Death Sentence Read Free

acceleration run out of the system, he realizes that he is sick, and even that he is dying. At about the same time--it might be before or after--his ship is boarded by someone. We don't know who, or why. That happens while he is still in the Metrannan star system."
    Kelly looked around the table. "Some time after he is boarded, but while he is still in the Metrannan System, and well short of the coordinates of his calculated transit-jump--he throttles back his acceleration for half a day, then cuts his engines altogether for a day, then boosts intermittently, at low power, at various headings, for another two days. I'll skip the details, but the short form is that the way he did it came right out of the BSI playbook. He followed the procedures for making it difficult or maybe even impossible for anyone to track his vehicle. Random, low-power burns, in random directions."
    "Reasonable enough," said Hannah. "He had been boarded once. He was trying to hide so he wouldn't be detected again."
    "Right. But the next part of the doctrine is to go back to continuous boost at as high a power as you dare risk, so as to get out of the search area as fast as you can. Normal acceleration to a transit-jump for the Sherlock -class ships is twenty to thirty gees. Wilcox boosted the Adler at one-quarter gee."
    Kelly tapped her fingers on the table. "Now, there are some things we tend to forget about our normal operating procedure. There's no real need to boost at high gee-rates, or to get to as high a final speed as we do, in order to reach a transit-jump. Your velocity has to be taken into account for the jump computations, but it's a relatively trivial calculation and a minor adjustment. You could go through a transit-jump at five kilometers an hour, or five million. It wouldn't matter.
    "It's physical position that matters during a jump. We boost our ships as hard as we do, and go as fast as we do, because the transit points tend to be so far out in space, and there's no particular penalty in technical terms for getting there faster, and besides, we tend to be in a hurry.
    "But high-boost, high-velocity flight paths are madly inefficient in terms of energy expenditure. We boost to a very high speed, do the transit, and then immediately start decelerating. Do the math, and you'll see that doing it that way saves us time--but not very much time, because we spend very little time at that final high velocity.
    "Mostly we do it that way because there isn't any reason not to do it that way. The ships we've got today have so much power it's ridiculous. But our ships would still go through a transit jump moving at near-zero velocity. Which is something that Wilcox proved. The Adler took two months to reach the transit point. He was almost certainly dead by then. But he had programmed the Adler to make the transit-jump on autopilot--and then to use maximum thrust, twenty-plus gees, to slow the Adler down to practically zero, a few billion kilometers out from Center. That's a lot of energy being released very quickly, in a way that's easily detectable. UniGov Military's space defense detectors did detect it--but they didn't investigate immediately because they projected that it would take the Adler six hundred years to reach the inner system. Not exactly an immediate threat."
    "Let me guess," Hannah said. "The BSI waited a couple of weeks before we reported the Adler as overdue. We waited another couple of weeks or a month before listing her as lost, presumed destroyed. When she did show up, she was months late, and on a totally different flight path than what we expected, and it took a while for anyone to think of matching up Space Defense's blip with our missing ship."
    "Right. And even then our people quite correctly concluded it was only a possible match, even a low-probability match. Odds were it was some other ship, nothing to do with us. Worth checking, but not worth tying up any of our people for the week or two it would take to fly to the