Death Sentence (48 page)

"Kind of the way that ladder behind you leads to a hatch that opens to the heavens."

"Kind of like that, yeah. Exactly like it, in fact. But what's the part about 'held open' mean?"

"Hold it," Hannah said. "Coming up on the booster firing. We've got to watch this."

The booster lit its engines, and even at the small scale of the nav display, it started to move, and move fast.

But it did not move for long. The
Stability
responded with astonishing speed. The glowing dot that represented the
Stability
accelerated violently, straight for the booster. It was another stern chase, but it was not a long one. Jamie and Hannah watched in silence as the xeno ship moved in on their decoy--but neither of them expected the end to come as soon as it did.

The two ships were still separated by thousands of kilometers when the booster flared up, flashed over into nothing, and then vanished from the nav plot as if it had never existed.

"My God!" said Hannah. "What did it use to destroy it at that kind of range?"

"I don't know," said Jamie. "Maybe some kind of heavy particle beam. But that ship's got weapons I wasn't expecting."

"But maybe--maybe--that's bought us a little time," said Hannah. "Constancy's going to have to put on the brakes, slow down again, reverse course, and resume the search pattern." The thought wasn't much comfort, seeing how fast that ship could attack. How long would they last when their time came?

Maybe not long at all. They would have to be ready by then, all their duties complete. "No more leaving the flight deck," she said. "Things might happen fast. I'm going to have to be close to the controls from now on. But even so--back to work," she said, not bothering with false heartiness or bravado. She looked Jamie straight in the eye. "We couldn't be much closer. We almost have it. I'm sure of it."

It seemed to take Jamie a moment to come back to himself. The effortless, casual suddenness of the booster's destruction had thrown him as well. "Ah, yeah," he said. "Yeah."

"'Held open,'" said Hannah. "'Climbing Jacob's leads to heavens door held open.' What's that supposed to mean?"

"I don't know."

Hannah stood up, grabbed on to the rope ladder, and climbed upward a rung or two. Suddenly she had it. "I know," she said. "At least I think I do. It doesn't seem like much. The top of the ladder is on those little rails that slide back and forth. You have to push the top of the ladder one way to line the ladder up with the hatch lip, but you have to shove it back the other way to close the hatch properly. 'Climbing Jacob's leads to heavens door held open' translates to mean 'You can climb the rope ladder through the nose hatch when it's open."

"Yeah, but so what?" asked Jamie.

Hannah climbed back down and shook her head. "I have no idea." She glanced at the nav plot. "There's good news. It looks like Bulwark of Constancy has decided to examine the wreckage or some bloody fool thing. The
Stability
's matching velocities with the debris cloud from the booster."

"If it exploded violently enough for our little nav plot display to come close to overloading, there probably aren't any fragments larger than five centimeters across."

"Yeah, but apparently Constancy doesn't know that," said Hannah.
And we get to live a little bit longer while it discovers that.
But there was no point in saying
that
out loud. "What's next on our little list of riddles?" she asked.

"I copied it into my datapad," he said. "Lemme see. 'A killing lightness weighs them down.'" Hannah looked down--and saw Taranarak, sitting on the lower deck because she couldn't bear heights, and was just barely fully recovered from her brush with death, caused by a few seconds' exposure to zero gee during the transit jump. "Metrannans," said Hannah. "'A killing lightness weighs them down.'"

"Of course!" said Jamie. "One more left," he said. "'Edgar's mantel, like Vogel's Eagle Name Source.'"

"Vogel. I hadn't really focused on that before. That's got to be Doc Vogel, back at base. It's an in-joke reference that would only make sense to a BSI agent who'd served at HQ since Vogel started there."

"Okay, so what? What's Vogel's Eagle?"

"Hold it. Hold it. Your datapad. Link into the ship's database and pull up a German-English dictionary. Get me the German word for 'eagle.'"

Jamie's eyes went wide. "I don't have to," he said. "I know that one. I just didn't put it together. The German for eagle is 'Adler.'"

"So, so that becomes--the name source for the
Irene Adler
. The Sherlock Holmes story. 'A Scandal in Bohemia.' Is there an Edgar in that story?"

"No! But there's an Edgar who wrote stories!" Jamie said. "Edgar Allan Poe. And he had a story, a detective story, a famous one, where there was a mantel that played a big part in the plot."

"
That
class I didn't sleep through," said Hannah. "'The Purloined Letter,' by Edgar Allan Poe. The whole point of it was that the letter was hidden in plain sight, on the mantel, but disguised to look like something else."

"And that links back to the earlier clue, with 'Her' capitalized," said Jamie. "Name Source is capitalized. The other 'Her' refers to the same thing--Irene Adler."

"Not the character in the story. The ship.
This
ship."

Jamie rubbed his head and groaned. "All right," he said. "If--
if
--we've got all this right, and
if
Trevor's mind hadn't aged into senile dementia before he wrote this down, then what the hell does it all mean?"

Hannah glanced at the nav plot again. Bulwark of Constancy was just coming up to the volume of space where the booster had been when it blew. Maybe--maybe--it could find some debris there that might tell it that the wreckage wasn't the
Sholto
or the
Adler
, but Hannah doubted it. The main thing was that the search would keep Constancy busy for a few more minutes. It might just be long enough. "Let me go over it again." She took the datapad from Jamie, read the original message, and translated it into what they thought the answers were.

"'If you want longevity, show the results of reading this to Hallaben. When a female hermit sights her dog, she is no longer alone,' or maybe the dog isn't in there. It
might
mean something can be seen only when the hermit is alone--or maybe only when the hermit
isn't
alone. 'Blank the town Red' brings 'paint' to our minds--and some paint has been used. Leaks hate patches--and the fact that there's one gone is called to our attention. The Metrannans get the blues when they try to see blue--and it's blue paint that has been used. And pardon the expression, but maybe the mentions of red are just red herrings. Climbing the ladder leads to the hatch--when it is open. Metrannans have to have gravity. In 'The Purloined Letter' the object of interest was hidden in plain sight."

"Let's leave the dog out. I think the dog is the real red herring, if you know what I mean," said Jamie. "We're reading in one or two layers too many. I think 'Her mutt' just means 'hermit.' But anyway, probably a patch has been painted blue, and slapped over something in plain sight, and that's where the decrypt key is hidden. And it's been done in such a way that it would be harder for Metrannans to find, because of their bad blue-end vision and need for gravity."

"There's a lot about sight and seeing in all the clues," Hannah observed.

"Yeah," said Jamie. "Trevor's telling us that we can see it from where we are, right now, inside the ship's cabin."

"But you can only see it when the
Adler
is or isn't alone, or on the ladder, or with the hatch open, or when--"

Jamie looked up sharply at Hannah. "We never closed the upper hatch at all while the two ships were together--except from the other side, from the
Sholto
. But there's no outer nose hatch to give us an air lock, so when the
Adler
's away from other ships, when she's alone--"

"The hatch is shut. It has to be. And if the Metrannans entered through the upper hatch, they would have to have the gravity system on, and they'd have to pull the ladder into position over the hatch lip to get up and down. The hatch would have to have stayed open the whole time they were here!"

"But wait a second. Trevor didn't rehide the key until
after
that search was over. If there's anything we've worked out with a great deal of confidence, that's it. He didn't hide the key until after the search. So why would the hatch position matter? It would only matter if he knew they'd
never
use the lower-deck air lock hatch."

Hannah shifted to Lesser Trade Speech, and called down to the lower deck. "Taranarak! You were telling me about the day you were arrested, when you went to meet with Bulwark of Constancy and they picked you up on the way home."

"Yes. That was the day it all started to fall apart, so far as I was concerned."

"Tell Jamie. Tell him what Bulwark's main argument was, the reason you couldn't let everyone on the planet, and all the Metrannans in the Galaxy, live twice as long."

"Because, Bulwark of Constancy said, 'Change is Wrong.'"

Hannah turned toward Jamie and grinned. "
That's
why," she said. "That's why the hatch position mattered. Trevor was worried about a second search. And he knew Bulwark was sure that Change is Wrong. If they had come in through the nose hatch the first time, then they would do it that way the second time, and the third, and the fourth, and forever. Because the other side of that rule is 'Do Everything the Same Way.' They would
always
come through the nose hatch, and the nose hatch would always have to stay open the whole time they were on board."

"That's a stretch," Jamie said. "Sooner or later they would have to work out that the lower-deck hatch would be easier for them--but yeah, I understand the logic." Jamie looked up at the docking hatch--the door to the heavens--with a gleam in his eye. "But the
Irene Adler
is alone right now, and the hatch is closed, and that's the best time to see--who knows what?"

At that moment, another audio alert sounded. Hannah and Jamie both checked the nav plot--and both of them saw what had caused the alert.

Bulwark of Constancy's ship had changed course yet again.

It was headed straight for them, straight as an arrow for a bull's-eye.

"How?" Hannah demanded, her blood running cold. "How did it lock in on us? What could the booster debris have told it?"

"Nothing," said Jamie. "It's just a little slow on the uptake. My guess is that her detectors
did
pick up our radio command--but Constancy didn't pay it any attention or understand what it meant at first. It just got really smart just a little late in the game and triangulated back from the direction of the radio signal source and the booster's start position." Jamie stared at the nav plot for a moment. "I've got an idea," he said. "It's going to take some timing and luck, but I've got an idea. You go take a look at that hatch."

"But--"

"Do it," Jamie said. "If you find it fast, we might still have a chance to radio in the key sequence before Constancy gets in range. I think I can keep us alive at least that much longer."

Hannah looked at her partner and saw that there was no time or reason to argue. If she was going to trust his judgment, this was when to do it. "All right," she said.

She reached for the ladder again and scrambled up to the hatch. Hannah knew in an instant that whatever Trevor had done, he had done in zero gee. She remembered what Jamie had spotted in the logs. The
Adler
's gravity had been kept at three-quarters of a gee--except for a two-hour period when it was cut to zero. She had just figured out what those two hours had been for.

With the stanchion pushed back on the rails away from the hatch lip, there was a hell of an overhang between the top of the ladder and the hatch proper. In zero gee, inspecting the closed hatch would be an utterly simple task. But with the gravity system cranked up to one-point-two-one gees for the benefit of Taranarak's delicate stomach, it bordered on the impossible.

"I beg of you, be careful!" Taranarak called out as Hannah leaned out from the ladder to grab on to an awkwardly positioned handhold on the side of the hatch.

"Calm yourself, Taranarak," said Hannah in Lesser Trade. "Or, better still, don't watch." But Taranarak's fright did serve to remind Hannah that there was a long straight drop to the lower deck if she let her hand slip. And breaking her neck would be every bit as fatal as a dose of Bulwark of Constancy's long-range weapon.

Hannah found a spot to keep her right foot on the ladder's top rung while wedging her left foot on top of a cable conduit and keeping a grip on the handhold. It wasn't exactly comfortable, and it was going to turn intensely painful if she stayed in that position too long, but it got her face up close to the inside cover of the nose hatch and left her with one hand free.

Even with her eyes no more than thirty centimeters from the hatch, even knowing that she was looking for a circular hull patch twenty centimeters in diameter, painted to match the grey-blue of the ship's interior, it took her a while to find it. At last she spotted it--aligned exactly over the hatch's centerpoint, painted to a smooth and perfect finish.

She reached up with her free hand and got the edge of a fingernail under it. Obviously, the patch hadn't been stuck down with the normal adhesive, or else she wouldn't have been able to get it free with a crowbar. She worried her fingernail under it a bit more and got enough of it clear to poke her fingertip under it and give it a gentle tug. A moment later, she was peeling the whole patch off. She got it free, managed to roll it up one-handed, then tucked it into the breast pocket of her coveralls. She needed both hands to get herself back over to the ladder before she lost all feeling in the foot that was wedged into the conduit.

She was down the ladder and back on the flight deck in a matter of moments. "Got it!" she cried out. "I've got it."