Death Sentence (2 page)

SCR-2 was cramped and stuffy. It was in essence a room inside a bank vault, barely large enough for a table with six chairs around it. It had to be kept fully isolated and shielded from the rest of BSI Orbital HQ and its ventilation and electrical systems were prone to misbehaving.

Jamie and Hannah went through the security scanners and into the room. At least the lights seemed to be working properly at the moment, though the ventilators were making their usual intermittent low grinding noises. They sat down at the back of the room. Jamie was not particularly surprised to see Commander Kelly and Dr. Vogel enter a moment or two later.

"Good morning to both of you," Commander Kelly said as she sat down. "Doctor, have a seat and let's get started."

Dr. Vogel set his datapad on the table as he sat down, peering distractedly at the screen. He frowned and reached for the power button. When the screen went dark, he looked around, as if he were only then fully aware of his surroundings. "Hmmph. This place. Do we have to be doing our talking in this damned tomb?"

Kelly looked at him with a half-amused, half-annoyed smile. "Yes," she said, and left it at that. She turned to the door controls, punched in a series of commands and clearance codes, then watched as the conference room's door swung inward and boomed shut.

Jamie swallowed as his ears popped. The ventilation system was up to its old tricks, forcing the air pressure in the conference room to rise the moment the door was sealed.

Kelly took her own seat with her back to the door and nodded to the two agents. "We've got an intriguing one for you," she said. "One you might take a personal interest in, Agent Mendez."

"How so, ma'am?"

"We finally found your predecessor. Trevor Wilcox. Or, more accurately, he found us."

"Too late to do him any good, unfortunately," Vogel added. "We've changed his status from 'missing and presumed dead' to plain ordinary 'dead.'"

Jamie felt his stomach do a backflip or two. It was one of the things that everybody thought about, but no one discussed, not if they could help it. An agent quit or retired or--more often than not--died. A new agent would be assigned, come into the Bullpen, and literally sit down at his or her predecessor's desk. Sometimes, as in Jamie's case, the new agent was assigned the dead agent's caseload, and even his living quarters and duty schedule.

Jamie had never met Trip Wilcox or known anything about him--but even so, he found himself, in effect, living Wilcox's life--sleeping in his bed, cooking in his kitchen, working in his cubicle, closing out the cases Wilcox had left unfinished. Sometimes it had been hard to tell if Wilcox were the ghost haunting him--or if he were the ghost haunting Wilcox, moving in the places he had been, doing the things he had done.

It had taken months before some people had stopped thinking of him as the kid in Wilcox's cubicle, before the work he did and the places he lived and worked had truly become
his.
Even so, it still happened that some busy, distracted agent would come bustling up to Jamie's cubicle, expecting to find Wilcox--and be plainly disconcerted to see Special Agent James Mendez there instead.

Would knowing Wilcox was well and truly dead put an end to all that--or merely remind everyone once again that Jamie was living in Wilcox's life?

"He was on this ship the rumor mill's been talking about?" Hannah asked.

Commander Kelly glanced at Vogel, grunted, and shook her head. "Word moves around fast, considering how security-conscious we're all supposed to be--but yes, Wilcox was aboard the BSI ship recovered in the outer reaches of Center's star system about a week ago. He'd plainly been dead for some time."

Kelly stared at her hands for a moment. "Wilcox was doing what we thought was a simple courier job. He was supposed to collect a document from the Metrannans that was to be handed directly over to the BSI Diplomatic Liaison Office. We have recovered the document from his ship's computer--at least we think we have. It's in the form of a highly encrypted data file--so encrypted we can't tell for sure if it's the file we want. The document is useless without the accompanying decryption key--and it might still be useless even so, without some sort of additional explanation that could provide a context."

"What is the document?" Jamie asked.

"We
think
it's some sort of complex technical report," said Kelly, "or else maybe some sort of political information pertaining to Metrannan relations with another species--and it is known that the Metrannans have been in talks with the Kendari on a few matters. BSI-DLO
claims
to know nothing more about the document, but they gave it the priority designation War-Starter--and, of course, we have to bear in mind that BSI-DLO doesn't always tell us everything."

"War-Starter?" Jamie asked. "I don't think I know that designation."

"Trust me--you don't
want
to know it," Kelly said bluntly. "It means what it sounds like. If the matter in question is handled badly, if things go the wrong way--the end result is on the scale of an interstellar, interspecies war. Not necessarily a war that directly involves humans, and maybe not a war at all--but something that could be just as violent and destabilizing. An uprising. A plague. Something that could do the same amount of damage as a major war."

"I read xeno-history a lot," Vogel said thoughtfully. "Often--not always, but often--in an interspecies war like that, at least one species is rendered extinct. Gone. Even if humanity wasn't directly involved in such a war, lots of humans could get hurt or killed, you bet."

"You're making us feel better and better," Hannah said.

"We're not planning to stop until you feel as good as we do," Kelly replied. "Let me back up and start over a little closer to the beginning. Plan A had been for Wilcox to be double-blind."

"Sounds like a sensible precaution for something designated War-Starter," said Jamie. Double-blind was BSI slang, the term borrowed from the scientific community, but with an entirely different meaning. A double-blind courier didn't know what he or she was carrying before
or
after the pickup.

"Very sensible," Kelly agreed. "But the BSI-DLO people didn't see it that way. They insisted on a single-blind pickup. They wanted Wilcox to get briefed at the other end so he'd know what he was carrying on the way back--and be able to tell them about it when he got home."

"Do you think he was killed because of that?" Hannah asked. "The man who knew too much?"

"We haven't even said that he was killed," Kelly said. "Just that he died."

"All right, then--
was
he killed?"

"It is a strange case," Vogel said sadly. "I believe so. No. That is not strong enough. I
know
so. It is a question of
proving
he was killed, demonstrating it. The cause of death is so, well,
peculiar,
that I cannot believe it was an accident or some strange 'natural' cause. It was murder--but we don't know how. Or why. But we will come to that, as well."

"In any event," Kelly went on, "we know for certain that Wilcox reached Metran, received the document and the decryption key, got his briefing, reboarded his ship, and headed for home. Judging from what we've learned so far of what was found aboard ship, he realized sometime after he was headed for home that he was slowly dying. He probably realized he wouldn't live long enough to get home. It also seems that his ship rendezvoused with another vessel while he was still alive and that outsiders came aboard his ship. Whether they were hostile or friendly, or why they came aboard, we don't know."

"Did these outsiders come aboard before or after he realized he was sick?" Jamie asked. "Could they have poisoned him or infected him in some way?"

"We don't know," Kelly replied, stony-faced.

"Wait a moment," Hannah said. "Wilcox went out before Agent Mendez was assigned to the Bullpen, something like six months ago. Mendez was assigned to replace him. When did all this happen?"

"You're right. Wilcox went out just over six months ago. The job should have taken about two or three weeks, all told. He arrived at Metran on schedule and departed three days later. We think he was boarded about three days out from Metran and died about two weeks after that--but that he was unconscious, or at least not fully competent, for some time before his death. We're basing this on very sketchy information and guesses, and dealing with some contradictions.

"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."