Walter Williams - Conventions of War

Michi seemed dubious. “How large a cloud of decoys are we going to need?”

Martinez tried to make a mental calculation and failed. “As many as it takes,” he said finally.

Michi turned to Chandra. “I want you to try all these tactics in simulation.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Give me regular reports.”

“Of course, my lady.” Chandra turned to the others. “The danger signal will be entering a system where the radars are still operating, or where we’re painted by a targeting laser from what will probably be a distant source.”

Ever since Chenforce had plunged into enemy space, the Naxids had been turning off all radars and other navigation aids in any system the loyalists had entered, so Chandra was right to say that radar would be a danger signal.

Michi poured a glass of amber wine and contemplated it while she tapped her fingers on the tabletop. “The best way to prevent this kind of attack is to blow up every wormhole station we come across,” she said. “That way they can’t relay course corrections to any incoming missiles. I’d hate to blow those stations; it’s uncivilized. But to preserve my command I’ll kill anything on the enemy side of the line if I have to.”

Martinez thought of the Bai-do ring burning as it fell into the planet’s atmosphere.

Michi reached out a hand and picked up her glass of wine. “Isn’t anyone drinking but me?” she asked.

Martinez poured himself a glass of wine and raised it in silent toast to Chandra. She had just made herself too valuable to be blamed for Fletcher’s death.

Chandra and Martinez finally had their long-postponed dinner the following day. Martinez thought it was probably no longer necessary to Chandra’s plans, but in any case he instructed Alikhan not to leave them alone together for too long.

Chandra entered the dining room looking splendid in her full dress uniform, the silver braid glowing softly on the dark green tunic and trousers. Her auburn hair brushed the tall collar that now bore the red triangular tabs worn by Michi’s staff.

“Congratulations, Lieutenant,” Martinez said.

“Thank you, Captain,” Chandra said. “And my congratulations onyour new appointment as well.” She smiled. “Your luck is surprisingly consistent, you know. People get killed, and you do well out of it.”

A number of replies floated uneasily in Martinez’s mind.Only lately was one of them. The last thing he wanted was to work out exactly how many people had to die in order for him to become captain of theIllustrious.

“Here we are then,” he said. “A couple of suspects.”

“That’s right,” Chandra said, then brightened. “Let’s conspire!”

The conspiracy was low-key. Martinez sat at the head of the table, with Chandra on his right. While Alikhan poured wine and delivered plates of nuts and pickled vegetables, they discussed which cadet could best be promoted to take Chandra’s place. While they spoke, Martinez debated whether to tell Chandra how close she had come to being sacrificed to Michi’s search for a killer, and decided against it.

“How are you faring with the 77-12s?” Chandra asked. “Other than scaring the hell out of the department heads, that is.”

“The revised logs were delivered this morning,” Martinez said. “I’ve been going over them ever since. Some are even complete.”

At least the department heads had learned not to yarn the logs: when they didn’t have the information, they admitted it. “Data pending” was the phrase they’d all decided to put in the blank spaces, probably because it looked better than nothing at all.

“Signaler Nyamugali sent a complete log, didn’t she?” Chandra said.

“Yes.” Martinez smiled. “Your former division did well.” He signaled to Alikhan for the first course. “Of course I’ll still have to check the log to confirm it hasn’t been yarned.”

“You won’t find any mistakes,” Chandra said. “I kept the signalers on their toes.”

“Nyamugali had an easier job than most of the others. Francis is going to have to account for every air pump, ventilation fan, and heat exchange system on the ship.”

Chandra was skeptical. “You’re feeling sorry for them now?”

“No, not very.”

Alikhan arrived with a warm, creamy pumpkin soup, fragrant with the scent of cinnamon. Chandra tasted it and said, “Your cook has it all over the wardroom chef, good as he is.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

“That was one of the small compensations of being with Fletcher,” Chandra said. “He’d always give me a good meal before boring me to death.”

Martinez considered this as he sampled the soup, and decided that Chandra could at least pretend to be a little more stricken by the death of an ex-lover.

“What did he bore you with?” Martinez asked.

“Other than the sex, you mean?” When Martinez didn’t smile at her joke, she shrugged and went on. “He talked about everything, really. The food we were eating, the wine we were drinking, the exciting personnel reports he’d signed that day. He talked about his art. He had a way of making everything dull.” A mischievous light came into her eyes. “What did you think of what he had hanging in his sleeping cabin? Did it give you sweet dreams?”

“I got rid of it,” Martinez said. “Jukes found some less depressing stuff.” He looked at her. “Why did Fletcher have Narayanguru there? What did he get out of it?”

Chandra gave an elaborate sigh. “You’re not going to make me repeat his theories, are you?”

“Why not?”

“Well,” she said, “he said that if he ever joined any cult, it would be the Narayanists, because they were the only cult that was truly civilized.”

“How so?”

“Let me try to remember. I was trying not to listen by that point.” She pursed her full lips. “I think it was because the Narayanists recognized that all life was suffering. They say that the only real things were perfect and beautiful and eternal and outside our world, and that we could get closer to these real things by contemplating beautiful objects in this world.”

“Suffering,” Martinez repeated. “Gomberg Fletcher, who was filthy rich and born into most privileged caste of Peers, believed that life was suffering. Thathis life was suffering.”

Chandra shook her head. “I didn’t understand that part either. If he ever suffered, he didn’t do it when I was looking.” A curl of disdain touched her lip. “Of course, he felt he was more refined than the rest of us, so he probably thought his suffering was so elevated that the rest of us didn’t understand it.”

“I can see why the Shaa killed Narayanguru, anyway,” Martinez said. “If you maintain that there’s another world, which you can’t prove exists, where things are somehow better and more real thanthis world, which wecan prove exists, you’re going to run afoul of the Praxis for sure, and the Legion of Diligence is going to have you hanging off a tree before you can spit.”

“Oh, there was more to it than the invisible world business. Miracles and so on. The dead tree that Narayanguru was hung on was supposed to have burst into flower after they took him down.”

“I can see where the Legion of Diligence would take a dim view of those stories too.”

That night, sitting on his bed while he drank his cocoa and looked at the picture of the woman, her child, and the cat, Martinez thought about Fletcher sitting in the same place, contemplating the ghastly figure of Narayanguru and thinking about human suffering. He wondered what Fletcher, a prominent member of two of the hundred most prominent Terran families in the empire, had ever suffered, and what comfort he received by looking at the bloody figure strung on the tree.