you'd care to give me your jacket, my lord?'
Martinez changed into another tunic 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 up his collar, 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 turning 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 frescos Fletcher had placed elsewhere on his Illustrious, in the sleeping cabin the walls 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 as if it had been acquired from some timeworn ruin of a house, a timbered hulk survived from a distant, desolate dark age. The ceiling panels might have been equally as old but were in a different style, dark wood again and roughly hewn, but polished to a mellow glow. The floor was laid with mud-colored tiles with geometrical patterns in faded yellow. Lights were recessed into crude 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 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 mobile, liquid mouth.
'You're Narbonne?' Martinez asked.
'Yes, my lord.'
'Stand by a moment.'
Martinez paged Marsden, the captain's secretary. When the secretary 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 that 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 was available in records 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 Martinez had to get Master Machinist Gawbyan and an assistant to drill the safe. Gawbyan, who had a truly spectacular pair of mustachios that curled so high and broadly they nearly met his eyebrows, settled grimly to work, and 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 four-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 Doctor Xi coming up the companion, climbing amid the faint scent of disinfectant. Xi braced rather 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.'
Martinez led the doctor to Lady Michi's anteroom, and stepped in to find Lady Ida Li behind the desk. 'Captain Martinez and Doctor Xi to see the squadron commander,' Martinez said.
They were shown in. Xi made 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 medical records 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.'
