Death Sentence (45 page)

Jamie had the oven almost completely empty, and was down to the very bottom of the chamber, before he brushed his gloved fingers on it. He pulled his arm out of the chamber and peered down into its dusty interior.

There, at the very back, carefully taped to the rear wall of the chamber, was a neatly folded square of what appeared to be official BSI investigator's notebook lined paper.

Jamie resisted the urge to hurry. Better to cross the t's and dot all the i's. He cleared out the rest of the ash, then wiped down the interior of the oven chamber with a cloth. He checked as much of the chamber as he could visually, and then stuck his hand back in and ran it around every square centimeter of the surface to confirm there wasn't anything else in there. He sealed up all his bags of ash and debris, wiped himself off as best he could, and put on a fresh set of gloves. Then and only then did he allow himself to reach in and oh-so-carefully peel the square of paper off the back of the oven's burn chamber. He made one last check, both by hand and by eye, to confirm that nothing else had been taped down under the square of paper.

And if all that slow and careful work also allowed him a little time to savor his triumph, he was not going to feel too guilty about that. He could have made up a pretty good list of reasons for why he had earned that moment.

Jamie carefully dropped the square of paper into a small transparent evidence bag, stood up, dusted himself off just a trifle more, and made an oddly triumphant exit from the refresher compartment.

Hannah was there waiting when Jamie came out. He peeled the breathing mask off with one hand and used the other to give the square of paper to Hannah.

Even Taranarak took an interest, forgetting her motion sickness enough to stand up on her four legs and stare at the paper. "Is that it?" Taranarak asked eagerly. "Is that the decrypt key?"

"Let's open it and find out," said Hannah. "Nice work, Jamie. Very, very, very nice work. I promise to give you an extremely large benefit of the doubt the next time I think you've completely lost your mind. Where was it, exactly?"

"Taped to the bottom of the burn chamber. Trevor must have burned a bunch of notebooks and other junk, scooped it all out, taped that paper in place, then dumped the ashes and burn debris back in on top of it. Go on," he said. "Open it up."

Hannah didn't argue. She reached over to a wall panel and pulled out a fold-out worktable, and the little bench seat that went with it. She sat down. Jamie grabbed one of the packing cases of gear from the
Sholto
and sat down on it opposite her, while Taranarak moved to stand between them. Hannah opened the evidence bag, slipped the paper square out, and examined it carefully. "It's taped shut," she said. "I don't want to tear it. Scissors?"

Jamie handed her a pair out of his evidence kit almost before she was finished asking. She carefully snipped the transparent tape apart, handed the scissors back, and unfolded the square. Inside was another square of paper. The outer piece was blank on both sides. It was obviously nothing more than an improvised envelope. Nonetheless, Hannah put it carefully back in the evidence bag. This was a time to be thorough, not a time to rush.

She unfolded the inner sheet. It was blank on one side. There was writing on the other, obviously written with great care.

She read it over--her heart sank as she did so. She handed it to Jamie. "I think we're in very big trouble," she said. The writing on the inner sheet of paper read this way:

To good old, Hallaben to see back half of

insult twice. Wen Her mutt cited know

more grant of bank officer. Ungreen leaks

hate this conic section. Blank the town

Red. Good sunset vision might mean a

being gets the blanks with other end of

Newton's glass. Climbing Jacob's leads to

heavens door held open. A killing

lightness weighs them down. Edgar's

mantel, like Vogel's Eagle Name Source.

"Okay," said Jamie as he put the paper down. "Does that stuff about the benefit of the doubt apply to Trevor?" he asked. "Because maybe Trevor was pretty far gone by the time he wrote those words."

"Is the news good? You are neither of you acting happy," said Taranarak in Lesser Trade.

"What?" said Jamie. "Oh, of course. Sorry." He shifted to Lesser Trade himself. "Forgive us. The note is in English--sort of--and force of habit made Hannah and me both drop into speaking English after reading it."

"I can already see that the note cannot be the decrypt key," said Taranarak in Lesser Trade. "It should be in Greater Trade Writing symbols. Hallaben would never have encoded anything using human writing. What does it say, anyway?"

"It's nonsense. Gibberish."

"Microdot?" Hannah asked. "Maybe the writing is meant to camouflage some sort of microdot or microwriting?"

"We've been through that," said Jamie. "Trevor didn't have the equipment." He shook his head and looked up at Hannah. "I really don't want to believe he was crazy," he said. "And I
can't
believe it. Everything else was so clear, so purposeful. Maybe it's not gibberish. Maybe it's code."

"No," said Hannah, staring at the words, and starting to feel just a trifle better. "Not code.
Clues.
"

"What?"

"Clues. Puzzle clues. But done up to hide them in plain sight from people without the background to spot what's wrong or odd. It
looks
like plain old English prose. If you were an alien who didn't speak or read English, you'd never know from how the words looked that it wasn't a farewell note to his mother or something. And if you were an alien who
did
read English fairly well, you'd want to tear your heart out. You wouldn't be able to make heads or tails out of this--because the text
reads
like crossword puzzle clues. Not exactly like them, but close. Puns. Jokes. Word play."

Jamie's face lit up. "Yes!" he said. "You're right. It's a puzzle. He left a puzzle for us to solve. And the answer will lead us to the--"

An alert tone went off, squawking at them from the flight deck. "Oh, for the love of God!" Hannah jumped half out of her seat at the noise. "That scared me half to death. You're right, Jamie. He left us a puzzle--and we picked a hell of a time to finally get around to finding it."

She stood up and made her way up the ladder and looked at the main display and shut off the alert. "It's the
Stability
, all right," she announced, raising her voice a bit to be heard on the lower deck, and speaking in Lesser Trade. "She's here a lot sooner than we expected, way ahead of schedule, and she's at a lot closer range than we figured. We're fine for the moment, but we've got to get busy pretty quick."

Jamie looked up to Hannah and tapped his finger on the note from Trevor. "Hannah, we have to deal with this.
Now.
"

"I agree. But we're going to have to find time for both problems," she said, trying to sound a lot calmer than she really was. Probably Jamie was doing the same. "Hang on, I'm coming down." She climbed down the ladder again and sat back down at the table, doing her best to seem calm, dispassionate, and professional. She doubted she was fooling anybody.

Hannah turned to Jamie and spoke in English. "We're on the clock, but there's something we have to decide before we go any further. We have to decide what to do about Taranarak. Do we trust her or not? I think the odds against her being a plant have just kept getting longer--and I don't think it much matters anymore. If there's something in her clothes or gear or whatever that can give Constancy a directional fix, we can't do anything about it anyway--and I think it's too late for anything we say to do Constancy any good even if it is listening somehow--and I very much doubt that our Unseen friend is listening. I think we might as well brief Taranarak now."

"I agree," said Jamie.

"What is going on?" Taranarak asked in Lesser Trade, her voice betraying her fear.

"A lot of things," said Hannah. "Constancy's ship, the
Stability
, is out there. We can track her because we saw her transit-jump entry, and because she's just lit her engines and we can detect her thrust plume. Our nav system is doing that now. And our nav system ought to be able to keep a pretty fair track on her by dead reckoning between burns, but we
won't
be able to see her directly unless her main thrusters are lit.

"Our nav system knows where
we
are, and knows where the
Sholto
is and where the booster is, and we've all matched velocities. It's very unlikely that the
Stability
has spotted any of our vehicles yet, even though she has better detectors than we do. We're pretty sure that she can't detect our ships unless they light their engines or transmit a signal. But the second any of our vehicles do any of those things, Constancy will be able to track them and shoot at them and kill them. We're going to play it as safe as we can by keeping all our systems powered down as much as possible so as to give Constancy less chance to detect us."

"So we just sit here and hide until we run out of food, or air?" Taranarak asked.

"No," said Hannah. "Jamie has worked out a plan that involves the booster and the
Sholto
. It ought to at least give us a fighting chance of escaping. The risks are high, but we're doing our best to reduce them."

"But our primary mission is to get the decrypt key back to Center," Jamie said. "Surviving would be very nice, and we'd very much like to do it--but sending the key by laser or radio signal would do just as well as physically delivering an object that has the key on it. We intend to keep searching for the key. If we find it, making sure the key code gets back to Center is going to take priority over our own survival."

"And finding this"--Hannah tapped at the handwritten message--"makes our job even more difficult. It seems very likely that it contains puzzles and jokes that serve as clues that will tell us where the key is. So we have to play two very serious games at the same time--hiding from Constancy while trying to lure it into a trap, and at the same time trying to solve this charming little puzzle. And if we do find what we're looking for, and it's a choice between survival and BSI HQ on Center getting the decryption key--well, you understand."

"I understand, and I completely agree. But I doubt I can help with either problem," Taranarak said unhappily.

"I think you're wrong about that," said Hannah. "This note was hidden in a way that made it easier for humans to find than Metrannans--but even so, we just barely managed to find it. If the decrypt key is still hidden on this ship, it's hidden so as to make it harder for Metrannans to spot it than for humans. You might be a big help with that." She turned and looked to Jamie. "But right now, this second, I need
you
to come look at the tactical plot."

"We're going to be up and down this ladder all day long," Jamie grumbled, following after her.

"Well, you'd better get used to it," said Hannah.

Jamie dropped into the pilot's seat and pulled up the navigation plot display. "Well, it could be a lot worse," he said, after studying it for a moment. "Our three ships are deployed pretty well. It would be better if they were farther apart, or
not
flying in formation with each other, just to make things harder on Constancy, but stuff like that would make things too much harder for us, too. We just don't have the tools to manage a tactical situation that complicated. The
Stability
is more or less in the center of our triangle, closest to the booster.

"The
Stability hasn't
matched velocities with our ships, of course, because Constancy doesn't know where they are, but she's moving in more or less the same direction but somewhat faster. She's going to pass through our formation, approximately at its center, in about an hour. The
Stability
's going to be between us and Center from there on in, which means that Constancy would almost certainly intercept any signals sent between BSI HQ and us--so we'd better not send any signals."