Walter Williams - Logs

Chandra 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 could be 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 hat 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 officers for her, and 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 someone who could promote his career-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 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 to drop 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 when 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 on a flag officer's staff. 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 errant 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 that by some miracle 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' 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 near-silence interrupted by Martinez' 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, a letter dated the day before his death but filled only with mundane detail, and containing none of the rage and monomania that everyone else had described.

"He's hiding from us!" he finally exploded.

His right hand clenched in a fist. The captain had hid from him too, too, 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' 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," he said.

"Who by?" Chandra said. When he didn't answer she her neck to read his display upside-down, and then gave a soft cry of surprise.