The Cause of Death (4 page)

"We can't police it without police," Hannah said after a moment or two of contemplating the sky. "Cho's just the latest. We're losing too many agents. Way too many. It's not just bad for morale--it's cutting deeply into efficiency. We're using up a lot of time just investigating the deaths of our own people."

"I know," said Commandant Kelly, her voice weary. "We're losing them faster than we can recruit--and
that
little fact does its own bit to discourage recruitment." She swung around to face Hannah. "So what do we do?"

"That's your job to decide, not mine."

"You're a
Senior
Special Agent. It's part of
your
job to advise me," Kelly replied. "Besides," she went on, patting the arms of her chair, "it wouldn't surprise me one little bit if
you
sat here someday. You could use some practice on the policy side."

Hannah gestured with one hand toward the Bullpen, and the newly emptied cubicle. "Obviously, we fill that desk. Close ranks and move on."

"Move on how? To where?"

Hannah Wolfson frowned and shook her head. "How, I can tell you--by facing facts. Every time we--humanity, I mean--every time we move outward, make new contacts with other races, or just expand our contacts with a race we've been dealing with for years, we find new problems. And there are now humans on four times as many worlds as there were just twenty years ago--but BSI hasn't even
doubled
in size in that same time. We're stretched too thin, trying to do too many things at once with not enough people."

Kelly gestured at a stack of papers on her desk. "What you just said in a hundred words, that nice thick report in the middle of the stack tells me in five hundred pages. But go on."

"Those are the facts. We have to face them
and
we have to respond to them. We have to stop doing things the way we did them ninety years ago."

"For example?"

Hannah stood up, and moved around to stand behind her chair, as if to get a bit farther away from the truth she was trying to face. "I wasn't sure of it at first, but you've convinced me. We need to do more partnering," she said. "'One case, one agent' simply doesn't work anymore."

"'One case, one agent,' " Kelly said, a sour note in her voice as she echoed the quotation. "That bit of folklore has probably put half the names on the memorial in Central Hall. We're going to run out of room on that thing pretty soon. I've been fighting like crazy to get the higher-ups to understand that one-agent-one-case worked when we were only dealing with three or four alien species in five or six star systems. Agents had a chance to study up on the cultures, the languages, to specialize. That's much harder now."

"Actually, it's impossible," Hannah replied. "I looked it up. The British Museum's Nonhuman Cultures Index lists more sentient alien species than we have agents."

"Which ought to prove my point," said Kelly. "So we try something else. It's time to go past the pilot program on partnering up agents and do it large scale."

"'Pilot program'? I don't think we can get away with calling it that. It's just one pair--Mendez and me--and you've only sent us out on a few cases. We'd have to expand the test to I don't know how many agents, and run them as partners for months to call it a
real
pilot program."

"By which time we'll have lost how many more new agents?" Kelly demanded. "I'd be willing to bet Cho would have made it back to his desk--
if
he had had someone there to watch his back. But if we wait until we've done enough tests and studies and surveys to make the planetside crowd happy, we're not going to have enough agents left to keep this place open."

"You're preaching to the converted," Hannah said. "Being out with Mendez convinced me. Agents need backup, support, another pair of eyes. Mendez and I have proved it by
doing
it and coming back alive."

"But you haven't proved it with paperwork and pie charts. Even so, if we don't start partnering on at least
some
calls until we get studies done, we're only going to have two or three agents
left
," said Kelly. "That's why we're going to pretend you two were a full pilot program." She rubbed her eyes. "And we're going with a full-blown partnering system, or at least we will--but not just yet."

"Why not? You just said yourself we need to do it now."

"We
need
to do it now--but we
can't
. I've got a lot of people to keep happy. I need more time." She gestured out the viewport at Center. "Our masters down there, planetside.
Their
bosses, back on Earth. Our budget for the next two years is just about to be approved--maybe. It's a couple of months late already. I
can't
make any policy changes right now that might make some smart bean counter reopen the whole budgeting process. One agent-pair I can get away with
if
I call it a test--as long as it's still working, still successful. But I
can't
risk expanding out to a full program until the new budget is approved and the funds are actually disbursed to our accounts. If I make changes now, it will make us look very bad. It might give someone an excuse to shut us down."

"Come on. You're saying you can't risk taking a step that might save your agents' lives because it might delay our
budget
allocation?"

"Not just delay it," Kelly said sharply. "Cancel it. Meaning the BSI itself might not survive." She gestured out the viewport at the planet Center. "The Director and the rest of the bigwigs at On-Planet HQ have asked for contingency plans for pullbacks. For being more selective about what cases we handle. So selective that we might as well not even
be
here.

"If we just take on 'near-zero-risk-to-agent cases,' to use the happy phrase of the Director's memo, some
other
smart little bean counter is going to notice that we're not doing anything the local cops couldn't do, and they'll shut us down. It will be the end of whatever good the BSI has done for human civilization outside the Solar System. And I happen to think we do a lot of good. We save lives. We uphold the law. We show the Elder Races that humans are willing to clean up their own messes. Maybe we've even prevented a war or two. So yes, reluctantly, I am risking my agents' lives to prevent budget cuts that might end up crippling our relations with the Elder Races for the next thousand years."

Kelly hesitated a moment, then turned to stare at a blank spot at the wall to Hannah's left. At last she spoke. "Off the record, Cho bought into the 'one-agent-one-case' idea. He declined when I asked if he wanted to partner up. With you."

Kelly let out a long and weary sigh, then went on. "I didn't make it a direct order. I should have. So Cho is on my conscience." She turned and looked sharply at Hannah. "I
don't
want you two on my conscience. Effective immediately, you have standing orders to keep Jamie Mendez alive. Just forgetting for one moment that he's a nice kid and we don't want to see him die, politically speaking, it would be a disaster for the BSI to lose any more new agents just now--much worse than suddenly making big changes to how we manage agents. I'll have a bad enough time with the higher-ups over Cho's death. And I can't just keep the baby agents in-house. I
have
to send them out. But if we lose any more agents--especially new ones--that could be the last nails in BSI's coffin."

Hannah nodded. "Orders received and understood," she said. There didn't seem to be anything else she could say.

"Good," said Kelly. "Then just let me page Mendez in here for the case briefing."

"Excuse me?" Hannah asked.

"You didn't think this conversation was just
academic
, did you?" Kelly asked with a grim smile. "I'm assigning you two to a fresh mission--right now."

THREE
BRIEFING

Jamie wasn't all that surprised to get called into Kelly's office five minutes after Hannah. One quick look at each of their faces told him what--or rather whom--they had been talking about.

Kelly gestured Jamie into a seat, then launched in. "I've got a job for the two of you," she said. She shoved a message sheet across the table so that it rested exactly between Hannah and Jamie. "That just came in from Reqwar. And before you can say you've never heard of Reqwar, neither had I until I looked it up. It's one of the minor Pavlat worlds."

Jamie picked up the message sheet. There were various dating and chrono and coordinate codes, but the message itself was printed in larger type, in the center of the page.

HUMAN GEORG HERTZMANN FREE

NOT GUILTY NOT PAVLAT DEATH

NEGOTIATOR HERE SEND CASE HEAR

HOME TAKE.

"It's not very clear what that means," Jamie ventured. "At least, not to me."

"We've seen worse," Kelly said placidly, and pointed to a framed document, hung on the wall. It was a message form, identical in format to one he held in his hand. The date on the message was five years old. The message itself read:

BSI KNOW OUI NEAT HILFE HIER

KALM NAO

"We never quite worked out how many languages that's supposed to be in," Kelly said. "We gave up trying to dope out what it
means
a long time ago. Now it's just a framed reminder that we don't know what the hell's going on, and the xenos aren't always that much help."

"We need reminding?" Hannah asked, plainly amused.

"What happened?" Jamie asked, allowing his curiosity to distract him. "I mean, with that message. Did you send an agent?"

"Sure we sent an agent--to the coordinates attached to the message. They put the agent's ship at a point in deep space, well away from any star system, or anything else, for that matter. We tried maybe half a dozen variants on the coordinates--figuring anyone who sent a message that scrambled might have written the coords wrong, too. Put them in the wrong order, or written them in another number base. I don't know how many variations we tried. Finally, we had to give up. Never did figure out what it was supposed to be about. Maybe it was a prank, or a test message, or a trap that didn't get sprung. I doubt we'll ever know." Kelly nodded toward the message in Jamie's hand. "The current message is a model of clarity in comparison."

Jamie shifted uncomfortably. "It's not all that clear to
me
."

Hannah reached for the message sheet. She read it over quickly and looked up. "What
do
you read it as meaning?" she asked.

"It's a bit ambiguous, I admit," said Kelly, "but I read it as saying this guy Hertzmann has been convicted of murder, and they don't want all the headaches of keeping a xeno-prisoner, so they want us to pick him up."

"Why does a xeno-prisoner make for headaches?" Jamie asked.

"A xeno-prisoner?" Kelly asked. "From a species you don't know much about? What
isn't
a headache? What's the right diet? What's a legit medical complaint, or legal complaint, and what's bogus? Is there something that's standard operating procedure in our prisons that would offend the xeno's culture, or be harmful to the prisoner without our knowing it? Do you want a pack of
other
xenos--relatives, lawyers, reporters, diplomats, scam artists, Space knows what, showing up to try and get him out or score points off his being locked up? The list goes on. It's a
lot
easier to get the home culture to agree to make the prisoner take his or her or its punishment back home. I figure they want this Hertzmann character to serve out his term in a human prison."

"Do we have a prisoner-transfer and sentence-equivalence agreement with the locals--or with
any
group of Pavlats?" Hannah asked.

"No, we don't--yet. But you're going to get us one--a standard working-level law-enforcement basic agreement. Something the diplomats can pump up into a treaty when they get around to it."

"
If
the diplos get around to it," said Hannah. "There's a pretty good backlog going."

"About twenty years' worth," Kelly agreed. "But that's not our problem, except it means getting a good solid interim agreement is even more important. It's going to be in force for a while." Kelly turned and looked at Jamie. "I figure you ought to have a leg up on this one, Mendez."

"How so, ma'am?"

"Your personnel file. You listed 'extensive experience in the Los Angeles Pavlavian expatriate community.' "

"Oh, well, yes." Jamie reddened. "That."

"Well,
have
you had extensive experience with them?"

"Well, yes, I have. But I don't know how much use it's going to be."

"Why not?"

How could he tell the commandant of the BSI Bullpen that he spent a summer working a Pavlat-owned store, in a neighborhood called Little Pavlavia, surrounded by Pavlats, and yet knew almost nothing about them? "Pavlats work very hard at not letting you learn about them, or get to know them."

"Didn't you make any friends, establish any contacts?"

Jamie shook his head apologetically. "Ma'am, it was a grunt job. I was the stock boy in a corner store. Pick up a box and put it over there. Mop the floor. Yes, I was there, in the community. Yes, I had extensive contacts, I guess. But hardly any of the customers were even willing to speak while I was in the room, let alone speak to
me
. Everything in that personnel file is true--but I was writing to make myself look good on a job application. It doesn't make me an expert on the Pavlats."