Death Sentence

by Roger MacBride Allen

  She handed him the datapad, a grim look her face. "You've seen them already, but look again. Evidence photos taken just after they came aboard, before Wilcox or anything else was removed. A couple of shots of Wilcox are taken from overhead, and you can see the lower deck pretty clearly below and behind. The lockers are empty--and you can tell because the locker doors are open. Latched open, so they couldn't swing shut."

  "This doesn't make any sense," Jamie protested.

  "Food containers," said Hannah. She pulled open the trash compactor and checked the bin. "Empty." She checked the datapad again. "There was a small bag full of trash sitting on the upper deck, next to the pilot's station. You can see it in the crime scene shots. They removed it and examined it. No decrypt key found. Just the remains of eight opened mealpacks, three empty, five partially empty, with the remaining food still there 'in an advanced state of decomposition,' plus three empty water bottles. Four unopened mealpacks and two full water bottles were also found strapped to hold-down netting by the pilot's chair." She glanced up at the pilot's station. "Those are still there. No other reports of trash or unopened food containers found."

  "Why are we the first ones to notice this?" Jamie asked. "Why wasn't it in any of the reports?"

  "Because everyone's always doing everything at once when they're prepping for a mission at crash speed. There isn't time to sit down and have a staff meeting about every decision. They trust--what was that slogan? It's on some motivational poster in Gunther's office. 'Trust Initiative over Coordination.' That was it. No one told anyone to re-mark the hull of the Adler to pretend it was the Sholto. Someone just realized it needed doing and went and did it. There were probably four or five crews--forensics, Gunther's crew, launch prep and replenishment, tech data recovery--that went in and out of this ship. Probably Gunther's team was too busy with the corpse to deal with anything else, and all the other teams assumed that one of the others had done the clean-out."

  "The forensics team missed the clean-out?" Jamie objected. "The launch prep team I can see, but forensics should have screamed bloody murder."

  Hannah checked her datapad one more time. "What the--how in blazes did this not jump out at me? They didn't protest because they were never on board."

  "What?"

  "Don't look at me like it was my fault. I'm standing in an iso-suit squinting at a datapad billions of kilometers from where it happened."

  "What happened?"

  "The log files show what teams with what personnel came on board. There was a forensics tech assigned to Gunther's team--but just to help with the body, and she was a medical forensics specialist, not an evidence tech. They remove the body. Then there's some sort of lock-down declared, and everyone ordered out of the ship. That was about twelve hours before we got our briefing." Hannah thought for a moment. "Sometime right about then, I'd guess, is when they got word back from BSI-DLO and the whole business about the War-Starter designation and so on. Next thing in the case log narrative is Kelly ordering a rush search of the ship for the decryption key, to be done at the same time as the ship was being prepped for launch--refueled, replenished, and so on."

  "It must have been about then that Commander Kelly decided to send us out with the Sholto and Adler docked together. That's where the break comes," Jamie said, who had pulled up the same data on his datapad. "The prime focus up to then had been figuring out how Special Agent Wilcox died. That was what the medical forensics specialist was doing there. But then that gets shoved on the back burner when they hear about the decrypt key and the War-Starter warning."

  "I think you're right. And up until that point, forensics was there for the medical-pathology angle of understanding why Wilcox died," Hannah said. "That part of their assignment is canceled, suddenly everything is rushed--and so their time in the ship is canceled. And the ship is searched by Gunther's people, who are just looking for the decrypt key, rather than the ship being examined by the forensics people who would be trying to determine what happened on board."

  "And in the rush and the shuffle, it doesn't really register with anyone that the ship is completely empty. So no one stops to realize, gee, that's kind of strange."

  "Until we notice it billions of kilometers from base with our transit-jump to the Metran system eight hours away." Hannah sat down on the edge of the pilot's chair and looked around. "So what the hell happened to all his personal gear? Did the Metrannan search party take it all? Just leave him enough food and water to get home, but take everything else so they could search it?"

  "That doesn't make much sense either," said Jamie. "They'd have the clothes and other stuff, but they would have left behind the ship, with all of its hiding places. They'd be volunteering to leave the Adler itself unsearched, or at least not as thoroughly searched. If they were going to search his clothing and personal effects in such detail that they needed to seize them to do microscans, then they'd have to be prepared to search the whole ship the same way. They should have just impounded the whole ship, thrown Agent Wilcox in the brig on their ship, hauled the Adler back to base, scanned her from stem to stern, and then started taking her apart down to the molecular level."

  "I think you're right--if we're assuming their behavior is always rational. Otherwise, of course, we can have them saying or doing anything we like, no matter how silly or illogical, because we can't possibly fathom what motivates the strange and mysterious Elder Races. Let's leave out that sort of logic." She thought for a minute. "Maybe the Metrannans stripped his ship before he left for some reason."

  Jamie shook his head. "No," he said. "It's another way of saying what you just said. If we can't think of a reason for them to do X, I don't think we can spin theories that rely on their doing X. Besides, I think I have an answer."

  "What?"

  "Trevor did it," Jamie said. "For us. For you and me. To help us on the case, the search."

  "I--I don't understand," Hannah said.

  "Remember all your arguments about how the decrypt key isn't going to be in a microdot or anything like that? You convinced me. We're working on the theory that the decrypt key is going to be someplace we can find it, but the xenos can't--or at least won't. But Trevor knows--knew--that time might be short. Maybe he doesn't know that BSI-DLO had designated the case a possible War-Starter, but he's been briefed by someone on Metran, and he knows it's serious.

  "He's left the planet, he's headed back, he's been boarded once already, and he might be boarded again. Maybe he knows that however he hid the key, he might not be able to stay lucky on the next search. He hid it someplace safe, somewhere the xenos wouldn't look. But he knew we'd be in a hurry, and he didn't want us to waste our time checking the seams on his coveralls or peeling back the lining of his duffel. Once he was clear of the boarding party, and while he still had the strength to do it, he put all his personal gear into the air lock, closed the inner door, and opened the outer door while it was still under pressure. He jettisoned the stuff for us--to help us on the investigation. He's the third agent, the silent partner, on this case. He knows he's under a death sentence, but he's still doing his job."

  "Jamie, you're making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. That's spooky. Really, really spooky."

  "It fits the facts. It's not only possible--it makes sense. Trevor had a motive for doing it. And it's testable. We can check to see if it happened."

  "The ship's auto-event log," said Hannah. "It would show when the air lock was used."

  "Come on," said Jamie. "I think we're onto something." He turned and began climbing the ladder to the upper deck.

  NINE

  LOST WHILE SEARCHING

  Jamie stepped off the ladder, Hannah right behind him. The two of them practically filled the tiny flight deck.

  "The auto-event log. Would it show if the outer door was opened with pressure in the lock?" Jamie asked.

  "I don't know," said Hannah, "but we can check." She started to sit down in the pilot's chair but caught the look in Jamie's eye. "You do it,"
she said. "This one is yours."

  Jamie hesitated a moment, nodded, and then sat down in the pilot's chair. It was not the chair in which Trevor Wilcox had died. That one had been removed and replaced. But this chair occupied the same place, put Jamie's body where Trevor's had been, positioned his head, his eyes, where he could see what the dead man had seen, placed his hands on the controls the dead man had used. What he was seeing--the control panel, the viewport, the cold and lonely darkness, the remote and distant stars--were the last things Trevor Wilcox III had ever seen.

  He allowed himself a moment to acknowledge that fact, to get past it, and even to offer a silent apology to Trevor's spirit for the intrusion, before he forced all such irrational thoughts from his mind and focused on the job. He brought up the log display system and made his selection.

  "Hey, that's the personal log, not the auto-event log," Hannah protested.

  "I know," said Jamie. "But there's something else I want to see first. I want to reread a few log entries from around the time he would have done the jettison, if he did it at all."

  Quick entry. Craft has docked with Adler. I am invited to permit visitors aboard. Visitors wish to view and admire the interior and contents of my fine spacecraft. I of course gladly accept this invitation to allow their visit.

  "Obviously, he wrote that assuming that he was already being monitored," said Hannah.

  "Agreed," Jamie said. The Sherlock-class ships were not large enough to be well shielded, and many of the Elder Races had astonishingly good detection systems that could easily monitor the electric impulses produced by typing at a keyboard or using a microphone connected to a dictation system. He read on to the next entry.

  My visitors have up and gone, departing after an extended visit. They took a strong interest in all I had aboard and did not wish to miss any chance to learn more about my ship and my work. It may be that they will wish to return and learn more in future. It is likely they have arranged to know more about me even when they are not here. I of course wish to be generous with my time and to inform them as much as possible, but my other duties might prevent this.

  It was the final entry in the personal log. It wasn't hard to interpret those words. The boarding party has left at last. They searched everywhere, and questioned me extensively. They might decide to come back and search again. And they wouldn't need to do that if they had found what they were looking for, Jamie reminded himself. They have probably installed listening or monitoring devices on the ship. I'll cooperate with them and tell them anything that won't do any harm, but I won't let them find what they shouldn't get.

  "That part about how the Metrannans might arrange to know more about me even when they are not here is pretty clear. Did Gunther's people find any listening devices or tracking units in the Adler? We don't want to fly back into the Metran system with the ship we're trying to hide booming out some beacon signal telling our friends where we are."

  "A little late to worry about that," said Hannah, checking her datapad. "I'm sure they checked--yeah, they did. Devices found in and on the Adler," Hannah said. "A small listening unit attached to the base of the pilot's seat, a signal monitor near a comm conduit, where it could read all the incoming and outgoing traffic, and a combination beacon and data transmitter stuck to the hull. The notation is that it is 'possible but highly unlikely' that there were others that they missed. If there are others, we're probably going to find out the hard way. By the way, though, you're assuming that it was the Metrannans who boarded. Wilcox doesn't say any such thing. We don't know who it might be--and it does take at least two sides to start a war."

  "Point taken," said Jamie. "But why was he so cagey about it?"

  "Maybe he was worried that they'd blow him out of the sky if he said anything they didn't like or said more than they wanted to be heard. That's probably why he stopped making personal log entries."

  "That makes sense."

  "Come on. Let's check the auto-event log."

  Jamie paused a moment before he closed the personal log. He had been half-hoping that there would be something more, something beyond the log entries that he had already examined on his datapad. Some last word from the ghost in the machine that he had not seen already. But there was nothing--not in the personal log, anyway.

  He switched over to the auto-event reporter log. The autologger monitored all the electromechanical systems on the ship and recorded every action they took.

  Neither Hannah or Jamie had much experience with the recorder used on the Adler, and it took them a while to figure out how to bring up detailed displays of air lock activity while filtering out everything else. Once that was accomplished, it was simple enough to examine air lock activity for the period between the departure of the boarding party and the recovery of the Adler in the outer reaches of the CenterStar System.

  What it showed was exactly what they had expected to find: The inner hatch had been opened, then closed and sealed about an hour later--long enough for Trevor to load all of his effects into the lock chamber. Then the manual override system was used to bring the lock chamber down to one-quarter of standard pressure, rather than to zero. The manual override was also used to disengage the safety systems and hydraulic door controls and send the rapid-open command to the outer hatch, releasing the pressure latches in an instant, so that explosive decompression would force the hatch door open and blow the lock's contents into space. The air lock was designed to be used that way, down to shock absorbers on the hatch hinges to keep it from slamming into the outer hull.

  The autolog showed that the hydraulics were then reengaged, the outer hatch swung shut and resealed, and the lock interior repressurized.

  "So that ought to prove it," said Jamie. "A perfectly standard junk-jettison job, from start to finish. It must have been Trevor that did the clear-out. And if he did do it, can you think of any reason for it besides his helping us?"

  "No, but that doesn't mean there isn't another reason. Still, you've convinced me, at least provisionally. Except all you've really proven is that he deliberately cycled the lock with pressure between the doors. It probably was to dump unwanted gear, but we don't know. And there's one detail that doesn't quite fit with your theory."

  "What's that?"

  "Look at the time indicator on when he opened the lock: less than a day after he was boarded and more than two days before the Irene Adler made her transit-jump back to the Center System. The Metrannans, or whoever it was that boarded him, might still have been close enough to detect the jettison. Why would he want to attract their attention again by doing something suspicious? And if the whole idea was to clear the decks and make our search easier, then he'd want to do the reverse of that as well and make their search harder if they came back. He'd want as much junk as possible on board, so they'd be forced to paw through more stuff. He'd have wanted to do the jettison as late as possible. Why do it so early?"

  "I can give you two plausible theories," said Jamie. "One, he wanted to jettison the stuff where the xenos would see it. Maybe he wanted to confuse them. Maybe he was hoping the xenos would have some reason to think the decrypt code would be in with the junk he was jettisoning. Maybe they did think that. Maybe the gag worked, and they went off after the junk instead of reboarding the Adler.

  "Or two, and I think this is the better but grimmer explanation: Trevor knew he was dying. He could see that his strength was failing and figured he'd better do the jettison procedure while he still could." Jamie studied the log display, and scanned the major event reports. "That fits," he said. "Unless I'm missing something, closing the air locks was just about the last event recorded that required Trevor to perform any physical act, like carrying things or moving equipment. Everything else from there on in was pretty much done on automatic, or else was something he could do from right here at the pilot's station by working the controls."

  "That is pretty grim," said Hannah. "But it does fit." She leaned in over the main data display. "Look, as long you're confirming theories,
let's go back to the time period when his personal log reports the boarding party. I want to see what it says about air lock use."

  "Why do you need to confirm that?"

  "The personal logs are pretty sketchy," she said. "The autolog's reports on air lock activity will tell us how long the xenos were docked to the Adler. It might give us an idea how thorough the search was."

  Jamie punched up the right commands, then frowned. "That can't be right," he said. "No use of the main air lock at all during that time period."

  "What? Check again."

  "I'm checking, I'm checking," said Jamie distractedly. "Date codes right, time codes, air lock activity report active--everything correct." He turned and looked at Hannah. "No air lock use," he said. "So how could there have been a boarding party?"

  "The times must be wrong. Maybe your junk-jettison air lock use was really the boarding party."

  "With the lock pressure cut to one-quarter and then a quick-release explosive-decompression outer-hatch opening? If there was breathable pressure on the other side, the hatch wouldn't have opened. He couldn't have opened the hatch--there would be higher outside pressure, tons of it, holding the hatch shut."

  "Okay, okay. I take your point. But that means there wasn't a boarding party, and about two-thirds of our assumptions are out the window--and it means Wilcox was lying or delusional when he made those log entries."

  "Wait a second. We just came aboard the Irene Adler, and we didn't use the air lock."

  Hannah frowned. "You mean Wilcox had the other ship dock to the Adler through the nose hatch?"

  Jamie worked the auto-event log again. "Bingo," he said. "About thirty minutes after that first personal log entry, the nose-hatch docking system was activated and made a hard dock with--whatever it was. This is just an engineering log. It doesn't identify the other ship. The interior pressure in the Adler didn't change, which probably means the other ship had an air lock system and used that to match pressure. I don't know if that tells us anything, but there it is. The hatch stayed open for just about four and a half hours, and once it was closed, the docking system released from the other ship. Half an hour after that, we get the second log entry. It all matches up."