The Icarus Hunt

by Timothy Zahn

  “To create a new identity for the Icarus, and to keep an eye on our backs,” I said. Across at the bridge door, the two ferrets reappeared and headed straight up Ixil’s legs. “As far as I’m concerned, we still don’t have a satisfactory explanation of what happened to Jones and Chort—”

  The ferrets reached Ixil’s shoulders; and abruptly, he made a quick double slashing motion across his throat with his fingertips. “—makes the best apple brandy anywhere in the Spiral,” I said, shifting verbal gears as smoothly as I could manage. The voice of someone speaking, I knew, could be heard well before the actual words could be made out, as could the sharp break of that voice being suddenly cut off. “In fact, I’d put it up against anything made on Taurus or even Earth—”

  I caught a movement from the corner of my eye; at the same time Ixil turned his head in that direction and nodded courteously. “Good evening, Tera,” he said, breaking into my improvised babbling. “What can we do for you?”

  I turned to face the door. Tera was standing in the doorway, a slight frown on her face as she took in Ixil seated in the restraint chair with me on the swivel stool. “You can get yourself out of that chair, that’s what,” she said. “The clock on the wall—and Mercantile regs—say it’s time for a shift change. It’s my turn for the bridge.”

  I frowned at my watch. Preoccupied with everything else that was happening, I hadn’t even thought about that. “You’re right,” I acknowledged. “Sorry—I’m not used to flying a ship where there are real shift changes and everything.”

  “Which I presume also explains why your mechanic’s in the control chair instead of you,” she countered. “You, Ixil, need to take over for Nicabar in the engine room; and you, McKell, need to hit the sack.”

  “I’m fine,” I insisted, getting to my feet. In that moment, though, I realized that she was right. Overall lack of sleep plus general tension level had combined with the Lumpy Brothers incident and my still-sore leg to suddenly throw a haze of wooziness over the universe. “On the other hand, maybe it would be a good idea to go under for a couple of hours,” I amended.

  “Make it eight of them and you’ve got a deal,” she said, jerking a thumb back down the corridor. “Go on—I’ll let you know if there’s any trouble. You’re in one of the cabins on the lower level, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “Number Eight.”

  “Fine,” she said, settling herself into the chair Ixil had just vacated. “Pleasant dreams.”

  I stepped out the door and clanked my way down the bare-metal rungs of the ladder to the lower deck. The central corridor—as with the mid deck, there was only one—was deserted. No big surprise, since aside from storage and recycling equipment there were only two sleeping cabins down here, mine and the one Ixil had moved into. A quiet part of the ship, where the rhythmic humming of the various machines would be quite conducive to lulling a weary traveler to sleep.

  But I wasn’t going to sleep. Not yet. Instead, I walked the length of the corridor to the aft ladder and headed back up to the mid deck, treading as quietly on the rungs as I could.

  Ixil was nowhere in sight, having apparently already disappeared into the wraparound to relieve Nicabar in the engine room. At the forward end of the corridor, I saw that Tera had rather pointedly closed the bridge door behind her. A girl who liked her privacy, I decided, though there might not be anything more to it than the natural reticence of a lone woman locked in a flying tin can with four unfamiliar men and two alien males. But whatever the reason, it was going to make my current project that much safer.

  The computer-room door was closed, too, but that was all right; near as I could tell, none of the Icarus’s doors locked. Taking one last look around to make sure I wasn’t being observed, I opened the door and went inside, closing it behind me.

  The room looked exactly the way it had when I’d last seen it, except of course that Tera wasn’t there. The Worthram T-66 computer dominated the space, pressing up against the aft bulkhead and covering much of the starboard wall as well. Fastened to the forward bulkhead was a two-sectioned metal cabinet with the hard-copy printer on one side and a set of shelves crammed with reference material and datadisks on the other. Squeezed in between the two was the computer control desk where Tera fought to beat the archaic machine into submission.

  And where, allegedly, she’d been sitting when she hit her head hard enough for me to hear from the wraparound.

  I went over and sat down in the chair. It wasn’t nearly as fancy as the one on the bridge; but then, in emergency maneuvers it was far more important for the pilot to stay in his seat than the computer jock. Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward and banged my head experimentally against the edge of the control panel.

  Even granted that I was hearing it from a more personal angle, the thud didn’t sound anything like what I’d heard earlier. That one had definitely been metallic; this one sounded exactly like a skull whacked against a control board.

  Rubbing thoughtfully at my forehead and the dull ache that had joined the chorus throughout my body, I looked slowly around the room. So there were two possibilities. Either Tera had coincidentally hit her head against something at about the same time I’d heard that metal-on-metal sound, or else she was lying. If the former, then I needed to look elsewhere; if the latter, there was something else in here that had in fact made the noise.

  The problem was, what? Unlike Ixil’s machine shop, there weren’t any tools lying around or hanging on racks that might fall and clatter against the deck. There were plenty of cables and connectors, but they were for the most part light and rubber-coated. The cabinet was plain metal, but it was bolted to the bulkhead. Besides, if it had tipped over, it would have left a mess of manuals and datadisks scattered on the deck which she wouldn’t have had time to pick up. The manuals themselves, it went without saying, couldn’t possibly make such a sound.

  Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, one of the manuals wasn’t what it seemed.

  It took me the better part of ten minutes to pull each of the manuals off the shelf, examine it carefully, and put it back in its place. Ten wasted minutes. None of them was anything other than it appeared, and none of them could have made that noise.

  Which left only one possibility. Whatever Tera had dropped, she was carrying it with her. A wrench, possibly, though what she would need a wrench for I couldn’t imagine.

  Or a gun.

  The mid-deck corridor was still deserted as I left the computer room and made my way down the aft stairway. I was tired, my head was now competing with my leg to see which could ache the most, and I had the annoying sense that I was chasing my own tail. Even if Tera did have a weapon, that didn’t necessarily mean she was up to anything. Besides, it was still entirely possible that the noise had come from somewhere else. I didn’t really believe it, but it was possible.

  The Number Eight sleeping cabin was like the other seven aboard the Icarus: small and cramped, with a triple bunk against the inner hull and a triple locker facing it from the corridor-side wall. An intercom was set into the inner hull beside the triple bunk, with a meter of empty hull space on its other side where a lounge seat or computer desk would have gone on a properly furnished ship. Clearly the ship had been designed to carry a lot more passengers than were currently aboard; as it was, we all conveniently got a cabin to ourselves, with one on the upper deck as a spare. The privacy was useful in that it gave me a fair amount of freedom of movement; not so useful in that it offered that same freedom to everyone else, too.

  The light switch was by the door. I punched it to nighttime dim, then crossed the room and lay down on the bottom bunk. Unrolling the blanket over me, I slid my plasmic under the pillow, where it would be available if needed, and closed my eyes. With unpleasant images of a frowning Uncle Arthur flickering behind my eyelids, I fell asleep.

  * * *

  I awoke slowly, in slightly disoriented stages, vaguely aware that something was wrong but not exactly sure what. The light was still
at the dim level I’d set, the door was still closed, and I was still alone in the cabin. The rhythmic drone of the environmental system was still vibrating gently through the air and hull around me. The deeper hum of the stardrive—

  The deeper hum of the stardrive wasn’t there.

  The Icarus had stopped.

  I had my boots and jacket on in fifteen seconds flat, almost forgetting to grab my plasmic in my rush to get out of the room. I hurried out into the corridor, went up the forward ladder like a cork out of a bottle, and charged into the bridge.

  Seated in the restraint chair, Tera turned a mildly questioning eye in my direction. “I thought you were asleep,” she said.

  “Why have we stopped?” I demanded.

  Her eyebrows lifted a bit higher. “We’ve got another hull ridge,” she said calmly. “Chort’s getting ready to go out and fix it.”

  I scowled past her at the displays. Sure enough, the new camera I’d had Ixil and Shawn install in the wraparound showed two space-suited figures just sealing the pressure door behind them. One was obviously Chort; the other was just as obviously Ixil. “You should have called me,” I growled.

  “Why?” she countered. “There’s nothing to this operation that the pilot needs to have a hand in. Besides, you’re off-duty, remember? Go back to bed.”

  The radio speaker clicked. “We’re ready, Tera,” Ixil’s voice said. “You can shut down the grav generator.”

  “Acknowledged,” Tera said, flipping back the safety cover and turning the switch ninety degrees. “Shutting off gravity generator now.”

  She pushed the switch, and I went through the usual momentary disorientation before my stomach settled down. “Go back to bed,” Tera repeated, her eyes on the monitors. “I’ll call you if there’s a problem.”

  “I’m sure you would,” I said shortly. Once again, it seemed, I had managed to embarrass myself in front of this woman. This was getting to be a very bad habit. “I’ll stay a bit.”

  “I don’t need you,” she said flatly, flicking a single glowering glance at me and then turning her attention back to the monitors. “More to the point, I don’t want you. Go away.”

  “Do we know where the ridge is?” I asked, ignoring the order.

  “Big sphere; starboard side,” she said. “Chort thinks it’s a small one.”

  “Let’s hope he’s right.”

  She didn’t answer. For a few minutes we watched the monitors together in silence, anxious silence on my part, frosty silence on hers. I presumed that Ixil had made it his business to make sure the grav generator couldn’t impulsively go on-line again; but I didn’t know for sure, and I didn’t want to ask him about it on an open radio channel. I tried to figure out how I would lock down the generator if it was up to me, but I didn’t know enough about the intricacies of the system.

  “You two been flying together long?” Tera broke into my thoughts.

  I blinked at her in mild surprise. Casual conversation from Tera was something new in my admittedly brief acquaintance with her. “Six years,” I told her. “I took him on about a year after I bought the Stormy Banks. I figured having a partner would help me run cargoes faster and more efficiently and bring in more money.”

  “I take it it didn’t work?”

  “What makes you say that?” I countered, long experience with that question putting automatic defensiveness into my voice.

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” she said. “Sorry—I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. With the Patth handling almost everything worth shipping these days, it’s a wonder everyone else hasn’t been driven out of business.”

  “Give them a few more years,” I said sourly. “The way they’re going, it won’t be long before they have it all.”

  “At least everything legitimate,” she said, giving me a sideways look. “You do run legitimate cargoes, don’t you, McKell?”

  “Every single chance I get,” I said, trying to put a touch of levity into my tone as I gazed at her profile, wishing I could read what was going on behind those hazel eyes of hers. Had she talked to someone while we were on Xathru? Heard something, perhaps, about my forced affiliation with Brother John and the Antoniewicz organization? “What about you?” I asked, hoping to change the subject. “How long have you been flying?”

  “Not long,” she said. “What do you do when you can’t get legitimate work?”

  So much for changing the subject. “Sometimes we’re able to pick up intrasystem cargoes,” I told her. “Occasionally we have to find temp jobs in whatever port we’re stuck in until something comes along. Mostly, we eat real light.”

  “You’re not a big fan of the Patth, then, I take it?”

  “No one who hauls cargo for a living is a fan of the Patth,” I said darkly, my conversation with Nicabar flashing to mind. “Is this your subtle way of suggesting we might be carrying a Patth cargo?”

  There were a lot of things, I knew, that a competent actress could do with her body, voice, and expression. But the last time I checked, the red flush that rose to briefly color Tera’s cheeks wasn’t one of them. “We’d better not be,” she said, the studied casualness in her voice a sharp contrast to the emotion implicit in that reddened skin. “Though I doubt we’ll find out for sure anywhere this side of Earth.”

  “If even then,” I pointed out. “Whoever Borodin’s got working that end isn’t under any obligation to let us watch while he cuts the cargo bay open.”

  “No, of course not,” she murmured, almost as if talking to herself. “I wonder why he lied to us about coming along.”

  “Who, Borodin? What makes you think he did lie?”

  She shrugged. “You saw that note he left. He had to have written it before the Ihmisits closed the port down for the night.”

  I thought about Director Aymi-Mastr of the Meima Port Authority and that murder charge she’d talked about. “Unless he just had it here as a precaution,” I suggested. “Maybe he fully intended to join us, but circumstances prevented him.”

  She snorted. “Right. A full bottle, or a warm bed. Circumstances.”

  “Or a small matter of murder,” I said.

  She looked at me, her eyes narrowing. “Murder?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I was told there was a warrant out for his arrest on a possible murder charge.”

  She shook her head. “Hard to believe,” she said. “He seemed like such a normal, upstanding man.”

  “That’s exactly what I said when they asked me about it,” I said approvingly. “Nice to know there’s at least one thing we agree on.”

  “Well, now, wait a minute,” she warned cautiously. “I never said I thought he didn’t do it, I just said it was hard to believe. I don’t know anything about the man.”

  “Sure, I understand,” I assured her. In fact, I understood far more than she probably realized. Just as her involuntary blush when talking about the Patth had given me a glimpse into her emotional state, so, too, had the complete lack of any such coloring when I told her about Cameron’s murder charge. And that despite her alleged total surprise at hearing such shocking news.

  Maybe she’d already used up all of her emotional reactions for one day. Or maybe she hadn’t been surprised by the murder charge for the simple reason that she’d already known all about it.

  “Computer Specialist Tera?” Chort’s whistly voice came over the speaker. “I believe I’m finished here. Shall I check the rest of the hull?”

  I was still watching Tera closely, which was why I caught the slight but unmistakable tightening of her facial muscles. Perhaps she was thinking along the same line that had suddenly occurred to me: that it had been just as Chort had set off on a similar check of the cargo and engine hulls his last time out that the accident with the grav generator had occurred.

  If it was, in fact, an accident. Perhaps someone aboard didn’t want anyone taking a close look at the outside of the cargo sphere.

  For a moment I was tempted to tell him to go ahead, just to
see if our theoretical spoilsport still had his same access to switches or junction boxes or whatever. But only for a moment. Ixil was sharing the hot spot with Chort, and the spoilsport might decide he didn’t like Ixil any more than he’d liked Jones. I had no interest in risking Ixil’s life or health, at least not then. Certainly not over a theory that hadn’t even occurred to me until five seconds ago.

  “This is McKell,” I said toward the speaker before Tera could answer. “Don’t bother, Chort—we don’t have time for it. You and Ixil just get back in and button up.”

  “Acknowledged,” he whistled.

  “That was my job,” Tera reminded me, throwing a brief glare in my direction. But to my hypersensitive eye, the glare didn’t seem to have the kind of fire behind it that I would have expected. Maybe she and I had indeed been thinking along the same lines, or maybe her chip-shoulder act was starting to wear a little thin. “You’re off-duty, remember?”

  “Right,” I said. “I keep forgetting. You can handle things here?”

  She didn’t even bother to answer that one, just gave me a look that said volumes all by itself and turned back to the monitors. Properly chastened, I floated out of the bridge, maneuvered down the ladder well, and returned to my cabin. I was once again stripping off my jacket when the warning tone sounded and gravity came back on.

  For a long time after that I just lay in my bunk, staring at the closed door in the dim light, as I ran that last conversation through endless repeats in my mind. Tera was an enigma, and in general I hated enigmas. In my experience, they nearly always spelled trouble.

  Unless I had been reading her words and her reactions all wrong. Or, worse, had somehow imagined them entirely. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I had oh-so-cleverly Sherlocked myself straight down a blind alley.

  But I hadn’t imagined the mishap with the grav generator or Jones’s death. I hadn’t imagined my brief detention on Meima, or the Lumpy Brothers, or their unreasonably advanced hand weaponry.