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?"