Honor Among Enemies

intended only for emergency use, and she grunted in anguish, unable to cry out properly under the massive thrust. Her thumb reached frantically for the manual override, finding the button with the blind, unerring speed of relentless training, and jabbed sharply... and nothing happened at all.

Nor was that the worst of it. Her attitude thrusters were equally berserk, whipsawing her wildly and sending her pinwheeling insanely off into space. She lost all spatial reference in the first two seconds, and her inner ear went mad as she whirled crazily away from the ship. It was only God's good grace that she was headed away from the ship; her malfunctioning SUT could just as easily have turned her straight into the hull, with instantly lethal consequences.

But the consequences she had were bad enough. For the first time in her life, Ginger Lewis was hammered by the motion sickness which had always evoked amused sympathy when she saw it in others. She vomited helplessly, coughing and choking as the instinct-level responses her instructors had beaten into her fought to keep her airways clear. She'd never expected to need that training, she wasn't the sort to whoop her cookies over a little vacuum work!, but only the legacy of her merciless DIs kept her alive long enough to hit the vomit-slimed chin switch that dropped her com into Flight Ops' EVA guard frequency.

'Mayday! Mayday! Suit malfunction!' she gasped while her thrusters continued to bellow like maddened animals. 'This...' She retched again, choking as dry heaves wracked her. 'This is Blue Sixteen! I'm, God, I don't know where I am!' She heard the panic in her own voice, but she couldn't even see. The contents of her stomach coated the inside of her helmet, wiping away the stars, compounding her disorientation, and still the thrusters thundered without rhyme or reason! 'Mayday!' she screamed into the com.

And no one answered at all.

'What the...?' Scotty Tremaine had just relieved Lieutenant Justice, LAC Two's ops officer, and settled into his chair in Flight Ops when he noticed the radar trace spearing away from the ship on an impossible vector.

He punched a query into the computers, but they didn't know what it was either, and he frowned. The guard frequency was silent, so it couldn't be somebody in trouble, but he couldn't think of what else it might be, either. He tapped a stylus to his display, painting the trace and dropping it onto the master plot in CIC, and then hit the all-hands transmit key.

'Flight Ops,' he said crisply into his boom mike. 'I have an unidentified bogey heading out at...' he checked the numbers '...thirty-five gees. All section leaders, check your sections. I want a headcount soonest!'

He sat back in his chair, gnawing his lip as reports started coming in. They rattled from the com with reassuring speed, and he checked each section leader off on his master list as he or she reported in. But then they stopped, and there was one section still unchecked.

'Blue Sixteen, Blue Sixteen!' he said into the mike. 'Blue Sixteen, I need your count!' Only silence came back, and then someone else spoke.

'Flight, this is Yellow Three. I sent Blue Sixteen to check out Pod Two-Four three or four minutes ago.'

Tremaine’s blood froze, and he shifted instantly to his link to Boat Bay One.

'Dutchman! Dutchman!' he barked. 'Flight Ops is declaring a Dutchman! Get the ready pinnace out now!'

A startled acknowledgment came back, and he plugged into CIC.

'Ullerman, CIC,' a voice said.

'Tremaine, Flight Ops,' Scotty said urgently. 'Listen up! I've got a Dutchman headed away from the ship at thirty-five gees. I painted the trace on your plot three minutes ago. Tie into the ready pinnace and guide them in on it, and for God's sake don't lose it!'

'Acknowledged,' the voice snapped, and Tremaine turned back to his own radar. It was short-ranged and much less powerful than the main arrays, and the trace was already fading from his display. He saw the much larger radar signature of the ready pinnace, driving hard on reaction thrusters to clear the ship, and his lips moved as he whispered a silent prayer for whoever that disappearing trace was.

If the pinnace didn't get to him before Tracking lost him, the poor bastard would become a Flying Dutchman in truth.

'Are you positive, Harry?' Honor asked quietly.

'Absolutely,' Lieutenant Commander Tschu grated. 'Some sick son-of-a-bitch rigged her SUT, Skipper. He tried to make it look like a general system failure, but he got too cute when he set her com up to 'fail.' The com's not part of the SUT, and he had to interface her SUT computers with her skinny. That's not hard, but it doesn't happen by accident; someone has to make it, and someone damned well did. The SUT computers totally fried, and all his execution files were supposed to crash and burn with the rest of the system, but my data recovery people found a single line of code directing output to her com buried in the garbage. It's only a fragment, but it's also completely outside normal programming parameters, because there's not supposed to be a link from the SUT to her com. This wasn't a hardware failure, and it wasn't corrupted files. It took specifically planted files to make it all happen.'

Honor locked her hands behind her. She didn't say a word for at least one full minute, but her eyes blazed. Morale, and performance, aboard Wayfarer had gone up by leaps and bounds. Her people had come together, fused into a single living, breathing whole by their shared accomplishments. They'd only had to look around to see how well they'd done, and she'd made certain they knew she was proud of them, as well. Even Sally MacBride and Master-at-Arms Thomas had commented to her on it, and Tschu's Engineering department had shown the greatest improvements of all.

Now someone had attempted to murder one of her crew, and the way whoever it was had done it was almost worse than the attempt itself. Few spacers would admit it, but the terror of being lost, of drifting helplessly in space until your suit air and heat ran out, was one of the darkest nightmares of their profession.

That was what someone had done to Ginger Lewis, and Honor's rage burned even hotter because it was her fault. She never doubted who was responsible for this, and she was responsible for the fact that Steilman was still at large. She should have forgotten about Tatsumi's career and Wanderman's sense of self-respect and smashed Steilman the first time he stepped out of line. She'd let herself be distracted, let herself actually look forward to Wanderman's giving Steilman his comeuppance, and forgotten that he might have marked Lewis down for a victim.

The right corner of her mouth began to tic, and Rafe Cardones, who knew the signs of old, felt himself tighten at the telltale sign of fury. Then he realized she was even more enraged than he'd thought, for her voice was calm, almost conversational when she spoke to him at last.

'Is Lewis all right?'

'Angie says she will be, but I'd say she's used up about two lifetimes of luck,' he replied carefully. 'Her attitude thrusters could just as easily have slammed her straight into the hull, and she inhaled enough stomach acid to cause major lung damage. Angie's on top of that, but she pulled thirty-five gees for twenty minutes, with no warning, and her vector looks like a near-weasel chasing a rabbit. That didn't do her a bit of good, and she was pretty far gone in anoxia, from the lung damage, not suit failure, before the pinnace got to her. By the way,' he added, 'Tatsumi was the ready section SBA. Angie says he's the only reason she's still alive.'

'I see.' Honor paced once around her day cabin while Nimitz crouched on his perch, tail lashing and coat bristled as he shared her searing wrath. Tschu had brought Samantha with him, and she quivered with her own echo of the emotions radiating from Honor and Nimitz... and her own person. The engineer reached up to stroke her spine soothingly, and she pressed back against his touch, but she also bared her fangs with a sibilant hiss.

'Who worked suit maintenance?' Honor asked finally, turning back to the others.

'I've pulled the duty roster, but we're working extra shifts with the pod reloading, and there were some extra hands involved,' Tschu said. 'I've got the check-off on Lewis's SUT, it was Avram Hiroshio, one of my best techs, but there've been so many people in and out of the suit morgue that anyone could have done it. It was all software, Ma'am. All the bastard needed was five seconds when no one was watching to overwrite his chip onto the SUT computer.'