Martinez suppressed a smile. The artworks were in highly intelligent frames that should have guarded them against acceleration, but nevertheless the impulse to protect the eighty-thousand-zenith painting showed Jukes had his priorities straight.
'Permission granted,' he said.
'My lord,' Mersenne said, after the missile went on its way. 'I've tracked the origin of the engine shutdown.'
'Yes?'
'It was a high pressure return pump from the number one heat exchange system. It failed, and set off a cascade of events that led to complete engine shutdown.'
'Failed?' Martinez demanded. 'What do you mean, failed?'
'I can't tell from this board. But for some reason when the pump failed, the valve on the backup system failed to open, and that led to the engine trip. The computer wasn't a hundred percent confident that it could keep the ship balanced with only two engines firing at all of eight gravities' acceleration, so it tripped the other engines as well.'
'Right,' Martinez said. 'Thank you, Mersenne.'
This was going to take some thought. And as soon as the ship secured from general quarters, he was going straight to the engine compartment and find out just what had happened.
'Yarning the logs.' Martinez spoke in a cold fury. 'You yarned the logs to hide fact that you hadn't been doing scheduled replacements, and as a result the ship was driven into danger.'
Master Rigger Francis stared expressionlessly at the wall behind Martinez' head and said nothing.
'Didn't I give you enough advanced warning?' Martinez asked. 'Didn't you guess what would happen if I caught you at something like this?'
Rage boiled in Martinez, fueled by the murderous aches in his head and wrist. For the first time in his career he understood how an officer could actually use his top-trimmer, could draw the curved knife from its sheath and slash the throat of a subordinate.
The evidence that damned Francis was plain. The huge, sleek turbopump designed to bring return coolant from the heat exchanger to the number one engine had been partly dismantled by Francis and her riggers. The plain metal-walled room reeked of coolant, and Martinez' shoes and cuffs were wet with the stuff. The finely-machined turbine that was the heart of the pump had disintegrated, sending metal shards downstream that jammed the emergency valve designed to shut off coolant flow in the event of a problem with the pump. With the first valve jammed open, a second valve intended to open the backup system had refused to open, and the result was an automatic shutdown for the engine.
It was difficult to understand how such a critical pump could suffer so catastrophic a failure. The pump and other pieces of crucial equipment were deliberately overdesigned, intended to survive well beyond their official lifespan. The only way a pump would crash in so terminal a fashion was because routine maintenance had been neglected.
That much was deduction. But what was the final nail in the master rigger's coffin was the fact that the serial number on the pump and the number recorded in the 77-12 were different. So far as Martinez could tell, the number in the 77-12 was pure fiction.
'Well,' Martinez said, 'Rigger Second Class Francis, I suggest that you get your crew busy replacing this pump.'
Francis' eyes flashed at the news of her demotion, and Martinez saw the firming of her jowls as her jaws muscles clenched.
Martinez turned to Marsden, who stood with his feet meticulously placed on a piece of dark plastic grate so as not to get coolant on his shoes.
'Who's the senior rigger now?' Martinez asked.
'Rigger/First Patil.' Marsden didn't even have to consult his database for the answer.
Martinez turned back to Francis. 'I will require the new department head to check every one of your entries in the 77-12. We don't want any more mysterious failures, do we?'
Francis said nothing. The humid atmosphere of the room had turned her skin moist, and droplets tracked down either side of her nose.
'You are at liberty to protest your reduction in rank,' Martinez said. 'But I wouldn't if I were you. If Squadron Leader Chen finds out about this, she's likely to have you strangled.'
He marched out, shoes splashing in coolant, his head and wrist throbbing with every step. Marsden followed, far more fastidious about where he put his feet.
Martinez next visited the weapons bay where Gulik and Husayn were both examining the guts of the antiproton projector that had failed in the Naxid attack. The whole mechanism had been pulled from the turret and replaced, and now a post-mortem was under way, parts scattered on a sterile dropcloth that had been spread on the deck.
Gulik jumped to his feet, bracing with his chin high as Martinez approached. There were dark patches under his arms, and sweat poured down his face. Martinez hadn't seen him this nervous since Fletcher's final inspection, when he'd slowly marched past Gulik and his crew with the knife rattling at his waist.
Martinez wondered if word had already passed to Gulik about what had just happened to Francis. The noncommissioned officers were wired into an unofficial communications network, and Martinez had a healthy respect for its efficiency, but he could hardly believe it worked this fast.
Perhaps, Martinez thought, Gulik was always this nervous around higher officers.
Or perhaps he had a guilty conscience.
He called up Gulik's 77-12 on his sleeve display and quietly checked the serial numbers. The serial numbers matched, so at least Gulik wasn't yarning his log.
'Do we know what happened?' Martinez asked.
'The electron injector's packed up, my lord,' Gulik said. 'It's a fairly common failure, on this model particularly.'
The antiprotons piggybacked on an electron beam, which kept the antiprotons contained until they hit the target, so the electron injector was a critical component of the system.
'I'll do further tests,' Gulik said, 'but it's probably just a matter of tolerances. These parts are machined very precisely, and they're stuck in the turret where they're subject to extremes of temperature and cosmic rays and all knows what. The turrets are normally retracted but we're keeping every point-defense weapon at full charge now, with the turrets deployed. Critical alignments can go wrong very easily.'
Martinez remembered what someone had said in Command, and he said, 'So it's not what happened at Harzapid?'
Gulik gave a start. Husayn answered for him, and firmly.
'Decidedly not, my lord.'
Martinez sensed that a significant moment had just slipped by, somehow, but he had no idea why it was significant.
'What did happen at Harzapid?' he asked.
There was silence as both Husayn and Gulik seemed to gaze for a moment into the past, neither of them liking what they saw there.
'It was bad, my lord,' Husayn said. 'The Naxids were outnumbered five to one, so they tried to bluff us into surrender. They occupied Ring Command and ordered us all to stand down. But Fleet Commander Kringan organized a party to storm Ring Command, and he ordered the loyal squadrons to prepare a fight at close range with antiproton weapons.
'None of us kept the antiprotons on our ships when we were in dock-you know how touchy they can be-so Lieutenant Kosinic was sent with a party to bring antiprotons in their containment bottles. He did, but when we hooked them up to the antimatter feeders we discovered that the bottles were empty.'
Martinez looked at him in surprise. 'Empty?'
'The Naxids must have got into our storage compartment and replaced the full bottles with empty ones. The squadcom sent Kosinic was out again to get bottles from Imperious, which was berthed next to us, but that's when the shooting started. That's when the docking tube was hit and Kosinic was wounded.'
