by Timothy Zahn
Considering what I’d seen of the Icarus’s hull back on the ground, I was frankly surprised we’d made it as far as we had.
Tera and Everett were standing in the corridor outside the EVA room when I arrived, watching Jones help a vacsuited Chort run a final check on his equipment. “Well, that didn’t take long,” Tera commented. “Any idea where the problem is?”
“Probably somewhere here on the larger sphere,” I said. “The computer didn’t have any ideas?”
She shook her head. “Like I said, it’s old and feeble. Nothing but macro sensors, and no predictive capability at all.”
“Don’t worry,” Chort assured us, his whistly voice oddly muted by his helmet. “That screech didn’t sound bad. Regardless, I will find and fix it.”
“Someone’s going to have to go into the wraparound with him, too,” Jones put in. “I checked earlier, and there aren’t any of the connections or lifeline-feeds of a standard airlock.”
I’d noticed that, too. “You volunteering?” I asked him.
“Of course,” he said, sounding surprised that it was even a question. “EVA assist is traditionally mechanic’s privilege, you know.”
“I’m not concerned with tradition nearly as much as I am whether we’ve got a suit aboard that’ll fit you,” I countered. “Tera, pull the computer inventory and see what we’ve got.”
“I already checked,” she said. “There are three suit/rebreather combos in Locker Fifteen. It didn’t list sizes, though.”
“I’ll go look,” Jones volunteered, checking one last seal on Chort’s suit and squeezing past him. “That’s lower level, Tera?”
“Right,” she said. “Just forward of Cabin Seven.”
“Got it.” Jones eased past me and headed for the aft ladder.
“So how will he handle it?” Everett asked. “Go into the wraparound and feed Chort the lifeline from there?”
“Basically,” I nodded. “There’s a slot just outside the entryway where the secondary line can connect, but he’ll want Jones feeding him the primary line as he goes along. Otherwise, it can get kinked or snarled on the maneuvering vents, and that eats up time.”
“I’ve heard of snarled lines giving false readings on sensors, too,” Tera put in. “He might wind up fixing a hull plate that didn’t need it.”
“That won’t happen,” Chort assured her. “I will know the damage when I reach it.”
“I’m sure you will,” Everett said, lumbering down the corridor toward the aft ladder. “I’ll see if Jones can use a hand.”
There were indeed three vac suits in the locker, one of which fit Jones just fine, and with Everett’s help he was suited up in fifteen minutes. Five minutes after that he and Chort were in the wraparound, the airlock doors at both ends were sealed, and I was on the bridge with the hull monitor cameras extended on their pylons.
And we were set. “Ready here,” I called into the intercom. “Revs, go ahead and shut down the gravity.”
“Right,” Nicabar acknowledged from the engine room, and I felt the sudden stomach-twisting disorientation as the Icarus’s grav generator went off-line. I double-checked the airlock status and keyed for the suit radios. “It’s all yours, Chort. Let him out easy, Jones.”
Given that Jones had a Craea at the other end of his line, my automatic warning was probably both unnecessary and even a bit ridiculous. Before the outer hatch was even all the way open Chort was out on the hull, pausing briefly to snap his secondary line into the connector slot and heading nimbly across the wraparound, using his hull-hooks and stickypads as if he’d been born in zero gee.
“Mind if I watch?” a voice asked from the doorway behind me.
I turned my head. Shawn was floating just outside the door, gazing past me at the monitors, an intense but oddly calm look on his face. “No, come on in,” I invited.
“Thanks,” he said, maneuvering his way into the room and coming to a stop hovering beside my chair. “There aren’t any monitors in the electronics shop, and I’ve never seen a Craea spacewalk before.”
“It’s definitely a sight to behold,” I agreed, trying not to frown as I studied his profile. The twitchy, nervous, sarcastic kid who’d been such a pain in the neck while we were waiting outside the Icarus had apparently been kidnapped sometime in the last six hours and replaced by this near-perfect copy. “How are you doing?”
He smiled, a little shamefacedly. “You mean how come I’m not acting like a jerk?”
“Not exactly the way I would have put it,” I said. “But as long as you bring it up …?”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, his lip twisting. “That’s another reason I wanted to talk to you, to apologize for all that. I was … well, nervous, I guess. You have to admit this is a really strange situation, and I don’t do well with strange situations. Especially early in the morning.”
“I have trouble with mornings sometimes myself,” I said, turning back to the monitors. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Thanks. He’s really good, isn’t he?”
I nodded. Chort was moving slowly along the edge of the cowling that covered the intersection of the two spheres, his faceplate bare centimeters above the hull as he glided over the surface. Here and there he would stop for a moment, touching something with his long fingers and occasionally selecting one of the squeeze tubes from the collection clamped to his forearms. I thought about getting on the radio and asking what he was doing, but decided against it. He clearly knew his business, and there didn’t seem any point in distracting him with a lot of questions. I made a mental note to pick up a set of zoomable hull cameras at our next stop.
The whistle from the radio speaker was so unexpected that Shawn and I both jumped, a movement that the zero gee magnified embarrassingly. “There it is,” Chort said as I grabbed my restraint straps and pulled myself firmly down into the chair again. “A small pressure ridge only. Easily repaired.”
He set to work with his squeeze tubes again. “I’ll never understand about that stuff,” Shawn commented. “If it’s so good at fixing hull cracks and ridges, why not coat the whole hull with it?”
“Good question,” I agreed, throwing him another surreptitious glance. Calm, friendly, and now even making intelligent conversation. I made another mental note, this one to restrict all my future interactions with him until after he’d had his morning coffee or whatever.
If Chort was a representative example of Craean spacewalking ability, it was no wonder they were so much in demand. In less than ten minutes he’d sealed the ridge, tracked two jaglines radiating from that spot, and fixed them as well. “All secure,” he announced. “I will check the rest of the sphere, but I believe this is the only problem.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Before you go any farther forward, you might as well go aft and run a quick check on the cargo and engine sections.”
“Acknowledged,” Chort said, turning around and heading back over the side of the cargo sphere. He paused once, moved down the side toward the wraparound—
And suddenly, with another stomach-wrenching disorientation, I fell down hard into my chair.
Shawn yelped in surprise and pain as he dropped like a rock to the deck beside me. But I hardly noticed. Incredibly, impossibly, the Icarus’s gravity field had gone back on.
And as I watched in helpless horror, Chort slammed against the side of the cargo sphere, caromed off the wraparound, and disappeared off the monitor screen.
“Revs!” I barked toward the intercom, twisting the camera control hard over. “Turn it off!”
“I didn’t turn it on,” he protested.
“I don’t give a damn who turned it on!” I snarled. I had Chort on the screen now, hanging limply like a puppet on a string at the end of his secondary line at the bottom of the artificial “down” the Icarus’s gravity generator had imposed on this small bubble of space. “Just shut it down.”
“I can’t,” he bit back. “The control’s not responding.”
I ground m
y teeth viciously. “Tera?”
“I’m trying, too,” her voice joined in. “The computer’s frozen up.”
“Then cut all power to that whole section,” I snapped. “You can do that, can’t you? One of you?”
“Working on it,” Nicabar grunted.
“Computer’s still frozen,” Tera added tautly. “I can’t see him—is he all right?”
“I don’t know,” I told her harshly. “And we won’t know until we get him back—”
I broke off suddenly, my breath catching horribly in my throat. Concentrating first on Chort’s fall, and then on getting the gravity shut down, it hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder why Chort had fallen that far in the first place. Why Jones hadn’t had the slack in the primary line properly taken up, or for that matter why he hadn’t already begun reeling the Craea back into the wraparound.
But now, looking at the outside of the entryway for the first time since the accident, I could see why. Hanging limply over the sill of the hatchway beside the equally limp primary line was a vacsuited hand. Jones’s hand.
Not moving.
“Revs, do you have a suit back there?” I called, cursing under my breath, trying to key the camera for a better look inside the entryway. No good; Jones had turned the overhead light off and the shadow was too intense for the camera to penetrate.
“No,” he called back. “What’s the—oh, damn.”
“Yeah,” I bit out, my mind racing uselessly. With the entryway open to space, the wraparound was totally isolated from the rest of the ship by the pressure doors at either end. I could close the hatch from the bridge; but the way Jones was lying, his hand would prevent it from sealing.
The only other way to get to him would be to depressurize one side of the ship so we could open the door. But we couldn’t depressurize the sphere—there were only two vac suits left for the four of us still in here, and I wasn’t about to trust the room or cabin doors to hold up against hard vacuum. And without a suit for Nicabar, we couldn’t depressurize the engine room, either. My eyes flicked uselessly over the monitors, searching for inspiration—
“He’s moving,” Nicabar called suddenly. “McKell—Chort’s moving.”
I felt my hands tighten into fists. The Craea’s body was starting to twitch, his limbs making small random movements like someone having a violent dream. “Chort?” I called toward the microphone. “Chort, this is McKell. Snap out of it—we need you.”
“I am here,” Chort’s voice came, sounding vague and tentative. “What happened?”
“Ship’s gravity came on,” I told him. “Never mind that now. Something’s happened to Jones—he’s not responding, and I think he’s unconscious. Can you climb up your line and get to him?”
For a long moment he didn’t reply. I was gazing at the monitor, wondering if he’d slipped back into unconsciousness, when suddenly he twitched again; and a second later he was pulling himself up the line with spiderlike agility.
Thirty seconds later he was in the wraparound, pulling Jones out of the way of the door. I was ready, keying for entryway seal and repressurization of the wraparound.
Two minutes later, we had them back in the ship.
The effort, as it turned out, was for nothing.
“I’m sorry, McKell,” Everett said with a tired sigh, pulling a thin blanket carefully over Jones’s face. “Your man’s been gone at least ten minutes. There’s nothing I can do.”
I looked over at the body lying on the treatment table. The terminally sociable type, I’d dubbed him back at the spaceport. He’d been terminal, all right. “It was the rebreather, then?”
“Definitely.” Everett picked up the scrubber unit and peeled back the covering. “Somewhere in here the system stopped scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the air and started putting carbon monoxide in. Slowly, certainly—he probably didn’t even notice it was happening. Just drifted to sleep and slipped quietly away.”
I gazed at the hardware cradled in those large hands. “Was it an accident?”
He gave me an odd look. “You work with air scrubbers all the time. Could something like this have happened by accident?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” I said, the image of that massive search Ixil and I had spotted out in the Meima wilderness vivid in my memory. No, it hadn’t been any accident. Not a chance in the world of that. But there was no sense panicking Everett, either.
“Hm,” Everett said. For another moment he looked at the scrubber, then smoothed back the covering and put it aside. “I know you’re not in the mood right now to count your blessings, but bear in mind that if Chort had died or broken his neck in that fall, we’d have lost both of them.”
“Blessings like this I can do without,” I said bitterly. “Have you looked at Chort yet?”
He grunted. “Chort says he’s fine and unhurt and refuses to be looked at. If you want me to run a check on him, you’ll have to make it an order.”
“No, that’s all right,” I told him. I’d never heard anything about the Craean culture being a particularly stoic one. If Chort said he was all right, he probably was.
But whether he would stay that way was now open to serious question. With that phony murder charge someone had apparently succeeded in scaring Cameron off the Icarus, and the guilt-by-association bit had nearly bounced me, as well. Now, Jones had been rather more permanently removed from the crew list, and Chort had come within a hair of joining him.
And all this less than eight hours into the trip. The universe was spending the Icarus’s quota of bad luck with a lavish hand.
“A pity, too,” Everett commented into my musings. “Jones being the mechanic, I mean. He might have been the only one on board who could have tracked down what went wrong with the grav generator. Now we may never know what happened.”
“Probably,” I agreed, putting the heaviness of true conviction into my voice. If Everett—or anyone else, for that matter—thought I was just going to chalk any of this up to mysterious accident and let it go at that, I had no intention of disillusioning them. “That’s usually how it goes with this sort of thing,” I added. “You never really find out what went wrong.”
He nodded in commiseration. “So what happens now?”
I looked over at Jones’s body again. “We take him to port and turn him over to the authorities,” I said. “Then we keep going.”
“Without a mechanic?” Everett frowned. “A ship this size needs all eight certificates, you know.”
“That’s okay,” I assured him, backing out the door. “Nicabar can cover for the few hours it’ll take to get to port. After that, I know where we can pick up another mechanic. Cheap.”
He made some puzzled-sounding reply, but I was already in the corridor and didn’t stop to hear it. Cameron’s course plan had put our first fueling stop at Trottsen, seventy-two more hours away. But a relatively minor vector change would take us instead to Xathru, only nine hours from here, where Ixil and the Stormy Banks were due to deliver Brother John’s illegal cargo. We needed a replacement mechanic, after all, and Ixil would fit the bill perfectly.
Besides which, I suddenly very much wanted to have Ixil at my side. Or perhaps more precisely, to have him watching my back.
CHAPTER
4
The parquet dockyard on Xathru was like a thousand other medium-sized spaceports scattered across the Spiral: primitive compared to Qattara Axial or one of the other InterSpiral-class ports, but still two steps above small regional hubs like the one we’d taken off from on Meima. The Parquet’s landing pits were cradle-shaped instead of simply flat, smoothly contoured to accommodate a variety of standard ship designs.
Of course, no one in his right mind would have anticipated the Icarus’s lopsided shape, so even with half its bulk below ground level the floors still sloped upward. But at least here the entryway ladder could be reconfigured as a short ramp with a rise of maybe two meters instead of the ten-meter climb we had had without it. Progress.
Nicab
ar volunteered to help Everett take Jones’s body to the Port Authority, where the various death forms would have to be filled out. I ran through the basic landing procedure, promised the tower that I would file my own set of accident report forms before we left, then grabbed one of the little runaround cars scattered randomly between the docking rectangles and headed out to the StarrComm building looming like a giant mushroom at the southern boundary of the port.
Like most StarrComm facilities, this one was reasonably crowded. But also as usual, the high costs involved with interstellar communication led to generally short conversations, with the result that it was only about five minutes before my name was called and I was directed down one of the corridors to my designated booth. I closed the door behind me, made sure it was privacy-sealed, and after only a slight hesitation keyed for a full vid connect. It was ten times as expensive as vidless, but I had Cameron’s thousand-commark advance money and was feeling extravagant.
Besides, reactions were so much more interesting when face and body language were there in addition to words and tone. And unless I missed my guess, the coming reaction was going to be one for the books. Feeding one of Cameron’s hundred-commark bills into the slot, I keyed in Brother John’s private number.
Somewhere on Xathru, StarrComm’s fifty-kilometer-square starconnect array spat a signal across the light-years toward an identical array on whichever world it was where Brother John sat in the middle of his noxious little spiderweb. I didn’t know which world it was, or even whether it was the same world each time or if he continually moved around like a touring road show.
Neither did InterSpiral Law Enforcement or any of the other more regional agencies working their various jurisdictions within the Spiral. They didn’t know where he was, or where the records of his transactions were, or how to get hold of either him or them. Most every one of the beings working those agencies would give his upper right appendage to know those things. Brother John’s influence stretched a long way across the stars, and he had ruined a lot of lives and angered a lot of people along the way.