Death Sentence

by Roger MacBride Allen

  By running the scrubber and keeping the breather mask on, he was able to keep the carbon dioxide level within safe ranges and also get enough oxy to breathe. But there was no way to get rid of the heat generated by his body, or the sweat that had nowhere to go in zero gee, or the water vapor he was exhaling. He had plenty of water to drink, if need be, but the climate in the lock was getting to be something close to a steam bath. He wasn't in much danger of drying out.

  He was as physically miserable as he could remember being in a long time, enough so that he was glad to have the navigation problems to distract him. Not that he was doing the nav work on his own. It was more a question of setting up problems for the nav computer to solve and approving or rejecting the proposed solutions. The challenge was not in planning an efficient trajectory for the Sholto toward Metran. The trick was in setting up a flight plan that would put the energy plume of the Sholto directly between the planet Metran and the Adler, so that the Adler could perform her independent braking maneuver without being spotted by whatever high-powered detectors were on-planet.

  Jamie was asking the computer to find flight plans that would allow the Adler to hide behind the Sholto's energy plume not only while they were inbound, but also during their exit from the Metran system. The further challenge was to avoid its looking like they were doing it. That meant that the Sholto had to fly as smooth and steady a flight path as possible while leaving the Adler to do the fancy maneuvers.

  It was the sort of thing Jamie was good at, and he worked the system quickly, developing a dozen basic scenarios for both their inbound and outbound flights. When the time came, they would be able to pull up the scenario that was the closest fit to the real-life situation and tweak it a little, rather than being forced to develop the flight plan from scratch in the middle of whatever emergency might develop.

  After a while Jamie recognized that he was reaching the point of diminishing returns, having developed so many variations that there was barely anything to pick between them. He shut down the system. All that was left would be to upload his work to the Adler's nav system once they had the other ship patched up and put back together.

  Patched up. The phrase reminded him of something that had been niggling at the corner of his mind. When they had been planning the repairs to the Adler's viewport, Hannah had mentioned that the hull patch kit aboard the Adler had only three of the circular twenty-centimeter patches left, instead of the four that should have been in the package. There certainly wasn't any chance they had overlooked a bright orange patch the size of a dinner plate slapped on the inside hull of the ship.

  It didn't necessarily mean anything. Maybe some agent on a previous mission had had a big evidence bag split open and simply reached for whatever could seal it up fast. Maybe one of the patches had gone bad, the adhesive dried out or whatever, and been discarded. It should have been logged or reported, of course. A hull patch was an important piece of safety equipment. But not everything that should have been reported was reported.

  But thoughts of the missing patch brought him back to the reason he was sealed inside an air lock, in zero gee, and floating in a film of his own sweat. He keyed on the comm loop. "What's the state of play, Hannah?" he asked.

  "Well, I've got the cable cut, and I only nearly sliced through my own suit twice. I've managed to push the cable end back out of the hole where the viewport was. It was a little exciting when the broken cable started to tumble. It sort of scraped against the hull, but nowhere near fast enough to do any damage. It's drifted well clear of both ships now and shouldn't be hard for us to miss when we start maneuvering. I'm just starting to squeeze a line of sealant around the edge of our slice of deckplate. I did a test fit already, and it ought to go into place just fine. Then I can slap the four Sholto patches and the three Adler patches around the edges of the deckplate and hose the foam-up sealant over the whole mess."

  "Good," Jamie said. "Report unto me when thy seventh seal is setteth in place."

  "Don't go all biblical on me."

  "Do you realize how long I've been waiting to use that line?"

  "Yes, because I've been waiting just as long but you beat me to it. And besides, I don't think 'setteth' is a word. Wolfson out."

  THIRTEEN

  LOTS OF NOTHING

  Hannah checked the pressure in the Sholto's main cabin, then wearily opened her suit helmet and felt her ears pop as the slight residual pressure differential adjusted itself. She pushed herself over to the air lock hatch and punched up the automatic controls. She was just too tired to open the hatch on manual.

  The door swung open--and the blast of locker-room air that struck her in the face made her wish she had kept her helmet sealed just a bit longer. Jamie propelled himself out of the lock chamber and peeled off the breathing mask. All of his clothes were soaked through with sweat. The inside of the hatch and the interior walls of the air lock were coated with condensed moisture. A faint misty cloud appeared for a moment as the hot wet air of the lock chamber came in contact with the cooler, drier air in the cabin.

  "I think I sweated off two kilos in there," he gasped.

  "You ought to measure it in liters, not kilos," Hannah said. "I was going to say I get to use the shower first, but you take the prize."

  "I'm not going to argue. So how's it look?"

  "Better than we have any right to expect," Hannah said. "No significant damage to the Adler besides the viewport and the pilot's chair nearly getting sliced in half. I left the viewport wedged into the chair and the stub of the cable still lodged in the viewport transparency. Our patch is ugly as the devil, but seems to be holding pressure without problems. But we're going to play it very, very safe. We'll keep both ships on reduced pressure to lessen the strain on the patch, and we'll wear pressure suits with the helmets on and open whenever we're aboard the Adler. We're going to keep both nose hatches shut when we're in the Sholto in case the patch fails. And we're going to keep both hatches open whenever we're aboard the Adler, just in case the patch fails and we need to be able to get back into the Sholto fast."

  "That's just about the rules that I was going to suggest," Jamie said. "What about the grav systems? Do we stay in zero gee or back to one gee on both ships, or what?"

  "I haven't decided," Hannah admitted. "I don't think that it's going to make any difference to the patch over the missing viewport. The ships were designed to operate under gravity."

  "Then if it's all the same to you, let's go with standard grav on both ships. Sitting still in zero gee was bad enough for my inner ears. I don't think I'd like to try moving around in a large space for hours on end. And besides, it's a lot easier to take a shower in gravity."

  "Okay, you sold me right there. Gravity it is," said Hannah. "Now get yourself freshened up fast. I'm itching for my turn--and that's no figure of speech."

  Twelve hours later, both of them were cleaned up and had managed to get at least some rest, if not much in the way of proper sleep, and they were back at it, searching the Adler.

  The job was harder than it had been at first. Working in open pressure suits, however necessary, was awkward and uncomfortable. The ruined pilot's chair still had the smashed viewport panel and the stub of cable was still lodged in place. There was no sense wasting time or risking injury trying to repair the chair or remove the debris from it. But there were enough broken and sharp edges that they didn't want it around, either. They wound up removing it from the upper deck and stuffing it in the Adler's lower-deck air lock just to get it out of the way. It was a necessary job, but it cost them nearly an hour of time that neither of them much liked losing.

  The other problem was that they weren't just searching the Adler. They had to inspect her as well, checking and double-checking to make sure that she had not suffered any other, hidden damage. That, of course, went beyond examining the accessible parts of the ship's interior. They went through the process of powering up the Adler's systems in the slowest, most careful and painstaking way they could manage, chec
king every subsystem and status display before going on to the next step.

  They lost more time checking the outsides of the ships. Hannah used the external cameras to inspect as much of both ship's exteriors as she could. Both had suffered scrapes, dents, and dings from cable strikes. Nothing bad enough to threaten the hull structure, but certainly bad enough to foul up both vehicles' aerodynamics. It was just as well they weren't expecting to fly either ship in an atmosphere. While it was entirely possible that there was severe damage just out of sight of the cameras, Hannah ruled and Jamie agreed that the dangers of doing an inspection space walk were far greater than the chance of discovering significant damage that they could actually repair.

  But even with all those distractions out of the way, Jamie was far from enthused about continuing the search. He felt himself to be every bit as intent a hunter as Hannah, every bit as eager and determined to track down a clue, a lead. But part of that talent consisted of listening to one's own instincts--and Jamie's instincts said they were on the wrong track. They had missed something. Somewhere, somehow, all their logic and searching had taken them off course. He was finishing up searching under one deckplate when he finally decided he had to say something. "Hannah?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Whatever it is we're looking for--this isn't the way we're going to find it."

  Hannah sighed and looked up from her own searches inside a breaker panel. "No, we're not. This isn't working. Unless it does work, and we do find it. But I agree. The odds are against us. The trouble is I don't know what else to do. Do you have any ideas?"

  "No," he said. "But what worries me is that under the flight plan we've chosen, we light the candle on the Sholto in eighteen hours, and we have to cut the Adler loose ten hours after that, and let her do her independent burn. And we have to eat and sleep, and get the Adler configured for auto and external control and probably about half a dozen other things as well. Even if this search was worth doing, we don't have time to finish it."

  "I agree with all of that," said Hannah. "This is probably a complete waste of time. Unless you find the decrypt code under the next deckplate. We just don't know enough to do anything else--and we won't learn anything more until we get on-planet. So until we have to cut the Adler loose, or until one of us comes up with a brilliant solution, we're going to keep on searching through this haystack for the needle that's probably not here." And with that, she turned back to the interior of the breaker panel, slowly and carefully studying each section of it before moving on.

  Jamie shut his eyes and allowed the sense of weary frustration that he had been holding back to wash over him, just for a moment. Slogging is part of the job, he told himself. It's the only lead we've got, so it's the lead we're going to follow. That sounded like the sort of thing Commander Kelly would say. And if there was anyone who was right more often than Hannah Wolfson, that person was Commander Wilhelmina Kelly.

  Jamie opened his eyes, shook his head to clear it, and moved on to the next deckplate.

  Everything went according to plan. Unfortunately. They searched until they were flat out of time for searching, did all the preps on the Adler, retreated to the Sholto, and lit her engines to start the initial braking maneuver to start trimming their ferocious velocity as they entered the Metran star system.

  Hannah insisted on running at five gees for a full four hours, watching every sensor and strain gauge all the time, before she grudgingly agreed to throttle up--very slowly and carefully, over a period of two hours--to twelve gees, but she flatly refused to risk their much-abused spacecraft at anything higher than that, even though all the boards showed solid green. There had been enough surprises.

  Hannah brought the main navigation plot up on the largest of the screens on the Sholto's control panel. On the left of the screen, slowly creeping toward the right, was the double dot that represented the current position of the Sholto and Adler. Along the right side of the screen was the bright reddish-gold circle representing the local sun, and, much closer to it than to the incoming ships, the present position of Metran itself.

  Hannah didn't bother to display any of the other planets or satellites or other bodies in the Metran system. None of them were going to enter into their problem, and she didn't want to be distracted by them. However, there were two other elements visible in the display: a blue and a red arc, both centered on Metran. They represented the approximate maximum range of ship-detection equipment watching from the planet for a ship under high-gee reactionless thrust. The blue one was far closer to the planet.

  It showed what human equipment could do. The red represented the best current estimate for what Elder Race detection systems could do. It was about three and half times farther out from the planet. Anything they wanted to conceal was going to have to be accomplished well outside that range. Inside that radius, they would have to rely on the much trickier task of maneuver-masking, of constantly keeping the Sholto between the planet and the Adler. On the plus side, spotting a ship with its engines off was a far more difficult task. Once the Adler was in her concealment orbit and had shut her engines down, she would be essentially undetectable to anyone's sensors.

  "The thing I don't understand," said Jamie, leaning over the pilot's chair and staring at the display, "is why are they only three or four times better than us?"

  "Hmmm?" Hannah asked absently as she checked her status boards again.

  "The detection range for the Elder Races. Why isn't it a lot better than it is? They've had thousands or millions of years' more time for technical development."

  Hannah grinned and raised a conspiratorial finger to her lips. "Shhh," she said. "UniGov doesn't want people asking that question. It could lead to trouble."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Actually it's not just the United Human Government. It's all the human governments, and all the spy agencies. That question gets them nervous. People are starting to notice that the Elder Race xenos are just way, way, ahead of us, instead of way, way, way, way ahead. Some people even think we're ahead of them in some fields. Remember how the Reqwar Pavlat had to call in human genetics experts?"

  "Hard to forget," said Jamie. "But what's so bad about us not being so far behind?"

  "Because it might make people start to tell themselves that human civilization isn't as weak or vulnerable or insignificant as the Elder Races keep telling us. The trouble is that, even if their detection systems and data systems and star drives are 'only' twice or three or ten times better than ours, when you'd assume that a million years of technology would make them a hundred or a thousand or a million times better--they still are three times better than our stuff. And there are a lot more of them than there are of us. If we humans started feeling our oats too much, and started to make nuisances of ourselves, it might just make a few of the old races--like the Xenoatrics on Metran--wake up from their nice long naps and decide to do something about it. And if they wanted to take the trouble, they could render the human race extinct inside of a week. So better not to rock the boat when you don't need to."

  "Yeah, I guess," he said doubtfully. "But why aren't they a million times better than we are?"

  "Pick your theory. Maybe there is some sort of inevitable plateau. Maybe there is some mental block that is innate to all intelligent life--a wall inside the mind that no race can get past. The Elder Races reached it long ago, but we just haven't gotten to it yet.

  "Or else there are explicit, objective limits to possible technical achievement, the way they used to assume there was no way to exceed the speed of light. Maybe there are limits to what can be done with electronics, computers, chemistry, and so on. The Elder Races have bumped up against them, and rightly assume that sooner or later, we'll hit them too. Or maybe it's all about attitude. Maybe the spirit grows tired. Why go to huge effort to get something that's utterly amazing when you already have something that's splendid? They don't need better than what they have, so why bother?

  "They're always so condescending and amus
ed about how hard humans and the Kendari are trying to catch up, trying to buy or steal or create or surpass all the inventions they've had since we were duking it out with the Neanderthals. They pat us on the head and roll their eyes because they know we'll grow out of it, and maybe catch up with them sooner or later--but never, never go beyond.

  "Or else you could listen to the people who do technical projections for UniGov. They say that if current trends continue, in another century or two, humans and Kendari will blow right past what the Elder Races can do." Hannah stared silently at her displays before she spoke again. "And if the tech projection people are right--then you'd better pray that humans and Kendari learn to get along with each other before then--or there's going to be nothing but smoking ruins left where the Galaxy used to be." She drummed her fingers on the control panel and glanced up at Jamie. "But catching up with the Elder Races is a dream--or maybe a nightmare--to worry about later. Right now all we have to do is keep them from spotting the Irene Adler. Let's get started."

  "Okay, engine stop," Hannah announced. "Confirming hatches sealed on both ships. Closed hatches confirmed."

  "Now who's doing call-outs?" Jamie asked, raising his voice to be heard from his seat on the lower deck.

  "Hey, you're a bad influence. Now let's see if the docking system really did come through unscathed."

  "What do we do if the docking rings are jammed together and we can't undock the two ships?" Jamie asked.

  "I have no idea," Hannah said. "Let's just hope that thirty seconds from now, we won't have to worry about it." She flipped a switch. "Undocking commenced."

  There was a comforting series of rattling bangs as the capture latches released. "Okay, that's a good sign," Hannah said. "I'm showing all latches fully released. We're at soft dock now. Disengaging soft seal connections. Stand by for the champagne cork."