Free A Working of Stars by Debra Doyle, James D. MacDonald

smell the aftereffects of such carnage. The sight of it alone was bad enough.
    He stood at last before the ship’s main console and turned the speaker volume on his pressure-suit up as high as it could go.
    “Ship-mind,” he said. “Is anybody on board here still alive?”
    The synthesized voice of the ship-mind spoke again. “Analysis of internal sensor data suggests at least one possible survivor.”
    Not here on the bridge; that was certain. “Where?”
    “Localizing the data now. Please follow the flashing guides.”
    A yellow light on the bulkhead by the airtight door started to blink on and off. He went back through the door into the passageway outside; another light was blinking on the bulkhead there, telling him to go left. More flashing lights appeared as he needed them, directing him steadily inward toward the heart of the ship, the most protected spaces. The raiders had been in these passages, too; more than once his feet, clumsy in the magnetized soles of his pressure-suit, stumbled over bodies.
    He found the survivor in the ship’s infirmary. The medical aiketen there had continued their work even with slaughter going on around them. Len supposed that the sus-Dariv fleet-apprentice who lay beneath the armor-glass lid of the stasis box, cocooned in a delicate web of balanced energy, had been left for dead by the mysterious invaders, and had made her way to the infirmary with the last of her strength.
    Len spoke again to the ship-mind. “How long can the stasis box maintain her like this?”
    “Indefinitely,” the ship-mind replied. “Subject only to the need for a reliable power supply.”
    “If I open the lid, can the aiketen revive her long enough to answer questions without killing her for good?”
    “Consultation with the infirmary’s quasi-organics is required in order to answer your question.”
    “Consult away.”
    Silence once again filled the infirmary. Somewhere in all that lack of noise, presumably, the ship-mind and the medical aiketen traded data back and forth.
    At last, the ship-mind said, “The aiketen are allowing the box’s energy fields to lapse for a brief period. Please ask your questions as concisely as possible; the patient’s condition cannot be supported for long outside stasis.”
    Len undid the clamps and lifted up the lid of the box. As he did so, the shimmering web of energy faded, and he got his first good look at the survivor of the attack. The girl was a fleet-apprentice, as Len had guessed from the bits of uniform he had glimpsed earlier, and as the ship-mind had intimated, she was in a bad way. Most of her torso was covered by one of those mysterious burn wounds—this one looking as though it must have been delivered at point-blank range—and her right arm and shoulder had been stabbed and hacked at by a boarding pike.
    As the aiketen ’s supporting web faded away, the fleet-apprentice drew a shuddering breath. Her eyes snapped open.
    “Who—?” The word came out in a painful whisper.
    “Lenyat Irao. Captain of the light-cargo carrier Fire-on-the-Hilltops .” The thought came to him that his pressure-suit, with its blank-faced helmet, must look disturbingly like ship-to-ship combat gear, and he groped for something to say that might give her confidence. “I’m under contract to the sus-Dariv for this run, so that makes us temporary kin.”
    “Good.” The fleet-apprentice’s eyes drifted closed. She lay there without speaking, while Len watched her ravaged chest rise and fall in shuddering, irregular breaths. After a while she seemed to gather strength again and went on: “You can take back word.”
    “I will,” said Len. “But—what happened? If I’m going to take back word, I have to know.”
    “We were attacked. Thought it was another family’s ship, challenging us for cargo … met them at the airlock, all in proper form … .”
    “I know how it goes.” Len had stood to meet a boarding party more than once himself, in the time he’d