Death Sentence (30 page)

"I understand," said Hannah.

"It is a matter of simple geometry to demonstrate that this trick would conceal nothing from a second detection station, if it were any significant radial distance from the first, as seen from the point of view of ship one."

"I quite see that, yes."

"Can you explain the intermittent detection of a ship under thrust on almost precisely your own heading but several billion long scientific units of linear measure behind your own ship during its arrival deceleration?"

"In a word, no," said Hannah, keeping her voice as cool as she could. "There are a lot of ships out there. I have no control over them and can't be called to account for what they do."

"Just so. Thank you for your answer."

Hannah hoped that the Metrannans were no better at reading human expressions and reactions than she was at reading Metrannans--but it was obvious there was
something
going on among the four beings behind the table in front of her--if the Xenoatric, the Unseen One, was in fact there at all. She hadn't seen it move a millimeter since their arrival. It could be a statue of a Xenoatric, or an empty carapace, for all she could tell.

The Metrannans were another story. She was nowhere near being able to understand what was happening, but it was clear there was a complicated dynamic at work. But who was headed up? Who was heading down? Tigman and Yalananav were obviously in some degree of alliance against Fallogon. But for how long? And how were the lines drawn, and why? And it seemed as if Fallogon was the one asking the tough questions--but offering them up soft and easy, almost like a defense lawyer trying to lead his witness without getting caught by the judge. Any halfway-decent interrogator could have made a lot more out of the maneuver-making angle--for the very good reason that there was actually something there. Instead he made it seem like a loose end to tie up after the other two had finished with their paranoid fantasies.

Hannah glanced at Jamie, then spoke again. "Unless there is anything more," she said, "I would like very much to make a start on getting
your
help with
our
problem. Our colleague, Trevor Wilcox, boarded his ship, left your world--and vanished. We come in search of any clue to what might have happened."

"You come very belatedly," Fallogon said. "It was roughly half of one of our local years ago that he departed from our world."

"But he was not listed as officially overdue for some time after that," said Hannah. "As for the rest of the delay, we are a small service, stretched thin, dealing with investigations on many worlds. But honor requires that we search, once our other duties permit it."

"What do you know of his mission here?" Yalananav demanded.

"That Learned Searcher Hallaben requested a human courier for an--item--a message or document of some sort--to be transported to the human world Center to another agency of our government. Trevor Wilcox was sent. For the sake of security, he was not told what he was to carry before he departed, nor was any other person in our service. So far as I am aware, no one in our service even knows if
anyone
in our government knows what the item was to be. The plan was for Special Agent Wilcox to be briefed when he arrived. We do not know if that happened."

Hannah paused, giving the Metrannans a chance to chime in, but none of them took the bait. "We do not know
anything
of what happened after his departure. We need your help to find out more."

"Your story is not plausible," said Tigmin. "Why would your service agree to act with so little information? There must have been a briefing."

"With respect, to the best of my information, there was not. Nor did our service--the Bureau of Special Investigations--have much choice. We were not asked to provide the courier. We were
ordered
to do so."

"You are saying that your people--your government--were willing to do this task without explanation?" Tigmin asked. "That
no
human ever learned what the, ah, 'item' that Special Agent Wilcox was asked to transport was? Or why it was being entrusted to humans?"

There was something oddly eager in Tigmin's tone and expression. It was almost as if he saw the message's being lost beyond hope of retrieval as good news. Hannah decided to feed him a bit more of the same, just to see what would happen. Tell him the truth, but tell it the way he wanted to hear it.

"The arrangement was that Wilcox was to be briefed on arrival," Hannah said again. "It is my understanding that no other human was ever fully briefed. I could be mistaken or even deceived in that. When the point is to limit knowledge, one must also limit knowledge of who
has
knowledge. However, it is my belief that no human alive knows what the 'item' was--other than that it was clearly very important. As to why we were asked to do this task, except for the very general purpose of keeping the item safe, I doubt any human knows--for knowing
why
would likely reveal the
what,
if you see what I mean."

Yalananav frowned and drummed the fingers of all four hands on the table. "Why would your--what do you call it--Unified Human Government--UniGov?"

"That is the short and informal term, yes. UniGov."

"Why would this UniGov agree to such a request?"

Hannah decided to tell them what they wanted to hear. "Because we are the younger of the two Younger Races, and we are small and weak, surrounded by a Galaxy full of Elder Races of great age and wisdom and effectively unlimited power. We need friends. We need acceptance. It is to our benefit to be useful, trusted, reliable."

Yes, we're just poor lonely little puppies with big brown eyes all alone in the big scary woods.
The words she had spoken were all true enough, if more than a little exaggerated. But if pretending humans were weaker than they were made the Metrannans happier and more relaxed, maybe they would let their guard down and let something useful slip.

"What is it you want to know from us that could help you in your search after your colleague?" Fallogon asked.

"Technical information," Jamie said.

"Such as?"

Jamie pulled out a notebook and started writing in longhand as he spoke. "The full maintenance records for his ship. Everything that was done to and for his ship while it was here. Complete tracking data for inbound and outbound flight. Recordings of all voice and data transmissions from his ship." He finished up his written list with a quick scribble of BSI shorthand. He gave Hannah the briefest of glances at it before dropping his hand over it. It read
let f. use that to keept. & y. chasing own tails. make 'em happy. sumthing going on.
"Can you think of anything else, Agent Wolfson?" he asked out loud.

"No, I think you've been quite thorough, Agent Mendez. Well done." She was distinctly relieved to know Jamie had spotted the same odd dynamics at work that she had. "Except, of course, for one other point," she said. "Presumably, someone at
this
end knew what the 'item' was." All the Metrannans, even Taranarak, seated silently to one side of the room, froze up, as motionless as Bulwark of Constancy.
And what is a Xenoatric doing sitting in on this very high-level hush-hush meeting anyway?
But that was a puzzle for later.

"It is at least possible that there was something about the item itself that directly or indirectly caused or contributed to the disappearance of Agent Wilcox and his ship," she said. "Can you perhaps tell us what the item was, or anything at all about it?"

Again, silence, lasting three, four, five, six heartbeats.

Hannah suddenly found herself thinking of the off-duty seven-card-stud poker games in the back room of the BSI Bullpen. Now and then you'd get dealt the last up-card and it would be something that would make everything else fall very obviously into place. If you got dealt the fourth card to the straight flush, it would make your hand almost unbeatable--
if
you had the fifth card to fill the flush in your down cards. But either you had the right card or you didn't.

If you did, you would know instantly and know how to bet at once. If you
didn't
have it, but were ready with your bluff when the bet got to you, ready to pretend, that could be just as good. Make the other players believe you had the straight flush, and you'd rake in the pot on the strength of the cards you were
acting
like you had.

But if you hesitated, if you had to pause, compute, calculate, for a split second longer than it would have taken you to make the obvious choice of how to bet the real thing, then it was all over. No bluff would be believable after that. There was nothing that could help you recover from that brief-but-fatal hesitation.

"I am sorry," Tigmin said at last, after a quiet that lasted far too long to be believed. "But that knowledge died with Hallaben. We were not in our present positions of authority at that time."

And Hannah knew from one look at the expressions on all the Metrannan faces in the room, knew beyond all possible doubt, that Tigmin was lying.

Hannah struggled to repress a smile and hold her own poker face in place.
Maybe, just maybe, Jamie and I can win this hand after all.

TWENTY

REVEALED IN DARKNESS

After two hours spent slogging through all the pointless technical information they could possibly have needed for their cover story, if they had actually cared about their cover story, Fallogon agreed to take mercy on them all and declare the session at an end.

Jamie and Hannah rode back in their aircar, stumbled back into their gondola, were sincerely grateful to watch the hatch close shut behind them, and even happy to see the guard posted outside. For a time, at least, until Tigmin, Yalananav, and Fallogon decided what to do next, they would be left to themselves. Hannah found herself understanding why the circus lions in the old stories were glad to get safely locked back into their old familiar cages.

"Man, oh man, oh man," Jamie said, dropping into a chair. "Getting back into one standard gee feels very good indeed. Why didn't that blasted database just tell us to put on black-and-white stripes or orange jumpsuits with numbers on the back? And you said it might not be
us
on trial."

"I'm still not sure it was," said Hannah. "It's just possible that the whole show was about Taranarak. Otherwise, what was she doing there?"

"I don't know. Playing along to distract us? We only had about ten minutes to talk with her back on Free Orbit Station," he said. "Not exactly enough to judge her character and motives or knowledge."

"How do you think they felt about it when we told them we didn't know what was in the message?"

Jamie glanced around the room, tapped a finger to his eye and ear, and looked quizzically at Hannah.

She shrugged. "What use can it be to them, knowing that we're wondering about their reactions? Do they think we
won't
be trying to figure out what all that was about? Besides, I'm too worn-out to play charades."

"Okay by me," Jamie said. "They can't be expecting us to have a real high opinion of them by now."

"So? How do you think they felt?"

"Relief. Very, very obvious relief. Those three seemed glad to know their secret was safe."

"Three?" Hannah wasn't so sure Fallogon was happy about it.

Jamie cocked his head at Hannah. "Hey, I'm not
that
tired. I'm not going to start analyzing who's on-first and who's dating whom and who's just broken up in plain English. And I hope that was cryptic enough for realtime purposes."

"I think it was. Anyway,
I
barely followed it. Let's talk history instead."

"Huh?"

"You had the same training courses I did. Same theory. Human history can offer insights and parallels to what goes on with the xenos. So what do you think? More like the French Revolution or the Russian?"

"What?
That
crowd? The Three? Hmmph. Early phase of the French Revolution, I'd say. Pre-Committee of Public Safety. Not the Jacobins, and definitely not the commissars."

"Yeah, that's what I thought. But why?"

Jamie frowned and thought it over. "Power vacuum," he said at last. "If I'm reading this right, the crisis was caused by a power vacuum. Not ideology, not a violent overthrow. They're just the guys who happen to be standing around in the right place when everything falls apart. The weird part here is that, as best I can see, the power vacuum was caused by the fact that the absence of government didn't matter for a long, long time. Then there was a sudden need for security, control--for
government
--after a zillion years of nothing changing and therefore no need for central control of anything. Then,
pow!,
a crisis hits and they
need
government all of a sudden. These guys get the job of putting things back together, and find out they like being in charge. They don't want things the way they were, or maybe they realize or at least believe it's not possible to put things back the way they were, but they'd like to stabilize things the way they are
now,
since they're in charge."

"Good luck with that one, with the French Rev as a model," Hannah said with a yawn. "But I think you're right. They've just about got things settled back down. They've established the new order. They want to keep it that way, and they don't want to take a chance on anything that might upset the very delicate balance.
Especially
since the new order has
them
in charge, as fate, or destiny, or the will of the people, or God himself, clearly intended."

"God in this case being the tin-plated potted palm?"

"Hmm. Maybe. I was just talking in general terms. The guys in charge
always
find a way to convince themselves that they got the job by divine right. But what
was
a Xenoatric doing there?"

"Maybe they just like having them around," said Jamie. "Or at least Tom and Dick did. I'm not so sure about Harry."