Walter Williams - Conventions of War

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.”

“Whatother 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. Thefiles aren’t there any longer, but thetracks might be, if they haven’t been written over in the meantime.”

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

“Notquite 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 was 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.

“Interesting,” he managed to say.

Chandra rose and leaned over his desk. “But,” she said, “I pointed out to Lady Michi that you’d played an important part in winning our side’s only victories against the Naxids, and that we really couldn’t spare you even if youwere a killer.”

The phrasing brought a smile to Martinez’s lips. “You might have given me the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “I mightnot have killed Fletcher, after all.”

“I don’t think Lady Michi was interested in the truth by that point. She just wanted to be able to close the file.” She perched on his desk and brushed its glossy surface with her fingertips. A triumphant light danced in her eyes. “So am I your friend, Gareth?” she asked.

“You are.” He looked up at her and answered her smile. “And I’m yours, because when Lady Michi was trying to pin the murder on you-with far more reason, I thought-I talked her out of it by using much the same argument.”

He saw the shock roll through Chandra like a slow tide. Her lips formed several words that she never actually spoke, and then she said, “She’s a ruthless one, isn’t she?”

“She’s a Chen,” Martinez said.

Chandra slowly rose to her feet, then braced. “Thank you, my lord,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Lieutenant.”

He watched her leave, a little unsteadily, and then paged Mersenne. When the plump lieutenant arrived, Martinez invited him to sit.

“Some time ago,” Martinez said, “before I joined the squadron, you found Lieutenant Kosinic leaving an access hatch on one of the lower decks. Do you happen to remember which one?”

Mersenne blinked in utter surprise. “I haven’t thought about that in months,” he said. “Let me think, my lord.”

Martinez let him think, which Mersenne accomplished while pinching his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger.

“That would be Deck Eight,” Mersenne said finally. “Access Four, across from the riggers’ stores.”