Death Sentence (5 page)

The cabling was one of about a half dozen hastily improvised fixes being done on the ships. It was a lash-up, a crude sort of insurance policy against the fact that, while the
Sherlock
-class ships were designed to travel while docked nose-to-nose, or with a booster stage attached, there was no data that anyone could find in a hurry about whether it was such a good idea to fly them docked nose-to-nose
and
with a booster. The idea was to transfer as much of the load and dynamic stress away from the docking ports and onto the main structure of the
Sholto
and the
Adler
.

The engineers were all confident the cables would provide sufficient additional stiffening and strengthening to keep the combined vehicle safe. Hannah was glad to hear that--although she couldn't help thinking that the engineers weren't the ones who were going to be flying the monstrosity in question. What had her worried was how they were going to detach the cables when it was time to fly the
Sholto
on a solo run--and then how they were supposed to reattach them for the return flight.

Never mind. Those were worries for later. She touched Jamie on the elbow and nodded toward a lock entrance a bit down the corridor. "Enough with the sightseeing," she said. "Time to move. That's where we're headed."

Jamie frowned and pointed out the port. "The single-ships are, ah, docked
sideways
to the station," he said. "That's going to make getting aboard a little tricky. Gravity's going to take a ninety-degree twist. Or do they just have the grav generators shut off in the ships so they're in zero gee?"

Hannah grinned. "That one they've managed to solve with the
Sherlock
-class ships. You'll see how. Come on."

She led him through the entrance and down a short passageway that ended in the access tunnel they had seen from the viewport. They walked down and came to a closed hatch that was plainly sideways, rotated ninety degrees clockwise from where they were standing. Right-way up, it would have been two meters high and a meter across. There were the usual red arrows labeled RESCUE pointing to the latch fixing, and a whole raft of yellow signs in any number of human and xeno languages explaining, in incomprehensible detail, how to open the door in an emergency.

In the center of the hatch, at eye level--or what would have been eye level if the hatch hadn't been on its side--painted in very official-looking black lettering, was a much larger notice. Hannah had to crane her neck to read it properly.

United Government Vessel

Bureau of Special Investigations

Vessel S/N UGV-BSI-3369-MTA6.167-JMAO.708

and, in elaborate red script under that,

BSI-3369

"Bartholomew Sholto"

"Okay," said Hannah, "so we've got the right ship."

"No we don't," said Jamie. "This is the
Irene Adler
."

Hannah looked at him oddly for a moment. "You having a little vision problem?"

"No," said Jamie. "But the paint on the signs is still fresh. Almost still wet. You can smell it a little. I assume they wouldn't just freshen up the paint job for the heck of it when the ground crews are under a lot of pressure to get us launched quickly. And pretending that the
Adler
is the
Sholto
is a big part of the plan. What sense would it make to play
that
game if the first xeno ship that got within range to read her hull markings would know she was the
Adler
?"

Hannah nodded. "So someone decided they'd have to re-mark the
Adler
if we're going to make it believable." One of the side effects of the brief-and-boost policy for Special Agents was that there was next to no time to discuss things, to decide things, to report decisions. Someone would realize something needed doing and just do it without telling anyone.

In the roughly one hundred minutes since the mission had been assigned, someone on the ground crew had shown enough initiative to repaint the hatch. There had no doubt been barely enough time to do the job itself--and there wouldn't have been a chance in the sky of getting it done if that someone had been required to get four approvals first. It was a system--if one could even call it a system--that required a good deal of common sense and initiative, and a great deal of trust among all the members of the team.

And it also required that the agents be ready to deal with any surprises that were thrown at them. "Your logic's good," Hannah said. "Let's see if it holds up." She consulted the access codes she had jotted down in the lockmaster's office, flipped open a panel in the hatch, and twisted her body around to punch in the key combination for the
Sholto
--only to be rewarded with a flashing red BAD CODE warning on the display panel and a harsh, low, error tone. "All right," she said, "we'll try it your way." She entered the
Adler
's access code. There was a confirming beep, and a series of smooth clunks and thuds, and the hatch swung up and open. They had to step back a bit to get out of its way. "Right you are, Jamie," she said. "Let's see what other surprises there might be inside."

The two of them ducked to get under the hatch, and entered the air lock chamber. The chamber was a cylinder on its side, about two meters high and eighty centimeters wide--a fairly snug fit for two people in flight suits, each carrying a duffel bag. If they had been in pressure suits, they wouldn't have fit in at the same time. The chamber's steel-mesh floor was level with the deck of the station's Docking Complex, so that it was offset from the inside and outside air lock hatches by a full ninety degrees.

"Why the heck did they put the air lock floor on its side?" Jamie asked.

"They didn't," Hannah said. "At least, not permanently." There were waist-high railings welded to the two sides of the mesh flooring. The one to the left had a small control panel bolted to it. Hannah pushed a button to close the lock's outer door. As soon as it was shut, the steel-mesh floor--and the direction of "down"--began to rotate slowly clockwise.

Jamie, startled, grabbed at the handrail and glared at Hannah, who was grinning ear to ear. "I take it that warning me wouldn't have been nearly as much fun, would it?" he growled.

"Nowhere near," Hannah said as the floor's rotation slowed to a smooth halt, level with the interior lock door. "The floor grating itself isn't even powered or anything. It's on rollers, so it will just naturally adjust itself to roll to where 'down' is. The air lock has its own independent grav generator that can redirect itself so 'down' is in any direction. Its standard setting is keyed to using the lock's doors. The grav field shifts by one degree or so at a time, about ten degrees a second, so as to match up with the local direction of 'down' inside or outside the ship."

"Cute," said Jamie, still plainly annoyed. "But if you've got any other clever pranks to play on me, save them for later, okay?"

Hannah grinned. "Let's see what we've got inside." She pushed another button on the lock's panel and the inner lock unlatched--to the sound of muffled curses from inside that became clearer and more distinct as the door swung open.

"What the--burning devils! Just when I was getting things squared away--oh, hello, ma'am. Sir." They saw a technician in blue, sweat-stained coveralls. He had obviously been crouching over, hooking something up, and been forced to scramble to get out of the way of the lock's swinging door.

Hannah recognized the man. Gunther Hendricks--one of the senior ground crew techs. Hannah never felt quite comfortable with the way Gunther called her "ma'am." He was too experienced, too skilled, to be showing her so much deference. She could only imagine how awkward Jamie felt about hearing himself called "sir" by a man old enough to be his grandfather. But Gunther Hendricks did everything by the book--and the book said that was how techs were supposed to address Special Agents.

"Sorry, Gunther," said Hannah. "We didn't know anyone was working in here. We didn't mean to barge in on you."

"No, it's all right," said Gunther. "I just get a little on edge when I'm installing one of these." He gestured toward a blue cylinder with rounded ends, about fifty centimeters long and twenty wide, on an equipment rack next to the air lock.

Hannah raised one eyebrow. "I don't blame you a bit for that," she said. The blue lozenge-shaped thing was a hellbomb, a self-destruct device that would destroy the ship so completely, vaporize it so thoroughly, that no trace of it would be left behind. "It'll put us a little on edge having it aboard."

"Good," said Gunther. "I don't care how many safeguards and lockouts and system checks you have on something like this. You know, and I know, as a matter of logic, that you could pound on that casing all day with a hammer, then fire a clip of heavy-caliber ammo at it, and it wouldn't even muss up the paintwork. That thing is
tough.

"But if you're smart, you treat it like it was made of spun sugar. It won't go off. It
can't
go off without you doing about six very specific things first. But ma'am, sir--people make mistakes, and machines aren't perfect. It just
might
be that this thing was put together wrong, or got dropped in shipment in just the right way to bend a delicate part out of true. It
might
be that my bolting it to the equipment rack set up just the right stresses so that it's primed to go off the next time it gets jostled. It's not true, but it
might
be. It's a one-in-a-billion, one-in-a-trillion shot."

"We know," said Hannah. "We know." She couldn't help noticing that Gunther hadn't called the thing by its proper name. He could barely bring himself to call it a self-destruct device, let alone "bomb." It clearly had him a lot more on edge than perhaps he realized.

"And we know that there are ships that disappear for no known reason," said Jamie. "We'll be careful."

Gunther looked at Jamie with wry amusement but spoke with a note of sadness in his voice. "You do that, sir. Please be sure you do that. Because this ship here, the
Irene Adler
, is one of those ships. Or was." He gestured up toward the
Adler
's tiny flight deck. "I was part of the crew that boarded her when she came in. He was up there, in the pilot's seat. I think he wanted to die looking at the stars." Gunther was silent for a moment. "Whatever it was that killed him was something he wasn't expecting, something we've never seen before. You'd call it a one-in-a-trillion chance," he said, "until it happens to
you.
"

Gunther Hendricks looked at them with a fierce, almost angry intensity. "I don't wish to pull anyone else out of this ship. I don't
ever
want to draw that duty again. I don't want any more ships that vanish for no good reason. I don't need more reasons to lie awake nights. Don't just be careful on this mission. Be
careful,
" he said, emphasizing the last word so hard that it was almost a shout.

The tiny ship filled with a suffocating silence. Gunther looked almost as startled by his outburst as Hannah felt. He spoke again, in a quieter tone, after a moment's pause. "Sorry," he said. "But--I knew Trevor Wilcox. Not well, but I knew him. And being part of the team that took him out of here, seeing what they had turned him into...well, that got to me."

"I believe it," Hannah said.

"You said 'they' turned him into what you found," Jamie said. "Who is 'they,' exactly?"

"The Metrannans, of course," Gunther said. "Who else would it be?"

"That's what we're going to find out," Jamie said. "Why do you blame them?"

Gunther frowned. "He went there young and healthy, and he died of old age on the way home. It must have been something there that did it to him, and it must have been the Metrannans that did it. Logic, that's all."

Hannah could see that Jamie was about to ask something more, to press the point harder. But Gunther wasn't a forensic pathologist. His logic was nothing more than a jump, a leap to conclusions inspired by fear. His answers on the subject would be useless--worse than useless, if they served to distract Jamie, lead him in the wrong direction. "That's enough, Jamie," she said, before he could speak.

And yet Jamie's instinctive urge to question Gunther was correct. Gunther was a first and unexpected witness. But better to talk to him about what he did know and had some expertise about. "Were you briefed on what this one is about, Gunther?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Some, not all," he said. "And I'm not feeling all that curious, I can tell you. There's something aboard this ship that you need to find. They've searched for it twice, and you're supposed to find it."

"So why are they having you install new equipment when we're supposed to treat this place like a murder investigation site?"

Gunther shook his head. "I don't know the why. I can guess that Kelly figures a max-power self-destruct means you can be sure of keeping the Metrannans from getting the document, and that's more important than
us
getting it. But on the how, I can tell you a lot more. We were ordered to do microscopic scans of the surfaces and subsurface density scans before we installed anything." He gestured to the spot where the self-destruct device was attached. "If there had been a microdot glued down on that piece of bulkhead, or a drilled-out and covered-over hollow big enough to
hide
a microdot, we'd have spotted it. Same thing with the section of deck where we attached the acceleration couch."

"I was about to ask about that," Hannah said, gesturing toward their feet. There was a portable acceleration chair there, folded flat to the deck.

"Why not do that level of search on the whole ship?" Jamie asked.

"Lots of reasons," said Gunther. "Just setting up the gear and doing the scans of a square meter of bulkhead and a square meter of deck took hours--and that was on flat surfaces. It would be ten times slower to microscan complex surfaces. We'd have to search inside the control panels or inside a sealed tank. It might take years. We'll do scans of all the items we had to take off the ship--Wilcox's body, his clothes, decayed food, depleted air-regen units, that sort of thing. We'll be lucky to complete just
that
much before you get back."