Free Death Sentence by Roger MacBride Allen

Ideally, neither would know anything at all about the other, and they'd each travel by different routes at different times and so on. Maybe that's even what happened. Special Agent Wilcox got the encoded document and some other courier--maybe not a BSI agent, maybe not even a human--got the decrypt key. Gunther's team didn't find it because it was never there. It was sent by some other route."
    "Possible, but not likely," Hannah said, poking at her soup. "If that had been the plan, an awful lot of things would have to go wrong for us to have gotten to this point. Someone at our end would have to know they were using two couriers. We knew about it when Wilcox failed to return. If there was a second courier, either he arrived and they know about it and they already have the key, or else he never showed up either. But they'd still know Wilcox didn't have the key. BSI-DLO wouldn't have asked for us to investigate if either of those things had happened.
    "I suppose there might have been some nightmare bureaucratic foul-up, with everything so compartmentalized that no one even knew that they didn't know what was going on, but I doubt it. Commander Kelly might not have been authorized to tell us everything about the case, but she wouldn't have sent us out unless there was very good reason to believe the decrypt key was aboard the Adler . And she wouldn't have risked sending agents on just guesses and hopeful theories. In other words, she wasn't allowed to inform us that there was only one courier, but she did know it."
    "So at least we're not on a wild-goose chase--or at least not that kind of wild-goose chase," Jamie said. "But if someone who has more need-to-know than we have tagged this thing War-Starter, then it should have been a two-courier job. The fact that it wasn't--or at least our assumption that it wasn't--tells me that someone was making it up as they went along."
    Hannah nodded thoughtfully as she blotted up the last of her soup with a crust of bread. "I'll go with all that. But you did flunk my what's-wrong-with-this-picture test."
    "Fine," Jamie said. "You win. You're smart and I'm dumb. What is it?"
    "Come on, think like a xeno, a proud member of an Elder Race species. Your civilization has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Nothing ever changes and nothing is new."
    "I still don't see it."
    Hannah grinned again. "You ever hear the bit of urban folklore about the American patent office at the end of one century or another? The nineteenth, it must have been. Some old fogy suggests that they might as well save money and shut it down because everything worthwhile had already been invented. Turns out the story isn't true--a complete garble, a reversal of the truth, in fact, but that's not the point."
    Then Jamie saw it. "Ah. I get it. A research lab. That would be a very undignified thing for an Elder Race to have around."
    "Because they have closed their patent office," Hannah said. "They've been at it for hundreds of thousands of years. Some of the Elder Races have been around for millions of years. They have invented everything--or at least they believe they have. It's supposed to be close to an article of faith for a lot of races. Except someone has decided maybe they haven't gotten to everything. Which means this Learned Searcher Hallaben is committing heresy, or near enough. And wherever there's a heretic, there's bound to be a true believer nearby."
    Jamie nodded eagerly. His mind had never been far from thoughts of their other mission--finding out who killed Special Agent Wilcox, and why. "Yeah," he said. "A true believer who just might have a motive for killing a courier."

SEVEN
    SHORT AND LONG
    Learned Searcher Taranarak stood placidly and listened to the bumping and thumping from the outside of her house as her jailers unbolted the door. Taranarak had had time to think things through. She had, thus far, been confined for thirty-two days--a barbarically long sentence by Metrannan standards--but