Conventions of War

by Walter Jon Williams

  There were more disciplinary problems among the crew now, fights and occasional drunkenness. They also had too little to occupy their time. It would have taken only thirty-odd people to con the ship from one place to another, and another thirty weaponers to manage the fighting. The rest were partly for redundancy’s sake, in the event of casualties, and many of the crew were intended to support the dignity of the officers, acting as their servants; but mainly crew were needed for damage control. In an emergency, hundreds of pairs of well-trained hands might be needed to keep the ship alive. The rest of the time the officers had to invent work for them, cleaning and spit-polishing, playing parts in rituals and ceremonies, and performing and reperforming routine maintenance.

  Everyone, officers and crew alike, were growing tired of it all.

  Still, beneath the weariness, Martinez began to sense an undercurrent of optimism. Chenforce was returning to the Home Fleet, and once there, would move on the enemy at Zanshaa and retake the capital. The crew were anticipating the war coming to its conclusion, and with it, the end of all the monotony.

  Even the danger of a merciless enemy had begun to seem preferable to the endless repetition and routine.

  One night, Martinez sipped his cocoa and looked at the mother and the cat and the infant in his red pajamas. It seemed to him that the Holy Family, whoever they were, had things pretty easy. They had their fire, their beds, their comfortable middle-class clothing, a child that was well-fed and well-clothed, enough food so they could spare some for their cat.

  There was no indication that they had to worry about unknown killers skulking outside their ornate painted frame, or coping with a sudden relativistic barrage of antimatter missiles, or whether reports given them by others had been yarned.

  By the time he finished his cocoa, Martinez began to feel envy for the lives of the people in the painting. They were simple, they were Holy, they were carefree.

  They were everything a captain wasn’t.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Perhaps, Martinez thought, it was the boredom induced by the long days of the ship’s routine that had led him to think about the killings again. After mulling it over for several days, he asked Chandra to come to his office in the middle of one long, dull afternoon.

  “Drink?” he asked as she braced. “By which I mean coffee.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Sit down.” He pushed a cup and saucer across his desk, then poured from the flask that Alikhan habitually left on his desk.

  A rich coffee scent floated into the room. Chandra sat expectant, eyes bright beneath the auburn hair.

  “I wanted to ask you about Kosinic,” Martinez said.

  Chandra, reaching for the coffee, pulled back her hand and blinked in surprise. “May I ask why?”

  “Because it occurred to me that all our thinking about the killings has been exactly wrong. We’ve been looking at Captain Fletcher’s death and trying to reason backward about what might have motivated it. But Kosinic’s death was the first—he was the anomaly. Thuc’s death followed from his, and I think Fletcher’s followed as well. So if we can just work out why Kosinic was murdered, everything else will fall into place.”

  Chandra frowned as she considered this reasoning, then gave him a searching look. “You don’t think it’s all down to Phillips and the cultists?”

  “Do you?”

  She was silent.

  “You knew Kosinic best,” Martinez said. “Tell me about him.”

  She accepted the remark without comment, then reached for the coffee and considered her words while she fiddled with the powdered creamer; Illustrious had long ago run out of fresh dairy. She took a sip, frowned, and took another.

  “Javier was bright,” Chandra said finally, “good-looking, young, and probably a little more ambitious than was sensible for someone in his position. He had two problems: he was a commoner and he had no money. Peers will mingle with commoners if they’ve got enough money to keep up socially; and they’ll tolerate Peers who have no money for the sake of their name. But a commoner with no money is going to be buried in a succession of anonymous desk jobs, and if he gets a command, it’s going to be a barge to nowhere, an assignment that no Peer would touch.”

  She took another sip of her coffee. “But Javier got lucky—Squadron Commander Chen was impressed by a report on systems interopability that happened to cross her desk, and she took him on staff. Javier wasn’t about to let an opportunity like that slide—he knew she could promote him all the way to Captain if he impressed her enough. So he set out to be the perfect bright staff officer for her, and right at that moment war broke out and he was wounded.”

  She sighed. “They shouldn’t have let him out of the hospital. He wasn’t fit. But he knew that as long as he stayed on Chen’s staff he could have a chance to do important war work right under the nose of an important patron—and of course by then he was in a perfect rage to kill Naxids, like all of us, but more so.”

  “He had head injuries,” Martinez said. “I’ve heard his personality changed.”

  “He was angry all the time,” Chandra said. “It was sad, really. He insisted that what had happened to Illustrious 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. “Illustrious was 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 it did 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 an engineer. 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.”r />
  “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.”

  “What other files was he looking at?” Chandra slid off the desk and onto 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. The files aren’t there any longer, but the tracks might be, if they haven’t been written over in the meantime.”

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

  “Not quite 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 w
as 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.