Mission of Honor

superdreadnought's outer armor but still well outside the big ship's core hull. Passages like this one were specifically designed and intended to be depressurized when the ship went to action stations as a means of limiting blast damage when the armor was breached. The fact that Charles Babbage hadn't bothered to do that said an enormous amount about the Solarian League Navy's readiness states. Or about Task Force 496's pre-battle appreciation of the threat levels it faced, at least.

'Well it's nice we'll have air, Selma,' Abigail responded mildly. 'On the other hand, who knows? They may actually have depressurized the next lateral. Besides, I understand Sollies don't like to take showers or wash their socks. So if it's all the same to you, I think we'll just keep our helmets sealed, anyway.'

'Suits me just fine, Ma'am,' Wilkie replied with a chuckle, and someone else laughed out loud. That laugh sounded just a bit nervous, perhaps, but Abigail wasn't going to fault anyone for that.

'Open it up,' she said.

'Aye, aye, Ma'am.'

Wilkie engaged the manual unlocking system and gripped the old-fashioned wheel. It took her a second longer—and a lot more effort—than it ought to have to get it moving, and the squealing sound it made set Abigail's teeth on edge. Not just because of the fingernails on a blackboard effect, either. There was no excuse at all for not properly maintaining the manual override mechanism on an emergency escape hatch!

Once Wilkie managed to undog the pressure door, it swung smoothly open. Macfarlane stepped quickly through it, turning to his left, up-ship, and one of the other flechette gunners stepped through it to the right.

'Clear port,' MacFarlane reported.

'Clear starboard,' the other man said.

'Go,' Gutierrez responded, and the rest of the boarding party flowed quickly through the opening under his critical eye. Fortunately, everyone remembered how he'd briefed them and no one fell over his or her feet in the process. In fact, although Abigail knew he'd never admit it, his 'vacuum-sucker' spacers moved with commendable caution and speed.

She herself paused and bent to examine the emergency hatch more closely. The passageway to which it had granted access was also illuminated only by emergency lighting, but at least all of the lighting units seemed to be up this time. And as she examined the hatch, she found that the normal power-assisted unlocking system appeared to have been far better maintained than the manual system had. Of course, there was the minor problem that at the moment it didn't have power, wasn't there?

A shadow fell over her, and when she looked up, she found that Musgrave had been looking over her shoulder.

'Ain't that a kicker, Ma'am?' the bosun muttered in tones of profound disgust. Over, she noticed, his dedicated link, not the general net.

'It does seem just a bit slipshod, Bosun,' she acknowledged over the same link. 'But not a lot more than leaving pressure in here.'

'Someone needs his butt kicked up between his ears, begging your pardon, Ma'am,' Musgrave concurred.

'Oh, I couldn't agree with you more. On the other hand, the SLN's a peacetime navy. Or it was , anyway. I imagine they put up with quite of bit of sloppiness.'

'Peacetime or not, they should've had the brains to at least pump the air! And even allowing for that, this here's an example of piss-poor maintenance discipline,' Musgrave growled, glowering at the neglected manual unlocking system. ''Less I'm mistaken, accidents've been known to happen in peacetime, too, Ma'am.'

'That they have,' Abigail agreed more grimly. 'Even aboard Solarian ships-of-the-wall, I suppose.'

She straightened and consulted the schematic which had been loaded into her electronic memo board. Theoretically, at least, she had the deck plans for the entire ship—or for the Scientist class as originally designed, at least—supplied specifically for SAR by Admiral O'Cleary. She hoped the schematics really were complete, without any surprises, intentional or unintentional, but she wasn't prepared to trust them fully. Still, they offered at least general guidance, and she'd marked them with the damage Tristram 's sensors had been able to map before she download them to the board.

'All right, Walt,' she said to Midshipman Corbett, who carried an identical memo board. 'This is where we split up. According to our damage map, this passage should extend another hundred meters forward before you hit a breach. It's got to be good for at least fifty meters, since that's the closest set of blast doors in that direction. You take your people and head forward.'

She tapped her own memo board with a stylus, and a lift bank flashed amber on both boards simultaneously.

'Make sure your com link doesn't get compromised, and stop at this lift bank,' she continued, indicating the flashing section of the schematic. 'Meantime, I'll head aft to Lift Nineteen. Whether there's power to the lifts or not, we can use the shafts to move inboard.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Corbett acknowledged. 'Bosun?'

'I'm on it, Sir,' Musgrave said with just a hint of reassuring gruffness, nodded to Abigail, and started down the passage in the indicated direction with his extraordinarily youthful superior officer in tow.

Abigail watched half of the boarding party moving off with them, then turned to grin at Gutierrez.

'Let's go, Matteo.'

* * *

Major Markiewicz followed Captain Ingebrigtsen and Master Sergeant Palmarocchi out of the lift doors at the 00 Deck level. According to the schematic in his battle armor's memory, he was approximately sixty meters aft of Leeuwenhoek 's command deck, and one hundred meters forward of her flag bridge. The 00 Deck corresponded to the Royal Manticoran Navy's Axial-One, the central—and best protected—deck of a warship's core hull, and Leeuwenhoek 's was both broader and higher than the other decks stacked above and below it. The passage before Markiewicz was well lit, yet he felt uneasily aware of its vastness, as if he couldn't quite make out details.

Don't be stupid, Evgeny. You can see just fine. It's just that you shouldn't be seeing this much empty space aboard any warship .

He snorted mentally, then turned to the dark-haired SLN lieutenant who'd been waiting at the lift doors. Allowing for prolong, she was probably somewhere in her thirties, he estimated—old for her rank in the RMN. Then again, the Sollies hadn't had as many vacancies created for promotion over the last couple of decades as Manticore had.

The name 'PABST, V.' was stenciled on the breast of her skinsuit, and she wore no helmet. She was of slightly above average height, although she looked like a stripling standing in front of his looming battle armor.

'Major Markiewicz, Royal Manticoran Marines,' he said crisply over his armor's external speakers.

'Lieutenant Pabst—Valencia Pabst,' she responded. 'I'm Admiral O'Cleary's flag lieutenant.'

'Excuse me, Lieutenant,' Ingebrigtsen put in a bit sharply, 'but don't Solarian officers salute superior officers?'

Pabst looked at her for a moment, as if Ingebrigtsen had spoken in some foreign tongue. Then she shook herself visibly, flushed, came to a reasonably correct position of attention, and saluted Markiewicz.

'I beg your pardon, Major.'

There was more than a little anger in her voice, but Markiewicz figured she was entitled to that.

'I realize this has all come as something of a shock, Lieutenant Pabst,' he replied, charitably ascribing her lapse in military courtesy to the aforesaid shock as he returned her belated salute.

'Yes, Sir. It has,' she agreed, still with that core of cold anger and resentment. 'If you'll follow me, please?'

'Lead on, Lieutenant,' Markiewicz replied.

'Top?' Ingebrigtsen said quietly to Palmarocchi.

'On it, Ma'am,' the master sergeant replied, and dropped back beside Lieutenant Lindsay.

He spoke very quietly to the young man for a moment, and then Lindsay and his platoon's first squad arranged themselves unobtrusively at Ingebrigtsen and Markiewicz's heels. The second and third squads stayed put, keeping an eye on the lift banks while Master Sergeant Palmarocchi and Platoon Sergeant Wilkie kept an eye on them. Markiewicz really wished Palmarocchi was along to watch his back, but he supposed that between them a grass-green lieutenant, an experienced captain, and a weary old major who'd once upon a time been a battalion