The Icarus Hunt

by Timothy Zahn

  And buried away at his control console near the middle of the sculpted chaos was Revs Nicabar.

  “Ah—McKell,” he greeted me as I successfully negotiated past a final pair of thick conduits leading to the large, shimmery Möbius strip that was the heart of the Icarus’s stardrive. “Welcome to Medusa’s Lair. Watch your head.”

  “And arms, legs, and throat,” I added, pulling out a swivel stool from the side of his console and sitting down. “How’s it flying?”

  “Amazingly well, actually,” he said. “Rather surprising, I know, considering that it looks like a refugee from a Doolian scrap heap. But whoever the designer was, at least the builder had the sense to install some decent equipment.”

  “It’s like that on the bridge, too,” I said. “Good equipment, odd placement. I’ll make you a small wager that it was a working spacer who designed it, not some so-called expert. Tell me, did you have any problems out in the port back there?”

  His eyes narrowed, just a bit, and I saw his gaze flick to the side of my head where the plasmic near miss had slightly singed my hair. I didn’t think the marks showed; possibly I was wrong. “None at all,” he said. “Of course, I was only outside a half hour or so—up till then I was sitting on the fuelers making sure they did their job properly. I take it there was some trouble I missed out on?”

  “You might say that,” I allowed. “Tell me about yourself, Revs.”

  I’d been hoping my sudden change of topic would spark a telling reaction. What I got was equally informative: no reaction at all. “What do you want to know?” he countered calmly.

  “Let’s start with your background,” I said. “Where you picked up your drive certification, how long you’ve been flying, why you were at loose ends on Meima, and how you were hired for this trip.”

  “I learned drive-jocking in the service,” he said. “EarthGuard Marines, stationed mostly out among the settlements in the Kappa Vega Sector. I was in for ten years, left six years ago to try my hand in the private sector.”

  “Odd timing,” I said. “Considering that by then the Patth had already swallowed up the lion’s share of the Spiral’s shipping.”

  “It was a gamble, but I’d had enough of military life by then and thought I could make a go of it. Mostly, I was right.” He shrugged. “As to the Icarus, I got signed up more or less simultaneously with my resignation from my previous ship.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.” His face hardened. “I’d just found out my freighter was actually mask-shilling for the Patth.”

  I frowned. “That’s a new one on me.”

  “It’s the latest Patth twist to get around local protection ordinances,” he said. “On some of these worlds twenty to forty percent of cargo tonnage has to be carried by local shippers. So the Patth hire a ship on the sly, load it to the gills with as much stuff as it can carry, and send it on in. It skews the numbers, the Patth pocket the profits, and it pulls business away from the people the ordinances are supposed to protect.” He shrugged. “Typical Patth connivery.”

  “I take it you resigned in something of a huff?”

  He grinned suddenly. “I don’t know if ‘huff’ quite covers it, but I made damn sure I was loud enough for everyone in the taverno to hear what was happening. Anyway, Borodin was there at the bar talking to someone else, and when I stomped out he followed and offered me this job.”

  He glanced around. “Though if I’d known what I was getting into, I might have looked a little harder for something else.”

  He looked at me, his eyes suddenly cool. “My turn for a question. Do you always carry a gun on board your own ship?”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “I’m impressed. I didn’t realize it was so obvious.”

  “Ten years in EarthGuard,” he reminded me. “Do I get an answer?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Number one: It’s not exactly my ship. Number two: I was kidnapped in port by a couple of alien lads who wanted our cargo.”

  “Interesting,” he murmured. “And you suspect someone aboard of complicity with them?”

  “I can’t imagine why anyone would be,” I said. It was a perfectly true statement, even if it wasn’t precisely an answer to his question.

  “No, of course not,” he agreed in a tone that implied he’d heard both the words I’d said and the words I hadn’t said and would be mulling them over later on his own. “In which case, I presume this visit is for the purpose of judging whether or not I’ll be helping you circle the wagons if and when the shooting starts?”

  I had to hand it to him, the man was sharp. “Very good,” I said approvingly. “I hereby withdraw all the unkind thoughts I’ve had toward EarthGuard Marines over the years. Most of them, anyway.”

  “Thanks,” Nicabar said dryly. “The answer’s a qualified yes. I’ve dealt with my share of pirates and hijackers, and I don’t like them much. You can count on me to help fight them off. But.”

  He leveled a finger at my chest. “My support and my presence are conditional on the cargo being totally legit. If I find out we’re running drugs or guns or that we’re mask-shilling for the Patth, I’m out at the next port. Clear?”

  “Clear,” I said firmly, hoping I sounded heartily on his side on this one. If he ever found out about my connection with Brother John, I was going to have some fancy verbal dancing to do. “But I don’t think you have anything to worry about on any of those scores. Borodin told me the cargo had been cleared through customs on Gamm, and one would assume they were reasonably thorough.”

  “Borodin told me that, too,” Nicabar said darkly. “But then, Borodin’s not here, is he?”

  “No, he’s not,” I conceded. “And before you ask, I don’t know why.”

  “I didn’t think you did.” He peered at me thoughtfully. “If you ever find out, I presume you’ll tell me.”

  “Of course,” I said, as if it went without saying, as I stood up. “I’ve got to get back to the bridge. See you later.”

  I made my way back through the wiring undergrowth, wishing irreverently for a machete, and ducked through the aft airlock hatch into the wraparound. Nicabar was sharp, all right. Maybe a little too sharp. Perhaps his lack of reaction to my story about being jumped was because he already knew all about it.

  In which case, unfortunately, I ran immediately and solidly into the question of why he hadn’t then done something to keep the Icarus from leaving Xathru. Unless the Lumpy Brothers were just hunting cargoes at random, maybe working strictly on their own.

  But that one didn’t wash at all. They’d known me by sight and name, and they’d known I’d come in from Meima. And they sure as hell hadn’t bought those corona weapons off a gun-shop rack.

  I was halfway through the wraparound, still turning all the questions over in my mind, when I heard a dull, metallic thud.

  I stopped dead in my tracks, listening hard. My first thought was that we had another pressure ridge or crack; but that wasn’t at all what the noise had sounded like. It had been more like two pieces of metal clanking hollowly against each other.

  And near as I could tell, it had come from someplace immediately ahead of me.

  I unglued myself from the deck and hurried ahead, ducking through the forward airlock and into the main sphere, all my senses alert for trouble. No one was visible in the corridor, and aside from the galley/dayroom three rooms ahead on my right all the doors were closed. I paused again, listening hard, but there was nothing but the normal hum of shipboard activity.

  The first door ahead on my right was the computer room. I stepped up to it and tapped the release pad with my left hand, my right poised ready to grab for my plasmic if necessary. The door slid open—

  Tera was seated at the computer, holding a hand pressed against the side of her head. “What?” she snapped crossly, glaring at me.

  “Just checking on you,” I said, glancing around the room. No one else was there, and nothing seemed out of place. “I thought I heard a noise.”

  “That was m
y head banging against the bulkhead,” she growled. “I dropped a datadisk and ran into the wall when I leaned over to get it. Is that all right with you?”

  “No problem,” I said hastily, backing out rapidly and letting the door close on her scowl. This was twice now, counting my spectacularly unnecessary floor dive back in that Meima hotel room, where I’d overreacted and made something of a fool of myself.

  The difference was that Ixil was already used to that sort of thing from me. Tera wasn’t, and my face was hot as I glowered my way forward.

  Ixil was seated in the restraint chair when I reached the bridge, Pix and Pax nosing curiously around the bases of the various consoles in their rodent way. “How was Nicabar?” he asked.

  “Smart, competent, and apparently on our side,” I told him. “Tera, unfortunately, probably now thinks I’m an idiot. Did you hear a metallic clunking noise a couple of minutes ago?”

  “Not from here, no,” he said, snapping his fingers twice. The two ferrets abandoned their exploration in response to the signal, scampering up his legs and onto his shoulders. “They didn’t hear anything, either,” he added. “Could it have been a pressure ridge forming?”

  “No, it wasn’t anything like that,” I said. “Tera told me she’d bumped her head on the bulkhead. But that’s not what it sounded like to me.”

  “Perhaps it was Shawn across the corridor from her in the electronics workshop,” Ixil suggested as the ferrets headed down his legs to the deck again. “He said he was going to be tearing apart and cleaning one of the spare trim regulators.”

  “He came here? Or did he use the intercom?”

  “He came here,” Ixil said. “He wanted to ask you to run a decision/diagnostic on the regulators already online, not wanting to have one of the spares torn apart if there was any chance we might need it.”

  “Unfortunately, this ship has all the decision-making capabilities of a politician up for reelection,” I said. “Tera’s computer back there is just this side of utterly useless.”

  “Yes, he mentioned that,” Ixil agreed. “I did what I could in the way of a diagnostic, then told him to go ahead.”

  “Fine,” I said, pulling out the console’s swivel stool. I sat down facing Ixil, keeping the door visible at the corner of my eye. “I presume you took the opportunity to find out a little about him?”

  “Of course,” he said, as if there would be any doubt. “An interesting young man, though he strikes me as something of the rebellious type. He’s quite well traveled—he went on several survey-match trips while in tech school, including one that followed Captain Dak’ario’s famous journey across the Spiral three hundred years ago.”

  “Sounds like a flimsy excuse to get out of real classes.” I sniffed. “Which school was it?”

  “Amdrigal Technical Institute on New Rome,” he said. “Graduated fifth in his class, or so he says.”

  “Impressive, if true,” I admitted grudgingly. “What was he doing on Meima?”

  “He was out of work,” Ixil said. “Why, he wouldn’t say—he went rather evasive every time I tried to move us back to that topic. He did say that he was sitting in a taverno wearing his class jacket and being picked on by some kids from a rival school when he caught Cameron’s eye.”

  “Borodin, please, at least in public,” I cautioned him. “That’s the name everyone else aboard knows him by.”

  “Right. Sorry.” He paused, an odd expression flitting across his face. “There’s one other thing that may or may not mean anything. Have you noticed Shawn seems to have a rather peculiar odor about him?”

  I frowned. My first reaction was to think that that was possibly the strangest comment Ixil had ever made, certainly in recent memory. But Ixil was a nonhuman, with access to a pair of even more nonhuman outriders, and all of them had different sensory ranges from mine. “No, I hadn’t,” I said.

  “It’s quite subtle,” he said. “But it’s definitely there. My initial thought was that it might be related to a possible medical problem, the odor coming either from the illness itself or induced by medication.”

  I felt my throat tighten. “Or it could be coming from some other kind of drug. The illegal type, maybe?”

  “Could be,” Ixil said. “Not standard happyjam, I don’t think, but there are any number of variations I’m not familiar with.” He shrugged. “Then again, it could also be a result of something exotic he had for lunch in the port.”

  “Nice to have it narrowed down.” Still, in all the years I’d known Ixil his instincts had never steered him wrong in this sort of thing. And there had been the attitude change I’d noticed myself in Shawn earlier in the trip, a change that could well have had something to do with drugs. “All right, we’ll keep an eye on him. See if he smells the same tomorrow after a day of shipboard food.”

  “I will,” he promised. “Speaking of tomorrow, I notice you’ve scheduled our next fueling stop on Dorscind’s World. I thought I might remind you that Dorscind’s World is not exactly a highlight of the average five-star tourist cruise.”

  “Which is precisely why I picked it,” I told him. Pix and Pax had finished their deck-level tour of the bridge now and had scampered out the door into the corridor. I sent up a silent prayer that they wouldn’t run across Everett; with his bulk, the big medic might step on them before he even noticed they were underfoot. “Paperwork accuracy has never been exactly a high priority with the Port Authority there, particularly if you’re a few commarks heavy on the docking fees. I figure that the eighty-two hours it’ll take to get there should be long enough for us to create a new identity for the Icarus that’ll be good enough to pass muster.”

  “I’m sure we can put something together,” he rumbled, eyeing me speculatively. “Did your tangle with the Lumpy Brothers bother you that much?”

  “More than you know,” I assured him grimly. “You see, according to the schedule Cameron left me—the schedule he presumably filed with the Meima Port Authority—the Icarus’s first stop was going to be Trottsen. We weren’t supposed to be on Xathru at all.”

  His squashed-iguana face hardened. “Yet the Lumpy Brothers knew you were there.”

  “And called me by name,” I nodded. “Granted, they may have tagged me when my turn was called at the StarrComm building—I had no reason at the time not to give my right name there. But why pick on me at all?”

  Ixil nodded thoughtfully. “Can’t be one of the crew,” he murmured, half to himself. “If someone here wanted the cargo, he would have simply stolen it himself after everyone else left the ship.”

  “Depending on whether he could get through Cameron’s security sealing,” I said. “But at the very least he would have made sure the Icarus didn’t lift. And all he needed to do to accomplish that was to phone the Port Authority with an anonymous report about a pair of crisped bodies lying next to a cul-de-sac loading dock.”

  Ixil cocked his head to the side. “In other words, he could have used the same technique that got you detained on Meima.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “And the fact that it didn’t happen on Xathru implies to me that it wasn’t someone aboard who pulled that stunt on Meima. But it does suggest a reason why the Lumpy Brothers latched on to me but not on to anyone else aboard.”

  Ixil nodded. “The Meima Port Authority report had your name.”

  “Not only my name, but my name linked with Cameron’s,” I said. “Someone got hold of that near-arrest report and disseminated it to assorted associates across the Spiral with instructions to be on the lookout for me. The Lumpy Brothers just happened to get lucky.”

  “Or else backtracked your name to the Stormy Banks and looked up my flight schedule,” Ixil suggested. “That might explain how they happened to be hanging around the StarrComm building.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that part,” I acknowledged. “You’re probably right.”

  “It also indicates our employer is probably still at large,” Ixil continued, stroking his cheek thoughtfully. “I imagi
ne he remembers all the rest of the names of the people he hired on Meima, in which case the private alert ought to have included their names as well.”

  “Good point,” I said, grimacing. What had become of Cameron was still high on my list of annoying loose ends. “Though that’s not definitive—I doubt any of the others had their names called over a loudspeaker in the market.”

  “Which leaves us only the question of who’s behind all this,” Ixil concluded. “And how we smoke him or them out into the open.”

  “Maybe that’s your only unanswered question,” I said. “Personally, I’m already on page two of that list. And as to who’s pulling the strings in the background, I’m not at all sure we even want to go poking that direction. It seems to me that our job right now is to get the Icarus and its cargo to Earth, preferably with it and us in one piece. Well, one piece each, anyway.”

  “You may be right.” He hesitated. “You said you called Brother John to discuss this sudden change in plans. You didn’t say whether or not you’d also spoken with Uncle Arthur.”

  I grimaced. “No,” I said. “I was hoping we could—oh, I don’t know. Surprise him, maybe?”

  Even without the ferrets on his shoulders to do their twitching thing, I had no trouble reading Ixil’s reaction to that one. “I won’t waste time by asking if you seriously believe that to be a good idea,” he said. “I’ll make you a small wager: that he won’t be any happier at your accepting this job than Brother John was.”

  “If you’re expecting me to cover that bet, you can forget it,” I said sourly, the proverbial admonition against trying to serve two masters running through my mind. No, Uncle Arthur would definitely not be happy with me over this one. And the longer I put off calling him, the unhappier he was likely to get. “Oh, all right,” I sighed. “I’ll call him as soon as we hit Dorscind’s World.”

  “That’s the spirit,” he said, with all the cheerful enthusiasm of someone who would probably find himself unavoidably busy tightening bolts on the Icarus while I was sweating it out under Uncle Arthur’s basilisk glare in a StarrComm booth. “What’s our plan until then?”