Death Sentence (16 page)

Jamie wanted to argue--but he knew she was right. If desperately wanting to know and understand everything about Trevor in his final days was interfering with the job, well, then, Trevor wouldn't want that either. He had sacrificed everything for the sake of the mission. It would be paying him no respect for Jamie to be distracted from it. "I've got it," he said.

Hannah's face softened. "Believe me," she said. "I understand. I've felt the same way. Maybe I'm feeling more of it than you realize, right now. But it can't get in the way of the job. Now let's get this thing open. It's going to be one of three things. Either the decrypt key is in it and the key is intact, and we can abort the mission, bring the key back to Center,
then
investigate how Wilcox died. Or else the key is there, but destroyed, in which case we have to abort, report
that
news to Center HQ, and see what they want to do about their War-Starter being missing. Or else the oven chamber will be stone empty--and we go on to Metran. So let's get to it. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Good. Hang on a second while I key in the security codes." Hannah consulted her datapad, entered the codes, and set the lock dials. Then she pressed down a control stud while twisting the handle.

The oven unlocked. Hannah swung the door up and open--and a choking cloud of dust and ash plumed up and into the compartment, setting Jamie and Hannah to coughing and wheezing. They retreated from the refresher compartment and Hannah slammed the door shut. "Emergency kit," Hannah managed to splutter out. "There on the wall behind you. Breathing masks."

Jamie wiped the grit from his eyes and his mouth and nodded. He crossed to the kit hanging on the wall and opened it. It was intended for use in case of a meteor strike or other air leak problem. Jamie pulled out a can of sealing foam, and an open pack of hull patches, and then found the masks. Fortunately, there were no fewer than three breather masks in it. Jamie handed Hannah a mask, wiped his eyes and mouth again, and put on his own.

"We've only got a little more than half an hour until our transit-jump," Hannah said, her voice made faint and muffled by the mask. "No time to do more than take another quick peek in there. Let's go."

Jamie grabbed a handlight from the emergency kit and switched it on. Hannah pulled the door to the head back open. The dust had settled a bit, though the air was still hazy. Hannah stepped inside and shifted over to make room for Jamie. He went in and shined the handlight down into the still-open door of the destruct oven.

The interior of the oven was jammed full of the ashes of burned paper and roasted, melted electronics, and other ruined debris that couldn't even be identified that generally. "So maybe he was a paper guy after all," said Jamie.

"And maybe, in there, is whatever is left of the decrypt key," said Hannah. "If so, there's nothing left of it now." She shook her head. "Not any of the three cases we expected, is it? So much for logic."

"But what do we do?" Jamie asked. "If the decrypt key was in there, it was fried. It's gone. That's game over, isn't it? We abort and go home?"

"We don't
know
that the decrypt key was in there, so we don't know if it was fried," said Hannah. "If there was
one
destroyed object in there, we could assume with a high degree of confidence it was the decryption key. But the key could be on or in anything. A chip, a piece of paper, a datapad, a photo. There's too much ash and melted junk in there for us to have any hope of identifying one bit of it as the missing key--so we have to assume that
none
of it is. Maybe Wilcox filled up the destruct oven with junk as a decoy for the boarding party. But if there's one place we won't find the key, it's in the middle of
that
mess." She bent down, swung the oven hatch shut, and relocked it.

"So what do we do?"

"So we go on with the mission," she said. "Let's get that cover plate secured before the transit-jump." The two of them wrestled the deckplate back into position, and Hannah used the powerdriver to screw the hold-down bolts back in. She stood up and looked down at her work. Somehow the moment felt like standing at a freshly filled grave of someone who had not been gone very long. "This doesn't change anything about the job," she said. "It just makes it harder."

She checked the time and cursed. "Twenty-two minutes to transit-jump," she said. "Let's go."

ELEVEN

JUMP TO TUMBLE

It was an axiom, a truism, a cliche: No two transit-jumps were alike. The jump in and out of other dimensions to move from one star system to another required incredible delicacy, accuracy, and power. The slightest error in navigation could produce huge errors at the arrival end--and some wholly remarkable visual and physical effects during the jump itself.

On the best-calibrated runs, with the distances and masses of the departure and target stars known with great precision, the jump effects were minimal, or even undetectably small. But BSI ships didn't always fly on the best-charted, best-calibrated routes--and the jump effects were often most decidedly detectable.

Colors, lights, vibrations, distortions would flicker in and out of being. The effects were not illusions, but all too real, ripples and shifts and twists and turns imposed on space-time itself. Mostly the effects stayed outside the ship, and acted on the vehicle as a whole. Sometimes, however, the distortions were sufficiently fine-grained, sufficiently complex, to reach
inside
a ship, so that what happened in the stern was different than what happened in the bow. Sometimes two people sitting next to each other would witness totally different effects.

Usually, the distortions were harmless and vanished in the moment the transit-jump was completed. Usually.

What worried Jamie about this run was not so much the navigation as the ship-handling--and that was no knock on Hannah's admittedly limited skills as a pilot. The
Sherlock
-class ships might be constructed in such a way that the ships could be docked together nose to nose and flown that way, but that didn't mean they were
intended
to be flown that way. If they had been designed from the ground up to fly in tandem, Gunther's people wouldn't have felt the need to rig six reinforcing cables between the ships.

But it went further than making the ships strong enough. The
Sholto
's jump generator was designed to transit one ship from star system to star system. It was asking a lot of the generator to handle an off-center mass twice that size. One thing they had going for them, oddly enough, was that the
Sherlock
-class ships were just about the smallest starships ever built by humans. Several of their components, including their jump generators, had originally been designed for much larger vehicles. Various other components were also more robust than might be expected, for similar reasons. But that didn't mean the integrated system was tuned, optimized, or fully rated for flying two ships instead of one. In theory, nothing ought to go wrong. But they weren't flying inside a theory.

Hannah and Jamie rushed through the last-minute prep for the transit-jump, powering down every possible system on both ships and closing the hatches between them.

Hannah had judged, and Jamie had agreed with her, that during the cruise phase of their flight, either the acceleration compensators would hold or they wouldn't. If they failed, and the interior of one or both ships were suddenly exposed to double-digit gees, it really wasn't going to matter if the hatches were open or shut--and keeping them shut and sealed would have slowed down their searches and investigations.

But they weren't going to be doing any searching or investigating during the transit-jump, and the jump would be, by far, the part of the journey that put the greatest stress on the ships.

Jamie drew the hatch-closing duty--and almost immediately ran into trouble. In order to pull shut the
Adler
's nose hatch, he had to brace his legs in the netting in the zero-gee section of tunnel between the two ships, then stick his body out into the topside end of the
Adler
's cabin, undog the hatch from the hold-open clamps that anchored it to the wall of the
Adler
's cabin, then retreat back into the tunnel, holding on to a handgrip on the hatch and pulling it along with him.

The first time he tried the maneuver, the hatch refused to swing to, and instead bounced out of his hand. The hatch had caught on something hard. He let the hatch go and checked for obstructions. It was only then that he discovered that the stanchions holding the top of the rope ladder were on a set of short rails, about half a meter long, allowing them to slide back and forth between two positions.

When slid to the end of the rails closest to the hatch, it was an easy straight-line climb up the ladder and into the hatch tunnel--but the ladder obstructed the outside edge of the hatch. When the stanchion holding the ladder was slid to the end of the rails closest to the wall of the cabin, there was plenty of clearance to close the hatch--but to get from the top of the ladder to the lip of the hatch would require an extremely awkward and dangerous backward lunge.

Two knobs held the stanchion in place. Jamie loosened them, slid the stanchion into the outer stowed position, tightened them back down, closed and sealed the hatch manually and checked it carefully, then retreated down the tunnel, back into the
Sholto
. He had to perform some further gymnastics to reposition the stanchion of the
Sholto
's ladder, undog her topside hatch, and then close and seal it as well.

Hannah, seated in the pilot's chair in the upper deck of the
Sholto
and busy with her own part of the prep for transit-jump, didn't notice Jamie's minor struggles until he was almost done. "Would that be any easier if I cut the internal gravity?" she asked, raising her voice so he could hear her. "I'm going to have to do it anyway."

"Thanks, no," Jamie said as he wrestled with the hatch latches. "I don't do all that well in zero gee."

"You
still
get a queasy stomach?" she asked, the amusement plain to hear in her voice.

"No, I don't," Jamie said, stretching the truth just a trifle. "But I'm just more comfortable doing this kind of work with some weight under my feet. I can brace myself better."

"Okay, fine."

"Anyway," said Jamie as he pulled the hatch to, "that's just about got it. Closing up now."

"Check that seal," Hannah said absently as she checked the status displays on the pilot's control panel.

"Thanks, Mom," Jamie said as he checked the seal. "Don't know how I'd make it through the day without you reminding me to keep breathing."

"Ha-ha," said Hannah. "Just for that, you can double-check them, and make sure we will keep breathing."

"Okay, okay. Double-checking--and seal confirmed. We're good."

"Then get down below and strap yourself in," said Hannah. "We're getting close to time--and the sequencer's going to be cutting lights and gravity in about three minutes."

"That's making it a little
too
exciting," Jamie said. He triple-checked the seal and hurried down the ladder. He paused at the upper deck and reached out to the pilot's chair to give Hannah a quick pat on the arm. "Good luck," he said, then climbed the rest of the way down the ladder to the lower deck.

"See you on the other side," Hannah said. "Hurry up now and get strapped into that flight chair."

Jamie didn't need any more urging. He got off the ladder and into the acceleration couch that Gunther's crew had installed so hurriedly. He couldn't keep himself from glancing at the brightly colored self-destruct bomb they had installed at the same time--but it wasn't always best to dwell on such things. He strapped himself in, double-checked his belts, and let out his breath with a whoosh. "Here we go," he muttered to himself, before raising his voice and calling out to Hannah. "Secure and ready for transit-jump."

"Stop kidding yourself," she called back. "No one's ever
ready
for a transit-jump. Stand by for ninety more seconds--mark--and we'll see what happens this time."

Jamie, fidgeting in his acceleration chair, looked up toward Hannah on the flight deck. She had rotated the pilot's chair around so that she was in effect lying flat on her back, her spine parallel to the deck, her feet elevated and pointed toward the nose and the centerline of the ship, and her head right in and under the viewports. The position gave her the best forward view possible from the pilot's chair.

From his angle, Jamie couldn't see much more than the back of her head, a bit of her chair, a small slice of the control panel, and a sliver of the view out the pilot's viewport. He could only see a small patch of stars and sky in the corner of the viewport. With the two ships docked together nose to nose, mostly what he could see was a section of the
Adler
's hull and one of the six reinforcing cables strung between the two ships.

He felt as if he were in the bottom of a pit looking up. Hannah had done nearly all of the piloting on their previous missions, but they had flown on ships designed to carry two people. He had flown the transit-jumps in the copilot's seat on the flight deck, where he could see out the viewport, see the status displays and controls, and lend a hand if anything went wrong. Strapped into a jury-rigged acceleration couch on the lower deck, he was blind and helpless.

Well, it wasn't as if Hannah was much more in the know, or even the least bit in control. The
Bartholomew Sholto
's automatic sequencer was running everything at this point anyway. Hannah wouldn't even want to risk a manual abort this deep into the jump sequence.

"Throttle-down complete," Hannah announced. "Zero acceleration. Stand by for internal gravity system shutdown--now."

Jamie felt his stomach do a sudden flip-flop. It wasn't zero gee itself that bothered him. It was the sudden shifts back and forth that scrambled his insides.

"Life support shutdown--now. Interior lighting shutdown--now."