Logs

'Your jewelry, lieutenant.'

Phillips slowly took the chain from around his neck and handed it to Martinez. Martinez issued him a pair of the soft slippers worn by prisoners and showed him to his narrow cell. The metal-walls were covered with many thick layers of green paint, and the single light was in a cage overhead. The room was almost filled with the toilet, the small sink, and the acceleration couch used for a bed.

Martinez closed the heavy hatch with its spy hole and told Espinosa to remain on guard. He put the ayaca pendant in a clear plastic evidence box and returned to the petty officers' quarters. The cabins had all been searched, and the search party had gone on to the body search, women searching women in the petty officers' mess while men searched men in the corridor.

Nothing was found. Martinez approached Michi and handed her the box with the ayaca pendant inside. She looked up at him in silent query.

'Lord Phillips,' he said.

At first Michi was surprised, and then her expression hardened. 'Too bad Fletcher didn't get him first,' she said.

Michi's expression didn't soften throughout the rest of the search, and Martinez could tell she was thinking hard, particularly after the search of the enlisted, and those on duty in Command and Engine Control, produced no cult symbols, no murder weapons, and no suspects.

'Page Doctor Xi to the brig,' Michi told her sleeve display. She looked up at Martinez. 'Time to interrogate Phillips,' she said.

'I don't think he killed Fletcher,' Martinez said.

'I don't, either, but he knows who did. He knows who the other members of the cult are.' Her lips drew back from her teeth in a kind of snarl. 'I'm going to have the lord doctor use truth drugs to get those names out of him.'

Martinez suppressed a shiver. 'Truth drugs don't always produce the truth,' he said. 'They lower a person's defenses, but they can confuse a prisoner as well. Phillips could just babble names at random for all we know.'

'I'll know,' Michi said. 'Maybe not this first interrogation, but we'll keep up the interrogations day after day, and in the end I'll know. The truth always comes out in the end.'

'Let's hope so,' Martinez said.

'Get Corbigny here as well. I'll take her to the brig with me. You and-' With a look at Marsden. '-your secretary can get back to running the ship.'

Martinez was startled. 'I-' he began. 'Phillips is my officer, and-'

I want to watch as you use chemicals to strip away his dignity and his every last secret. Because it's my fault you're putting him through this.

'He's not your officer any more,' Michi said flatly. 'He's a walking dead man. And frankly I don't think he's going to welcome your presence.' She looked at him, and her look softened. 'You have a ship to run, captain.'

'Yes, my lady.' Martinez braced.

He and Marsden spent the rest of the day in his office dealing with the minutiae of command. Marsden was silent and hostile, and Martinez' mind kept running into blind alleys instead of concentrating on his work.

He supped alone, drank half a bottle of wine, and went in search of the doctor.

As he approached the pharmacy he encountered Lady Juliette Corbigny leaving. She was pale and her eyes were wider than ever.

'Beg pardon, lord captain,' she said, and sped away, almost in flight. Martinez looked after her, then walked into the pharmacy, where he found Xi slumped over a table, his chin on one fist as he contemplated a beaker half- filled with a clear liquid. The sharp scent of grain alcohol was heavy on his breath.

'I'm afraid Lieutenant Corbigny isn't well,' Xi said. 'I had to give her something to settle her tummy. Part way into the interrogation she threw up all over the floor.' He raised the beaker and looked at it solemnly. 'I fear she isn't cut out for police work.'

Savage, pointless anger roiled in Martinez. 'Did anything go well?' he asked.

'The interrogation wasn't a success, particularly,' Xi said. 'Phillips said he hadn't killed the captain, and didn't know who did. He said he doesn't belong to a cult. He said the ayaca pendant was given to him by his sweet old nurse when he was a child, and by the way the story can't be confirmed because she's dead. He said he had no idea that the ayaca had any significance other than being a pretty tree that a lot of people put in their gardens.'

Xi slumped over his table, and took a drink from the beaker.

'When the drug hit him he kept to his story until his mind got the addles, and then he started to chant. Garcia and the squadcom and Corbigny, when she wasn't spewing, tried to keep him on the subject of the captain's death, but he kept going back to the same chant. Or maybe there were different chants. It was hard to tell.'

'What was he chanting?'

'I don't know. It was in some old language that nobody recognized, but we heard the word Narayanguru all right, so it's a cult ritual language and when the Investigative Service hears the recording they'll find someone to identify it, and that will be the end of Lord Phillips, and if the IS is on speaking terms with the Legion that week and passes the information, the Legion will probably arrest half the Phillips clan and that will be the end of them, because the Legion have many more methods of interrogation than are available to us here, and doctors who are far more bad than I am, and who are very proud that their confession rate is nearly one hundred percent.' He looked at the beaker again, and then raised his head to look at Martinez.

'Captain, I have been remiss. I am a bad doctor and a bad host. Will you share my beverage of consolation?'

'No thanks, I've had enough already. And you're going to have a hell of a hangover.'

Xi gave a weary grin. 'No, I'm not. A dose of this, a dose of that, and I will rise a new man.' His face fell. 'And then the squadcom will turn me into a bad doctor again, and have me shoot chemicals into the carotid of a harmless little man who didn't hurt anybody, if you ask me-which nobody did-but who's going to die anyway, and I wish I'd kept my damn mouth shut about the captain's injuries.' He poured more alcohol into his beaker. 'I thought I was going to be a brilliant detective, tracking clues like the police in the videos, and instead I find myself involved in something soiled and disgusting and sordid, and frankly I wish I could throw up like Corbigny.'

'Keep this up and you will,' Martinez said.

'I shall do my best,' Xi said, and raised his glass. 'Bottoms up.'

The taste of defeat soured Martinez' tongue. As he left the pharmacy, he swore that the next time he had a brainstorm, he'd keep it to himself.

A call from Garcia brought Martinez out of bed and running to the brig while still buttoning his undress tunic over his pajamas. 'There was a guard here all night, lord captain,' Garcia said in a rapid voice as soon as Martinez entered the room. 'There's no way anyone could have got to him.'

Martinez walked to Lord Phillips' cell and looked inside and wished he hadn't.

Sometime over the course of the night Phillips had torn open the acceleration couch that served as his bed, pulled out fistfuls of the foam padding, and then filled his mouth with the foam and kept packing it in until he choked.

Choked to death. Phillips was half off the couch and his mouth was still full of foam and his face was black. His eyes were open and gazed overhead at the light in its cage. Bits of the foam floated over the room like motes of dust.

Doctor Xi knelt by him. He eyes were red-rimmed and his hands trembled as he made a cursory examination.

'He knew he'd crack,' Michi said after she arrived. 'He knew he'd give us the names sooner or later. He decided to die first to protect his friends.' She shook her head. 'I wouldn't have thought he had the nerve for it.'

Martinez turned to her, rage poised on his tongue, and then he turned away.

'We're still no better off than we were!' Michi cried, and slammed her fist into the metal door.

Later that morning Martinez conducted vicious, mean-spirited inspections of Missile Battery One and the riggers' stores, but it didn't make him feel any better.