The Praxis (28 page)

Plans for saving
Corona
eddied through his head, all fog and futility.

Sorensen to Villa to Yamana to Sorensen to Digby, he thought.

And goal.

M
artinez, with most of
Corona's
crew, stood on the station rim outside the airlock and cheered and clapped as Tarafah led
Corona's
team out of the ship. Immaculate in white sweats, with
Corona's
blazon on his chest and his lieutenant captain's shoulder boards pinned on, Tarafah grinned and waved as if he were jogging into a stadium filled with ten thousand fans. Koslowski followed at the head of the players.

“
Corona! Corona!”
the crew chanted. Martinez pounded his big hands together till they were sore.

The team jogged away to the rim train station that would take them to the skyhook terminal, and were followed by the waddling figure of their trainer, Mancini. Lieutenant Garcia, in undress mourning whites, whooped and waved her cap over her head.

“Let's go!” she shouted. “Let's give the Coronas our support!”

Shouting, most of the crew poured after the team, leaving behind the cadets condemned to spend the day aboard, and Dietrich and his partner Hong, both looking depressed at having to play military constable while the rest of the crew was off on a lark.

Served them right for being large and handsome, Martinez thought. Since the airlock guards were the members of
Corona's
crew most often seen by outsiders, Tarafah chose them for their imposing appearance rather than for any skill at policing.

Lieutenant Garcia herself remained behind, cheering and clapping as the crew pounded after their team. Then she turned to Martinez and stepped up to him.

“Take this,” she said in a soft voice, and Martinez felt something warm and metallic pressed into his palm. “Just in case you're right.”

Martinez glanced at his half-opened hand, saw Garcia's second lieutenant's key, and felt his mouth go dry. He shut his fist on the key.

“Koslowski doesn't wear his key while playing,” Garcia murmured. “I don't know where he keeps it. Try his safe.”

Martinez managed a nod. “Thank you,” he said.

Garcia's dark eyes held his. “If they take the Fleet,” she said, “blow everything. The ships, the ring, everything.”

Martinez stared into the dark eyes. His nerves wailed like violin strings tuned to the breaking point. “I understand,” he said.

Garcia gave a quick, nervous nod, then turned and ran after her crew.

Martinez let his breath out slowly as he watched Fleet personnel stream past along the rim. They laughed and shouted, carrying banners and signs, their officers striding with them, happy to let them have fun. It was their first holiday since the period of mourning began, and they were ready for an delirious good time, already drunk on freedom and anticipation.

Martinez watched them go by and wondered what would happen if he just ran out among them and started shouting, “Back to your ships! There's a rising! If you go down to the planet, all is lost!”

He'd be laughed at, if he was lucky. If he was unlucky, he'd be hit on the head by the constables and dragged off to jail.

Blow everything,
he thought again. There were thousands of personnel on the ships and the ring station, and millions of civilians, all to be vaporized or blown to bits—but only if he was right about the Naxid rising. If his fears were justified, everything was
already
lost.

Except maybe
Corona
. Maybe he could save his ship.

He put Garcia's key in his pocket, then turned to face the airlock. Dietrich and Hong stood there, stiff-spined in the presence of officers, along with Warrant Officer First Class Saavedra, a middle-aged, mustachioed man who had double duty as
Corona's
secretary and supply officer, and Cadet Kelly, a lanky, clumsy pinnace pilot in charge of the weapons department in the absence of the drunken master weaponer.

“Kelly. Saavedra. After you.” Martinez made shooing motions with his arms, and the two turned obediently and headed into the airlock. Martinez began to follow, then paused by the two constables. Dietrich and Hong braced as they detected his inspection.

“I want you to understand,” Martinez said, “that no one comes aboard
Corona
without my permission.”

“Yes, Lord Lieutenant,” the two chorused, eyes forward.

“And by that I mean
anyone
,” Martinez continued, speaking with forceful emphasis that he hoped did not sound either fanatic or insane. “If Anticipation of Victory itself comes back from the dead and demands to be let on, you are not to let him aboard without my express permission.”

The two blinked in surprise. “Very good, Lord Lieutenant,” Dietrich said.

Martinez looked from one to the other. His mouth was dry and he hoped his voice wouldn't break. “And furthermore,” he said, “you will use all necessary force to
prevent
anyone from coming aboard who does
not
receive my permission. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Lord Lieutenant,” the two chorused again, though Martinez could see more of their eye whites than he should, a sure indication they thought the third lieutenant was out of his mind.

“There is a special order I wish to give you,” Martinez said. “If I think it necessary for you to retreat from this post through the airlock and into the ship, I will transmit the words ‘Buena Vista.'” He looked at them, then repeated with special emphasis, “
‘Buena…Vista.'
Repeat the words, please.”

“Buena. Vista.” In chorus.

“Buena Vista,” Martinez repeated again. The name of the house on Laredo where he'd been born, the name given by his romantic mother in words that belonged to an antique Terran language no longer spoken and read only by scholars.

He could see, drawn through the ether between the two constables in invisible letters, the conviction that he was insane.

“Very good,” Martinez finished. “I'll send Alikhan out with refreshments every so often. Remember what I said.”

There were four doors between Martinez and the interior of
Corona
, two at the rim airlock, where Dietrich and Hong stood guard, and two on the frigate's bow lock, with the docking tube in between. Martinez moved along this series of barriers and entered his kingdom.

A kingdom with nineteen subjects, most present in obedience to the regulation that required every vessel in commission to carry sufficient crew aboard, even in dock, in case an emergency required that the ship be maneuvered. A dozen of those aboard were intended to work the ship, and the rest consisted of the two constables and a full kitchen staff preparing a huge celebratory meal in anticipation of
Corona's
victory.

Martinez let himself into the ship's small armory with his lieutenant's key, then summoned Alikhan and Maheshwari. While he waited he signed out a sidearm and strapped the weapon on its constable-red belt around his waist. He signed two more out to Alikhan's and Maheshwari, then handed Alikhan's pistol to him as he arrived, along with a red constable's armband and helmet.

“I'm thinking of sending you to the airlock,” he said. “Those boys might need some stiffening.”

“Very good, my lord.” He looked at the armory datapad, then signed for his weapon and pressed his thumb to the weapon's ID scanner.

“And another thing,” Martinez said. “I want you to go to the riggers' locker and get whatever you'll need to drill the first lieutenant's safe.”

Alikhan nodded. “Do you wish that done immediately, my lord?”

“No.” Breaking into the premier's safe in search of his key was, among other things, a capital crime, and if he were discovered, it would be a race between the Criminal Investigation Division and the Legion of Diligence to see who would kill him first. Martinez wasn't quite willing to commit himself to the executioner's garotte just yet.

“Just have the equipment ready in the lord lieutenant's cabin. If we have to burn gees out of here, it'll be easier to have what you need on hand rather than have you try to haul it to Koslowski's cabin under three and a half gravities.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Maheshwari arrived and braced to the salute. He was a small, mahogany-skinned man, with crinkly hair gone gray, a pointed beard, and mustachios dyed a spectacular flavor of red.

Martinez handed him a sidearm. “I hope this won't be necessary,” he said.

“There won't be trouble in
my
division,” Maheshwari said as he signed for the weapon and scanned in his thumbprint. “But I can't speak for some of the other folk on board.”

“In a short while I'm going to call for an engine startup drill. It takes forty minutes or so to ready the engines for a cold start, yes?”

Maheshwari smiled with brilliant white pebble-sized teeth. “It can be done much faster, my lord.”

“Let's not. I want the drill to seem as normal as possible.”

As possible
was the key here. No drill was going to be normal on the Festival of Sport.

“The electrical and data connections are dropped at three minutes forty, if I remember,” Martinez said. “We'll start the drill and then hold at four minutes.”

“Beg pardon, my lord,” Maheshwari reminded, “but water and air connections are dropped at four minutes twenty.”

“Oh. Right. We'll hold at five, then.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Dropping water, air, electrical, and data connections to the ring station would be the station's first warning if
Corona
left its berth unexpectedly. Martinez wanted to delay that warning as long as he could.

At least he was confident that, if necessary, he could leave his berth when he wanted to, whether the engines were ready or not. He knew that 641 years ago a raging fire had broken out in Ring Command on Zanshaa's ring station, subsequently spreading to seven berthed ships, all destroyed along with their crews. The ships could not unberth, or even close their airlock doors, without permission from Ring Command, which by then had been gutted by fire.

Since then, regulations had insisted that a ship under threat could unberth without permission, and had complete control of its airlock doors. Martinez could get
Corona
out of its berth; the only question was whether the other warships would permit her to survive past that point.

Martinez did his best to pretend that he had his imperturbable, omnipotent officer's face on, and ventured to give the master engineer a confident smile. “Good luck, Maheshwari.”

Maheshwari's response was courtly. “The same to you, Lord Lieutenant.”

The engineer braced in salute and returned to Engine Control.

Martinez locked the armory and went to the central belt elevator that would take him to Command, then hesitated, one hand on the wide belt that held his sidearm and stun baton. If he walked into Command wearing this thing, everyone would consider him a lunatic. If the Naxids did nothing, or if what they did had a rational explanation, then the entire crew would know by the end of the day. He'd become a laughingstock.

He stood in the hatch and heard the laughter in his mind, laughter ringing down the years as long as he remained in the service. If he were wrong, he could expect nothing less. Everything Fanaghee and Kulukraf were doing could have an innocent explanation—well, not
innocent
exactly, but at least
rational
. If he had missed that, if the Naxids were doing anything but rising, he would never hear the end of it. The story would become one of those Fleet legends that would follow a person for his entire career, like the story of Squadron Commander Rafi ordering the cadets to bind and beat him.

The endless belt of the central elevator rustled past. Suddenly he wanted very much to return to the weapons locker, check in his pistol, and go to the wardroom to watch the game on video and cheer on
Corona's
team.

The hell with it, he thought. He was
already
a laughingstock to most of the crew.

He put a foot on the next descending rung, took a hand-hold onto the rung above, and stepped into the central trunk corridor. He stepped off two decks below, and immediately saw Zhou, the brawler he'd released from arrest two days before, polishing the silverware in the officers' mess, across the corridor from Command.

Wonderful, Martinez thought. He had Zhou, Ahmet, and Knadjian in his crew, as well as every other miscreant that the captain had condemned to labor instead of the games.

Zhou, polishing away, gave Martinez a dubious look from his blackened eyes, which widened when he saw the pistol belt. Martinez gave a curt nod and walked into Command.

“I am in Command,” he announced.

“The officer of the watch is in Command,” Cadet Vonderheydte agreed, speaking from his position at the comm board. The scent of coffee, wafting from the cup he'd propped near one hand, whispered invitingly in the room.

Martinez stepped into the locked captain's cage. “Status?” he asked.

Vonderheydte, whose cage was directly behind the captain's, saw the pistol belt, and his eyes widened. “Um, ship systems are normal,” he said. “And—oh yes! The dishwasher in the enlisted galley blew a circuit breaker, and it's being looked into.”

“Thank you, Vonderheydte.” He turned his back on the cadet and sat in the captain's chair. Cushions sighed beneath his weight, and he adjusted the pistol to a more comfortable position, then reached over his head and drew down the captain's displays until they locked in front of him.

He set one display to the security camera. Crewmen were still streaming past the airlock toward the rim rail stop. Nothing untoward was visible, but then, he didn't expect anything for a few hours yet, not until the crews had descended to the planet's surface and all the remainder were distracted by the sports.

He settled back in his chair. “We'll be having an engine drill presently,” he said, and then listened to the profound, astonished silence that followed his words.