The Cause of Death (5 page)

"Frankly, that's about what I figured," Kelly said. "But you're as close to an expert on the Pavlats as we have in the Bullpen at the moment." She nodded, making it clear the subject was closed. "So: a nice, simple job. Collect the prisoner, get the locals to sign on the dotted line, bring the prisoner back here, and hand him over to the Star Marshals--sometime when the StarMars aren't on a doughnut break. A milk run. Any questions?"

Jamie had something like an infinite supply, but he focused on what struck him as the central problem. "Ah, ma'am--as you say, the message is ambiguous. Suppose it means something else, and it's not just a prisoner pickup?"

"Then we find that out when we get there and deal with the situation as we find it," said Hannah.

Kelly gestured toward Hannah. "What she said." She glanced up at the wall clock, then stood up--plainly a cue for the others to do so as well, and they did. "Consider yourselves briefed. You have one hour before you boost," she said. She looked at Jamie, then at Hannah. "So what are you waiting around here for?"

FOUR
DEPARTURE

Fifty-nine minutes after the clock started, Hannah Wolfson was strapping herself into the left-hand pilot's seat on the bubble-domed command deck of the
Captain Arthur Hastings
while Jamie Mendez strapped himself into the right-hand seat.

The
Hastings
was a short, fat cylinder with three decks. The lower deck held the propulsion, the environmental control, cargo, and aux gear. The main deck had living quarters and work areas. The command deck was a smaller cylinder, barely large enough to hold the pilot's and copilot's stations, centered on the topside hull of the ship and capped by a transparent hemispherical forward view dome.

The ship carried two small ballistic landers, the
Lotus
and the
Orient Express
. BSI tradition had it that certain classes of ships in the BSI were named for famous characters, events, places, and vehicles in detective fiction. Captain Hastings had assisted Hercule Poirot on several cases. The steamship
Lotus
figured in
Death on the Nile
, and the train of the same name in
Murder on the Orient Express.
There was a complete set of the works of Agatha Christie aboard the
Hastings
--another part of the tradition--but there wouldn't be much time for pleasure reading.

The two landers were strapped down on the topside hull, one on either side of the command deck bubble. A portable habitat module was also strapped down topside, collapsed and stowed, to serve as accommodation for the prisoner they were expecting to transport home.

The ship's designers had played a few games with gravitic orientation. On the main and lower decks, and on the topside hull of the ship,
down
was toward the lower base of the cylindrical ship, toward the engines, opposite the direction of normal travel. However, the command deck's gravity field was rotated ninety degrees, so that
down
was
out
, toward one section of the cylinder rim, so the two landers were to the "left" and "right," and the portable habitat module was "overhead." That put "down" below the feet of the pilot and copilot in their command chairs. The arrangement led to a disconcerting transition as one moved from deck to deck, but allowed the craft to be flown from a normal seated position rather than with the pilot flat on his or her back.

But more things than not knowing which way was up or down could disorient a person. Hannah glanced over at her partner as the ship left the docking pad. He was looking a bit worried--and Hannah was pretty sure she knew why. Lots of people still found the idea of a completely automated starship disconcerting. Enter the destination planet's coordinates, hit the START button, and the ship would take it from there. It just didn't seem right. Star travel was too complex, too challenging, too full of surprises to have faith in such arrangements.

It tended to be nonpilots who were most worried by automated starships--and Jamie had no flight training at all. Hannah, on the other hand, had managed to earn a basic pilot's certificate some years back--and she trusted robotic piloting. She could fly the
Hastings
and the landers if need be, but she viewed herself as a backup to the automatics--not the other way around.

The BSI was practically the only outfit that had fully automated starships--and practically the only outfit that
needed
them. The official reasoning was that it would take far too long to train someone as a BSI agent
and
as a fully qualified starship pilot. But there was another reason that no one liked to talk about. A BSI ship had to be able to carry a badly injured agent back home without pilot intervention.

Soon the
Hastings
was well clear of Central Transit Station. The ship pointed herself toward deep space, and all there was in the viewport was the quiet, placid stars in all their glory, calm and everlasting.

Hannah's control board indicators showed they were boosting out toward their transition point, accelerating at a high rate. But however fast the ship was moving, it was not so fast as to make the stars appear to move. The acceleration compensation was smooth and perfect enough to damp over every vibration. The illusion of being motionless, at rest, quiet and safe, was all but complete. They might be boosting at twenty gees, but outside of the control panel indicators, there was no way to tell.

Hannah unbelted herself from the command chair and turned to Jamie, speaking in a voice calculated to be as calming as the unchanging glory outside the viewport. "So," she began, "were you able to find enough to do in the copious amounts of time you had for your research?"

She was relieved to see that Jamie responded with a grin. "Actually, I have to admit I did a lot better than I thought I would. I just asked questions, questions, questions, and didn't wait to read the answers."

Hannah reached for a display pad, flipped it to show research status, and was duly impressed to see that questions posed by one Jamie Mendez had generated 23.34 gigabytes of answer-data--more than what she had drawn herself by a good four gigs. Of course, 99.999 percent of the data that both of them had turned up would end up being utterly useless. The challenge over the next few days would be in filtering it down, finding the remaining .001 percent that could help them deal with the situation on the ground--whatever it was, exactly--and keep them both alive.

"It looks like you did good work," she said. "But now it's time to do more." She glanced at the nav displays. "We've got maybe nine or ten hours of cheap and easy radio contact with Center before we're out of reliable range of everything but the really big dish antennae--which they aren't going to bother to use to talk with us. Then we can switch to lasergram contact, which isn't
quite
so cheap or easy. A while after
that
we'll be so far off, and moving so fast, that the laser transmitters in Center orbit will have trouble tracking us, and the signal delay times will get impractical. We'll be out of effective range of anything but QuickBeam messages, and we don't want to have to rely on QB more than we have to."

"We don't have a QuickBeam
sender
on this ship, do we?" Mendez asked, plainly alarmed. Human-built QB senders had a bad reputation for detonating now and again.

"Stars no!" Hannah replied. "A QB sender would be
bigger
than this ship. But we can receive QB, and we can relay via radio or laser, and ask for Center to send a query via QB to whatever other star system you like--within reason. They don't like us using QB any more than we have to. The BSI budget isn't everything that it could be."

"Hmmm. Okay. There was one query I was thinking of sending, or at least wishing I could send."

"What, and who to?"

Jamie looked a little embarrassed. "To my old boss," he said. "Bindulan Halztec. The Pavlat I worked for. Kelly didn't give me a chance to say so, but I
had
heard of Reqwar--it's where Bindulan Halztec was from. He had to leave in a hurry years and years ago. I never did get the whole story. Some sort of political trouble."

"I thought from what you said he was just a shopkeeper."

"Just a shopkeeper on
Earth
," Jamie said. "It was pretty clear from the way he acted, and the way the other Pavlats acted, that he was something more--a lot more--than that before he came to Earth. And, if it came to that, his shop was something more than a shop. Any Pavlat with a problem wound up there, sooner or later--and usually the problem got solved. He had connections. I never was all that clear what they were, but he had them. Still does, I'm sure."

"So you think he might be able to give you a little background help." BSI agents often used precisely this sort of back-channel friend-of-a-friend contact. The problem in the present case was that they knew so little about what the case was about that it would be hard to come up with a useful set of questions to ask, and even harder to come up with a set of useful questions that would be short enough to send via QB. "All right," she said. "Draft something short--very short--and show it to me. Do that first, while we're still in easy range of Center. Any other thoughts?"

"Well, maybe just the start of one. I ran the name of the man we're supposed to escort back--if that's what we're supposed to do. Georg Hertzmann. Ran searches and metasearches and did some datamine work."

"Yeah, so?"

"So what I came up with is that if you run a query on Georg Hertzmann, and on Pavlat or Reqwar or both--practically everything that references those items has one other common referent."

"Okay, I'll bite. What's the punch line?"

"Pax Humana."

Hannah made no attempt to conceal her surprise. "
That
muddies the waters. If Hertzmann belongs to PH, how is it a guy who belongs to a nonviolent action movement was convicted of murder?"

"That's what I was wondering. I didn't have any chance at all to track it further than that--it might not even be that he
is
a PH member. But there's
definitely
some sort of connection. PH has a big office on Center. They might know something that could help us."

"If they're in the mood to share," Hannah said thoughtfully. "I guess we need to make that query too, before we're out of range. I'll work that side of it while you're writing your letter to Shopkeeper Halztec." It took no particular detective skill to spot the disappointment in Jamie's face. He had wanted to work the Pax Humana lead himself. Hannah was pretty sure she knew why, based on what she had seen in his personnel file. "Look, Jamie--I know you're a big admirer of Pax Humana. It's in your file that you applied for PH membership."

"And got turned down," he muttered.

"That might be more of a compliment than you think," said Hannah. "But it's off point right now. I can easily understand your wanting to be the one to deal with them. But you obviously
have
to be the one to write to Halztec, and we're pressed for time for both queries. That means I have to be the one to contact Pax Humana."
And I don't think it's any bad thing that they don't see a request for information signed by a failed applicant who's still a big fan
. Pax Humana was in no need of more uncritical adoration than it was getting already.

PH would be more likely to respond with useful information if the query came from a more senior person with a more detached attitude. But the odds were against their responding at all. Pax Humana didn't hold the BSI in the highest regard--and Hannah, like most BSI agents, returned the favor. In her experience, they were awfully big on demanding respectful treatment but not so great on extending it. "Let's go," she said. "We're on the clock."

* * *

Hannah tried to be a bit cagey in her signal to Pax Humana's offices on Center. She was asking for information, not help, after all. She felt obliged to include the text of the message received from Reqwar, on the off chance that it contained some coded reference that would make sense to someone there, but she did her best to downplay the seriousness of the situation--easy to do when she knew next to nothing about it.

Jamie, meantime, worked up a tight, well-drafted query for his Pavlat friend, in a format suitable for QB transmission, in less than twenty minutes. In less time, in fact, than it took her to draft her query. She could have told him that, just to give his ego a bit of a boost. But she allowed herself the luxury of keeping quiet--and of not knocking a corner off her own ego. She got busy, and got the signals sent.

* * *

REQWAR . . . Habitable planet currently occupied by the Pavlat (see cross-ref). Mass .703 Earth, diameter .91 Earth, surface gravity .85 Earth, atmosphere at sea level .940 bar (approx 92.5% Earth sea level normal.) Period of rotation 31 hours, 15 minutes, 4 seconds.

Jamie rubbed his eyes, blinked, and tried to focus again. His cabin aboard the
Hastings
was, all things considered, a reasonably comfortable place, if you didn't mind having to fold just about everything in and out of the floors, walls, and even the ceiling, but it was, nonetheless, a small, windowless box. He could handle that. What was really throwing him off was time. Fatigue and time.