Death Sentence (27 page)

"How soon until we hit significant atmosphere?"

"I have no idea of the pressure gradient for this atmosphere," Jamie said. "Could be ten seconds or ten minutes or maybe a hair longer. Not much more than that. About all we can do is sit back and watch the show."

And there was plenty to watch. There were few sights as endlessly fascinating as a living world from orbit, the constant change and interplay between light and dark, cloud and clear sky, land and sea.

A few minutes later, as they were passing through ninety kilometers altitude, their speed dropped again, to a steady two hundred and four kilometers an hour. Moments later, they could hear a low murmuring, a moaning and whistling, coming through the hull of their car as it shuddered and quivered through the thickening air. And, somehow, in some indefinable moment, they were suddenly not moving
toward
Metran, but there already, inside the atmosphere, part of the world, inside its realm and moving through it.

Whatever confusion Hannah might have felt about the direction of their travel was gone. The gravity in their car might be set at a ninety-degree angle to the ground, but that didn't matter anymore. They were moving
down.

Perhaps they could have, should have, spent those precious minutes diligently and furtively searching the Elevator car as they had searched the
Adler
, dutifully looking for what was almost certainly not there, but it was inconceivable that either of them could have torn their eyes away from the spectacle before them.

Down they swept, toward what seemed an insignificant dot of cloud, a dot that swelled to truly massive size as they plunged toward it, then the cloud and the outside world vanished altogether in a cocoon of featureless grey, and then they were under it, through it, and looking straight down at the massive complex of sidings and access roads and marshaling yards and cargo sheds and vast facilities they could not identify at all--and in the center of them all, coming straight up at them, was Groundside Station.

They had arrived.

EIGHTEEN

IMPROPER DRESS REQUIREMENT

Arrival, they quickly discovered, did not mean the end of travel. They had come to rest with their car's interior gravity rotated ninety degrees so their "forward" end pointed straight down. They could hear the clanking and banging of heavy-duty machinery. Suddenly, smoothly, their room was swung clear of the cable cluster, and they were free of the Elevator itself. It wasn't a car anymore. Hannah decided to think of it as a gondola.

They heard the grinding and clanking of heavy-duty motors powering up, and watched the world rotate through ninety degrees, coming about level with their own point of view.

It was a distinct relief to have the exterior universe right-way up--and also, somehow, it was reassuring to
see
the cable cluster that been hidden from their view for the whole ride down. They didn't get much more than a glimpse of it before their gondola was sliding toward one of dozens of round holes in the massive wall of the main Station chamber. As casually as a mail clerk of antique days might have popped a package into a sorting slot, they were dropped onto some sort of conveyor belt.

Hannah gave up all hope of keeping track of the shuntings and transfers and handoffs after that, and was not entirely clear about their surroundings until their gondola had been placed on a sort of flatbed rail car that was in turn being guided into position on what looked like an extremely advanced version of a magnetic-levitation rail link.

Moments later, they were under way again, hurtling along an elevated track, leaving Groundside Station behind. They watched as it receded from view. It reminded Hannah of the old medieval renderings of the Tower of Babel. Tall, squared-off, multileveled, with the cables of the Elevator sprouting from its roof, and an uncountable number of roads, rail links, conveyor belts, pipelines, and power feeds spanning out from it, like the main threads of a spiderweb, all designed to serve and feed the beast that sat at its center.

"Jeez," said Jamie, watching the monstrous Station recede behind them. "I sure hope we don't have to find our own way back through all that."

"I was just thinking the same thing," said Hannah. "Come on, let's eat what passes for breakfast before we get sidetracked by the next special-effects show."

Other than the utter lack of any sense of motion, there was a sense of luxury to their little train ride. They could look out the massive view windows at something like a normal landscape, dotted with vegetation that resembled short, stubby trees. They could see animals--eight-legged animals--grazing in the local red-tinged equivalent of grass. The lighting might be a trifle eerie, the animals might be strange, the "Safe Phude Fore Peeple frum Eerth" might have an odd flavor and consistency, but the horizon was where it ought to be, the coffee from their own stores was good, they were traveling rapidly toward their destination, their current accommodations were vastly more comfortable than the utilitarian metal-and-plastic fold-down interior of the
Bartholomew Sholto
, and they weren't being shown any huge or magnificent piece of engineering that could not help but make them feel utterly insignificant.

"I'm feeling lazy," said Jamie. "Do you mind if we talk about things we don't mind our friends hearing?"

"I'm with you," said Hannah. "My fingers are getting tired."

"Okay, then. Taranarak seemed to be in an awful hurry to bundle us into this thing," he said. "What do you think that was about?"

"I doubt it was anything more than keeping to a schedule," said Hannah. "From where
I
was sitting, it seemed as if she had a lot more she wanted to say to us, before we ran out of time. I'm no expert at reading Metrannan expressions, but I had her read as in a hurry to talk, and frustrated that we had to be put aboard so soon. She got to us late, after all."

"Well, the one piece of solid news she gave us wasn't exactly helpful."

"You mean Learned Searcher Hallaben being dead? Agreed. I was counting on him to be the most likely person to know something about Trevor Wilcox." Hannah frowned. It was a tricky game they were playing. Their cover mission of finding out about what happened to Wilcox was just too close to the real job of getting a lead on where the decrypt key might be. It would be all too easy to make a slip, and there was no doubt in her mind that the walls had very sensitive ears. "Maybe Taranarak will know something. I would like to talk to her again."

"It's probably all a fool's errand anyway," said Jamie. "Most likely what happened to Wilcox and the
Adler
was some fuel pump failed or some mechanic put a left-handed gravistran in backwards and the ship blew up out there somewhere."

All right, Jamie, you get eight bonus points for acting and misdirection
. "Probably," Hannah agreed for the sake of the microphones, "but we have to cover all the bases. What I worry about is that too much time has passed, and the trail has gone cold. Hallaben's dying doesn't help matters. I don't know. Maybe we can get access to maintenance and servicing records of the
Adler
while she was landed--or docked, or whatever--to Free Orbit Station."

Of course, the
Adler
hadn't vanished, so those records couldn't help in solving that nonexistent mystery--but it was possible that the records
would
hold some sort of clue as to where or how Wilcox had hidden the decrypt key. After all, they had received their restocking supplies as soon as they landed. Say, for example, if Wilcox and the
Adler
had received similar service and then a second, last-minute restock. It might be that the items from the second restock were where the decrypt key was hidden.

All long shots, but they were down to long shots. Which reminded Hannah of another point. She worked it through as she poured herself more coffee and sipped it thoughtfully. If Wilcox had stashed the decrypt key aboard the gondola they were riding in, that would have been a high-risk, last-ditch sort of play. Wilcox couldn't know or expect that humans, let alone BSI agents, would be the next ones to ride in it--and he would have been just as aware of likely surveillance as Hannah and Jamie were. If the locals could see them
searching
for the key, they could have seen Wilcox
hiding
it.

But maybe there was somewhere else on the planet--some room he stayed in, some package he left with a trusted local, where he could have hidden the key. Except no, blast it, the whole idea made no sense. She had fallen into the habit of thinking of the decrypt key as a thing in itself, the actual goal of their mission, when in fact the whole point of the decrypt key was that it would unlock the message that had been recovered from the
Adler
's secure computer file system. How could it be used to unlock the message if it was left back on Metran, light-years from the file itself?
Unless they kept a backup copy.
That made sense.

The
Adler
's secure file system was not merely built to be secure from infiltration or unauthorized access. It was robustly built, heavily armored, and shielded, designed to survive violent events--including the destruction of the
Adler
itself. Given that, so long as long as the ship was intact, the files in that system could be presumed safe from snooping or from destruction. But, whatever sort of recording device the key was on, it was almost certainly not as well protected as the message. A memory chip could be smashed or melted. Paper could be burned.

Wilcox could have trusted in the message's surviving aboard the
Adler
, but be much less confident in the decrypt key's survival. If there were a copy, it would have allowed Wilcox the luxury of destroying the original, secure in the knowledge that the message itself would be safe. In which case, in order to protect the message, all he would have had to do was to destroy the decrypt key. The moment the boarding party's ship docked with the
Adler
, Trevor could have simply destroyed the key. Maybe they hadn't been able to find it because it wasn't there.

There might well be a backup of the key somewhere, deliberately left behind. And that somewhere would either be someplace Trevor Wilcox had been on this planet, or
with
someone he trusted. Which meant, maybe, that Hallaben's death wasn't
such
bad news. Taranarak hadn't given the impression that Learned Searcher Hallaben had died suddenly or unexpectedly. He likely would have had time to entrust the backup key to someone. Or even if he had received the local equivalent of a safe dropped on his head, surely he would have had the common sense to protect his own life's work by putting it in something like a safe-deposit box.

"
You
went quiet all of a sudden," Jamie said. "Plus your coffee's gotten cold. I think I've figured out the flash heater. Want me to warm it up?"

"Hmmm? Yeah, thanks." Hannah grabbed a notebook, and quickly scribbled down a shorthand version of her thinking. Jamie finished heating the coffee and returned to the table. He stood there, watching silently, as she wrote. When she was done, she closed the cover on the notebook and handed it to him. He opened it, read her notes, tore the pages out, folded them, and shoved them into the destruct oven's shredder feed. He nodded, and then signed to her.

Cute. Might even be right. But if so, then why did Trevor do the clean-out? Why prep the ship to help us search for something that wasn't there? He did the clean-out AFTER the boarding party came aboard. Unless we have something wrong, that has to mean that there was still something worth searching for when he did it. It was his last effort, after all. I think he was knowingly using up his last reserves of physical strength and endurance before he died. He wouldn't have worked that hard, sacrificed so much, just to play games.

Hannah sighed. "You're right," she said out loud. "I forgot that part. And I think you're right about another thing. We've missed something. We
do
have something wrong."

"We're not the only ones," said Jamie. "Look out there."

Hannah hadn't been paying much attention to the passing scenery. They had arrived at the outskirts of Metran's one and nameless city. Ahead of them were proud and gleaming towers, a graceful and orderly skyline. She looked to where Jamie was pointing, and saw they were passing through what appeared to be a warehouse district.

A burned-out, still-smoldering warehouse district. Roofs had caved in. Goods of all sorts were spilled out on the ground, and they could see Metrannans moving through the wreckage. Looters? Scavengers? Repair personnel? Guards protecting the wreckage or the crime scene? They were past in a flash, and it was impossible to know more.

They were slowing down as they approached the center of the city. It was impossible to miss the other damage. Broken windows as obvious as punched-out missing teeth, blackened buildings, piles of wreckage shoved to one side of the street. "They surely do have something wrong," Hannah half whispered, shocked by what she saw. If they had read Taranarak's hints properly, all of the ruin they were seeing was directly linked to the loss of the message Trevor Wilcox had been carrying. It was more than enough to scare her. It wasn't hard to imagine someone needing someone to blame, wanting to shoot the messenger--and settling for the chance to shoot the messenger's friend.