'm sure there'll be more urgent things than this, but for now why don't you see if you can find a viewer, some readers, and some archives? If we're stuck here for a while we'll need something to do. I'm serious.”

Deilani left looking conflicted, and I was glad she didn't have a weapon. If we really did find ourselves waiting around for weeks on end, she'd be glad I'd asked her to do this.

I had some peace and quiet to figure out our next move. It would take time for Salmagard and Nils to extract a cell and get it back
here without using lifts. The next item on the list would be water. We'd have to find some kind of containers, then think of the best way to access the water aboard the freighter. Not with the taps, of course—those were controlled by the computer. My inclination was to crack open a pipe, seal it, and just open it again when we needed more, but there was probably a more elegant way. Nils would know.

I sat up, instinctively touching the com control on my collar with my one free hand. Someone had just dropped off the shared feed. The change in the audio was subtle, almost undetectable, but in the quiet dimness of the empty medbay I couldn't miss it.

I shifted channels until I heard voices. No surprise: Nils and Deilani. Deilani's idea, no doubt.

“. . . but
can
you do it?” Deilani was asking. She was trying to pressure him into something.

“I
could
. But I won't.”

“You're refusing an order?”

“Ma'am, you don't have a chain of command, and even if you did, I would not be in it.”

“Under these circumstances—” Deilani began, but Nils cut her off.

“Under these circumstances we do what we have to, and that means listening to whoever's got the best idea.” I was proud of Nils, but I wished he'd shown this kind of backbone earlier.

So this was what they sounded like when I wasn't around. These trainees had been drilled to exude Evagardian presence. Restraint, professionalism, perfection. They were less guarded now. Deilani had plenty of bluster when we were face-to-face, but she was also trying to pull in the other trainees for support behind my back. Smart. Sort of.

“He's an enemy operative, and he's going to try something. He doesn't
want
an imperial rescue,” Deilani was saying earnestly.

Actually, I hadn't thought that far ahead. It looked as though Deilani was worrying about my problems for me. That was sweet of her.

“But he's
getting
one, and he knows it because we've got a liner on the ship,” Nils pointed out. He was right. If the Empire did find us, it was just as likely to be because of Salmagard's wonderful genes as me.

“Yes, and his only chance is if we aren't there to tell them who he really is.” Deilani had thought this through.

“We don't
know
who he really is,” Nils protested.

“
She
does.”

It was time to step in. Deilani was going down a dangerous path, and she was putting Nils in a bad place, and from the sound of it she would soon be questioning Salmagard. Nils had no good options; disobey a man who
might
be an honorary admiral, or disobey a woman who was most certainly an imperial lieutenant.

This wasn't ideal. Why couldn't Deilani just mellow out? No, that wasn't a reasonable expectation. That was what made this so frustrating: her paranoia was legitimate. There was sabotage everywhere, and me on top of it. I knew how sketchy I must look to these three. Of course she was on edge. She was just following her training and trying to look out for her comrades, for the people she
knew
were her comrades.

She saw me as a threat, and she was trying to protect Nils and Salmagard. Maybe that meant she had the makings of a decent officer.

But she was going to get us all killed if she kept this up. Good intentions weren't enough.

“You two
did
see me hand off my weapon, didn't you?” I asked suddenly into the com.

The following silence was gratifying. I could picture their faces. Deilani rallied quickly.

“I daresay,” she said tightly. “We could not expect a Ganraen agent to be
entirely
helpless, even unarmed.”

And damn if that wasn't a damned reasonable thing to say. I sighed. I wanted to retort that surely a Ganraen operative couldn't possibly pose a threat to three imperials and their superior genes and training, but I decided against it.

“And just because you haven't done anything yet doesn't mean you won't later,” she added. I groaned inwardly. She was being childish. If I fought her stubbornness with stubbornness, I wouldn't win.

“Admiral,” Salmagard's soft, lustrous voice interrupted. I silently thanked the universe; without her, this ordeal would've been infinitely worse.

“What is it?” I heard Deilani hiss in frustration. She couldn't have seriously expected her little chat with Nils to stay private. If privacy was what she wanted, she should have encoded the channel. Did they teach that to young officers going into bio? Probably not.

“I have movement.”

That took a second to sink in. “Where?”

“In the buffer ring.”

That was at the reactor.

Never mind why anyone would be there—who could she have detected? “Nils, Deilani, where are you?”

“Bay Four.”

“Bridge.”

So it wasn't them. Why had Salmagard and Nils separated? No
time to think about it. I flicked out my knife and slashed the straps tying me to the examination table. I couldn't untie myself; it wasn't my fault Deilani had forgotten that I still had my knife. It wasn't my job to point that out to her. She was the officer, after all. Hadn't they taught her about attention to detail?

I turned on my EV suit's lights and left Medical.

“Are you tracking?” I asked over the com.

“No, sir. I've lost it.”

“I'm on my way. Private, get back to Nils and hold up. I'm going to find Deilani. Keep scanning.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You're supposed to be secured!” Deilani said as I slid down a ladder to come face-to-face with her.

“A lot of things are supposed to happen, Lieutenant. You don't hear me whining. Don't act like you're not glad to see me. You know you don't know the way to engineering, and if there's somebody else on this ship, I don't want anyone moving around alone.”

“Not friends of yours, then?”

“I don't have friends,” I said.

She made an aggravated noise, but she followed me.

I didn't know what to think, so I didn't. I just ran, and with only minimal lights, that was difficult enough.

We found Nils and Salmagard outside the buffer. With the reactor shut down, the ring-shaped tank of mercury served no purpose. And without the reactor, the ship had no purpose. It was just a big metal box.

The core was in marginally better condition than the rest of the ship. There were signs that there had been maintenance recently, and some imperial materials on display. One panel on the gray wall
was covered by a shiny smart-panel that glowed faintly. Seeing the Evagardian technology in this ship wasn't getting any less surreal.

“Where?” I asked Salmagard.

She pointed down at the maintenance trench beneath the ring. “It was brief—only a flicker.” She sounded almost apologetic. “The readings are unusual. It's as though there's some kind of interference, Admiral.”