Like the one to shut the engines down stone cold, now. And the one to close down power to the food plants and the water purifiers. Nothing she could do about the air, really, but she could shut down the scrubbers and the heating vents, and dump the regulator data. She tied every crucial database she could think of up tight.
Then there was the command Keale had created, in case worse came to worse. “Ozone?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Mind wipe.”
“Completing request.”
Those were the last words the AI would ever say. Right now it was in there eating out its own brain. If the pogos wanted to do anything with this ship, they would have to enter in each and every command sequence themselves, without any help.
The inner hatch opened and a half dozen Dedelphi spilled into the room. Esmaraude swung her chair around and pulled out the command word as she did it. The Dedelphi looked bewildered, she thought, to see no one left but her.
“You will not be hurt,” said the leader in tilting English. “We want the ship.”
“It's yours.” She held aloft the command word for them to see, and before any of them could move, brought it crashing down against the console.
Lareet nudged the fragments of the shattered command word with her toes. The captain had let herself be led quietly away down to where the rest of her people were being held. Now, only clean-suited sisters filled the command center. Umat stood next to the captain's station, listening to Dayisen Wital give the rest of her report.
“We captured two of the three command words,” said Dayisen Wital. “The head count of prisoners matches the duty roster for the ship. There have been three Human casualties, one very serious, but so far no deaths.” Her ears lowered involuntarily to her scalp. “We lost six hundred sisters.”
Lareet squeezed Umat's shoulder and lifted her ears to the dayisen around them. “We will mourn our sisters. This ship is the payment of their life debt. They, we, have done well. Very well.”
The dayisen swelled with pride.
“Do we have any idea what Keale's doing?” asked Umat.
One of the Ovrth Ondt bustled over. “We have a call from engineering; they estimate about twelve cutter-style ships on their way.”
Umat nodded. “Dayisen Wital, start tossing out the prisoners. That will keep them busy for a while.”
“What do you think they will do, Sister?” asked Lareet softly.
Umat shrugged. “At this point, I have no idea. I am hoping they don't either.”
The shuttle Theodore Graves accelerated hard and pushed Keale back into the swaddling couch. The Graves was too small to have a gravity deck, so they had been under acceleration gee all the way out. He had rotated the couch so he was sitting upright and able to reach the worktable his portable had been slotted into. Around him, two dozen of his people had done the same. They conferred with their machines, their implants, or one another, in quiet, confident tones. All of them avoided looking at him.
Keale had threaded into the shuttle's exterior cameras, and his portable screen showed him the approach of the white blur that would eventually resolve itself into the Ur. From this distance, it was unlikely that they'd see anything useful, even an escaping shuttle, but he wanted to look anyway. Esmo's info-dump had reached him two hours ago. He'd quick-scanned it, looking for something that could be done, something that could be exploited to bring this disaster to a quick close. There wasn't much.
What he ready wanted to do was shout at the Dedelphi overrunning the ship. “What do you idiots think you're doing?” he wanted to say. “Do you know what we'll do to you? To your sisters on the ground? Do you have any idea what we can do to all of you? Obviously not, because if you'd stopped to think about it, you wouldn't have pulled this suicidal stunt!”
Instead, he turned to his staff. “Ashe, how're the spy ’lites coming?”
Ashe, a big-boned, serious, golden-haired woman, murmured something to her implant. “The guys in the Tamulevich say they'll have them up and flying by the time we get there.”
Good enough. “Whalen, anything on the long-range?”
The sand brown man bent over his own portable and shook his head. “All quiet. Whatever's going on in there, it's staying in there.”
“Anything on the computer lines?”
“Not since the cut-and-run order came.” Whalen touched a few keys. “We're not picking up anything, not even maintenance calls between the AI and the jobbers. Whatever they're doing, they're not talking about it anywhere we can listen in.”
Probably using paper, or their hardwired speakers. Primitive, but completely secure from Human spying.
For the moment, he told himself. For the moment only.