Conventions of War (13 page)

“And what happened was?” Michi prompted.

“Captain Fletcher got out of bed sometime during the night, went into his office, fell and hit his head. There was an obvious wound on his right temple, and the corner of his desk had some blood, hair, and a bit of skin adhering.” For some reason, Garcia had trouble pronouncing the word “adhering,” but he managed it on the third try.

“My suspicion is that the captain got caught off-balance during the course change early this morning. There was one at 0346. There was a moment of weightlessness, and then when acceleration resumed he was caught wrong-footed. Or maybe he was floating weightless in the room and resumption of gravity caught him by surprise. Dr. Xi might be able to confirm the timing.”

Michi saw his surprised look out of the corner of her eye. “Captain Martinez?” she said. “Did you have a question?”

Martinez was startled. “No, my lady,” he said quickly. “I just remembered that I woke during that course change. I wonder…if I heard something.”

He groped through his memory, but failed to grasp whatever it was that had brought him awake.

“It was most likely the zero-gravity alarm that woke you up,” Kazakov said.

“Very possible, my lady.”

Michi returned her attention to Garcia. “Was the captain dressed?” she asked.

“No, my lady. He wore pajamas, a dressing gown, and slippers.”

“I have no more questions,” Michi said. She glanced at Martinez and Kazakov. “Is there anything else?”

“I have a question,” Martinez said. “Did you take any notice of what the captain was working on?”

“Working?”

“If he was in his office, I'd suppose he'd be working.”

“He wasn't working at anything. The display wasn't turned on, and there were no papers on the desk.”

“Where was his captain's key?”

Garcia opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. “I don't know, my lord.”

“Was it slotted into the desk?”

“I don't think so.”

Martinez looked at Michi. “That's all,” he said. “I think.”

Michi turned to the petty officer. “Thank you, Garcia,” she said.

He braced and made his way out. Michi gave Martinez a look. “That was good thinking, about the captain's key. It's got access to practically everything.” She turned to her desk and began entering codes. “I'll cancel the key's privileges.”

This proved to be unnecessary, as the next to report was Dr. Xi, who put Captain Fletcher's key on the desk in front of the squadron commander. The strip of plastic was on an elastic band.

“I found this around his wrist,” Xi said.

Lord Yuntai Xi was a small man with a well-tended white beard, salt-and-pepper hair that hung over his collar, and a little potbelly. The Xi clan were clients of the Gombergs, and he had known the captain from boyhood. He spoke in a steady tenor voice, but there was sadness in his brown eyes.

“Because we've spent most of the last several hours at general quarters, I've been able to conduct only a superficial investigation. There is a substantial depression on the right side of the skull, and the skin is torn, and skull fracture is the obvious cause of death. There are no other wounds. I made a small incision under the ribs on the right side and inserted a thermometer into the liver, and from that I calculate that the time of death was 0401, plus or minus half an hour.”

Martinez noted that 0401 was only seven minutes after the change of course that might have caused the captain's stumble and death.

“Thank you, Lord Doctor,” Michi said. “I think in view of the questions that will inevitably be raised, an autopsy will be required.”

Xi closed his eyes and sighed. “Very well, my lady.”

After Xi left, Michi took up Fletcher's key and held the thin plastic strip thoughtfully in her hand.

“Do you wish me to make an announcement to the ship's company?” Martinez asked.

“No. I'll do it.” She tossed the key into the rubbish. “That's a bad coincidence,” she said.

“Yes, my lady,” said Kazakov. Her expression was thoughtful.

“Coincidence?” Martinez repeated.

“First Kosinic,” Kazakov explained, “and then Captain Fletcher.”

Kosinic had been Lady Michi's first tactical officer. He had died early in Chenforce's journey from Harzapid to Zanshaa, and his death provided an opening on the staff that Martinez—a recent addition to the Chen family—had jumped to fill.

“Coincidence?” Martinez said again. “I don't understand what you mean. I thought Lieutenant Kosinic died from wounds received at Harzapid.”

“No.” Michi's glare was savage. “He fell and hit his head.”

 

M
artinez returned to his cabin to find that Alikhan, assisted by his other orderlies, Espinosa and Ayutano, were packing his belongings.

Alikhan turned to him as he paused in the doorway. “I presume we will be moving to the captain's cabin, my lord,” he said.

“I suppose we will.” Martinez hadn't actually gotten that far in his thinking.

Nor was there any point in wondering how Alikhan knew of the vacancy in the captain's quarters. Even though no announcement had been made, everyone on the ship must know by now that Fletcher was dead.

“We've removed the staff tabs from all your tunics except for what you're wearing now,” Alikhan said. “If you'd care to give me your jacket, my lord?”

Martinez unbuttoned his collar and stepped into his sleeping cabin. Alikhan and his mates had nearly finished the job, remarkably efficient considering the amount of gear an officer was supposed to carry with him from one posting to the next.

“Are the captain's belongings also being packed?” he asked.

“Everything but what was in his office,” said Alikhan. “There's a constable on guard there.”

“Right,” Martinez said. He turned, left his cabin, buttoned his collar again, and marched down the corridor to Fletcher's office. The Constable there braced as he entered.

“Come with me, Constable,” he told her, and walked through the office, deliberately averting his eyes from the desk with the blood and the scrapings of Fletcher's scalp. He entered Fletcher's sleeping cabin, stopped in the doorway and gaped.

Something Chandra said had led him to conclude that he'd find erotica on Fletcher's walls, but Fletcher hadn't adorned his private room with anything so ordinary. In place of the bright tile work or classically balanced frescoes Fletcher had placed elsewhere on his
Illustrious,
the walls in the sleeping cabin were paneled in ancient dark wood. The wood was rough-hewn and scarred and had never been painted or polished. Presumably it had been fireproofed as Fleet regulations required, but otherwise it looked to have been acquired from some timeworn ruin of a house, a timbered hulk from a desolate dark age. The ceiling panels were perhaps equally old but were in a different style, dark wood again and roughly hewn, but polished to a mellow glow. On the floor were mud-colored tiles with geometrical patterns in faded yellow. Lights were recessed into crude hand-beaten copper sconces. Small dark old pictures sat on the walls in metal frames that winked dully of gold or silver.

Dominating the far wall was the life-sized figure of a man, cast apparently in porcelain. The man had been savagely tortured and then hung on a tree to die. Cuts and blood and the marks of burning tongs were vivid in the translucent porcelain flesh and rendered in immaculate detail by the artist. Despite the many wounds and the agonized posture, the clean-shaven face of the man was serene and unearthly, with unnaturally large dark eyes that wrapped partly around the sides of the head. His hair had been braided in long ringlets that hung to his shoulders. As Martinez took a step closer, he saw that the figure had been lashed by metal bands to what appeared to be a chunk of a perfectly genuine tree.

He looked in amazement from the object on the wall to the two servants who stood braced by open trunks half filled with the captain's belongings.

“What is
that
?” he couldn't stop himself from asking.

“Part of Captain Fletcher's collection, my lord.”

The answer came from the older of the two, a gray-haired man with a long nose and a moist, mobile mouth.

“You're Narbonne?” Martinez asked.

“Yes, my lord.”

“Stand by a moment.”

Martinez paged Marsden, the captain's secretary. When he arrived, Martinez turned to him.

“I want a complete inventory taken of all Captain Fletcher's belongings,” he said. “I want that signed by you and witnessed by everyone here, including—” He nodded toward the guard. “Your name?”

“Huang, my lord.”

“Including Huang.”

Marsden nodded his bald head. “Yes, my lord.”

“I'll try to access the captain's safe so we can inventory the contents as well.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Getting into the captain's safe proved more difficult than Martinez expected. A combination in records was available to the captain, but Fletcher had changed the numbers at least once since he'd taken command, and the old combination was no longer valid. Martinez got Fletcher's captain's key from Michi, but that didn't serve either. In the end he had to call Master Machinist Gawbyan. The machinist, who had a truly spectacular pair of mustachios that curled so broad and high they nearly met his eyebrows, arrived with an assistant and a bag of tools. When the safe was finally open, the contents were uninteresting: some money, a beautifully made custom pistol with a box of ammunition, some bank records, notes on investments, and a pair of small boxes. One box contained a small, frail old book written in some incomprehensibly ancient alphabet. The other box held a carved white jade statue of a nearly naked six-armed woman dancing atop a skull, a sight that wasn't very shocking after the sight of the tortured man lashed to the tree.

Martinez supposed the book and the statue were valuable, so he decided to keep them in his own safe once Gawbyan finished repairing the damage he'd just inflicted. “Make a note,” Martinez told Marsden, “that I've kept in my own possession a small book and a small statue of a woman.”

“Very good, my lord,” Marsden said, and wrote on his datapad.

He took the objects to the safe in his own office, and on his return encountered Dr. Xi coming up the companion, climbing amid the faint scent of disinfectant. Xi braced apologetically, then said, “I was on my way to report to Lady Michi.”

“Yes?”

His sad eyes contemplated Martinez for a moment, then grew hard. “Join me if you like.”

They were shown into Michi's office, and Xi offered another unpracticed salute.

“I've performed the autopsy,” he said, “but it was hardly necessary, since it was obviously murder nearly from the start.”

Michi pressed her lips together in a thin line, then said, “Obvious? How?”

“I put a sensor net around the lord captain's head and got a three-dimensional image of the skull. Captain Fletcher's right temple was struck by three separate blows, grouped closely together—the multiple blows weren't obvious from the superficial examination I was able to conduct this morning, but on the three-dimensional image they were very clear.”

“His head was driven into the desk three times?” Michi asked.

“Or hit with a blunt object twice, then slammed into the desk to make it look like an accident.”

Michi spoke to her desk. “Page Rigger First Class Garcia to the squadcom's office.” She looked at Martinez. “Who's military constabulary officer?”

“Corbigny, my lady.”

Michi turned to her desk again. “Page Lieutenant Corbigny as well.”

Martinez turned to Xi. “I don't suppose Lieutenant Kosinic's body is still on the ship.”

Xi looked at him. “As a matter of fact, the body's in a freezer compartment. We didn't cremate.”

“Perhaps you ought to take a look at it.”

Xi turned away, his gaze directed at the wall over Michi's head. His lips pursed out, then in. “I should,” he said. “I wish I had when he died.”

“Why didn't you?”

Michi answered for him. “Because the cause of death seemed so obvious. In the fighting at Harzapid, Kosinic suffered broken bones and head injuries. When he came on board, he insisted he was fit, but his report from the hospital stated he was subject to blinding headaches, vertigo, and fainting spells. When he was found dead, it seemed obvious that he'd fainted and hit his head.”

“Where was he found?”

“In the Flag Officer Station.”

Martinez was surprised. “What was he doing there alone?”

Michi hesitated. “Li and Coen told me he sometimes worked there by himself. It was less distracting than the wardroom.”

“Was he working on anything in particular?”

“He was tactical officer. I'd had him plan a full schedule of squadron maneuvers, concentrating on the defense of Zanshaa.”

Martinez turned at the sound of someone entering. Rigger Garcia came into the room and braced.

“Rigger/First Garcia reporting, my lady.”

“Thank you. Stand at ease, and take notes if you need to.”

Corbigny arrived a few seconds later, and seemed intimidated by the presence of the squadron commander. The slim, dark-haired young woman was the most junior lieutenant on the ship, and therefore got the jobs none of the other officers wanted. One of these was Military Constabulary Officer, which put her in theoretical charge of the ship's police. If nothing else, supervising the Constabulary would give Corbigny a rapid education in the varieties of vice, depravity, and violence available to the average Fleet crouchback, an education desirable and probably necessary for her further development as an officer.

Garcia adjusted his sleeve display. “I'm recording, my lady.”