Conventions of War

TWENTY-ONE

Lord Chen’s comm unit began to make an urgent squeak. “Pardon me, Loopy,” he said. He put down his cocktail and reached into the pocket of his jacket.

He stood on the seaside terrace of his friend Lord Stanley Loo, known since his school days as “Loopy.” A Cree orchestra played festive music from a bandstand that looked as if it had been designed by a lacemaker. The sea breeze carried over the terrace the refreshing scent of salt and iodine, and the roar of the waves on the rocks sometimes drowned out the band. Antopone’s red sky gave the waves a lurid cast.

“Chen,” he said, raising his unit to his ear.

“My lord. Lord Tork requires your immediate presence aboardGalactic.”

Lord Chen recognized the careful diction of Lord Convocate Mondi, one of the members of the Fleet Control Board, a Torminel who took special care not to lisp around his fangs.

“The meeting’s not for another three days,” Chen said. He reached for his cocktail with his free hand and raised it to his lips.

“My lord,” Mondi said, “is this communication secure?”

A cold hand touched Chen’s spine. He put down his drink and turned away from the group on the terrace. “I suppose so,” he said. “No one’s within listening distance.”

There was a slight hesitation, and then Mondi spoke again. “The Naxids are moving from Zanshaa,” he said. “It looks like they’re heading for Zarafan under high acceleration.”

And from Zarafan, Lord Chen knew, they could go straight on to Laredo, where the Convocation were taking up residence.

Where his daughter would land any day.

“Yes,” he said, “I understand. I’ll be there as soon as I can arrange transport.”

And then, as the surf boomed below, he put his hand comm away and returned to the party.

“Something’s come up, Loopy,” he said. “Can you have someone arrange my return to the skyhook?”

“General quarters! Now general quarters! This is not a drill!”

From the panic that clawed at the amplified voice of Cadet Qing, Martinez knew from the first word this wasn’t a drill. By the time the message began to repeat he had already vaulted clean over his desk and was sprinting for the companion that led to Command, leaving Marsden sitting in his chair staring after him.

Martinez sprang for the companion just as the gravity went away. The distant engine rumble ceased, leaving the corridor silent except for the sound of his heart, which was thundering louder than the general quarters alarm. Martinez had no weight but still had plenty of inertia, and he hit the companion with knees and elbows. Pain rocketed through his limbs despite the padding on the stair risers. He bounced away from the companion like an oversized rubber eraser but managed to check his momentum with a grab to the rail.

His feet began to swing out into the corridor, and that meantIllustrious was changing its heading. He had to get up the companion and into Command before the engines fired again. His big hand tightened on the rail so he could swing himself back to the steep stair, kick off and jump to the next deck.

No good. The engines fired suddenly and he had weight again. His arm couldn’t support his entire mass and folded under him, and the rail caught him a stunning blow across the shoulder. He flopped onto his back on the stair. Risers sliced into his back.

Martinez tried to rise, but the gravities were already beginning to pile on.Two gravities. Three… Pain lanced through his wrist as he seized the rail to try to haul himself upright. The stair risers were cutting into him like knives.Four gravities at least… He gasped for breath. Eventually he realized he wasn’t going to be able to climb.

He realized other things as well. He was on a hard surface. He hadn’t recently taken any of the drugs that would help him survive heavy gravity. He could die if he didn’t get off this companion, cut by the stairs like cheese by a slicer.

A sort of crabbing motion of his arms and legs brought him bumping down the stairs, each step a club to his back and mastoid, but once his buttocks thumped on the deck it was harder to move, and the risers were still digging into his spine.Five gravities… His vision was beginning to go dark.

Martinez crabbed with his arms and legs and managed to thump down another stair. Comets flared in his skull as his head hit the tread. He clenched his jaw muscles to force blood to his brain and dropped down another step.

It was Chandra’s nightmare, he realized. Relativistic missiles were inboundand he needed to get to Command. It would be the height of stupidity to die here, vaporized by a missile or with his neck broken by the sharp edge of a stair.

He thumped down another stair, and that left only his head still on the companion, tilted at an angle that cramped his windpipe and strained his spine.Six gravities… His vision was totally gone. He couldn’t seem to breathe. Without the drugs, Terrans could only rarely stay conscious at more than six and a half gravities. He had to get off the stair or his neck was going to be broken by the weight of his head.

With a frantic effort he tried to roll, his palms and heels fighting for traction against the tile, fighting the dead weight that was pinning him like a silver needle pinning an insect to corkboard. Vertigo swam through his skull. He fought to bring air into his lungs. He gave a heave, every muscle in his body straining.

With a crack, his head fell off the stair and banged onto the tile. Despite the pain and the stars that shot through the blackness of his vision he felt a surge of triumph.

Gravity increased. Martinez fought for consciousness.

And lost.

When he woke, he saw before him a window, and beyond the window a green countryside. Two ladies in transparent gowns gazed at the poised figure of a nearly naked man who seemed to be hovering in a startlingly blue sky. Above the man was a superior-looking eagle, and on the grass below the two ladies were a pair of animals, a dog and a small furry creature with long ears, both of whom seemed to find the floating man interesting.

It occurred to Martinez that the man in the sky wasn’t alone. He, Martinez, was also floating.

His heart was thrashing in his chest like a broken steam engine. Sharp pains shot through his head and body. He blinked and wiped sweat from the sockets of his eyes.

The man still floated before him, serene and eerily calm, as if he floated every day.

It was only gradually that Martinez realized he was looking at a piece of artifice, at one of the trompe l’oeil paintings that Montemar Jukes had placed at intervals in the corridors.

The engines had shut down again. Now weightless, Martinez had drifted gently from the deck to a place before the painting.

He gave a start and looked frantically in all directions. The companion leading to Command was two body lengths away. So far as he knew, the emergency, the battle, or whatever it was, had not ended.

He swam with his arms to reorient himself, and kicked with one foot at the floating man. He shot across the corridor, absorbed momentum with his arms-pain shot through his right wrist-and then he did a kind of handspring in the direction of the companion.

He struck the companionway feet first and folded into a crouch, which enabled him to spring again, this time through the hatch atop the companion.

From there it was a short distance to Command’s heavy hatch. The door was armored against blast and radiation and would have been locked down at the beginning of the emergency. Martinez hovered before the hatch, his left hand clutching at the hand grip inset into the door frame, his right stabbing at the comm panel.

“This is the captain!” he said. “Open the door!”

“Stand by,” came Mersenne’s voice.

Stand by?Martinez was outraged. Who did the fourth lieutenant think he was, some snotty cadet?

“Let me into Command!” Martinez barked.

“Stand by.” The irritating words were spoken in an abstract tone, as if Mersenne had many more important things on his mind than obeying his captain’s orders.

Well, perhaps he did. Perhaps the emergency was occupying his full attention.

But how much attention did it take to open a damn hatch?

Martinez ground his teeth while he waited, fist clamped white-knuckled around the hand grip. Lieutenant Husayn floated up the companion and joined him. Blood floated in perfect round spheres from Husayn’s nose, some of them catching on his little mustache, and there was a cut on his lip.

There hadn’t been the regulation warning tone sounded for high gee-or for no gee, for that matter. Probably there hadn’t been time to give the order. Martinez wondered how many injuries Dr. Xi was coping with.

After Martinez had been waiting nearly a minute, the hatch slid open with a soft hiss. He heaved on the hand grip and gave himself impetus for the command cage.

“I have command!” he shouted.

“Captain Martinez has command!” Mersenne agreed. He sounded relieved. He was already drifting free of the command cage, heading toward his usual station at the engines display.

Martinez glanced around the room as he floated toward his acceleration cage. The watch were staring at their displays as if each expected something with claws to come bounding out of them.

“Missile attack, my lord,” Mersenne said as Martinez caught his acceleration cage. The cage swung with him, and he jacknifed, then inserted his feet and legs inside. “At least thirty. I’m sorry I didn’t let you into Command, but I didn’t want to unseal the door until I was certain the missiles had all been dealt with-didn’t want to irradiate the entire command crew if there were a near miss.”

It grated, but Martinez had to admit Mersenne was right.

“Any losses?” he asked.

“No, my lord.” Mersenne floated to a couch next to the warrant officer who had been handling the engines board, then webbed himself in and locked the engine displays in front of him. “We starburst as soon as we saw the missiles incoming, but when we hit eight gravities, there was an engine trip.”

Martinez, in the act of webbing himself onto his couch, stopped and stared.“Engine trip?” he said.

“Engine number one. Automated safety procedures tripped the other two before I could override them. I’ll try to get engines two and three back online, and then work out what happened to engine one.”

So now he knew why he’d suddenly found himself floating. The engines had quit, apparently on their own, and in the middle of a battle.

He pulled his displays down from over his head, heard them lock, began a study of the brief fight.

The Naxids hadn’t attacked in the Osser system, as Chandra’s war game had predicted. They’d waited for Chenforce to proceed to the next system, Arkhan-Dohg, where the hot, humid world of Arkhan supported a population of half a billion, mostly heat-loving Naxids, and cold, glacier-ridden Dohg supported a billion more, for the most part furry Torminel.

Chenforce hadn’t found anything to shoot at in Osser, and there was very little traffic in Arkhan-Dohg. The Naxids knew they were coming, and every ship that could move was being routed away from them.

Even though Chenforce was finding few targets at present, they were still creating a massive disruption in the rebel economy. The hundreds of ships fleeing Chenforce weren’t carrying cargoes to the appropriate destination. Not only were cargoes being routed well out of their way, many cargoes were stalled waiting for transport, and elsewhere industries were failing for want of supply.

The Naxid attempt to swat them from the sky had occurred when the squadron was two days into the Arkhan-Dohg system. Chenforce was suddenly painted with tracking lasers. Mersenne had immediately gone to general quarters and orderedIllustrious to accelerate as rapidly as possible away from the other ships. BeforeIllustrious was on its new heading, the sensor operators were reporting brief flares that showed incoming missiles making last-instant course corrections.

Most of the missiles targeted the swarm of decoys cruising ahead of Chenforce, but a few got through the screen to target the squadron itself, all to be destroyed by point-defense weapons. By that time the number one engine onIllustrious had tripped off and the cruiser was drifting, its captain floating bruised and unconscious in the corridor outside his office.

The Battle of Arkhan-Dohg, from the first alarm to the destruction of the last incoming missile, had taken a little less than three minutes.

“One failure in the point-defense array,” Husayn reported from the weapons station. “Antiproton gun three failed after one shot.”

“Just like Harzapid,” muttered Mersenne.

“How many decoys do we have in the tubes?” Martinez asked Husayn.

“Three, my lord.”

“Fire them immediately. We want to get decoys ahead of the squadron in case the Naxids have a follow-up attack.”

The Command crew looked a little hollow-eyed at this possibility.

“Decoys fired, my lord. Tubes cleared. Decoys proceeding normally under chemical rockets to safety point.”

“Replace them in the tubes with another set of decoys,” Martinez added.

Primary command crew were drifting through the hatch and quietly taking up their stations. Alikhan arrived lugging Martinez’s vac suit by a strap. Martinez told him to report to the weapons bays after putting the suit in one of the vac suit lockers: he didn’t have time to put it on right now.

“I’ve commenced a countdown on engines two and three,” Mersenne reported. “We’re at five minutes twenty-one.”

“Proceed.”

“My lord,” Husayn said, “decoys’ antimatter engines have ignited. All decoys maneuvering normally.”

“My lord,” said Signaler Roh, “Judge Arslanqueries our status.”

“Tell them we experienced a premature engine shutdown,” Martinez said. “Tell them we expect no long-term problem.”

“Yes, Lord Captain. Ah…Squadcom Chen wants to speak with you.”

“Put her on my board.”

“Yes, Lord Captain.”

Martinez hadn’t strapped on the close-fitting cap that held his earphones, virtual array, and medical sensors, so Michi’s voice came out of the speaker on his display, and was audible to everyone in command.

“Captain Martinez,” she said, “what thehell just happened?”

Martinez reported in as few words as possible. Michi listened with an intent, inward look on her face. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll order the rest of the squadron to take defensive positions around us until we’re maneuverable again.”

Martinez nodded. “May I recommend that you order more decoy launches?”

“Lieutenant Prasad’s already taken care of that.” Michi’s head tilted as she looked into her display. “Captain,” she said, “you look like you got run over by a herd of bison.”

“Acceleration threw me down a companion.”

“Are you all right? Shall I page Dr. Xi to Command?”

“I’m sure he’s busy enough where he is.”

She nodded. “Find out who painted us with that laser,” she said, “and blow him the fuck up.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“And take out the wormhole stations as well. I’m not having them spotting for the enemy.”

It’s uncivilized,Michi had said when she’d first raised the possibility of destroying wormhole stations. She’d occasionally done it in the past, when it was necessary to preserve secrecy concerning Chenforce’s movements, but for the most part she’d left them alone.

The moment defining,Martinez thought. Nothing like being shot at to rub away these refined little scruples.

The orange end-stamp came onto the display, signaling that Michi had broken the collection.

“Sensors,” Martinez said, “are we still being hit by that laser?”

“No, my lord,” Pan said. “They switched off as soon as the last missiles were destroyed-and because their information is limited by the speed of light, they don’tknow what happened here yet. So they must have had advanced warning concerning exactly when to light us up and when to stop.”

“Did you get a bearing?”

“It would help if I could communicate with the other ships and triangulate.”

“Do so.” Martinez turned to Husayn. “Weapons, target Wormhole Stations One, Two, and Three. Take them all out, one missile each. Don’t wait for my command, just do it.”

“Yes, Lord Captain.”

Martinez let himself float for a moment in his harness and considered the order he’d just given. Itwas uncivilized. The wormhole stations not only maintained communication between the worlds, they acted to stabilize the wormholes by balancing the mass moved through them in either direction. Commerce would be slowed to a crawl through wormholes that were in danger of becoming unbalanced.

Arkhan-Dohg had just effectively been blockaded. It was a blockade that would continue until new stations were both built and equipped with the massive asteroid-sized chunks of matter they used to keep the wormholes in balance. The war might be over for ages before Arkhan-Dohg saw another merchant vessel.

“One minute to engine ignition, my lord,” Mersenne said.

“Hold at ten seconds.” Martinez hesitated, then said, “We can proceed on two engines without trouble?”

Mersenne’s tone was confident. “Yes, my lord.”

“Missiles launched and proceeding on chemical rockets,” Husayn said. “Tubes clear.”

“Roh, put me through to the squadcom.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Ida Li’s face appeared on Martinez’s display. “You have a message for Lady Michi?”

“Just that we’ll have two engines online in less than a minute. Does the lady squadcom have a heading for us?”

“Stand by.”

The screen blanked, and when an image returned it was that of Chandra Prasad. “I’m sending course coordinates to your pilot’s station now. Acceleration one-tenth of a gravity, until we’re sure the engines don’t cut out again.”

“Understood. Mersenne, sound the warning for acceleration.”

There were a few moments of genuine suspense waiting for the engine countdown to conclude, and then a distant rumble and a slight kick that sent the acceleration cages slowly tumbling until they settled at their deadpoints. Computers balanced the angle of thrust of the two engines to compensate for the loss of the third. Acceleration was gradually increased until one constant gravity was maintained.

“Engines performance normative,” Mersenne said.

“Very good.”

“My lord.” It was Pan. “We’ve tracked the origin of that targeting laser. It was Arkhan Station Three.”

Arkhan, with its relatively small population, didn’t rate a full accelerator ring around the planet, but instead had three geosynchronous stations tethered to the planet’s equator by elevator cables. Station 1 had a modest-sized accelerator ring grappled to it, like a gold band attached to a diamond.

“Husayn,” Martinez said, “one missile to target Station Three, please.”

As the missile was launched, he supposed the Naxids had no right to be surprised. Chenforce had made it clear that anything that fired on it would be destroyed, be it ship, station, or ring.

At least it wasn’t Bai-do. At least he wouldn’t be dropping an entire ring, with its billions of tons of mass, into the atmosphere of an inhabited world.

He hoped the Naxids had evacuated the station’s thousands of civilians before putting them in a cross fire, but he suspected they hadn’t. The Naxids, so far as he could tell, never had a Plan B-if Plan A didn’t work, they just tried Plan A all over again, only with greater sincerity.

“My lord,” said Roh. “I have a message from Rigger Jukes.”

“Yes?” Martinez couldn’t imagine what the artist wanted.

“He asks permission to enter your quarters and inspect the paintings for damage.”

Martinez suppressed a smile. The artworks were in highly intelligent frames that should have guarded them against acceleration, but nevertheless the impulse to protect the eighty-thousand-zenith painting showed Jukes had his priorities straight.

“Permission granted,” he said.

“My lord,” Mersenne said after the missile went on its way. “I’ve tracked the origin of the engine shutdown.”

“Yes?”

“It was a high pressure return pump from the number one heat exchange system. It failed, and set off a cascade of events that led to complete engine shutdown.”

“Failed?”Martinez demanded. “What do you mean, failed?”

“I can’t tell from this board. But for some reason when the pump failed, the valve on the backup system failed to open, and that led to the engine trip. The computer wasn’t a hundred percent confident that it could keep the ship balanced with only two engines firing at all of eight gravities’ acceleration, so it tripped the other engines as well.”

“Right,” Martinez said. “Thank you, Mersenne.”

This was going to take some thought.

As soon as the ship secured from general quarters, he was going straight to the engine compartment and find out just what had happened.

“Yarning the logs.” Martinez spoke in a cold fury. “You yarned the logs to hide the fact that you hadn’t been doing scheduled replacements, and as a result the ship was driven into danger.”

Master Rigger Francis stared expressionlessly at the wall behind Martinez’s head and said nothing.

“Didn’t I give you enough advanced warning?” Martinez asked. “Didn’t you guess what would happen if I caught you at something like this?”

Rage boiled in Martinez, fueled by the murderous aches in his head and wrist. For the first time in his career he understood how an officer could actually use his top-trimmer, could draw the curved knife from its sheath and slash the throat of a subordinate.

The evidence that damned Francis was plain. The huge, sleek turbopump designed to bring return coolant from the heat exchanger to the number one engine had been partly dismantled by Francis and her riggers. The plain metal-walled room reeked of coolant, and Martinez’s shoes and cuffs were wet with the stuff. The finely machined turbine that was the heart of the pump had disintegrated, sending shards downstream that jammed the emergency valve designed to shut off coolant flow in the event of a problem with the pump. With the first valve jammed open, a second valve intended to open the backup system had refused to open, and the result was an automatic shutdown for the engine.

It was difficult to understand how such a critical pump could suffer so catastrophic a failure. The pump and other pieces of crucial equipment were deliberately overdesigned, intended to survive well beyond their official lifespan. The only way a pump would crash in so terminal a fashion was because routine maintenance had been neglected.

That much was deduction. But what proved the final nail in the master rigger’s coffin was the fact that the serial number on the pump and the number recorded in the 77–12 were different. So far as Martinez could tell, the number in the 77–12 was pure fiction.

“Well,” Martinez said, “Rigger Second Class Francis, I suggest that you get your crew busy replacing this pump.”

Francis’s eyes flashed at the news of her demotion, and Martinez saw the firming of her jowls as her jaw muscles clenched.

Martinez turned to Marsden, who stood with his feet meticulously placed on a piece of dark plastic grate so as not to get coolant on his shoes.

“Who’s the senior rigger now?” Martinez asked.

“Rigger/First Rao.” Marsden didn’t even have to consult his database for the answer.

Martinez turned back to Francis. “I will require the new department head to check every one of your entries in the 77–12. We don’t want any more mysterious failures, do we?”

Francis said nothing. The humid atmosphere of the room had turned her skin moist, and droplets tracked down either side of her nose.

“You are at liberty to protest your reduction in rank,” Martinez said. “But I wouldn’t if I were you. If Squadron Leader Chen finds out about this, she’s likely to have you strangled.”

He marched out, shoes splashing in coolant, his head and wrist throbbing with every step. Marsden followed, far more fastidious about where he put his feet.

Martinez next visited the weapons bay where Gulik and Husayn were both examining the guts of the antiproton projector that had failed in the Naxid attack. The whole mechanism had been pulled from the turret and replaced, and now a postmortem was under way, parts scattered on a sterile dropcloth that had been spread on the deck.

Gulik jumped to his feet, bracing with his chin high as Martinez approached. There were dark patches under his arms and sweat poured down his face. Martinez hadn’t seen him this nervous since Fletcher’s final inspection, when the captain had slowly marched past Gulik and his crew with the knife rattling at his waist.

Martinez wondered if word had already passed to Gulik about what had just happened to Francis. The noncommissioned officers were wired into an unofficial communications network, and Martinez had a healthy respect for its efficiency, but he could hardly believe it worked this fast. Perhaps Gulik was always this nervous around higher officers.

Or perhaps he had a guilty conscience.

He called up Gulik’s 77–12 on his sleeve display and quietly checked the serial numbers. They matched, so at least Gulik wasn’t yarning his log.

“Do we know what happened?” Martinez asked.

“The electron injector’s packed up, my lord,” Gulik said. “It’s a fairly common failure, on this model particularly.”

As the antiprotons piggybacked on an electron beam, which kept the antiprotons contained until they hit the target, the electron injector was a critical component of the system.

“I’ll do further tests,” Gulik said, “but it’s probably just a matter of tolerances. These parts are machined very precisely, and they’re stuck in the turret where they’re subject to extremes of temperature and cosmic rays and all knows what. The turrets are normally retracted, but we’re keeping every point-defense weapon at full charge now, with the turrets deployed. Critical alignments can go wrong very easily.”

Martinez remembered what someone had said in Command, and he said, “So it’s not what happened at Harzapid?”

Gulik gave a start. Husayn answered for him, and firmly. “Decidedly not, my lord.”

Martinez sensed that a significant moment had just slipped by, somehow, but he had no idea why the moment was significant.

“Whatdid happen at Harzapid?” he asked.

There was silence as both Husayn and Gulik seemed to gaze for a moment into the past, neither of them liking what they saw there.

“It was bad, my lord,” Husayn said. “The Naxids were outnumbered five to one, so they tried to bluff us into surrender. They occupied Ring Command and ordered us all to stand down. But Fleet Commander Kringan organized a party to storm Ring Command, and he ordered the loyal squadrons to prepare a fight at close range with antiproton weapons.

“None of us kept the antiprotons on our ships when we were in dock-you know how touchy they can be-so Lieutenant Kosinic was sent with a party to bring antiprotons in their containment bottles. He did, but when we hooked them up to the antimatter feeders, we discovered that the bottles were empty.”

Martinez looked at him in surprise. “Empty?”

“The Naxids must have got into our storage compartment and replaced the full bottles with empty ones. The squadcom sent Kosinic out again to get bottles fromImperious, which was berthed next to us, but that’s when the shooting started. That’s when the station airlock was hit and Kosinic was wounded.”

Husayn’s mouth stretched in a taut, angry grimace beneath his little mustache. “The Fourth Fleet blew itself to bits in a few minutes of close-range fire. All the Naxids’ ships were destroyed, but most of the loyalists were hurt too, and some ships completely wrecked. There were thousands of deaths. Butthe Naxids didn’t shoot at us! They knewIllustrious was helpless.”

Frustration crackled in Husayn’s voice. Martinez could imagine the scene in Command, Fletcher calling for firepower that simply wasn’t there, the weapons officer-Husayn himself-pounding his console in fury. Kosinic racing along the docking tube with a party of desperate crouchbacks and the hand carts that carried the antiproton bottles. The long moments of helpless silence as the battle started and the crew waited for the fire that would rend their ship and kill them, followed by the horrid realization of the insult that the Naxids were flinging in their teeth, that the enemyknew thatIllustrious could be of no assistance to their own side, and disdained so much as to target them.

The feeling of helplessness, Martinez thought, must have been at least as frustrating and terrifying as that of the captain of a ship pinned to a stair by heavy gee while his ship fought for its life without him.

“Captain Fletcher cast off from the ring, my lord,” Husayn continued, “and maneuvered as if to attack. We were hoping to draw their fire away from the others, but the Naxids still refused to respond. We hit them with our lasers, but the lasers really can’t do the sort of damage antimatter can in those conditions, and…” He grimaced again. “Still they wouldn’t attack us. We watched the whole battle from the sidelines. Captain Fletcher was in a perfect rage-I’d never seen him like that, never saw him show emotion before.”

“Where was Squadron Commander Chen?”

“On the planet, my lord. Dinner party.”

Martinez couldn’t imagine Michi being happy about what had happened toIllustrious either.

“We were very glad to finally get a swat at the Naxids at Protipanu, my lord,” Husayn said. “It was good to pay them back.”

“Yes,” Martinez said. “Illustriousdid very well at Protipanu. You all did very well.”

He looked from Husayn to Gulik, who was still standing rigid, the sweat pouring down his face, his eyes staring into some internal horror.

No wonder they hadn’t talked about it, Martinez thought. He’d thoughtIllustrious had won a hard-fought victory alongside the other loyalists of the Fourth Fleet, and assumed the cruiser had just been lucky not to suffer any damage. He hadn’t known thatIllustrious and its crew hadn’t been a part of the fighting at all, except for Kosinic and his little party who had been caught out of their ship.

“Very good,” Martinez said softly. “I think we might institute a series of test firings and inspections to make sure the point-defense weapons won’t fail when we need them.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Carry on then.”

As he left, Martinez felt Gulik’s wide-eyed stare boring into his neck, and wondered what it was that Gulik was really looking at.

His next stop was the sick bay, where he received Dr. Xi’s report on the twenty-two crew with broken bones and the twenty-six more with bad sprains or concussions, all as a result of the unexpected high accelerations. The failure of engine number one had probably saved the ship from more casualties, and very possibly from fatalities.

Xi examined the back of Martinez’s head and prescribed painkillers, and a muscle relaxant before bed. He scanned the wrist and found a minor fracture of the right pisiform carpal. He taped the wrist and gave Martinez a shot of fast-healer hormones, then gave him a med injector with more fast-healers.

“Three times a day till you run out,” he said. “It should be healed in a week or so.”

Martinez toured the sick bay, speaking to each of the injured crouchbacks, then returned to his office to find Jukes waiting, happy to report that the artworks had survived the accelerations without damage. Martinez sent Jukes on his way, then made official his demotion of Francis, added a furious couple of paragraphs to Francis’s efficiency report, and had supper.

He remained awake for the countdown that started engine number one, and made certain that the new turbopump was performing up to specs before calling for Alikhan to bring him his nightly cocoa.

“What are they saying now, Alikhan?” Martinez asked.

Alikhan was looking with great disapproval at Martinez’s shoes, spattered with engine coolant and the muck of the heat exchange room.

“Francis is furious,” he said. “She was planning on retiring after the war, and now she’ll have a much smaller pension.”

Martinez held his cup of cocoa under his nose and inhaled the rich sweet scent. “So she’s gathering sympathy then?” he asked.

Alikhan drew himself up with magisterial dignity and dropped the soiled shoes into their bag. “Fuck her,” he pronounced, “she put the ship in danger. You could have cut her throat, and maybe you should have. As it is, you hit her where she hurts. With Francis it’s always about money.”

“Right,” Martinez said, and concealed a smile. “Thank you, Alikhan.”

He swallowed his muscle relaxant, then slid into bed and sipped his cocoa while he looked at the painting of the woman, child, and cat.

Day by day,Illustrious was becoming his ship, and less something that belonged to Fletcher, or the petty officers, or the Fourth Fleet. Today had been an important step in that process.

Another couple months, he thought pleasantly, and the cruiser would fit him like a glove.

Chenforce made a high-gravity burn around Arkhan-Dohg’s sun and hurled itself for Wormhole 3, its presence marked by the radioactive dust that had been its relay station. No Naxid missiles barred their way.

On the other side of Wormhole 3 was Choiyn, a wealthy world with five billion inhabitants and considerable industry. Four uncompleted medium-sized warships, large frigates or light cruisers, were cast adrift from its ring and destroyed, along with half a dozen merchant ships that had been unable to clear the system in time.

No Naxid attack threatened, but to be safe, Michi vaporized all the wormhole stations anyway, lest they provide tracking data to the enemy.

Martinez was busy with drills, inspections, and minutiae. Rao, Francis’s replacement, produced revised 77-12s that corrected Francis’s elisions, and Martinez’s inspections showed that Rao’s data were not in error.

Cadet Ankley, who had been made Acting Lieutenant after Phillips’s suicide, spectacularly lost his temper when an inspection of his division had turned up some chaotic inventory, and had to be returned to the ranks of the cadets while Cadet Qing was promoted in his place.

This failure was balanced by Chandra Prasad’s success. Her exercises had Chenforce pelted by relativistic missiles from all directions, and also compelled the squadron to confront a wide variety of Naxid attacks, the enemy converging on Chenforce from various headings and with a wide variation in velocity. It was a big surprise when a virtual Naxid squadron starburst to mirror Martinez’s new tactics, and Chenforce had a murderous fight on its hands that ended in mutual annihilation. The sting of this humiliation stayed with Martinez for some time, but eventually he concluded that if the war went on long enough, the Naxids were bound to adopt the new tactics or something like them, and that the Fleet should be ready with countertactics.

If only he could think of some.

After Choiyn came Kinawo, a system that featured a main-sequence yellow star orbited by a blue-white companion so furiously radioactive that the system was bereft of life except for the crews of a pair of heavily shielded wormhole stations, both of which were quickly destroyed. Chenforce would transit Kinawo in six days and then enter El-Bin, a system with two habitable planets, one heavily industrialized and the other covered with grazing, herdsmen, and their beasts.

El-Bin also had four wormholes, each of which offered a different possibility. Which meant that El-Bin was the last possible place to make a certain decision, and whatever way that decision went, it would effect the outcome of the war.

Martinez invited Lady Michi to supper the night before the squadron was to transit to El-Bin. He had Perry pull out all the stops and prepare a ham, a duck that had been preserved in its own fat, and dumplings stuffed with cheese, smoked pork, and herbs. When Michi arrived, he greeted her with cocktails, pickles, and cheese huffers. She seemed undefinably different, and more attractive. Studying her, he decided the difference was the hair. She still wore it at collar length, with straight bangs across the forehead, but somehow the style suited her more now than in the past.

“You’ve changed your hair,” he said, “but I can’t work out how.”

She smiled. “Buckle. Since he doesn’t belong to Captain Fletcher anymore, I thought I’d take advantage of his availability.”

“He’s done a splendid job. You’re looking very well.”

She patted her hair. “Now that Buckle’s on staff, I think you’ll find some more attractive crew walking about the ship.”

“I’ll look forward to that.”

Martinez sat Michi at the place of honor in the captain’s dining room and had Alikhan open a bottle of wine. The plates arrived, each served by Narbonne in its turn, and Michi was impressed by the vast quantity of food that kept rolling out of the kitchen.

“I won’t keep my good looks for long if I eat all this,” she remarked.

“I’d be alarmed for you if you ate everything,” Martinez said, “but I can have Perry prepare a package of leftovers for you. He’d love it, I’m sure-score points againstyour cook.”

“I’d rather not have my cook in a mood to poison me, thanks all the same.”

Over coffee and fried ice cream they began a discussion of that morning’s exercise, in which Chandra had set a pair of converging Naxid squadrons on a virtual Chenforce.

“Prasad is proving useful,” Michi said. “I’ve completely changed my mind about her.”

“Yes?”

“Before I took her on staff, I thought I disliked her. Now that I’ve had a chance to work with her closely, I realize that I hate her guts.” She scowled, her brows meeting. “She’s ambitious, she’s unscrupulous, she’s tactless, and she’s ill-bred. But she’s too good, damn it. I can’t get rid of her.”

Martinez didn’t disagree with this estimate, and though he was pleased at having unloaded Chandra onto his superior, he felt it would be tactless to show it.

“I’m sorry she’s so turbulent,” he said.

“I have to wonder what Kosinic saw in her,” Michi muttered.

Martinez stared at her. “Kosinic and Chandra were…?”

“Yes. It began over a year ago, when Kosinic first joined my staff and Prasad had a job on Harzapid’s ring. I’m not sure it continued after Kosinic was wounded, because that’s when Prasad came aboard and began her relationship with the captain.” She scowled. “I suppose Kosinic lacked the strength of character to resist her.”

Martinez feigned a fascination with his coffee cup.Is Chandra killing all her ex-lovers? he wondered, and then wondered whether the one guard outside during the night watches was enough.

“Interesting,” he said.

Michi raised an eyebrow. “Do you think so? I think it’s squalid.”

“No reason it can’t be both.” Surprise about Chandra and Kosinic swam through his mind, and then he wondered about Michi’s reaction to the business. Perhaps she’d had a little crush on her young protege? With an effort he pushed speculation to the side. He had other things in mind.

He looked at Michi. “I have some ideas, my lady, of a tactical nature.”

A delicate smile touched her lips. “Yes? This supper isn’t purely social then?”

“I hoped to show you a pleasant evening in exchange for having to listen to my ideas-well, idea, there’s only one.”

“The dumplings have made me generous. Go on.”

Martinez took a deliberate sip of his coffee, the bitter taste welcome after the sweet dessert. He put his cup carefully in the saucer. “I’d like to make the case for an attack on Naxas.”

Michi smiled. “I was wondering when you’d suggest an attack on the enemy capital. I was making little bets with myself about it.”

“The Naxids have fifty warships in their fleet,” Martinez said, “and we know that forty-three of them were in the fleet that took Zanshaa. That leaves seven at Magaria and Naxas combined. There was a small squadron of five ships at Naxas at the beginning of the war, and I’d bet they’re still there. I’d also be willing to bet they haven’t been reinforced.

“Chenforce has seven ships, though admittedlyCelestial was damaged at Protipanu and can’t fight at full efficiency. Our magazines are depleted by about a third, but we have new tactics, good morale, and a tradition of victory. One attack at Naxas can overwhelm the defenders and put the enemy government at our mercy. It might be the winning stroke.”

Michi gave a long sigh. “You have no idea how tempting you make it all sound.” She placed her hands flat on the table before her, fingers extended. “But we don’t know that the enemy government is still on Naxas. It might well be in transit to Zanshaa.”

“That’s a risk,” Martinez admitted.

“Plus it’s not as if the Naxids don’t know where we are. They may have sent reinforcements to Naxas. Even if we get there first and defeat the five ships, a rescue force may still arrive, and we’d have another fight on our hands, with magazines running empty from the previous fight.”

“Yes.”

“And of course they may have completed some of their new ships and sent them to Naxas. And we might not be lucky. And of course my orders specifically order menot to go to Naxas.”

“True.” Martinez nodded.

She peered at him from beneath her bangs. “You have no answer to these objections?”

Martinez felt a sigh building somewhere in his diaphragm, and he suppressed it. “I don’t, my lady.” Because he had considered all these points himself, and all together the objections were formidable.

Michi seemed disappointed. “I was hoping you would. Because I’ve been thinking about Naxas for some time.”

Martinez groped for words. “I don’t have logic on my side,” he admitted. “All I have is the sense that we should go to Naxas. It seems to me that we could knock off five enemy ships at a fairly small risk. And then, if the Naxids don’t give up, we could leave and complete our return journey.”

Michi looked at her hands again. “No. Too many unknowns. We’ve had a very successful raid thus far. If we were unlucky at Naxas, we’d not only hand the enemy a victory-and our own side would have no way to know what happened to us-but we’d be altering the Fleet’s strategic plan.” She looked at him, amusement in her dark eyes. “And since you’re the unacknowledged author of the Fleet’s strategic plan, I presume you’ll want to maintain it.”

“Yes, my lady.” Martinez felt a constriction in his chest as a mental calculation reached its inevitable conclusion. “In that case,” he said, “I feel obliged to raise the possibility of doing to the Naxids what they tried to do to Chenforce. Accelerate some missiles to relativistic velocities and use them to hammer Naxas. We could bring the ring right down on the heads of their government.”

Michi shook her head again. “That wouldn’t end the war,” she said. “That would just widen it. The Naxids would feel obliged to use the same tactic, and I don’t want to see the rings at Harzapid and Zarafan and Felarus come down.”

Martinez felt his breathing slowly ease. “That’s a relief,” he admitted. “I felt that the option should be mentioned, but I can’t say my heart was behind the recommendation.”

“Yes.” Michi sipped her coffee. “If I’m going to have to destroy our civilization in that way, I’d much rather it be a result of a direct order from a superior, and not something I did on my own.”

Martinez smiled, but he wondered exactly how readily Michi would obey such an order. She’d been ruthless enough in other areas.

Uncomfortable with this line of thought, he allowed further calculation to spin through his mind. “Well,” he said, “if we’re not going to the Naxid home world, it seems to me that we should do our best to convince the enemy that Naxas isexactly where we’re going.”

“You have a suggestion, I take it?”

“There are four wormholes in El-Bin. We’ll be entering the system through Wormhole One. If we exit the system by way of Wormhole Two, we’d be on the direct route for Naxas, and Wormhole Three takes us eventually to Seizho by way of Felarus, which is avery long route. We actually want to take Wormhole Four, which will begin our loop to rejoin the Home Fleet.

“At present, our course takes us directly from Wormhole One to Wormhole Four, minus a bit of dodging to avoid hypothetical missiles. But if instead we loop around El-Bin’s sun, it might look to the enemy as if we’re intending to slingshot for Wormhole Two and Naxas. And if they’re indeed sending reinforcements to their home world, that’ll keep them heading for home under high gees just at the moment when Naxas is no longer under threat.”

“Wrong-foot them a few days more,” Michi murmured. “Yes, I’ll do that.”

After that the conversation descended into trivialities, and eventually Michi yawned and rose and thanked him for dinner. He walked with her to the door and she surprised him by putting an arm around his waist and resting her head on his shoulder.

“If you weren’t married to my niece,” she said in his ear, “and if I didn’t actuallylike her, I’d make an adulterer out of you right now.”

Martinez tried not to let his mouth fall open. “I’m sure it would be delightful,” he said finally, “but on Terza’s behalf I thank you.”

She gave him a smile from under one cocked eyebrow and made her way out. Martinez waited for the door to close, then walked to the nearest chair and sat down heavily.

We have all been on this ship too long,he thought.

The voyage continued. Chenforce entered El-Bin and made its deceptive swing about its star, all crew strapped into their couches and unconscious through a ten-gee deceleration. Whether the maneuver fooled the Naxid command into diverting ships wasn’t apparent until two systems later, in Anicha, where Chenforce stumbled on a host of merchant ships, all in desperate flight. Anicha, it turned out, was where the Naxids had diverted their merchant ships, getting them out of the way of the presumed showdown at Naxas.

Chenforce destroyed 131 ships at Anicha and more in the next system, where some had managed to flee.

The great ship slaughter at Anicha was an exception: for the most part,Illustrious settled into a routine, inspections and drills and musters. The officers invited one another to dinner parties, but behind the gaiety was a kind of weariness. It was clear that everyone had been on the ship too long.

Martinez now found the 77-12s perfectly reliable. Because they gave him ways of knowing his ship, and becauseIllustrious was performing so well in the squadron exercises, he reduced the number of inspections and hoped the crew were grateful. He also sometimes abandoned the full-dress formality: on occasion he arrived at an inspection in Fleet-issue coveralls and crawled into conduits and access tunnels, places where Fletcher would never have gone lest he soil his silver braid.

Fletcher had polishedIllustrious to a high gloss but hadn’t really known his ship. Even with his frequent inspections, he could only guess at the real status of the ship’s plant and systems. He saw only the surface, and never knew what rot might be concealed by a thick layer of polish.

Martinez was learning his ship from the inside out. He would inspect every pump, every launcher, every conduit. He would makeIllustrious his own.

He worked hard. His wrist healed. He still sometimes woke to the phantom scent of Caroline Sula on his pillow.

Every so often he met with Jukes to discuss the new designs forIllustrious. He was beginning to get used to the idea of his ship as a gaudy personal banner, as far away from Fletcher’s concept as possible.

In the meantime, Jukes painted his portrait. The artist had wanted to create the portrait electronically and print it, but Martinez desired a proper portrait, with paint on canvas, and Jukes complied with weary grace. He put an easel in Martinez’s office and worked there, preferring more obscure hours.

His portrait was romantic and lofty, Martinez in full dress, the Orb in one hand, his gaze directed somewhere over the viewer’s right shoulder. The other hand rested on a tabletop, next to a model ofCorona. Behind him would be a picture-within-a-picture, a portrait ofIllustrious blazing into battle. Jukes seemed to think the picture-within-a-picture device was clever. Martinez didn’t understand why exactly, but saw no reason to contradict the other’s professional judgment.

There was some discussion whether the portrait ofIllustrious should portray the ship in its current form, with Fletcher’s abstract color scheme of pink, white, and green, or in the bolder style they planned forIllustrious after the war.

Martinez put off making the decision, but eventually decided to use Fletcher’s color scheme. Should he win any glory in the war, it would be withIllustrious in its current appearance, and that would be what he wanted to commemorate.

Besides, he thought, there was no reason to stop at just one portrait. The redesignedIllustrious could be immortalized another time.

Martinez began to notice at musters and inspections that the crew looked obscurely more attractive. Kazakov came to dine one day with her hair down rather than knotted behind her head, and Martinez was struck by how good-looking she was.

Buckle, it seemed, was working his magic as a hair stylist and cosmetician. Even Electrician Strode’s bowl haircut seemed more shapely. Martinez called Buckle to his cabin for a haircut, and had to admit that the result was an improvement.

He made Jukes repaint the portrait to include the more attractive hair style.

There were more disciplinary problems among the crew now, fights and occasional drunkenness. They also had too little to occupy their time. It would have taken only thirty-odd people to con the ship from one place to another, and another thirty weaponers to manage the fighting. The rest were partly for redundancy’s sake, in the event of casualties, and many of the crew were intended to support the dignity of the officers, acting as their servants; but mainly crew were needed for damage control. In an emergency, hundreds of pairs of well-trained hands might be needed to keep the ship alive. The rest of the time the officers had to invent work for them, cleaning and spit-polishing, playing parts in rituals and ceremonies, and performing and reperforming routine maintenance.

Everyone, officers and crew alike, were growing tired of it all.

Still, beneath the weariness, Martinez began to sense an undercurrent of optimism. Chenforce was returning to the Home Fleet, and once there, would move on the enemy at Zanshaa and retake the capital. The crew were anticipating the war coming to its conclusion, and with it, the end of all the monotony.

Even the danger of a merciless enemy had begun to seem preferable to the endless repetition and routine.

One night, Martinez sipped his cocoa and looked at the mother and the cat and the infant in his red pajamas. It seemed to him that the Holy Family, whoever they were, had things pretty easy. They had their fire, their beds, their comfortable middle-class clothing, a child that was well-fed and well-clothed, enough food so they could spare some for their cat.

There was no indication that they had to worry about unknown killers skulking outside their ornate painted frame, or coping with a sudden relativistic barrage of antimatter missiles, or whether reports given them by others had been yarned.

By the time he finished his cocoa, Martinez began to feel envy for the lives of the people in the painting. They were simple, they were Holy, they were carefree.

They were everything a captain wasn’t.