Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Martinez ended the experiment pleased with himself and with his ship. The pleased feeling lasted until he returned to his office, where Marsden presented him with a vast number of documents, all requiring his attention, or his judgment, or at the very least his signature.

  He ate his dinner at his desk while he worked his way through the documents, and sent Marsden to his own meal.

  Chandra Prasad arrived half a minute after his dinner, as if she were waiting for him to be alone. He looked up at her knock, lowered his stylus to the desk and told her to come in. As she approached, he wondered in a curiously offhand way whether she’d come to murder him, but decided against it. The sunny smile on her face would have been too incongruous.

  “Lieutenant?” he said, raising his eyebrows.

  “The lady squadcom just told me that I was the new tactical officer,” Chandra said. “I guessed you had something to do with that, so I thought I’d come by and thank you.”

  “I mentioned your name,” Martinez said. “But last I heard it was a temporary appointment. I think she’s going to try a series of people.”

  “But I’ll be first,” Chandra said. “If I impress her, she won’t need the others.”

  Martinez smiled encouragingly. “Good luck.”

  “I’ll need more than luck.” Chandra bit her lower lip. “Can you give me a hint about how best to impress the squadcom?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Martinez said. “I don’t think I’ve managed it lately.”

  She looked at him with narrowed eyes, as if trying to decide whether to get angry.

  He picked up his stylus and said, “Come to dinner tomorrow. We’ll discuss your ambitions then.”

  Calculation entered her long eyes. “Very good, Captain.”

  She braced, and he sent her away and went back to reviewing his paperwork, and nibbling on his dinner in between paragraphs. He had no sooner finished both papers and the meal when Kazakov arrived with a new series of documents that, as executive officer, she was passing to him for review.

  It was mid-afternoon before he finished all that, and went into the personnel files to acquaint himself with the petty officers he would be having to supper. They were as Kazakov had said: long-serving professionals, with high scores on their masters’ exams and good efficiency reports from past superiors. All received high marks from Fletcher—including Thuc, the man he’d executed.

  Martinez then checked the documentary evidence that should have corroborated Fletcher’s good opinions, and almost immediately found something that appalled him.

  His supper, he thought darkly, would be more than social.

  He opened the supper with the traditional toast to the Praxis, then gave a preamble to the effect that he was counting on his guests to maintain continuity in a ship that had just suffered a series of shocks, and he knew from their records and their efficiency reports that they were all more than capable of giving all that was required.

  He looked from one of the eight department heads to the next—from round-faced Gawbyan to rat-faced Gulik, from Master Rigger Francis with her brawny arms and formidable jowls to Cho, Thuc’s gangly replacement—and he saw pleased satisfaction in their faces.

  The satisfaction stayed there for the entire supper, as Perry brought in each course and as Martinez questioned each of his guests about the state of their department. From Master Data Specialist Amelia Zhang he learned the condition and the capacities of the ship’s computers. From Master Rigger Francis he received myriad details, from the stowage of the holds to the state of the air scrubbers. From Master Signaler Nyamugali he had an informative discussion on the new military ciphers introduced since the beginning of the war, a critical task since both sides had started with the same ciphers and the same coding programs.

  It was a pleasurable, instructive meal, and the satisfaction on the faces of the department heads had only increased by the time Perry brought in the coffee.

  “In the last days I’ve come to see how well-managed a ship we have in Illustrious,” Martinez said as the scent of the coffee wafted to his nostrils. “And I had no doubt that much of that excellent management was due to the quality of the senior petty officers here on the ship.”

  He took a slow, deliberate sip of coffee, then put his cup down in the saucer. “That’s what I thought, anyway,” he added, “at least until I saw the state of the 77-12s.”

  The satisfaction on the petty officers’ faces took a long, astounded moment to fade.

  “Well, my lord…” Gawbyan began.

  “Well,” said Gulik.

  “The 77-12s aren’t even remotely current,” Martinez said. “I don’t see a single department that can give me the information I need in order to know the status of my ship.”

  The department heads looked across the long table at one another. Martinez read chagrin, exasperation, embarrassment.

  And well they should be mortified, he thought.

  The 77-12s were maintenance logs supposed to be kept by every department. The petty officers and their crews were supposed to make note of all routine maintenance, cleaning, replacing, lubricating, checking the status of filters, seals, fluids, the airtight gaskets in the bulkheads and airlocks, and the stocks of replacement parts. Every item on Illustrious was designed to a certain tolerance—overdesigned, some would have thought—and each was supposed to be replaced or maintained well before that tolerance was ever reached. Every part inspection, every replacement, every routine maintenance, was supposed to be recorded in a department’s 77-12.

  Keeping the records current was an enormous inconvenience for those responsible, and they all hated it and tried to avoid the duty whenever possible. But the 77-12s, properly maintained, were the most effective way for a superior to know the condition of his ship, and to a newly appointed captain, they were a necessity. If a piece of equipment failed, the 77-12 could tell the captain whether the failure had been due to inadequate maintenance, human error, or some other cause. Without the record, the cause of a failure would be anyone’s guess, and finding out the correct reason would take time and could distract an entire department.

  In wartime, Martinez felt that Illustrious couldn’t afford the time and distraction of tracking the cause of any failure of a critical piece of equipment, not when lives were potentially in the balance. And he simply detested not knowing the condition of his command.

  “Well, my lord…” Gulik began again. There was a nervous look in his sad eyes, and Martinez remembered the sweat on his upper lip as he stood at the end of the line of weaponers, all passing under Fletcher’s gaze. “Well, it all has to do with the way Captain Fletcher ran the ship.”

  “It’s all the inspections, my lord,” said Master Rigger Francis. She was a brawny woman, with broken veins in her cheeks and hair that had once been red. “You saw how thoroughly Captain Fletcher conducted an inspection. He’d pick a piece of equipment and ask about its maintenance, and we’d have to know the answers. We wouldn’t have a chance to look it up in the records, we’d have to know it.”

  Master Cook Yau leaned his thin arms on the table and peered around Francis’s broad body. “We don’t have to write the information down, my lord, because we had it all in our heads.”

  “I understand.” Martinez gave a grave nod. “If you have it all in your heads,” he added, “then it should be no trouble to put it all in the 77-12s. You should be able to give me a complete report in, say—two days?”

  Martinez found himself delighted by the bleak and downcast looks the department heads gave one another. Yes, he thought, yes, it’s absolutely time you found out I was a bastard.

  “So what’s today, then?” he asked cheerfully. “The nineteenth? Have the 77-12s to me by the morning of the twenty-second.”

  He’d have to continue the inspections, he thought, because he’d have to check everything against the 77-12s to make sure the forms weren’t pure fiction. “Yarning the logs,” as it was called, was another time-honored custom of the service.
/>   One way or another, Martinez swore he would learn Illustrious and its workings, human and machine both.

  He let them drink their coffee in the sudden somber silence, bade them farewell, and went to his sleeping cabin intending to sleep the sleep of the just.

  “How did I do, Alikhan?” he asked in the morning, as his orderly brought in his full dress uniform.

  “The petty officers who aren’t cursing your name are frightened,” Alikhan reported. “Some were up half the night working on their 77-12s, and kept recruits running from one compartment to the next confirming what they thought they remembered.”

  Martinez grinned. “Do they still think I’ll do?” he asked.

  Alikhan looked at him with a tight little smile beneath his curling mustachios. “I think you’ll do, my lord,” he said.

  As Martinez was eating breakfast, he received a written invitation from the warrant officer’s mess for dinner. He read the invitation and smiled. The warrant officers had learned something from the petty officers. They weren’t going to wait for their invitation to dine with him and find out all the things he thought were wrong with them, they were going to bring him onto their home ground and then take it on the chin if they had to.

  Good for them.

  He accepted with pleasure, then sent a message to Chandra saying he would have to postpone their dinner for a day. He knew the message would not make her happy. He followed this with a message that none of the lieutenants would find to their liking: his request that all up-to-date 77-12s be filed in two days.

  He then called for Marsden and the fifth lieutenant, whose title was Lord Phillips and whose personal name was Palermo.

  Sub-Lieutenant Palermo, Lord Phillips was a tiny man whose head didn’t even reach Martinez’s shoulder. His arms and legs were thin, his body slender, almost frail. His small hands were beautifully proportioned and his face was pale, darkened slightly by a feeble mustache. His voice was a quiet murmur.

  Phillips commanded the division that embraced the ship’s electronics, from the power cables and generators to the computers that navigated the ship and controlled its engines, so Martinez started by inspecting the workshop of Master Data Specialist Zhang. The shadowy little room with its glowing screens was kept in immaculate order. Martinez asked Zhang if she had made any progress at her 77-12, and she showed him the work she’d managed since the previous evening. He checked two items randomly and found that they’d been logged correctly.

  “Excellent work, Zhang,” he said, and marched with his party to the domain of Master Electrician Strode.

  Strode was a little below average height but broad-shouldered and heavily muscled, with symbols of his sexual prowess tattooed on his biceps. His hair was brown and cut in a bowl haircut, with his nape shaved and pale hairless patches around the ears. His mustachios were impressive but not nearly as sensational as Gawbyan’s. Martinez expected to find his department in spotless condition, since Strode would have had warning that the captain was on the prowl since he’d arrived in Zhang’s domain. He wasn’t disappointed.

  “Have you made any progress with your 77-12?” Martinez asked.

  “I have, my lord.”

  Strode called up the log on one of his displays. Martinez copied it to his sleeve display and asked Strode to accompany him on a brief tour to a lower deck. He paused by one of the deck access panels, marked by a trompe l’oeil niche on the wall, with Jukes’s painting of a graceful one-handled vase. Martinez looked again at the annotation in the 77-12.

  “According to your log,” Martinez said, “you’ve replaced the transformer under Main Access 8-14. Open the access, please.”

  Not looking the least bit pleased, Strode tapped codes into the access locks and the floor panel rose on its pneumatics. An electric hum shivered up through the deck. The scent of grease and ozone rose from the utility compartment, and lights came on automatically.

  Martinez turned to Lord Phillips. “My lord,” he said, “would you be so kind as to go into the compartment and read me the serial number on the transformer.”

  Without offering a word, Phillips slid through the deck access. Crouched in the narrow space, he found the serial number and read it off.

  The number wasn’t the same as in Strode’s 77-12.

  “Thank you, Lord Lieutenant,” Martinez said, staring hard into Strode’s fixed, angry face. “You can come up now.”

  Phillips rose and brushed grime off his dress trousers.

  “Close the access, please,” Martinez said.

  Strode did so.

  “Strode,” Martinez said, “you are reprimanded for yarning your log. I will check the 77-12s, and from this point forward I will check yours in particular.”

  Sullen anger still burned in Strode’s eyes. “My lord,” he said, “the serial number was…provisional. I hadn’t had the chance to check the correct number.”

  “See that your logs are less provisional in the future,” Martinez said. “I’d rather have no information at all than information that’s misleading. You are dismissed.”

  He walked off while Marsden was still noting the reprimand on his datapad. Phillips followed.

  “You’ll have to check those logs yourself, Lieutenant,” Martinez told him. “Those forms are going to be full of yarns otherwise.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Phillips murmured.

  “Come to my office for coffee,” Martinez said.

  The coffee break was not a success. Martinez knew that Phillips was one of Fletcher’s protégés, that the Phillips clan were clients to the Gombergs, and that Phillips, like Fletcher, had been born on Sandama, though like the captain, he’d spent most of his life on Zanshaa. Martinez hoped to discuss Fletcher, but Phillips’s responses were barely audible, and so terse and monosyllabic that Martinez gave up the task as hopeless and sent Phillips about his business.

  He would have to be satisfied with sending a pair of signals, the first to the petty officers, that he was serious about the 77-12s, the second to the lieutenants, that they had better supervise the department heads very closely.

  Dinner with the warrant officers was much more cheerful, and the table was well provided, thanks to Warrant Officer/First Toutou, who headed the commissary. The warrant officers were specialists, pilots or navigators, supply officers or sensor technicians, or the commissary, and didn’t run large departments like the senior petty officers. Their own 77-12s would be much easier to complete.

  Some didn’t have to fill 77-12s at all, as was attested by Toutou’s broad smile and laughing demeanor.

  The mess orderly was pouring little glasses of a sweet trellinberry liqueur at the end of the meal when Martinez’s sleeve display gave a chime. He answered.

  “Captain, I need you in my office.” Michi’s voice told him that she would brook no delay.

  “Right away, my lady,” Martinez said. He rose from his chair, and before he could stop them, the others rose too.

  “Be seated,” he told them. “And many thanks for your hospitality. I’ll return it someday.”

  Dr. Xi waited with Michi in her office. Martinez looked for Garcia and didn’t find him.

  “Tell him,” Michi said, without bothering to tell Martinez to relax his salute.

  Xi turned his mild eyes to Martinez. “When I was looking through my references for methods of lifting fingerprints, it mentioned that prints left on skin can fluoresce under laser light. So I asked Machinist Strode to provide a suitable laser, and he had one of his minions assemble one for me.”

  Martinez, still braced with his chin lifted, looked at Xi from the corner of his eye. “You found fingerprints on the captain?” he asked.

  Michi looked up, and an expression of annoyance crossed her face. “For all’s sake, Martinez,” she said, “relax and have a seat, will you?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  Xi politely waited for Martinez to take a chair, then continued as if there had been no interruption. “There were fingerprints on the captain, yes. Mine, and Gar
cia’s, and those of my orderlies. No others that I could find.”

  Martinez had no reply to this.

  “I then got Lieutenant Kosinic’s body out of the cooler, and I put a sensor net over his head and got a three-dimensional map of his injuries. He died from a single blow to the head, perfectly consistent with losing his balance, falling, and hitting his head on the rim of the hatch.”

  One fewer murder, anyway, Martinez thought.

  “When I looked for fingerprints with the laser,” Xi continued, “I found my own and my assistants’. And I also found one large thumbprint on the underside of the jaw on the right side.” He pressed his own thumb to the point. “Right where a thumb might rest if a person were grabbing Kosinic’s head and slamming it into the hatch rim.”

  He gave a little grin. “It was quite a job to read that print properly,” he said. “I couldn’t use a normal print reader, and so I had to take several close-up photographs while the print was fluorescing, and then convert the format to—”

  “Skip that part,” Michi instructed.

  Xi seemed disappointed that he was not getting the chance to fully reveal the scope of his cleverness. He licked his lips and went on.

  “The thumbprint was that of Master Engineer Thuc,” he said.

  Martinez realized his mouth was open, and he closed it. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  Thuc was enormous and covered with muscle, and certainly strong enough to smash Kosinic’s head on the first try. He looked at Michi.

  “So Thuc killed Kosinic,” he said. “And Fletcher found out about it somehow and executed Thuc.”

  She nodded. “That seems likely.”

  “He said he killed Thuc for the honor of the ship,” Martinez said. “He was very sensitive on points of rank and dignity, and maybe he thought it would be an affront to his own pride to order a formal inquiry to reveal the fact that one of his enlisted personnel killed an officer, and so he decided to handle it himself.”