Both of them normally worked with the sort of standard-issue BSI investigator's notebook Jamie had just handed to Hannah. It was a flip-top spiral-bound notebook, about thirteen centimeters wide and twenty-four centimeters tall. Inside were three sections, with stiff cardboard dividers between the sections. The front section was horizontally ruled paper for general note-taking. The middle was graph paper, with vertical and horizontal lines breaking up the page into one-centimeter boxes for making rough scale drawings in the field. The third section was unlined paper for freehand drawing. The front cover was emblazoned with the BSI badge-star design, and under it
FOR OFFICIAL BSI USE ONLY
60 sheets 20 lined/20 graph/20 blank
Form 401920/2482
Under that were blanks for the user to fill in.
AGENT NAME:___________
CASE NUMBER REFERENCE:__________
DATE USE STARTED:____________
DATE USE ENDED:____________
and a series of other boxes that no one ever bothered to fill in. The inside front cover, and the fronts and backs of the section dividers and the back cover displayed a series of supposedly helpful look-up charts. One set converted metric measures to the various Galactic systems, and, for the real throwbacks, even to feet, miles, ounces, and pounds. Another was a list of "Useful Phrases" in Lesser Trade Speech, the language of commerce and diplomacy used by many xeno species. The guides and charts were all well-intentioned, but Hannah had never heard of anyone using any of them.
There was something oddly comforting about seeing the familiar, old-fashioned charts. She had used a notebook exactly identical to the one in her hand on her first case--and she had kept it as a memento, even if that violated five or six security regulations. No doubt because she herself had such a sentimental attachment to them, examining Wilcox's notebooks seemed a particularly personal, almost intimate, thing to do.
Except, suddenly, it dawned on her that they hadn't been personal, or special, or intimate to him. "Wait a second," she said. "Wilcox isn't a paper guy."
"Right," said Jamie. "At least we don't have any proof that he is. Everything we've seen suggests he's a digital guy."
"Have we seen a single example of his handwriting?" Hannah asked. "Or anything on paper? Printouts? Sketches?"
"Not that I've spotted."
"Does that mean he never used paper, or just that he scooped up every scrap of paper in his general clear-out?"
"Well, if he cleared everything else out, he missed the notebooks," said Jamie.
"But they're blank. Empty."
"Not the one you're holding," Jamie replied. "Not all the way. Flip to the back of the graph-paper section."
Hannah did so--and frowned in puzzlement at what she saw there.
In the center of the page was an elaborately drawn and decorated design, a sort of logo, of the initials BSI. The B and the S were fully drawn and filled in with flourishes and backgrounds and curlicues, but the I was merely sketched in, as if the artist hadn't quite gotten around to finishing it. Centered directly under it was a two-line slogan, written in very careful script.
Where we protect our treasures
unless we must destroy them
Hannah laughed. "This is from a little before your time," she said. "It's an old in-joke. Ask anyone in the Bureau's Internal Investigations Unit, and they'll tell you that BSI stands for BURN STASH IMMEDIATELY. According to them, every time they ask for an agent's work notes, wouldn't you know it, bad luck has struck again and he's tossed the papers they want into the destruct oven, just five minutes before. The regs say that everyone's supposed to 'destroy unneeded insecure notes on a regular basis,' but most agents tend to hold on to their old notes, just in case. But as soon anyone hears a rumor that IIU might come looking around, everyone starts following the regs to the letter."
"Well, Wilcox seems to have followed that rule."
Hannah tapped the design with her finger. "We don't even know that this is Wilcox's doing," she said. "We can't even be sure he was the one who drew the logo or wrote the words. This could have been left behind by the last agent to fly the Adler prior to Wilcox's mission, or the one before that, or the one before that."
"But only if Trevor missed this notebook while he was doing the clear-out. We haven't caught him making too many mistakes so far."
"The mistake being that he left these notebooks behind when he was clearing the place out to make our search easier?"
"Right."
"I'm not sure I can count it as a mistake not to check carefully every single page of every single notebook to make sure they're all blank when you're clearing out an entire spacecraft."
"No. But think about it. Trevor is sitting where you are right now whenever he pilots the ship. The notebooks were held to the bulkhead with that elastic restraint loop there, like this." Jamie took the other notebooks, pulled back the loop, slipped them into it, and let the loop go. It made a loud snapping noise as it slapped into the notebooks. "Right in his line of sight whenever he turns his head."
"And if he's not a paper guy, why does he put a stack of spare notebooks right there?" Hannah asked. "Unless they were put there by the agent before or the agent before that, and were just left there."
"Even so--he's cleaning out everything else on board the ship. It would take him five seconds to grab the notebooks and toss them into whatever trash bag he was using."
"So you're saying if he left them behind, he did it on purpose."
"Right."
"And if so, he did it for a reason."
"Right."
"And, unless we go over the books with a scanning electron microscope looking for DNA-encoded microstrands and such like, the only thing in any of the notebooks is this design and the words underneath, so what we have on this page has to be the reason."
"Right. Unless I'm wrong."
"Yeah, but you don't make many mistakes, either," said Hannah. She stared thoughtfully at the design and the words underneath it. "'Where we protect our treasures unless we must destroy them.' The way that's placed under the BSI design, it looks like it's supposed to be a joke, that it's the Bureau's motto. But there's more than one way to read it. Instead of referring to the organization, it could also refer to a physical place. A place that's on this ship--and every BSI ship."
"The destruct oven if you rig it for Mode Two!" Jamie said. "The search team didn't look there, did they?"
"Not that we have any record of," said Hannah.
"And we haven't looked there either," said Jamie. "How could we all miss that?"
"Rush and panic and trying to do everything at once," said Hannah. "And no one would think of it because no one ever uses the oven in Mode Two. You don't use them that way until things are in very bad shape."
"Well, things got pretty bad for Trevor," said Jamie. "Plenty bad enough if he had a boarding party to deal with. That sounds like a Mode Two situation if I've ever heard of one."
There was a concealed and camouflaged destruct oven aboard every BSI ship. It consisted of a sealable chamber that could be heated to extreme temperatures, combined with an oxygen feed system and a sophisticated venting system, all of it designed to promote rapid and thorough burning. Every piece of portable BSI data-storage equipment from the paper notebooks to the highest-end datapads and computers was designed to fit into a destruct oven, and was specifically made so it could not survive a destruct oven burn cycle.
In Mode One, an agent simply shoved whatever needed destroying into the oven, sealed it, and turned it on. It was intended for the routine and precautionary destruction of potentially sensitive material.
Mode Two was for when things got much hairier. If an agent thought he or she might be caught or killed, or his ship captured, and if the agent was carrying high-value materials, data important enough to protect that was also data that couldn't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, the standard operating procedure was to store all sensitive documents in the destruct oven and leave them there. T
he usual protocol was to rig it so that it would start a destructive burn cycle if anyone tried to open it without entering the proper pass codes. The oven could also be triggered by more or less any sort of remote control or panic button or timer or deadman switch the agent might choose.
"So let's look now."
"Forty-five minutes until transit-jump," Hannah said. "We need to make sure we've got time to get ready for it. We'll have to move fast."
"I don't even know where the oven is hidden on this class of ship," Jamie admitted.
"I do," Hannah said grimly. "It's concealed in the bathroom, the head. It's under the deck--right in front of the chemical toilet."
"Take the powerdriver and hand me that prybar, will you?" Hannah asked as the last of the screws holding in the deckplate came loose. She swapped tools with Jamie and wedged the prybar under the lip of the deckplate.
It lifted up easily, and Jamie grabbed the edge of the plate and lifted it clear. A sprinkling of smoky-smelling dust swirled in the cramped compartment as he swung the plate out of the way and leaned it against the wall. They looked into the space it had covered and saw what resembled a small but highly complex safe, complete with combination lock and reinforced door and armored hinges. "So," he said, "what are we going to find here?"
"Well, with any luck at all, the decrypt key, of course," said Hannah, reaching for her datapad to pull up the codes to unlock and disarm the system.
"But if it's stashed here, when did he stash it?" Jamie asked. "It couldn't have been before the boarding party arrived, because he did the gear-jettison after that, and we haven't come up with any explanation for the gear-jettison, unless it was to help us search the ship and not be distracted by searching through his personal effects. Why go through all that if he already had the key hidden in the destruct oven and the boarding party had missed it? And if he hid it in there after the boarding party--again, why do the gear-jettison? He'd have to know that sooner or later someone would think of looking in the oven--and probably assume that they'd think of it sooner than anyone actually did."
"He could have stashed the destruct key in the oven the second he was back on board after leaving Metran," said Hannah, "before he knew anything at all about the chances of his being boarded. He might figure the oven was the safest place on board. It functions as a hidden wall safe. It would just be a sensible precaution."
"Let me ask you this," said Jamie. "I didn't know where the destruct oven was, since I've never flown one of these tubs--but I knew there was one. What do you want to bet that every Kendari Inquiries Service agent in the field knows all about BSI destruct ovens?"
"No one's talked about the Kendari being part of all this," Hannah objected.
"No, but information can be bought and sold," said Jamie. "Besides, the data wouldn't need to come from the Kendari. The logs show that Trevor docked--or more like landed--his ship at the Metran's Grand Elevator and then rode down to the surface. I'm sure he left the ship locked and sealed and so on--but that wouldn't stop the locals from scanning it fifteen different ways. The Metrannans are a well-connected Elder race. They must have a lot of tech we can't even dream of. Trevor would have to have assumed that whoever boarded him would know where the oven was, and maybe even how to get past the ship's security and the oven's."
"Okay, so maybe he didn't stash it there then," Hannah said. "Or else your argument is very logical and convincing--but it's just plain wrong--and he did stash it there, before or after the boarding party, and what does it matter if he did it before or after?"
Jamie scowled. "I'm not sure. But I think we owe it to Trevor to try and understand everything he did as best we can."
Hannah looked at him hard. "Listen up, Special Agent Mendez, and get it straight. Trevor Wilcox III was my colleague, too--but this case got War-Starter slapped on it, and investigating his death is a secondary mission--something close to a cover story. Your trying to be his posthumous best friend doesn't do him any good, and I'm starting to worry it's going to get in the way of us doing our job. We're supposed to find the decrypt key, first and foremost. We're not supposed to be building a monument to Trevor Wilcox. Got it?"
Jamie wanted to argue--but he knew she was right. If desperately wanting to know and understand everything about Trevor in his final days was interfering with the job, well, then, Trevor wouldn't want that either. He had sacrificed everything for the sake of the mission. It would be paying him no respect for Jamie to be distracted from it. "I've got it," he said.
Hannah's face softened. "Believe me," she said. "I understand. I've felt the same way. Maybe I'm feeling more of it than you realize, right now. But it can't get in the way of the job. Now let's get this thing open. It's going to be one of three things. Either the decrypt key is in it and the key is intact, and we can abort the mission, bring the key back to Center, then investigate how Wilcox died. Or else the key is there, but destroyed, in which case we have to abort, report that news to Center HQ, and see what they want to do about their War-Starter being missing. Or else the oven chamber will be stone empty--and we go on to Metran. So let's get to it. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Good. Hang on a second while I key in the security codes." Hannah consulted her datapad, entered the codes, and set the lock dials. Then she pressed down a control stud while twisting the handle.
The oven unlocked. Hannah swung the door up and open--and a choking cloud of dust and ash plumed up and into the compartment, setting Jamie and Hannah to coughing and wheezing. They retreated from the refresher compartment and Hannah slammed the door shut. "Emergency kit," Hannah managed to splutter out. "There on the wall behind you. Breathing masks."
Jamie wiped the grit from his eyes and his mouth and nodded. He crossed to the kit hanging on the wall and opened it. It was intended for use in case of a meteor strike or other air leak problem. Jamie pulled out a can of sealing foam, and an open pack of hull patches, and then found the masks. Fortunately, there were no fewer than three breather masks in it. Jamie handed Hannah a mask, wiped his eyes and mouth again, and put on his own.
"We've only got a little more than half an hour until our transit-jump," Hannah said, her voice made faint and muffled by the mask. "No time to do more than take another quick peek in there. Let's go."
Jamie grabbed a handlight from the emergency kit and switched it on. Hannah pulled the door to the head back open. The dust had settled a bit, though the air was still hazy. Hannah stepped inside and shifted over to make room for Jamie. He went in and shined the handlight down into the still-open door of the destruct oven.
The interior of the oven was jammed full of the ashes of burned paper and roasted, melted electronics, and other ruined debris that couldn't even be identified that generally. "So maybe he was a paper guy after all," said Jamie.
"And maybe, in there, is whatever is left of the decrypt key," said Hannah. "If so, there's nothing left of it now." She shook her head. "Not any of the three cases we expected, is it? So much for logic."
"But what do we do?" Jamie asked. "If the decrypt key was in there, it was fried. It's gone. That's game over, isn't it? We abort and go home?"
"We don't know that the decrypt key was in there, so we don't know if it was fried," said Hannah. "If there was one destroyed object in there, we could assume with a high degree of confidence it was the decryption key. But the key could be on or in anything. A chip, a piece of paper, a datapad, a photo. There's too much ash and melted junk in there for us to have any hope of identifying one bit of it as the missing key--so we have to assume that none of it is. Maybe Wilcox filled up the destruct oven with junk as a decoy for the boarding party. But if there's one place we won't find the key, it's in the middle of that mess." She bent down, swung the oven hatch shut, and relocked it.
"So what do we do?"
"So we go on with the mission," she said. "Let's get that cover plate secured before the transit-jump." The two of them wrestled the deckplate back into position, and Hannah used the powerdriver to screw t
he hold-down bolts back in. She stood up and looked down at her work. Somehow the moment felt like standing at a freshly filled grave of someone who had not been gone very long. "This doesn't change anything about the job," she said. "It just makes it harder."
She checked the time and cursed. "Twenty-two minutes to transit-jump," she said. "Let's go."
ELEVEN
JUMP TO TUMBLE
It was an axiom, a truism, a cliche: No two transit-jumps were alike. The jump in and out of other dimensions to move from one star system to another required incredible delicacy, accuracy, and power. The slightest error in navigation could produce huge errors at the arrival end--and some wholly remarkable visual and physical effects during the jump itself.
On the best-calibrated runs, with the distances and masses of the departure and target stars known with great precision, the jump effects were minimal, or even undetectably small. But BSI ships didn't always fly on the best-charted, best-calibrated routes--and the jump effects were often most decidedly detectable.
Colors, lights, vibrations, distortions would flicker in and out of being. The effects were not illusions, but all too real, ripples and shifts and twists and turns imposed on space-time itself. Mostly the effects stayed outside the ship, and acted on the vehicle as a whole. Sometimes, however, the distortions were sufficiently fine-grained, sufficiently complex, to reach inside a ship, so that what happened in the stern was different than what happened in the bow. Sometimes two people sitting next to each other would witness totally different effects.
Usually, the distortions were harmless and vanished in the moment the transit-jump was completed. Usually.
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