“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 signifi
cant 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 pelt
ed 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.”
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