Free Heris Serrano by Elizabeth Moon Page A

said. "I asked you what the sulfur extraction rate was. Do you know, or not?" With each day, her unease about the yacht's basic fabric and systems had grown. Getting answers from the crew had turned out to be harder than she expected.
     
    The moles looked at one another before Timmons answered. "Well . . . pretty much, Cap'n. It's below nom at the moment, but it usually runs that way 'cause that dauber wants a sulf-rich sludge for his veggie plots."
     
    It took Heris a moment to translate civtech slang and decide this meant Lady Cecelia's gardener wanted more sulfur in the first-pass sludge. In the meantime, they still had not answered as she thought they should. She let the steel edge her voice. "Below nom is not what I'm looking for. What, precisely, is the number you have for sulfur clearance?" Again, the sidelong look from one mole to another. This time it was Kliegan who answered.
     
    "It's . . . ah . . . zero point three. Of first-sig nom, that is—"
     
    "Which is . . . ?" prompted Heris; she could feel temper edging higher.
     
    "Well, the book says one point eight, but this system's never worked any better'n one point six, just under first-sig. Mostly we run about two sigs below, say about point seven or so. System's underutilized, so it's not that important. It's rated for a population of fifty, and we don't have that many aboard."
     
    Heris closed her eyes briefly, running over the relevant equations in her head. Sulfur clearance was only one of the major cycles, but critical to the ship's welfare because errors could not only make people sick, but degrade many ship components as well. Delicate com equipment didn't like active sulfur radicals in the ship's atmosphere. She added ship's crew, house staff, and owner's family. "In case you haven't noticed," she said briskly, "we now have fifty-one humans and a long voyage ahead of us. I presume you flushed the tanks and re-inoculated them while we were in port—?" But the hangdog looks told her they hadn't. "And the last logged maintenance by offship personnel was this—Diklos and Sons, Baklin Station?"
     
    "That's right, ma'am," Timmons said. "They couldn't have done such a good job, fancypants as they are, 'cause the system never did pick up the points, but Captain Olin said never mind—"
     
    "Oh, he did?" Heris struggled to keep her thoughts off her face. First his demand for an odd, inconvenient course that did not meet the owner's needs, and now a tolerance for malfunctioning environmental equipment—something no sane captain would have. Failing to order the tanks flushed and recharged at Rockhouse might have been spite—revenge for being fired—but until then he had risked his own life as well. What could have made the risk worth it? "We'd better see how bad it is," she said briskly. "Suit up and we'll go take a look—"
     
    "You, Captain?" asked Iklind. He almost never spoke, she'd discovered, letting chatty Timmons say anything necessary. But now he looked worried.
     
    Heris let her brows rise. It had worked on other ships; it should work here. "Did you think I wouldn't want to check for myself?"
     
    "Well, it's not that, Captain . . . only . . . these things can smell pretty bad." Pretty bad was an entirely inadequate description of a malfunctioning sulfur loop, and she was sure more than the sulfur scrubbers were in trouble. Once the pH had gone sour, many of the enzymes in other loops worked erratically, as the chemistry fluctuated.
     
    "That's why we'll be suited," she said. When they didn't move she said. "Five minutes, in the number four access bay."
     
    "Complete suits?" asked Timmons. "They're awfully hot—"
     
    "You prefer to risk the consequences?" Heris asked. "With a system you know is malfunctioning?"
     
    "Ah . . . it's just stinks," Timmons said. When she glared at him, he said, "All right, Captain. Suits." But as he left, she heard him mutter, "Damn lot of nonsense. Can't be enough reaction in that loop