Death Sentence

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Jamie paid her no mind, but instead finished flipping through the pages of the book. He shoved it at her, and grabbed for the next one in the stack. "Count!" he said. "Count the pages in that one. Double-check me while I do the next one."

  "What?"

  "Count the pages. It's simple enough. Just do it."

  But she didn't do it. Instead she stared at him, a cold feeling of fear in the pit of her stomach. She had just decided on a risky course of action that still had plenty of chances to get them killed while exposing every human on Center, maybe every human everywhere, to grave danger. And she had done it on the basis of trusting the judgment of a young man who obviously thought that, in spite of their situation, counting the pages in notebooks was the most important thing he had to do.

  The good people of Center, and Earth, and every human world, might be in more trouble than she had thought.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ACROSS AND DOWN

  Hannah stared at her partner for a very long time. "James," she said at last, speaking very slowly. "James, I think you need to lie down for a while." Maybe a long while. With ropes tied around you.

  "Count them! Forty-eight!" he announced triumphantly. "Sixteen pages in each section! In all four books! I was right!"

  "That's the big clue you didn't want to talk about until we got here? Agent Mendez, in case you've forgotten, we've got a xeno spacecraft, piloted by a psychotic who killed Wilcox, about to complete a transit-jump right into our laps so it can continue trying to hunt us down and kill us. We've got a certain spray gun that I'd really like to get back to the boys in the lab. I've got a semiconscious xeno on the next deck down who is either a spy for one of about four factions on Metran, some of whom would like to kill us, or else a refugee who might have vital information--and I've got you counting notebook pages. I am seriously starting to think about forcibly sedating you. What in the hell are you talking about?"

  "On Metran. All the notebooks felt wrong," he said. "All our investigator's notebooks felt too fat when they were new. They felt right after I had used them for a while. I thought at first it was just the higher gravity. But then I figured out the real reason--and just now I got the chance to confirm it. And I was right!"

  "What?"

  Jamie flipped the book shut, and pointed to the cover. "You gave me the idea, the connection, when you told Fallogon not to judge a book by its cover. It says right there. Sixty sheets. Twenty lined, twenty graph, twenty blank. But it's not true! All four of the surviving books on this ship have forty-eight sheets each--exactly sixteen each of lined, graph, and blank paper."

  "So what? You've lost it, Jamie. And you've lost me. You've got about thirty seconds left to convince me that you are not completely out of your mind."

  Jamie pointed at the spiral wiring binding that held the notebook's pages together. "Look there! Not a single, microscopic bit of scrap or paper fluff. Not a sign at all that any of the pages had even been there. Not on any of them. They've all been very carefully removed."

  "So what?"

  "So the Metrannans count in fours and sixteens and sometimes by twelves, and four books, each with four sets of sixteen sheets making up forty-eight total sheets would be a very nice, neat, round number to them--and they like things nice and neat and even, if you hadn't noticed. And I really doubt that the Metrannans sent into this ship by Bulwark of Constancy could read English or Arabic numbers. If they wanted to see if any pages had been used and torn out, they would have counted the physical pages. Trevor figured that out too, after he was searched--but he had some reason to use one or more pages of the notebooks, and he didn't want to leave any clue behind that he had done so, in case there was another search."

  Hannah started to see it. Just a glimmer, but she started to see it. "But if they had counted the pages on the first search, then checked again on a second search, they'd spot the anomaly. He'd have drawn attention to the thing he was trying to hide."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. If the first searchers didn't count the pages, or if they didn't take relentlessly detailed notes, or the second searchers didn't read the detailed notes, then Trevor could have gotten away with it. And if there was a second search, they might not think to count the pages again. But what this tells me is that Trevor removed at least one page from at least one of these notebooks, then figured out that he needed to hide the fact that there were missing pages. So he tore out enough sheets from all the notebooks to make them come out even. And the only reason it would be worth doing all that is if he had written something very, very important on a notebook page and didn't want the bad guys to notice."

  "But what happened to the leftover sheets?"

  "I think he burned them."

  "Hold it. You had me going for a second there," said Hannah. "But you just jumped the tracks. Burned them where?"

  Jamie grabbed at one of the notebooks and flipped it open to the last page of the graph-paper section. "There," he said. "The only thing written in any of the surviving notebooks. Where we protect our treasures/unless we must destroy them. That's the reason he left four books behind. We wondered about that, too, remember? Three as window dressing, and the fourth to hold that message. It's not a doodle. It's not a joke. It's a message to us. To you and me."

  Hannah looked at the logo over the motto. "BSI. Burn Stash Immediately. The destruct oven?"

  "Except the joke logo is a message too," Jamie said. "The B for Burn and the S for Stash are finished, and very elaborately decorated. But not the I. It's not finished. The I for Immediately isn't done. Burn Stash--but not immediately."

  "But the destruct oven was filled to bursting!" Hannah objected.

  "Right! And it shouldn't have been. A stranger, a xeno, would have no way of knowing that--but Trevor was assuming we'd know BSI procedures and regulations and how the oven was supposed to be used, so we'd be smart enough to figure it out, but we weren't. There's no way Trevor had enough classified material on board the ship to fill that oven so completely. Besides, we know he jettisoned a large amount of stuff. Why burn things needlessly when he could have just dumped it all overboard? Either the oven should have been totally empty, or it should have held a small amount of unburned material, ready to be destroyed if need be, or else we should have found the ashes or burn residue of whatever single datastore device held the decryption key. And if the destruct key was burned, it must have been just before the boarding party came onto the ship. In that case, what point would there be in doing the clear-out he did after the search? A full oven makes no sense."

  "So why was it full to bursting?"

  "Because he stuffed it full of whatever paper he could find, along with anything else that might hold data that he hadn't thrown overboard already, and I can tell you why he did that, too. If you were a xeno from a species that tended to be very concerned with clothing and appearance, and you managed to pry open a concealed chamber and get a choking faceful of ashes, maybe you wouldn't search that spot too carefully. And there's one other thing--"

  An alert buzzer went off. Hannah checked her board. "It's the Sholto," she said. "Right on schedule. Hold on. I've got to make sure she gets herself into position and we've got all the communications working right."

  "Right," Jamie said distractedly. "Go ahead." Hannah worked her boards while Jamie struggled to keep from fidgeting like an eight-year-old impatient to open his birthday presents.

  Hannah refused to be hurried. If they wanted to live through the next few hours, they had to be sure the Sholto was ready to play her part. "All right," she said. "That's done. Sholto linked in, and she will make her matching burn in a couple of minutes. I can monitor from here. You were saying there was something else?"

  "Yes!" Jamie said. "Something both of us missed. I almost had it once on the planet, but it got chased out of my mind until Fallogon started pontificating at us. He said something like a sealed vessel under pressure wouldn't change the way it looked."

  "Yeah, so?"

  "So the oven is sealed for use. When
we first popped open the cover over the destruct oven door, it kicked ash into the air. There was ash outside the oven door. That couldn't happen unless the oven was opened after it was used to burn something."

  Hannah thought about that for a second, then got an eager look in her eye. "Okay. Let me see if I can put this together. You're saying that Trevor burned a bunch of junk, probably including the missing notebooks, in the destruct oven--then opened it up again. He did that because he wanted to hide something in the oven, and he wanted the ashes to discourage a thorough examination of the oven, in case the bad guys found it during a later, longer search. Which suggests that there was something unburned in there that he wanted to stay hidden. And we can both guess what that might be."

  "Right. Perfect. Exactly."

  "It's going to be a messy job," she said.

  Jamie grinned. "I've figured out how to do it," he said. "And I'm volunteering."

  The nav system lit up, showing the Sholto coming about and making her velocity-matching burn. Seconds later, the Adler, the Sholto, and the booster were all flying in formation, in a rough equilateral triangle that measured approximately ten thousand kilometers on a side. Hannah barely noticed. She was too busy thinking about the destruct oven.

  Jamie's first idea for keeping the ash under control had been to use the Adler's emergency pressure suit. But that was too much, too complicated. Instead he went with the same breathing mask he had used while waiting out the repairs in the air lock, plus a pair of rubber gloves. That and a cup to scoop the ashes out and a few large evidence bags to hold them were all he really needed.

  They had to move a recuperating but still wretchedly unhappy Taranarak up out of her pile of padding and blanket so as to get at the entrance of the refresher compartment.

  Jamie went in, wearing the mask and gloves, and closed the door behind him to keep the ash out of the main cabin. He knelt down, popped up the deckplate, and watched happily as a few motes of ash jumped into the air. He checked his datapad for the combination, keyed it in, and opened the destruct oven's door, slowly and carefully.

  Only a tiny bit of ash jumped into the air. Jamie set to work at once, slowly and carefully scooping out the powdered ash and melted scraps of plastic. It was with something akin to both grim satisfaction and glee that he pulled out a blackened length of spiral wire, of the type used in BSI notebooks, and then another, and another, and another. The wires were the remains of the complete notebooks that had been burned, along with the surplus pages from the four books that had survived.

  He started to worry when he realized that he had almost cleared out the entire oven chamber, one slow scoop of material at a time, without finding anything. The air in the refresher chamber was thick with dust and floating ash, and a residue of the stuff was adhering to every available surface. His knees were aching. But he wasn't finding anything at all.

  Could he have missed it? Were they going to have to sift through all those bags full of ash, looking for some blob of material that only looked burned and melted that held the decrypt key? Or had all his lovely logic been wrong, from beginning to end? Maybe Trevor had been using the notebooks to keep an endlessly detailed personal diary and simply decided to get rid of them after the gear jettison, maybe when he was already too weakened by the aging illness to go through the effort of dumping all the notebooks out the air lock.

  Jamie had the oven almost completely empty, and was down to the very bottom of the chamber, before he brushed his gloved fingers on it. He pulled his arm out of the chamber and peered down into its dusty interior.

  There, at the very back, carefully taped to the rear wall of the chamber, was a neatly folded square of what appeared to be official BSI investigator's notebook lined paper.

  Jamie resisted the urge to hurry. Better to cross the t's and dot all the i's. He cleared out the rest of the ash, then wiped down the interior of the oven chamber with a cloth. He checked as much of the chamber as he could visually, and then stuck his hand back in and ran it around every square centimeter of the surface to confirm there wasn't anything else in there. He sealed up all his bags of ash and debris, wiped himself off as best he could, and put on a fresh set of gloves. Then and only then did he allow himself to reach in and oh-so-carefully peel the square of paper off the back of the oven's burn chamber. He made one last check, both by hand and by eye, to confirm that nothing else had been taped down under the square of paper.

  And if all that slow and careful work also allowed him a little time to savor his triumph, he was not going to feel too guilty about that. He could have made up a pretty good list of reasons for why he had earned that moment.

  Jamie carefully dropped the square of paper into a small transparent evidence bag, stood up, dusted himself off just a trifle more, and made an oddly triumphant exit from the refresher compartment.

  Hannah was there waiting when Jamie came out. He peeled the breathing mask off with one hand and used the other to give the square of paper to Hannah.

  Even Taranarak took an interest, forgetting her motion sickness enough to stand up on her four legs and stare at the paper. "Is that it?" Taranarak asked eagerly. "Is that the decrypt key?"

  "Let's open it and find out," said Hannah. "Nice work, Jamie. Very, very, very nice work. I promise to give you an extremely large benefit of the doubt the next time I think you've completely lost your mind. Where was it, exactly?"

  "Taped to the bottom of the burn chamber. Trevor must have burned a bunch of notebooks and other junk, scooped it all out, taped that paper in place, then dumped the ashes and burn debris back in on top of it. Go on," he said. "Open it up."

  Hannah didn't argue. She reached over to a wall panel and pulled out a fold-out worktable, and the little bench seat that went with it. She sat down. Jamie grabbed one of the packing cases of gear from the Sholto and sat down on it opposite her, while Taranarak moved to stand between them. Hannah opened the evidence bag, slipped the paper square out, and examined it carefully. "It's taped shut," she said. "I don't want to tear it. Scissors?"

  Jamie handed her a pair out of his evidence kit almost before she was finished asking. She carefully snipped the transparent tape apart, handed the scissors back, and unfolded the square. Inside was another square of paper. The outer piece was blank on both sides. It was obviously nothing more than an improvised envelope. Nonetheless, Hannah put it carefully back in the evidence bag. This was a time to be thorough, not a time to rush.

  She unfolded the inner sheet. It was blank on one side. There was writing on the other, obviously written with great care.

  She read it over--her heart sank as she did so. She handed it to Jamie. "I think we're in very big trouble," she said. The writing on the inner sheet of paper read this way:

  To good old, Hallaben to see back half of

  insult twice. Wen Her mutt cited know

  more grant of bank officer. Ungreen leaks

  hate this conic section. Blank the town

  Red. Good sunset vision might mean a

  being gets the blanks with other end of

  Newton's glass. Climbing Jacob's leads to

  heavens door held open. A killing

  lightness weighs them down. Edgar's

  mantel, like Vogel's Eagle Name Source.

  "Okay," said Jamie as he put the paper down. "Does that stuff about the benefit of the doubt apply to Trevor?" he asked. "Because maybe Trevor was pretty far gone by the time he wrote those words."

  "Is the news good? You are neither of you acting happy," said Taranarak in Lesser Trade.

  "What?" said Jamie. "Oh, of course. Sorry." He shifted to Lesser Trade himself. "Forgive us. The note is in English--sort of--and force of habit made Hannah and me both drop into speaking English after reading it."

  "I can already see that the note cannot be the decrypt key," said Taranarak in Lesser Trade. "It should be in Greater Trade Writing symbols. Hallaben would never have encoded anything using human writing. What does it say, anyway?"

  "It's
nonsense. Gibberish."

  "Microdot?" Hannah asked. "Maybe the writing is meant to camouflage some sort of microdot or microwriting?"

  "We've been through that," said Jamie. "Trevor didn't have the equipment." He shook his head and looked up at Hannah. "I really don't want to believe he was crazy," he said. "And I can't believe it. Everything else was so clear, so purposeful. Maybe it's not gibberish. Maybe it's code."

  "No," said Hannah, staring at the words, and starting to feel just a trifle better. "Not code. Clues."

  "What?"

  "Clues. Puzzle clues. But done up to hide them in plain sight from people without the background to spot what's wrong or odd. It looks like plain old English prose. If you were an alien who didn't speak or read English, you'd never know from how the words looked that it wasn't a farewell note to his mother or something. And if you were an alien who did read English fairly well, you'd want to tear your heart out. You wouldn't be able to make heads or tails out of this--because the text reads like crossword puzzle clues. Not exactly like them, but close. Puns. Jokes. Word play."

  Jamie's face lit up. "Yes!" he said. "You're right. It's a puzzle. He left a puzzle for us to solve. And the answer will lead us to the--"

  An alert tone went off, squawking at them from the flight deck. "Oh, for the love of God!" Hannah jumped half out of her seat at the noise. "That scared me half to death. You're right, Jamie. He left us a puzzle--and we picked a hell of a time to finally get around to finding it."