Conventions of War (35 page)

“My lord,” said Signaler Roh, “
Judge Arslan
queries our status.”

“Tell them we experienced a premature engine shutdown,” Martinez said. “Tell them we expect no long-term problem.”

“Yes, Lord Captain. Ah…Squadcom Chen wants to speak with you.”

“Put her on my board.”

“Yes, Lord Captain.”

Martinez hadn't strapped on the close-fitting cap that held his earphones, virtual array, and medical sensors, so Michi's voice came out of the speaker on his display, and was audible to everyone in command.

“Captain Martinez,” she said, “what the
hell
just happened?”

Martinez reported in as few words as possible. Michi listened with an intent, inward look on her face. “Very well,” she said. “I'll order the rest of the squadron to take defensive positions around us until we're maneuverable again.”

Martinez nodded. “May I recommend that you order more decoy launches?”

“Lieutenant Prasad's already taken care of that.” Michi's head tilted as she looked into her display. “Captain,” she said, “you look like you got run over by a herd of bison.”

“Acceleration threw me down a companion.”

“Are you all right? Shall I page Dr. Xi to Command?”

“I'm sure he's busy enough where he is.”

She nodded. “Find out who painted us with that laser,” she said, “and blow him the fuck up.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“And take out the wormhole stations as well. I'm not having them spotting for the enemy.”

It's uncivilized,
Michi had said when she'd first raised the possibility of destroying wormhole stations. She'd occasionally done it in the past, when it was necessary to preserve secrecy concerning Chenforce's movements, but for the most part she'd left them alone.

The moment defining,
Martinez thought. Nothing like being shot at to rub away these refined little scruples.

The orange end-stamp came onto the display, signaling that Michi had broken the collection.

“Sensors,” Martinez said, “are we still being hit by that laser?”

“No, my lord,” Pan said. “They switched off as soon as the last missiles were destroyed—and because their information is limited by the speed of light, they don't
know
what happened here yet. So they must have had advanced warning concerning exactly when to light us up and when to stop.”

“Did you get a bearing?”

“It would help if I could communicate with the other ships and triangulate.”

“Do so.” Martinez turned to Husayn. “Weapons, target Wormhole Stations One, Two, and Three. Take them all out, one missile each. Don't wait for my command, just do it.”

“Yes, Lord Captain.”

Martinez let himself float for a moment in his harness and considered the order he'd just given. It
was
uncivilized. The wormhole stations not only maintained communication between the worlds, they acted to stabilize the wormholes by balancing the mass moved through them in either direction. Commerce would be slowed to a crawl through wormholes that were in danger of becoming unbalanced.

Arkhan-Dohg had just effectively been blockaded. It was a blockade that would continue until new stations were both built and equipped with the massive asteroid-sized chunks of matter they used to keep the wormholes in balance. The war might be over for ages before Arkhan-Dohg saw another merchant vessel.

“One minute to engine ignition, my lord,” Mersenne said.

“Hold at ten seconds.” Martinez hesitated, then said, “We can proceed on two engines without trouble?”

Mersenne's tone was confident. “Yes, my lord.”

“Missiles launched and proceeding on chemical rockets,” Husayn said. “Tubes clear.”

“Roh, put me through to the squadcom.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Ida Li's face appeared on Martinez's display. “You have a message for Lady Michi?”

“Just that we'll have two engines online in less than a minute. Does the lady squadcom have a heading for us?”

“Stand by.”

The screen blanked, and when an image returned it was that of Chandra Prasad. “I'm sending course coordinates to your pilot's station now. Acceleration one-tenth of a gravity, until we're sure the engines don't cut out again.”

“Understood. Mersenne, sound the warning for acceleration.”

There were a few moments of genuine suspense waiting for the engine countdown to conclude, and then a distant rumble and a slight kick that sent the acceleration cages slowly tumbling until they settled at their deadpoints. Computers balanced the angle of thrust of the two engines to compensate for the loss of the third. Acceleration was gradually increased until one constant gravity was maintained.

“Engines performance normative,” Mersenne said.

“Very good.”

“My lord.” It was Pan. “We've tracked the origin of that targeting laser. It was Arkhan Station Three.”

Arkhan, with its relatively small population, didn't rate a full accelerator ring around the planet, but instead had three geosynchronous stations tethered to the planet's equator by elevator cables. Station 1 had a modest-sized accelerator ring grappled to it, like a gold band attached to a diamond.

“Husayn,” Martinez said, “one missile to target Station Three, please.”

As the missile was launched, he supposed the Naxids had no right to be surprised. Chenforce had made it clear that anything that fired on it would be destroyed, be it ship, station, or ring.

At least it wasn't Bai-do. At least he wouldn't be dropping an entire ring, with its billions of tons of mass, into the atmosphere of an inhabited world.

He hoped the Naxids had evacuated the station's thousands of civilians before putting them in a cross fire, but he suspected they hadn't. The Naxids, so far as he could tell, never had a Plan B—if Plan A didn't work, they just tried Plan A all over again, only with greater sincerity.

“My lord,” said Roh. “I have a message from Rigger Jukes.”

“Yes?” Martinez couldn't imagine what the artist wanted.

“He asks permission to enter your quarters and inspect the paintings for damage.”

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.

As soon as the ship secured from general quarters, he was going straight to the engine compartment and find out just what had happened.

 

“Y
arning the logs.” Martinez spoke in a cold fury. “You yarned the logs to hide the 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's 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's shoes and cuffs were wet with the stuff. The finely machined turbine that was the heart of the pump had disintegrated, sending 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 proved 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's eyes flashed at the news of her demotion, and Martinez saw the firming of her jowls as her jaw 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 Rao.” 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 postmortem 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 the captain had 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 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. They 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.”

As the antiprotons piggybacked on an electron beam, which kept the antiprotons contained until they hit the target, 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 the moment 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 out again to get bottles from
Imperious,
which was berthed next to us, but that's when the shooting started. That's when the station airlock was hit and Kosinic was wounded.”