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least
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doesn’t have Syndic thugs watching my every move.”
    Geary finally smiled. “How are your crew holding up?”
    “Could be worse. They volunteered, too, which I remind them of if the complaints get too loud.”
    “What about the Marines, Major Dietz?” Geary asked.
    The Major made a gesture of nonchalance. “They’ve been in worse places, and they all volunteered, too, Admiral. Of course, the Marines did that volunteering the day they joined, so we didn’t ask regarding this particular assignment.”
    Admiral Lagemann and Major Dietz led Geary through the compartments occupied by the human sailors and Marines, everyone pulling themselves along through zero gravity by means of handholds either put into place by the Kicks or fastened on by humans since they had moved in here. Temporary cable runs carrying power, communications relays, and sensor data were strung everywhere, as were larger tubes that provided ventilation, heating, cooling, and recycling of the air inside this small part of
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, so that the atmosphere remained breathable. As Lagemann had warned, there were a lot of places where overheads came down too far and threatened to dent skulls. Geary also found numerous spots where the accesses narrowed enough that he had to move through them with care, scraping slowly past the life-support tubes and cable runs that made the openings even tighter. “This brings home more than anything how much smaller the bear-cows are than us,” Geary commented.
    “Fortunately,” Lagemann replied, “it’s actually a little easier for us to get around without gravity. We can wriggle through some places up high that would be a pain to reach if we were walking. And the Kicks may be small, but this is a damned big ship. I’ve been on my share of human battleships and battle cruisers, including a Syndic battle cruiser that picked me up when I was captured by them. You know some passages on those seem to go on forever. But
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 . . . I swear that sometimes it feels as if the bow is in one star system and the stern is in another.”
    The small group had paused at one of the temporary air locks leading into the rest of the ship. “How are you keeping an eye on things outside this area?” Geary asked.
    “We’ve got sensors strung into some portions of the ship,” Lagemann replied. “For the rest, patrols.”
    “That is,” Major Dietz continued, “security patrols that follow paths worked out by our systems to cover every compartment and passageway at least every few days. Some of the patrols take more than half a day.”
    “How big are the patrol teams?”
    “Full squads, plus one or two sailors. They do full safety and security scans.”
    Geary felt his eyebrows rising in surprise. “That’s a lot of people for patrols of empty spaces. Has there been trouble?” One thing he had learned early on as a junior officer was that sailors could be counted on to seek out compartments where they could find privacy for various activities prohibited by rules and regulations. On most ships, compartments like that were hard to find, but on
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there was a remarkable number of them.
    Major Dietz and Admiral Lagemann exchanged glances. “There hasn’t been any problem with people wandering off on their own,” Lagemann explained. “Not after the first few days.”
    “Why not? Even if people didn’t plan doing something they didn’t want to be caught at, I’d think there’d be an urge to explore.”
    “Not on this ship,” the Major said. “They’re out there. In the passageways.”
    “Who’s out there?” Geary asked, feeling a slight chill.
    “The Kicks,” Lagemann said. “I don’t think I’m particularly sensitive or superstitious, but I can feel them. Thousands of them died on this ship, and if you go out there in the rest of the ship, you can sense them crowding around you. They know we took their ship, and they don’t like it.”
    Major Dietz nodded. “I’ve been in