by Timothy Zahn
The cold chill was starting up again. I knew that tone Ixil was using. Knew it far too well. “And that is?” I prompted.
He took the bottles from Everett and gazed at the labels. “Cyanide gas.”
“All right, then, try this,” I suggested, scowling at the bridge displays. There wasn’t anything there worth scowling at—they were looking just fine—but I was feeling the need to scowl at something. “They were put there as a warning to us.”
“To us?” Ixil asked pointedly from the swivel stool across from me, the words mangled by the enormous sandwich he seemed to be trying to line-feed into his mouth. Kalixiri healing comas were unarguably useful things, but they did come with a certain physical cost. That was already Ixil’s second such sandwich, and he would probably demolish a third before his hunger even started to abate.
“All right, fine: it was a warning to you,” I said, scowling some more. “The question is, why bother? What did our saboteur have to gain by slapping a red flag across our noses? Sorry—across your nose?”
“If it was the saboteur,” he said, breaking off a small piece of the sandwich and leaning over to give it to Pax. Both ferrets were on the floor: Pax crouching where he could see the corridor outside the open bridge door, Pix circling the room by the inner hull listening for any eavesdroppers who might wander in from that direction. Ixil and I had already made sure that the intercom system, conveniently reactivated sometime during or immediately after my borandis search, couldn’t be used against us again. “Maybe it was someone trying to warn us there’s a saboteur aboard.”
“If it was, he should learn how to compose letters,” I said sourly. “Let’s try it from a different angle. Who else aboard might know about that trick with the qohumet and whatever?”
“Prindeclorian,” he said around another bite of sandwich. “Hard to tell, unfortunately. It was a favorite of armchair revolutionaries twenty years ago, along with a host of other common-chemical concoctions, and it received a fair amount of word-of-mouth publicity. But it never really caught on, mainly because you either need a small area to contaminate or a large supply of the necessary chemicals.”
“And because the fact that you have to set it on fire limits its subterfuge value?”
“Definitely,” he agreed. “Most people seeing a bright yellow flame spewing a cloud of greenish smoke won’t stick around to see what the smoke might do to them.”
“Unless the person in question is in a Kalixiri coma in a cabin the size of a large shoe box,” I concluded with a grimace. “You suppose there are other equally handy chemicals aboard?”
Ixil paused to chew. “I imagine almost anything in sick bay would be lethal in a high enough dose,” he said when he got his mouth clear again. “Unless you want to throw all of it overboard, there’s not much we can do about it.”
“That might not be such a bad idea,” I growled. “I’m starting to wonder if the only reason you’re alive is that Shawn’s escape interrupted our would-be killer in his work.”
Ixil paused in the act of taking another bite. “Excuse me? I thought your current theory was that the saboteur released Shawn so that he could chase everyone else out of the ship while he came back and did his dirty work.”
“That was the old theory,” I told him. “This is the new theory. He’d gotten your door open, but then heard the commotion on the mid deck and decided he’d better be found someplace else when they came looking for him. Not wanting to be caught with his pockets full of chemicals, he stashed them inside the room for safekeeping, hied himself off to someplace innocent, and just never got a chance to come back.”
“And also put the control chip inside the room so that he wouldn’t be able to open the door again himself?”
I glared at him. “That’s right, let yourself get mired down in facts. Never mind the simple elegance of the theory.”
“My apologies,” Ixil said, an odd look on his face as he set the remains of his sandwich on the nav table. “An idea. I’ll be right back.”
He left. I started another systems check, just for something to do, and did some more glaring at the various instruments. Unfortunately, he was right: If the saboteur planned to come back later, why take out the control chip? Not to mention the rest of the damage he’d done to the release pad.
Unless that had happened since we’d returned. Maybe he’d tried to come back early and found the ship surrounded by Najik customs officers. He wouldn’t have had a chance to act after that until the Najik had come and gone, while the rest of us were busy getting the Icarus ready to fly.
But why smash the pad at that point? What did it gain him?
Unless he’d already gotten into the cabin and wanted to make sure no one was able to get in to interrupt him. With the inside release pad intact, he would have had no trouble leaving whenever he wanted to.
So what had he done in there?
There was a clumping of heavy footsteps, and Ixil reappeared, carrying a large object wrapped in a folded cloth in his hand. “Have you checked with Pix and Pax since you woke up?” I asked. “I’m wondering if they might have seen someone else in there with you.”
“Yes, I have; and no, they didn’t,” he said, sitting down again. He set the object in his lap and started to unwrap it. “Except for seeing you come in for the ship’s schematics, of course. On the other hand, they were both asleep much of the time, so I can’t absolutely state that no one else got in.”
Dead end. “You need to train them to sleep one at a time.”
“If I’d been more alert before I went under I would have tried,” he said. “Though it might not have worked. Instructions like that often get lost when I don’t have any neural contact with them for a few hours and can’t reinforce the orders.”
I gestured toward the object in his hand. “What’s that?”
“Exhibit A.” He pulled back the last fold of cloth, and I found myself looking at what had to be the biggest universal wrench on the ship, the kind used for unbolting thruster casings.
“Ah,” I said. “And the significance of it is …?”
“Look closely, right here,” he said, pointing at a spot about midway along the rectangular cross-sectioned handle. “See the black streak?”
I leaned forward. It was there, all right: a faint black vertical mark, with a wider and fainter echo beside it as if a charcoal line had been smeared. “Let me guess,” I said, leaning back again. “A mark from the rubber edge of your cabin door?”
“Very good,” he said, lifting the wrench up by the cloth for a closer look of his own. “Those doors hit pretty hard when the buffer doesn’t engage. My assumption is he hit the release pad, then shoved this into the gap when it opened.”
And it was still moving as the door hit it; hence, the smeared streak. “That would have left enough of an opening for the bottles, but not enough to get his arm through,” I pointed out. “Probably why they weren’t farther from the door. Unless he was hoping someone would kick them on the way in or out.”
“That wouldn’t have done him any good,” Ixil reminded me. “You have to ignite the mixture, remember?”
“None of this does him any good,” I growled, mentally giving the whole thing up as hopeless. There was some vital information we didn’t yet have—I was sure of it. And until we found out what it was all we were going to accomplish by chasing our meager data around was to make ourselves dizzy.
Apparently, Ixil had figured that out, too. “As you suggested in an earlier conversation, it all makes perfect sense,” he said, starting to wrap up the wrench again. “We just don’t yet know what that sense is.”
I nodded to the wrench. “You planning to check it for fingerprints?”
“I was thinking of it,” he agreed. “Knowing the Icarus, though, I suspect we’ll need to use it before we ever get within hailing distance of a proper fingerprinting expert.”
“Knowing the Icarus, I’d say you were right,” I agreed. “So what now?”
“I thought I
’d see about fixing my door,” he said, tucking the wrench under one arm and snapping his fingers as he reached for the remains of his sandwich. The two ferrets came at his call, scampering up his body to his shoulders. “Your door, rather, since your outer pad’s on my cabin now. I can take the pad off the empty Number Two cabin on the top deck and replace the whole thing.”
“What if we want to get in there?” I asked.
“What for?” he asked reasonably. “Anyway, we can always move a pad from one of the other cabins temporarily if we need to.”
“Point,” I conceded. “Okay, go ahead.”
“Right. I’ll see you later.” Stuffing another large corner of his sandwich into his mouth, he headed out.
For a couple of minutes, ignoring my own resolve not to waste time and effort doing so, I chased our meager data around in a couple more circles. It didn’t get me anywhere.
And then, behind me out in the corridor, I heard the steady tread of approaching footsteps. Two pairs, from the sound of it, neither of them Ixil’s.
It was probably something totally innocent, of course. But I’d had enough unpleasant surprises for one day, and I wasn’t interested in having any more of them. Folding my arms across my chest, I slid my right hand out of sight beneath my jacket and got a grip on my plasmic, then swiveled my seat around to face the open doorway.
The first in line was Tera, stalking onto the bridge like she owned it. “McKell,” she said in terse greeting. There was nothing the slightest bit friendly about her expression. “We need to talk to you.”
Before I could reply, the other half of the “we” stepped into sight behind her: Nicabar, looking even less friendly than she did. Not a good sign. “Come in,” I said mildly, ignoring the fact that they were already in. “Revs, aren’t you supposed to be on duty in the engine room?”
“Yes,” he said, his eyes flicking once to my folded arms. If he suspected I was holding my gun, he didn’t comment on it. “I asked Chort to watch things for a few minutes.”
Strictly speaking, that was a violation of the Mercantile Code, me being the captain and not being informed and all. But so far this trip I’d been fairly casual about the duty roster, and there didn’t seem much point in complaining about it now. “Fine. What can I do for you?”
Tera glanced at Nicabar, who glanced in turn out into the corridor and then unlocked the release, letting the door slide shut beside him. “You can start with some honesty,” Tera said as they both looked back at me. “This Mr. Antoniewicz whose name scares off customs inspectors. Who exactly is he?”
It was a trap, of course. And with someone else, it might have worked. But Tera didn’t have the facial control or sheer chutzpah to pull it off. “You already know the answer,” I said. I shifted my gaze to Nicabar. “Or rather, you know it. I see you’ve already given Tera your version; how about doing the same for me?”
“He’s a dealer in death and misery,” Nicabar said, his voice as dark as his expression. “He buys and sells drugs, guns, customs officials, governments, and people’s lives.”
His eyes bored into mine. “And we want to know what exactly your relationship is to his organization.”
“Nice speech,” I complimented him, stalling for time. I’d known from the start that the relative ease with which I’d obtained Shawn’s borandis would inevitably generate speculation among the others as to how I’d pulled it off. But I hadn’t expected that speculation to turn into full-blown suspicion so quickly or so bluntly. This could be very awkward indeed. “Did you work it up specially for this occasion? Or is it left over from the last ship you worked that had ties to Antoniewicz? Or the one before that, or the one before that?”
“What exactly are you implying?” Nicabar asked, his tone the unpleasant stillness of the air when there’s a thunderstorm brewing in the distance.
“I’m saying that you and everyone else aboard the Icarus has worked for Antoniewicz at one time or another,” I told him. “You had no choice. Antoniewicz’s fingers stretch into so many nooks and crannies across the Spiral it’s practically impossible to engage in any business that doesn’t touch something he’s involved with.”
“That’s not the same,” Tera protested.
“What, if you don’t know what you’re doing it doesn’t count?” I scoffed. “There’s a very slippery slope beneath that kind of moral position.”
“Speaking of slippery, you still haven’t answered our question,” Nicabar put in.
“I’m getting to it,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure the answer was in the proper context. One of the ways Antoniewicz got a slice of so many pies was by buying up legitimate businesses, especially those in serious financial trouble. I was a legitimate business. Thanks to the Patth shipping monopoly, I got into serious financial trouble. Antoniewicz bought me up. End of story.”
“Not end of story,” Nicabar said. “He didn’t just buy your business. He bought you.”
“Of course he did,” I said, putting an edge of bitterness into my tone. “Ixil and I are the business.”
“So you sold your soul,” Nicabar said contemptuously. “For money.”
“I prefer to think of it as having traded my pride for a little bottom-line integrity,” I shot back. “Or do you think it would have been more honorable to have declared bankruptcy and left my creditors holding an empty bag. Well?”
“How much debt are we talking about here?” Tera asked.
“Five hundred thousand commarks,” I told her. “And let me also say that I tried every single legitimate way to get the money before I finally gave up and let Antoniewicz’s people bail us out.” Which wasn’t strictly true, of course. But there was no need to muddy the water here.
“What about now?” she asked.
“What about now?” I countered. “You think I wouldn’t love to pay off the debt and be out from under his thumb? Antoniewicz has done this before, you know, and he’s quite good at it. The way he’s got things structured, we’re going to be in servitude to him till about midway into the next century.”
“There must be another way,” she insisted.
I felt my forehead creasing. For someone who’d come in here ready to accuse me of being the scum of the Spiral, she seemed awfully concerned about my personal ensnarement in this web. Maybe even suspiciously concerned. “Such as?” I asked.
“You could turn him in,” she said. “Go to one of the police or drug-enforcement agencies. Or even EarthGuard Military Intelligence—if he deals in weapons they’re surely interested in him, too. You could offer to testify against him.”
I sighed. “You still don’t get it. Look, Tera, every police force in the Spiral has been trying to get their hands on Antoniewicz for at least twenty years. EarthGuard, too, for all I know. The problem isn’t evidence or even persuading suicidal fools to testify; the problem is finding him. No one knows where he is, and at the rate things are going, no one’s going to figure it out anytime soon, either.”
“But—”
“And furthermore, blowing the horn on him would end it for me permanently,” I cut her off. “He’s got my debt held with a bank on Onikki, under their charming debtors’ prison laws. All he has to do is call it in, and I’ll spend the next thirty years working it off at fifty commarks a day. Sorry, but I have other plans.”
“Like spending the same thirty years working for Antoniewicz?” Nicabar said pointedly.
“The choices stink,” I agreed. “But at least this way I’m not doing hard labor, and I still get to fly.”
“As Antoniewicz’s wholly owned drink-fetcher.”
I shrugged. “Like I said, the choices stink. If you’ve got any others, I’m listening.”
“What if you could find someone to pay off the debt?” Tera asked.
“Like who?” I demanded. “If the banks wouldn’t look at me before, they sure aren’t going to start now. Unless one of you has half a million in spare change, it’s not going to happen.”
The corner of her mo
uth twitched. “It sounds like you’ve already given up.”
“What I’ve done is accepted reality.” I cocked an eyebrow. “The question is, are you two prepared to do the same?”
Both of them frowned. “What do you mean?” Tera asked.
“I mean you have to decide whether you’re going to rise above your finicky scruples and continue to fly with me,” I said. I was taking a risk, I knew, bringing up the subject that way. But only a slight one—that was, after all, what they’d come here planning to confront me with in the first place. Besides, if they could be blunt, so could I.
And Tera, at least, could certainly be blunt. “I would think it’s a matter of whether you will be allowed to continue flying with us,” she retorted.
“Afraid it doesn’t work that way,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m the pilot, hired for the job by Borodin. None of you has the position or rank to replace me.”
“Under the circumstances, I doubt you’d have the gall to file a complaint,” Nicabar pointed out.
“Oh, I might have the gall,” I said. “But I wouldn’t, mainly because there wouldn’t be anything to gain. You and the Icarus would already be gone, taken by the hijackers I’ve already told you about.”
“Assuming there was any truth to that story,” Tera scoffed.
“Why would I make something like that up?”
“Maybe you’re hoping to scare us all into jumping ship,” she said. “Maybe you’ve got another crew lined up ready to move in when that happens, like you had Ixil ready when Jones got killed. Maybe you’re the real hijacker.”
“Then why didn’t I move my crew in on Dorscind’s World while you were all out sampling the sights?” I countered. “Why bother with any story at all?”
“And you don’t know who these hijackers are?” Nicabar asked.
“All I know is that they’re very well organized,” I said. “And that for whatever reason, they think they want the Icarus.”