Death Sentence

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "So we are left with the worst of all cases," said Yalananav. "We have a population utterly convinced that there is a cure for their short lives, convinced that we have deliberately denied it to them--which is in fact what Hallaben and Bulwark of Constancy did--and we now have no treatment, and no prospect of a treatment." An annunciator chirruped, and Yalananav consulted his pocket dataviewer. "The commander of the Order Patrols reports that maybe--maybe--the riots are subsiding," he said. "He believes we may have a period of quiet setting in."

  "At least until the next rumor breaks loose," Tigmin said.

  "I no longer fear rumors, Colleague Tigmin," Yalananav said as he put away his dataviewer. "But after what I have just heard, I tremble at the very thought of the truth breaking loose."

  EIGHT

  THERE AND GONE

  Jamie squirmed in the Sholto's pilot seat and flexed his fingers a few times before placing them on the controls. They had topped off the Sholto's thruster power as much as possible, transferring energy from the booster stage. It was time to cut loose from the booster and head out on their own. Jamie had drawn the piloting duty. He wasn't yet fully qualified, and wasn't supposed to fly a ship except under direct supervision of a certified pilot like Hannah.

  "Okay," said Hannah, "take it easy. No need to rush."

  "And no need to breathe down my neck quite so hard," Jamie grumbled. He did a mental check of his planned procedures and sequences, took a deep breath, and keyed in the first command. He watched the displays as first the Sholto's engines, then the auxiliary booster's thrusters, throttled down to zero. He could almost imagine that he felt a flickering shift in weight as the thrust zeroed out, but he knew it was an illusion. The Sholto's acceleration compensators were far too powerful, precise, and sensitive to allow any such variations. Otherwise, Hannah and he would have been mashed flat into jelly at the start of the flight. The gravity field in the Sholto was a steady one gee and was going to stay that way.

  Jamie checked his displays again. There was no great rush to complete this maneuver, and he was much more interested in getting it right rather than doing it fast.

  "All right," he said. "All ship thrusters and auxiliary booster throttles are at zero. Main and aux booster propulsion systems to safe mode. Prepping for undock from aux booster."

  "I'm right here, Jamie," Hannah said, plainly amused. "I can see the displays as well as you can."

  "Just trying to do it right," Jamie said, trying to sound calmer than he felt. "Call-outs are part of the official procedure."

  Hannah gestured out the viewport toward the lonely stars. "No one else around for about a billion kilometers or so. I won't tell if you won't."

  "So sue me. I'm trying to develop good habits here, okay?" He checked everything over one more time and moved to the next step. "Confirming prep for undock," he said.

  "And then you can confirm the confirmation," Hannah said.

  "All right, all right, all right." Jamie was inescapably reminded of his first driving lessons. He had tried to convince his father that manual operation of a ground vehicle was a totally archaic skill, as dead as blacksmithing or archery. But his father had insisted, and reminded him that automatic systems can break down, or impose needless limits in emergencies, or simply not be available in out-of-the-way places. The same arguments could be applied to flying a BSI starship. The BSI ships were supposed to be totally automated, but if an agent trained to fly was aboard, that pilot-agent could serve as a backup or deal with unexpected situations.

  No one had ever bothered configuring an autopilot system to deal with the case of two Sherlock-class ships docked nose-to-nose that needed to be undocked from an auxiliary booster strapped on underneath. This one needed a pilot.

  "All systems in green. Initiating strap-down release command." He pressed the appropriate button and heard the massive latches letting go with a series of echoing booms. "All strap-down latches showing good release. Initiating safe distancing maneuver." Jamie took the joystick and used it to tap the forward attitude thrusters just ever so slightly, pushing the Sholto and the Adler away from the aux booster. "Clean separation," he announced, indulging himself far enough to allow a note of smugness to shine through.

  "All right, very good," said Hannah, giving him a pat on the shoulder. "You get a gold star. You acted just like a real pilot, and you'll get the proper notation in your file. Get us a safe distance from the booster, send it back to the barn, get our candle lit again, and let's be on our way."

  Jamie had all the appropriate sequences programmed in already and was just about to execute the first one when he hesitated. "Wait a second," he said. "Just for a minute, let me think like a ship's commander and not a pilot."

  "Okay, Captain Mendez. Or aye, aye, sir, I suppose. What have you got?"

  "Come on, I'm being serious. We're supposed to order the booster to decelerate itself, then boost itself back to BSI HQ to be picked up, refurbed, and reused, right?"

  "And we're supposed to eat all our vegetables at dinner and brush our teeth before we go to bed," Hannah said. "So we follow the rules. That's command thinking?"

  "My point is that it seems to me we've got a lot of possible scenarios where we come back short of propulsion power," Jamie replied. "You and Kelly talked about it at the briefing. We might have so little juice left that we could be stranded, waiting for pickup--maybe long enough for food or air or water to start running short. The booster's supposed to use much lower thrust--only about two gees--to get itself back, since they aren't in a hurry to have it returned and there's no point in running it at full tilt and wearing it out. As of right now, the aux booster still has lots of power stored on board.

  "Suppose instead we just left the booster on its current heading and brought it to near-zero velocity relative to CenterStar. Rig it so we could find it again on the way back in. If we had a high-precision lock on its trajectory, and we did get back to CenterStar System with our tanks just about dry, we could order it to home back in on us, redock, use the booster's propulsion, and boost home under our own power, get back a lot sooner, and return the booster not much later than we would have otherwise."

  Hannah frowned, then nodded. "Okay, Cap'n Mendez. That makes a lot of sense. See if you can set it up. I like anything that gives us more options. Just don't spend so much time on it that we arrive late at our transit-jump point and have to recalculate. Meantime, I'm going to get back to reading the files before we get to the fun part and start searching the Adler."

  "All right," he said. "It shouldn't take me long." But somehow he found himself wishing it would. It was wholly irrational, of course, but the longer they put off searching the Adler, the longer they delayed going back aboard her, the more he dreaded doing so.

  You starting to be scared of ghosts? No, that wasn't it. But it came close. Aside from studying up on Metran and Metrannans, he had also read over the personnel file of Special Agent Trevor Wilcox III as closely as he could.

  There was often an odd one-way intimacy between a murder victim and the investigator on the case. Jamie knew things about Special Agent Trip Wilcox that Wilcox's own mother likely didn't know. There was every evidence in the file that Agent Wilcox had been a fine and admirable person--but even a saint commits minor sins on occasion.

  It was a violation of Trevor Wilcox's privacy for Jamie to know all about the mistakes on his income tax, his repeated requests for advances on his pay, the small fortune in QuickBeam messages sent back and forth to the fiancee on Earth, the two mental-health days he had been granted when he received the news that she had married the boy next door instead, even a brief report on the ruckus his mother had caused when the former fiancee had refused to return the ring that had belonged to Trevor's grandmother. The file was silent as to how or whether that crisis had been resolved. When he had read that, Jamie had felt torn between desperately hoping the ring had been returned, and a deep sense of something close to shame for knowing such an intimate detail.

  In a normal murde
r investigation, there might have been some purpose in knowing such things. The fiancee might have been a suspect. The financial problems might have served as a warning flag, pointing toward some other difficulty that might in turn point toward motives or suspects. The transcripts of the QuickBeam messages might have had some reference to a time, a place, a person, an event that might be a lead.

  But Trevor Wilcox III was found in the depths of space months after dying of old age, alone, billions of kilometers from any human being, and the only reasonable explanation for how that could have happened was that he had been killed by a xeno using some weapon utterly unknown to humanity or, far less likely, by some previously unknown illness. Nothing in Trevor's personnel record could possibly offer any sort of clue as to how that had happened.

  Jamie looked up toward the Adler. Except maybe, just maybe, knowing every single thing there was to know about Trev Wilcox was going to be absolutely vital. Maybe he used his ex-fiancee's name on a password. Maybe knowing that Wilcox had consistently misspelled the same word over and over in his love letters would tell them that a log entry supposedly written by Wilcox was a plant, a forgery, because the misspelling wasn't there.

  After all, Wilcox must have known he was going to die. He must also have known that Jamie and Hannah, or someone like them, would be sent to investigate--and he would have known how the BSI worked. He would have known that someone like Special Agent Jamie Mendez would study his personnel file, check his bank records, study his love life, read the notation on his mother's weakness for drink. Wilcox might well have factored that into whatever plans he made, whatever means he chose to conceal the decrypt where xenos would never find it, where, perhaps, most humans would never find it, but where two BSI agents who studied the murder victim would find it.

  Did that make the intrusion even worse--or did it, somehow, make Trev Wilcox into Jamie and Hannah's silent coinvestigator, working with them from beyond the grave?

  Or are you just trying to come up with excuses for snooping around in his private affairs to make yourself feel better?

  Jamie turned back to his piloting problems with a heavy heart. If he had been trying to make himself feel better about the case--or about searching the Adler--he was definitely not doing a very good job.

  A more practiced pilot might have been able to do it sooner, but after a few false starts, Jamie had the booster programmed to slow itself down to a crawl and then wait for their return on a very precisely designated trajectory, and also managed to get the combined craft of the Sholto and the Adler back under boost, relying solely on the Sholto's main propulsion.

  "Ready to get moving?" Hannah asked. They stood on the Sholto's lower deck, looking up the rope ladder toward the Adler's waiting interior. Both of them were in hooded white isolation suits, with gloves on their hands and pullover booties covering their shoes. They looked like a pair of high-tech ghosts preparing to haunt the ship where Trevor Wilcox had died.

  "No," said Jamie. "I'm not ready. I feel as if I'm getting ready to spend the night in a haunted house because someone dared me. Or that we're about to clear out a family home after a relative has died."

  "Now I know why the whole idea of this search has been giving me a case of the creeps. Come on. The sooner we start, the sooner it's over with."

  Hannah led the way up the ladder past the upper deck and the open hatch cover. She paused for a moment, and then moved carefully into the zero-gee confines of the docking tunnel. She grabbed on to the netting, flipped herself over, and aimed her feet at the Adler's ladder. She started moving down into the other ship. Jamie followed her up the ladder and felt his stomach do a few flip-flops as he went into the zero-gee zone. He grabbed hold of the netting, flipped himself around--and then had to pause for a moment as his stomach nearly rebelled altogether. He swallowed hard, took a deep breath, maneuvered around to the Adler's rope ladder, and made his way down into the ship in which Trevor Wilcox had died.

  Both agents made their way down to the lower deck of the Adler and stood there, looking around uncertainly. Hannah shook her head. "Weird. Really weird. These two ships are supposed to be exactly the same. They look exactly the same. But somehow this one just screams out different to me."

  "I know what you mean," Jamie said. It wasn't any one thing that signaled the differences to him--in fact, at first, he wasn't even sure what the differences were. No doubt most of them were due to the fact that the Sholto had just come off a refit and refurbishment. There were no scuff marks on her control panels, no scratches in the paint, no dents and dings in the bulkheads. The interior of the Adler had any number of such small signs of wear.

  But that wasn't all of it. There were subtle differences in the rhythm of the Adler's interior noises and vibration, the way the air circulated, perhaps even the color of the light. "The two ships might be twins, but they aren't identical," he said. "Not by a long shot. It's all subtle stuff, yeah, but you couldn't trick any human who had spent time aboard any sort of spacecraft that the Adler was the Sholto. I'm guessing that xenos wouldn't be any easier to fool. It would be a good idea if we could avoid boarding parties."

  "That's exactly what I was going to say," Hannah said.

  "Okay, let's get to the business at hand," said Jamie. "You're the senior agent. What's your carefully thought-out, rigidly logical plan for managing the search?"

  Hannah shrugged, rustling the fabric of her iso-suit. "I never know how to do a search until I'm there and about to do it. I don't want to get all mystical or anything like that, but I always try to listen to what the search area, the crime scene, is telling me." She paused for a minute. "And this one is trying its hardest to lie to us."

  "What are you talking about?"

  She gestured to indicate the whole of the Adler. "This ship is saying empty. Untouched. Unused. Climb back through the docking tunnel to the Sholto, and her interior sure doesn't look that way. We've taped research notes to the wall, stowed our luggage less than perfectly--by the way, you left your socks on the deck again--eaten meals, and done any number of other things that leave traces. Signs of habitation."

  "So what?"

  "So there's none of that here. Even allowing for the fact that Gunther and his crew had to do a very nasty cleanup job--removing the body and the pilot's chair and any, ah, decay products and so on--the place is too clean." She looked around, and shook her head. There were two small lockers off to one side of the air lock, meant for stowing personal effects. Hannah stepped over to them and opened them up. "Empty," she said. "It should have jumped out at both of us when we first came through the ship," she said. "Where is it all?"

  "All what?" Jamie asked.

  "His personal items," she said, gesturing at the empty lockers. "Courier runs aren't brief-and-go jobs, the way a criminal case usually is. They're scheduled in advance. I checked the records. He had more than forty-eight hours' notice that he was headed out on this run, and he had been on Sherlock-class ships before. He knew how Spartan they are, and his planned mission would have him cooped up on this thing for eight days outbound and eight inbound, with only about a day off-ship in between. And he wouldn't need to do the usual panic-stricken study-in-transit job either. He must have known he was going to have time on his hands. So what did he do to keep from getting bored out of his mind? Where are his books? His movies to watch? Every agent in BSI is nuts for crossword puzzles. I keep four or five books of them in the Ready-To-Go duffel in my cubicle back in the Bullpen, plus books, movies, that sort of thing. They're in the Sholto right now."

  "For that matter," Jamie said, "where are his clothes?" There was a larger locker on the opposite side of the air lock intended for hanging up shirts, jackets, and trousers. Jamie opened that as well. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all to meet with the very, very clothes-conscious Metrannans. What did he do, live in one set of shipboard coveralls for the whole mission?"

  "Not unless he wanted to be beheaded for insulting his hosts," Hannah said. She pulled a datapad out of her iso-suit
's outer pocket and worked the controls. "Lemme just check the manifest for his mission."

  "That wouldn't have a detailed inventory of personal effects," Jamie objected. "Just a report that the agent had carried his standard Ready-To-Go duffel or whatever other luggage he had."

  "I know," said Hannah. "But it does report his RTG duffel and one other 'suitcase containing personal items for use in transit.'" She looked at Jamie. "So where are they? Where are the suitcase and the duffel? And where is his suitcase full of fancy-dress clothes for Metran?"

  "Gunther and his crew must have taken all that stuff off," said Jamie.

  "No," said Hannah, checking the datapad again. "They didn't. They did a detailed inventory of removed items--and none of his clothes or personal items--or the luggage itself--the RTG duffel bag or the other suitcase--were listed."

  "They must have taken them off," Jamie said. "Books and clothes and luggage would all give you lots of places to conceal the decrypt key. Stick it inside the binding of a paper-page book. Sew it into the lining of the duffel, or razor open a seam in your jacket lining and stuff it in there. Plus they wouldn't have gone through all that stuff here on board. They'd have been able to do a much better job searching through all that stuff back in the BSI HQ forensics lab."

  "I agree. You're absolutely right," said Hannah. "They would have taken all the personal effects out of the ship and searched through them with scanners and probes and opened up all the seams and bindings and fasteners and so on. Except they didn't."