Martinez glanced up at the sound of purposeful footsteps, and looked up to see Captain Lord Gomberg Fletcher standing in the door of his office. Fletcher wore his full dress uniform, with white gloves and the ceremonial sickle-shaped knife at his waist.
Martinez jumped to his feet and braced. “Lord Captain!” he said.
Fletcher looked at him from his deep-set eyes. “I’d be obliged if you’d join me, Captain Martinez.”
“Certainly, my lord.” Martinez began to walk around the desk, then hesitated. “Should I change into full dress, my lord?”
“That won’t be necessary, Lord Captain. Come along, if you please.”
Martinez left his office and joined the captain, who was accompanied also by Lord Sabir Mersenne, the fourth lieutenant, and Marsden, the captain’s short, bald secretary, both also in full dress. Without another word, Fletcher turned and began walking down the corridor, the others following. Martinez wondered if he should have worn full dress when eating breakfast by himself, or at least should be embarrassed that he hadn’t.
Fletcher’s silver-embossed scabbard clanked faintly on the end of its chain. Martinez had never seen the captain wear his knife, not even at his very formal dinners.
The party went down two decks, leaving behind officers’ country and the haunts of the enlisted. The captain marched to a hatch and knocked with a gloved hand.
The hatch was opened by Master Engineer Thuc, whose towering figure nearly filled the doorway before he stepped back to reveal the engine control room. Beneath panels showing strong-thewed characters working with huge levers and winches on some impossibly antique machinery, the control room crew were lined up, braced, and spotlessly turned out.
Apparently Captain Fletcher was conducting him on one of his frequent inspections. The captain was a demon for inspections and musters, and usually inspected some part of the ship every day thatIllustrious wasn’t engaged in some other crucial business. Today was the engine division’s turn, but Martinez could not imagine why he had been invited along. He wasn’t a line officer, but staff, and not in Fletcher’s chain of command—the state ofIllustrious ‘s engines was none of his business.
So while he watched Fletcher and his two subordinates crawl over the engine control room, passing white-gloved fingers over the glossy surfaces, Martinez wondered why he had been summoned to observe this ritual, and paranoia soon began to scuttle through his mind on chitinous insect legs. Surely this had to do with Chandra Prasad. Surely Fletcher suspected him of being her lover, and the inspection was part of an elaborate revenge plot.
The captain found flaws—a suspicious creak in an acceleration cage that indicated a worn part, a scratch on the transparent cover of a gauge, an emergency radiation suit carelessly stowed—and then the party went on to look at the engine department’s storage lockers, at the heavily shielded antihydrogen compartments, and—after donning ear protection—at the massive reactor that powered the ship and the huge turbopumps that operated the thermal exchange system.
Martinez knew that in the reactor room the noise was hellish, but his earphones automatically pulsed out sound waves that canceled that of the pumps, and all he heard in his ears was a distant white noise. But hisbody reacted to the sound: he could feel the vibration in his bones and in his soft organs, and when he touched a wall or pipe.
Fletcher stroked the pumps with white-gloved fingers, found them clean, and then returned to the engine control room so that his questions might be heard. Thuc followed the captain in docile silence, his muscular body looming over Fletcher’s shoulder except when he darted forward to open a hatch or a locker door.
“You’ve changed the filters on the main pump recently?”
“Just after Protipanu, my lord,” Thuc said. “We aren’t due for another change for two months.”
“Very good. And the pump itself?”
“We’ll swap it out in another…” Thuc considered his answer, his eyes focused somewhere above the captain’s left shoulder. “…thirty-eight days, my lord.”
“Very well.” The captain tugged his white gloves over his wrists and smoothed the fine kidskin over his fingers. “I’ll just inspect your crew then.”
He marched down the line of engine crew, stopping to make an occasional comment about dress or deportment. At the end of the line he encountered Thuc again, marched about him, then nodded.
“Very good, Thuc,” he said. “Excellent marks, as always.”
“Thank you, Lord Captain.” A hint of a smile touched his lips.
When Fletcher moved, he was so fast that Martinez failed to see it properly and could only reconstruct the action later, out of fragments of memory. The sickle-shaped blade sang from the sheath, whistled through the air, and buried itself in Thuc’s throat. A crescent of arterial blood splattered the mural behind Thuc’s head.
Thuc was too large a man to fall all at once. First his shoulders dropped, and then his knees gave way. His barrel chest sank, his stomach sagged, and then—as Fletcher’s knife cleared his throat—Thuc’s head lolled down. It was only then that he fell like a tower of wooden blocks kicked by a careless child.
Martinez’s heart began to beat again, roaring in his ears. He looked at Fletcher in shock.
Fletcher looked expressionlessly at the body with his ice-blue eyes, and took a step away from the spreading pool of red. He flicked scarlet from his blade with a movement of his wrist.
The smell of blood hit Martinez’s senses, and he bit down hard on the stomach that was trying to quease its way past his throat.
“Marsden,” Fletcher said, “call the doctor to examine the body, and have him bring a stretcher party to carry it away. Cho,” to a staring petty officer, “you are now in charge of the engineering department. Once the doctor is done, call the off-duty watch to help you police this…untidiness. In the meantime, I’d appreciate a cleaning cloth.”
Cho nearly ran to one of the storage lockers, returned with a cloth, and handed it with bloodless fingers to the captain. Fletcher used it to clean the knife blade and mop some of the red off his tunic, then threw the cloth to the deck.
A pale-faced young recruit swayed, then toppled to the floor in a dead faint. Fletcher ignored him and turned again to Cho.
“Cho,” he said, “I trust you will maintain Engineer Thuc’s high standards.” He nodded to the control room crew, then turned and made his way out.
Martinez followed, his nerves leaping. He wanted to flee Fletcher’s company, to barricade himself in his quarters with a pistol and several bottles of brandy, the first for protection and the second for comfort.
He looked left and right at Marsden and Mersenne, and saw their expressions mirroring his own thoughts.
“Captain Martinez,” Fletcher said. The words made Martinez start.
“Yes, Lord Captain?” He was moderately surprised that he managed three whole words without stumbling, screaming, or falling into dumb silence.
Fletcher reached the companionway that led to the deck above and turned to Martinez.
“Do you know why I invited you along this morning?”
“No, my lord.”
He had managed another three words. He was making real progress. Soon he might be walking on his own and tying his own shoelaces.
Martinez found himself very aware of the captain’s right hand, the hand that would reach across his body to draw the knife. He found his own hands ready to lurch forward and seize Fletcher’s forearm if the hand approached the hilt.
He hoped that Fletcher did not see that he was so aware of his right hand. He tried not to stare at it.
“I asked you along so that you could report to Squadron Commander Chen,” Fletcher said, “and tell her exactly what just occurred.”