by Timothy Zahn
The days settled into a steady if slightly frantic routine. Chort spent every waking hour outside, clearly loving it, except for the brief periods when he had to come in to have his rebreather recharged. Those of us who could fit into the remaining suits—which was everyone except Everett—took our turns outside with him, most of us not nearly as enthusiastic about the wide-open spaces as Chort was. The rest of our time was divided between more disassembly, shifting the necessary equipment to the inner hull and tossing the rest, or collapsing on our transplanted bunks in the near coma that had taken the place of normal sleep.
With the verbal sniping and general lack of sociability that had marked the trip up to this point I had braced myself for the escalation in overall tension that all this unscheduled exercise was bound to create. Once again—and this one was really to my surprise—it didn’t happen. There was the occasional snapped word or under-the-breath curse, but for the most part I found my fellow travelers suddenly behaving far more like a seasoned crew than a random collection of semihostile strangers.
In retrospect, I suppose, I shouldn’t have been so surprised by the sudden transformation. Before the Najiki near miss at Utheno we’d been little more than interstellar truck drivers, doing a dull job for low pay, with nothing in particular to look forward to after it was done, and with only the vague threat of a possible hijacking to make it even marginally interesting. Now, suddenly, we were on the cusp of history, with the chance to make a name for ourselves and at the same time stick it hard to the Patth and their hated economic empire. We had the chance for immortality—and, even more importantly, for possibly serious riches—and that simultaneous group grab for the brass ring was drawing us firmly together.
Of course, lurking behind the chance to make history was the darker knowledge that if the Patth caught up with us even our own personal histories would pretty well be over. That was undoubtedly part of the cooperation, too.
But whatever the reason, the progress the first four days was nothing short of remarkable. So much so that midway through the fifth day I pulled Everett and Ixil off the work crews and sent them aft to the engine room to start recalibrating the equipment that the Najiki ion attack had scrambled. Then, with Chort, Nicabar, and Shawn working outside, I took Tera over to her computer and settled in for a crash course in Alien Stardrive 101.
The class didn’t take nearly as long as I’d hoped it would.
“That’s it?” I asked as the last page of data scrolled to the top of the computer display. “That’s all they found?”
“Be thankful we have even this much,” she countered tartly. But there were worry lines creasing her forehead, too. Perhaps, like me, she was starting to realize just how much of a long shot this whole scheme really was. “The idea wasn’t to sit there on Meima until they had the whole thing figured out to five decimals, you know. The minute they realized what they had, they shot that message off to Dad. This isn’t much more than the five weeks it took to get the Icarus parts shipped in and put together.”
“I suppose,” I conceded, scowling at the meter-square opening into the sphere, a disguised access panel that Tera had luckily known how to open. “And they never got more than a couple of meters inside?”
“No,” she said. “They were afraid of crossing circuits or damaging something else along the way. You can see for yourself what a maze of conduits and loose wires it is in there.”
I stretched flat along the hull beside the hole and shined a light in. She was right: It was a jungle in there. “Reminds me of the engine room,” I said, playing the light around some more. It looked like there were panels of glowing lights on what little I could see of the wall through the wiring. “I wonder if it was planned that way or if all the cable ties just fell apart over the years. You said there was another access from the other side of the sphere?”
“Yes, behind the secondary breaker panel in the engine room,” she said. “They put hinges on the breaker panel so that it swings right out.”
“Has it got a better view than this one?”
“Not really.” She gestured toward the access hole. “They tried sending in probes, but the umbilicals kept getting caught on the wiring and Dr. Chou was afraid they’d tear something trying to get them loose. They had one self-guided probe that got in a little farther, but something confused its sensors and it froze up completely.”
“Well, we’re not going to get anywhere without a complete idea of what’s in there,” I said.
“I hope you’re not suggesting one of us go inside,” she said darkly. “If the probes couldn’t make it through, you certainly won’t.”
“I like to think I’m a bit more competent at working my way through tangled wiring than someone tugging blindly on a probe control,” I told her. “As it happens, though, I was thinking of starting with someone slightly smaller.”
She frowned. “Who?”
I nodded in the direction of the engine room. “Go get Ixil,” I said, “and I’ll show you.”
Ixil wasn’t any more enthusiastic about my idea than Tera was. “I don’t know, Jordan,” he said, stroking Pax’s head uneasily as he crouched on his left forearm and hand. “Every design of stardrive I’ve ever heard of has had a half-dozen high-voltage sites and shock capacitors associated with it. If Pax touches one of those, it’ll kill him.”
“He goes through power conduits all the time,” I reminded him. “How does he avoid insulation breaks and short circuits there?”
“He knows what to look for with our stuff,” Ixil said. “This is an unknown alien design, with an entirely different set of cues. For that matter, even the lower-voltage lines may have lost their insulation over the years. You and I are big enough to survive a minor shock like that. Pax isn’t.”
“I know,” I said. “And I wish there were another way. But there isn’t. We have to see what’s in there; and Pix and Pax are the only eyes we’ve got.”
“Except ours,” Ixil said. “Why don’t I go instead?”
“No,” Tera said, a fraction of a second before I could get the word out myself. “Not a chance.”
“But I could see what’s there,” he persisted. “There are cues I know how to read that Pax hasn’t got the basic intelligence to pick up on. If I go just a little way in, far enough to see past the initial tangle, I could brief him on whatever I find and then let him go in. It would give him a better chance.”
Tera shook her head. “I’m sorry, Ixil, but I can’t let you do that. Dad was absolutely adamant that no one go inside until we got all the power sources and cables mapped out, for that very reason. It’s Pix or Pax or no one at all.”
Ixil lowered his eyes to the ferret, his mouth tight. “All right,” he said with a resigned sigh. “What exactly do you want him to do?”
“We need to find a path through to the center of the sphere,” I said. “Chort and Nicabar are a little fuzzy on the details of this exotic double-sphere design of theirs, but they both agree there should be a large resonance crystal somewhere in the center, probably with a control panel either wrapped around it or somewhere nearby. If they’re right, and if we can either scope out the controls—or, better yet, connect it through to a control system out here—we may be able to activate it.”
“If it’s even still functional after all this time,” Ixil muttered, putting Pax up on his shoulder.
“Well, something’s drawing and using power in there,” I reminded him. “Though where it’s getting it from I haven’t the foggiest idea. Warn him to watch where he puts his feet and nose, and to take his time. We’re not in any special hurry here.”
Ixil nodded, and for a moment he just stood there silently, communing with the outriders. Then, taking a deep breath, he picked Pax up off his shoulder and set him down beside the opening. For a moment the ferret sniffed at the edge, his little nose wrinkling as if he didn’t care for the smell of age in there. Then, with what sounded almost like a reassuring squeak, he scrabbled over the edge and disappeared.
Ixil was kneeling at the edge in an instant, plucking the light from my hand and playing it inside. “Doesn’t seem to be any gravity in there,” he said, leaning his face into the opening. “He’s working his way along the wires the way he does in zero gee.”
I looked at Tera. “I don’t know,” she said. “Though if the purpose of the grav field out here is to make sure the center of the resonance cavity stays clear, there really wouldn’t be any need for one in the smaller sphere.”
Ixil grunted, and for another few minutes we stood or crouched there in silence. Then, hunching his shoulders, Ixil straightened up again. “He’s gone,” he said, handing the light back to me. “Disappeared behind something that looked like a multicable coupler.”
“He’ll be fine,” Tera said quietly, laying a hand soothingly on his arm. “He does this sort of thing all the time, remember?”
Ixil grunted, clearly not in the mood to be soothed. “I’d better get back to the engine room—there’s still a lot of recalibration to be done, and Everett doesn’t know how to do most of the calculations on his own. You’ll call me when he comes back?”
“Yes,” I assured him. “Actually, Tera, you might want to go back there with him and open the other access hole, the one you said was behind the breaker panel. If Pax gets disoriented, it would be handy for him to have a second way out.”
“Good idea,” she said. “Come on, Ixil.”
They climbed up the slight curve—it still made me vaguely dizzy to watch people walking around the hull in here—and disappeared through the open pressure door into the zero gee of the wraparound. With a sigh, I lay down on the hull again and shined my light into the opening. Pax was gone, all right, though I imagined I could hear occasional scratching sounds as he maneuvered his way through the maze. Leaning partially over the hole, I stuck my head carefully in and played the light slowly around the inner surface.
I was halfway around in my sweep when I saw the gap.
I was still lying there studying it two minutes later when Tera returned. “He’s really not happy about this, is he?” she commented as she sat down cross-legged beside me. “He claims they’re not pets, but I think he really—”
“Did Chou and his people take photos of what they could see from this opening?” I interrupted her.
She took a half second to switch gears. “I think so,” she said. “At least some. I hadn’t pulled them up before because—”
“Pull them up now,” I ordered, trying to keep my sudden apprehension out of my voice. “Find me one that shows a gray trapezoid about half a meter across with about two dozen wires coming off gold connectors along its edges.”
She was already at the computer, fingers playing across the keys. “What is it?” she asked tightly.
“Just find me the picture,” I said tersely, getting up and stepping to her side.
Dr. Chou’s people, it turned out, had taken a lot of pictures. It took Tera nearly a minute to find the specific area I was looking for.
And when she did, my apprehension turned to fullblown certainty.
“Tera, you told me your dad left the ship at Potosi,” I said. “How do you know? Did he leave a note?”
She shook her head, her neck twisted to look up at me. “No, nothing like that,” she said, a note of uncertain dread in her voice as she picked up on my own mood. “I told you: He and his things were gone, and I couldn’t find him anywhere on the ship.”
“Right,” I nodded. “Except that you didn’t think to look inside the small sphere here, did you?”
Her eyes widened, her throat muscles suddenly tense. “Oh, no,” she breathed. “He’s not—oh, God.”
“No, no, I can’t see him,” I hastened to assure her. “There’s no—I mean—”
“No body?”
“No body,” I confirmed. At least not one I could see, I carefully refrained from saying. “What there is by that trapezoid is a gap in the wiring. A big gap, as if someone maneuvered his way through the thicket, creating a hole as he went.”
“It couldn’t have been Pax?” she asked, her voice going even darker.
“It’s man-sized,” I told her gently. “Look, maybe he’s just lying low in there.”
She shook her head, a short, choppy movement. “No, we’ve been doing work here by the access panel off and on for the past couple of days. He’d have heard my voice and come out.” She swallowed. “If he could.”
I looked back over at the hole, coming to the inevitable decision. “I’m going in,” I announced, taking a step that direction.
A step was all I got. Like a rattlesnake her hand darted out and grabbed my arm. “No!” she snapped, holding on with a strength that surprised me. “No! If he’s dead, it means something in there killed him. We can’t risk you, too.”
“What, all this concern for a soul-dead smuggler?” I retorted. It wasn’t a nice thing to say, but at the moment I wasn’t feeling particularly nice. “Maybe he’s not dead in there—you ever think of that? Maybe he’s injured, or unconscious, or paralyzed. Maybe he can’t get to the opening, or can’t even call out to you.”
“If he went in while we were on Potosi, he’s been in there eleven days,” she said. Her voice sounded empty, but her grip on my arm hadn’t slackened a bit. “Any injury serious enough to prevent him from getting out on his own would have killed him long before now.”
“Unless he just got the injury,” I shot back. I wasn’t ready to give in, either. “Maybe he got thrown around while I was dodging the ion beams off Utheno. He could still be alive.”
She took a deep breath. “We’ll wait for Pax to come out.”
“We’ll wait half an hour,” I countered.
“One hour.”
I started to protest, took another look at her face, and gave it up. “One hour,” I agreed.
She nodded, and for a long moment she stared down at the access hole. Then, reluctantly, she keyed off the computer photo we’d been looking at and sat down on the deck. “Tell me about yourself, McKell,” she said.
I shrugged, sitting down on the deck beside her. “There’s not very much to tell.”
“Of course there is,” she said quietly. “You had hopes and plans and dreams once. Maybe you still do. What would you be doing now if you weren’t smuggling?”
“Who knows?” I said. She didn’t care about my hopes and dreams, of course. I knew that. She was just casting around looking for some mindless chatter, something to distract herself from the mental image of her father floating dead in there. “Once, I thought I might have a career in EarthGuard. That ended when I told a superior officer exactly what I thought of him.”
“In public, I take it?”
“It was public enough to earn me a court-martial,” I conceded. “Then I thought I might have a career in customs. I must have been a little too good at it, because someone framed me for taking bribes. Then I tried working for a shipping firm, only I lost my temper again and slugged one of the partners.”
“Strange,” she murmured. “I wouldn’t have taken you for the terminally self-destructive type.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’m only self-destructive where potentially promising careers are concerned. When it comes to personal survival, I’m not nearly so incompetent.”
“Maybe the problem is you’re afraid of success,” she suggested. “I’ve seen it often enough in other people.”
“That’s not a particularly original diagnosis,” I said. “Others of my acquaintance have suggested that from time to time. Of course, for the immediate future my options for success of any sort are likely to be seriously limited.”
“Until about midway into the next century, I believe you said.”
“About that.”
She was silent a moment. “What if I offered to buy you out of your indenture to that smuggling boss?”
I frowned at her. There was no humor in her face that I could detect. “Excuse me?”
“What if I offered to buy out your ind
enture?” she repeated. “I asked you that once, if you recall. You rather snidely countered by asking if I had a half million in spare change on me.”
I felt my face warm. “I didn’t know who you were then.”
“But now you do,” she said. “And you also know—or you ought to if you don’t—that I have considerably more than a half-million commarks to play with.”
A not-entirely-pleasant tingle ran through me. “And you’re suggesting that bailing me out of my own pigheaded mismanagement would be worth that much to you?” I asked, hearing a hint of harshness in my voice.
“Why not?” she asked. “I can certainly afford it.”
“I’m sure you can,” I said. This was not safe territory to be walking on. “The Cameron Group probably spends half a million a year just on memo slips. Which, if I may say so, is a hell of a better investment than I would be for you.”
“Who said anything about you being an investment?” she asked.
“Process of elimination,” I said. “I don’t qualify as a recognized charity, and I’m too old to adopt.”
Somewhere along in here I’d expected her to take offense. But either she was too busy worrying about her father to notice my ungrateful attitude, or she had a higher annoyance threshold than I’d thought. “Perhaps it’s a reward for bringing the Icarus safely home,” she said. “Payment for services rendered.”
“Better wait until it’s sitting safely on the ground before you go off the edge with offers of payment,” I warned. “Unless, of course, you think I’m likely to weaken before we get to Earth and figure this is the best way to lock in my loyalty.”