“He’s hiding it from us!” he finally exploded.
His right hand clenched in a fist. The captain had hid his nature as well, 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’s 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.”
“Who by?” Chandra said. When he didn’t answer, she craned her neck to read his display upside down, then gave a soft cry of surprise.
“Captain Gomberg Fletcher,” she breathed.
They stared at one another for a moment.
“You can’t suppose,” Chandra began, “that Fletcher was somehow part of the Naxid plot, and that Javier found out about it, and Fletcher had him killed?”
Martinez considered this, then shook his head. “I can’t think of anything the Naxids could offer Fletcher to make him betray his ship.”
Chandra gave a little laugh. “Maybe they offered to give him a painting he really wanted.”
Martinez shook his head. “No, I think Kosinic must have discovered the Narayanist cult. Or he discovered something else that got him killed, and Fletcher suppressed the information in order to protect the Narayanists.” He looked at the data glowing in the depths of his desk, and his heart gave a surge as he saw the date.
“Wait a moment,” he said. “Fletcher erased the file the same day he died.” He looked more carefully at the date. “In fact, he seems to have erased the file around the time he was killed.”
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.