Death Sentence (43 page)

Taranarak had to admit that the humans' endless planning and rehearsal were paying off. In a stunningly short time, all the gear they had packed and prepped, all the bundles stacked in the flight deck, all the supplies that might help keep them alive in the days ahead, had been moved from one ship to the other. Their sense of urgency was infectious, and she stood on the
Sholto
's lower deck, eagerly watching the seemingly impossible gyrations of the humans. It was clear that they were not descended from tree dwellers--they
were
tree dwellers. No sensible being, descended from sensible creatures that lived their lives on good safe flat ground, could ever have tolerated such movements.

She might get used to the sight of them climbing, but seeing them move through the zero-gee tunnel between the ships, seeing Wolfson flitting around in the weightlessness of the
Adler
, directly over Taranarak's head, was something else again. It was of very little comfort to see that Mendez appeared to be slightly distressed by his much more limited work in the zero-gee ship. Weightlessness might be a very useful thing for cargo handlers, but it would never be suitable for any sort of refined person.

But then, at last, they powered up the gravity system aboard the
Adler
, and it was time for the last bulky, awkward, inconveniently shaped object to be moved from one ship to the other. Taranarak took a double dose of her fast-dwindling stock of motion-sickness suppressant, and set out to do what she had, short days ago, promised never to do.

She grabbed hold of the
Sholto
's rope ladder with her outer arm pair, awkwardly lifted her left forward foot onto the first rung, and started climbing. The sensation was terrifying. The humans made encouraging noises, and urged her on, rung after rung, but it was a nightmare all the same.

And then came the horrors of the docking tunnel. She knew what she had to do, knew the danger was really quite small, but even so, it was terribly hard. To move deliberately into a zero-gee zone, to scramble along on the netting hung along its sides, to flip over in midair--then to emerge back into blessed gravity, but moving down the rope ladder, moving blind, the humans still humiliatingly comforting, mortifyingly helpful, until she was past the flight deck, then down on the lower deck, and safe.

Safe for the moment, at any rate. The worst was yet to come. Because this was a human ship. And they were already rushing to make their jump. And human ships shut down their gravity systems for transit-jumps.

"There we are," Mendez said, as soon as she was down. "Close the hatch at will, Hannah. Undock, get us clear, and let's get under boost again."

Twenty minutes later, the
Adler
was back under boost, with the
Sholto
a few hundred kilometers behind and matching course.

It felt surprisingly good to be back aboard the
Adler
, Hannah decided. It might be cramped--more so with three of them aboard--and it might be in worse shape than the
Sholto
, but it was where they were supposed to be. She realized that she had been suffering an unconscious itch the whole time they were away from the
Adler
, a sense that she was not doing her proper work, almost that she was shirking her duty, because she wasn't aboard the
Adler
, searching for the decrypt key. The problem was, of course, that she still wasn't doing that job.

Other things had to come first. Hannah braced herself in the space where the pilot's seat used to be and slathered the last of the electroset compound over her improvised patch-up job on the wrecked side viewport. She smoothed the material down as best she could, shrugged, shook her head, and shoved the two power leads into the stuff. She flipped off the safety on the powersetter and pushed the button. Low-voltage currents moved through the claylike substance and induced a state change. Within seconds, the compound was hard as steel-reinforced concrete--and about as transparent. They had lost even more of their view out, but there was at least a fighting chance that their ship would hold pressure as they went through the transit-jump.

"Hannah! I'm ready for you now," Jamie called out. "And let's not forget we're on the clock."

"Who could forget, with you around? I'm coming."

She went down the ladder to the lower deck and helped Jamie wrestle the second acceleration chair, the one that Gunther had attached on the lower deck, back up the ladder and onto the flight deck. Even Jamie had to agree that during the transit the pilot would need a pilot's seat more than a passenger would. The original pilot's chair was still stuffed into the
Adler
's air lock to keep it out of the way. They had briefly discussed dumping it into the
Sholto
before undocking the two ships, but that would have cost them extra time and effort they did not have to spend.

Speaking of time, they were coming up on a mere fifteen minutes until transit-jump. Hannah hurried to get the chair where it needed to be and bolted down to the deck. In a way, it was a good thing they were so rushed just before the jump. It kept them from becoming worried and distracted over what was going to come next.

Or maybe it didn't. She glanced up at Jamie's face as he worked to tighten down the final bolt. He was eager, enthused, even excited. Whatever it was that he swore not to talk about until they were through the jump was clearly on his mind.

"Set!" Jamie said. "Okay. I'm going to go get Taranarak strapped down, then do the best I can for myself." There weren't any good places besides the pilot's chair for riding out a transit-jump. Jamie and Taranarak had to throw blankets and padding down on the deck and strap themselves in with cargo hold-down belts.

"I'll go down with you and talk to her one more time," said Hannah. She went down to the lower deck and knelt on the floor next to where Taranarak was already strapped in, already as dosed up against zero gee as they dared--and already scared out of her mind. "All you have to do is remain calm and in control," Hannah said in Lesser Trade, feeling as if she were a medic tending to some hard-luck roadside-injury victim. "We'll only have the grav system off for about thirty seconds before the jump, and I'll power it up as soon as we're through. It'll be uncomfortable for you, but that's nowhere near enough time for it to get dangerous."
Unless, of course, something goes wrong or the passage through the jump takes an unusually long period of subjective time
. But no sense pointing all that out to Taranarak. She knew it all already, without being reminded of it.

"Thank you," said Taranarak. "Your concern is appreciated--but now you must return to your post. I will feel far more secure seeing you at the controls."

"Ten minutes, Hannah," said Jamie in English as he floundered around a bit with his improvised restraint system.

"Okay," she said. "I'm on it. Thanks for the use of the chair."

She scrambled back up to the flight deck and made herself ready. The autosequencer was the one flying the ship now, but Hannah was there as the all-purpose backup system, with at least some hope of dealing with the unexpected--as if there hadn't been enough of that already. She glanced up at the lumpen mass of electroset compound and muttered a prayer to whoever might be listening that it would hold.

She checked her status boards and switches once again. What had Jamie come up with that she had missed? It had to be that he had figured out some clue to where the decrypt key was. He had as much as said so, for all of his refusing to speak at all. Had he really found something? Or was he wrong? Had he miscalculated, or found some way to kid himself, fend off the guilt he felt over failing Trevor, failing to complete the mission?

Three minutes to go.

The sequencer was setting to work in earnest, powering down unneeded systems, shifting everything into safe mode. It occurred to Hannah that they were asking a lot of the poor old
Adler
, moving her from dormant mode to remote ops to crewed status and then a transit-jump in rapid succession, after all she had been through already. And what about the
Sholto
? She was scheduled for an automatic transit-jump ten minutes after the
Adler
. The plan was for her to position herself to do one last bit of maneuver-masking, putting herself and her thrust plume's energy field directly between the
Adler
and Constancy's ship. Constancy would know that the
Adler
had jumped, of course, but not knowing precisely when or where would make it a lot harder for Constancy to find her on the other side.

Main engines throttling down. Life support shutdown. Cabin lighting off. This time it ought to be a nice, smooth, well-calibrated jump, without any overstressed jump generators or off-center loads or support cables taking too much dynamic load. Ought to be. Didn't mean it would be.

"Grav systems off in five--four--three--two--one--zero!" Hannah realized a split second too late that she had done the callout in English. Never mind. Taranarak no doubt had noticed the change all by herself. She shifted to Lesser Trade Speech and spoke again. "Transit-jump in twenty human brief-duration units." She wasn't even going to
try
to do conversions to Elder Race units on the fly in her head. "In fifteen! In ten! Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. TRANSIT!"

Something grabbed hold of the ship and shook it once, twice, hard. Outside the surviving viewports, she could see fat green blobs of glowing, sparking light. There was a low humming sound, almost like a slightly off-key choir singing. A soundless flash of pure blinding white light lit up the interior of the
Adler
--and they were through.

The friendly and familiar sight of the stars as seen from the Center System bloomed into being all around them. The
Adler
's nav system came back on and instantly acquired one, two, three positioning beacon signals. Hannah overrode the sequencer to bring up the grav system sooner, and felt one point two one gees of gravity pressing her down.

"Jamie?" Hannah called over her shoulder, still working her board. "How did you like the ride?"

"That was it? We're clear? Jump complete?"

"I think we've earned an easy one, don't you? You okay? And how's our passenger--or patient, or whatever?"

"Pinkish-green again, and gurgling, but I think she's recovering already."

"Maybe she's getting used to it," said Hannah. "Keep an eye on her while I phone home and whistle up the booster."

The moment the rest of the ship's systems came on, Hannah brought the ship around to aim her nose--and her directional antenna--squarely at Center. Because they weren't under boost, and therefore didn't have their main engines pointed directly at the inner systems, in effect serving as a powerful jamming system, their communications range was much better than it would normally be, and Hannah was confident their signal would be heard.

She double-checked her celestial-navigation aim against the positioning beacons and got a satisfyingly close agreement. She powered up the
Adler
's main radio transmitter, routed its signal through the directional antenna, and transmitted thirty seconds of Mayday calls. It would take hours for the calls to cross the endless kilometers between their position and the planet, and days for help to arrive, even under the best of circumstances. But that was not the only reason to send the Mayday at once.

They were going to have to power down everything possible and rig for silent running before Constancy showed up. Hannah took a little time right then and there to shut down systems they weren't going to need for a while. Every little power output she killed would increase their chances of staying hidden. She dearly wished that she could have killed the grav system, but there was no hope of that, unless she were willing to kill Taranarak as well.

As soon as the Mayday calls were completed, Hannah spun the ship at random and fired the main engines for thirty seconds, just so as to shift their position and velocity away from where it had been at transit-jump arrival. With any luck, that would make it harder for Constancy to track them. As soon as the burn ended, she switched over to the broadcast antenna and sent the wakeup code for the booster stage that had gotten them through the first part of their journey. It almost wasn't necessary. The
Adler
's nav system already had a fix on the
Adler
's own position, and got a location lock on the booster at almost the same moment the booster woke up and answered.

"Okay," Hannah said to the booster. "We're here and you're there. Good." She cued up the next message for the booster and sent it. Then she told the nav system to zero out their velocity relative to the booster and handed ship control to the automatic systems. The nav system flipped the
Adler
around to another new heading and fired the main engine very briefly, and then gave a few little love taps to the attitude jets.

Hannah was very pleased to see that the maneuver had used up very little propulsion power because they barely
had
any propulsion power left. They certainly didn't have enough juice left even to make a start on braking maneuvers. They were utterly dependent on BSI HQ sending a rescue vessel. They had made a conscious and deliberate decision not to take the time required for transferring power from the
Sholto
, on the theory that the other ship would need it more for the job it would have to do.
This plan had better work.