what he did know and had some expertise about. "Were you briefed on what this one is about, Gunther?" she asked.
He shrugged. "Some, not all," he said. "And I'm not feeling all that curious, I can tell you. There's something aboard this ship that you need to find. They've searched for it twice, and you're supposed to find it."
"So why are they having you install new equipment when we're supposed to treat this place like a murder investigation site?"
Gunther shook his head. "I don't know the why. I can guess that Kelly figures a max-power self-destruct means you can be sure of keeping the Metrannans from getting the document, and that's more important than us getting it. But on the how, I can tell you a lot more. We were ordered to do microscopic scans of the surfaces and subsurface density scans before we installed anything." He gestured to the spot where the self-destruct device was attached. "If there had been a microdot glued down on that piece of bulkhead, or a drilled-out and covered-over hollow big enough to hide a microdot, we'd have spotted it. Same thing with the section of deck where we attached the acceleration couch."
"I was about to ask about that," Hannah said, gesturing toward their feet. There was a portable acceleration chair there, folded flat to the deck.
"Why not do that level of search on the whole ship?" Jamie asked.
"Lots of reasons," said Gunther. "Just setting up the gear and doing the scans of a square meter of bulkhead and a square meter of deck took hours--and that was on flat surfaces. It would be ten times slower to microscan complex surfaces. We'd have to search inside the control panels or inside a sealed tank. It might take years. We'll do scans of all the items we had to take off the ship--Wilcox's body, his clothes, decayed food, depleted air-regen units, that sort of thing. We'll be lucky to complete just that much before you get back."
"And probably it's not on a microdot," said Hannah. "I really doubt that's the way Wilcox would have hidden the item we're supposed to look for."
"Why not?" Jamie asked.
Hannah grinned. "That's a short question with a long answer, and we don't have much time before we boost. We'll go into it later," she said. But there was more to her reasons for keeping quiet than mere time-saving. They were already likely skating up to the edge of what the techs were cleared to hear about their assignment. It was a professional courtesy to keep Gunther from accidentally learning more than he'd want to know on a case like this. "Anything else we need to know from you, Gunther?" she asked, steering the conversation into safer areas.
"Just that we're installing the identical gear on the real Sholto ," Gunther said, pointing upward toward the Adler 's nose hatch. "Two reasons for that, of course. You'll need two acceleration chairs if you're in just one of the ships during part of the mission, and of course we want the two ships to look as much like each other as possible, just in case."
"In case of what?" Jamie asked.
Gunther shrugged. "I don't know the plan, but it stands to reason, if you want the Adler to pretend it's the Sholto , it's probably smart if the two ships look the same, inside and out."
"Right you are," said Hannah. "And for what it's worth, we don't know the plan, either. We'll get out of your way so you can go ahead and finish up," she said. "I think we'd better get over to the Sholto and start prepping for our ride out of here."
"Very good, ma'am," he said. "Good luck out there. To both of you."
Hannah nodded unhappily. She had flown in them before, and she didn't much care for the Sherlock -class ships. They were supposed to be miracles of efficiency, the smallest all-mode ships ever built by humans, capable of landing on a planet's surface, boosting to orbit, crossing long interplanetary distances, and transiting between star systems. But there was a reason those jobs were usually divvied up between two or three kinds of ships. Shoehorning a