Walter Williams - Logs

"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.

Martinez' next stop was the sick bay, where he received Doctor 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' 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 Martinez a med injector with more fast-healers.

"Three times a day till you run out," he said. "You 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' 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' 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, and 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 Three, 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 Three 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' life was busy with drills, inspections, and minutiae. Patil, Francis' replacement, produced revised 77-12s that corrected Francis' elisions, and Martinez' inspections showed that Patil's data were not in error.

Cadet Ankley, who had been made acting-lieutenant after Phillips' suicide, had 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 an assortment of Naxid attacks, the enemy converging on Chenforce on a variety of headings, and with a wide variation in velocity.

Doctor Xi told Martinez that his wrist had healed, and discontinued the fast-healers.

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. After El-bin was Anicha.

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 because Illustrious was performing so well in the squadron exercises, Martinez reduced the number of inspections and hoped the crew were grateful. He also abandoned the full-dress formality at least part of the time: 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.

There began to be more disciplinary problems among the crew, fights and occasional drunkenness. They had been on the ship too long and were getting on each other's nerves. 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 re-performing routine maintenance.

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

Perhaps it was the boredom induced by the long days of the ship's routine, but Martinez began to think about the killings again. And after thinking for several days, he asked Chandra to come to his office in the middle of one long, dull afternoon.

"Drink?" he asked as she braced. "By which I mean coffee."

"Yes, my lord."

"Sit down." He pushed a cup and saucer across his desk, then poured from a flask that Alikhan habitually left on his desk.

A rich coffee scent floated into the room. Chandra sat expectant, eyes bright beneath the auburn hair.

"I wanted to ask you about Kosinic," Martinez said.

Chandra, reaching for the coffee, pulled her hand back and blinked in surprise. "May I ask why?"

"Because it occurred to me that all our thinking about the killings has been exactly wrong. We've been looking at Captain Fletcher's death and trying to reason backwards about what might have motivated it. But Kosinic's death was the first-he was the anomaly. Thuc's death followed from his, and I think Fletcher's followed as well. So if we can just work out why Kosinic was murdered, everything else will fall into place."

Chandra frowned as she considered this reasoning, then gave him a searching look. "You don't think it's all down to Phillips and the cultists?"

"Do you?"

She was silent.

"You knew Kosinic," Martinez said. "Tell me about him."