Death Sentence Read Free Page A

outer system, locate the blip--then confirm that it was nothing. And, of course, there was a little bureaucratic gamesmanship to it as well. Space Defense wanted to say it might be our ship, so we'd be the ones who had to go out and do the recovery so they wouldn't have to spend their time or effort.
    "By the same token, I didn't want to spend more time and effort than needed, because it probably had nothing to do with us. I figured we'd find a robot freighter with a defective propulsion system or something like that. So I ordered a BSI ship to go take a look, flying on automatic, no crew. It wasn't worth tying up a larger or more capable spacecraft than necessary, so I sent the Bartholomew Sholto , with a bunch of cameras and robotics and teleoperator systems on board. Once the Sholto got there, one of our techs back here could work the remote controls to investigate."
    She frowned, leaned forward in her chair, and drummed her fingers on the table again for a moment. "Instead, we found the Adler . Dead. All power off, drifting. The Sholto docked to her, nose to nose, then used the Sholto 's engines to start boosting the docked-together ships back to base. The remote operators here at HQ managed to get the hatches open on both ships and sent a robotic camera into the Adler to look around. The first thing they found was Wilcox--dead. Very, very dead." She paused. "And that was pretty much the last thing they found. Or at least the last thing of any significance. But I'll come back to that.
    "It took a while for the knowledge of what our team had found to percolate up from the techs flying the mission to the Bullpen, and to me. We notified BSI-DLO, and they notified the people who had been waiting for the document to arrive--and right now, today, I still don't know who that final 'customer' is. Things are being kept very quiet and compartmentalized. Whoever the customer is, it didn't take long for the word to come rocketing back down to us that the document had to be found, and found as quickly--and as quietly--as possible.
    "The robotics on the Sholto scanned and searched every square centimeter of the Adler 's interior. We linked into all her data systems and searched them by remote as well. Nothing.
    "As soon as we got her back here to base, and got Wilcox's remains off the ship--and did some decontamination--we sent search teams aboard as well. Nothing. And all the time, BSI-DLO has been jumping up and down, demanding we find what isn't there, and find it right away."
    "We've searched the Adler twice, with BSI-DLO screaming at us to find the key immediately. Once via the remotes on the way in, and once here at base. We haven't found the decrypt key."
    "Do you have any idea what it looks like?" Jamie asked. "Are you even sure it's there?"
    "The short answers are no, and no," said Kelly. "Goes a long way to explain the problems we're having, doesn't it? Bear in mind that the key itself isn't a physical object. From everything we've been able to learn, it ought to be just a string of characters. Once it's recovered and handed over to BSI-DLO, some tech will key the characters into the appropriate computer program and the document will be magically decoded. Think of all the ways characters might be stored or written down or encoded or whatever, and then think of all the ways you might disguise or hide whatever it was that held that string of characters. It could be concealed just about anywhere, or disguised or embedded in just about anything."
    "So what, exactly, do you want us to do?" asked Jamie.
    "Really simple stuff," said Kelly. "Find the decryption key, find out what the document was about, find out who killed Wilcox, why they killed him--and how they killed him."
    "I don't understand how that could be a mystery," Hannah said. "You recovered the body, right?"
    "Yes, it was aboard ship."
    "So you've examined it. How is it you can't tell the cause of death or whether or not it was murder?"
    "Oh, yes, I can tell the cause of