“And another thing,” Martinez said. “I want you to go to the riggers’ locker and get whatever you’ll need to drill the first lieutenant’s safe.”
Alikhan nodded. “Do you wish that done immediately, my lord?”
“No.” Breaking into the premier’s safe in search of his key was, among other things, a capital crime, and if he were discovered, it would be a race between the Criminal Investigation Division and the Legion of Diligence to see who would kill him first. Martinez wasn’t quite willing to commit himself to the executioner’s garotte just yet.
“Just have the equipment ready in the lord lieutenant’s cabin. If we have to burn gees out of here, it’ll be easier to have what you need on hand rather than have you try to haul it to Koslowski’s cabin under three and a half gravities.”
“Very good, my lord.”
Maheshwari arrived and braced to the salute. He was a small, mahogany-skinned man, with crinkly hair gone gray, a pointed beard, and mustachios dyed a spectacular flavor of red.
Martinez handed him a sidearm. “I hope this won’t be necessary,” he said.
“There won’t be trouble inmy division,” Maheshwari said as he signed for the weapon and scanned in his thumbprint. “But I can’t speak for some of the other folk on board.”
“In a short while I’m going to call for an engine startup drill. It takes forty minutes or so to ready the engines for a cold start, yes?”
Maheshwari smiled with brilliant white pebble-sized teeth. “It can be done much faster, my lord.”
“Let’s not. I want the drill to seem as normal as possible.”
As possiblewas the key here. No drill was going to be normal on the Festival of Sport.
“The electrical and data connections are dropped at three minutes forty, if I remember,” Martinez said. “We’ll start the drill and then hold at four minutes.”
“Beg pardon, my lord,” Maheshwari reminded, “but water and air connections are dropped at four minutes twenty.”
“Oh. Right. We’ll hold at five, then.”
“Very good, my lord.”
Dropping water, air, electrical, and data connections to the ring station would be the station’s first warning ifCorona left its berth unexpectedly. Martinez wanted to delay that warning as long as he could.
At least he was confident that, if necessary, he could leave his berth when he wanted to, whether the engines were ready or not. He knew that 641 years ago a raging fire had broken out in Ring Command on Zanshaa’s ring station, subsequently spreading to seven berthed ships, all destroyed along with their crews. The ships could not unberth, or even close their airlock doors, without permission from Ring Command, which by then had been gutted by fire.
Since then, regulations had insisted that a ship under threat could unberth without permission, and had complete control of its airlock doors. Martinez could getCorona out of its berth; the only question was whether the other warships would permit her to survive past that point.
Martinez did his best to pretend that he had his imperturbable, omnipotent officer’s face on, and ventured to give the master engineer a confident smile. “Good luck, Maheshwari.”
Maheshwari’s response was courtly. “The same to you, Lord Lieutenant.”
The engineer braced in salute and returned to Engine Control.
Martinez locked the armory and went to the central belt elevator that would take him to Command, then hesitated, one hand on the wide belt that held his sidearm and stun baton. If he walked into Command wearing this thing, everyone would consider him a lunatic. If the Naxids did nothing, or if what they did had a rational explanation, then the entire crew would know by the end of the day. He’d become a laughingstock.
He stood in the hatch and heard the laughter in his mind, laughter ringing down the years as long as he remained in the service. If he were wrong, he could expect nothing less. Everything Fanaghee and Kulukraf were doing could have an innocent explanation—well, notinnocent exactly, but at leastrational . If he had missed that, if the Naxids were doing anything but rising, he would never hear the end of it. The story would become one of those Fleet legends that would follow a person for his entire career, like the story of Squadron Commander Rafi ordering the cadets to bind and beat him.
The endless belt of the central elevator rustled past. Suddenly he wanted very much to return to the weapons locker, check in his pistol, and go to the wardroom to watch the game on video and cheer onCorona’s team.
The hell with it, he thought. He wasalready a laughingstock to most of the crew.
He put a foot on the next descending rung, took a hand-hold onto the rung above, and stepped into the central trunk corridor. He stepped off two decks below, and immediately saw Zhou, the brawler he’d released from arrest two days before, polishing the silverware in the officers’ mess, across the corridor from Command.
Wonderful, Martinez thought. He had Zhou, Ahmet, and Knadjian in his crew, as well as every other miscreant that the captain had condemned to labor instead of the games.
Zhou, polishing away, gave Martinez a dubious look from his blackened eyes, which widened when he saw the pistol belt. Martinez gave a curt nod and walked into Command.
“I am in Command,” he announced.
“The officer of the watch is in Command,” Cadet Vonderheydte agreed, speaking from his position at the comm board. The scent of coffee, wafting from the cup he’d propped near one hand, whispered invitingly in the room.
Martinez stepped into the locked captain’s cage. “Status?” he asked.
Vonderheydte, whose cage was directly behind the captain’s, saw the pistol belt, and his eyes widened. “Um, ship systems are normal,” he said. “And—oh yes! The dishwasher in the enlisted galley blew a circuit breaker, and it’s being looked into.”
“Thank you, Vonderheydte.” He turned his back on the cadet and sat in the captain’s chair. Cushions sighed beneath his weight, and he adjusted the pistol to a more comfortable position, then reached over his head and drew down the captain’s displays until they locked in front of him.
He set one display to the security camera. Crewmen were still streaming past the airlock toward the rim rail stop. Nothing untoward was visible, but then, he didn’t expect anything for a few hours yet, not until the crews had descended to the planet’s surface and all the remainder were distracted by the sports.
He settled back in his chair. “We’ll be having an engine drill presently,” he said, and then listened to the profound, astonished silence that followed his words.
Sorensen to Villa to Yamana to Sorensen to Digby—and goal. Martinez heard Vonderheydte give a shout as the ball shot pastBeijing’s goalkeeper and into the net.
Warrant Officer/Second Mabumba punched the air with a fist. He sat at the engineering station, and in his excitement atCorona’s second goal, had forgotten to be resentful of Martinez for the engine drill that placed him in Command instead of the warrant officers’ lounge, where he could have watched the game in comfort, and with a glass of beer by his hand.
Maheshwari in Engine Control was holding the engine countdown at five minutes. Martinez knew he had hardly won the enduring love of the entire engineering division for calling the drill on a sports holiday and keeping them at their stations.
He’d left Command only once, to help Alikhan bring food, coffee, and comfort to the two guards at the outside airlock, where Martinez made it clear to Dietrich and Hong that any orders from Alikhan were to be treated as if they were orders from himself.
Clearly, the silent faces of the sentries suggested, there was more than one madman aboard the ship.
Next, Martinez tried to see what he could do about sending alarms to other elements of the Fleet, perhaps to Zanshaa. A check with data on file at the Exploration Service, which crewed and maintained the wormhole stations that stitched the empire together with communications lasers that pulsed messages and data from one system to another, showed that there was no chance of getting word outside the Magaria system. In the previous few months, on a leisurely schedule, the crews of each station had been replaced—with Naxids.
Another possibility existed. There were civilian ships in the system, outbound. He could send a message to each of these, and hope that at least some information escaped the system. He checked the navigation plots and discovered there were sixteen civilian ships in the Magaria system. He checked their registration, and after discounting the three large inbound transports belonging to a corporation called Premiere Axiom, based on the
