The Service of the Sword

Pampas obviously saw the same thing. 'No obvious damage,' he reported as he drifted in front of the first node, fingering its surface like a phrenologist looking for bumps. 'Guess we'll have to go deeper. Pop the tool kit, Rafe, and hand me a universal socket.'

They stayed aboard the Lorelei for sixteen hours, approximately two hours past the point where Cardones's own brain began to fog over. Pride alone dictated that he hide his fatigue as he continued to assist Pampas, but apparently even ONI's supermen were subject to the same frailties as standard- issue mortals. As the last of those sixteen hours crawled past, the muffled curses at dropped tools or fumbled components grew steadily more frequent, until Sandler finally bowed to the inevitable and ordered everyone back to the Shadow for a hot meal and seven hours of sleep.

Seven hours and fifteen minutes later, they were back aboard the Lorelei.

And after twelve more hours aboard her, they had it all. Or at least as much they were going to get.

'There's not a lot I can tell you yet, Skipper,' Pampas said tiredly as they gathered around the wardroom table with their steaming cups of coffee or tea or cocoa. 'Not until we finish tapping into the rest of the diagnostic jacks and can build a complete system map. But the one thing that is clear is that all of them went down together.'

'The forward and after groups both?' Damana asked.

'All of them,' Pampas confirmed. 'That alone tells us something new is going on here.'

'Unless that's how a grav lance normally affects things,' Jackson pointed out.

Sandler looked at Cardones. 'Rafe?' she invited.

'It wasn't the way our grav lance behaved,' Cardones said, shaking his head. 'It didn't affect the Q-ship's impeller nodes at all, for one thing. And even in destroying their sidewall, it only took down the starboard side, the side nearest us.'

'As far as you know,' Hauptman put in pointedly. 'Your sensors were pretty far gone by then, weren't they?'

'Yes, but they weren't so far gone that we couldn't get ranging readings as we pumped out our energy torpedoes,' Cardones told her. 'And the post-battle analysis of the destruction pattern clearly indicated that her port sidewall was still up when the torpedoes started ripping the guts out of her.'

'Makes sense,' Swofford murmured. 'Just having that much metal between sidewall generators would make it hard for even a concentrated grav pulse to take out everything at once.'

'Which makes this all the more ominous,' Pampas said. 'Something coming from the outside shouldn't be able to knock out every single node at the same time like it did.'

'On the other hand, it's not like the nodes are running independently, either,' Sandler pointed out. 'In fact, aren't they pretty solidly interconnected, at least on a software and control level?'

'Right, but only on a software and control level,' Pampas said. 'You could bring down all the nodes at once by blowing the computer or frying the control lines, at least theoretically. But that's not what happened here. At least,' he added, lifting his eyebrows questioningly at Swofford, 'that's not what happened in the forward nodes.'

'It's not what happened in the after ones, either,' Swofford confirmed. 'We took a good look at the control system before we started plugging into the diagnostics. None of the lines were fried.'

'There is, of course, one other possibility,' Cardones spoke up.

All eyes turned to him. 'Yes?' Sandler prompted.

Silently, Cardones cursed the fatigue-driven fogginess that had made him open his mouth. It was such a ridiculous idea. . . . 'It's a really slim possibility,' he hedged. 'I'm not sure it's even worth bringing up.'

'Well, we won't know that until we hear it, will we?' Damana said reasonably. 'Come on, we're too tired for Twenty Questions.'

Cardones gave up. 'I was just wondering if it was possible for the nodes to have been blown from the inside,' he said hesitantly. 'I mean, as . . . sabotage.'

He had expected snorts of derision or at the very least a matching set of skyward-rolled eyeballs. But to his surprise—and relief—neither happened. 'Interesting,' Damana commented. 'Seems to me there's one tiny problem with it, though.'

'It would be tricky to pull off—' Cardones admitted.

'I wasn't referring to the technical difficulties,' Damana cut him off gently. 'I was thinking more about the fact that all the members of the crew have been accounted for out there.'

Cardones grimaced. He'd felt vaguely like a fool even before bringing it up. Now, at least, he knew the specific parameters of that feeling. 'Oh. Right.'

'It was a good idea, though,' Damana said encouragingly.

'And not one I'm ready to toss out with the bath water quite yet, actually,' Sandler said, sounding thoughtful. 'True, the number and gender of bodies match up with the official ship's manifest; but who's to say they didn't take on a passenger or extra hand somewhere along the way?'

'Wouldn't they have logged it if they had?' Jackson asked.

'They're supposed to,' Hauptman said. 'But if someone knew his way around a computer well enough to bring down the impeller, he'd certainly know how to edit a few log entries. My problem is why anyone would bother doing such a thing in the first place.'

'Well, there's the cargo, for starters,' Jackson said dryly. 'Worth—what did we decide? Somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-three million?'

'Sure, but why cripple the ship?' Hauptman said. 'If you're going to shut down the impeller, why not do it in such a way that you can bring it up again afterward? That way you can have the cargo and the ship.'

'Unless it's a gigantic disinformation scheme,' Sandler said. 'We've already speculated that someone might have staged these attacks for the purpose of getting their hands on an ONI task ship.'

'Which didn't happen,' Damana pointed out.

'Yet,' Pampas reminded him.

'If they haven't hit us by now, they're not coming,' Damana insisted. 'But if you're suggesting this is a variation of that scenario, Skipper, I can't see the point. What would they hope to gain?'

'Actually, the Captain may be on to something,' Swofford said, rubbing meditatively at his lower lip. 'Suppose we brought back a report saying that someone was able to do thus-and-so to a ship's impellers from a million klicks away. What do you suppose BuWeaps' response would be?'

'Ask for a bigger budget,' Pampas murmured.

A slightly strained chuckle ran around the table. BuWeaps' appetite for money was legendary. 'Right,' Swofford said. 'I meant after that.'

'Well, obviously, they'd start a crash research project,' Jackson said. 'They'd first try to figure out what this theoretical weapon had done, then how to reproduce the effect, then how to devise a counter against it, and then how to build one for ourselves.'

'All the while draining money and manpower from every other project in the pipeline,' Damana said, nodding slowly. 'It does make a certain amount of lopsided sense, doesn't it?'

'Especially when the whole thing drags on without anyone able to even figure out how the thing works,' Sandler said. 'A nice piece of distraction, especially with us in the process of gearing up for a war with the Peeps.'

'I don't know,' Pampas said, gazing down at the table. 'Sounds too complicated for a Peep operation, and I can't see who else would bother. I'm still not convinced there really isn't something new out there.'

'Neither am I,' Sandler assured him. 'But at this point it's worth brainstorming all possibilities.'

'Well, in that case, you might as well throw this one into the hopper, too,' Hauptman said. 'It occurs to me that, along with creating a distraction for BuWeaps, this could also push the government into leaning even harder on the Sollies.'

'Wait a minute,' Jackson frowned. 'Where'd the Sollies come into this?'

'No, she's right,' Damana agreed. 'I mean, where else could this superweapon have come from?'

'And pushing the Sollies any harder than we already have over the leaks in their embargo might goad them into getting their backs up,' Hauptman said. 'Maybe to the point of scrapping it altogether.'

'Boy, there's a thought,' Pampas muttered. 'A Peep navy armed with Solly