Death Sentence Read online

  "He managed to configure the ship to do the jump from Metran's star system to the Center System before he died. He didn't rig any sort of beacon that would let us know to come get him. We don't know if that was deliberate or not. He might have figured that we'd find him sooner or later even with no beacon but that any bad guys wouldn't."

  "Let me guess," said Hannah. "Since we don't even know if there were any bad guys, you don't have much in the way of theories about who the theoretical bad guys might be. Right?"

  "Got it in one," Kelly agreed. "Let me start at the beginning and go from there, and tell you what we know," Kelly said. "A rough sequence of events. Wilcox travels to Metran. Wilcox collects the document. Wilcox leaves Metran and heads for home. During his acceleration run out of the system, he realizes that he is sick, and even that he is dying. At about the same time--it might be before or after--his ship is boarded by someone. We don't know who, or why. That happens while he is still in the Metrannan star system."

  Kelly looked around the table. "Some time after he is boarded, but while he is still in the Metrannan System, and well short of the coordinates of his calculated transit-jump--he throttles back his acceleration for half a day, then cuts his engines altogether for a day, then boosts intermittently, at low power, at various headings, for another two days. I'll skip the details, but the short form is that the way he did it came right out of the BSI playbook. He followed the procedures for making it difficult or maybe even impossible for anyone to track his vehicle. Random, low-power burns, in random directions."

  "Reasonable enough," said Hannah. "He had been boarded once. He was trying to hide so he wouldn't be detected again."

  "Right. But the next part of the doctrine is to go back to continuous boost at as high a power as you dare risk, so as to get out of the search area as fast as you can. Normal acceleration to a transit-jump for the Sherlock-class ships is twenty to thirty gees. Wilcox boosted the Adler at one-quarter gee."

  Kelly tapped her fingers on the table. "Now, there are some things we tend to forget about our normal operating procedure. There's no real need to boost at high gee-rates, or to get to as high a final speed as we do, in order to reach a transit-jump. Your velocity has to be taken into account for the jump computations, but it's a relatively trivial calculation and a minor adjustment. You could go through a transit-jump at five kilometers an hour, or five million. It wouldn't matter.

  "It's physical position that matters during a jump. We boost our ships as hard as we do, and go as fast as we do, because the transit points tend to be so far out in space, and there's no particular penalty in technical terms for getting there faster, and besides, we tend to be in a hurry.

  "But high-boost, high-velocity flight paths are madly inefficient in terms of energy expenditure. We boost to a very high speed, do the transit, and then immediately start decelerating. Do the math, and you'll see that doing it that way saves us time--but not very much time, because we spend very little time at that final high velocity.

  "Mostly we do it that way because there isn't any reason not to do it that way. The ships we've got today have so much power it's ridiculous. But our ships would still go through a transit jump moving at near-zero velocity. Which is something that Wilcox proved. The Adler took two months to reach the transit point. He was almost certainly dead by then. But he had programmed the Adler to make the transit-jump on autopilot--and then to use maximum thrust, twenty-plus gees, to slow the Adler down to practically zero, a few billion kilometers out from Center. That's a lot of energy being released very quickly, in a way that's easily detectable. UniGov Military's space defense detectors did detect it--but they didn't investigate immediately because they projected that it would take the Adler six hundred years to reach the inner system. Not exactly an immediate threat."

  "Let me guess," Hannah said. "The BSI waited a couple of weeks before we reported the Adler as overdue. We waited another couple of weeks or a month before listing her as lost, presumed destroyed. When she did show up, she was months late, and on a totally different flight path than what we expected, and it took a while for anyone to think of matching up Space Defense's blip with our missing ship."

  "Right. And even then our people quite correctly concluded it was only a possible match, even a low-probability match. Odds were it was some other ship, nothing to do with us. Worth checking, but not worth tying up any of our people for the week or two it would take to fly to the outer system, locate the blip--then confirm that it was nothing. And, of course, there was a little bureaucratic gamesmanship to it as well. Space Defense wanted to say it might be our ship, so we'd be the ones who had to go out and do the recovery so they wouldn't have to spend their time or effort.

  "By the same token, I didn't want to spend more time and effort than needed, because it probably had nothing to do with us. I figured we'd find a robot freighter with a defective propulsion system or something like that. So I ordered a BSI ship to go take a look, flying on automatic, no crew. It wasn't worth tying up a larger or more capable spacecraft than necessary, so I sent the Bartholomew Sholto, with a bunch of cameras and robotics and teleoperator systems on board. Once the Sholto got there, one of our techs back here could work the remote controls to investigate."

  She frowned, leaned forward in her chair, and drummed her fingers on the table again for a moment. "Instead, we found the Adler. Dead. All power off, drifting. The Sholto docked to her, nose to nose, then used the Sholto's engines to start boosting the docked-together ships back to base. The remote operators here at HQ managed to get the hatches open on both ships and sent a robotic camera into the Adler to look around. The first thing they found was Wilcox--dead. Very, very dead." She paused. "And that was pretty much the last thing they found. Or at least the last thing of any significance. But I'll come back to that.

  "It took a while for the knowledge of what our team had found to percolate up from the techs flying the mission to the Bullpen, and to me. We notified BSI-DLO, and they notified the people who had been waiting for the document to arrive--and right now, today, I still don't know who that final 'customer' is. Things are being kept very quiet and compartmentalized. Whoever the customer is, it didn't take long for the word to come rocketing back down to us that the document had to be found, and found as quickly--and as quietly--as possible.

  "The robotics on the Sholto scanned and searched every square centimeter of the Adler's interior. We linked into all her data systems and searched them by remote as well. Nothing.

  "As soon as we got her back here to base, and got Wilcox's remains off the ship--and did some decontamination--we sent search teams aboard as well. Nothing. And all the time, BSI-DLO has been jumping up and down, demanding we find what isn't there, and find it right away."

  "We've searched the Adler twice, with BSI-DLO screaming at us to find the key immediately. Once via the remotes on the way in, and once here at base. We haven't found the decrypt key."

  "Do you have any idea what it looks like?" Jamie asked. "Are you even sure it's there?"

  "The short answers are no, and no," said Kelly. "Goes a long way to explain the problems we're having, doesn't it? Bear in mind that the key itself isn't a physical object. From everything we've been able to learn, it ought to be just a string of characters. Once it's recovered and handed over to BSI-DLO, some tech will key the characters into the appropriate computer program and the document will be magically decoded. Think of all the ways characters might be stored or written down or encoded or whatever, and then think of all the ways you might disguise or hide whatever it was that held that string of characters. It could be concealed just about anywhere, or disguised or embedded in just about anything."

  "So what, exactly, do you want us to do?" asked Jamie.

  "Really simple stuff," said Kelly. "Find the decryption key, find out what the document was about, find out who killed Wilcox, why they killed him--and how they killed him."

  "I don't understand how that could be a mystery," Hannah said. "You recove
red the body, right?"

  "Yes, it was aboard ship."

  "So you've examined it. How is it you can't tell the cause of death or whether or not it was murder?"

  "Oh, yes, I can tell the cause of the death," Vogel growled. Jamie had noticed several times before that Vogel's syntax in English started to slide toward the grammar of his native German whenever he got upset. "My examination of the body told me that, and more. In fact, it was telling me far too much, more than makes sense. Wilcox had 25 years of age. He had perfect health at his last exam, ten days before he got this mission. No allergies, no bad teeth, good immune system. You name it, and that part of his body worked perfect."

  He paused and glanced at his datapad. "If I wanted to be cute or didn't want to do my job the proper way, I could say he died of heart failure--but who doesn't die of that? Question is, what caused this man to have the heart failure? Antwort--I mean answer: BSI Special Agent Trevor Wilcox III, also known as Trev Wilcox or Trip Wilcox, male, age twenty-five, died of general systemic failure brought on by extreme old age."

  "What?" Jamie asked.

  Vogel went on, ignoring the interruption. "Old age. Everything worn out. Collapsed. All soft tissues were involved in failure. However, bones, teeth, hair, nails, that sort of thing, all showed as normal or with only slight alteration from normal state for person of his age and previous state of health. In other words, the soft tissues--skin, muscles, internal organs, and so on collapsed due to old age before the hard body parts had enough time to age."

  The shocked silence hung there for a moment before Kelly drove it away. "However Wilcox was killed, he was killed on Metran--or at least as a result of something done to him in the Metrannan System. And we have to work on the assumption that he was killed for some reason related to his courier job--in other words, because of a document that might be a War-Starter. Dr. Vogel's full autopsy report has already been loaded aboard the data system of the Bartholomew Sholto, along with everything we've got on the Metrannans. You two will boost toward Metran aboard the Sholto this afternoon."

  "But the Sholto is a Sherlock-class too, isn't it?" Jamie asked. "Aren't those single-person ships?"

  Kelly looked at him with a bemused expression. "You've done your homework," she said. "You're right. The Sherlock-class are all single-ships."

  "So why put two people in a single-seater?" Hannah asked.

  "Because the Sholto won't be alone. She's already docked to the Adler, and we're going to keep them docked together. We're always short of ships, and scaring up another one would just waste time. But there are other reasons, which I'll get into in a moment," said Kelly. "Here are your orders. You'll fly the combined craft to Metran and investigate, searching for clues to where the decrypt key might be. Your cover story will be that you're trying to find out what happened to Wilcox. You'll leave the Adler in a distant and hidden orbit of Metran's orbit--a Pluto-class orbit ought to do it--and fly down to Metran aboard the Sholto. They're installing a second acceleration chair right now. It'll be a tight fit, but doable."

  "Tight fit is scarcely the word for it," Hannah muttered.

  "You will spend the transit time between Center and Metran searching the Adler and studying the data aboard her. We've searched her twice. You'll do it the third time. I think the key is aboard the Adler, but concealed in such a way that it is impossible to detect without an outside clue. I think that Wilcox left that clue behind on Metran. However, I could be wrong, so you'll search. If you do find anything of significance, you will abort the mission to Metran and head for home. But I'm not expecting that. We would have found anything aboard that could be found that way. I believe there will be some clue, some lead, in the Metran System, that will point you toward what we're looking for."

  "What, for example?" Jamie asked.

  "Tradecraft stuff," Hannah said. "If Wilcox knew or suspected that he was going to be in danger, he might have left behind some sort of lead or clue or message that would make sense to us but not to the locals."

  "That's one class of possibilities," Kelly agreed. "There may be others. In any event, you'll have the Adler right there, near to hand, to check the leads out at once."

  "Aren't we running a tremendous risk, taking the Adler along back to Metran when she's probably got vital data hidden on board?" Jamie asked. "She might be destroyed, or seized."

  "Possibly. But if that information is there, two diligent searches did not find it. The key is, for all intents and purposes, lost already. Perhaps we could find it if we disassembled the Adler and had a hundred techs spend six months examining the pieces, one by one. But we don't have the hundred techs to spare, and BSI-DLO is making it very clear that they don't think we have the six months, either. If we take too long to find that key, that could be as bad as never finding it at all. We've lost months already, while the Adler was floating around in the outer edges of Center's stellar system. What if the crisis is just about to blow up in our faces? We don't even know what the crisis is yet. We need information, and we need it fast. You're taking the Adler with you. That's my decision--and my responsibility."

  "And, bear in mind," said Vogel, "assuming the whatever-in-hell-it-is turns out to be on board the Adler, it's not just our people and our robots that have searched for it and not found it. The Metrannans--or whoever it was that boarded the Adler--have done the same. How likely is it they or we will find anything if they search again, without some sort of clue or guidance?"

  Kelly nodded in agreement. "My hunch--or at least my hope--is that you'll learn something on Metran that will lead you to what is hidden--so I want you to have the Adler handy for reference. Time could be critical."

  Kelly fell silent and stared hard at the wall over Hannah's head for a moment before looking at the agents again. "It's my further judgment that destroying whatever is aboard the Adler is preferable to risking the chance of its falling into the wrong hands--which very likely is the same thing as letting the Metrannans get it back--but maybe not. You are to escape to the Sholto and destroy the Adler if she is about to be captured or searched while you're aboard. We have a team aboard her right now rigging the ship to self-destruct if anyone tries to board her in your absence."

  "What fun," said Hannah. "That sort of thing is always so relaxing when you're headed back to the ship and wondering if you remember the access codes correctly."

  "So make sure you remember them," Kelly said. "The point is, the decrypt might still be there, on board the Adler. We have to find it." She looked at Hannah and Jamie. "Any questions?" she asked.

  "Is the assignment physically possible for the ships?" Jamie asked. "Can the Sholto land and take off from Metran and do the boost back to where the Adler will be--and still be able to boost us back to here?" Jamie was getting the distinct impression that no one was worrying about the tactical and logistical angles enough--and it was going to be his skin and Hannah's out there.

  "The short answer is no," Kelly said drily. "The long form is that we've had to do this sort of thing before. The techs on the flight deck are working on it now. We'll hang a booster off the Sholto. You'll use it on the boost out of Center System and dump the booster before you make your jump to Metran. You'll do a power-transfer from the Adler to the Sholto, and then fly the Sholto in and land her--doing your best to make it look as if she flew there all the way on her own. And you'll most likely not have to ride her down to the surface. Apparently they have excellent orbital facilities.

  "Your best-case scenario: The Metrannans are friendly enough--most of them, anyway--and you shouldn't have any problem refueling at that end. Worst case: You'll have to shift propulsion power between the Adler and the Sholto. If you have enough power to bring both ships home, fine. If not, you transfer every drop of propulsion power you've got back to the Adler, transfer to her, destroy the Sholto, and head for Center System. You ought to have enough power left to make it back to Center Station. If you don't, just get as far as the outer system, yell for help, sit tight, and we'll come get you."
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  "Another tight fit," said Hannah. "And one that could last a while. If it comes to that, just be sure not to take your time. We might be short of a few things besides propulsion power by then."

  "There will be a fast ship on standby before you jump to Metran," Kelly promised.

  "I see why we transfer from the Sholto to the Adler if we only have propulsion power enough for one ship," said Jamie. "We don't want to leave the Adler where the Metrannans might find her and have another crack at searching her. But why destroy the Sholto? It seems like a pretty high-handed way to treat government property."

  "Because we do not, do not, do not want to get the Metrannans thinking about the Adler in any way at all," said Kelly. "We don't want them seeing two Sherlock-class ships at once. So far as they are concerned, the Adler never made it home and we know nothing about what might or might not be aboard her. We know nothing about how Wilcox died. They will see you arrive and depart on another ship. Your cover story--but it's not just a cover story, it's part of your assignment--is to find out who killed Wilcox, and why--and, if possible, how."

  Jamie nodded. "Okay, I get it. That's why we're taking the Sholto--because she's the twin of the Adler. If they see us depart in the Sholto, and we're later forced to retreat to the Adler and destroy the Sholto, and they detect us flying a craft that shows exactly the same mass, size, configuration, and so on as the Sholto, they'll never know we've made the switch. So if comes to that, we're going to have to destroy the Sholto so completely that no one ever even finds the wreckage."

  "Now you're getting the idea," Kelly said approvingly.

  "If we can't admit to having any clues about how Wilcox died, that's going to make our investigation on Metran harder," Hannah objected.

  "We all have our problems," Kelly said. "If the Adler has the key to a War-Starter on board, that has to take priority over the details of how an agent died in the line of duty--especially one who sacrificed his life in the act of getting that data to us."