resumed their previous behavior.
Bleskoth had programmed them cleverly. If Severin hadn’t warned Martinez which of the Naxid formations were the actual warships, Martinez would have been hard-pressed to work out the answer for himself.
Martinez left the Flag Officer Station for his cabin, where Alikhan helped him out of his vac suit and then poured his nightly cup of cocoa.
“There’s a good feeling in the ship, my lord,” Alikhan reported. “The crew are convinced we’re going to win.”
“I’ll try not to disappoint them,” Martinez said.
Alikhan bowed slightly. “I’m sure you won’t, my lord.”
Martinez showered off the polyamide scent of his suit seals, then got into bed for what turned out to be a lengthy struggle between sleep and his own imagination, each making ingenious sallies, excursions, and flanking attacks to thwart the other. Very little was resolved in those hours, except that Martinez realized that his goals had changed.
He wasn’t simply going to win the battle. He’d known he could beat the Naxids for some time.
The trick was to beat Bleskoth without compromising Michi Chen’s mission. And that meant that Chenforce could take no hits, lose no ships, suffer no casualties.
At Hone-bar he had managed exactly that, but at Hone-bar he had an entire friendly squadron to produce, like a magician, from beneath his cloak. Here he had no such advantage.
In the darkness of his cabin, he swore he would produce such a victory.
And then, turning on the lights and lighting the tactical screen, he began to make the victory real.
In five hours the oncoming Naxid decoys, unable to defend themselves except by acceleration and weaving, were destroyed by twelve of Chenforce’s sixteen missiles. The remainder continued to accelerate, taking separate, meandering courses to their destination, Wormhole Station 3. The relay station needed to be destroyed before Martinez unveiled his tactics around Okiray.
Martinez watched the decoys destroyed on the ceiling display above his bed. Afterward, reasonably content, he managed a few hours’ sleep.
After breakfast the Naxid squadron, preceded by the group of eleven decoys, made a screaming turn around Pelomatan and fell into the wake of Chenforce. They dropped their acceleration to two gravities while they considered the tactical implications for the loyalists’ deceleration, then increased to eight gravities, which would leave them merely miserable instead of unconscious, crippled, or dead.
Very tricky timing…
A quiet, eerie normality continued for the rest of the day. The crew weren’t called to action stations, not even when another missile barrage was fired at yet another group of decoys rounding Okiray. The Naxids paid more attention to the missile firings than Chenforce did: once again every enemy ship and decoy cut its acceleration for twelve minutes as the flares from the missiles reached them.
AboardIllustrious officers and enlisted were all employed as the service required, the normal cleaning and polishing and routine maintenance, and Captain Fletcher mustered the divisions responsible for suit-and-seal maintenance and for mechanical repair, and gave their workrooms a thorough inspection, awarding the usual demerits for untidiness and grime.
The senior petty officers, somewhat more practical, devoted extra time to inspection and maintenance of the powerful damage-control robots, which, remotely controlled by operators in armored crew compartments, would effect repairs in the eventIllustrious was damaged by enemy action. Martinez quietly had a few words with the division chiefs, and they gladly accepted Alikhan, Espinosa, and Ayutano as auxiliaries within their commands.
Martinez figured he wouldn’t be needing them to uphold his dignity in an actual battle.
He found himself wandering the ship, with no goal in mind other than a reluctance to stay in any one place for very long. He had never been good at waiting, and the wandering helped keep him from checking the figures on his plan over and over again.
The crew, he found, were remarkably quiet: it was as if they werelistening, going about their duties but extruding invisible antennae that strained the aether for information from the officers, from each other, from the vacuum beyond the cruiser’s hull. Even after the captain ordered the spirit locker opened and the crew served a ration of liquor with their supper, the good cheer was subdued and the drinking thoughtful.
Walking in his stiff-collared dress tunic to the squadcom’s suite, Martinez encountered Chandra Prasad, dressed with equal formality, on her way to a private supper with the captain. She braced at the salute, but then a broad smile broke out on her face and her stiff posture softened.
“Three years ago,” she said, “who’d have guessed?”
He looked at her. Apparently they were going to have the conversation that he had been doing his best to avoid.
The moment awkward, he thought.
Chandra shook her head, a disbelieving smile spreading across her face. “Golden Orb,” she said. “Hero of the empire. Marriage to the Chen heir…” Amusement flashed in her eyes. “The captain thinks you’re a freak of nature, you know that?”
The feeling’s mutual, then, Martinez thought.
“It’s a violation of Fletcher’s aesthetic to hear clever ideas spoken in your accent,” Chandra said. Then, as annoyance raced along his nerves, she reached out and patted his arm. “But hedoes believe you’re clever. He thinks it’s a shame you weren’t born to the right family.”
“He should know the right family,” Martinez said, “if anyone should.”
Chandra offered a cynical smile. She spread her hands and glanced down at herself. “And look at me. Nothing’s changed. Still scraping along looking for a patron.”
You haven’t found one?Martinez wondered. What was Fletcher, then?
She looked at him. “There wouldn’t be a Chen to spare, would there?”
“Lady Michi has a boy at school, but you’d have to wait.” He tried to make a joke out of it, but there wasn’t any laughter in Chandra’s dark eyes.
“Really, Gareth,” she said. “I’m desperate. I could use some help.”
“I can’t promote you, Chandra,” Martinez said. “Not till I get flag rank, and I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.”
“But you’re going to get command of a ship before long. And that ship will need a first lieutenant. And if you do something brilliant with your ship, the way you do, your premiere’s going to get a promotion.” She folded her arms and gave him a searching look. “I’m putting my money on you, Gareth. You always seem to come out on top.”
Frantic alarm bounded like a rubber ball along the inside of Martinez’s skull. He really didn’t want Chandra as a first lieutenant. It wasn’t that he minded her ambition, but he’d want a premiere less tumultuous, and besides he didn’t want her close to him. Yet he felt sympathy for her position—eight months ago, he’d been in the same situation, a provincial officer with no patronage and scant chance for promotion.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “But look—we’re going to beat the Naxids here. And that will mean notice for everybody on the flagship.”
Disdain curled her lip. “It’ll mean notice foryou. And for Chen, and the captain, and promotion for Kazakov— and isn’t she smug about it, the bitch!” She shook her head. “There isn’t going to be much notice left over for the little provincial who’s been waiting for seven years for her next step.”
Martinez found whatever sympathy he’d retained oozing away. “There’s nothing I can do now,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do”—he gave a hopeless shrug—“when circumstances change.”
“I know you will.” She put a hand on his arm again, then leaned forward to softly kiss his cheek. Her scent whirled in his senses. “I’m counting on you, Gareth.”
She turned from Martinez and went to her meeting with the captain. His head spun left and right, like that of a frantic puppet, until he made certain that the kiss had been unobserved.
This is going to be trouble, he thought.
Supper with the squadcom was surprisingly relaxed. He presented the latest version of his plan, and received her approval.
“I’m going to head for the wormhole gate, by the way,” she said. “I agree with your analysis of Bleskoth’s
