Death Sentence

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "Why the heck did they put the air lock floor on its side?" Jamie asked.

  "They didn't," Hannah said. "At least, not permanently." There were waist-high railings welded to the two sides of the mesh flooring. The one to the left had a small control panel bolted to it. Hannah pushed a button to close the lock's outer door. As soon as it was shut, the steel-mesh floor--and the direction of "down"--began to rotate slowly clockwise.

  Jamie, startled, grabbed at the handrail and glared at Hannah, who was grinning ear to ear. "I take it that warning me wouldn't have been nearly as much fun, would it?" he growled.

  "Nowhere near," Hannah said as the floor's rotation slowed to a smooth halt, level with the interior lock door. "The floor grating itself isn't even powered or anything. It's on rollers, so it will just naturally adjust itself to roll to where 'down' is. The air lock has its own independent grav generator that can redirect itself so 'down' is in any direction. Its standard setting is keyed to using the lock's doors. The grav field shifts by one degree or so at a time, about ten degrees a second, so as to match up with the local direction of 'down' inside or outside the ship."

  "Cute," said Jamie, still plainly annoyed. "But if you've got any other clever pranks to play on me, save them for later, okay?"

  Hannah grinned. "Let's see what we've got inside." She pushed another button on the lock's panel and the inner lock unlatched--to the sound of muffled curses from inside that became clearer and more distinct as the door swung open.

  "What the--burning devils! Just when I was getting things squared away--oh, hello, ma'am. Sir." They saw a technician in blue, sweat-stained coveralls. He had obviously been crouching over, hooking something up, and been forced to scramble to get out of the way of the lock's swinging door.

  Hannah recognized the man. Gunther Hendricks--one of the senior ground crew techs. Hannah never felt quite comfortable with the way Gunther called her "ma'am." He was too experienced, too skilled, to be showing her so much deference. She could only imagine how awkward Jamie felt about hearing himself called "sir" by a man old enough to be his grandfather. But Gunther Hendricks did everything by the book--and the book said that was how techs were supposed to address Special Agents.

  "Sorry, Gunther," said Hannah. "We didn't know anyone was working in here. We didn't mean to barge in on you."

  "No, it's all right," said Gunther. "I just get a little on edge when I'm installing one of these." He gestured toward a blue cylinder with rounded ends, about fifty centimeters long and twenty wide, on an equipment rack next to the air lock.

  Hannah raised one eyebrow. "I don't blame you a bit for that," she said. The blue lozenge-shaped thing was a hellbomb, a self-destruct device that would destroy the ship so completely, vaporize it so thoroughly, that no trace of it would be left behind. "It'll put us a little on edge having it aboard."

  "Good," said Gunther. "I don't care how many safeguards and lockouts and system checks you have on something like this. You know, and I know, as a matter of logic, that you could pound on that casing all day with a hammer, then fire a clip of heavy-caliber ammo at it, and it wouldn't even muss up the paintwork. That thing is tough.

  "But if you're smart, you treat it like it was made of spun sugar. It won't go off. It can't go off without you doing about six very specific things first. But ma'am, sir--people make mistakes, and machines aren't perfect. It just might be that this thing was put together wrong, or got dropped in shipment in just the right way to bend a delicate part out of true. It might be that my bolting it to the equipment rack set up just the right stresses so that it's primed to go off the next time it gets jostled. It's not true, but it might be. It's a one-in-a-billion, one-in-a-trillion shot."

  "We know," said Hannah. "We know." She couldn't help noticing that Gunther hadn't called the thing by its proper name. He could barely bring himself to call it a self-destruct device, let alone "bomb." It clearly had him a lot more on edge than perhaps he realized.

  "And we know that there are ships that disappear for no known reason," said Jamie. "We'll be careful."

  Gunther looked at Jamie with wry amusement but spoke with a note of sadness in his voice. "You do that, sir. Please be sure you do that. Because this ship here, the Irene Adler, is one of those ships. Or was." He gestured up toward the Adler's tiny flight deck. "I was part of the crew that boarded her when she came in. He was up there, in the pilot's seat. I think he wanted to die looking at the stars." Gunther was silent for a moment. "Whatever it was that killed him was something he wasn't expecting, something we've never seen before. You'd call it a one-in-a-trillion chance," he said, "until it happens to you."

  Gunther Hendricks looked at them with a fierce, almost angry intensity. "I don't wish to pull anyone else out of this ship. I don't ever want to draw that duty again. I don't want any more ships that vanish for no good reason. I don't need more reasons to lie awake nights. Don't just be careful on this mission. Be careful," he said, emphasizing the last word so hard that it was almost a shout.

  The tiny ship filled with a suffocating silence. Gunther looked almost as startled by his outburst as Hannah felt. He spoke again, in a quieter tone, after a moment's pause. "Sorry," he said. "But--I knew Trevor Wilcox. Not well, but I knew him. And being part of the team that took him out of here, seeing what they had turned him into...well, that got to me."

  "I believe it," Hannah said.

  "You said 'they' turned him into what you found," Jamie said. "Who is 'they,' exactly?"

  "The Metrannans, of course," Gunther said. "Who else would it be?"

  "That's what we're going to find out," Jamie said. "Why do you blame them?"

  Gunther frowned. "He went there young and healthy, and he died of old age on the way home. It must have been something there that did it to him, and it must have been the Metrannans that did it. Logic, that's all."

  Hannah could see that Jamie was about to ask something more, to press the point harder. But Gunther wasn't a forensic pathologist. His logic was nothing more than a jump, a leap to conclusions inspired by fear. His answers on the subject would be useless--worse than useless, if they served to distract Jamie, lead him in the wrong direction. "That's enough, Jamie," she said, before he could speak.

  And yet Jamie's instinctive urge to question Gunther was correct. Gunther was a first and unexpected witness. But better to talk to him about what he did know and had some expertise about. "Were you briefed on what this one is about, Gunther?" she asked.

  He shrugged. "Some, not all," he said. "And I'm not feeling all that curious, I can tell you. There's something aboard this ship that you need to find. They've searched for it twice, and you're supposed to find it."

  "So why are they having you install new equipment when we're supposed to treat this place like a murder investigation site?"

  Gunther shook his head. "I don't know the why. I can guess that Kelly figures a max-power self-destruct means you can be sure of keeping the Metrannans from getting the document, and that's more important than us getting it. But on the how, I can tell you a lot more. We were ordered to do microscopic scans of the surfaces and subsurface density scans before we installed anything." He gestured to the spot where the self-destruct device was attached. "If there had been a microdot glued down on that piece of bulkhead, or a drilled-out and covered-over hollow big enough to hide a microdot, we'd have spotted it. Same thing with the section of deck where we attached the acceleration couch."

  "I was about to ask about that," Hannah said, gesturing toward their feet. There was a portable acceleration chair there, folded flat to the deck.

  "Why not do that level of search on the whole ship?" Jamie asked.

  "Lots of reasons," said Gunther. "Just setting up the gear and doing the scans of a square meter of bulkhead and a square meter of deck took hours--and that was on flat surfaces. It would be ten times slower to microscan complex surfaces. We'd have to search inside the control panels or inside a sealed tank. It might take years. We'll do scans of all the items w
e had to take off the ship--Wilcox's body, his clothes, decayed food, depleted air-regen units, that sort of thing. We'll be lucky to complete just that much before you get back."

  "And probably it's not on a microdot," said Hannah. "I really doubt that's the way Wilcox would have hidden the item we're supposed to look for."

  "Why not?" Jamie asked.

  Hannah grinned. "That's a short question with a long answer, and we don't have much time before we boost. We'll go into it later," she said. But there was more to her reasons for keeping quiet than mere time-saving. They were already likely skating up to the edge of what the techs were cleared to hear about their assignment. It was a professional courtesy to keep Gunther from accidentally learning more than he'd want to know on a case like this. "Anything else we need to know from you, Gunther?" she asked, steering the conversation into safer areas.

  "Just that we're installing the identical gear on the real Sholto," Gunther said, pointing upward toward the Adler's nose hatch. "Two reasons for that, of course. You'll need two acceleration chairs if you're in just one of the ships during part of the mission, and of course we want the two ships to look as much like each other as possible, just in case."

  "In case of what?" Jamie asked.

  Gunther shrugged. "I don't know the plan, but it stands to reason, if you want the Adler to pretend it's the Sholto, it's probably smart if the two ships look the same, inside and out."

  "Right you are," said Hannah. "And for what it's worth, we don't know the plan, either. We'll get out of your way so you can go ahead and finish up," she said. "I think we'd better get over to the Sholto and start prepping for our ride out of here."

  "Very good, ma'am," he said. "Good luck out there. To both of you."

  Hannah nodded unhappily. She had flown in them before, and she didn't much care for the Sherlock-class ships. They were supposed to be miracles of efficiency, the smallest all-mode ships ever built by humans, capable of landing on a planet's surface, boosting to orbit, crossing long interplanetary distances, and transiting between star systems. But there was a reason those jobs were usually divvied up between two or three kinds of ships. Shoehorning a reentry system and landing gear into the same hull as a stardrive and a long-duration life-support system meant a lot of design compromises, a lot of hardware that was expected to do two or three things reasonably well, instead of doing one job very well.

  "This bucket doesn't look much bigger than the old Orient Express--back before we got her blown up," said Jamie. "And she was just a surface-to-orbit job. This thing is a starship?"

  "She's a starship," Hannah confirmed, "and she's exactly the same size as the poor old Express. They're both modifications from the same hull design."

  "Makes me appreciate the Captain Hastings," Jamie replied.

  "You've been in the lap of luxury. Back before you and I partnered together, I practically lived in these tubs." The Hastings had been their star-to-star transport on a number of missions, and had carried the ill-fated and since-replaced Orient Express as a landing craft. Half of Hannah's career had been spent on riding ships like the Adler to and from missions--or at least it seemed that way to her. It was a bit of a jolt to realize that Jamie had never been aboard one before. He had been partnered with Hannah from his first day in the Bullpen, and therefore hadn't spent any time at all on single-ships.

  The Adler was basically a rounded-off cone, and her interior reflected that. The lower deck, where they were standing, was a circle about five meters across, with much of the perimeter space taken up by the air lock, a small and uncomfortable refresher compartment with toilet and washing facilities, and various engineering and access panels. There was a fold-down bed, and a pull-down table, and a fold-out chair--but not room to have all three of them out at once. The galley was another series of pull-out modules, as was the miniature station intended for in-field forensic work. There was barely any room left for personal items or specialty equipment. Living in a Sherlock-class ship was an adventure in constantly stowing and unstowing gear. It was going to be doubly fun with two of them aboard, plus the luggage packed with fancy-dress clothes they had to to take along.

  Hannah looked up toward the upper deck and the nose hatch. Of course, calling it an upper deck was a massive overstatement. It was all of three and a half meters above the level of the lower deck. At that level, the conical ship's diameter had narrowed to about three meters wide, at a generous estimate. The upper deck was really nothing more than a section of open steel-mesh flooring that took up only about half of the ship's interior diameter, with the rest left open to serve as a passageway between the nose hatch and the lower deck. Bolted to the steel-mesh floor was an acceleration chair that faced the ship's less-than-sophisticated control panel and three small viewports. The pilot's chair could be swiveled about to put the pilot's back to the deckplates so she was looking toward the ship's forward end for close-in maneuvering and docking with the nose hatch. There was a rope ladder rigged from the nose hatch down to the lower deck of the Adler. The steps of the ladder were heavy-duty plastic, and the ladder ropes ended in metal rings that slipped into snap-shut stanchions on the deck. The topside end of the ladder was secured the same way--and there was another set of snap-shuts that held the ladder in place at the level of the upper deck.

  Hannah slung the strap of her duffel bag over her shoulder and started the climb up the ladder toward the nose hatch, and the Sholto. Jamie followed.

  She paused at the upper deck, shifting to one side of the ladder to let Jamie come up alongside her. They both stared at the pilot's acceleration chair for a moment.

  "Yeah," said Gunther, answering the unasked question. "That's where we found him. At his station, staring out at the stars. We, ah, had to remove and replace the pilot's chair. It wasn't in very good shape, after, ah, Special Agent Wilcox had been in it for all those months."

  It seemed to Hannah that there wasn't any better response to that than a moment's silence. She let the moment pass, and then began climbing upward again. Jamie stayed behind a moment longer than he needed, staring at the empty pilot's seat.

  Sometimes being a good partner meant pretending not to notice private moments seen from too close in. Hannah moved on to the top of the ship.

  The rope ladder came to an end in two more snap-shut cleats just to one side of the open nose-hatch hatchway. The circular hatch was open, and the hatch cover was swung to one side and latched in place up against the inner hull, opposite to the pilot's station.

  She peered up and through the open hatch. The Adler was joined nose to nose with the Sholto, and the interiors of the two hatches joined to form a tunnel about ninety centimeters wide and two meters long. Each ship's hatch had a tube-shaped section of cargo netting stretched taut around the length of its interior. The Adler's netting was bright blue, while the Sholto's was flaming orange.

  "That's not all that identical," she said, pointing to the netting as Jamie came up behind her.

  "Yeah, but it will help us tell which ship we're in," Jamie said. "And look there. We're covered." Jamie pointed to a carefully wrapped-up pack of orange netting tucked in between the Adler's blue netting and the hatch tunnel's interior surface. Hannah peeked through the tunnel and saw a corresponding pack of blue netting tucked in behind the Sholto's orange netting. They could swap one for the other in a minute or two, if the need arose.

  Hannah grunted. She should have had more faith in Gunther and his team.

  She pushed her duffel into the docking tunnel and went in after it. She found herself suddenly in zero gee, all her reflexes scrambled as she floated rapidly upward toward the nose of the Sholto and the point where gravity would kick in again--with down in the opposite direction. She lunged for the netting to save herself and grabbed at her duffel just in time. Obviously, the engineers had rigged the gravity generators to provide zero gee inside the tunnel as a sort of transition zone between the two ships, since each had "down" in the opposite direction from the other. She took a moment to calm
herself before turning around to see Jamie, grinning evilly back at her.

  "I thought so," he said with a laugh. "That's why I let you go first."

  She smiled ruefully. "Okay," she said, "I guess I had that coming. Let's go look around the real Sholto."

  She pulled herself completely into the docking tunnel so that she floated in zero gee. It was a tight squeeze, but she managed to flip herself around so her feet were pointed in the opposite direction. She got the duffel strap around her shoulder again, then maneuvered herself around to the Sholto's rope ladder. She eased herself downward into the full-gee interior of the ship. It was a decidedly odd experience to have her legs in full gravity and her head in zero gee.

  Hannah quickly concluded that she didn't like it, and made her way rapidly down the ladder to the Sholto's lower deck, dodging past two technicians crammed into the upper deck making some last-minute adjustment. Jamie followed behind her. They stood on the lower deck of the Bartholomew Sholto and looked straight back up the way they had come, toward the Irene Adler. Gunther was up there--or was it down there?--in the center of the Adler's lower deck. He craned his neck up to look at them, waved, then turned back to his work, giving them a fine view of the top of his head as he walked out of view on what Hannah's hindbrain was quite certain was the ceiling.

  "This is going to take some getting used to," she said to Jamie.

  "You mean the way half of everything is upside down?" he asked with a laugh. "It's been that way since the first day I signed up with BSI. Come on, let's get squared away and ready for boost. We're on the clock."

  FIVE

  CONSTANT OF CHANGE

  "Change is wrong," said the being on the low platform in the front of the room. The chamber was dimly lit, the rounded walls glowing faintly. A single shaft of light framed the glittering form of Bulwark of Constancy. The room's arrangements resembled something suitable for a place of worship.

  Learned Searcher Taranarak of geneline Lucyrn resembled Bulwark of Constancy not at all, but her species and Constancy's had lived together in close quarters for millions of year. She could read Constancy's body language as perfectly as she could that of a Metrannan--and Taranarak knew that Constancy could interpret her own gestures just as well.