Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

"Grant her a stay of execution, of course, until her story can be checked. It's the only thing you can do."

The instant I said it I knew I'd made a mistake. Abruptly, Randon's sympathetic interest tarnished as he perceived himself being pressed too hard by a subordinate. Lord Kelsey-Ramos would have understood my insistence as merely an excess of strong feeling; Randon was still too young to risk even the appearance of weakness, certainly not in the presence of a third party. "May I remind you," he bit out, "that if I do that the Bellwether winds up trapped in Solitaire system?"

"We could send a message out on another ship," I pointed out doggedly. Backing out now would do nothing but give Randon's emotional opposition time to solidify. I had no choice but to keep pressing him, to keep his thoughts and feelings fluid until I could find a formula that would allow him to save face while still keeping Calandra alive. "A courier ship could make the trip to Outbound and back in, what, twelve days?"

"Closer to ten," Schock offered.

"Okay; ten days," I said. "We could request the full transcript of Calandra's trial and have the whole thing reviewed before you were planning on leaving Solitaire anyway."

"Except that there may not be any couriers heading for Outbound right at the moment," Randon countered. "And the judiciary on Outbound is under no obligation to release their records to us, anyway."

"But—"

"And," he cut me off, "suppose you're right? Suppose we do find something that warrants a new trial?"

"Well, then—" I stopped in midsentence.

Randon nodded grimly. "Right. If we decide to take her back to Outbound, how do we get the Bellwether back through the Cloud?"

I looked at Schock. Somehow, I hadn't gotten around to thinking that far ahead. "Well... we could send another message to Whitecliff at the same time, couldn't we? Ask them to send us another felon to take Calandra's place?"

"They won't do it." There was a positiveness in Randon's tone, a clear sense that this one wasn't just a theoretical position for argument's sake. "The authorities won't allow more than two zombis to a ship, except under extremely unusual circumstances. You would have to be able to prove that Paquin was innocent before they would even consider sending us a substitute."

"How can we prove anything like that until we have the trial records?" I growled. "It's a storage loop argument."

"Yes, it is," Randon agreed. Not apologetic, not really angry: just agreeing. "I'm sorry, but the system simply isn't set up to allow convicted felons to slide through the net at this stage."

Or in other words, Calandra's life wasn't worth enough to him to buck established channels. Lord Kelsey-Ramos would have had the courage to do that—

But Lord Kelsey-Ramos wasn't in charge here. Randon was.

I took a deep breath. Rarely had righteous anger hit me with such a surge of emotion, and I had to fight to try and think through the haze. "All right," I said at last. "If I can... if I can find us a substitute zombi before we're ready to leave, will you, as master of this ship, grant Calandra a temporary stay of execution?"

Randon eyed me thoughtfully. "One life worth more than another? Hardly what I'd have expected of you."

Hardly what I would have expected of myself. I said nothing, and after a moment he nodded. "All right, Benedar, you've got yourself a deal." He hesitated. "I don't have to remind you that you have to remain within legal bounds in obtaining this zombi for us, do I?"

The warning felt surprisingly like an insult. But perhaps the knife twist in my stomach was coming entirely from my own conscience. If I could offer a life in trade for Calandra's, was it so big a step to trading a life for profits? "I understand, sir," I said, my mouth dry. "Thank you, sir."

I turned to go. "Benedar?" he called after me.

Steeling myself, I looked back. "Yes?"

His gaze was almost physical in its intensity. "You'd better be right about this."

I swallowed. Truth? said Pilate. What is that? "Yes, sir," I told him quietly, and left.

It took me a long time to fall asleep that night. So long, in fact, that I was still awake at one-thirty when the Mjollnir drive kicked off and the Bellwether was once again space-normal.

There was something eerie about lying alone in the still of the night, I'd long ago learned; something that turned even the most ordinary of daytime noises into something darkly ominous... and the distant thunggk of the Mjollnir circuit breakers was hardly an ordinary noise.

For a long minute I just lay in the darkness, suddenly weightless, listening to my heart pounding in my throat and straining to hear anything more. If there was something wrong—if somehow we'd lost our path through the Cloud and been brought out too early...

From the rear of the ship a faint drone became audible, increasing gradually in volume and pitch, and beneath my bed I could feel the faint answering tremor as the living-ceramic deck of my stateroom angled to keep itself perpendicular to the acceleration vector. A measure of effective weight returned, and increased, and it was clear that the Bellwether's voyage was progressing normally.

If such a word as "normal" could be used about a voyage piloted by a dead man.

I gritted my teeth and swung my legs out of bed. I knew myself far too well to let this slide. In my mind's eye still lingered a dark, irrational terror: the Bellwether, helpless, stranded somewhere out in deep space, light-years from Solitaire.

You will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free...

Fortunately, in this case truth was easy to obtain. Padding the two steps to my lounge desk, I picked up my control stick and flopped down into the contour couch. "Wall: front view," I called, activating the computer. Ahead of me, the pastel blue stateroom wall faded into the black of space—

I took a deep breath, the knots in stomach and psyche dissolving. Off to the left, blazing an artificially muted light against the scattering of stars, was Solitaire's sun.

I watched it for a moment, then turned my attention to the rest of the skyscape, searching for Solitaire itself. It was easy to find: a small crescent, just below and to the right of center, with an identical crescent a few degrees away. We'd come space-normal practically on top of it, astronomically speaking. Incredible precision, especially coming from a possessed dead man—

I shook the thought away. "Wall: grid," I called. The faint red grid lines appeared— "Wall: section fifty-six: magnification one thousand."

The picture jumped, enlarging to fill the wall with the two crescents. Solitaire and Spall, all right—the one known exception to the usual rule that double planets were terrible real estate for humans to dig into. Vaguely, I remembered reading somewhere that both of these worlds were habitable, though the specific reasons why Solitaire had been chosen over Spall eluded me. For the moment, though, I didn't care. The crisis was over, we'd made it through the Cloud, and with luck I could finally relax enough to get to sleep. I started to ease out of the couch—

And paused. As long as I was up anyway... "Wall: locate Collet," I ordered. "Magnification, quarter-fill."

There was a brief pause as the computer searched for the gas giant and calculated the magnification needed to make the image the size I'd asked for. Then the twin crescents disappeared... and despite knowing what to expect I very nearly gasped out loud.

Not at the planet itself, of course. Filling a quarter of the wall as per request, Collet's hazy green/gray surface was delicately but unspectacularly banded in the normal pattern of gas giants everywhere. At both its poles was an almost cream-colored haze, while at a dozen spots to either side of its equator I could pick out the spiral patterns of huge hurricane storms, some of which had been raging since the first colonists arrived in the system seventy years ago. Perfectly standard planet... until you looked at its rings.