The Cause of Death

by Roger MacBride Allen

  "We can't police it without police," Hannah said after a moment or two of contemplating the sky. "Cho's just the latest. We're losing too many agents. Way too many. It's not just bad for morale--it's cutting deeply into efficiency. We're using up a lot of time just investigating the deaths of our own people."

  "I know," said Commandant Kelly, her voice weary. "We're losing them faster than we can recruit--and that little fact does its own bit to discourage recruitment." She swung around to face Hannah. "So what do we do?"

  "That's your job to decide, not mine."

  "You're a Senior Special Agent. It's part of your job to advise me," Kelly replied. "Besides," she went on, patting the arms of her chair, "it wouldn't surprise me one little bit if you sat here someday. You could use some practice on the policy side."

  Hannah gestured with one hand toward the Bullpen, and the newly emptied cubicle. "Obviously, we fill that desk. Close ranks and move on."

  "Move on how? To where?"

  Hannah Wolfson frowned and shook her head. "How, I can tell you--by facing facts. Every time we--humanity, I mean--every time we move outward, make new contacts with other races, or just expand our contacts with a race we've been dealing with for years, we find new problems. And there are now humans on four times as many worlds as there were just twenty years ago--but BSI hasn't even doubled in size in that same time. We're stretched too thin, trying to do too many things at once with not enough people."

  Kelly gestured at a stack of papers on her desk. "What you just said in a hundred words, that nice thick report in the middle of the stack tells me in five hundred pages. But go on."

  "Those are the facts. We have to face them and we have to respond to them. We have to stop doing things the way we did them ninety years ago."

  "For example?"

  Hannah stood up, and moved around to stand behind her chair, as if to get a bit farther away from the truth she was trying to face. "I wasn't sure of it at first, but you've convinced me. We need to do more partnering," she said. "'One case, one agent' simply doesn't work anymore."

  "'One case, one agent,' " Kelly said, a sour note in her voice as she echoed the quotation. "That bit of folklore has probably put half the names on the memorial in Central Hall. We're going to run out of room on that thing pretty soon. I've been fighting like crazy to get the higher-ups to understand that one-agent-one-case worked when we were only dealing with three or four alien species in five or six star systems. Agents had a chance to study up on the cultures, the languages, to specialize. That's much harder now."

  "Actually, it's impossible," Hannah replied. "I looked it up. The British Museum's Nonhuman Cultures Index lists more sentient alien species than we have agents."

  "Which ought to prove my point," said Kelly. "So we try something else. It's time to go past the pilot program on partnering up agents and do it large scale."

  "'Pilot program'? I don't think we can get away with calling it that. It's just one pair--Mendez and me--and you've only sent us out on a few cases. We'd have to expand the test to I don't know how many agents, and run them as partners for months to call it a real pilot program."

  "By which time we'll have lost how many more new agents?" Kelly demanded. "I'd be willing to bet Cho would have made it back to his desk--if he had had someone there to watch his back. But if we wait until we've done enough tests and studies and surveys to make the planetside crowd happy, we're not going to have enough agents left to keep this place open."

  "You're preaching to the converted," Hannah said. "Being out with Mendez convinced me. Agents need backup, support, another pair of eyes. Mendez and I have proved it by doing it and coming back alive."

  "But you haven't proved it with paperwork and pie charts. Even so, if we don't start partnering on at least some calls until we get studies done, we're only going to have two or three agents left," said Kelly. "That's why we're going to pretend you two were a full pilot program." She rubbed her eyes. "And we're going with a full-blown partnering system, or at least we will--but not just yet."

  "Why not? You just said yourself we need to do it now."

  "We need to do it now--but we can't. I've got a lot of people to keep happy. I need more time." She gestured out the viewport at Center. "Our masters down there, planetside. Their bosses, back on Earth. Our budget for the next two years is just about to be approved--maybe. It's a couple of months late already. I can't make any policy changes right now that might make some smart bean counter reopen the whole budgeting process. One agent-pair I can get away with if I call it a test--as long as it's still working, still successful. But I can't risk expanding out to a full program until the new budget is approved and the funds are actually disbursed to our accounts. If I make changes now, it will make us look very bad. It might give someone an excuse to shut us down."

  "Come on. You're saying you can't risk taking a step that might save your agents' lives because it might delay our budget allocation?"

  "Not just delay it," Kelly said sharply. "Cancel it. Meaning the BSI itself might not survive." She gestured out the viewport at the planet Center. "The Director and the rest of the bigwigs at On-Planet HQ have asked for contingency plans for pullbacks. For being more selective about what cases we handle. So selective that we might as well not even be here.

  "If we just take on 'near-zero-risk-to-agent cases,' to use the happy phrase of the Director's memo, some other smart little bean counter is going to notice that we're not doing anything the local cops couldn't do, and they'll shut us down. It will be the end of whatever good the BSI has done for human civilization outside the Solar System. And I happen to think we do a lot of good. We save lives. We uphold the law. We show the Elder Races that humans are willing to clean up their own messes. Maybe we've even prevented a war or two. So yes, reluctantly, I am risking my agents' lives to prevent budget cuts that might end up crippling our relations with the Elder Races for the next thousand years."

  Kelly hesitated a moment, then turned to stare at a blank spot at the wall to Hannah's left. At last she spoke. "Off the record, Cho bought into the 'one-agent-one-case' idea. He declined when I asked if he wanted to partner up. With you."

  Kelly let out a long and weary sigh, then went on. "I didn't make it a direct order. I should have. So Cho is on my conscience." She turned and looked sharply at Hannah. "I don't want you two on my conscience. Effective immediately, you have standing orders to keep Jamie Mendez alive. Just forgetting for one moment that he's a nice kid and we don't want to see him die, politically speaking, it would be a disaster for the BSI to lose any more new agents just now--much worse than suddenly making big changes to how we manage agents. I'll have a bad enough time with the higher-ups over Cho's death. And I can't just keep the baby agents in-house. I have to send them out. But if we lose any more agents--especially new ones--that could be the last nails in BSI's coffin."

  Hannah nodded. "Orders received and understood," she said. There didn't seem to be anything else she could say.

  "Good," said Kelly. "Then just let me page Mendez in here for the case briefing."

  "Excuse me?" Hannah asked.

  "You didn't think this conversation was just academic, did you?" Kelly asked with a grim smile. "I'm assigning you two to a fresh mission--right now."

  THREEBRIEFING

  Jamie wasn't all that surprised to get called into Kelly's office five minutes after Hannah. One quick look at each of their faces told him what--or rather whom--they had been talking about.

  Kelly gestured Jamie into a seat, then launched in. "I've got a job for the two of you," she said. She shoved a message sheet across the table so that it rested exactly between Hannah and Jamie. "That just came in from Reqwar. And before you can say you've never heard of Reqwar, neither had I until I looked it up. It's one of the minor Pavlat worlds."

  Jamie picked up the message sheet. There were various dating and chrono and coordinate codes, but the message itself was printed in larger type, in the center of the page.

  H
UMAN GEORG HERTZMANN FREE

  NOT GUILTY NOT PAVLAT DEATH

  NEGOTIATOR HERE SEND CASE HEAR

  HOME TAKE.

  "It's not very clear what that means," Jamie ventured. "At least, not to me."

  "We've seen worse," Kelly said placidly, and pointed to a framed document, hung on the wall. It was a message form, identical in format to one he held in his hand. The date on the message was five years old. The message itself read:

  BSI KNOW OUI NEAT HILFE HIER

  KALM NAO

  "We never quite worked out how many languages that's supposed to be in," Kelly said. "We gave up trying to dope out what it means a long time ago. Now it's just a framed reminder that we don't know what the hell's going on, and the xenos aren't always that much help."

  "We need reminding?" Hannah asked, plainly amused.

  "What happened?" Jamie asked, allowing his curiosity to distract him. "I mean, with that message. Did you send an agent?"

  "Sure we sent an agent--to the coordinates attached to the message. They put the agent's ship at a point in deep space, well away from any star system, or anything else, for that matter. We tried maybe half a dozen variants on the coordinates--figuring anyone who sent a message that scrambled might have written the coords wrong, too. Put them in the wrong order, or written them in another number base. I don't know how many variations we tried. Finally, we had to give up. Never did figure out what it was supposed to be about. Maybe it was a prank, or a test message, or a trap that didn't get sprung. I doubt we'll ever know." Kelly nodded toward the message in Jamie's hand. "The current message is a model of clarity in comparison."

  Jamie shifted uncomfortably. "It's not all that clear to me."

  Hannah reached for the message sheet. She read it over quickly and looked up. "What do you read it as meaning?" she asked.

  "It's a bit ambiguous, I admit," said Kelly, "but I read it as saying this guy Hertzmann has been convicted of murder, and they don't want all the headaches of keeping a xeno-prisoner, so they want us to pick him up."

  "Why does a xeno-prisoner make for headaches?" Jamie asked.

  "A xeno-prisoner?" Kelly asked. "From a species you don't know much about? What isn't a headache? What's the right diet? What's a legit medical complaint, or legal complaint, and what's bogus? Is there something that's standard operating procedure in our prisons that would offend the xeno's culture, or be harmful to the prisoner without our knowing it? Do you want a pack of other xenos--relatives, lawyers, reporters, diplomats, scam artists, Space knows what, showing up to try and get him out or score points off his being locked up? The list goes on. It's a lot easier to get the home culture to agree to make the prisoner take his or her or its punishment back home. I figure they want this Hertzmann character to serve out his term in a human prison."

  "Do we have a prisoner-transfer and sentence-equivalence agreement with the locals--or with any group of Pavlats?" Hannah asked.

  "No, we don't--yet. But you're going to get us one--a standard working-level law-enforcement basic agreement. Something the diplomats can pump up into a treaty when they get around to it."

  "If the diplos get around to it," said Hannah. "There's a pretty good backlog going."

  "About twenty years' worth," Kelly agreed. "But that's not our problem, except it means getting a good solid interim agreement is even more important. It's going to be in force for a while." Kelly turned and looked at Jamie. "I figure you ought to have a leg up on this one, Mendez."

  "How so, ma'am?"

  "Your personnel file. You listed 'extensive experience in the Los Angeles Pavlavian expatriate community.' "

  "Oh, well, yes." Jamie reddened. "That."

  "Well, have you had extensive experience with them?"

  "Well, yes, I have. But I don't know how much use it's going to be."

  "Why not?"

  How could he tell the commandant of the BSI Bullpen that he spent a summer working a Pavlat-owned store, in a neighborhood called Little Pavlavia, surrounded by Pavlats, and yet knew almost nothing about them? "Pavlats work very hard at not letting you learn about them, or get to know them."

  "Didn't you make any friends, establish any contacts?"

  Jamie shook his head apologetically. "Ma'am, it was a grunt job. I was the stock boy in a corner store. Pick up a box and put it over there. Mop the floor. Yes, I was there, in the community. Yes, I had extensive contacts, I guess. But hardly any of the customers were even willing to speak while I was in the room, let alone speak to me. Everything in that personnel file is true--but I was writing to make myself look good on a job application. It doesn't make me an expert on the Pavlats."

  "Frankly, that's about what I figured," Kelly said. "But you're as close to an expert on the Pavlats as we have in the Bullpen at the moment." She nodded, making it clear the subject was closed. "So: a nice, simple job. Collect the prisoner, get the locals to sign on the dotted line, bring the prisoner back here, and hand him over to the Star Marshals--sometime when the StarMars aren't on a doughnut break. A milk run. Any questions?"

  Jamie had something like an infinite supply, but he focused on what struck him as the central problem. "Ah, ma'am--as you say, the message is ambiguous. Suppose it means something else, and it's not just a prisoner pickup?"

  "Then we find that out when we get there and deal with the situation as we find it," said Hannah.

  Kelly gestured toward Hannah. "What she said." She glanced up at the wall clock, then stood up--plainly a cue for the others to do so as well, and they did. "Consider yourselves briefed. You have one hour before you boost," she said. She looked at Jamie, then at Hannah. "So what are you waiting around here for?"

  FOURDEPARTURE

  Fifty-nine minutes after the clock started, Hannah Wolfson was strapping herself into the left-hand pilot's seat on the bubble-domed command deck of the Captain Arthur Hastings while Jamie Mendez strapped himself into the right-hand seat.

  The Hastings was a short, fat cylinder with three decks. The lower deck held the propulsion, the environmental control, cargo, and aux gear. The main deck had living quarters and work areas. The command deck was a smaller cylinder, barely large enough to hold the pilot's and copilot's stations, centered on the topside hull of the ship and capped by a transparent hemispherical forward view dome.

  The ship carried two small ballistic landers, the Lotus and the Orient Express. BSI tradition had it that certain classes of ships in the BSI were named for famous characters, events, places, and vehicles in detective fiction. Captain Hastings had assisted Hercule Poirot on several cases. The steamship Lotus figured in Death on the Nile, and the train of the same name in Murder on the Orient Express. There was a complete set of the works of Agatha Christie aboard the Hastings--another part of the tradition--but there wouldn't be much time for pleasure reading.

  The two landers were strapped down on the topside hull, one on either side of the command deck bubble. A portable habitat module was also strapped down topside, collapsed and stowed, to serve as accommodation for the prisoner they were expecting to transport home.

  The ship's designers had played a few games with gravitic orientation. On the main and lower decks, and on the topside hull of the ship, down was toward the lower base of the cylindrical ship, toward the engines, opposite the direction of normal travel. However, the command deck's gravity field was rotated ninety degrees, so that down was out, toward one section of the cylinder rim, so the two landers were to the "left" and "right," and the portable habitat module was "overhead." That put "down" below the feet of the pilot and copilot in their command chairs. The arrangement led to a disconcerting transition as one moved from deck to deck, but allowed the craft to be flown from a normal seated position rather than with the pilot flat on his or her back.

  But more things than not knowing which way was up or down could disorient a person. Hannah glanced over at her partner as the ship left the docking pad. He was looking a bit worried--and Hannah was pretty sure she knew why. Lots of people s
till found the idea of a completely automated starship disconcerting. Enter the destination planet's coordinates, hit the START button, and the ship would take it from there. It just didn't seem right. Star travel was too complex, too challenging, too full of surprises to have faith in such arrangements.

  It tended to be nonpilots who were most worried by automated starships--and Jamie had no flight training at all. Hannah, on the other hand, had managed to earn a basic pilot's certificate some years back--and she trusted robotic piloting. She could fly the Hastings and the landers if need be, but she viewed herself as a backup to the automatics--not the other way around.

  The BSI was practically the only outfit that had fully automated starships--and practically the only outfit that needed them. The official reasoning was that it would take far too long to train someone as a BSI agent and as a fully qualified starship pilot. But there was another reason that no one liked to talk about. A BSI ship had to be able to carry a badly injured agent back home without pilot intervention.

  Soon the Hastings was well clear of Central Transit Station. The ship pointed herself toward deep space, and all there was in the viewport was the quiet, placid stars in all their glory, calm and everlasting.

  Hannah's control board indicators showed they were boosting out toward their transition point, accelerating at a high rate. But however fast the ship was moving, it was not so fast as to make the stars appear to move. The acceleration compensation was smooth and perfect enough to damp over every vibration. The illusion of being motionless, at rest, quiet and safe, was all but complete. They might be boosting at twenty gees, but outside of the control panel indicators, there was no way to tell.

  Hannah unbelted herself from the command chair and turned to Jamie, speaking in a voice calculated to be as calming as the unchanging glory outside the viewport. "So," she began, "were you able to find enough to do in the copious amounts of time you had for your research?"