'Yes, my lady.'
'Give me regular reports.'
'Of course, my lady.' Chandra turned to at the others. 'The danger signal will be entering a system where the radars are still operating, or where we're painted by a targeting laser from what will probably be a distant source. That's how we'll know we're running into danger.'
Ever since Chenforce had plunged into enemy space, the Naxids had been turning off all radars and other navigation aids in any system the loyalists had entered. Chandra was perfectly right to say that radar would be a danger signal.
Michi poured a glass of amber wine and contemplated it while she tapped her fingers on the tabletop. 'The best way to prevent this kind of attack is to blow up every wormhole station we come across,' she said. 'That way they can't relay course corrections to any incoming missiles. I'd hate to blow those stations; it's uncivilized. But to preserve my command I'll kill anything on the enemy side of the line if I have to.'
She reached out a hand and picked up her glass of wine.
'Isn't anyone drinking but me?' she asked.
Martinez poured himself a glass of wine and raised it in silent toast to Chandra.
He thought she had just made herself too valuable to be blamed for Fletcher's death.
Chandra and Martinez finally had their long-postponed dinner the following day. Even though Martinez thought it was probably no longer necessary, he instructed Alikhan not to leave them alone for too long a space of time.
Martinez was probably no longer necessary to Chandra's plans.
Chandra entered the dining room looking splendid in her full dress uniform, the silver braid glowing softly on the dark green tunic and trousers. Her auburn hair brushed the tall collar that now bore the red triangular tabs worn by Michi's personal staff.
'Congratulations, lieutenant,' Martinez said
Alikhan arrived with a warm, creamy pumpkin soup, fragrant with the scent of cinnamon. Chandra tasted it and said, 'Your cook has it all over the wardroom chef, good as he is.'
'I'll tell him you said so.'
'That was one of the small compensations of being with Fletcher,' Chandra said. 'He'd always give me a good meal before boring me to death.'
Martinez considered this as he sampled the soup and decided that Chandra could at least pretend to be a little more stricken by the death of an ex-lover.
'What did he bore you with?' Martinez asked.
'Other than the sex, you mean?' When Martinez didn't smile at her joke, she shrugged and went on. 'He talked about everything, really. The food we were eating, the wine we were drinking, the exciting personnel reports he'd signed that day. He talked about his art. He had a way of making everything dull.' A mischievous light came into her eyes. 'What did you think of what he had hanging in his sleeping cabin? Did it give you sweet dreams?'
'I got rid of it,' Martinez said. 'Jukes found some less depressive stuff to hang.' He looked at her. 'Why did Fletcher have Narayanguru there? What did he get out of it?'
Chandra gave an elaborate sigh. 'You're not going to make me repeat his theories, are you?'
'Why not?
'Well,' she said, 'he said that if he ever joined any cult, it would be the Narayanists, because they were the only cult that was truly civilized.'
'How so?'
'Let me try to remember. I was trying not to listen by that point.' She pursed her full lips. 'I think it was because the Narayanists recognized that all life was suffering. They said that the only real things were perfect and beautiful and eternal and outside our world, and that we could get closer to these real things by contemplating beautiful objects in this world.'
'Suffering,' Martinez repeated. 'Gomberg Fletcher, who was filthy rich and born into most privileged caste of Peers, believed that life was suffering. That his life was suffering.'
Chandra shook her head. 'I didn't understand that part, either. If he ever suffered, he didn't do it when I was looking.' A curl of disdain touched her lip. 'Of course he felt he was more refined than the rest of us, he probably thought his suffering was so elevated that the rest of us didn't understand it.'
'I can see why the Shaa killed Narayanguru, anyway,' Martinez said. 'If you maintain that there's another world, which you can't prove exists, where things are somehow better and more real than this world, which we can prove exists, you're going to run afoul of the Praxis for sure, and the Legion of Diligence is going to have you hanging off a tree before you can spit.'
'Oh, there was more to it than the invisible world business. Miracles and so on. The dead tree that Narayanguru was hung on was supposed to have burst into flower after they took him down.'
'I can see where the Legion of Diligence would take a dim view of those stories, too.'
That night, sitting on his bed while he drank his cocoa and looked at the picture of the woman, her child, and the cat, he thought about Fletcher sitting in the same place, contemplating the ghastly figure of Narayanguru, and thinking about human suffering. Martinez wondered what Fletcher, a prominent member of two of the hundred most prominent Terran families in the empire, had ever suffered, and what comfort he received by looking at the bloody figure strung on the tree.
Doctor Xi had said Fletcher found his position a burden, for all that he worked dutifully at what was expected of him. He wasn't really an arrogant snob, according to Xi, he was just playing a part.
Fletcher had been empty, filling his hours with formal ritual and aesthetic pleasure. He hadn't created anything; he hadn't ever made a statue or a painting, he just collected them. He hadn't done anything new or original with his command, he'd just polished his ship's personnel and routines the same way he'd polish a newly-acquired silver figurine.
He had suffered, apparently. Perhaps he had known all along how hollow his life had become.
He had sat where Martinez was now sitting, and contemplated objects that other people considered holy.
Martinez wasn't going to figure Fletcher out tonight. He put the cocoa aside, brushed his teeth, and rolled beneath the covers.
Time passed. Martinez dined with Husayn and Mersenne on successive days, and the next day spent eight hours in Command, taking Illustrious through the wormhole to Osser. Squadrons of decoys were echeloned ahead of the squadron, in hopes of attracting any incoming missiles. Along with the decoys flew pinnaces, painting the vacuum ahead with their laser range finders. Every antimissile weapon was charged and pointed dead ahead.
Chenforce made some final-hour maneuvers before passing the wormhole, checking their speed and entering the wormhole at a slightly different angle, so as to appear in the Osser system on a course that wouldn't take them straight on to Qupyl, the next system, but slightly out of the direct path.
Martinez lay on his acceleration couch, trying not to gnaw his nails as he stared at the sensor displays, waiting for the brief flash that would let him know that missiles were incoming. His tension gradually eased as the returning radar and laser signals gradually revealed more of the Osser system, and then a new worry began to possess him.
The Naxids would have to wonder why Chenforce had changed its tactics, particularly when they hadn't met any genuine opposition since Protipanu, at the very beginning of their raid. If the Naxids analyzed the raiders' maneuvers, then reasoned backwards to find what the tactics were intended to prevent, they would be able to see that Michi Chen and her squadron was very, very concerned about a missile barrage fired at relativistic velocities.
If the tactic hadn't yet occurred to the Naxids, Chenforce might now be handing them the idea.
But that was a worry for another day. For the present it was enough to see that the ranging lasers were finding nothing, that more and more of the system was being revealed without an enemy being found, and that Chenforce was as safe from attack as it was ever going to be.
Days passed. Martinez conducted regular inspections to learn his ship and crew, and to confirm the information reported on the 77-12s. He dined in rotation with Lord Phillips, who was scarcely more talkative than he had been at their previous meeting, with Lieutenant the Lady Juliette Corbigny, whose volubility more than made up for Phillips'
