“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’s 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 by 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 announce an inspection on Deck 8, and there would be plenty of witnesses to anything he might find.
After breakfast, Martinez staged an inspection in which Access 4 on Deck 8 was opened. The steady rumble of ventilation blowers rose from beneath the deckplates. He 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 Rao.
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 Rao, 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 where he’d seen Kosinic. Martinez had several of the nearby access plates raised, and he descended into each to find again that everything was in order.
Frustration bubbled in his blood as he complimented Rao on his record-keeping, and it kept bubbling as he marched away.
Hours later, while he was eating a late supper—a ham sandwich made of leftovers from the meal he’d given Michi—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 now, days after they’d been spoken, it came back to Martinez.
Gambling, he thought.
He 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, 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 from the dining room. “Yes,” he said. “No. Never mind that now.”
Alikhan looked at him. “Yes, my lord.”
“Some time ago,” Martinez said, “you took an advance on your salary in order to pay a gambling debt.”
Alikhan gave a cautious nod. “Yes, my lord.”
“I would like to know who you were gambling with.”
Alikhan hesitated. “My lord, I shouldn’t like to—”
“Do they cheat?” Martinez asked.
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 his head.
Gambling was of course against Fleet regulations, but such regulations were applied with a degree of discretion. Action was rarely taken if the petty officers played cards in their lounge, or the lieutenants wanted to play tingo in the wardroom, or the recruits rolled dice in the engine spaces. 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, 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 a
re.”
This logic took a few seconds to work its way through Alikhan’s mind, but in the end he nodded.
“Very well, my lord,” he 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 mentioning this conversation to anyone.”
“Of course n—”
“Dismissed.”
Martinez was already racing on to the next problem. He called up the accounts of Francis, Gawbyan, Gulik, and Thuc, and saw that they jumped on every payday, far more than if they were being paid their salary. Nearly two-thirds of their income seemed to come 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. 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 Rao had corrected the serial number from the purely fictional one that Francis had originally recorded in the log.
Every item in Illustrious, 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 included 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 8 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, replaced by a new pump fresh from the factory, and sold as scrap.
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.
TWENTY-THREE
Once the Fleet Control Board and their staff had come aboard, Galactic cast off from the ring in order to build the delta vee necessary for escape in the event the Naxids came to Antopone. A few hours later the two brand-new heavy cruisers launched. Their Daimong crews were inexperienced, and the ships hadn’t yet received their weapons. They couldn’t fight, and so would have to flee.
A squadron of eight Naxid ships had departed the fleet guarding the Zanshaa system: they were heading for Zanshaa Wormhole 2 at a steady four gees acceleration. At that rate they could be at Zarafan in less than ten days.
From Zarafan they could continue to Laredo, normally a journey of three months, but less if they continued to tenderize themselves with heavy gravities. Or from Zarafan the Naxids could take a wormhole that could lead them eventually to Antopone and, from there, Chijimo; or alternately, they could use another wormhole to take them through a series of barren systems to Seizho, from which they could return to Zanshaa.
This last was thought unlikely. If they wanted to raid Seizho, they could go there direct from the capital.
“They’ve learned from us,” Mondi said in his precise way. He adjusted the dark goggles he wore over his night-adapted eyes. “Our raids must be hurting them if they’re launching a raid themselves.”
“But is this their only raid?” Pezzini wondered. “This could be a probe designed to get our defenses off balance, and then they launch a larger strike elsewhere—Harzapid and what remains of the Fourth Fleet, for example.”
Lord Chen contemplated mosaics on the walls, with their bright warships rocketing out of wormholes, and shook his head.
“That doesn’t matter, my lords,” he said. “We don’t have the ships to oppose more than one raid, and in any case Laredo has to be protected.”
He was just a politician, he thought, not a Fleet officer, but even he knew that. He could already picture in his mind the panicked series of instructions from the Convocation, demanding that the Fleet save them from the Naxids.
“Very well,” said Lord Tork. “We shall order Lord Eino to move his forces in this direction, to guard the Convocation if necessary.”
Tork was in the process of dictating this order to the secretary of the board when the secretary’s comm unit chirped—a message from Lord Eino Kangas stating that the Home Fleet was already in motion, heading for Antopone.
Kangas had read the situation as the board had, and reached an identical conclusion.
Bulletins arrived almost hourly, so Lord Chen and the others were kept well-informed of the movements of the various players. The Naxids took ten days to reach Zarafan, a journey that normally took a month. Once there, they destroyed the few civilian ships that hadn’t made their escape and demanded and received the planet’s surrender. It had been hoped that the Naxids might detach ships to remain in the system—detachments could be picked off later—but instead they reduced their fierce acceleration and swung through Wormhole 3 on a course that would eventually take them to Antopone. The course of the enemy raid was now clear: Zarafan-Antopone-Chijimo, and then the return to Zanshaa. It was an unambitious raid compared to those Michi Chen and Altasz had launched into Naxid space, but perhaps it was a rehearsal for others.
Now that Kangas knew where the enemy were bound, he increased his acceleration and headed for Antopone, his ships crossing paths with the Galactic and the two refugee cruisers heading the other way. Kangas wanted to arrive at Antopone ahead of the Naxids to protect the shipbuilding facilities on the planet’s ring.
Kangas’s ships were ready for a fight. The five survivors of the Home Fleet burned to avenge their defeat at Magaria, and Do-faq’s seven ships were confident of victory, having already wiped out a Naxid squadron at the Lai-own home world of Hone-bar.
Kangas succeeded in arriving first, placing his forces between Antopone and the arriving Naxids. The raiders—seven frigates led by a light cruiser—arrived in the system to find twelve heavy cruisers driving for them head-on, with barrages of missiles already launched.
The Fleet Control Board, in their meeting room on Galactic, watched the battle courtesy of the amazingly detailed spectra gathered by detectors on the Antopone ring, and projected in three-dimensional holographic images above the board’s long table. The illusion that they were watching in real time was perfect, and Lord Chen had to keep reminding himself that the battle had in fact occurred fifteen hours before. They saw the missiles launched at a target that had not as yet appeared through the wormhole, the Naxid squadron entering “hot” with radars and ranging lasers hammering, and then a frenzy of countermissile firings and maneuvers as the Naxid commander rearranged his formation.
“The Naxid’s pissing his pants by now,” Pezzini said with satisfaction.
“No!” Tork cried, his melodious voice edged w
ith an uncanny shimmering quality that Lord Chen had never heard before. Chen stared at him, and then at the display.
“Starburst,” Pezzini said critically. “And damned early too.”
The compact bundle of ships that was Kangas’s command were separating, flying apart like the casing of an exploded bomb.
“Kangas may just have lost the war!” Tork said. Anger buzzed in his voice. “He has shamed us before our ancestors!”
Chen knew that warships usually clumped together in rigid formations that enabled the commander to communicate with them, and that at some point in a battle the ships would “starburst”: separate from one another in order to provide a less compact target. He also knew that his son-in-law, Captain Martinez, had devised a new tactical system based on the ships separating from one another early and engaging in maneuvers governed by some rather obscure branches of mathematics. Lord Tork and other conservative officers were bitterly opposed to these new ideas.
“Do-faq has corrupted Kangas!” Tork said. “Do-faq, who was corrupted by Martinez and has practiced these innovations! The fleetcom has fallen a victim to these dangerous new fashions!”
“The Home Fleet’s advantage was in numbers,” Pezzini remarked. “Kangas has thrown that all away. With his ships separated that way, each is fighting on its own.”
Chen remained silent. The battle had been fought hours ago, he reminded himself.
The opposing forces, hurtling toward each other, closed the distance rapidly. Missiles found each other in the spaces between the contending squadrons, creating expanding spheres of hot expanding plasma and radio hash. The Naxid force disappeared from the display as the missile burst screened them from the sensors on the Antopone ring. More missiles hurled themselves into the gap between the racing squadrons, and the plasma screen broadened and thickened.
Eventually the Home Fleet flew into the screen, and vanished as if an invisible hand had wiped it from existence.
“Damn,” Pezzini said, rather clinically.
Conventions of War Page 35