by Timothy Zahn
“That could be unpleasant,” he agreed. “Still, I’ve been here eleven days, and no one but you and your little pet here has shown up.”
He frowned suddenly. “It has been eleven days since we landed on Potosi, hasn’t it? Time rather blends together here.”
“Yes, eleven’s about right,” I confirmed. “I take it this little side trip wasn’t part of your scheme?”
He snorted. “Why, did you think it might be?”
“Considering all the rest of the finagling you and your daughter have done on this trip, I thought it worth asking,” I said pointedly. “So how exactly did you wind up falling down the rabbit hole?”
He grimaced. “I slipped into the Icarus’s transmission chamber a little while before we left Potosi,” he said. “Right after my encounter with the would-be murderer. I worked through the wiring—”
“Wait a second,” I interrupted, the back of my neck tingling. “What do you mean, would-be murderer?”
“The man who was apparently planning to poison one of your crewers,” he said. “Cabin Seven, down on the lower deck. Didn’t you know?”
Ixil’s cabin. “We knew something strange had happened there,” I told him grimly. “But we haven’t been able to make sense out of it. How about filling in the blanks?”
He shrugged. “There’s not much I can tell you,” he said. “Elaina told me everyone was leaving to look for a runaway crewer—Shawn, I think she said, the one with the medical condition. I had already decided to temporarily relocate to the small sphere, so I waited until the ship was quiet and headed to the lower deck to pick up some extra food supplies.”
“How did you get out of the ’tweenhull area?” I asked. “Through Cabin Two, Jones’s old cabin?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Elaina told you about that, too, I see. I take it that was you who chased me around the ’tweenhull area?”
“That’s right,” I confirmed.
“I thought so. At any rate, after you nearly caught me, I realized the ’tweenhull area wasn’t a safe hiding place. I also didn’t think it safe to stay permanently in Jones’s cabin, which was why I’d decided to move into the small sphere. But when I reached the lower deck, I found that all the overhead lights had been turned off and there was a man with a small finger-light working on the cabin door.”
“Could you see who it was?” I asked, feeling my heartbeat pick up. At last, I was going to have a name to connect with Jones’s murder.
The anticipation was premature. “Sorry,” Cameron said, shaking his head. “The finger-light was set very low, and he was nothing more than a shadowy shape crouching by the doorway. From what little reflected backlight I was getting on his face, though, he didn’t look familiar. Possibly someone from the port area who’d sneaked aboard while everyone was gone.”
I clenched my teeth in frustration. “Unfortunately, the hatch was locked when they all left the ship,” I said. “Which means one of the crew had to have come back to let him in.”
“Ah.” He peered closely at me. “Jones’s murderer, you think?”
“I think having both a murderer and the accomplice of an entirely different murderer aboard a ship the size of the Icarus would be pushing coincidence a bit far,” I said sourly. “All right, fine, so our murderer has friends. Who doesn’t? What happened next?”
“He obviously thought the ship was deserted, because he was so engrossed in his work that I was nearly to him before he even realized I was there,” Cameron said. “He’d gotten a big wrench wedged into the doorway to hold it open. Oh, I didn’t mention that part. The door was only opening partway—”
“Yes, I know,” I interrupted him. “I was the one who gimmicked it that way.”
“Ah.” He gave me an odd look, then shrugged. “At any rate, he turned just as I got within about two steps of him. I frankly didn’t think I would make it the rest of the way, but he froze just long enough before straightening up and grabbing for the wrench. Fortunately for me, it was jammed in fairly tightly and he didn’t have good leverage reaching over his shoulder that way, which meant I was able to step in close and get in the first punch. Edge-hand blow to the side of his neck.”
I glanced down at his arms. Still well muscled, but to my perhaps hypercritical eye they looked thinner than they had when I’d seen him on Meima. “I gather it worked,” I said.
“Rather to my amazement, it did,” he said. “Especially since his light was dazzling my eyes at the time, which limited my ability to pick my target. I made sure to hit him again a couple of times on his way down, just to make sure. Again fortunately for me, he hit the deck and stayed there.”
“It’s so gratifying when they do that,” I agreed. “Do you think you’d recognize him if you saw him again?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “I really didn’t get a good look at him. Besides, I imagine it’s a moot point by now. He surely hightailed it off the ship as soon as he woke up. Unless you and the Icarus have suddenly picked up a new passenger, that is.”
“No, no new passengers,” I confirmed.
He spread his hands. “So that’s that,” he said. “You have to admit it’s a big Spiral for a single man to lose himself in.”
“I once thought it was a big Spiral for a single starship to lose itself in,” I countered. “I don’t think so anymore. So then what did you do?”
“After he was unconscious, I spotted the bottles he’d been working with on the floor and looked them over,” he said. “Any doubts I’d had about hitting him vanished at that point; they turned out to be the ingredients for a cyanide-gas bomb.
“I knew I didn’t have much time before he either awoke or all of you came trooping back aboard the ship, and I didn’t have anything I could tie him up with, so I decided all I could do would be to thwart this particular scheme and call it a draw. The cabin door was still wedged open, so I resealed the bottles and put them as far inside as I could reach and then pulled the wrench out and let the door slam shut. Then, just to make sure he didn’t have time to try anything else, I pulled the opening mechanism’s control chip and added it to the pile and smashed what was left.”
“Leaving a very thorny mystery in your wake,” I said. “We were going nuts trying to figure out what happened there.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “All I can say is that it wasn’t my intent to be so mysterious. My plan was to hide out just for a day or two, until you’d had a chance to thoroughly search the ’tweenhull area and confirm there wasn’t anyone in residence there. At that point I expected you to conclude that it had been one of the crew you’d chased around, give up your search for stowaways, and I could come back out. Then I’d be able to tell Elaina the whole story, and she would have found a way to warn you about future incursions into the ship from outside.”
He shook his head, his throat tightening visibly. “Only it didn’t quite work out that way. I made it through that tangled mess of a decompressed-wiring zone and found myself in a nice clear space. But then gravity came on, pulling me in toward the middle. I grabbed that striped arm to try to slow myself down, hit what I now realize was the triggering mechanism in the end, and here I am.”
“A long way from nowhere,” I said heavily, studying his slightly sunken cheeks. “Not to mention out of delivery range of the nearest grocery store. I’m a little surprised you haven’t starved to death.”
“My meals have been a bit sparse lately,” he conceded. “I wasn’t planning on being here very long, though of course I made sure to leave myself a wide margin for error. Not quite this wide, though. That’s not a water bottle you have there with your pack, is it?”
I’d completely forgotten about the water bottle and food bars I was carrying. “Sure is,” I said, feeling a twinge of admittedly selfish reluctance as I handed it over to him. This wasn’t going to last even one person very long, let alone two of us. “Your daughter must be psychic,” I added as he uncapped the bottle and drank deeply. “I was only planning a quick look into the small sphere, but sh
e still made me take a survival pack along.”
There was a moment of silence as he drank. I looked around the sphere again, this time spotting his camper’s mattress and catalytic waste handler half-hidden in the glare of one of the display boards.
“Bless her heart,” he said when he finally came up for air. I noticed with another twinge that the bottle was now only two-thirds full. “Fortunately for us, we’re not going to need it.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re going home,” he said. He raised the bottle and had another drink, a shorter one this time. “Just as soon as we can gather my things together.”
“Really,” I said, my tone studiously neutral. I’d never heard of anyone going insane between eye blinks, which implied that he must have gone round the bend before I even got here. “Tell me how.”
“No, my mind hasn’t snapped, McKell,” he assured me as he lifted an arm and pointed off to my right. “Look over there.”
I followed the direction of his finger and found myself looking at one of the alien displays, this one marked with yellow-and-black squares. “All right. What is it?”
“It’s the destination setting,” he said. “Destination being defined as the particular stargate you’ll be traveling to if you slide down the centering arm and hit the trigger. Now; do you see the display to its left?”
“Such as it is,” I said. The second display was an identical array of squares, except that all of them were black.
“That one gives the identification code for the stargate you just left,” he said. “Unfortunately, whether by design or malfunction, it only stays lit for a few minutes after transport before going blank again. That’s why I couldn’t get back by myself; by the time I realized the significance of that particular display, it had long since gone black. However—”
“Wait a minute,” I said, frowning. “How do you know all this? Tera told me the Meima archaeologists didn’t get very far in their analysis of the thing.”
He shrugged. “Well, I have been here eleven days, you know,” he reminded me. “I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing. And though you probably didn’t know it, I was once a Trem’sky Scholar in Alien Studies. I did quite a fair bit of archaeology and alien translation back in my youth.”
It was a speech clearly and carefully designed to impress and lull the gullible. But I wasn’t in the mood to be impressed, and lulling was completely out of the question. “That’s baloney, and you know it,” I said bluntly. “You had one course in archaeology and three in alien language, all of which focused on known species and didn’t have a thing to do with interpreting unknown scripts. And that Trem’sky Scholarship was an honorary title Kaplanin University gave you after you donated fifty million commarks to them for a new archaeological research center.”
His face had gone rigid. “You’re very well informed,” he said softly. “One might wonder how. And why.”
“The how is that I have friends with good memories,” I said. “The why is just as simple: I like to know who it is I’m working for. I certainly won’t find that out by taking what you say at face value.”
He eyed me speculatively. “You can see for yourself why I’ve been secretive about myself and my agenda,” he said, waving a hand around him. “What’s your excuse?”
“I like my life,” I told him. “Not my current circumstances, necessarily, but the basic idea of continued existence.”
“And what are your current circumstances?”
“Somewhat messy,” I said. “But we’re getting away from the point. How do you know so much about the stargate?”
We locked gazes for another few seconds. Then his eyes drifted away from mine, as if he was too tired to keep up his end of the nonverbal battle. “Elaina doesn’t know this,” he said, “but the archaeologists had already cracked much of the alien script before my people and I arrived on Meima to build the Icarus. With that hurdle crossed, we were able to gain considerable knowledge of the inner workings of the artifact.”
His lips puckered. “Though we still thought that what we had was a new stardrive, with the destination and incoming displays having to do with navigation.”
“So where is all this knowledge?” I asked. “I presume you’re not going to try to tell me you memorized it.”
His expression had gone all speculative again. “Why do you need to know?”
“In case something happens to you,” I explained patiently. “I don’t know whether you know it, but you’re the very last of the Mohicans now—the rest of your group has been rounded up and are in Ihmisit hands. Possibly Patth hands by now, actually; I haven’t kept up-to-date on developments. If they get you, too, that’ll be it as far as the good guys are concerned.”
“And if you know where the data is, you might be tempted to trade it for that life you want so much to keep,” he pointed out. “I think it might be safer if I kept that little secret to myself for the time being.”
I snorted. “Standing tall and stalwart against the invading hordes might be good melodrama, but it makes lousy real-world policy,” I told him flatly. “Face it, Cameron, you’re in a dangerous and completely untenable position here, and you’re going to have to bite the bullet and trust someone. At the moment, that’s me.”
Again his eyes drifted away. “I suppose you’re right,” he said with a sigh. “All right. The data is stored in code in a file on my notepad here. If something happens to me, either Elaina or my executive assistant Stann Avery will be able to locate and decode it.”
“Got it,” I said. It wasn’t the entire truth, I knew—he’d given in much too easily for that. But it was probably at least a partial truth, and for the moment I could live with that. “All right, then. I’ll send you in some more food and water when I get back to the Icarus. Is your little toilet system working okay?”
“Wait a minute,” he said, his face suddenly gone taut. “What do you mean, when you get back? We can both go—no one has to stay here to operate the device.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, but I’m afraid you can’t show your face yet. I didn’t tell you: We’ve disassembled most of the ship’s interior. Makes it a lot safer for the return trip, but it also means there’s no place left where you could have been hiding. You suddenly pop up now and someone’s going to start putting the pieces together.”
“What about the smaller sphere?” he asked, his voice taking on an edge of panicked insistence. “I could have been hiding in the smaller sphere.”
“Besides which, you’re the one who holds the key to this bombshell,” I continued, gesturing at his notepad. “Don’t forget, we’ve got a murderer aboard the Icarus. The farther you and your notepad stay away from him, the better.”
He wasn’t happy about it—that much was evident from the play of emotions across his face. But he could see the logic in what I was saying, and a few extra days of isolation didn’t stack up all that badly against the possibility of being knifed in the back. Slowly, reluctantly, he gathered control of himself and nodded. “You’re right,” he said with a sigh. “All right, I’ll stay. Any idea how long I’ll have to be here?”
“Until we find a safe place to put down,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll let you know.”
“You’d better,” he warned with a game attempt at a smile. “The view in here doesn’t really have all that much to recommend it.”
“You can start naming the constellations,” I suggested, getting to my feet. “So. How do I work this thing?”
He gestured to the articulated arm angling its way toward the center of the sphere twenty meters above us. “Once I’ve set the destination panel, I expect all you’ll need to do is work your way along the arm to the trigger section at the end,” he said. “Basically the same as you did on the Icarus.”
Except that on the Icarus the gravitational field had been pointing the other way. It looked like I was in for a long climb. “Right,” I said. “Don’t worry if it takes me a couple of hours to get the
supplies to you. There isn’t a lot of privacy in the ship right now, and I don’t want anyone to catch me putting a survival pack together. Someone might jump to the wrong conclusion.”
“Or even the right one?” he suggested.
I nodded. “Especially the right one.”
A ghost of something flicked across his face. “You’ll let my daughter know I’m all right, won’t you? We’ve hardly spoken since the trip began—there just haven’t been any safe opportunities—but I know she’s worried about me.”
“And vice versa?” I suggested.
His lips compressed. “Very much vice versa,” he agreed quietly. “I’d appreciate it if you’d watch over her for me.”
“I will,” I promised. “You can count on it.”
For a moment he studied my face, as if trying one last time to see if I was indeed someone in whom he could place this kind of trust. I met his eyes stolidly, not flinching away from the probe, exuding all the sincerity I could muster. And after a couple of heartbeats he nodded. “All right,” he said with a sigh. “You’d best be on your way, then.”
I nodded and gave a whistle. Pax emerged from a mass of wiring he’d been nosing through and bounded enthusiastically over to me. I managed to catch him before he could start with equal enthusiasm up my leg and settled him into a cradling carry in the crook of my elbow. “I’ll let you know when you can come out,” I told him, crossing the sphere to where the arm was anchored. “I’ll either come myself or send in one of the ferrets.”
“Understood,” he said. “Good luck.”
“You, too,” I said. Reaching up with my free hand, I wrapped my legs around it and started awkwardly to climb.
The awkwardness didn’t last long. I’d barely started my climb when I felt myself rapidly going weightless. For about five seconds I hung there in zero gee, and then the gravity began again, only this time pointed the opposite direction, toward the center of the sphere. I quickly turned myself around, noticing that Cameron was still glued, albeit openmouthed, to the inner surface. I don’t know why finding a two-tier artificial gravity in our unknown aliens’ bag of tricks should have surprised me, but it did. The level of the pull stayed about where it had been aboard the Icarus, keeping me moving inward without giving me the feeling of uncontrolled falling. I looked over—up, rather—at Cameron once as Pax and I slid down toward the center, wondering if he’d noticed that I’d somehow never gotten around to agreeing to his request that I tell Tera he was here.