"I can't promote you, either. You know that."
An intense fire burned in Chandra's eyes. "But your relatives can," she said. "Your father-in-law is on the Fleet Control Board and Michi Chen is his sister. Between the two of them they should be able to work an overdue promotion for a lieutenant."
"I've told you before," Martinez said. "I can't do anything out here."
She looked at him levelly. "Some day," she said, "you're going to need a friend in the service, and I'm going to be that friend. I'm going to be the best and most loyal friend an officer ever had."
Martinez had his doubts: Chandra's friendship seemed to come at a very high price. Though, professionally speaking, could think of no reason why Chandra shouldn't be promoted.
Other than the erratic and impulsive behavior, of course, and the chaotic love life.
But how bad was that, really? he asked himself. Compared with some of the captains he'd known, Chandra was practically a paragon.
Chandra, misunderstanding his silence, leaned forward and took his hand. Her fingers were warm in his palm. The hologram gleamed on her tunic.
"Please, Gareth," she said. "I really need you now."
"I'll speak to Lady Michi," Martinez said. "I don't know how much credit I've got with her, but I'll try."
"Thank you, Gareth." She rested her hip on the desk and leaned across to kiss his cheek. Her scent flared in his senses. He stood, and dropped her hand.
"That won't be necessary, lieutenant," he said.
She looked at him for a moment out of her long eyes, and her look hardened. She straightened and regained her feet.
"As you wish, captain," she said. She braced, her pointed chin held high. "With the captain's permission?"
"You are dismissed," Martinez said. His mouth was dry.
She went to the door and slid it open.
"I meant what I said," she said, "about being your friend."
She was gone, leaving the door behind her. Someone walked past-Lord Shane Coen, Michi's red-haired signals lieutenant-and Coen cast a curious glance into the room.
Martinez nodded at him in what he hoped was a brisk, military fashion, and sat down behind the game of hyper-tourney.
It was a while before he could get his mind on the game.
Three watches ticked by, with nothing for Martinez to do but sleep, spend his time at hyper-tourney, check the tactical display to see if anything had changed, and stare at Terza's picture in the surface of his desk. No one invited Martinez to dine. He considered asking the lieutenants to an informal cocktail party, an alternative to the full-dress dinners Fletcher had imposed on the cruiser, but he then reflected that he'd have to invite Chandra, and decided against it.
Martinez glanced up at the sound of purposeful footsteps, and looked up to see Captain Lord Gomberg Fletcher standing in the door of his office. Fletcher wore his full dress uniform, with white gloves and the ceremonial sickle-shaped knife at his waist.
Martinez jumped to his feet and braced. "Lord captain!" he said.
Fletcher looked at him from his deep-set eyes. "I'd be obliged if you'd join me, Captain Martinez."
"Certainly, my lord." Martinez began to walk around the desk, then hesitated. "Should I change into full dress, my lord?"
"That won't be necessary, lord captain. Please come along, if you please."
Martinez left his office and joined the captain, who was accompanied also by Lord Sabir Mersenne, the fourth lieutenant, and Marsden, the captain's short, bald secretary, both also in full dress. Without another word, Fletcher turned and began walking down the corridor, the others following. Martinez wondered if he should have worn full dress when eating breakfast by himself, or at least should be embarrassed that he hadn't.
Fletcher's silver-embossed scabbard clanked faintly on the end of its chain. Martinez had never seen the captain wear his knife, but then he'd never accompanied Fletcher on an inspection before. Perhaps the extreme formality was a part of the captain's style.
The party went down two decks, leaving behind officers' country and the haunts of the enlisted. The captain marched to a hatch and knocked with a gloved hand. It was the hatch, Martinez knew, that led to the engine spaces.
The hatch was opened by Master Engineer Thuc, whose towering figure nearly filled the doorway before he stepped back to reveal the engine control room. Behind the line of acceleration cages, beneath murals showing strong-thewed characters working with huge levers and winches on some impossibly antique machinery, the control room crew were lined up, braced, and spotlessly turned out.
Apparently Captain Fletcher had asked Martinez to accompany him on one of his frequent inspections.
The captain was a demon for inspections and musters, and usually inspected some part of the ship every day that Illustrious wasn't engaged in crucial military business. Today was the engine division's turn, but Martinez could imagine no reason why he had been invited along. He wasn't a line officer, but staff, and not in Fletcher's chain of command-the state of Illustrious' engines was really none of his business.
So while he watched Fletcher and his two subordinates crawl over the engine control room, passing white-gloved fingers over the glossy surfaces, Martinez wondered why he had been summoned to observe this ritual, and paranoia soon began to scuttle through his mind on chitinous insect legs. Surely this had to do with Chandra Prasad. Surely Fletcher suspected Martinez of being her lover, and the inspection was part of an elaborate revenge plot.
The captain found flaws-a suspicious creak in an acceleration cage that indicated a worn part, a scratch on the transparent cover of a gauge, an emergency radiation suit carelessly stowed-and then the party went on to look at the engine department's storage lockers, at the heavily shielded antihydrogen compartments, and-after donning ear protection-at the massive reactor that powered the ship, and the huge turbopumps that operated the thermal exchange system.
The experience of the chamber was odd. Martinez knew that the noise was hellish, but his earphones automatically pulsed out sound waves that canceled that of the pumps, and all he heard in his ears was a distant white noise. But his body reacted to the sound: he could feel the vibration in his bones and in his soft organs, and when he touched a wall or pipe.
Fletcher stroked the pumps with white-gloved fingers, found them clean, and then returned to the engine control room so that his questions might be heard. Thuc followed the captain in docile silence, his muscular body looming over Fletcher's shoulder except when he darted forward to open a hatch or a locker door.
"You've changed the filters on the main pump recently?"
"Just after Protipanu, my lord," Thuc said. "We aren't due for another change for two months."
"Very good. And the pump itself?"
"We'll swap it out in another…" Thuc considered his answers, his eyes focused somewhere above his left shoulder "…thirty-eight days, my lord."
"Very well." The captain tugged his white gloves over his wrists and smoothed the fine kidskin over his fingers. "I'll just inspect your crew, then."
He marched down the line of engine crew, stopping to make an occasional comment about dress or deportment. At the end of the line he encountered Thuc again, and nodded.
"Very good, Thuc," he said. "Excellent marks, as always."
"Thank you, lord captain." An hint of a smile touched his lips.
When Fletcher moved it was so fast that Martinez failed to see it properly and could only reconstruct the action later, out of fragments of memory. The sickle-shaped blade sang from the sheath, whistled through the air, and buried itself in Thuc's throat. A crescent of arterial blood splattered the mural behind Thuc's head.
Thuc was too large a man to fall all at once. First his shoulders dropped, and then his knees gave way. His barrel chest sank, then his stomach sagged, and then-as Fletcher's knife cleared his throat-Thuc's head lolled down. It was only then that Thuc fell like a tower of wooden blocks kicked by a careless child.
Martinez' heart began to beat again, a roaring in his ears. He looked at Fletcher in shock.
Fletcher looked expressionlessly at the body with his ice-blue eyes, and took a step away from the spreading pool of red. He flicked scarlet from his blade with a movement of his wrist.
The smell of blood hit Martinez' senses, and he bit down hard on the stomach that was trying to quease its way past his throat.