Death Sentence by Roger MacBride Allen Read Free Book Online Page A

those months."
    It seemed to Hannah that there wasn't any better response to that than a moment's silence. She let the moment pass, and then began climbing upward again. Jamie stayed behind a moment longer than he needed, staring at the empty pilot's seat.
    Sometimes being a good partner meant pretending not to notice private moments seen from too close in. Hannah moved on to the top of the ship.
    The rope ladder came to an end in two more snap-shut cleats just to one side of the open nose-hatch hatchway. The circular hatch was open, and the hatch cover was swung to one side and latched in place up against the inner hull, opposite to the pilot's station.
    She peered up and through the open hatch. The Adler was joined nose to nose with the Sholto , and the interiors of the two hatches joined to form a tunnel about ninety centimeters wide and two meters long. Each ship's hatch had a tube-shaped section of cargo netting stretched taut around the length of its interior. The Adler 's netting was bright blue, while the Sholto 's was flaming orange.
    "That's not all that identical," she said, pointing to the netting as Jamie came up behind her.
    "Yeah, but it will help us tell which ship we're in," Jamie said. "And look there. We're covered." Jamie pointed to a carefully wrapped-up pack of orange netting tucked in between the Adler 's blue netting and the hatch tunnel's interior surface. Hannah peeked through the tunnel and saw a corresponding pack of blue netting tucked in behind the Sholto 's orange netting. They could swap one for the other in a minute or two, if the need arose.
    Hannah grunted. She should have had more faith in Gunther and his team.
    She pushed her duffel into the docking tunnel and went in after it. She found herself suddenly in zero gee, all her reflexes scrambled as she floated rapidly upward toward the nose of the Sholto and the point where gravity would kick in again--with down in the opposite direction. She lunged for the netting to save herself and grabbed at her duffel just in time. Obviously, the engineers had rigged the gravity generators to provide zero gee inside the tunnel as a sort of transition zone between the two ships, since each had "down" in the opposite direction from the other. She took a moment to calm herself before turning around to see Jamie, grinning evilly back at her.
    "I thought so," he said with a laugh. "That's why I let you go first."
    She smiled ruefully. "Okay," she said, "I guess I had that coming. Let's go look around the real Sholto ."
    She pulled herself completely into the docking tunnel so that she floated in zero gee. It was a tight squeeze, but she managed to flip herself around so her feet were pointed in the opposite direction. She got the duffel strap around her shoulder again, then maneuvered herself around to the Sholto 's rope ladder. She eased herself downward into the full-gee interior of the ship. It was a decidedly odd experience to have her legs in full gravity and her head in zero gee.
    Hannah quickly concluded that she didn't like it, and made her way rapidly down the ladder to the Sholto 's lower deck, dodging past two technicians crammed into the upper deck making some last-minute adjustment. Jamie followed behind her. They stood on the lower deck of the Bartholomew Sholto and looked straight back up the way they had come, toward the Irene Adler . Gunther was up there--or was it down there?--in the center of the Adler 's lower deck. He craned his neck up to look at them, waved, then turned back to his work, giving them a fine view of the top of his head as he walked out of view on what Hannah's hindbrain was quite certain was the ceiling.
    "This is going to take some getting used to," she said to Jamie.
    "You mean the way half of everything is upside down?" he asked with a laugh. "It's been that way since the first day I signed up with BSI. Come on, let's get squared away and ready for boost. We're on the clock."

FIVE
    CONSTANT OF CHANGE
    "Change is