Death Sentence by Roger MacBride Allen Page A

known how the BSI worked. He would have known that someone like Special Agent Jamie Mendez would study his personnel file, check his bank records, study his love life, read the notation on his mother's weakness for drink. Wilcox might well have factored that into whatever plans he made, whatever means he chose to conceal the decrypt where xenos would never find it, where, perhaps, most humans would never find it, but where two BSI agents who studied the murder victim would find it.
    Did that make the intrusion even worse--or did it, somehow, make Trev Wilcox into Jamie and Hannah's silent coinvestigator, working with them from beyond the grave?
    Or are you just trying to come up with excuses for snooping around in his private affairs to make yourself feel better?
    Jamie turned back to his piloting problems with a heavy heart. If he had been trying to make himself feel better about the case--or about searching the Adler --he was definitely not doing a very good job.
     

     
    A more practiced pilot might have been able to do it sooner, but after a few false starts, Jamie had the booster programmed to slow itself down to a crawl and then wait for their return on a very precisely designated trajectory, and also managed to get the combined craft of the Sholto and the Adler back under boost, relying solely on the Sholto 's main propulsion.
    "Ready to get moving?" Hannah asked. They stood on the Sholto 's lower deck, looking up the rope ladder toward the Adler 's waiting interior. Both of them were in hooded white isolation suits, with gloves on their hands and pullover booties covering their shoes. They looked like a pair of high-tech ghosts preparing to haunt the ship where Trevor Wilcox had died.
    "No," said Jamie. "I'm not ready. I feel as if I'm getting ready to spend the night in a haunted house because someone dared me. Or that we're about to clear out a family home after a relative has died."
    "Now I know why the whole idea of this search has been giving me a case of the creeps. Come on. The sooner we start, the sooner it's over with."
    Hannah led the way up the ladder past the upper deck and the open hatch cover. She paused for a moment, and then moved carefully into the zero-gee confines of the docking tunnel. She grabbed on to the netting, flipped herself over, and aimed her feet at the Adler 's ladder. She started moving down into the other ship. Jamie followed her up the ladder and felt his stomach do a few flip-flops as he went into the zero-gee zone. He grabbed hold of the netting, flipped himself around--and then had to pause for a moment as his stomach nearly rebelled altogether. He swallowed hard, took a deep breath, maneuvered around to the Adler 's rope ladder, and made his way down into the ship in which Trevor Wilcox had died.
    Both agents made their way down to the lower deck of the Adler and stood there, looking around uncertainly. Hannah shook her head. "Weird. Really weird. These two ships are supposed to be exactly the same. They look exactly the same. But somehow this one just screams out different to me."
    "I know what you mean," Jamie said. It wasn't any one thing that signaled the differences to him--in fact, at first, he wasn't even sure what the differences were. No doubt most of them were due to the fact that the Sholto had just come off a refit and refurbishment. There were no scuff marks on her control panels, no scratches in the paint, no dents and dings in the bulkheads. The interior of the Adler had any number of such small signs of wear.
    But that wasn't all of it. There were subtle differences in the rhythm of the Adler 's interior noises and vibration, the way the air circulated, perhaps even the color of the light. "The two ships might be twins, but they aren't identical," he said. "Not by a long shot. It's all subtle stuff, yeah, but you couldn't trick any human who had spent time aboard any sort of spacecraft that the Adler was the Sholto . I'm guessing that xenos wouldn't be any easier