Logs

Martinez turned to her, rage poised on his tongue, and then he turned away.

"We're still no better off than we were!" Michi cried, and slammed her fist into the metal door.

Later that morning Martinez conducted vicious, mean-spirited inspections of Missile Battery One and the riggers' stores, but it didn't make him feel any better.

"General quarters! General quarters! This is not a drill!"

From the panic that clawed at the amplified voice of Cadet Qing, Martinez knew this wasn't a drill from the first word. 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 Martinez' heart, which was thundering louder than the general quarters alarm. Martinez had no weight but he 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 he managed to check his momentum with a grab to the rail.

His feet began to swing out into the corridor, and that meant Illustrious 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 and he began to swing himself back to the steep stair so that he could kick off and jump to the next deck.

No good. The engines fired without warning and suddenly Martinez 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 Martinez 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 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 inbound and 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.

Martinez 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 past 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 Martinez woke he saw before him a window, and beyond the window was 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 flew 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, that he, Martinez, was also floating.

His heart was going like a triphammer. 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 that he was looking at a piece of artifice, at one of the trompe l'oeil paintings that Montemar Jukes had placed at intervals in Illustrious' 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 to shoot himself across the corridor. Striking the wall he 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 the heavy hatch to Command. 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 Martinez 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, Martinez thought, 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 Doctor Xi was coping with.

With a soft hiss, the door slid open after Martinez had been waiting nearly a minute. 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 he 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."

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

"Any losses?" Martinez 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 when there was an engine trip."

Martinez, in the act of webbing himself onto his couch, stopped and stared.

"Engine trip?" he said.

"Number one engine. 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 Martinez 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 Battle of Arkhan-Dohg, from the first alarm, when a targeting laser had painted the squadron, 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 followup 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' 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 Arslan queries 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 Martinez' display, and was audible to everyone in command.

"Captain Martinez," she said, "what the hell just happened?"

Martinez reported in as few words as possible. Michi listened with an intent, inward look on here 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 Doctor 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, to preserve secrecy concerning Chenforce's movements, but she'd left most of them alone.

Nothing like being shot at, Martinez thought, 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't know 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. It was 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.

With the destruction of its wormhole stations, Arkhan-Dohg would in effect be 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 have been over for some time 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. Tubes clear."

"Roh, put me through to the squadcom."

"Yes, my lord."

Ida Li's face appeared on Martinez' 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 there was 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 One 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. Squadcom Chene had made it clear that anything that fired on it would be destroyed, be it ship, station, or ring.

He hoped the Naxids had evacuated the station's thousands of civilians before putting them in a crossfire, 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. And 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 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' 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' shoes and cuffs were wet with the stuff. The finely-machined turbine that was the heart of the pump had disintegrated, sending metal 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 was 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' eyes flashed at the news of her demotion, and Martinez saw the firming of her jowls as her jaws 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 Patil." 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 post-mortem 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 he'd 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, Martinez thought, 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. The serial numbers 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."

The antiprotons piggybacked on an electron beam, which kept the antiprotons contained until they hit the target, so 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 it was significant.

"What did 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 was out again to get bottles from Imperious, which was berthed next to us, but that's when the shooting started. That's when the docking tube 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. But the Naxids didn't shoot at us! They knew Illustrious 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. Kusinic 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 enemy knew that Illustrious 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 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 to Illustrious, 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. "Illustrious did 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 had thought Illustrious had won a hard-fought victory alongside the other loyalists of the Fourth Fleet, and had assumed the cruiser had just been lucky not to suffer any damage. He hadn't known that Illustrious and its crew hadn't been a part of the fighting at all, 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.

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."

Chandra fiddled with the powdered creamer-Illustrious had long ago run out of fresh dairy. She took a sip, frowned, and took another.

"Javier was bright," Chandra said finally, "good-looking, young, and probably a little more ambitious than was sensible for someone could be in his position. He had two problems: he was a commoner and he had no money. Peers will mingle with commoners if they've got enough money to keep up socially; and they'll tolerate Peers who have no money for the sake of their name. But a commoner with no money is going to be buried in a succession of anonymous desk jobs, and if he gets a command it's going to be a barge to nowhere, an assignment hat no Peer would touch."

She took another sip of her coffee. "But Javier got lucky-Squadron Commander Chen was impressed by a report on systems interopability that happened to cross her desk, and she took him on staff. Javier wasn't about to let an opportunity like that slide-he knew she could promote him all the way to captain if he impressed her enough. So he set out to be the perfect bright staff officers for her, and at that moment war broke out and he was wounded."

She sighed. "They shouldn't have let him out of the hospital. He wasn't fit. But he knew that as long as he stayed on Chen's staff he could have a chance to do important war work right under the nose of someone who could promote his career-and of course by then he was in a perfect rage to kill Naxids, like all of us but more so."

"He had head injuries," Martinez said. "I've heard his personality changed."

"He was angry all the time," Chandra said. "It was sad, really. He insisted that what had happened to Illustrious at Harzapid was the result of a treacherous Naxid plot-which of course was true-but he became obsessed with rooting out the plotters. That made no sense at all, because by that point the Naxids were all dead, so what did it matter which of them did what?"

Martinez sipped his own coffee and considered this. "Illustrious was the only ship that wasn't able to participate in the battle," he said. "Was that what Kosinic was obsessing about?"

"Yes. He took it personally that his load of antiproton bottles were duds, and of course he was wounded when he went back for more, so that made it even more personal."

"The antiproton bottles were stored in a dedicated storage area?"

"Yes."

A ship in dock was usually assigned a secure storage area where supplies, replacement parts, and other items were stockpiled-it was easier to stow them there, where they could be worked with, rather than have the riggers find space for them in the holds, where they wouldn't be as accessible when needed. Those ships equipped with antiproton weapons generally stored their antiproton bottles there, in a secure locked facility, as antiprotons were trickier to handle than the more stable antihydrogen used for engine and missile fuel. An antiproton bottle was something you didn't want a clumsy crouchback to drop on his foot.

"The Naxids had to have gained the codes for both the storage area and the secure antiproton storage," Chandra said. "I don't see how we'll ever find out how they did it, and I don't see why it matters at this point. But Javier thought it did matter, and if anyone disagreed with him he'd just turn red and shout and make a scene." Sadness softened the long lines of her eyes. "It was hard to watch. He'd been so bright and interesting, but when he was wounded he turned into a shouter. People didn't want to be around him. But fortunately he didn't like people much, either, so he spent most of his time in his quarters or in Auxiliary Control."

"He sounds a bit delusional," Martinez said, "but suppose, when he was digging around, he found a genuine plot? Not to help the Naxids, but something else."

Chandra seemed surprised. "But any plot would have to be something Thuc was involved in, because it was Thuc who killed him, yes?"

"Yes."

"But Thuc was an engineer. Javier was on a flag officer's staff. Where would they ever overlap?"

Martinez had no answer. Suddenly Chandra leaned forward in her seat, her eyes brilliant with excitement. "Wait!" she said. "I remember something Mersenne once told me! Mersenne was somewhere on the lower decks, and he saw an access hatch open, with Javier just coming out from the underdeck. He asked Javier what he was doing there, and Javier said that he was running an errant for the squadcom. But I can't imagine why Lady Michi would ever have someone digging around in the guts of the ship."

"That doesn't seem to be one of her interests," Martinez murmured. "I wonder if Kosinic left a record of what he was looking for." He looked at her. "He had a civilian-model datapad I didn't have the passwords for. I don't suppose that by some miracle you know his passwords?"

"No, I'm afraid not." Her face grew thoughtful. "But he didn't carry that datapad around with him all the time. He spent hours in Auxiliary Control at his duty station, so if there were records of what he was looking at, it's probably still in his logs, and you can-"

His mind, leaping ahead of her, had him chanting her conclusion along with her.

"-access that with a captain's key!"

A quiet excitement began to hum in Martinez' nerves. He opened his collar and took out his key on its elastic. He inserted the narrow plastic key into the slot on his desk and called up the display. Chandra politely turned away as he entered his password. He called up Javier Kosinic's account, and scanned the long list of files.

"May I use the wall display?" Chandra asked. "I could help you look."

The wall display was called up and the two began a combined search, each examining different files. They worked together in a near-silence interrupted by Martinez' call to Alikhan for more coffee.

Frustration built as Martinez examined file after file, finding only routine paperwork, squadron maneuvers that Kosinic had planned as tactical officer, and a half-finished letter to his father, a letter dated the day before his death but filled only with mundane detail, and containing none of the rage and monomania that everyone else had described.

"He's hiding from us!" he finally exploded.

His right hand clenched in a fist. The captain had hid from him too, too, but he'd finally cracked the captain's secret.

Kosinic would crack too, he swore.

"Let me check the daily logs," Chandra said. "If we look at his activity, we might be able to see some patterns."

The logs flashed on the wall screen, the automatic record of every call that Kosinic had ever made on the computer resources of the ship.

Tens of thousands of them. Martinez' gaze blurred as he looked at the long columns of data.

"Look at this," Chandra said. She moved a cursor to highlight one of Kosinic's commands. "He saved a piece of data to a file called `Rebel Data.' Do you remember seeing that file?"

"No," Martinez said.

"It's not very large. It's supposed to be in his account, in another file called `Personal.'" Chandra's cursor jittered over the display. "Here's another save to the same file," she said. "And another."

Though he already knew it wasn't there, Martinez looked again at Kosinic's personal file and found nothing.

"It must have been erased."

"Or moved somewhere," Chandra said. "Let me do a search."

The search through the ship's vast data store took about twelve seconds.

"If the file was moved," Chandra concluded, "it was given a new name."

Martinez had already called up the log files. "Let's find the last time anyone gave a command regarding that file."

Another five seconds sped by. Martinez stared in shock at the result.

"The file was erased," he said.

"Who by?" Chandra said. When he didn't answer she her neck to read his display upside-down, and then gave a soft cry of surprise.

"Captain Gomberg Fletcher," she said.

They stared at one another for a moment.

"You can't suppose," Chandra began, "that Fletcher was somehow part of the Naxid plot, and that Javier found out about it, and Fletcher had him killed."

Martinez considered this, then shook his head. "I can't think anything the Naxids could offer Fletcher to make him betray his ship."

Chandra gave a little laugh. "Maybe they offered to give him a painting he really wanted."

Martinez shook his head. "No, I think Kosinic must have discovered the Narayanist cult. Or he discovered something else that got him killed, and Fletcher suppressed the information in order to protect the Narayanists." He looked the data glowing in the depths of his desk, and his heart gave a surge as he saw the date.

"Wait a moment," he said. "The date shows that Fletcher erased the file the same day he died." He looked more carefully at the date. "In fact, he seems to have erased the file around the time he was killed."

Chandra surged out of her chair and part way across his desk to confirm this. Her perfume, some kind of deep rosewood flavor with lemony highlights, suddenly floated into his senses. Glowing columns of data reflected in her eyes as she scanned for information. "The erase command came from this desk," she pointed out. "Whoever killed him sat in your chair, with the body leaking blood on the floor next to him, and cleaned up the evidence."

Martinez scanned along the log file. "Fletcher logged in three hours earlier, and never logged out. So he was probably looking at Kosinic's file when the killer arrived."

"What other files was he looking at?"

Chandra slid off the desk and onto her own chair. She gave a series of rapid orders to the wall display.

"That night he made entries in a file called `Gambling,'" she said.

Martinez looked at her in surprise. "Did Fletcher gamble?"

"Not in the time I knew him."

"Did Kosinic?"

"No. He couldn't afford it."

"Lots of people gamble who can't afford it," Martinez said.

"Not Javier. He thought it was a weakness, and he didn't think he could afford weakness." She looked at Martinez. "How else do you think he exposed himself to hard gee acceleration when he had broken ribs and a head injury? He couldn't afford to be wounded, and he did his best to ignore the fact he should have been in hospital." She returned her attention to the display. "The gambling file was erased at the same time as Javier's rebel file."

Martinez scanned the files that Fletcher had been accessing in the two days before his death. Reports from the department heads, statistics from the commissary, reports on the status of a damage control robot that had been taken offline due to a hydraulic fault, injury reports, reports on available stores… all the daily minutiae of command.

Nothing was unusual except those two files, "Rebel Data" and "Gambling." And those had been erased by the killer.

And erased very thoroughly, as Martinez discovered. Normally a file was erased by simply removing it from the index of files, and unless the hard space had been overwritten with some other data, it was possible to reconstitute it. But the two missing files had erased through a method of overwriting their hard space with a series of random numbers. There was no way to find what had been in those files.

"Damn it!" Martinez entertained a brief fantasy of hurling his coffee cup across the room and letting it go smash on the nose of one of Fletcher's armored statues. "We got so close."

Chandra gave the wall display a bleak stare. "There's still one chance," she said. "The system makes automatic backups on a regular schedule. The automatic backups go into a temporary file and are erased by the system on a regular basis. The files aren't there any longer, but the tracks might be, if they haven't been written over in the meantime."

"The chances of finding those old files must be…"

"Not quite astronomical." She pursed her lips in calculation. "I'd be willing to undertake the search, my duties permitting, but I'm going to need more authority with the system than I've got as a staff lieutenant."

He warmed his coffee while he considered Chandra's offer. He supposed that she was still theoretically a suspect. But on the other hand it was unlikely she'd offer to spend her time going through the ship's vast datafiles track by track.

Unless of course she was covering up her own crimes.

Martinez thought were interrupted by a polite knock on the dining room door. Martinez looked up to see his cook, Perry.

"I was wondering when you'd be wanting supper, my lord."

"Oh." Martinez forced his mind from one track to the next. "Half an hour or so, then?"

"Very good, my lord." Perry braced and withdrew, closing the door behind him.

Martinez returned his attention to Chandra and realized, a little belatedly, that it might have been the polite thing to invite her to supper.

He also realized he'd made up his mind. He didn't think Chandra had killed anybody-had never believed it-and in any case he had to agree with Michi that the squadron couldn't spare her.

If she wanted to spend her spare hours hunting incriminating tracks in the cruiser's data banks and erasing them, he didn't much care.

"If you'll give me your key," he said, "I'll see if I can give you more access."

He awarded her a clearance that would enable her to examine the ship's hard data storage, then returned her key. She tucked the key back into her tunic and gave him a provocative smile.

"Do you remember," she said, "when I told you that I'd be the best friend you ever had?"

Martinez was suddenly aware of her rosewood perfume, of the three tunic buttons that had been undone, and of the fact that he'd been living alone on the ship for far too many months.

"Yes?" he said.

"Well, I've proved it." Chandra closed the buttons, one by one. "One day the squadcom talked to me about whether or not you could have killed Fletcher, and I talked her out of the idea."

Martinez was speechless.

"You shouldn't count too much on the fact that you married Lord Chen's daughter," Chandra went on. "The impression I received was that if you died out here, it might solve more problems for Lord Chen than it would cause. He'd have a marriageable daughter again, for one thing."

Martinez considered this, and found it disturbingly plausible. Lord Chen hadn't wanted to give up his daughter, not even in exchange for the millions the Martinez clan were paying him, and Martinez' brother Roland had practically marched Lord Chen to the wedding in a hammerlock. If Martinez could be executed of a crime-and furthermore a crime against both the Gombergs and the Fletchers-then he couldn't imagine Lord Chen shedding many tears.

"Interesting," he managed to say.

Chandra rose and leaned over his desk. "But," she said, "I pointed out to Lady Michi that you'd played an important part in winning our side's only victories against the Naxids, and that we really couldn't spare you even if you were a killer."

The phrasing brought a smile to Martinez' lips. "You might have given me the benefit of the doubt," he said. "I might not have killed Fletcher, after all."

"I don't think Lady Michi was interested in the truth by that point. She just wanted to be able to close the file." She perched on his desk and brushed its glossy surface with her fingertips. A triumphant light danced in her eyes. "So am I your friend, Gareth?" she asked.

"You are." He looked up at her and answered her smile. "And I'm yours, because when Lady Michi was trying to pin the murder on you-with far more reason, I thought-I talked her out of it using much the same argument."

He saw the shock roll through Chandra like a slow tide. Her lips formed several words that she never actually spoke, and then she said, "She's a ruthless one, isn't she?"

"She's a Chen," Martinez said.

Chandra slowly rose to her feet, then braced.

"Thank you, my lord," she said.

"You're welcome, lieutenant."

He watched her leave, a little unsteadily, and then paged Mersenne. When the plump lieutenant arrived, Martinez invited him to sit.

"Some time ago," Martinez said, "before I joined the squadron, you found Lieutenant Kosinic leaving an access hatch on one of the lower decks. Do you happen to remember which one?"

Mersenne blinked in utter surprise. "I haven't thought about that in months," he said. "Let me think, my lord."

Martinez let him think, which Mersenne accomplished while pinching his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger.

"That would be Deck Eight," Mersenne said finally. "Access Four, across from the riggers' stores."

"Very good," Martinez said. "That will be all."

As Mersenne, still puzzled, rose to his feet and braced, Martinez added, "I'd be obliged if you mention my interest in this to no one."

"Yes, my lord."

Tomorrow, Martinez thought, he would schedule an inspection, and something interesting might well come to light.

After breakfast Martinez staged an inspection in which Access Four on Deck Eight was opened. The steady rumble of ventilations blowers rose from beneath the deckplates. Martinez descended with Marsden's datapad, squeezed between the blowers and a coolant pipe wrapped in bright yellow insulation material, and checked the serial numbers on the blowers against the numbers on the 77-12 that had been supplied by Rigger/First Patil.

The numbers matched.

Martinez crouched in the confined space and checked the numbers again. Again they matched.

He straightened, his head and shoulders coming above deck level, and looked at Patil, who looked at him with anxious interest.

"When were these blowers last replaced?"

"Just before the war started, my lord. They're not due for replacement for another four months."

So these were the same blowers that Kosinic had seen when he'd gone down the same access. If it wasn't the serial numbers, Martinez thought, what had Kosinic been looking for?

Martinez ducked down the access again and ran his hands along the pipes, the ductwork, the electric conduit, just in case something had been left here, a mysterious message or an ominous warning. He found nothing but the dust that filled his throat and left him coughing.

Perhaps Mersenne had been wrong about from which he'd seen Kosinic emerge. Martinez had several of the nearby access plates raised, and he descended into each to find again that everything was in order.

It was hours later, while he was eating a late supper-a ham sandwich made of leftovers from the meal he'd given Michi-that a memory burst on his mind.

With Francis it's always about money.

That had been Alikhan's comment on the cruiser's former master rigger, and suddenly, days after they'd been spoken, the words suddenly seemed to echo in Martinez' skull.

Gambling, he thought.

Martinez carried his plate from the dining room to his desk, where he called up the display, then used the authority of his captain's key to access the commissary records and check the files of the commissary bank.

Actual cash wasn't handed to the crew during the voyage: accounts were kept electronically in the commissary bank, which was, technically anyway, a branch of the Imperial Bank which issued the money in the first place. Crew would pay electronically for anything purchased from the commissary, and any gambling losses would be handled by direct transfer from one account to another.

The crew were paid every twenty days. Martinez looked at the account of Rigger Francis, and saw that it totaled nearly nine thousand zeniths, enough to buy an estate on nearly any planet in the empire.

And this was only the money that Francis had in this account. She could have more in accounts in other banks, in investments, in property.

Martinez called for Alikhan. His orderly came into the dining room first, was surprised to find Martinez in his office, and approached.

"Would you like me to take your plate, my lord?"

Martinez looked in surprise at the plate he'd brought with him.

"Yes," he said. "No. Never mind that now."

Alikhan looked at him. "Yes, my lord."

"I want to know about the gambling that's going on among the petty officers." Martinez looked at him. "Do they cheat?"

Alikhan considered his answer for a long moment before speaking.

"I don't think so, my lord. I think they're very experienced players, and at least some of the time they play in concert."

"But they gamble with recruits, don't they?"

Martinez thought he saw an angry tightening of Alikhan's lips before the answer came.

"Yes, my lord. In the mess, every night."

It's always about money. Again Alikhan's words echoed in Martinez' head.

Gambling was of course against Fleet regulations, but such regulations were applied with a degree of discretion. If the petty officers played cards in their lounge, or the lieutenants wanted to play tingo in the wardroom, or the recruits roll dice in the engine spaces, action was rarely taken. It was a minor vice, and nearly impossible to stop. Gambling games and gambling scams were almost universal in the Fleet.

But the gambling could become dangerous when it crossed lines of caste. When petty officers gambled with recruits, serious issues of abuse of power came into play. A superior officer could enforce a vicious payment schedule at extortionate rates of interest, and could punish recruits with extra duties or even assault. A recruit who owed money to his superior could not only lose whatever pay he happened to possess at the time, but could lose future salary either in direct losses or interest payments. The recruit might be forced to pay in other ways: gifts, sexual favors, performing the petty officers' duties, or even being forced to steal on behalf of his superior.

It had been months since Chenforce left Harzapid, and it would be months more before Illustrious would stop in a Fleet dockyard. A recruit in the grips of a gambling ring could lose his pay for the entire journey, possibly the entire commission.

"Who's taking part in this?" Martinez asked.

"Well, my lord," Alikhan said, "I'd rather not get anyone in trouble."

"You're not getting them in trouble," Martinez said. "They're already in trouble. But you can exclude those who aren't a part of it by naming those who are."

This logic took a few seconds to work its way through Alikhan's mind, but in the end he nodded.

"Very well, my lord," Alikhan said. "Francis, Gawbyan, and Gulik organize the games. And Thuc was a part of it, but he's dead."

"Very good," Martinez said. He turned to his desk, then looked back at Alikhan. "I don't want you talking about this."

"Of course n-"

"Dismissed."

Martinez' mind was already racing to the next problem. He called up the accounts of Francis, Gawbyan, Gulik, and Thuc, and saw that they jumped on every payday-but when he looked at the figures, Martinez saw they were being paid far more than their salary. Nearly two-thirds of their income seemed to becoming in the form of direct transfers from other crew. Martinez backtracked the transfers, and found no less than nine recruits who regularly transferred their entire pay to the senior petty officers. They'd been doing it for months. Others were paying less regularly, but still paying.

Anger simmered in Martinez. You people like playing with recruits so much, he thought, maybe you should be recruits.

He would break them, he thought. And he'd confiscate the money, too, and turn it over to the ship's entertainment fund, or perhaps to Fleet Relief to aid distressed crew.

He checked the totals and found that Gulik was losing the money practically as fast as he was making it. Apparently the weaponer was truly devoted to gambling, and eventually lost every bit of his earnings to his friends. At the moment he had practically nothing in his accounts.

The scent of coffee wafted past his nose, and he looked up from the accounts to find that someone had placed a fresh cup of coffee by his elbow, next to a plate of newly-made sandwiches. Alikhan had made the ghostly delivery and Martinez hadn't even noticed.

He ate a sandwich and drank a cup of coffee.

Always about the money, he thought.

He opened the 77-12 that he'd viewed just that morning and looked again at the serial number of the ventilation blowers. He backtracked through the record and found that Patil had corrected the serial number from the purely fictional one that Francis had originally recorded in the log.

Every item in Martinez knew, came with its own history. Every pump, every transformer, every missile launcher, every robot, every processor, and every waste recycler came with a long and complex record that recorded the date of manufacture or assembly, the date at which it was purchased by the Fleet, the date at which it was installed, and each date at which it was subject to maintenance or replacement.

Martinez called up the history of the air blowers on Deck Eight and discovered that, according to the records, the blowers had been destroyed with the Quest, a Naxid frigate involved in the mutiny at Harzapid.

Rebel Data, he thought.

He checked the history of the turbopump that had failed at Arkhan-Dohg, and found that the turbopump had been decommissioned three years earlier, sold as scrap, and replaced by a new pump fresh from the factory.

His mouth was dry. He was suddenly aware of the silence in his office, the easy throb of his pulse, the cool taste of the air.

He knew who had killed Kosinic and Fletcher, and why.

Invitations went out in the morning, sent to all the senior petty officers. An invitation for drinks with their new captain, set for an hour before supper, was not something the customs of the service would let them decline, and decline they did not. The last affirmative reply came within minutes of the invitations being sent out.

The petty officers entered the dining room more or less in a clump: round-faced Gawbyan with his spectacular mustachos, Strode with his bowl haircut, burly Francis, thin, nervous Cho. Some of them were surprised to find the ship's secretary Marsden waiting with his datapad in his hands.

The guests sorted themselves out in order of seniority, with the highest-ranked standing near Martinez at the head of the table. Gulik was on his right, across from Master Cook Yau, with Gawbyan and Strode the next pair down, each with a grand set of mustachios; and then Zhang and Nyamugali. Near the bottom of the table was the demoted Francis.

Martinez looked at them all as they stood by their chairs. Francis seemed thoughtful and preoccupied, and was looking anywhere but at Martinez. Yau looked as if he had left his kitchens only reluctantly. Strode seemed determined, as if he had a clear but not entirely pleasant duty before him; and Gulik, who had been so nervous during inspections, was now almost cheerful.

Martinez picked up his glass and raised it. Pale green wine trembled in Captain Fletcher's leaded crystal, reflecting beads of peridot-colored light over the company.

"To the Praxis," he said.

"The Praxis," they echoed, and drank.

Martinez took a gulp of his wine and sat. The others followed suit, including Marsden, who sat by himself to the side of the room and set his datapad to record. He picked up a stylus and stood ready to correct the datapad's transcription of the conversation.

"You may as well keep the wine in circulation," Martinez said, nodding to the crystal decanters set on the table. "We'll be here for a while, and I don't want you to go dry."

There were murmurs of appreciation from those farther down the table, and hands reached for the bottles.

"The reason this meeting may take some time," Martinez said, "is because like the last meeting, this is about record-keeping."

There was a kind of collective pause from his guests, and then a resigned, collective sigh.

"You can blame it on Captain Fletcher, if you want to," Martinez said. "He ran Illustrious in a highly personal and distinctive way. He'd ask questions during inspections and he'd expect you to know the answers, but he never asked for any documentation. He never checked the 77-12s, and never had any of his officers do it."

Martinez looked at his wine glass and nudged it slightly with his thumb and forefinger, putting it in alignment with some imaginary dividing line running through the room.

"The problem with the lack of documentation, though," he said, keeping his eyes on the wine glass, "is that to a certain cast of mind, it means profit." He sensed Yau stiffen on his left, and Gulik gave a little start.

"Because," Martinez continued, picking carefully through his thoughts, "in the end Captain Fletcher only knew what you told him. If it looked all right, and what he was told was plausible, then how would he ever find out if he'd been yarned or not?

"Particularly because Fleet standards require that equipment exceed all performance criteria. Politicians have complained for centuries that it's a waste of money, but the Control Board has always required that our ships be overbuilt, and I think the Control Board's always been right.

"But what that meant," he said, "is that department heads could, with a little extra maintenance, keep our equipment going far longer than performance specs required." He looked up for the first time, and he saw Strode watching him with a kind of thoughtful surprise, as if he was recalculating every conclusion he'd ever drawn about Martinez. Francis was staring straight ahead of her, her gray hair partly concealing her face. Cho seemed angry.

Gulik was pale. Martinez could see the pulse beating in his throat. When he saw Martinez studying him, he reached for his glass and took a large gulp of the wine.

"If you keep the old equipment going," Martinez said, "and if you know where to go, you can sell the replacement gear for a lot of money. Things like blowers and coolers and pumps can bring a nice profit. Everyone likes Fleet equipment, it's so reliable and forgiving and overbuilt. And they were getting this stuff new, right out of the box."

He looked at Francis' scowling profile. "I checked the turbopump that failed at Arkhan-Dohg-using the correct serial number, not the number that Rigger Francis tried to yarn me with-and I found out the pump was supposed to have been retired three years ago. Someone had been keeping it going long after it should have been sold as scrap."

Martinez turned to Gulik. Sweat was pouring down the weaponer's face. He looked as deadly sick as he had been on the morning of Fletcher's last inspection, as the captain stalked toward him with the knife dangling at his waist.

"I also checked the serial number of the antiproton gun that failed in the same battle, and that was supposed to have been retired thirteen months ago. I hope that whoever sold the replacement wasn't selling it to someone who was intending to use it as a weapon."

"It wasn't me," Gulik croaked. He wiped sweat from his upper lip. "I don't know anything about this."

"Whoever did it," Martinez said, "didn't intend to endanger the ship. We weren't at war. Illustrious had been docked in Harzapid for years without so much as shifting its berth. The heavy equipment was going on and off the ship all the time, moving through the locked storage room where substitutions could be made without anyone being the wiser."

Martinez turned to look down the line of petty officers. "In order to work this scheme," he said, "you'd need that storage room. You'd also need the services of a first-rate machinist, with access to a complete machine shop, so that the old equipment could be rehabilitated before it was reinstalled."

Strode turned his head to look at Gawbyan. The master machinist's lips had thinned to a tight line across his fleshy face. His mustachios were brandished like tusks. One large, fat-fingered hand had closed into a fist around the stem of his wineglass.

"So far, so good," Martinez said. "Our happy band of felons were making a profit. But then they took on some partners. And the partners were Naxids."

That surprised some of them. Yau and Cho stared. Strode's mouth dropped open.

"Specifically," Martinez said, "the Naxid frigate Quest, which was berthed next to Illustrious on the ring station. I expect the gang knew the Naxid petty officers informally before anyone mentioned the possibilities of mutual profit. And then they began using one another's facilities and swapping parts with one another, which is how equipment from the Quest ended up aboard Illustrious.

"Now in order to exchange parts, the codes for the storage areas had to be exchanged as well. And that didn't work out so well, because the Naxids involved somehow got the extra codes for the antiproton storage areas-maybe they came up with a plausible story of needing to exchange antiproton bottles, or maybe they just hid a camera where they could get a view of the lock-but the result was that shortly before the Naxid rebellion, all of our antiproton bottles were exchanged for empty ones."

The our was deliberate, even though Martinez hadn't been there. In war there was us and them, and Martinez wanted to make it clear who was which.

"The result was that Illustrious was helpless to defend itself in the battle, and unable to aid our comrades. I'm sure you all remember what that was like."

They did. He watched as they relived their helplessness, as anger blotched their faces, as jaw muscles clenched at the memory of humiliation.

"The bastards," Nyamugali said. Hatred burned in her eyes. "The bastards," she repeated.

Us and them, Martinez thought. Very good, signaler.

"Illustrious survived the battle," Martinez said, "no thanks to the thieves. But the Naxid rebellion left them with a problem. Before the war, they were felons; but once shots were fired, they were traitors. And while the penalty for theft from the state can be dire under the Praxis, the cost of being found a traitor is much, much worse.

"The thieves' problems increased," Martinez said, "when an officer launched his own, personal investigation of how the antiproton bottles turned up empty. Maybe his injuries had turned him into an obsessive, or maybe when he was running into the storage area to fetch the bottles, he'd seen something that made him suspicious. But once Kosinic started conducting his own equipment inspections-lifting access plates and checking the machine spaces-it was clear that he was going to find the evidence that would condemn our ship's clique. So Kosinic had to die."

"It was Thuc." Gawbyan's voice came out in a half-strangled croak. "Thuc killed Kosinic because of the cult. You said so yourself."

"I was both right and wrong," Martinez said. "Thuc did kill Kosinic. But not because Thuc was a cultist. Kosinic was killed because Thuc was a thief, and Thuc may not have acted alone."

There was a moment of silence. Somewhere down the table, Master Data Specialist Zhang tossed back her glass of wine, then reached for a bottle and refilled it.

"Kosinic's death was ruled accidental, as it was meant to be," Martinez continued. "All continued well for the conspirators, until the worst possible thing happened. Captain Fletcher himself grew suspicious. Maybe it was his turn to wonder how only his antiproton bottles, of all those in the Fourth Fleet, had turned up empty; or maybe he began to realize the weakness in his own system of inspections; or maybe he grew offended when he discovered that a gambling ring composed of high-ranking petty officers was skinning a group of recruits in the mess hall every single night."

That accusation struck home, Martinez saw. Even those who weren't a part of the gambling had to know about it, and most of them had the decency to look embarrassed.

"Captain Fletcher was a proud man," Martinez said. "His pride had already been offended when his ship was disarming in a crucial battle. That was the sort of thing that would have launched an official investigation if Illustrious hadn't been so badly needed in the emergency-and maybe there would have been an investigation anyway if Fletcher hadn't been so well connected, I don't know.

"That his ship had not only been humiliated at Harzapid, but was also home to a gang of traitorous thieves was a further blow to the captain's pride. Any kind of official investigation would reveal how badly Captain Fletcher had let things get out of hand. That would be a black mark that neither his career or his pride would be able to survive.

"So Captain Fletcher decided to handle the situation on his own. He executed Thuc and claimed captain's privilege. No doubt he intended to execute the rest as well."

"I wasn't a part of any ring," Gulik said suddenly. "Fletcher had the chance to execute me, and he didn't."

Martinez looked at the weaponer and slowly shook his head. "Fletcher looked at your current bank account and saw that you were broke," he said. "He didn't think you were a thief because he couldn't find the profits. But when I looked at a running total of your bank account, I saw that you were very clearly a member of the ring, but that you're also a compulsive gambler whose money slips through your fingers almost as soon as you earn it."

Desperation shone in Gulik's eyes. There was a strange odor coming off of him, sweat and fear and alcohol ghosting out of his pores.

"I never killed anybody," he said. "I didn't have anything to do with that."

"But you know who did," Martinez said.

"I-" Gulik began.

"Quiet!" Francis barked. She glared down the table at Gulik. "Don't you see what he's doing? He's trying to get us to turn on each other." Her fierce gaze looked at each of the petty officers in turn. "He's trying to divide us! He's trying to get us so frightened that we start make accusations against each other!" She looked at Martinez, and her lip curled. "We know who really killed Fletcher, don't we? The man who stepped into his place as captain!"

Martinez fought to control the surge of adrenaline that poured into his veins at the accusation. He pressed his hands carefully to the tabletop to control any trembling. With deliberation he looked at Francis and gave her a sweet smile.

"Nice try, Rigger Francis," he said. "You're at liberty to file that accusation if you wish. But you'd better have evidence. And you'd better have an explanation for how air blowers from the Quest ended up on Deck Eight, Access Four."

She stared at him for a moment, hate-filled eyes locking his, and then she turned away. "Fucking officers!" she said. "Fucking Peers!"

Martinez spoke into the ringing silence, and tried to keep his voice level.

"So Fletcher had to die. And once the killers disposed of him, they must have again congratulated themselves again on a narrow escape. Except that then I stepped into Fletcher's place, and I insisted on every department completing its 77-12."

Martinez permitted himself a thin smile. "The conspirators must have had a debate among themselves as how best to handle the new requirement. If the 77-12s had accurate information, it would point to obsolete equipment and the Quest. But if the logs were yarned, an inspection could reveal the deception."

He looked at Francis. "Rigger Francis' misadventures with the turbopump demonstrated the folly of yarning the log. So the others gave correct information and hoped that no one ever checked the hardware's history." He shrugged. "Last night I checked."

He swept the others with his eyes. "I'm going to assume that any department with equipment from the Quest is run by someone who's guilty. I've checked enough to see that there's machinery from the Quest in the Thuc's old department, and in Gulik's, and in Francis'."

Francis made a contemptuous sound with her tongue and turned her head away. Gulik looked as if someone had just thrown a poisonous snake in his lap.

Martinez turned to Gawbyan. "They couldn't have done any of it without you. So you're guilty, too."

Gawbyan's lips emerged from the thin line into which he'd pressed them. "Naxids," he said. "Naxid engineers could have done that work."

Martinez considered this idea and conceded that it was possible, if unlikely.

"Your account at the commissary will be examined closely," he said, "and we'll see if you share any mysterious payments with your mates. That'll be proof enough as far as I'm concerned."

A contemptuous look entered Gawbyan's eyes.

"I didn't kill anyone," Gulik said rapidly. "I didn't want to be a part of any of it but they talked me into it. They said I could earn back some of the money I'd lost at cards."

"Shut up, you rat-faced little coward," Francis said, but she said it without concern, as if she'd already lost interest in the proceedings.

"Gawbyan and Francis killed the captain!" Gulik cried. "Fletcher had already shown he wasn't going to kill me, I had no reason to want him dead!"

Francis flashed the weaponer a look of perfect disdain, but said nothing. Martinez saw Gawbyan's big hands closing into fists.

If this were one of the Doctor An-ku dramas that Michi enjoyed, this would have been the moment at which the killers would have produced weapons and made a murderous lunge for Martinez, or taken hostages and tried to bargain their way out. But that didn't happen.

Instead Martinez called for Alikhan, and Alikhan entered from the kitchen with Garcia and four constables, including Martinez' servants Ayutano and Espinosa. All, even Alikhan, were armed with stun batons and sidearms.

"Gawbyan, Gulik, and Francis," Martinez said. "Lock them up."

All three were cuffed from behind. There was no resistance, though Francis gave Alikhan a scornful look.

"Wait, captain!" Gulik said as he was manhandled out the door. "This isn't fair! They made me!"

Alikhan remained behind, hovering behind Martinez. Martinez felt a great tension begin to ebb. He picked up his wine glass and took a long drink and put the glass back on the table.

It wasn't as if he didn't deserve a drink right now.

He looked at the remaining petty officers. "There were lines crossed on this ship," Martinez said. "Four senior petty officers conspired to rob recruits of their pay, and no one complained, no one talked, and no one did anything about it. Those same recruits branched out into sale of Fleet property, and they put the ship in danger over and over. People died at Harzapid because of those four.

"And it wasn't just the petty officers," Martinez said. "Captain Fletcher crossed some lines, too, and maybe that made others think it was acceptable."

He looked at his remaining guests and saw them staring at nothing, or perhaps looking inward. Cho and Zhang seemed angry. Patil looked as if he were ready to weep.

"If any of you were involved with any of these schemes," Martinez said, "I need to know now. I need to know what you know. Believe me, it will go better with you if you turn yourselves in than if I find it out on my own. Right now I haven't done anything more than spot-check the logs, and I haven't look at financial records in any kind of detailed way. But I will. Now that I know what to look for, I'll have that information very soon."

There was silence, and then Amelia Zhang turned to Martinez and said, "You won't find anything wrong in my department, my lord. And you can look at my finances and see I live on my pay and that most of it goes to my kids' school fees."

"My department's clean," said Strode. He brushed one of his mustachios with a knuckle. "I yarned my log, I admit that, but I didn't like those others, Thuc and Francis particularly, and whenever they talked to me about ways of making money I wouldn't listen."

Martinez nodded.

"Illustrious depends on you all," he said. "You're more important to this ship than the officers. You're all professionals and you're all good at what you do, and I know that's the case because Captain Fletcher wouldn't have had you aboard otherwise. But those others-they're the enemy. Understand?"

He has a feeling he's made better speeches in his career. But he hoped he'd succeeded in creating a dividing line, the kind that is necessary in war, between us and them. Those he'd just labeled as us were people he needed very badly. Illustrious had been scarred, not in combat but in its heart, and the remaining petty officers were going to be a vital part in any healing. He could have had the killers arrested in their beds and dragged to the brig, but that wouldn't have had the same effect on their peers. It could have been put down to arbitrary action on the part of an officer, and that wasn't what Martinez wanted. He wanted to demonstrate in front of their peers how guilty the killers were, and exactly how long and detailed their treachery was, and how badly it had put the ship in danger. He had wanted to separate them from us.

Martinez felt a sudden weariness. He'd done everything he'd set out to do, and said far more than he'd intended to say. He pushed back his chair and rose. Chairs scraped as they were pushed back, and the others jumped to their feet and braced.

Martinez reached for his glass and raised it.

"To the Praxis," he said, and the others echoed him. He drained his glass, and the others drained theirs.

"I won't keep you," he said. "I'll talk to the new department heads tomorrow morning."

He watched them file out, and when they were gone he reached for a bottle and refilled his glass. He drained half of it in one long swallow, and then he turned to Alikhan.

"Tell Perry I'll have supper in my office after I report to the squadcom."

"Very good, my lord."

Alikhan turned and marched, adjusting the belt with its sidearm and baton. Martinez looked at Marsden.

"Did you get all that?"

"Yes, my lord."

"Turn off your record function, please."

Marsden did so, and stood bald and impassive, waiting for Martinez' next order.

"I'm sorry about Phillips," Martinez said.

Surprise fluttered in the other man's eyes. He turned to Martinez.

"My lord?"

"I know you would have saved him if you could."

There was an instant of surprise on Marsden's face, and then he mastered it, and his face was impassive again.

"I'm sure, my lord, I don't know what you mean."

"You people have hand signals and so on, don't you?" Martinez asked. "You would have given Phillips a warning if he hadn't happened to be on watch in Command." He took a breath and sighed it out. "I wish you had."

Marsden looked at him with intense brown eyes, but said nothing.

"I worked out a while ago," Martinez said, "that Thuc may have been a killer, but he wasn't a Narayanist. The tree pendant was found in Thuc's belongings because you put it there, Marsden, when I sent you to collect his things. You knew that I was about to launch an investigation into cult affiliations, and you wanted to get rid of the evidence. So you took the pendant from around your own neck and put it in with Thuc's jewelry."

Marsden's neck muscles twitched. He looked stonily at Martinez.

"My lord," he said, "that's pure speculation."

"I couldn't work out why you were behaving so strangely," Martinez said. "You were very angry when I first mentioned Narayanists-and then you denounced me for daring to insult the Gomberg and Fletcher clans. You forced me to search you right then and there, though of course that was after you'd ditched your pendant. I thought you were some extreme kind of snob. What I didn't realize was that I'd just insulted your most deeply-held beliefs.

"The problem is," Martinez said, "that pendant helped to condemn Phillips. You didn't know that one of Thuc's fingerprints was found on Kosinic's body. That linked murder and Narayanism in my mind, and I charged off on a campaign to find cult killers. That's the way cultists are always portrayed in video dramas-killing people and sacrificing children to false gods. I was misled by a lifetime of watching that sort of drama. I forgot that Narayanism isn't a killing sort of belief."

"I wouldn't know, my lord," Marsden said.

Martinez shrugged. "I wanted you to know I was sorry about the way I handled things. You won't forgive me, I'm sure, but I hope you'll understand." He took a long drink of his wine. "That's all, Marsden. If you can copy me that recording, and append a transcription as soon as you can, I'd be very much obliged."

Marsden braced. "Yes, my lord."

"You are dismissed."

Marsden turned and walked away, his back straight, his head facing rigidly forward. Martinez watched the door close behind him.

Apology not accepted, he thought.

He took another long drink of his wine, and then he walked to his office, put the wine glass on his desk, and walked out into the corridor.

It was time to report to Lady Michi.