Walter Williams - Conventions of War

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.”