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.

“Whatdid 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 fromImperious, 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.”

Husayn’s mouth stretched in a taut, angry grimace beneath his little mustache. “The Fourth Fleet blew itself to bits in a few minutes of close-range fire. All the Naxids’ ships were destroyed, but most of the loyalists were hurt too, and some ships completely wrecked. There were thousands of deaths. Butthe Naxids didn’t shoot at us! They knewIllustrious was helpless.”

Frustration crackled in Husayn’s voice. Martinez could imagine the scene in Command, Fletcher calling for firepower that simply wasn’t there, the weapons officer—Husayn himself—pounding his console in fury. Kosinic racing along the docking tube with a party of desperate crouchbacks and the hand carts that carried the antiproton bottles. The long moments of helpless silence as the battle started and the crew waited for the fire that would rend their ship and kill them, followed by the horrid realization of the insult that the Naxids were flinging in their teeth, that the enemyknew thatIllustrious could be of no assistance to their own side, and disdained so much as to target them.

The feeling of helplessness, Martinez thought, must have been at least as frustrating and terrifying as that of the captain of a ship pinned to a stair by heavy gee while his ship fought for its life without him.

“Captain Fletcher cast off from the ring, my lord,” Husayn continued, “and maneuvered as if to attack. We were hoping to draw their fire away from the others, but the Naxids still refused to respond. We hit them with our lasers, but the lasers really can’t do the sort of damage antimatter can in those conditions, and…” He grimaced again. “Still they wouldn’t attack us. We watched the whole battle from the sidelines. Captain Fletcher was in a perfect rage—I’d never seen him like that, never saw him show emotion before.”

“Where was Squadron Commander Chen?”

“On the planet, my lord. Dinner party.”

Martinez couldn’t imagine Michi being happy about what had happened toIllustrious either.

“We were very glad to finally get a swat at the Naxids at Protipanu, my lord,” Husayn said. “It was good to pay them back.”

“Yes,” Martinez said. “Illustriousdid very well at Protipanu. You all did very well.”

He looked from Husayn to Gulik, who was still standing rigid, the sweat pouring down his face, his eyes staring into some internal horror.

No wonder they hadn’t talked about it, Martinez thought. He’d thoughtIllustrious had won a hard-fought victory alongside the other loyalists of the Fourth Fleet, and assumed the cruiser had just been lucky not to suffer any damage. He hadn’t known thatIllustrious and its crew hadn’t been a part of the fighting at all, except for Kosinic and his little party who had been caught out of their ship.

“Very good,” Martinez said softly. “I think we might institute a series of test firings and inspections to make sure the point-defense weapons won’t fail when we need them.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Carry on then.”

As he left, Martinez felt Gulik’s wide-eyed stare boring into his neck, and wondered what it was that Gulik was really looking at.

His next stop was the sick bay, where he received Dr. Xi’s report on the twenty-two crew with broken bones and the twenty-six more with bad sprains or concussions, all as a result of the unexpected high accelerations. The failure of engine number one had probably saved the ship from more casualties, and very possibly from fatalities.

Xi examined the back of Martinez’s head and prescribed painkillers, and a muscle relaxant before bed. He scanned the wrist and found a minor fracture of the right pisiform carpal. He taped the wrist and gave Martinez a shot of fast-healer hormones, then gave him a med injector with more fast-healers.

“Three times a day till you run out,” he said. “It should be healed in a week or so.”

Martinez toured the sick bay, speaking to each of the injured crouchbacks, then returned to his office to find Jukes waiting, happy to report that the artworks had survived the accelerations without damage. Martinez sent Jukes on his way, then made official his demotion of Francis, added a furious couple of paragraphs to Francis’s efficiency report, and had supper.

He remained awake for the countdown that started engine number one, and made certain that the new turbopump was performing up to specs before calling for Alikhan to bring him his nightly cocoa.

“What are they saying now, Alikhan?” Martinez asked.

Alikhan was looking with great disapproval at Martinez’s shoes, spattered with engine coolant and the muck of the heat exchange room.

“Francis is furious,” he said. “She was planning on retiring after the war, and now she’ll have a much smaller pension.”

Martinez held his cup of cocoa under his nose and inhaled the rich sweet scent. “So she’s gathering sympathy then?” he asked.

Alikhan drew himself up with magisterial dignity and dropped the soiled shoes into their bag. “Fuck her,” he pronounced, “she put the ship in danger. You could have cut her throat, and maybe you should have. As it is, you hit her where she hurts. With Francis it’s always about money.”

“Right,” Martinez said, and concealed a smile. “Thank you, Alikhan.”

He swallowed his muscle relaxant, then slid into bed and sipped his cocoa while he looked at the painting of the woman, child, and cat.

Day by day,Illustrious was becoming his ship, and less something that belonged to Fletcher, or the petty officers, or the Fourth Fleet. Today had been an important step in that process.

Another couple months, he thought pleasantly, and the cruiser would fit him like a glove.

Chenforce made a high-gravity burn around Arkhan-Dohg’s sun and hurled itself for Wormhole 3, its presence marked by the radioactive dust that had been its relay station. No Naxid missiles barred their way.

On the other side of Wormhole 3 was Choiyn, a wealthy world with five billion inhabitants and considerable industry. Four uncompleted medium-sized warships, large frigates or light cruisers, were cast adrift from its ring and destroyed, along with half a dozen merchant ships that had been unable to clear the system in time.

No Naxid attack threatened, but to be safe, Michi vaporized all the wormhole stations anyway, lest they provide tracking data to the enemy.

Martinez was busy with drills, inspections, and minutiae. Rao, Francis’s replacement, produced revised 77-12s that corrected Francis’s elisions, and Martinez’s inspections showed that Rao’s data were not in error.