Death Sentence (26 page)

Using shorthand was another part of the concealment process--and shorthand also made the writing faster. Even if the opposition took the trouble to learn to read printed English, and even handwritten English, getting from there to the hooks and pockmarks and slang of BSI shorthand would still be a major challenge. Jamie maintained that Hannah's handwriting was bad enough to represent a further barrier to understanding--including his. The destruct oven was the next stage in concealment. As soon as a page was filled, it was fed to the destruct oven's built-in shredder/burner. And that was just one-half of the process. Protocol called for one agent to write in shorthand, while the other read the writing and replied in sign language--and for them to swap roles every few minutes.

Someday, perhaps, the Kendari Inquiries Service would devote sufficient resources to learning the combination of hand-spelling, symbolic gestures, totally arbitrary gestures, visual representations of spoken puns, and even more esoteric elements that made up the BSI's version of sign language. It seemed unlikely any other species would put in the effort--and even the Kendari had yet to show any signs of trying. It seemed hugely unlikely that the Metrannans would do so.

"All right," said Hannah, "let's get started."

Jamie began. "do you knect the dots the way i do?" he wrote. "what tan sed sure made me think trev's msg was sumthing to do w/longlife treatment. formula 4 it? or maybe it's part of formula delib left out?"

Agreed,
Hannah signed back.
The timing sure suggests it. Trevor collects a message from Geriatrics Institute. The message gets lost. Not long after a rumor starts spreading, saying longlife secret has gone missing. But why they would send it to us, to humans and UniGov, I don't understand
.

"+ formula
isn't
missing if they just give trev a copy. unless they give him
only
copy? crazy idea, but maybe poss. safekeeping? accident destroys all other copies & is no backup? can u think of other reason?"

I probably could, but there's no point in speculating.
Hannah paused for a moment.
We must remember rumors are often very wrong. Just because the mob thinks it was a longlife treatment, that doesn't mean it wasn't a cure for Metrannan baldness. And just because we connect the dots that way and it makes a pretty picture, it doesn't make it the right picture. We could be making a wrong assumption--or Taranarak could be deliberately misleading us. And another big question: Why give the secret formula to lowly stupid Younger Race like humans? And why suppress cure for short lives? Many mysteries.

"many many. like: where r we going? who will we c? what clues could b on this world to tell us y trev offed, who did it, where key is?"

I was going to ask you all that.

"i kno. that's y i ask u 1st."

Thanks a lot, partner.

They ran through a notebook and a half's worth of paper, and swapped the jobs of shorthand writing and signing back and forth a half dozen times. They thought up a great many more questions, but didn't get much further forward with answers.

Finally they gave it up and decided to turn in for the night--if it could be called "night" with the full light of the local sun shining down on them. Fortunately, Jamie managed to find a status and control monitor, mounted and positioned and designed in a way that would seem totally counterintuitive to humans. The instructions for it appeared to be posted in six languages, one of which was Metrannan, four of which were completely unknown, and the last of which was very bad written-form Lesser Trade Speech. Jamie followed it well enough to opaquify the overhead half of their cylinder and dim the interior lighting.

They had brought along their own emergency rations, of course, but it was only common sense to leave those alone as long as possible. After a bit more digging and exploring, they found a cupboard full of ration packs marked as human-edible in several languages, including not only written-form Lesser Trade Speech and Greater Trade Writing, but even English. More or less. The lettering was a bit skewed somehow, and the spelling wasn't all it could be, but the package did say

Gud Four Humans to Be Eaten

(Safe Phude Fore Peeple frum Eerth)

As Jamie pointed out, that was open to interpretation, and might mean it was certified as safe for cannibals, but a quick check with their portable food testers gave the happy news that the Metrannans were better biochemists than linguists. The water tested as safe, even if it had an odd brackish aftertaste. The best that could be said of the flavors of any of the rations was that they were "interesting," but if patience was a BSI job skill, so was an iron stomach. They both got through what Jamie insisted on calling a "meal-like event" without incident.

Although the food--if one could call it food--was barely acceptable, the beds were beyond reproach, a vast improvement on the roll-up mats and sleeping-bag arrangements they had been using aboard the
Sholto
, and even better than the beds in their duty quarters back at BSI HQ.

It took a little doing, but Jamie finally did manage to decode the status display sufficiently to tell them how long it would be until they hit atmosphere and how long until they arrived on the ground. Neither of them wanted to miss either event, so Jamie set the alarm on his datapad to wake them a half hour before they hit air.

What Jamie hadn't counted on was the absolutely obvious idea that popped into his head the next morning, the moment the alarm went off and he swung out of bed. He hurried over to Hannah's bed to wake her and tell her about it--until he realized that not only was she no longer there, but that she had beaten him into the bathroom and the shower, leaving him with nothing to do but sit down and wait for her.

But Hannah managed to balance the sin of early rising with the good act of getting in and out of the bathroom quickly. The door soon opened, and she emerged, fully dressed in a slight variation of the business suit she had worn the day before. "Morning!" she said. "I
think
this thing can't run out of hot water, but I did my best to save you some, just in case. And the controls don't work exactly the way they do at home--to put it mildly. So watch it."

"But I--"

"Come on! Hurry up! We don't want to miss the show."

Jamie opened his mouth to protest--but then he stopped himself. It hadn't taken many missions for both Hannah and Jamie to realize that being in a split-gender field team in close quarters required a specialized etiquette.

For Jamie, one of the most important lessons was knowing when to notice there was something he wasn't supposed to notice. Hannah might well be not quite as completely put-together as she looked. Some bit of feminine apparel might not be easy to do up in the tight confines of the bathroom. She might want him to get into the bathroom so that she could have a moment or two of privacy
outside
of it. "I'll be right out," he said.

Hannah breathed a sigh of relief as soon as Jamie was in the bathroom. There were a few adjustments to women's clothes that just weren't possible inside a cramped bathroom--and those adjustments were even trickier with all the concealed gear they both had to carry. Once she had a little more room to work in, it only took her a moment or two to get herself suitably pinned, buttoned, adjusted, and organized.

Jamie soon emerged, looking reasonably scrubbed and refreshed, but plainly a little put off. The sullen reddish lighting didn't make him look much happier. "So much for that theory," he said. "At least the easy part of it."

"What theory?" Hannah asked.

"Well, I got to thinking. The Metrannans can't possibly have many cars like this one--cars made up for humans, I mean. And this one doesn't look exactly brand-new. A few scuff marks here and there, lots of little signs that things have been used once or twice. So they probably didn't start from scratch and fire up some custom-built robotic lab to put all this together for us when we first signaled we had arrived in system."

"Right. Probably they have a whole fleet of these in storage somewhere, with cars modified for each species that might visit the planet. Vixa, Kendari, Pavlat, human, Stanlarr, whatever. More cars if the species comes here a lot, fewer if they don't come that often."

"Right. So connect the dots."

Hannah thought for a moment, then she got it. She shifted to sign language.
There are very good odds this is the same car Trevor rode in.

Bingo,
Jamie signed back, and reached for a notebook. He scribbled quickly, closed the book, and handed it to Hannah. "maybe he fig searcher wld travel same way he did. maybe he left backup copy or even
only
copy of key here in this car. that's y we nvr found it on
Adler
. it nvr got there."

Cute,
Hannah signed.
But you're not fitting theory to data. You're using the absence of data as evidence your idea is right.

"OK, so it's not ideal logic. it's at least idea we cn check. we cn search car. search n places and n ways metrannans not likely 2 look. i chckd bathroom jst now. fixtures etc dont fit metrs. i look for places hard 2 c in red light. c idea?"

I see it. Did the Metrannans? Do they have cameras in bathroom? If I were running things, I would.

"didnt think of tht."

But your idea is good. Yes, we should search--discreetly, so it doesn't look like we're looking. It's a long shot, but sometimes long shots come in. And if you do find it--keep your cool. Don't let them--or me--know you've got it until we're safe. Whenever that might be.

"The main thing is that I'm very, very glad the Metrannans did build an Elevator car custom-made for humans," Hannah said aloud, closing the topic by changing the subject. "But let's not miss the show! Go work the controls and get the opaquifier turned off. I want to see where we are."

"Right," said Jamie. It took him a minute or two, and he managed to kill the lights altogether and plunge them into total darkness twice, but then he got it right. The ceiling faded away and the sky bloomed into existence above them and before them.

They knew what to expect, but it was still a breathtaking sight.

The planet before them had grown until it took up half the field of view. Dawn was just breaking, off to the east, the terminator line sharp and clear. The lights of the planet's only city were a patchwork dazzle to the north, with a long and sinuous flickering of light marking the routes of transit lines threading down to the south, toward the Elevator's Groundside Station.

They had gotten close enough, and were still moving fast enough, that their movement toward the planet had become plainly noticeable. More than noticeable, it was frightening, with the ground leaping closer with every minute. The visual cues--and the sideways gravity under their feet--were utterly at odds with each other. It was impossible to decide if they were traveling on the flat and level, hurtling arrow-straight toward a destination directly ahead, or falling like a rock, dropping straight down. Hannah's internal perception of what she was seeing flipped back and forth every few moments.

The two of them stood, transfixed, as daylight flooded the land ahead and below, and the green and blue and white and lovely world of Metrannan moved ever closer.

"How high up are we now?" Hannah asked.

"Um. Hang on. Lemme convert," said Jamie. "Just over a hundred fifty kilometers. Our speed has been varying, but if I've got it right, our current speed is three thousand kilometers an hour. And I don't care what sort of aerodynamics or acceleration comp this thing has. I wouldn't want to hit the top of the atmosphere at this speed. We'd better start slowing down really soon or else--"

As if on cue, without a sound, without a shake or shudder, all motion came to a smooth and perfect halt. Or
almost
all motion. It took a moment to be sure, but then they could see their car was still moving, but at a far slower rate.

"Okay," said Jamie. "Good to know they do what I tell them to do.
Now
we're doing a leisurely, oh call it four hundred and fifty kilometers an hour."