“Yes, I’m afraid that my righting technique did more damage than the blast that threw her onto her side had in the first place,” Daniel said, looking up again though he knew perfectly well what he was going to see. “Still, it couldn’t be helped.”
The outrigger struts were attached to the hull frames. They hadn’t broken when the ship slammed down harder than the shock absorbers could compensate for, but they’d bent—and, bending, had buckled hull plates around the base of each strut. Straightening the plates would be a dockyard job and a major one at that.
“About thirty percent of the Goldenfels’ spaces no longer hold air,” he continued. “Fortunately the main passages are axial and airtight, so we can close off compartments and still have use of the ship from stem to stern. Since we’re a skeleton crew, we don’t need even as much volume as we have left.”
He grinned. “We’re a well-gnawed skeleton at that, I fear.”
“She isn’t the Goldenfels,” Adele said absently as she knuckled her eyes. “That was her cover name. According to the bridge computer she’s actually HSK2 Atlantis, an Alliance naval unit.”
She looked at Daniel. “There’s a separate bridge unit that isn’t linked to the ship systems,” she explained. “That’s why I wasn’t able to access it before when we. . . .”
She stuck her hand out, then turned it over to mime the way the freighter had flopped onto its side. The gesture was perfectly clear, but it amused Daniel to realize how very tired they must both be that they were unable to call up familiar words.
“Pasternak’ll finish with the High Drive soon, probably within twenty-four hours,” Daniel said, trying to swim through the fog that surrounded his mental processes. He really needed rest, and for the life of him he couldn’t imagine when he was going to get it. The dilemma made him smile, albeit tiredly. “I really want to lift from here. There’s hundreds of the Goldenfels’ crew out there in the bush with impellers. I don’t think they could successfully storm the ships, not with the plasma cannon constantly manned, but I expected constant sniping.”
Adele cleared her throat. She seemed embarrassed.
Daniel gave her a sharp look; he was beginning to come out of his fog. “Go on, tell me,” he said more sharply than he’d intended.
“Before Tovera entered my service,” Adele said, looking out toward the jungle, “she worked for an officer of the Fifth Bureau, the Alliance security office which reports directly to Guarantor Porra.”
“Go on,” Daniel said. He hadn’t known or particularly wanted to know the details, but the general outline wasn’t a surprise. If Adele—and Hogg—trusted Tovera, that was enough for him.
“She has authentication codes that the Alliance signals officer would recognize, even if he isn’t himself a member of the Fifth Bureau,” Adele said. “Many of the castaways retain their commo helmets, so Tovera could contact them directly and expect her message to be spread throughout the body of the crew. She asked for my help because she wouldn’t have been able to determine the correct frequencies herself.”
“Ah,” said Daniel. “Of course we’d have responded to snipers with the plasma cannon, but I was surprised that that implied threat had completely forestalled incidents. Tovera made the threat more personal, I gather?”
“She said that if a Cinnabar spacer was wounded, she’d kill a prisoner,” Adele said. She swallowed and turned so that her eyes met Daniel’s. “She said that if a Cinnabar spacer was killed, she would kill five prisoners. And she said that Captain Leary knew nothing of this: she was with the Fifth Bureau, and it wasn’t for mere Fleet personnel to question the Guarantor’s purposes.”
She cleared her throat. “And I didn’t stop her, Daniel.”
“Stopping Tovera . . . ,” Daniel said, “or Hogg, either one, isn’t a process to enter into lightly. We have enough enemies in this business that I’m not going to turn down any help that’s offered.”
He rubbed his eyes but he shouldn’t have, not for a moment yet, because when he was no longer looking at his immediate surroundings he caught a vision of what might have happened: Hogg holding a screaming prisoner by the hair—because Hogg was involved, had maybe planned the whole thing—and drawing his knife, he’d use his knife, across her throat.