Death Sentence (38 page)

Jamie stared at him in bewilderment. It was an astonishingly rapid change of attitude. Exactly how many parts had he seen Fallogon play that day? And what, exactly, was the game he was playing? And on which side--or sides--was he playing? Then he realized there was far more consistency than he had seen at first. All he had to do was see everything through the lens of
whatever would get the longlife treatment back.

If that meant misdirecting the questioning to protect the humans in the morning, but feeding them information in the evening, so be it. If it meant dismissing them altogether the moment they were not of use, arranging their departure, then saddling them with a Metrannan troublemaker more determined than he was to get the formula, that was not a problem. A skilled chess player might go to all lengths to defend a particular piece--then sacrifice it in a heartbeat if doing so would ensure a win. It was a perfectly acceptable and proper gambit, and it would never occur to anyone to object to it.

Unless, of course, one was the chess piece in question.

The liftpod was a thirty-meter-long needle-nosed silver bullet lying on its side. It had a forward nose skid, two aft skids for landing gear, and a personnel hatch up toward the bow, but was otherwise featureless. The hatch was hinged at the bottom, so as to open out into an access ramp.

A harried tech was rattling off a hurried explanation of what was going to happen, and Taranarak--who was scarcely less flustered--was doing her best to translate what he was saying into Lesser Trade. It was not going well.

Eighty meters away, Fallogon's aircar was already buttoning up again. It lifted off almost at once, abandoning Jamie, Hannah, and Taranarak to their fate--and, probably more importantly, getting Fallogon away fast. If he wasn't there long, it increased the chances that he could get away with claiming he had never been there at all. In the snake pit of Metrannan politics, there could be any number of reasons he might need to deny it.

Only a few hundred meters away was Groundside Station, somehow looking even more like the Tower of Babel in the dimness of the predawn hours.

"You--that is, ah, we--will be sealed into the passenger cabin," Taranarak was saying, echoing what the tech was saying. "It will be small, a tight fit, but you--we--should all fit. Air content and pressure and gravity will all be normal throughout the journey. There are no viewports and only one small status board. This is a vehicle for rapid emergency transport, not for tourists to look at the passing scenery. As soon as the hatch is sealed and they have run the last checks, the vehicle will go into, ah, horizontal hover, and lift to about--let's see, it would be about fifty of your meters, if I have that right. The landing skids will retract.

"The liftpod will rotate until the nose points directly down--no! forgive me! until the nose points exactly
up.
The liftpod will accelerate to about, oh, in human measures, about eight hundred kilometers an hour very quickly and hold that speed for the first few minutes, until it is clear of the lower atmosphere. The liftpod will then accelerate at, let's see, let me convert, about thirty-eight of your acceleration units--yes, thirty-eight gravities. It will shut down its engines and coast for a brief period while it rotates to put its engines forward.

"It will decelerate at the same rate and come to rest a few twelves of meters above the target point on Free Orbit Station.

"It will make a landing in the same horizontal attitude, about eighty-four meters from the
Sholto
. The hatch will open automatically, and an air tunnel will form between our landing point and the
Sholto
. There will be air pressure so that we may walk from the liftpod to the
Sholto
. All is completely automatic."

"How long?" Jamie asked. He was thinking of the tactical situation and doing his best to squeeze out every bit of information possible. Any minor detail might be the one that saved their lives. "How long will it take us to get there?"

"Hmmm? What? Didn't I say? Forgive me. Let me figure the conversion. About one and a twelfth of your hours, if I have that right."

"Which do you think would be scarier to calculate," asked Hannah. "Our maximum velocity or our average velocity?"

"Both, when you consider we're going to do the whole run about a hundred meters away from the cable cluster," said Jamie. "Wouldn't it be fun if we hit it? Thanks, Taranarak."

They walked a few paces away from the Metrannans and looked up at the vehicle and the cable cluster. "Well, here we are," Jamie said, "with all our clothes, equipment, and food blown up, and we ourselves presumably presumed dead. All we've got is the clothes we're standing up in, plus whatever we have in my pockets and your handbag, which means there's me in my tuxedo and you in your very lovely evening gown, along with a Metrannan in fancy dress who's halfway to being in shock and has no supplies of her own at all--besides the supply of emergency rations she had smuggled onto our ship. We're about to be loaded into a giant lawn dart, then fired into space so we can get to our own ship before a set of possibly ruthless and/or imaginary bad guys can try to break into it and maybe set off the self-destruct system and strand us here on this lovely planet. And if we get past all
that,
we have to shoehorn all three of us into a ship meant for one person, boost as fast as we can for the outer system, then figure out what we do from there. It seems to me we're in trouble. Again."

"Thanks for the summing up," said Hannah. "Don't ever volunteer to be the morale officer."

Taranarak was halfway across the tarmac to the liftpod's hatch. She gestured and called to them to hurry up. "You try hurrying in a gravity field that's an extra twenty-one percent," Jamie growled. "That's one bright spot about leaving sooner than we thought," he said to Hannah. "Maybe my feet will stop hurting." Then Jamie remembered there were problems going the other way, and he upped his pace, to get to Taranarak sooner. "Taranarak!" he called out. "Gravity aboard our ships is only about four-fifths of what you're used to--and we sure don't have any meds on our ship that could help you."

Taranarak had been looking spooked and disoriented to start with. Hours before she had been at a fashionable dinner party hosted by the rulers of the planet. Since then her home had been destroyed before her eyes in an attempt on her life and she had been ordered into exile. Jamie's words seemed to take a minute to penetrate into her brain. "What? Oh! Yes!" She turned to the technician and spoke with him. He spoke into a pocket comm unit, listened, then spoke to her again.

"Very good. My thanks for thinking of that. They have a small stock of a palliative drug that should at least see me through the first few days."

"Good. I
think
we can adjust the onboard gravity to help you, but I don't know the ship's systems that well. Ah, you might also ask if they could provide you with some clothes suitable for wear on the ship--and any other small necessities. We won't have
anything
suitable for use by a Metrannan." They might even have trouble scrounging up supplies for her once they got back to Center--if they made it that far--but there was no point in worrying that far ahead.

"Excellent, excellent suggestions." She turned to the tech again, who seemed to be starting to feel harassed himself. He gave another positive reply, though not as cheerful a one. Taranarak turned back to Jamie. "They will grab whatever they can off their supply shelves in the next two short-duration units, throw it all in a container, and put it aboard the liftpod with us. But we must board
now.
"

"No argument from me," said Jamie. "They've already tried to blow us up once. Let's go."

The interior of the liftpod's passenger section was an almost featureless cylinder, completely covered in a sort of yellowish-white padding material, just spongy enough to be a little bit hard to walk on. There were thick woven loops set at regular intervals into the floor, the side panels and the overhead panels to serve either as handholds or as strap-down points for cargo.

By the hatch there was a combination door-control and status panel set at eye level for a Metrannan, and the interior of the hatch was padded with the same material as the rest of the compartment. That was it. Obviously the idea was to leave the interior wide open, to leave as much space as possible for whatever might be needed in a rush at Free Orbit Level Station. From Hannah's point of view, no seats at all was a major improvement over Metrannan-style saddle-seats. The moment the hatch was shut, she kicked over her shoes and lay down with her feet on the floor, her head propped up a bit on the padded side of the interior. "Wake me up when we get there," she said, "and I'm almost not kidding."

Jamie loosened his tie, pulled off his own shoes, and sat down next to her. "Um, don't you think that maybe we should talk about a few things?"

"No," said Hannah. "I think we should rest. Once that hatch opens on the station, we've got to get outside, deal with whatever the situation is, get aboard the
Sholto
, and get away. There's nothing I know about that we have to discuss that will matter between now and when we boost off the station. After we get
that
done, we'll have lots of time to talk, and enough to talk about to keep us busy until we match course with the
Adler
. And we'll have a lot more chance to talk privately. For all we know, Fallogon set this whole thing up from start to finish to get us aboard this hypersonic padded cell so he could listen in on all the hidden mikes, and Taranarak is in on it with him, and
she's
wired for sound and had an intensive course in English before we got to the planet."

"You
are
paranoid. Maybe with reason, I grant, but even so." Jamie glanced over at Taranarak. She was squatted down on the deck and digging through the small box of odds and ends that were going to be all the Metrannan goods she would have for a while. Maybe for the rest of her life. "Right about now she looks more like someone almost catatonic with shock and not so much like a secret agent."

"Yeah, well, later on I'll tell you about my slightly more realistic theory that says Hallaben's unfortunate death was no accident. The point is that if we get killed before we get aboard the
Sholto
and out of here, none of it matters--and once we're aboard the
Sholto
, it won't matter if Taranarak is a plant. How could she report back? Plus it'll be a lot easier to speak privately in any event. We can hide in the
Sholto
's air lock and pull the hatch shut if we want."

"
I
won't want," said Jamie. "I was locked in that air lock for long enough."

"Whatever. But for now, the best we can do for ourselves is rest up as best we can, check whatever gear we actually have, and think about what it might take to get us back to the
Sholto
."

There was a faint hum and a low whistling sound from the outside of the ship. "Were those takeoff noises?" Hannah asked.

Jamie stood up and went over to the status display. "No," he said in a strained, mock-calm sort of voice. "We missed the takeoff. If I'm doing
my
conversions right, we are already at about two thousand meters and climbing--and if you want to stay sane, don't think about what the gravity orientation is on this thing relative to the ground."

"Good advice," she said. "Now check your gear."

TWENTY-FOUR

DOWN AND OUT

When the Metrannans made a system automatic, they went all the way. According to the information placard attached to the status display board, not only would the hatch open automatically when the liftpod landed itself, but there was no way to override the mechanism and do it on manual. A sensible arrangement if the beings aboard were totally untrained and/or incapacitated or if the liftpod was carrying cargo only, but not so great for a lightly armed and jumpy pair of Special Agents who would prefer to go out the door when
they
were ready, and not when the door was ready.