Conventions of War (31 page)

Sula returned the smile. At last she had her army. Her own team of three plus a tough, disciplined order of killers who had decided, after all—and after a proper show of resistance—to be loved.

T
ime 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. Pinnaces flew along with the decoys, 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 Arkhan-Dohg, 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 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 backward to find what the tactics were intended to prevent, they would be able to see that Michi Chen and her squadron was 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.

Eight hours after they entered the new system, Martinez finally asked permission from Michi to secure from general quarters, and
Illustrious
dropped to a lower level of alert. He returned to his paperwork, but it was all he could do to avoid calling the officer of the watch every few minutes to make certain the squadron wasn't flying into jeopardy.

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 at their previous meeting; with Lieutenant Lady Juliette Corbigny, whose nervous chatter was a contrast to her silence in the presence of the squadcom; and with Acting Lieutenant Lord Themba Mokgatle, who had been promoted to the vacancy left as Chandra shuttled to Michi's staff.

Late one day, as Martinez sipped his cocoa and gazed at the painting of the woman, child, and cat, he realized that there was another figure, a man who sat on a bed opposite the fire from the woman and her baby. He hadn't noticed him because the painting was dark and needed cleaning, and the man wasn't illuminated by the fire. One moment he wasn't there, and the next Martinez suddenly saw him, head bent with a stick or staff in his hands, appearing like a ghost from behind the painted red curtain.

He couldn't have been more surprised if the cat had jumped from the picture into his lap.

The dim figure on the canvas was the only discovery Martinez managed during that period. The killer or killers of Captain Fletcher remained no more than a phantom. Michi grew ever more irritable, and snapped at him and Garcia both. Sometimes Martinez caught a look in her eye that seemed to say,
If you weren't family
…

In time, after the first breathless rush of taking command was over, he was reminded that there were too many captains' servants on the ship. He had Garcia take Rigger Espinosa and Machinist Ayutano into the Constabulary, with the particular duty of patrolling the decks on which the officers were quartered. Buckle the hair stylist was sent to aid the ship's barber. Narbonne was taken onto Martinez's service as an assistant to Alikhan, a demotion that Narbonne seemed to resent.

That left Baca, the fat, redundant cook that no one seemed to want, and Jukes. Baca was eventually taken on as an assistant to Michi's cook, a post he wasn't happy about either, and that left Martinez with his own personal artist.

Martinez called Jukes into his office to give him the news, and the man turned up in Fleet-issued undress and managed to brace rather professionally in salute. Martinez decided that tonight he must have gotten to Jukes before Jukes got to the sherry.

“I've been playing with a design for
Illustrious,
” Jukes said. “Based on folk motifs from Laredo. Would you like to see it?”

Martinez said he would. Jukes downloaded from his sleeve to the wall display, and revealed a three-dimensional model of an
Illustrious,
covered with large, jagged geometric designs in violent shades of red, yellow, and black. Nothing more unlike Fletcher's subtle, intricate pattern of pink, white, and pale green could be imagined.

Martinez looked in surprise at the cruiser, which was rotating in the display, and managed to say, “That's very different.”

“That's the point. Anyone looking at
Illustrious
is going to know that Captain Martinez is on station, and that he's a bold skipper who's not afraid to stand out from the common run of officers.”

Martinez suspected that he already stood out more than was good for him. He knew that Lord Tork, head of the Fleet Control Board, was not about to forgive him for achieving such prominence so quickly, not when the Fleet's whole style was based on letting family connections quietly work behind the scenes to further elevate those who had been already elevated from birth. As far as the board was concerned, any further glory won by Martinez would only be at the expense of more deserving Peers, that he should have taken his promotion and decoration and been happy to return to the obscurity from whence he'd come.

Flying that gaudy red and yellow design anywhere within Tork's domain would shriek his presence aloud in the ears of a superior who never wanted to hear his voice again. It would be like buying media time to advertise himself.

But Tork was already a lost cause,
Martinez thought. A little advertising wasn't going to change anything. So why not?

“Have you considered interiors?” he asked.

Jukes had. Martinez looked at designs for the office and dining room, both as brazen as the exterior designs, one dominated by verdant jungle green and the other by dark reds and yellows that suggested sandstone cliffs standing over a desert.

“Keep working along these lines,” Martinez said. “And if another theme occurs to you, feel free to work it out. We've got a lot of time.” It would be ages before
Illustrious
saw a dock or underwent a refit—the raid into Naxid space would last at least another couple months, and then the Fleet would have to reunite to retake Zanshaa.

There was a whole war between
Illustrious
and any new paint job.

Still, Martinez saw no reason not to plan for a grand triumph and its aftermath, in which he could decorate
Illustrious
as if it were his private yacht. For the odds were that either he would experience a grand triumph or be blown to atoms, and for his part, he'd rather assume the former.

“I should mention at this point, my lord,” Jukes said, “that Captain Fletcher was paying me sixty zeniths per month.”

“I looked up the captain's accounts, and he paid you twenty,” Martinez said. “For my part, I propose to pay you fifteen.”

As Martinez spoke, Jukes's expressions went from smug confidence to chagrin to horror. He stared at Martinez as if he'd just turned into a creature with scales and fangs. Martinez tried not to laugh.

“I don't
need
a personal artist,” he explained. “I'd rather have a rigger first class, but I don't expect I'll get one.”

Jukes swallowed hard. “Yes, my lord.”

“And I was thinking,” Martinez said, “that when things become a little less busy, you might begin a portrait.”

“A portrait,” Jukes repeated dully. He didn't seem to be thinking very well through his shock, because he asked, “Whose portrait, my lord?”

“The portrait of a bold skipper not afraid to stand above the common run of officers,” Martinez said. “I should look romantic and dashing and very much in charge. I shall be carrying the Golden Orb, and
Corona
and
Illustrious
should be in the picture too. Any other details I leave to you.”

Jukes blinked several times, as if he'd had to reprogram part of his mind and the blinks were elements of his internal code.

“Very good, my lord,” he said.

Martinez decided he might as well pay Jukes a compliment and take his mind off his misfortunes. “Thank you for changing the pictures in my cabin,” he said. “The view is now a considerable improvement.”

“You're welcome.” Jukes took a breath and made a visible effort to reengage with the person sitting before him. “Was there a piece you particularly liked? I could locate other works in that style.”

“The one with the woman and the cat,” Martinez said. “Though I don't think I've seen any painting quite in that style anywhere.”

Jukes smiled. “It's not precisely typical of the painter's work. That's a very old Northern European piece.”

Martinez looked at him. “And North Europe is where, exactly?”

“Terra, my lord. The painting dates from before the Shaa conquest. Though I should say the
original
painting, because this may be a copy. It's hard to say, because all the documentation is in languages no one speaks anymore, and hardly anyone reads them.”

“It
looks
old enough.”

“It wants cleaning.” Jukes gave a thoughtful pause. “You've got a good eye, my lord. Captain Fletcher bought the painting some years ago, but decided he didn't like it because it didn't seem one thing or another, and he put it in storage.” His mouth gave a little twitch of disapproval. “I don't know why he took it to war with him. It's not as if the painting could be replaced if we got blown up. Maybe he wanted it with him since it was so valuable, I don't know.”

“Valuable?” Martinez asked. “How valuable?”

“I think he paid something like eighty thousand for it.”

Martinez whistled.

“You could probably buy it, my lord, from the captain's estate.”

“Not at those prices, I can't.”

Jukes shrugged. “It would depend on whether you could get a license for cult art anyway.”

Martinez was startled. “Cult art.
That's
cult art?”

“
The Holy Family with a Cat,
by Rembrandt. You wouldn't know it was cultish except for the title.”

Martinez considered the painting through his haze of surprise. The cult art he remembered from his visits to the Museums of Superstition, and the other pieces he'd seen on Fletcher's cabin walls, made its subjects look elevated, or grand or noble or at the very least uncannily serene, but the plain-faced mother, the cat, and the child in red pajamas merely looked comfortably middle-class.

“The cat isn't normally seen with the Holy Family?”

A smile twitched at Jukes's lips. “No. Not the cat.”

“Or the frame? The red curtain?”

“That's the contribution of the artist.”

“The red pajamas?”

Jukes laughed. “No, that's just to echo the red of the curtain.”

“Could the title be in error?”

Jukes shook his head. “Unlikely, my lord, though possible.”

“So what makes it cult art?”

“The Holy Family is a fairly common subject, though usually the Virgin's in a blue robe, and the child is usually naked, and there are usually attendants, with some of them, ah…” He reached for a word. “…floating. This particular treatment is unconventional, but then there were no hard and fast rules for this sort of thing. Narayanguru, for example, is usually portrayed on an ayaca tree, I suppose because the green and red blossoms are so attractive, but Captain Fletcher's Narayanguru is mounted on a real tree, and it's a vel-trip, not an ayaca.”

A very faint chord echoed in Martinez's mind. He sat up, lifting his head.

“…and Da Vinci, of course, in his
Virgin of the Rocks,
did a—”

Martinez raised a hand to cut off Jukes's distracting voice. Jukes fell silent, staring at him.

“An ayaca tree,” Martinez murmured. Jukes wisely did not answer.

Martinez thought furiously, trying to reach into his own head. Mention of the ayaca tree had set off a train of associations, then conclusions, but in an instant, without him having to think through a single step. He now had to consciously and carefully work backward from his conclusions through the long process to make certain that it all held together, and to find out where it had started.

Without speaking, he rose from his desk and walked to his safe. He opened a tunic button and drew out his captain's key on its elastic, inserted the key into his safe and pressed the combination. Seals popped as the door swung open, and Martinez caught a whiff of stale air. He took out the clear plastic box in which Dr. Xi had placed Fletcher's jewelry, opened it and separated the signet ring and the silver mesh ring from the gold pendant on its chain. Holding the chain up to the light, he saw the tree-shaped pendant dangling, emeralds and rubies glittering against the gold.

“An ayaca tree like this?” he asked.

Jukes squinted as he looked at the dangling pendant. “Yes,” he said, “that's typical.”

“Would you say that this pendant is particularly rare or unusually beautiful or stands out in any way?”

Jukes blinked at him, then frowned. “It's very well made and moderately expensive, but there's nothing extraordinary about it.”