Martinez felt a sigh building somewhere in his diaphragm, and he suppressed it. “I don’t, my lady.” Because he had considered all these points himself, and all together the objections were formidable.
Michi seemed disappointed. “I was hoping you would. Because I’ve been thinking about Naxas for some time.”
Martinez groped for words. “I don’t have logic on my side,” he admitted. “All I have is the sense that we should go to Naxas. It seems to me that we could knock off five enemy ships at a fairly small risk. And then, if the Naxids don’t give up, we could leave and complete our return journey.”
Michi looked at her hands again. “No. Too many unknowns. We’ve had a very successful raid thus far. If we were unlucky at Naxas, we’d not only hand the enemy a victory—and our own side would have no way to know what happened to us—but we’d be altering the Fleet’s strategic plan.” She looked at him, amusement in her dark eyes. “And since you’re the unacknowledged author of the Fleet’s strategic plan, I presume you’ll want to maintain it.”
“Yes, my lady.” Martinez felt a constriction in his chest as a mental calculation reached its inevitable conclusion. “In that case,” he said, “I feel obliged to raise the possibility of doing to the Naxids what they tried to do to Chenforce. Accelerate some missiles to relativistic velocities and use them to hammer Naxas. We could bring the ring right down on the heads of their government.”
Michi shook her head again. “That wouldn’t end the war,” she said. “That would just widen it. The Naxids would feel obliged to use the same tactic, and I don’t want to see the rings at Harzapid and Zarafan and Felarus come down.”
Martinez felt his breathing slowly ease. “That’s a relief,” he admitted. “I felt that the option should be mentioned, but I can’t say my heart was behind the recommendation.”
“Yes.” Michi sipped her coffee. “If I’m going to have to destroy our civilization in that way, I’d much rather it be a result of a direct order from a superior, and not something I did on my own.”
Martinez smiled, but he wondered exactly how readily Michi would obey such an order. She’d been ruthless enough in other areas.
Uncomfortable with this line of thought, he allowed further calculation to spin through his mind. “Well,” he said, “if we’re not going to the Naxid home world, it seems to me that we should do our best to convince the enemy that Naxas isexactly where we’re going.”
“You have a suggestion, I take it?”
“There are four wormholes in El-Bin. We’ll be entering the system through Wormhole One. If we exit the system by way of Wormhole Two, we’d be on the direct route for Naxas, and Wormhole Three takes us eventually to Seizho by way of Felarus, which is avery long route. We actually want to take Wormhole Four, which will begin our loop to rejoin the Home Fleet.
“At present, our course takes us directly from Wormhole One to Wormhole Four, minus a bit of dodging to avoid hypothetical missiles. But if instead we loop around El-Bin’s sun, it might look to the enemy as if we’re intending to slingshot for Wormhole Two and Naxas. And if they’re indeed sending reinforcements to their home world, that’ll keep them heading for home under high gees just at the moment when Naxas is no longer under threat.”
“Wrong-foot them a few days more,” Michi murmured. “Yes, I’ll do that.”
After that the conversation descended into trivialities, and eventually Michi yawned and rose and thanked him for dinner. He walked with her to the door and she surprised him by putting an arm around his waist and resting her head on his shoulder.
“If you weren’t married to my niece,” she said in his ear, “and if I didn’t actuallylike her, I’d make an adulterer out of you right now.”
Martinez tried not to let his mouth fall open. “I’m sure it would be delightful,” he said finally, “but on Terza’s behalf I thank you.”
She gave him a smile from under one cocked eyebrow and made her way out. Martinez waited for the door to close, then walked to the nearest chair and sat down heavily.
We have all been on this ship too long,he thought.
The voyage continued. Chenforce entered El-Bin and made its deceptive swing about its star, all crew strapped into their couches and unconscious through a ten-gee deceleration. Whether the maneuver fooled the Naxid command into diverting ships wasn’t apparent until two systems later, in Anicha, where Chenforce stumbled on a host of merchant ships, all in desperate flight. Anicha, it turned out, was where the Naxids had diverted their merchant ships, getting them out of the way of the presumed showdown at Naxas.
Chenforce destroyed 131 ships at Anicha and more in the next system, where some had managed to flee.
The great ship slaughter at Anicha was an exception: 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 becauseIllustrious was performing so well in the squadron exercises, he reduced the number of inspections and hoped the crew were grateful. He also sometimes abandoned the full-dress formality: 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.
Fletcher had polishedIllustrious to a high gloss but hadn’t really known his ship. Even with his frequent inspections, he could only guess at the real status of the ship’s plant and systems. He saw only the surface, and never knew what rot might be concealed by a thick layer of polish.
Martinez was learning his ship from the inside out. He would inspect every pump, every launcher, every conduit. He would makeIllustrious his own.
He worked hard. His wrist healed. He still sometimes woke to the phantom scent of Caroline Sula on his pillow.
Every so often he met with Jukes to discuss the new designs forIllustrious . He was beginning to get used to the idea of his ship as a gaudy personal banner, as far away from Fletcher’s concept as possible.
In the meantime, Jukes painted his portrait. The artist had wanted to create the portrait electronically and print it, but Martinez desired a proper portrait, with paint on canvas, and Jukes complied with weary grace. He put an easel in Martinez’s office and worked there, preferring more obscure hours.
His portrait was romantic and lofty, Martinez in full dress, the Orb in one hand, his gaze directed somewhere over the viewer’s right shoulder. The other hand rested on a tabletop, next to a model ofCorona . Behind him would be a picture-within-a-picture, a portrait ofIllustrious blazing into battle. Jukes seemed to think the picture-within-a-picture device was clever. Martinez didn’t understand why exactly, but saw no reason to contradict the other’s professional judgment.
There was some discussion whether the portrait ofIllustrious should portray the ship in its current form, with Fletcher’s abstract color scheme of pink, white, and green, or in the bolder style they planned forIllustrious after the war.
Martinez put off making the decision, but eventually decided to use Fletcher’s color scheme. Should he win any glory in the war, it would be withIllustrious in its current appearance, and that would be what he wanted to commemorate.
Besides, he thought, there was no reason to stop at just one portrait. The redesignedIllustrious could be immortalized another time.
Martinez began to notice at musters and inspections that the crew looked obscurely more attractive. Kazakov came to dine one day with her hair down rather than knotted behind her head, and Martinez was struck by how good-looking she was.
Buckle, it seemed, was working his magic as a hair stylist and cosmetician. Even Electrician Strode’s bowl haircut seemed more shapely. Martinez called Buckle to his cabin for a haircut, and had to admit that the result was an improvement.
He made Jukes repaint the portrait to include the more attractive hair style.
There were more disciplinary problems among the crew now, fights and occasional drunkenness. 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 reperforming routine maintenance.
Everyone, officers and crew alike, were growing tired of it all.
Still, beneath the weariness, Martinez began to sense an undercurrent of optimism. Chenforce was returning to the Home Fleet, and once there, would move on the enemy at Zanshaa and retake the capital. The crew were anticipating the war coming to its conclusion, and with it, the end of all the monotony.
Even the danger of a merciless enemy had begun to seem preferable to the endless repetition and routine.
One night, Martinez sipped his cocoa and looked at the mother and the cat and the infant in his red pajamas. It seemed to him that the Holy Family, whoever they were, had things pretty easy. They had their fire, their beds, their comfortable middle-class clothing, a child that was well-fed and well-clothed, enough food so they could spare some for their cat.
There was no indication that they had to worry about unknown killers skulking outside their ornate painted frame, or coping with a sudden relativistic barrage of antimatter missiles, or whether reports given them by others had been yarned.
By the time he finished his cocoa, Martinez began to feel envy for the lives of the people in the painting. They were simple, they were Holy, they were carefree.
They were everything a captain wasn’t.
TWENTY-TWO
Perhaps, Martinez thought, it was the boredom induced by the long days of the ship’s routine that had led him to think about the killings again. After mulling it over 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 the flask that Alikhan habitually left on his desk.