He took a slow, deliberate sip of coffee, then put his cup down in the saucer. 'That's what I thought, anyway,' he added, 'at least until I saw the state of the 77-12s.'
Their satisfaction on the petty officers' faces took a long, astounded moment to fade.
'Well, my lord,' Gawbyan began.
'Well,' said Gulic.
'The 77-12s aren't even remotely current,' Martinez said. 'I don't see a single department that can give me the information I need in order to know the status of my ship.'
The department heads looked across the long table at one another. Martinez read chagrin, exasperation, embarrassment.
And well they should be mortified, Martinez thought.
The 77-12s were a maintenance log supposed to be kept by every department. The petty officers and their crews were supposed to make note of all routine maintenance, cleaning, replacing, lubricating, checking the status of filters, of seals, of fluids, of the airtight gaskets in the bulkheads and airlocks, of the stocks of replacement parts. Every item on Illustrious was designed to a certain tolerance-overdesigned, some would have thought-and each was supposed to be replaced or maintained well before that tolerance was ever reached. Every part inspection, every replacement, every routine maintenance was supposed to be recorded in a department's 77-12.
Keeping the records current was an enormous inconvenience for those responsible, and they all hated it and tried to avoid the duty whenever possible. But the 77-12s, properly maintained, were the most effective way for a superior to know the condition of his ship, and to a newly-appointed captain they were a necessity. If a piece of equipment failed, the 77-12 could tell the captain whether the failure had been due to inadequate maintenance, human error, or some other cause. Without the record, the cause of a failure would be anyone's guess, and finding out the correct reason would take time and could distract an entire department.
In wartime, Martinez felt that Illustrious couldn't afford the time and distraction of tracking the cause of any failure of a critical piece of equipment, not when lives were potentially in the balance. And he simply detested not knowing the condition of his command.
'Well, my lord,' Gulik began again. There was a nervous look in his sad eyes, and Martinez remembered the sweat on his upper lip as he stood at the end of the line of weaponers, all passing under Fletcher's gaze. 'Well, it all has to do with the way Captain Fletcher ran the ship.'
'It's all the inspections, my lord,' said Master Rigger Francis. She was a brawny woman, with broken veins in her cheeks and hair that had once been red but was now the color of a dishrag. 'You saw how thoroughly Captain Fletcher conducted an inspection. He'd pick a piece of equipment and ask about its maintenance, and we'd have to know the answers. We wouldn't have a chance to look it up in the records, we'd have to know it.'
Master Cook Yau leaned his thin arms on the table and peered around Francis' broad body. 'We don't have to write the information down, my lord, because we have it all in our heads.'
'I understand.' Martinez gave a grave nod. 'If you have it all in your heads,' he added, 'then it should be no trouble to put it all in the 77-12s. You should be able to give me a complete report in, say-two days?'
Martinez found himself delighted by the bleak and downcast looks the department heads gave one another. Yes, he thought, yes, it's absolutely time you found out I was a bastard.
'So what's today, then?' he asked cheerfully. 'The nineteenth? Have the 77-12's to me by the morning of the twenty-second.'
He'd have to continue the inspections, he thought, because he'd have to check everything against the 77-12s to make sure the forms weren't pure fiction. 'Yarning the logs,' as it was called, was another time-honored custom of the service.
One way or another, Martinez swore he would learn Illustrious and its workings, human and machine both.
He let them drink their coffee in the sudden somber silence, bade them farewell, and went to his sleeping cabin intending to sleep the sleep of the just.
'How did I do, Alikhan?' he asked in the morning, as his orderly brought in his full dress uniform.
'The petty officers who aren't cursing your name are frightened,' Alikhan reported. 'Some were up half the night working on their 77-12s, and kept a number of recruits up running from one compartment to the next confirming their recollections.'
Martinez grinned. 'Do they still think I'll do?' he asked.
Alikhan looked at him with a tight little smile beneath his curling mustachios. 'I think you'll do, my lord,' he said.
As Martinez was eating breakfast he received a written invitation from the warrant officer's mess for dinner. He read the invitation and smiled. The warrant officers had learned something from the petty officers. They weren't going to wait for their invitation to dine with Martinez and find out all the things he thought were wrong with them, they were going to bring Martinez onto their home ground and then take it on the chin if they had to.
Good for them.
He accepted with pleasure, then sent a message to Chandra saying he would have to postpone their dinner for a day. He knew the message would not make her happy. He followed this with a message that none of the lieutenants would find to their liking, his request that all up-to-date 77-12s be filed in two days.
He then called for Marsden and the fifth lieutenant, whose title was Lord Phillips and whose personal name was Palermo.
Sub-lieutenant Palermo, Lord Phillips was a tiny man whose head didn't even reach Martinez' shoulder. His arms and legs were thin, his body slender, almost frail. His small hands were beautifully proportioned and his face was pale, darkened slightly by a feeble mustache. His voice was a quiet murmur.
Phillips commanded the division that embraced the ship's electronics, from the power cables and generators to the computers that navigated the ship and controlled its engines, so Martinez started by inspecting the workshop of Master Data Specialist Zhang. The shadowy little room with its glowing screens was kept in immaculate order. Martinez asked Zhang if she had made any progress at her 77-12, and she showed him the work she'd managed since the previous evening. He checked two items randomly and found that they'd been logged correctly.
'Excellent work, Zhang,' Martinez said, and marched with his party to the domain of Master Electrician Strode.
Strode was a little below average height but broad-shouldered and heavily muscled, with symbols of his sexual prowess tattooed on his biceps. His hair was brown and cut in a bowl haircut, with his nape shaved and pale hairless patches around the ears. Martinez expected to find it in spotless condition, since Strode would have had warning that the captain was on the prowl since he'd arrived in Zhang's domain. Martinez wasn't disappointed.
'Have you made any progress with your 77-12?' Martinez asked.
'I have, my lord.'
Strode called up the log on one of his displays. Martinez copied it to his sleeve display and asked Strode to accompany him to on a brief tour to a lower deck. He paused by one of the deck access panels, marked by a trompe l'oeil niche on the wall, with Juke's painting of a graceful one-handled vase. Martinez looked again at the annotation in the 77-12..
'According to your log,' Martinez said, 'you've replaced the transformer under Main Access 8-14. Open the access, please.'
Not looking the least bit pleased, Strode tapped codes into the access locks and the floor panel rose on its pneumatics. An electric hum shivered up through the deck. The scent of grease and ozone rose from the utility compartment, and lights came on automatically.
Martinez turned to Lord Phillips. 'My lord,' he said, 'would you be so kind as to go into the compartment and read me the serial number on the transformer.'
Without offering a word Phillips took the deck access and slid his feet beneath. Crouched in the narrow space, Phillips found the serial number and read it off.
The number wasn't the same as that in Strode's 77-12.
'Thank you, lord lieutenant,' Martinez said, staring hard into Strode's fixed, angry face. 'You can come up now.'
Phillips rose and brushed grime off his dress trousers. 'Close the access, please,' Martinez said. Strode did so.
'Strode,' Martinez said, 'you are reprimanded for yarning your log. I will check the 77-12s, and from this point
