Death Sentence (8 page)

Jamie looked startled. "How do we know that isn't exactly what did happen?" he asked. "Maybe the Metrannans did wait for him to die, came aboard, found the decrypt key, and took it away. The reason Gunther and his team couldn't find the key was that it was already gone."

"You're not making me feel better," Hannah said. "But you have made up my mind about your first question. I say we hit the paperwork first, at least for a while. We should do a first pass that might at least help us whittle down the possibilities."

"Makes sense to me," said Jamie. "We might even find out something about what Special Agent Wilcox was supposed to be doing, what his mission was."

"I've got to admit I'm just a teeny bit curious about that War-Starter designation," said Hannah. "It'd be nice to know what that was about."

"What?" Jamie asked in mock horror. "And ruin the surprise?"

Hannah laughed. "Absolutely," she said, "even if it gets some xenos upset. Let's go to work."

METRANNANS--Native to the planet
Metran
(see reference). Physical description: There are eight limbs in all: four legs and four manipulating (e.g. nonlocomotive) arms. The legs are short, set close together, and arranged directly under the vertical torso. The typical upright stance of a Metrannan roughly resembles that of a standing human. Height is about one and a quarter to one and a half meters. The skin is covered by scales on all the body except for the hands, feet, and face. Scale coloration varies by individual, and ranges from light blue to pink, but seems to have no social or other significance.

The four arms are arranged with one "strongwork" pair positioned as with human arms, and a smaller "closework" set, better for fine manipulation, set at a position roughly analogous to the human rib cage. The hands consist of four mutually opposable fingers.

The head is large and rounded, and the neck so short the head seems to sit directly on the torso. There are four eyes--a primary pair facing forward and a rear-facing pair. The Metrannan head is generally, but not always, surrounded by a manelike ruff of hair.

Notable characteristics: The Metrannans are the shortest-lived of all the sentient species currently known to humanity. Metrannans typically live to the age of forty human years. Even that is a significant increase on their original life span.

Metrannans require a relatively high gravity field. A force much below the one-sixth-gee field of the Earth's Moon will eventually prove fatal. Metrannans lose consciousness after about thirty seconds in zero gee, and die if not returned to a strong gravity field within a few minutes.

METRAN--The human name given to the home world of the
Metrannans
(see reference), an intelligent species that was in turn named for the world. The Metrannans have their own names for themselves and their home world, but both are unpronounceable to most humans.

The world, and by extension the species and the culture, are named for the species' cultural habit of living exclusively in giant, highly planned and rigidly controlled cities--and only one city per planet.

The planet itself is somewhat larger than Earth, with a higher gravity and a denser atmosphere. Metran is unique among the human-cataloged home worlds of sentient species in that the species known to humans as the
Xenoatrics
(see reference) have had a colony established there so long that it predates the evolution of the Metrannans themselves. (The Xenoatric home world is not known to humans, but it is definitely not Metran.) The Xenoatric Enclave, estimated to be several million years old, still stands in the center of the Metrannan City. The Enclave is completely surrounded by...

Jamie blinked, jerked upward in his chair, and shook his head. It was far from the first time he had caught himself starting to drift off. He sighed, rubbed his eyes, and turned to stare out the viewport for a moment, if only to rest his eyes.

It wasn't that he wasn't interested in learning about Metran. It was just that he was so tired, so burned-out from reading, reading, reading the query results.

Working the file had never been the most exciting part of police work. Sifting through a pile of papers, or grinding through screen after screen of data, was just plain dull. Most of what was written in the average case file was set down in the most blindingly boring bureaucratese.

A report might spend pages and pages on the most trivial side issues and gloss over the key facts with no details at all. A file would have so many obvious sloppy errors and misstatements of fact that it became impossible to rely on anything in it.

And yet, examining the files was absolutely essential. They might contain--they
ought
to contain--that one golden nugget of information that could break the case wide open--or maybe just keep a certain James Mendez alive.

Of necessity, the query results covered not just the case in question--what little they had on it--but all the information BSI had about the culture, history, biology, and psychology of the species in question--a species that the assigned agent in question might never have so much as heard of before being tapped for the mission. Besides which, the files on a given xeno species were never complete and were often highly inaccurate.

It would be as if a xeno investigator had to come to Earth to solve a murder, and her sum total of information on the human race consisted of what she had time to learn en route from an old out-of-date encyclopedia with half the entries missing, plus some old newspapers and a stack of gossip magazines--with perhaps
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and
The Diaries of Samuel Pepys
thrown into the mix on the off chance they might be of some use and because they were the only history books available.

"Getting on toward dinnertime, Jamie," Hannah called from the lower deck.

"Good," he said. "I'm too punchy to accomplish much of anything. Let me just tidy up my references, and I'll be down in a minute."

On previous cases, Hannah and Jamie had fallen into the habit of studying the query results individually, then meeting up at mealtimes to discuss what they had found. Having both of them shoehorned aboard the
Bartholomew Sholto
, a ship that was a tight fit for a single person, made both sides of that procedure difficult. Hannah was hunched over the one small fold-out table on the lower deck, struggling to keep her notes and materials from spreading out too far and falling to the deckplates or getting wedged in some bit of fold-out gadgetry. Jamie was in the pilot's station, which had the benefit--and distraction--of affording a spectacular view of the stars but also had even less to offer in the way of flat surfaces.

Jamie squared his data displays and notebooks up as much as he could, stood up, stretched, and made his way down the rope ladder to the lower deck. As he did, he glanced upward at the upside-down view of the
Irene Adler
's interior, and felt a brief twinge of completely irrational guilt as he did so. So much effort had been taken, so many risks had been run, so that they could search that ship's interior as soon as possible--and yet neither of them had so much as gone aboard her since their launch from BSI HQ.

Hannah pretty much had dinner ready by the time he got down the ladder--but she hadn't had to do much. There was barely room enough to store food, let alone provide a real galley. Instead they had self-heating ready-to-eat meals in disposable containers. The BSI worked hard to make the meals palatable, and for the most part they succeeded, but mealtime aboard the
Sholto
was definitely not high cuisine. Hannah pulled the activation tab on a mealpack and handed it to Jamie.

"So," he asked. "Made any progress?"

"Some," said Hannah. "I think I've got a better handle on what Wilcox was supposed to be doing."

"I still don't get why Commander Kelly couldn't brief us on that."

"I'd assume it was because Kelly simply didn't know," Hannah said. "You haven't drawn any courier jobs like that yet, but they happen. The BSI Diplomatic Liaison Office will get in a request from the Diplomatic Service, or maybe even from some other agency that needs something moved quietly from here to there. It might be that no one in BSI-DLO would even know what, exactly, the message or item was, but if all they're doing is handing the task to us, they don't
need
to know--and neither do we. The argument is that it can be safer for the agent on the job
not
to know--and for it to be generally known that courier runs are double-blind. No one's going to hunt you down and torture you three months after you get back to find out what was in the envelope if everybody--good guys and bad guys--know that you didn't know yourself."

"I suppose," Jamie said, peeling back the top of his mealpack to reveal a reasonable facsimile of a piping-hot cordon bleu, "but somebody killed Wilcox for some reason, and being ignorant didn't save him. Maybe he could have protected himself if he had known the score."

"He started
out
ignorant," Hannah said, opening her own mealpack. She smiled, and Jamie knew why. French onion soup again, one of her favorites. "But we
don't
know whether or not he stayed that way. He could have been briefed in whole or in part while he was on Metran. And even if he wasn't briefed, he couldn't have helped but learn some things just by following his instructions."

"How so?" Jamie asked between bites.

"He was supposed to meet up with a certain Metrannan, Learned Searcher Hallaben, who worked at the City Geriatrics Research Center. Hallaben was supposed to hand him a document--no mention of any decryption key--and Wilcox was to bring it back to BSI-DLO for delivery to the ultimate customer. You spot anything wrong with that picture?" There was a faint smile at the corner of Hannah's mouth.

He thought for a moment but couldn't see any obvious red lights on the board. "The closest I can come is the bit about only one document. From what Kelly said to us, they recovered the document itself from the
Adler
's computers--presumably from the onboard secure file system. But if this was a really secure operation, they would have used
two
couriers--one for the document and one for the decrypt key. Ideally, neither would know anything at all about the other, and they'd each travel by different routes at different times and so on. Maybe that's even what happened. Special Agent Wilcox got the encoded document and some other courier--maybe not a BSI agent, maybe not even a human--got the decrypt key. Gunther's team didn't find it because it was never there. It was sent by some other route."

"Possible, but not likely," Hannah said, poking at her soup. "If that had been the plan, an awful lot of things would have to go wrong for us to have gotten to this point. Someone at our end would
have
to know they were using two couriers. We knew about it when Wilcox failed to return. If there was a second courier, either he arrived and they know about it and they already have the key, or else he never showed up either. But they'd
still
know Wilcox didn't have the key. BSI-DLO wouldn't have asked for us to investigate if either of those things had happened.

"I
suppose
there might have been some nightmare bureaucratic foul-up, with everything so compartmentalized that no one even knew that they didn't know what was going on, but I doubt it. Commander Kelly might not have been authorized to tell us everything about the case, but she wouldn't have sent us out unless there was very good reason to believe the decrypt key was aboard the
Adler
. And she wouldn't have risked sending agents on just guesses and hopeful theories. In other words, she wasn't allowed to
inform
us that there was only one courier, but she did know it."

"So at least we're not on a wild-goose chase--or at least not that
kind
of wild-goose chase," Jamie said. "But if someone who has more need-to-know than we have tagged this thing War-Starter, then it
should
have been a two-courier job. The fact that it wasn't--or at least our assumption that it wasn't--tells me that someone was making it up as they went along."

Hannah nodded thoughtfully as she blotted up the last of her soup with a crust of bread. "I'll go with all that. But you did flunk my what's-wrong-with-this-picture test."

"Fine," Jamie said. "You win. You're smart and I'm dumb. What is it?"

"Come on, think like a xeno, a proud member of an Elder Race species. Your civilization has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Nothing ever changes and nothing is new."

"I still don't see it."

Hannah grinned again. "You ever hear the bit of urban folklore about the American patent office at the end of one century or another? The nineteenth, it must have been. Some old fogy suggests that they might as well save money and shut it down because everything worthwhile had already been invented. Turns out the story isn't true--a complete garble, a
reversal
of the truth, in fact, but that's not the point."

Then Jamie saw it. "Ah. I get it. A
research
lab. That would be a very undignified thing for an Elder Race to have around."

"Because they
have
closed their patent office," Hannah said. "They've been at it for hundreds of thousands of years. Some of the Elder Races have been around for
millions
of years. They
have
invented everything--or at least they believe they have. It's supposed to be close to an article of faith for a lot of races. Except someone has decided maybe they haven't gotten to everything. Which means this Learned Searcher Hallaben is committing heresy, or near enough. And wherever there's a heretic, there's bound to be a true believer nearby."

Jamie nodded eagerly. His mind had never been far from thoughts of their other mission--finding out who killed Special Agent Wilcox, and why. "Yeah," he said. "A true believer who just might have a motive for killing a courier."