None of that mattered now. Clear in her mind was the plan, as if someone had drawn it in scarlet ink on white paper . . . she heard herself explaining it in crisp phrases to the others. And they responded to her confidence, her enthusiasm.

By the time she was in the pinnace, her p-suit on but not sealed, and the gloves flipped back, the first flurry of action had settled to a purposeful, organized bustle.

The captain's voice in her ear caught her attention. "Lieutenant-you were right about two things.

Koutsoudas says he's picked up a single signal from the derelict, something he believes only Sera Meager would send. Fleet frequencies, Fleet codes, and a message that the fox has gone to ground.

And there's at least one shuttle headed for the derelict. We can't get you there before it arrives; our jump limit will leave you at least five minutes behind them."

"Yes, sir."

"The rest of the wave's insystem, and I've been in contact with the admiral. I'm sending both SAR teams, and the other pinnace will have all the supplies we can stuff into it. You have discretion to use whatever force is necessary to protect Sera Meager and her companion. We will be sending reinforcements when we've dealt with the other ships, but that may be some hours. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir." Hours . . . it might be days before they were reinforced. And they would have no heavy weapons. The sonic riot-control generators used in aired-up stations wouldn't work on a derelict open to vacuum . . . what could she use? "Meharry-"

"Yes, sir." Meharry's eyes had a feral glitter reflecting Esmay's own enthusiasm.

"Captain tells me we're going to be docking five minutes behind a hostile shuttle. The station's supposedly not aired up-at least, some of it isn't aired up. We'll need more than small arms."

"On it." Meharry ducked out, leaving Esmay staring at blank air. Well, she'd been with Heris Serrano for years . . . and this was how it was supposed to work . . . tell the good ones what to accomplish and then get out of their way. But she hadn't expected to feel quite this . . .

"Lieutenant-" It was a squad of the neuro-enhanced troops, heavily laden with weapons segments; their sergeant handed her a screenful of official numbers and letters for her signature-if they came back without all eight CFK-201.33-rs, it would be her job to explain where they had gone . .

. and she hadn't a clue what they were, or any of the long list of components below them. She ran her command wand aross the bottom of the list, and handed it back.

"We'll be first out as usual . . ." the sergeant said, with not quite a question mark.

"Right," Esmay said, dragging her mind back from Meharry's disappearance and the mysteries of Fleet inventory control to the immediate tactical problem. "And with hostiles ahead of us, and no idea whether our rescue targets have pressure suits."

"Piece of cake," the sergeant said. "None of the hostiles are going to be female, from what I hear, and our targets are. So we just shoot the bad boys, and leave the girls alone."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

"What now?" asked Hazel. Brun shrugged. She needed to think. She was hungry, thirsty-she sipped at the helmet tube-and very, very sleepy. And her legs hurt; the anesthetic spray was wearing off.

What could they do, with the few weapons they had? She could almost hear Commander Uhlis's voice yelling at her in the class: your best weapon is between your ears. Yes, and she'd like to keep it there, preferably in one piece.

"If we could get the artificial gravity on," Hazel said, "then we could turn it off."

Brun supposed she meant in order to confuse their enemies-but it would gain them only minutes, if that. It would certainly reveal their presence-the gravity generator wouldn't be on if no one was here. A vague plan began to form in her brain, shapeless as rising mist.

Exploring the controls while in a p-suit was a lot safer than playing around with them otherwise; Brun grinned as she remembered Oblo's cautionary tales. She prodded one after another, seeing what worked.

"Lights!" Hazel said. That was obvious. But was it lights in this room or overall? Brun waved a wide-armed gesture; Hazel nodded and pushed off to explore. Brun peered at the panel. If she could figure out how to bring up station scan, there should be an idiot display somewhere on the main board that would tell her what she needed to know, in several languages and nonverbal symbols.

Since the controls worked at all, she ought to be able to bring up station scan.

The rocker switch, when she found it, was located underneath a foldout panel. Brun pushed it with a silent prayer for luck . . . and the displays came up, flickering badly at first but steadying.

How long had they been off? And what was powering them now? She looked for the idiot display.

There. As she'd expected, one of the languages on the display was her own . . . another was Guerni. She couldn't read the third at all, but that didn't matter now. She flicked through the opening menu: station layout, environmental system controls, life support, emergency procedures (which included a section on biohazard containment), power system, communications.

Station layout made clear what the place had been-a biological laboratory of some kind; probably-Brun thought-one of those fairly common at colony startup, which tailored biologicals for the specific conditions found downside. Many colonies had them . . . but why, then, was this one derelict?

The station had been clearly divided into living space for the workers, and eight labs separated by locks and seals-three on one arm, and five on the other. The big open gap was, Brun saw, out near the end of one arm; they had docked under a solar-collecting panel halfway down the other.

Deep in the station's core, the system's expert slept, as it had slept for decades of local time.

All peripherals were offline; all sensors shut down. Its last instruction set lay uppermost, ready to execute if anyone turned on the power, but hard vacuum and random radiation had changed a few bits here and there. Normally that would have been no problem; its self-repair mechanisms were necessarily robust, designed for industrial use in space. But they were not designed for decades on a derelict that had been vandalized in a hurry, its expert laid to rest in half the time required.

When the lights came on, a trickle of power ran through its connections, shunted there by the designers who intended the expert to be functioning whenever the station was occupied.

Slowly-slowly for its design-the expert woke, layer by layer. Power in the lines meant someone had returned; that gave permission for it to draw power on its own and engage the self-check and self- repair routines. The topmost instruction set began executing, inhibiting return of some active functions. Those who inhabited the station now might be either legitimate employees or intruders .

. . if they were intruders, the expert was not to reveal itself by independent action, but instead isolate them and transmit a call for help.

Passive scan devices collected information. Two humans, female by all parameters, wearing female- design employee p-suits whose code numbers were in the directory: emergency evacuation suits from Laboratory Two. The expert engaged suit telemetry cautiously; the suits' inhabitants didn't notice. Neither human fit a known profile, but a quick check of the decay data from the reactor

indicated that it had been decades since the expert was put to sleep. Therefore it was unlikely that these employees would be known to it.

One, in the control room, was following a rational restart procedure on station control functions.

The expert did not interfere, but observed. She seemed to know what she was doing. The other was exploring the corridor leading to the second arm. The expert turned its attention to the outside world.

Hazel came back to the control room. "Lights are on all down that corridor. I couldn't see into all the compartments, though. The ones I could, some were dark and some weren't. You must've hit a main switch."

Brun nodded, and pointed to the panel that controlled lighting. It indicated power to the lights throughout, with a summary of lights switched off, and lights not functioning even though switched on. She pointed at other panels; Hazel leaned closer. She had found the power reports for both the internal reactor-now nearly depleted, and producing less than 40% of its former power-and the solar panels, also below nominal. With the damage they'd seen on the outside, she could believe that. Still, the station had been designed to support research and manufacturing; the power still available would easily restore life support throughout, if they could find the air for it.

The air for the central core she had already found-the heat generated by the reactor had nurtured the base beds of the environmental system all these years, and the slowly accumulating air had been stored under pressure. But should they air up? External air would free them from the need to carry tanks around, and extend the effective life of the ones they had. Yet airing up the station would prove someone was aboard-it would be easily detectable from the outside. Moreover, if intruders blew the station, and they didn't have their suits on, they'd die.

Brun was still mulling this over when Hazel brought her a handcomp with voice output . . . Brun grinned, and grabbed it. It had the standard plug connections, so Brun jacked it into the suit intercom connection on the outside, and tapped some of the preset message keys. She had a choice of three languages, and twenty preset messages. "All correct," said a tinny male voice with a strong accent. She looked at Hazel and cocked her head.

"I didn't hear it," Hazel said. "Maybe you have to hit the transmit key inside the helmet to transmit to other suits."

A nuisance. Brun fumbled with the comp and bumped the helmet transmit button with her chin as she keyed the preset message. "All correct."

"Got it!" Hazel said. "Now maybe we can find one with more capability."

"All correct," Brun tapped again. Then she hit each key once, to be sure what the messages were, and again to practice how to say "Help!" and "Danger!" and "Shift report." One of the keys transmitted no voice signal, but an electronic bleep that was probably, Brun thought, some kind of ID code for a central computer. She hit that one only once.

Besides the preset messages, the handcomp had key input for other data. Brun tried tapping out "Does this work?" but Hazel shook her head.

The expert system awaited whatever instruction would follow the authorization signal. "Does this work?" fit no protocol, but its natural-language processing was up to the task of interpreting it.

It must mean "Did the expert system receive that authorization and can it receive keyboard input?"

"At your service," it transmitted through the correct frequencies. Both humans stopped in the way that humans did when presented with novel or unexpected data.

"What was that?" asked the one who had not transmitted the authorization code. The expert waited for the other to reassure her, meanwhile retrieving a complete suit readout indicating fatigue toxins and mild hypothermia and analyzing the vocal patterns to conclude that this individual was a pubertal human female, a native speaker of Gaesh with the accent common to the nearby merchanters of the Familias Regnant rather than that of the Guerni Republic. It instructed the

suit to warm up a bit, and increase oxygen flow.