by Timothy Zahn
“Release him!” Lumpy Two spat. He was holding my plasmic straight out at me now, clutched in a two-handed grip, his whole body trembling.
“Make me,” I grunted, looping my right arm around Lumpy One’s throat and pulling him hard back against me. If I’d guessed wrong about this—if he did not in fact have a backup weapon—I was now officially in serious trouble.
But he did. There it was, a hard flat object pressing against my abdomen as I held him to me. Cranking his arm up another couple of centimeters, eliciting a gasped phrase that was probably an unfavorable comment on my parentage, I twisted the knife tip down and jabbed it into the fabric of his tunic. With the jammed knife preventing him from lowering his arm, and the limits of his own tendon structure preventing him from raising it, the limb was effectively self-immobilized, freeing my left hand. Reaching up the back of his tunic, I grabbed his weapon.
Lumpy One shouted something, probably a warning, to his companion. But by then it was already too late. Almost too late, anyway. Lumpy Two got off a shot that nearly scorched the side of my face as the superheated plasma ball made a near miss, and fired another that would have seared my right arm and possibly killed Lumpy One outright if I hadn’t bent my knees suddenly, driving my kneecaps into the backs of Lumpy One’s legs and dropping us both halfway to the ground. The jolt of the sudden movement sent the embedded knife tip tearing a couple of centimeters farther into the cloth and, judging from Lumpy One’s gasp, into the skin beneath it as well.
And then I had his weapon out and pointed over his shoulder. The gun wasn’t remotely like anything I was familiar with, but I didn’t have time to do anything except hope like hell it had some stopping power behind it. Flicking a thumb key that I hoped was the safety, I squeezed the trigger.
From the size and shape of the weapon, I would have guessed it to be a fléchette thrower or maybe a two-shot scattergun. It wasn’t. My hair and skin tingled with electrical discharge; and suddenly Lumpy Two was writhing in agony in the middle of a sheathing of blue-white coronal fire.
The electrical firestorm lasted about two seconds. From the looks of things, Lumpy Two himself didn’t last nearly that long.
Under other circumstances I would probably have taken a few seconds to gape at the unexpected display of firepower I’d just unleashed. But I wasn’t given that chance. Mouthing obvious obscenities, Lumpy One broke out of my grasp with a sudden lurch and spun around to face me, the sound of tearing cloth warning that he was half a second away from freeing his knife hand. I jumped to the side, swinging the alien weapon around; and as he got his arm free and lunged toward me, I fired again.
With the same result. Three seconds later, I was standing alone over two alien bodies, both of them charred literally beyond recognition.
I had seen a lot of repulsive things in my years of knocking around the Spiral, but this one definitely took the cake. Glancing around for any sign of witnesses—our little confrontation seemed to have gone unnoticed—I squatted down beside the corpses, trying to breathe through my mouth as I forced myself to sift through what was left of their clothing.
But there was nothing. No ID folders, no cash wallets, not even any bank cards. Or at least, I amended to myself, nothing that had survived the attack.
Lumpy Two was wearing a duplicate of the alien handgun in a half-melted holster at the small of his back. I managed to pry it loose and pocketed both weapons for future study. I retrieved my ID folder and cash from the ground—Lumpy One had dropped all of it when I jumped him—and returned my now scorched but still functional-looking plasmic to its holster. Taking one final look around, I headed away at a brisk walk.
Ixil was waiting for me at the Icarus’s entryway. “I thought you were going to be here in thirty minutes,” he greeted me as I came up.
“I ran into a little trouble,” I told him. “Why didn’t you go inside?”
“I thought it would be better if you were here to introduce me,” he said. “Besides, the entryway appears to be double-locked.”
“Great,” I scowled, punching the new code I’d set up after leaving Meima into the keypad. A double-locked entryway in port either meant the rest of the crew had sacked out for a couple of hours’ sleep or, more likely, they’d scattered to the four winds the minute my back was turned.
“Had you told them to stay with the ship?” Ixil asked as the hatch swung open.
“No, I was too busy making arrangements to get Jones’s body to the Port Authority and worrying about what I was going to say to Brother John,” I said. “Under the circumstances, I wish I had, though.”
“I thought you smelled a bit singed,” he said. “Why don’t we go inside and you can tell me all about it.”
“Let’s talk here instead,” I said, sitting down inside the wraparound where I could look out into the docking area. “If people with guns start wandering casually toward the ship, I’d like to see them before they get here.”
“Reasonable,” Ixil agreed, sitting down a couple of meters away from me where he could cover a different field of view from mine. As he settled down, Pix and Pax hopped off his shoulders and skittered down the ramp, vanishing in opposite directions around the ship. “Now,” Ixil said, “why don’t you start at the beginning.”
So I started at the beginning, with my near arrest on Meima, and gave him the whole story, finishing with my near death on Xathru half an hour earlier. The two ferrets came in twice while I was talking, dumping their scouting information on Ixil and presumably getting new instructions before scampering off again. Given that Ixil didn’t know anyone involved in any of this, I wondered what exactly he was having the outriders look for. Maybe it was just pure Kalix hunters’ instinct.
“I seem to have missed all the excitement,” he said when I finished. “A pity.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” I warned. “It’s still a long way to Earth.”
“It is that,” he conceded. “You said you took the aliens’ weapons?”
I passed them over to him. He looked at the charred one for a moment, his nose wrinkling at the smell, then exchanged it for the other. “Interesting,” he said, studying it closely. “Coronal-discharge weapons aren’t exactly new—I presume from your description that that’s what these are—but I’ve never heard of such compact ones before.”
“I’ve never seen one of any size,” I said. “I can tell you one thing, though: These things really mess up victim identification.”
“I can imagine,” he said soberly. “Face, retinas, and prints, plus any IDs or datadisks the victim happens to be carrying, all destroyed or badly damaged. A convenient little side effect of the killing shot.”
“You have such a way with words,” I growled. “I just hope these things don’t catch on with the taverno brawling crowd.”
“I think that highly unlikely,” Ixil assured me. “Aside from the tremendous manufacturing costs involved and the relative ease of detection, corona weapons by their nature have a very short range. Three meters, I’d guess; four at the outside.”
I shivered. In an uncomfortably large number of situations, a four-meter range would be perfectly adequate for the purpose. “Remind me to practice up on my distance shots.”
“Good idea.” He dropped the guns into his hip pouch. “I’ll try taking one apart later and see if I can figure out where it was made. Right now, I’m more curious about this deadly accident of yours.”
“I’ll admit right up front that it’s got me stumped,” I said, feeling disgusted with myself. Strange and unpleasant things were happening all around me, and so far I didn’t have a handle on any of it. “I ran a diagnostic across the whole system, and I can’t figure how the grav generator kicked in when it did.”
“You are, of course, hardly an expert in such things,” Ixil pointed out, not unkindly. “There are three main locations where the generator can be turned on: the bridge, engineering, and computer.”
“Right,” I said. That much I knew. “I was on t
he bridge—and I didn’t do it—Revs Nicabar was in engineering, and Tera was handling the computer.”
“Both of them alone, I take it?”
“Nicabar definitely was,” I said. “The only way back there is through the wraparound, which was serving as airlock at the time.”
“Odd design,” Ixil murmured, glancing around.
“Tell me about it,” I said dryly. “I don’t know if Tera was alone, but the only person who could have been with her was Hayden Everett, our medic.”
“Who you also said helped Jones on with his suit before the incident,” Ixil said thoughtfully.
“You think there’s a connection?”
He shrugged, a human gesture he’d picked up from me. “Not necessarily; I merely note the fact. I also note the fact that if Everett wasn’t with Tera, that means all the rest of the crew were alone.”
“Actually, no,” I corrected him. “Geoff Shawn, the electronics man, had come to the bridge to watch Chort’s spacewalk on my monitors.”
“Really,” he said. “Interesting.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “In what way?”
“I said there were three main places where the grav generator could be turned on,” he said, stroking his cheek thoughtfully with stubby fingertips. “But there are probably several other places where someone could jump power into the system.”
“I was afraid of that,” I said heavily. “I suppose it would be too much to ask that there would be no way to set that sort of thing up with a timer.”
“You mean so that Shawn’s appearance on the bridge might have been solely to establish an alibi for himself?”
“Something like that.”
He shrugged again. “If he could tap into the system, I see no reason he couldn’t set it up on a timer, too.” He paused. “Of course, for that matter, the same thing goes for Chort and Jones.”
I frowned. “You must be kidding.”
“Must I?” he countered. “Look at the facts. Chort wasn’t injured in the fall, at least not very seriously. And if Jones set it up, he may have planned to catch him before he fell too far.”
“And his motive?”
“Whose, Jones’s or Chort’s?”
“Either one.”
Ixil shrugged. “What motive does anyone here have? That’s the main reason I hesitate to ascribe any of this to malice.”
I sighed; but he was right. Considering the Icarus’s haphazard design, glitches could easily turn out to be the rule rather than the exception. “What about Jones’s rebreather?”
Ixil hissed softly between his teeth. “That one I don’t like at all,” he said. “I don’t suppose you still have it.”
I shook my head. “We had to turn over the suit and rebreather both with Jones’s body.”
“I was afraid of that,” he said. “I would have liked to have looked it over. Frankly, I don’t know if it’s even theoretically possible for a rebreather to malfunction that way on its own.”
“Then you’re thinking sabotage?”
“That would be my guess; but again, for what purpose? Why would anyone aboard want to kill Jones?”
“How should I know?” I asked irritably. “These people are total strangers to me.”
“Exactly my point,” he said. “From your description of how Cameron was hiring his crewers, all these people are supposedly also total strangers to each other.”
I frowned. That part hadn’t occurred to me. “You’re right,” I said slowly, thinking back to that first meeting back at the base of the Icarus’s stairway. “No one gave any indication of knowing any of the others. At least not when I was watching.”
“Which implies that if any of this is deliberate there must be some other motivation,” Ixil concluded. “The general sabotage of the ship, perhaps, or the systematic disabling of the crew.”
“Tied in with Cameron’s failure to show up at the ship, maybe?” I suggested.
“Could be,” Ixil agreed. “The massive manhunt we saw near the archaeology dig would support that theory, not to mention your playmates with the high-tech weaponry.”
I drummed my fingers on the deck. “So where does that leave us?”
“With quite a few unknowns,” Ixil said. “The key one, in my mind, being this mysterious cargo you’re carrying. Have you any idea what’s in there?”
“None whatsoever,” I said. “There’s nothing listed in the computer that I could find, and there are no access panels listed on the schematics where we could even go to take a look. When Cameron said it’d been sealed, he meant it.”
“We may have to find some way to unseal it before we’re done with this,” Ixil said.
There was a scrabbling sound at the hatchway, and Pix and Pax appeared. “Okay, I give up,” I asked, finally tired of wondering about it. “What exactly have they been doing out there? Neither you nor they know what any of the crew looks like.”
“Given your brush with the Lumpy Brothers, as you call them, it occurred to me that someone might have the Icarus under surveillance,” Ixil said as the ferrets climbed his torso to his shoulders again. “I’m watching for anyone who seems to be loitering around the area without a legitimate reason to do so.”
“Ah. And?”
“If he’s there, he’s very good at his job,” Ixil concluded. “By the way, is one of your crewers about one-point-nine meters tall and bulking out at a good hundred ten kilograms, with short black hair and a face like a throw-boxer with a bad win/loss record?”
“Sounds like our medic, Everett,” I said, scooting across the floor to his side. Sure enough, there he was, heading toward us with an air of brisk determination about him. “Yes, that’s him,” I confirmed, getting to my feet. “Be nice, now—he’s probably never seen a Kalix before.”
Apparently lost in his own thoughts, Everett didn’t even notice us standing in the shadow of the wraparound until he was halfway up the ramp. Judging from how high he jumped, he had indeed never seen a Kalix before. “It’s all right—don’t worry,” I said quickly, before he could turn tail and run for the hills. “This is Ixil. He’s with us.”
“Ah,” Everett said, regaining his balance and most of his composure and peering oddly at Ixil. “So this is your partner. Ixil, was it?”
“Yes,” Ixil said. “How did you know I was Jordan’s partner?”
Everett blinked. “He said he would be bringing his partner in to take Jones’s place,” he said, looking at me uncertainly. “Just before we set down. Didn’t you say that?”
“Yes, I did,” I confirmed. “Any problems with the drop-off?”
“Not really,” he said. “It was your basic fifteen-minute inquest. They did want to keep the suit and rebreather, though.”
“I figured they would,” I said. “Where’s Nicabar?”
“He headed off somewhere after the inquest,” Everett said. “Why, is that a problem?”
“It could become one,” I said. “Did you happen to see any of the others on your way back?”
“I passed Shawn at one of the vendor stalls a few minutes ago,” he said. “I haven’t seen anyone else.”
“Perhaps it’s time we called them,” Ixil suggested. “I presume you have their phone numbers, Jordan?”
“Yes, they’re programmed into list two,” I said, handing him my phone. “Give them a call, will you, and tell them to get back as soon as they can. I’ll make sure the refueling’s been finished and get the rest of the paperwork out of the way.”
“What can I do?” Everett asked.
You can tell me who out there has it in for this ship and its crew, the suggestion ran through my mind. But there was no point springing something like that on him. Odds were he hadn’t the faintest idea anyway. “Go make sure your gear’s ready for liftoff,” I told him instead. “As soon as the rest get back, we’re out of here.”
CHAPTER
5
They straggled in over the next hour, Shawn and Nicabar clearly glad we were getting under way, Tera just as cle
arly annoyed that we’d cut short what had apparently been a successful shopping spree, at least judging from the number of bags she hauled aboard. Chort didn’t show any particular preference one way or the other.
With the ever-looming threat of hue and cry from the Port Authority over the deaths of my two assailants—and the associated threat that the port might be summarily shut down at any minute—I spent the entire time sweating as I fought upstream against bureaucratic inertia, trying to finish Jones’s death report and all the procedural preflight paperwork before the bodies were discovered.
To my surprise, we got cleared and headed out into space without any sign of official outrage or panic over the charred remains I’d left at the loading dock. Perhaps the spot the Lumpy Brothers had picked for my interrogation had been more private than it had looked. Either that, or someone had done a very efficient job of sweeping the whole incident under the rug.
I’d had short conversations with each of the crewers on the trip from Meima, but most of them had either concerned basic ship’s business or were just casual chat. But now, with everything that had happened since then, I decided it was time to skip past the surface and find out what exactly these people were made of. If someone was out to get us, I needed to know which ones I could trust not to buckle under pressure.
And so, as soon as we’d made our slice into hyperspace and were on our way, I left Ixil watching the bridge and headed aft.
The Icarus’s engine room was just like the rest of the ship, only more so. The same odd arrangement of equipment and control systems was repeated back there, as if Salvador Dali had been in charge of the layout. In addition, though, the general attempt elsewhere to keep the various cables and fluid conduits tucked out of the way in the gap between the inner and outer hulls had seemingly been abandoned here. They were everywhere: a bewildering, multicolored spaghetti tangle that brushed against sleeves and shins and occasionally threatened to clothesline the unwary traveler.