“I didn’t pick the quarrel with Randall, ma’am,” Sikander replied, unable to keep the anger from his voice. “He has goaded me since the moment I set foot on board. And any officer would have been justified in seeking satisfaction for the way he treated my date at the Governor’s Ball.”
“I don’t care, Mr. North. Am I clear?”
Sikander scowled, but nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Good,” Captain Markham said. “The next time you feel the need to make a fellow officer eat their words, remember that it’s your good fortune that Hiram Randall doesn’t feel like pressing charges against you. Perhaps you don’t understand him as well as you think. And if you ever injure one of my officers again—‘accident’ or not—you will be off this ship so quickly your head will spin. Dismissed.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Sikander stood and saluted, then marched out of the room.
As far as reprimands went, it was not as bad as it could have been. He probably deserved worse. But even so, it left him fuming. He couldn’t afford to draw the captain’s ire, and if Lieutenant Commander Chatburn had it in for him, too, then Sikander’s life could become complicated and unpleasant. A hostile executive officer could make any junior officer’s life a living hell even without looking for a reason to bring him up on charges. The XO has one friend on this ship, and that’s Hiram Randall, Sikander told himself. Nice going, Sikay.
It didn’t take long for Peter Chatburn to make his displeasure known. The next morning, after the officers’ muster, Sikander detoured through the wardroom to brace himself for the day with some strong coffee. He had just poured himself a mug when Chatburn stepped through the hatch, and joined him by the wardroom’s coffee service.
“Mr. Chatburn,” Sikander said. “Good morning.”
“Mr. North,” the XO replied with a nod. He loomed over Sikander without even meaning to as he poured his coffee. Chatburn stood a good twenty centimeters over Sikander’s own 175, and unlike many Aquilans he was broad-shouldered and strongly built. Sikander remembered hearing that he’d been a standout rugby player during his Academy days. Chatburn was also Hector’s only other title-bearing officer, heir to a large estate on High Albion, the capital world of the Commonwealth. Not all Commonwealth worlds possessed a peerage system, but enough did that family connections often mattered a great deal in the Navy’s higher ranks; Hector’s executive officer would likely go far in the service.
Sikander waited for Chatburn to bring up the fight, but the XO surprised him. “Any new insight about our missing torpedo yet?” he asked as he stirred his coffee.
Sikander quickly changed gear, bringing the details of the investigation to mind. He’d had the Torpedo Division working on little else for weeks now. “Nothing much, sir. I watched the torpedo mates take Tube Two apart and put it back together again for hours last week. We are confident it is not the launcher, but other than that…”
“A problem with the tube was a long shot at best. Those things have been in service for twenty years—there’s nothing the torpedo mates don’t know about them.” Chatburn took a long sip from his mug. “Did you confirm the maintenance records and update installations?”
“Yes, sir. As far as we can tell, the scheduled maintenance and software updates were all performed. If the fault wasn’t in the launcher and the torpedo was properly maintained, the only other possibility I can see is that Ms. Larkin’s customization of the torpedo console settings caused some sort of software fault. Maybe she used a bad macro without knowing it.”
“I doubt Larkin’s user preferences would have caused a major fault. She’s too sharp for that.”
“So I hear, but we might as well eliminate what possibilities we can, sir.” Sikander shook his head. “Unfortunately, without the torpedo we may never know what exactly failed.”
“That’s not going to be good enough,” Chatburn said. “Captain Markham expects something better than ‘We don’t know.’ For that matter, so do I. It’s not the way we do things on Hector, Mr. North.”
“Yes, sir,” Sikander replied with a grimace. He didn’t appreciate being talked to as if he were a brand-new ensign, but he couldn’t really say anything else.
“If I was missing a torpedo, I’m not sure I would spend my evenings socializing ashore. Perhaps a few hours reviewing Ms. Larkin’s code would have been a better use of your leisure time than picking fights with other officers. Especially if you think that might be the reason we lost a multimillion-credit torpedo on the range.”
“Yes, sir.” Sikander just barely managed to answer without snarling, and swallowed the next few words that came to his lips. By tradition, a ship’s executive officer served as the whip cracker and disciplinarian in the command structure. It was Chatburn’s job to get results, not to win friends. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder whether Chatburn would have criticized an Aquilan about the level of effort devoted to the problem. He set down his mug, and nodded to the XO. “With your permission, I will return to my investigations. There is one more thing I can try.”
“Carry on, Mr. North,” Chatburn replied. He returned his attention to his own coffee.
Sikander left the wardroom, careful not to slam the door behind him. If the problem really did turn out to be an error in routine maintenance or a failed installation of new software, it almost certainly had occurred before he had even reported to Hector. It was hardly fair to hold it against him, but sometimes things weren’t fair. He didn’t know what more he could do about the damned torpedo than was already being done … but as he stormed toward the Gunnery Department’s compartments, several decks below the wardroom, an idea began to take shape.
In the department office he found Sublieutenant Larkin studying a screen full of code—one of the recent software updates, or so he guessed. A junior deckhand named O’Neal, who served as the Gunnery Department yeoman, worked alongside her, pulling maintenance records from the ship’s info assistant. O’Neal started to rise, but Sikander waved a hand. “As you were,” he told the enlisted man.
Larkin was fixed on the information in front of her. “Software update?” he asked her.
She nodded without looking up. “From three months back. The control code for the torpedo’s drive received a minor upgrade. I’m looking to see what changed.”
“Have you found any significant differences?”
“Not really, and I suspect this is a dead end anyway. Both our practice torpedoes received the same update. If the code was bad enough to make one fail, they both should’ve failed.”
Sikander nodded; that was probably true enough. In fact, it suggested that perhaps they should focus their efforts on things that had happened to one torpedo but not the other. “I think we need to look at the technicians who performed the regular maintenance on the torpedoes,” he told her. “The records show that the torpedoes received the same maintenance on the same dates, but we don’t know that the torpedo mate actually performed each procedure exactly the same way.”
Larkin gave him a sharp look. “You think the torpedo maintenance was gundecked?”
That was precisely what Sikander suspected, but he didn’t want to throw around a serious accusation lightly. As long as sailors had served in ships, they’d been tempted to skip out on jobs no one was likely to check, and fill out the paperwork saying the work had been done. Why they called it gundecking, Sikander had no idea, but it was a very serious matter and could get a torpedo mate in a great deal of trouble.