Death Sentence

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "But why would he use the nose hatch?" Hannah asked. "I can tell you that the Metrannans wouldn't like it. They aren't exactly built to move gracefully on rope ladders. They have four arms and four legs, a morbid fear of exposed heights, and no arboreal ancestors to provide them with climbing instincts."

  "Maybe that was exactly the point," Jamie said. "The Metrannans wouldn't like it. We're assuming that Trevor knew he was dying by that time, and he might well know--or at least assume--that it was the Metrannans who had done it to him. Why would he do them any favors? And what were they going to do to him if he wasn't nice? Kill him?"

  "Well, maybe. But tweaking their noses as revenge for their murdering him doesn't seem quite in character for Wilcox, somehow."

  "Too petty for a man brave enough to do everything we know he did?"

  "Something like that," Hannah said.

  "Who knows?" Jamie said. "Maybe the pilot of the Metrannan spacecraft picked the nose hatch, and Trevor just didn't feel like correcting his dumb mistake. Besides, we still don't know for sure that it was the Metrannans. It could have been some other species that's comfortable with ladders and heights."

  "Hmmph. True enough. We'd know that and a hell of a lot more if the Adler had been recording the feed from her interior cameras."

  "Yeah, but Trevor deliberately disabled the cams for the same reason we did. You don't record yourself on a mission designated 'War-Starter.' The bad guys could have just played back the recording and watched where he hid the decrypt."

  Cutting out all the auto-record cameras and microphones was standard operating procedure for most BSI missions. Far safer to keep the system turned off at all times instead of running the risk of forgetting to turn it off while performing some crucial and secret part of the job.

  "I know why nothing was recorded," Hannah said with some irritation in her voice. "That doesn't stop me from wishing we had the recordings. I suppose we're lucky to have the engineering logs." She thought for a second. "Any change in the gravity system while the boarding party was present?"

  Jamie checked and looked toward Hannah with surprise. "Yeah," he said. "Interior grav got cranked up to one-point-two-one gees--Metran surface gravity."

  "Huh?" Hannah leaned in and checked the display herself. "I was figuring that if Wilcox was trying to annoy them, he would have dialed gravity down a ways. Metrannans hate low gravity--and with good reason. Even a brief exposure to zero gee can kill them."

  Jamie checked further along in the log. "It gets weirder. After the boarding party is gone, interior gravity was reset to three-quarters of a standard gee for several days. It was cut to zero for a couple of hours, then returned to three-quarters and left there."

  "I don't get it," said Hannah. "The second part makes sense. Dialing gravity down to three-quarters is a pretty smart move if you're dying of a degenerative disease. That's enough of a reduction to ease the stress on your system, but not so much that your reflexes would get messed up, that sort of thing. But if he's going to do that for himself, why crank up the interior gravity to make his guests comfortable--especially when he's just docked using the nose hatch to irritate them, and when higher gravity has got to put a strain on him--maybe a big enough strain to kill him?"

  "I've got all the same questions and none of the answers," Jamie said. "But at least setting the system to exactly one-point-two-one gees signals that he was boarded by Metrannans."

  "Maybe that's why he did it," said Hannah. "It's for our benefit, just like clearing out all of his personal effects. It's a deliberate signal to us that it was beings who liked that gravity field who boarded him."

  "It could be," Jamie said. "But somehow it's not all that convincing. Would he really risk a heart attack just to send us such a subtle and easy-to-miss message? Especially when he had so much to do after they left. Yeah, later on, he went to a lot of effort jettisoning his gear for our benefit--but it wasn't at the risk of dying before he could complete his preparations. Cranking up the gravity system while he was aging by, say, a year every hour would increase the odds of his dying before he'd done his job. He would only do it because it was absolutely necessary, not to let us confirm a very obvious theory about who boarded his ship."

  "It almost seems like poor sportsmanship for you to punch such big sensible holes in a flimsy little theory," Hannah said.

  "Yeah, right," Jamie said, smiling. "You're always so kind and gentle about blowing my theories out of the water."

  "Touche," said Hannah, staring thoughtfully at the display. "But still, finding all this out makes me feel better," she said. "It's very obvious that Wilcox was working very purposefully and carefully, thinking through everything as best as he could--and everything we've learned so far suggests that he was very good at that kind of thinking. I don't think my odds of beating him at chess would have been all that good. I'd be willing to bet a year's pay that his using the nose hatch and increasing the gravity during the search were necessary to accomplish clear and specific goals."

  "I'll go further," said Jamie. "My guess is that his using the nose hatch and cranking up the gravity were all of a piece with his clearing out the gear. They're part of a whole we're not seeing yet, but they're all very clean, well-made puzzle pieces. There's going to be a way to fit them all together. And if we find a way for them all to fit, it's going to be the only way. When we have an answer, we'll know it's the answer."

  "I bet you're right," said Hannah. "Unless senile dementia had already kicked in before the boarding party arrived and there isn't any sense to anything he did after that."

  "That's why I like partnering with you," said Jamie. "Your cheerful attitude and irrepressible optimism. Come on, let's get started with the physical search."

  TEN

  SAVED TO BURN

  Three numbingly dull hours later, Hannah felt certain that there was nothing remotely cheerful left in her attitude. A spacecraft, even a small one, had a remarkably large number of places where an object could be hidden--especially when Jamie and she had only the vaguest idea about what they were looking for. If--if their assumptions were right, and if the logic underlying those assumptions was even close to right, then they were looking for an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye onto which the decrypt key could have been recorded using the equipment normally carried aboard a Sherlock-class ship, or with the personal gear Wilcox had carried aboard.

  Unfortunately, that description covered everything from a note written on a piece of paper and taped to the inside of an access panel to a standard miniature memory chip hidden inside a hollowed-out key cap on the pilot's station main keyboard.

  They had quickly worked out a series of rules for the first-pass search, mostly based on making a further series of not entirely reliable assumptions about what Wilcox would and would not have done--and also what he physically could and could not have done.

  He wouldn't have risked damaging the ship or making it harder to operate, or dared take any step that might require a repair he might not be able to do once he got much weaker--which made the idea that he had fiddled with the main control panel seem less likely.

  They quickly established that Wilcox couldn't have hidden the key on the exterior of the Adler, or anywhere inside the ship accessible only from an exterior access port--a fuel door or a maintenance hatch. There was an emergency pressure suit on board, but it was still unused and in its sealed shipping container. Nor was there any record of either hatch being used between the time of his departure from Metran and the arrival of the boarding party. Besides, a man dying of a rapidly progressing degenerative disease wouldn't have risked the rigors and dangers of a space walk. It was possible that the Adler might have been docked or landed in some facility with breathable air while in the Metran system, and Wilcox could have gotten at the ship's exterior then--but the risks of being observed would have been far too high.

  All that gave them at least some reasonably logical guidelines for their initial search. They were also paying at least
some attention to the idea that Wilcox could have hidden it in some place that a xeno couldn't or wouldn't find it, but that a human--more specifically a BSI agent--would think of looking.

  The only trouble with that idea was there weren't all that many ways to hide things that would utterly confound a nonhuman. Jamie had suggested that they concentrate on the upper deck, given the Metrannans' dislike of heights. A flimsy bit of reasoning, granted, but there was something to it. However, there was barely enough room on the upper deck for two people, even when they weren't crawling around peering into things. Jamie could concentrate his attention up there as much as he wanted, so far as Hannah was concerned. She was perfectly happy to work on the lower deck, where there was more room to turn around.

  Jamie had another bright idea that seemed to have some promise, at least at first. As a general rule of thumb, xeno food was literally indigestible to humans: The differences in biochemistry were large enough that, unless the foods were specially processed or treated, the human digestive tract could draw no nutritive value from Kendari fare or Pavlat cooking. Because human and Metrannan biochemistry had some features in common, some Metrannan foods were edible to humans--but most of their foods were deadly poison, while others could induce violent allergic reactions. The reverse was likewise true--many human foods were actively dangerous to Metrannans.

  Fortunately for the health of both sides, each also found most of the other species' meals utterly nauseating. The average Metrannan dish was about as palatable to a human as a plate of rotten eggs served in light lubricating oil. Metrannans were no more fond of most human foods. Perhaps, Jamie speculated, Special Agent Wilcox had taken advantage of that and hidden the key inside an unopened mealpack, on the theory that a Metrannan wouldn't be very eager to open it in the first place, let alone search it too thoroughly.

  There were four unopened mealpacks left aboard the Adler. Jamie and Hannah spent an unpleasant half hour dissecting every morsel in every one of them on the off chance the key had been concealed inside a meatball or the like. They likewise carefully examined the interior and exterior of each container. But there had been no sign of any memory chips floating in the gravy, or suspiciously long strings of characters inserted into the expiration dates.

  But worse than searching the food was the fact that they had to preserve it all, just in case their assumptions were wrong, and they later discovered that Wilcox had somehow concealed the decrypt key inside a strand of DNA in the cabbage used to make the kimchi or the like. They sealed it all up as best they could and stuffed it in a corner of the Adler's air lock.

  But merely setting foot in the air lock had given Jamie another inspiration, and he set to work taking apart the air lock's self-adjusting floor mechanism. If Trevor had concealed the decrypt key on the underside of the floor panel, that would have given him a reason to use the nose hatch for docking, simply to keep the xenos from spending more time than necessary in the main air lock. That theory had come up dry, too, with no better result than a set of scraped knuckles for Jamie and a series of large grease stains on his iso-suit.

  Even Jamie had run out of bright ideas at that point, and the search had devolved into the dullest possible grunt work, crouching over in every possible awkward and uncomfortable position, peering and poking and prodding into every nook and cranny of the Adler's interior, popping every access panel, checking every bit of equipment that might have served as a place to conceal the decrypt key. The grease marks and dirty smudges and sweat stains on Hannah's iso-suit multiplied as her mood darkened.

  What made the job even duller was the absolute necessity of documenting all of it. They had to photograph everything they searched and keep up a running monologue of description, in preparation for the all-but-inevitable time when they would have to go back through it all again.

  If, as seemed increasingly likely, they didn't find the key on this pass, they would have to try again, and again, and again after that. Without documentation, it would be almost impossible to remember what had and had not been searched, or how thoroughly each item had been checked. And, after all, it was just possible that they would come across a clue later on that would suddenly make sense of something they had found long before. It would be extremely useful to have a record of everything accessible from their datapads, with all the commentary transcribed and cross-indexed.

  Time seemed to flow past Hannah, as if she existed outside it and was not there at all, but was being forced to watch from the outside as two white-suited figures hunched over display screens, control panels, trash containers, storage lockers, fold-out furniture, both of them constantly muttering into their throat mikes, each of them pausing every now and again to get another careful, detailed close-up of another perfectly ordinary item that might, just might, conceal the decrypt key that some faceless bureaucrat in BSI-DLO had decreed might start--or prevent--a war. It was hard to avoid thinking they were following a meaningless ritual for no better reason than that it was what they were expected to do.

  Hannah had promised herself that she would plod grimly on, searching for a decrypt key that could be anywhere, any size, and disguised as almost anything and hidden almost any place, until one hour before the transit-jump. She found herself checking the time almost compulsively, every few minutes, sometimes every few seconds, as if some part of her subconscious refused to believe that time could possibly be passing so slowly, and required constant confirmation that it was so.

  Hannah began searching through the next storage locker. Part of her mind was on the job, part of it straining against the temptation to check once again how much time was left, but most of her attention was focused on the sharp stabbing pain between her shoulder blades and the dull soreness in her knees. Check the time. Ten minutes to go. A can of blue-grey spray-on touch-up paint, matching the ship's interior, nearly full. A can of flat black paint, and one of red, both full. A small toolkit containing screwdrivers, wrenches, a small hammer, a measuring tape, a factory-sealed tube of flexible patching material, and a battery-powered drill.

  Check the time. Still ten minutes--no, now nine minutes--to go. No visible changes to the tools or the plastic box that held them. No indications of hollowed-out volumes in any of the items. A plastic box subdivided into small drawers about eight-by-eight centimeters, each drawer containing a different type of screw, nut, bolt, strap, or other small fastener. Empty each drawer and examine each small part to confirm that nothing had been concealed in among them. Each small drawer has a label with the item name and item count for the contents. Examine each emptied drawer. The counts all matched. Nothing appeared to have been concealed in any of them. Five minutes left until she could stop.

  Confirm inventory of each item so as to establish none had been used. That was sure to soak up some time. Counts match stated inventory. No fasteners have been used. One roll of heavy adhesive-backed strapping tape, partly used. One roll of light-duty adhesive-backed tape, partly used. One half-full box of large trash disposal bags. One nearly empty box of small trash disposal bags. There wasn't any way of knowing when, where, or by whom the partially used items had been consumed. It might have been on the Adler's last voyage, or on some other mission six months or a year before. Probably some combination of all those. Check the time. The time must be up, or nearly up, by now.

  And, praise the stars, it was! Time was up, and then some. There was a mere fifty-six minutes to transit-jump.

  She put the boxes of trash bags away, closed the storage locker, shut down her camera, mike, and datapad, and stood up slowly, painfully, all her muscles cramped and sore from sitting in awkward and uncomfortable poses.

  "Jamie!" she called out. "Quitting time!"

  "Huh? What? Oh, yeah, okay," he said, his voice distracted. "Come up here, will you?" he asked.

  "You haven't found something, have you?" she asked as she stretched, and then climbed the ladder to the upper deck.

  "I've found something," Jamie said. "But I don't think it's anything we can use." He st
ood up and stretched, then moved over to one side of the tiny pilot's station and gestured for Hannah to take the pilot's seat. "Grab the chair," he said. "It feels good to stand up properly."

  "Glad to," she said. "It feels good to sit down properly." She sat down and turned to Jamie. "So, what have you got?"

  "I decided to save the most obvious for last," said Jamie. "Notebooks. The standard investigator's notebooks."

  "Yeah," said Hannah. "That is a little too obvious." There were BSI Special Agents who sneered in contempt at anything as old-fashioned as a paper notebook. They used nothing but datapads, scanners, cameras, and digital recorders to record information in the field.

  Hannah and Jamie were in the other, pro-paper, camp. The electronic tools were all quite useful, obviously, but paper most definitely had its place. The pro-paper Special Agents argued that there were many tasks for which pen and paper were the best choice. An agent using a notepad and pen never worried about running out of power--though, granted, the agent could run out of ink, or paper. A notepad couldn't be electronically jammed, and no electronic eavesdropping gadget would ever be able to read its contents if you kept the cover closed.

  And paper was easy to get rid of. It could be shredded, burned, pulped, simply torn up and scattered over a wide area, or, in a pinch, chewed and eaten.

  And, of course, there was the advantage that paper was so hopelessly old-fashioned that many xenos never even thought of notepads as a way to store information, and they certainly had no expertise in recovering data from destroyed paper pages.

  Those inside the pro-paper camp were almost obsessive about the type of paper notebook to be used--what size and weight of paper, whether or not the pages could be easily torn out, what sort of cover. Some agents even had their notebooks custom-made, at ruinous expense. Hannah and Jamie, at least, stayed out of that trap--though Hannah had to admit she was tempted at times.