Authors: Roger MacBride Allen
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."
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."