Conventions of War def-3

by Walter Jon Williams

  “He was angry all the time,” Chandra said. “It was sad, really. He insisted that what had happened toIllustrious at Harzapid was the result of a treacherous Naxid plot-which of course was true-but he became obsessed with rooting out the plotters. That made no sense at all, because by that point the Naxids at Harzapid were all dead, so what did it matter which of them did what?”

  Martinez sipped his own coffee and considered this. “Illustriouswas the only ship that wasn’t able to participate in the battle,” he said. “Was that what Kosinic was obsessing about?”

  “Yes. He took it personally that his load of antiproton bottles were duds, and of course he was wounded when he went back for more, so that made it even more personal.”

  “The antiproton bottles were stored in a dedicated storage area?”

  “Yes.”

  A ship in dock was usually assigned a secure storage area where supplies, replacement parts, and other items were stockpiled-it was easier to stow them there, where they could be worked with, rather than have the riggers find space for them in the holds, where they wouldn’t be as accessible when needed. Those ships equipped with antiproton weapons generally stored their antiproton bottles there, in a secure locked facility, as antiprotons were trickier to handle than the more stable antihydrogen used for engine and missile fuel. An antiproton bottle was something you didn’t want a clumsy crouchback dropping on his foot.

  “The Naxids had to have gained the codes for both the storage area and the secure antiproton storage,” Chandra said. “I don’t see how we’ll ever find out how they did it, and I don’t see why it matters at this point. But Javier thought itdid matter, and if anyone disagreed with him, he’d just turn red and shout and make a scene.” Sadness softened the long lines of her eyes. “It was hard to watch. He’d been so bright and interesting, but after he was wounded, he turned into a shouter. People didn’t want to be around him. But fortunately, he didn’t like people much either, so he spent most of his time in his quarters or in Auxiliary Control.”

  “He sounds a bit delusional,” Martinez said. “But suppose, when he was digging around, he found a genuine plot? Not to help the Naxids, but something else.”

  Chandra seemed surprised. “But any plot would have to be something Thuc was involved in, because it was Thuc who killed him, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Thuc was anengineer. Javier was a staff officer. Where would they ever overlap?”

  Martinez had no answer.

  Suddenly, Chandra leaned forward in her seat, her eyes brilliant with excitement. “Wait!” she said. “I remember something Mersenne once told me! Mersenne was somewhere on the lower decks, and he saw an access hatch open, with Javier just coming out from the underdeck. He asked Javier what he was doing there, and Javier said that he was running an errand for the squadcom. But I can’t imagine why Lady Michi would ever have someone digging around in the guts of the ship.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be one of her interests,” Martinez murmured. “I wonder if Kosinic left a record of what he was looking for.” He looked at her. “He had a civilian-model datapad I didn’t have the passwords for. I don’t suppose you know his passwords?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.” Her face grew thoughtful. “But he didn’t carry that datapad around with him all the time. He spent hours in Auxiliary Control at his duty station, so if there were records of what he was looking at, it’s probably still in his logs, and you can-”

  His mind, leaping ahead of her, had him chanting her conclusion along with her.

  “-access that with a captain’s key!”

  A quiet excitement began to hum in Martinez’s nerves. He opened his collar and took out his key on its elastic. He inserted the narrow plastic key into the slot on his desk and called up the display. Chandra politely turned away as he entered his password. He called up Javier Kosinic’s account and scanned the long list of files.

  “May I use the wall display?” Chandra asked. “I could help you look.”

  The wall display was called up and the two began a combined search, each examining different files. They worked together in a silence interrupted by Martinez’s call to Alikhan for more coffee.

  Frustration built as Martinez examined file after file, finding only routine paperwork, squadron maneuvers that Kosinic had planned as tactical officer, and a half-finished letter to his father, dated the day before his death but filled only with mundane detail and containing none of the rage and monomania Chandra had described.

  “He’s hiding it from us!” he finally exploded.

  His right hand clenched in a fist. The captain had hid his nature as well, but he’d finally cracked the captain’s secret.

  Kosinic would crack too, he swore.

  “Let me check the daily logs,” Chandra said. “If we look at his activity, we might be able to see some patterns.”

  The logs flashed on the wall screen, the automatic record of every call that Kosinic had ever made on the computer resources of the ship.

  Tens of thousands of them. Martinez’s gaze blurred as he looked at the long columns of data.

  “Look at this,” Chandra said. She moved a cursor to highlight one of Kosinic’s commands. “He saved a piece of data to a file called ‘Rebel Data.’ Do you remember seeing that file?”

  “No,” Martinez said.

  “It’s not very large. It’s supposed to be in his account, in another file called ‘Personal.’” Chandra’s cursor jittered over the display. “Here’s another save to the same file,” she said. “And another.”

  Though he already knew it wasn’t there, Martinez looked again at Kosinic’s personal file and found nothing. “It must have been erased.”

  “Or moved somewhere,” Chandra said. “Let me do a search.”

  The search through the ship’s vast data store took about twelve seconds.

  “If the file was moved,” Chandra concluded, “it was given a new name.”

  Martinez had already called up the log files. “Let’s find the last time anyone gave a command regarding that file.”

  Another five seconds sped by. Martinez stared in shock at the result. “The file was erased.”

  “Who by?” Chandra said. When he didn’t answer, she craned her neck to read his display upside down, then gave a soft cry of surprise.

  “Captain Gomberg Fletcher,” she breathed.

  They stared at one another for a moment.

  “You can’t suppose,” Chandra began, “that Fletcher was somehow part of the Naxid plot, and that Javier found out about it, and Fletcher had him killed?”

  Martinez considered this, then shook his head. “I can’t think of anything the Naxids could offer Fletcher to make him betray his ship.”

  Chandra gave a little laugh. “Maybe they offered to give him a painting he really wanted.”

  Martinez shook his head. “No, I think Kosinic must have discovered the Narayanist cult. Or he discovered something else that got him killed, and Fletcher suppressed the information in order to protect the Narayanists.” He looked at the data glowing in the depths of his desk, and his heart gave a surge as he saw the date.

  “Wait a moment,” he said. “Fletcher erased the file the same day he died.” He looked more carefully at the date. “In fact, he seems to have erased the file around the time he was killed.”

  Chandra surged out of her hair and partway across his desk to confirm this. Her perfume, some kind of deep rosewood flavor with lemony highlights, floated into his senses. Glowing columns of data reflected in her eyes as she scanned for information. “The erase command came from this desk,” she pointed out. “Whoever killed him sat in your chair, with the body leaking on the floor next to him, and cleaned up the evidence.”

  Martinez scanned along the log file. “Fletcher logged in three hours earlier, and never logged out. So he was probably looking at Kosinic’s file when the killer arrived.”

  “Whatother files was he looking at?” Chandra slid off the desk and o
nto her own chair. She gave a series of rapid orders to the wall display. “That night he made entries in a file called ‘Gambling.’”

  Martinez looked at her in surprise. “Did Fletcher gamble?”

  “Not in the time I knew him.”

  “Did Kosinic?”

  “No. He couldn’t afford it.”

  “Lots of people gamble who can’t afford it,” Martinez said.

  “Not Javier. He thought it was a weakness, and he didn’t think he could afford weakness.” She looked at Martinez. “Why else do you think he exposed himself to hard gee when he had broken ribs and a head injury? He couldn’t afford to be wounded, and he did his best to ignore the fact he should have been in the hospital.” She returned her attention to the display. “The gambling file was erased at the same time as Javier’s rebel file.”

  Martinez scanned the files that Fletcher had been accessing in the two days before his death. Reports from the department heads, statistics from the commissary, reports on the status of a damage control robot that had been taken offline due to a hydraulic fault, injury reports, reports on available stores…all the daily minutiae of command.

  Nothing was unusual except those two files, Rebel Data and Gambling. And those had been erased by the killer.

  And erased very thoroughly, as Martinez discovered. Normally a file was erased by simply removing it from the index of files, and unless the hard space had been overwritten with some other data, it was possible to reconstitute it. But the two missing files had been zeroed out, erased by overwriting their hard space with a series of random numbers. There was no way to find what had been in those files.

  “Damn it!” He entertained a brief fantasy of hurling his coffee cup across the room and letting it smash the nose of one of Fletcher’s armored statues. “We got so close.”

  Chandra gave the wall display a bleak stare. “There’s still one chance,” she said. “The system makes automatic backups on a regular basis. The automatic backups go into a temporary file and are erased by the system on a schedule. Thefiles aren’t there any longer, but thetracks might be, if they haven’t been written over in the meantime.”

  “The chances of finding those old files must be-”

  “Notquite astronomical.” She pursed her lips in calculation. “I’d be willing to undertake the search, my duties permitting, but I’m going to need more authority with the system than I’ve got as a member of Chen’s staff.”

  He warmed his coffee while he considered Chandra’s offer. He supposed that, as someone involved with both murder victims, she was still theoretically a suspect. But on the other hand, it was unlikely she’d offer to spend her time going through the ship’s vast datafiles track by track.

  Unless, of course, she was covering up her own crimes.

  Martinez’s thoughts were interrupted by a polite knock on the dining room door. He looked up to see his cook, Perry.

  “I was wondering when you’d be wanting supper, my lord.”

  “Oh.” He forced his mind from one track to the next. “Half an hour or so?”

  “Very good, my lord.” Perry braced and withdrew, closing the door behind him.

  Martinez returned his attention to Chandra and realized, belatedly, that it might have been polite to invite her to supper.

  He also realized he’d made up his mind. He didn’t think Chandra had killed anybody-had never believed it-and in any case he had to agree with Michi that the squadron couldn’t spare her.

  If she wanted to spend her spare hours hunting incriminating tracks in the cruiser’s data banks and erasing them, he didn’t much care.

  “If you’ll give me your key,” he said, “I’ll see if I can give you more access.”

  He awarded her a clearance that would enable her to examine the ship’s hard data storage, then returned her key. She tucked it back into her tunic and gave him a provocative smile.

  “Do you remember,” she said, “when I told you that I’d be the best friend you ever had?”

  Again, Martinez was suddenly aware of her rosewood perfume, of the three tunic buttons that had been undone, and of the fact that he’d been living alone on the ship for far too many months.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve proved it.” She closed the buttons, one by one. “One day the squadcom talked to me about whether you could have killed Fletcher, and I talked her out of the idea.”

  Martinez was speechless.

  “You shouldn’t count too much on the fact that you married Lord Chen’s daughter,” Chandra went on. “The impression I received was that if you died out here, it might solve any number of Lord Chen’s problems. He’d have a marriageable daughter again, for one thing.”

  Martinez considered this, and found it disturbingly plausible. Lord Chen hadn’t wanted to give up his daughter, not even in exchange for the millions the Martinez clan were paying him, and his brother Roland had practically marched Lord Chen to the wedding in a hammerlock. If Martinez could be executed of a crime-and furthermore, a crime against both the Gombergs and the Fletchers-then he couldn’t imagine Lord Chen shedding many tears.

  “Interesting,” he managed to say.

  Chandra rose and leaned over his desk. “But,” she said, “I pointed out to Lady Michi that you’d played an important part in winning our side’s only victories against the Naxids, and that we really couldn’t spare you even if youwere a killer.”

  The phrasing brought a smile to Martinez’s lips. “You might have given me the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “I mightnot have killed Fletcher, after all.”

  “I don’t think Lady Michi was interested in the truth by that point. She just wanted to be able to close the file.” She perched on his desk and brushed its glossy surface with her fingertips. A triumphant light danced in her eyes. “So am I your friend, Gareth?” she asked.

  “You are.” He looked up at her and answered her smile. “And I’m yours, because when Lady Michi was trying to pin the murder on you-with far more reason, I thought-I talked her out of it by using much the same argument.”

  He saw the shock roll through Chandra like a slow tide. Her lips formed several words that she never actually spoke, and then she said, “She’s a ruthless one, isn’t she?”

  “She’s a Chen,” Martinez said.

  Chandra slowly rose to her feet, then braced. “Thank you, my lord,” she said.

  “You’re welcome, Lieutenant.”

  He watched her leave, a little unsteadily, and then paged Mersenne. When the plump lieutenant arrived, Martinez invited him to sit.

  “Some time ago,” Martinez said, “before I joined the squadron, you found Lieutenant Kosinic leaving an access hatch on one of the lower decks. Do you happen to remember which one?”

  Mersenne blinked in utter surprise. “I haven’t thought about that in months,” he said. “Let me think, my lord.”

  Martinez let him think, which Mersenne accomplished while pinching his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger.

  “That would be Deck Eight,” Mersenne said finally. “Access Four, across from the riggers’ stores.”

  “Very good,” Martinez said. “That will be all.”

  As Mersenne, still puzzled, rose to his feet and braced, Martinez added, “I’d be obliged if you mention my interest in this to no one.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Tomorrow, Martinez thought, he would announce an inspection on Deck 8, and there would be plenty of witnesses to anything he might find.

  After breakfast, Martinez staged an inspection in which Access 4 on Deck 8 was opened. The steady rumble of ventilation blowers rose from beneath the deckplates. He descended with Marsden’s datapad, squeezed between the blowers and a coolant pipe wrapped in bright yellow insulation material, and checked the serial numbers on the blowers against the numbers on the 77–12 that had been supplied by Rigger/First Rao.

  The numbers matched.

  Martinez crouched in the confined space and checked the numbers again. A
gain they matched.

  He straightened, his head and shoulders coming above deck level, and looked at Rao, who looked at him with anxious interest.

  “When were these blowers last replaced?”

  “Just before the war started, my lord. They’re not due for replacement for another four months.”

  So these were the same blowers that Kosinic had seen when he’d gone down the same access. If it wasn’t the serial numbers, Martinez thought, what had Kosinic been looking for?

  Martinez ducked down the access again and ran his hands along the pipes, the ductwork, the electric conduit, just in case something had been left here, a mysterious message or an ominous warning. He found nothing but the dust that filled his throat and left him coughing.

  Perhaps Mersenne had been wrong about where he’d seen Kosinic. Martinez had several of the nearby access plates raised, and he descended into each to find again that everything was in order.

  Frustration bubbled in his blood as he complimented Rao on his record-keeping, and it kept bubbling as he marched away.

  Hours later, while he was eating a late supper-a ham sandwich made of leftovers from the meal he’d given Michi-a memory burst on his mind.

  With Francis it’s always about money.

  That had been Alikhan’s comment on the cruiser’s former master rigger, and now, days after they’d been spoken, it came back to Martinez.

  Gambling,he thought.

  He carried his plate from the dining room to his desk, where he called up the display, then used the authority of his captain’s key to access the commissary records and check the files of the commissary bank.

  Actual cash wasn’t handed to the crew during the voyage: accounts were kept electronically in the commissary bank, which was technically, a branch of the Imperial Bank, which issued the money in the first place. Crew would pay electronically for anything purchased from the commissary, and any gambling losses would be handled by direct transfer from one account to another.

  The crew were paid every twenty days. Martinez looked at the account of Rigger Francis and saw that it totaled nearly nine thousand zeniths, enough to buy an estate on nearly any planet in the empire.