Conventions of War (19 page)

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 Garcia'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.”

Michi nodded again. “Go on.”

“But if that's true,” Martinez said, “then who the hell killed
Fletcher
?”

Michi gave him an odd, searching look. “Who benefits?” she said.

Irritation rasped along Martinez's nerves. “If you're expecting me to break down and confess,” he said, “you're going to be disappointed.”

“Others may benefit besides you,” Michi pointed out. “For example, someone who knew that Fletcher would never favor her ambitions, but who thought you might.”

Martinez suspected that Michi's choice of pronoun was not accidental. “Thuc might have had an accomplice,” he suggested. “An accomplice who thought he was next on Fletcher's list.”

“Did you know,” Michi said, “that Lieutenant Prasad excelled in Torminel-style wrestling at the Doria Academy?”

“No,” Martinez said, “I didn't. I haven't had time to review her file.”

Even if Torminel wrestling didn't quite allow bashing an opponent's head in, Martinez knew it was an aggressive style that included strangulation and all sorts of unpleasant, painful joint manipulation and pressure point attacks. He could now see Chandra immobilizing Fletcher long enough to hustle him to his desk and slam his head against its sharp edge, in the process leaving her fingerprints on the underlip.

“I also see,” Michi said, “that you and Lieutenant Prasad shared a communications course some years ago.”

“That's true. While she was there, she didn't murder anyone that I know of.”

Michi's lips twitched in a grim smile. “I'll take your enthusiastic character reference under advisement. Did you notice that Captain Fletcher gave Prasad a venomous efficiency report?”

“I saw that, yes. But I know of no evidence that she was aware of it.”

“Perhaps she wanted to prevent it from being written, but was too late.” Michi tapped her fingers on her desktop. “I'd like you to inquire, as discreetly as possible, about Prasad's movements during the watch in which Captain Fletcher was killed.”

“I can't possibly be discreet with such an inquiry,” Martinez said. “And besides, Garcia already accounted for everyone on the ship.”

“Garcia is an enlisted man and experiences a natural diffidence when interrogating officers. An officer is best for these things.”

Martinez decided he might as well concede. He no longer knew why he was defending Chandra in any case.

“Well,” he said, “I'm interviewing the lieutenants one by one anyway. I'll ask them about that night, but I don't think any will give me a story different from anything they've already told Garcia.”

“I mess in the wardroom,” Xi said. “I could make a few inquiries as well.”

“We
must
find an answer,” Michi said.

On his way to his office, Martinez contemplated Michi's choice of words: she had said
an
answer, not
the
answer.

He wondered if Michi was willing to sacrifice
the
answer—the
real
answer—in favor of
any
answer. An answer that would end the doubts and questions on the ship, that would help to unify
Illustrious
under its new captain, that would put the entire incident to bed and let
Illustrious,
and the entire squadron, get on with their job of fighting Naxids.

It was a solution that would sacrifice an officer, that was true, but an officer who was an outsider, a provincial Peer from a provincial clan, isolated from the others who had all been handpicked by Fletcher. An officer who no one seemed to like very much anyway.

An officer who was very much like the officer he himself had been just a year ago.

He didn't like Michi's solution on these grounds, and on others as well. There had been three deaths, and he thought Michi was too quick to consider the first two solved. He had a sense that the deaths all had to be related in some way, though he couldn't guess at what might connect them.