Death Sentence (6 page)

"And probably it's not on a microdot," said Hannah. "I really doubt that's the way Wilcox would have hidden the item we're supposed to look for."

"Why not?" Jamie asked.

Hannah grinned. "That's a short question with a long answer, and we don't have much time before we boost. We'll go into it later," she said. But there was more to her reasons for keeping quiet than mere time-saving. They were already likely skating up to the edge of what the techs were cleared to hear about their assignment. It was a professional courtesy to keep Gunther from accidentally learning more than he'd want to know on a case like this. "Anything else we need to know from you, Gunther?" she asked, steering the conversation into safer areas.

"Just that we're installing the identical gear on the real
Sholto
," Gunther said, pointing upward toward the
Adler
's nose hatch. "Two reasons for that, of course. You'll need two acceleration chairs if you're in just one of the ships during part of the mission, and of course we want the two ships to look as much like each other as possible, just in case."

"In case of what?" Jamie asked.

Gunther shrugged. "I don't know the plan, but it stands to reason, if you want the
Adler
to pretend it's the
Sholto
, it's probably smart if the two ships look the same, inside and out."

"Right you are," said Hannah. "And for what it's worth, we don't know the plan, either. We'll get out of your way so you can go ahead and finish up," she said. "I think we'd better get over to the
Sholto
and start prepping for our ride out of here."

"Very good, ma'am," he said. "Good luck out there. To both of you."

Hannah nodded unhappily. She had flown in them before, and she didn't much care for the
Sherlock
-class ships. They were supposed to be miracles of efficiency, the smallest all-mode ships ever built by humans, capable of landing on a planet's surface, boosting to orbit, crossing long interplanetary distances, and transiting between star systems. But there was a reason those jobs were usually divvied up between two or three kinds of ships. Shoehorning a reentry system and landing gear into the same hull as a stardrive and a long-duration life-support system meant a lot of design compromises, a lot of hardware that was expected to do two or three things reasonably well, instead of doing one job very well.

"This bucket doesn't look much bigger than the old
Orient Express
--back before we got her blown up," said Jamie. "And she was just a surface-to-orbit job. This thing is a
starship
?"

"She's a starship," Hannah confirmed, "and she's
exactly
the same size as the poor old
Express
. They're both modifications from the same hull design."

"Makes me appreciate the
Captain Hastings
," Jamie replied.

"You've been in the lap of luxury. Back before you and I partnered together, I practically
lived
in these tubs." The
Hastings
had been their star-to-star transport on a number of missions, and had carried the ill-fated and since-replaced
Orient Express
as a landing craft. Half of Hannah's career had been spent on riding ships like the
Adler
to and from missions--or at least it seemed that way to her. It was a bit of a jolt to realize that Jamie had never been aboard one before. He had been partnered with Hannah from his first day in the Bullpen, and therefore hadn't spent any time at all on single-ships.

The
Adler
was basically a rounded-off cone, and her interior reflected that. The lower deck, where they were standing, was a circle about five meters across, with much of the perimeter space taken up by the air lock, a small and uncomfortable refresher compartment with toilet and washing facilities, and various engineering and access panels. There was a fold-down bed, and a pull-down table, and a fold-out chair--but not room to have all three of them out at once. The galley was another series of pull-out modules, as was the miniature station intended for in-field forensic work. There was barely any room left for personal items or specialty equipment. Living in a
Sherlock
-class ship was an adventure in constantly stowing and unstowing gear. It was going to be doubly fun with two of them aboard, plus the luggage packed with fancy-dress clothes they had to to take along.

Hannah looked up toward the upper deck and the nose hatch. Of course, calling it an upper deck was a massive overstatement. It was all of three and a half meters above the level of the lower deck. At that level, the conical ship's diameter had narrowed to about three meters wide, at a generous estimate. The upper deck was really nothing more than a section of open steel-mesh flooring that took up only about half of the ship's interior diameter, with the rest left open to serve as a passageway between the nose hatch and the lower deck. Bolted to the steel-mesh floor was an acceleration chair that faced the ship's less-than-sophisticated control panel and three small viewports. The pilot's chair could be swiveled about to put the pilot's back to the deckplates so she was looking toward the ship's forward end for close-in maneuvering and docking with the nose hatch. There was a rope ladder rigged from the nose hatch down to the lower deck of the
Adler
. The steps of the ladder were heavy-duty plastic, and the ladder ropes ended in metal rings that slipped into snap-shut stanchions on the deck. The topside end of the ladder was secured the same way--and there was another set of snap-shuts that held the ladder in place at the level of the upper deck.

Hannah slung the strap of her duffel bag over her shoulder and started the climb up the ladder toward the nose hatch, and the
Sholto
. Jamie followed.

She paused at the upper deck, shifting to one side of the ladder to let Jamie come up alongside her. They both stared at the pilot's acceleration chair for a moment.

"Yeah," said Gunther, answering the unasked question. "That's where we found him. At his station, staring out at the stars. We, ah, had to remove and replace the pilot's chair. It wasn't in very good shape, after, ah, Special Agent Wilcox had been in it for all those months."

It seemed to Hannah that there wasn't any better response to that than a moment's silence. She let the moment pass, and then began climbing upward again. Jamie stayed behind a moment longer than he needed, staring at the empty pilot's seat.

Sometimes being a good partner meant pretending not to notice private moments seen from too close in. Hannah moved on to the top of the ship.

The rope ladder came to an end in two more snap-shut cleats just to one side of the open nose-hatch hatchway. The circular hatch was open, and the hatch cover was swung to one side and latched in place up against the inner hull, opposite to the pilot's station.

She peered up and through the open hatch. The
Adler
was joined nose to nose with the
Sholto
, and the interiors of the two hatches joined to form a tunnel about ninety centimeters wide and two meters long. Each ship's hatch had a tube-shaped section of cargo netting stretched taut around the length of its interior. The
Adler
's netting was bright blue, while the
Sholto
's was flaming orange.

"That's not all that identical," she said, pointing to the netting as Jamie came up behind her.

"Yeah, but it will help us tell which ship we're in," Jamie said. "And look there. We're covered." Jamie pointed to a carefully wrapped-up pack of orange netting tucked in between the
Adler
's blue netting and the hatch tunnel's interior surface. Hannah peeked through the tunnel and saw a corresponding pack of blue netting tucked in behind the
Sholto
's orange netting. They could swap one for the other in a minute or two, if the need arose.

Hannah grunted. She should have had more faith in Gunther and his team.

She pushed her duffel into the docking tunnel and went in after it. She found herself suddenly in zero gee, all her reflexes scrambled as she floated rapidly upward toward the nose of the
Sholto
and the point where gravity would kick in again--with down in the opposite direction. She lunged for the netting to save herself and grabbed at her duffel just in time. Obviously, the engineers had rigged the gravity generators to provide zero gee inside the tunnel as a sort of transition zone between the two ships, since each had "down" in the opposite direction from the other. She took a moment to calm herself before turning around to see Jamie, grinning evilly back at her.

"I thought so," he said with a laugh. "That's why I let you go first."

She smiled ruefully. "Okay," she said, "I guess I had that coming. Let's go look around the real
Sholto
."

She pulled herself completely into the docking tunnel so that she floated in zero gee. It was a tight squeeze, but she managed to flip herself around so her feet were pointed in the opposite direction. She got the duffel strap around her shoulder again, then maneuvered herself around to the
Sholto
's rope ladder. She eased herself downward into the full-gee interior of the ship. It was a decidedly odd experience to have her legs in full gravity and her head in zero gee.

Hannah quickly concluded that she didn't like it, and made her way rapidly down the ladder to the
Sholto
's lower deck, dodging past two technicians crammed into the upper deck making some last-minute adjustment. Jamie followed behind her. They stood on the lower deck of the
Bartholomew Sholto
and looked straight back up the way they had come, toward the
Irene Adler
. Gunther was up there--or was it down there?--in the center of the
Adler
's lower deck. He craned his neck up to look at them, waved, then turned back to his work, giving them a fine view of the top of his head as he walked out of view on what Hannah's hindbrain was quite certain was the ceiling.

"This is going to take some getting used to," she said to Jamie.

"You mean the way half of everything is upside down?" he asked with a laugh. "It's been that way since the first day I signed up with BSI. Come on, let's get squared away and ready for boost. We're on the clock."

FIVE

CONSTANT OF CHANGE

"Change is wrong," said the being on the low platform in the front of the room. The chamber was dimly lit, the rounded walls glowing faintly. A single shaft of light framed the glittering form of Bulwark of Constancy. The room's arrangements resembled something suitable for a place of worship.

Learned Searcher Taranarak of geneline Lucyrn resembled Bulwark of Constancy not at all, but her species and Constancy's had lived together in close quarters for millions of year. She could read Constancy's body language as perfectly as she could that of a Metrannan--and Taranarak knew that Constancy could interpret her own gestures just as well.

She bent her four knees in unison, a movement that, in her culture, was meant to express agreement more than submission. Taranarak's actual emotional state, however, might have been better described as weary toleration combined with frustration, though it would be unwise in the extreme to express anything like that to one of the Unseen.

"By all moral, philosophical, and cultural measures, you are no doubt correct, and I of course agree with you," Taranarak lied, "but right or wrong, change is forced upon us."

And change was not only absolutely essential for their mutual survival, not only a good thing, but an absolute moral imperative. However, one did not voice such opinions to the Unseen. "It infects, it spreads, like one of the illnesses in the Old Stories."

"The illnesses never touched
our
kind, but only yours--and they were stopped," replied Bulwark of Constancy. "And thanks to the unchanging determination of
my
people, they have never returned to harm
your
people." Bulwark of Constancy gestured with its upper-left and lower-right expressive mandibles, indicating dismissal of a poor analogy.

"I beg your pardon," Taranarak said. For a supposedly changeless being, Constancy was being--what was the delicious human word that Trevor of geneline Wilcox had used?
Crotchety!
That was it. Bulwark was being most unusually crotchety and fussy. But, of course, the mere existence of humans and Kendari, the fact that the Young Races must be dealt with at all, even if only as a mere trivial inconvenience, was a massive affront to the whole worldview of the Unseen Race. It was unfortunate that she had been forced to bring such matters to the attention of Bulwark of Constancy. "I did not wish to offend."

"Nor have you--yet. But it is desired that you proceed with your report and conclude with all deliberate dispatch."

"Very well," said Taranarak. "It is my opinion that the danger can only grow worse as the level of uncertainty grows. There is growing awareness, among many factions, that there is--or at least was--a treatment that can...alter matters." She dared not say anything more explicit than that for fear of offending Constancy.

"It is wrong to alter matters. As a matter of simple logic, it is plain that any change could only be for the worse, because circumstances and conditions remain optimal, as they have been for a significant part of a standard galactic rotation."

Not optimal for everyone,
Taranarak thought.
For the Unseen, perhaps, but not for Metrannans.
"Wrong or right does not enter into it," she said. "The knowledge that there
is
--or even that there
might
be--a way to change matters is in and of itself destabilizing the situation." She hesitated. "Whatever we might think of change in general, or how
this
change might affect our society--our civilization--it is beyond any empirical dispute that this change might well have the potential to provide the deepest and most profound benefit to some individual Metrannans."
Practically all individual Metrannans.