The Icarus Hunt

by Timothy Zahn

  All eyes, which had been locked on me, now turned as if pulled by a set of invisible puppet strings to Tera. “That she didn’t want revealed?” Nicabar asked.

  “Specifically, a secondary hatchway on the top of the engine section,” I said. “A hatch her father had used to sneak into the ship that morning on Meima.”

  “Wait a minute,” Shawn said, sounding bewildered. “Tera is … she’s Borodin’s daughter?”

  “Exactly,” I said, nodding approvingly and trying to ignore the aghast look on Tera’s face. “Except that the man who called himself Alexander Borodin was in fact a rather better-known industrialist by the name of Arno Cameron.”

  There was the sound of jaws dropping all around the table. “Arno Cameron?” Everett all but gasped. “Oh, my God.”

  “I wondered about that,” Nicabar murmured. “Someone had to have had tremendous resources to put a ship like the Icarus together in the first place.”

  “And if there’s one thing Cameron’s got, it’s tremendous resources,” I agreed. “It also turns out that Cameron was the one who sabotaged the cutting torch, though Ixil getting burned was an accident. He’d eavesdropped on Ixil and me as we discussed cutting a hole into the cargo area, and for obvious reasons didn’t want us to do that. Gimmicking the torch was the only way he could come up with to stop us in the limited time he had to work with.”

  “Borodin—I mean, Cameron—was aboard the Icarus with us?” Shawn asked. “Where was he hiding?”

  “He must have been in the gap between the inner and outer hulls,” Nicabar said. “It was the perfect hiding place. None of us even knew there was that much space in there until we started taking the ship apart.”

  “That’s exactly it,” I confirmed. “He surfaced once or twice to touch base with Tera, or to check our course heading on the computer-room repeater displays. But mostly he just lay low.”

  “So where is he now?” Everett asked. “I trust you’re not going to try to tell us he’s still hidden aboard somewhere?”

  “I’d be very surprised to find that he was,” I said. “Getting back to the main point, it turns out Cameron was the one responsible for those lethal chemicals being in Ixil’s cabin in the first place.”

  “You’re wrong,” Tera snapped, her eyes blazing. “I already told you Dad didn’t want to hurt him or anyone else.”

  “I didn’t say he did,” I said mildly. “Actually, his part in all that was to save Ixil’s life. But I’ll come back to that.

  “So as I said, some of these incidents can be explained away,” I continued, letting my gaze sweep around the table. “But not all of them, unfortunately. Which brings us to the murder—the deliberate murder—of our first mechanic, Jaeger Jones.”

  “Murder?” Chort said, his voice almost too whistly in his agitation for me to understand. “I thought it was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t,” I told him. “But the murderer hoped most of us would think it was. All of us, in fact, except one person.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Everett snorted. “Why would the Patth want to kill Jones?”

  “I never said the Patth had anything to do with it,” I said. “But since you bring it up, that very question is what had me stymied for so long. You remember Shawn’s disease-crazed escape on Potosi, and the Najiki Customs officials who nearly impounded the ship? That was our murderer’s handiwork, too.”

  “What do you mean, his handiwork?” Tera asked. “I thought Shawn broke free on his own.”

  “No, he had help, though he probably doesn’t remember it,” I said. “The murderer needed Shawn to run away so that everyone would scatter to search for him and he’d be free to make a couple of private vid calls. The stumbling point here is that our killer seemed hell-bent on stopping the Icarus, no matter what he had to do. Yet at every place where he might have turned us over to the Patth, he didn’t do it.”

  “Sounds like you’re describing a schizophrenic,” Everett murmured.

  “Or a plain, flat-out psycho,” Shawn added, glancing furtively around the table. “Someone who kills just for the fun of it.”

  “Actually, there’s nothing unbalanced about him at all,” I assured them. “But all right; let’s assume for a minute that he is a nutcase. Let me then throw out another question, one that helped me start thinking in the right direction. Here we have Arno Cameron, creator of an enormous financial and industrial empire, wandering through the hot spots of Meima looking for a crew to get this vitally important piece of hardware back to Earth. Question: Given that Cameron’s success must have been at least partially based on being an excellent judge of character, how in the world did he not catch on to the fact that one of the people he was hiring was a schizophrenic, psychotic potential murderer?”

  For a minute all I saw in their faces was confusion, either at the question itself or because they were puzzling over the answer to it. All their faces, that is, except Tera’s. In that instant I saw in her suddenly wide eyes that the pieces were finally starting to fall into place. “The answer, of course,” I continued, not waiting for the class to respond, “is that he didn’t sense any such problem because one of you is not the man he hired for your particular slot on the ship.”

  Chort found his voice first. “That is incredible,” he said, the whistling under only slightly better control. “How would anyone have known the Icarus was valuable enough to do such a thing?”

  “And once he knew it, why didn’t he just go to the Patth and turn us in?” Shawn added. “This makes less sense than the psycho nutcase theory.”

  “Not really,” I said. “The answers, in order, are that he had no idea at all that there was anything special about the Icarus. And he didn’t turn the ship in to the Patth because his purpose in coming aboard was something else entirely.”

  I nodded to Everett. “Everett was the one who finally pushed me onto the right track,” I said. “It was back when you all learned what the Icarus was carrying, and he pointed out that Borodin and the Patth weren’t the only possible players in this game. I suddenly realized that he was right; and furthermore realized who the other player was.”

  “Who?” Tera demanded.

  I lifted a hand. “Me.”

  There was a short silence. “I don’t get it,” Shawn said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about me, and about the people I work for,” I told him. “And about the fact that the murderer came aboard the Icarus for the sole purpose of delivering me a message. A lesson in obedience.”

  My gun had been waving almost idly around the table, the hand gripping it making small gestures as I spoke. Now, in a single smooth motion, I brought it to point rock-steady at the center of the large torso looming up over the far end of the table from me. “You can tell him, Everett,” I said quietly, “that I got the message.”

  Another silence descended on the room, this one as thick and dark as tar paste. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Everett said at last, his voice husky and as dark as the silence had been.

  “I’m talking about a crime boss named Johnston Scotto Ryland,” I said. “A man who thought I needed to be taught a lesson about strict obedience to one’s orders and one’s master.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Shawn said, sounding bewildered. “You’ve lost me completely. How did a crime boss get into this?”

  “Because he’s a crime boss who’s holding a half million of McKell’s debt,” Nicabar said, his eyes studying me with an intensity I didn’t much care for. “McKell’s been smuggling for him for the past few years.”

  “You’re a smuggler?” Shawn demanded, staring accusingly at me. “So that’s how you got the borandis so easily. I should have guessed that a big simon-pure hotshot like you—”

  “Put a baffle on it, Shawn,” Nicabar cut him off. “So what did you do to earn this lesson, McKell?”

  “Ixil and I had a cargo of his bound for Xathru,” I said. “We were running a little ahead of sche
dule, so I diverted us briefly to Meima.”

  “Why?” Tera asked.

  “I’ll get to that later,” I said. “Ryland has informers everywhere, even on a backwater world like Meima. I think Ryland was already having suspicions about my loyalty, so when one of his snitches reported I’d landed there instead of Xathru he apparently concluded I was getting ready to jump ship or double-cross him or some such thing. Regardless, he decided I needed a lesson on why that was a bad idea. Were you that informer, Everett, or just the local muscle for the territory?”

  Everett didn’t answer. “Well, the personnel list’s not important,” I said. “Either way, Ryland ordered Everett to tail me and find out what I was up to. He followed me as I wandered around Meima; and was probably right there in that taverno when Cameron came over and offered me the pilot’s post aboard the Icarus.”

  “How did he know you’d been hired?” Tera asked. “Unless he was close enough to overhear, couldn’t you two just have been having a chat?”

  “I’m sure he wasn’t that close,” I said. “I was keeping a close watch, and I would have remembered anyone sitting that close. But he didn’t have to hear anything. All he needed was to see Cameron give me a guidance tag to know I was taking a job with him.

  “So when Cameron left, Everett decided to tail him instead of staying on me, probably hoping to find out who exactly I was dealing with. I had planned to follow Cameron myself, but I got diverted by a trio of unhappy Yavanni and lost him. He followed Cameron, watched him hire a couple more crewers; and then apparently decided to take a closer look at one of you. So he let Cameron leave, followed his latest acquisition into a nice dark alley, and clobbered him.”

  “And this person was who?” Tera asked.

  “Whoever Cameron had hired to be ship’s medic, of course,” I said. “Because when Everett called to report what he’d found—which wasn’t much—Ryland told him to take this person’s place and follow me aboard the Icarus. Fortunately for us, Everett was actually qualified to handle the job. Or maybe it wasn’t just luck; maybe he’d picked on the medic on purpose.”

  Chort whistled suddenly, a sound that hurt my ears. “I remember,” he said. “He was the last to arrive. He said he had been delayed at the gate.”

  “Actually, he’d probably been skulking around the side of one of the other ships watching the rest of us gathering,” I said. “He probably had a whole story worked out to spin for Cameron about how he’d bought the job from a buddy who’d suddenly taken ill or something.”

  Nicabar snorted gently. “Pretty pathetic story.”

  “It may have been something better.” I cocked an eyebrow at Everett. “Feel free to jump in if you feel your creativity or cleverness is being maligned.”

  “No, no, keep going,” he said evenly. “It’s all nonsense, of course, but it does make for fascinating listening.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught the slight wrinkling of Nicabar’s forehead. Everett didn’t seem particularly worried; and if there was anyone who had a right to be worried at the moment, it was Everett.

  “Whatever his story was, it turned out to be unnecessary,” I continued, trying to distract Nicabar’s attention away from questions about Everett’s unconcerned attitude. The last thing I wanted right now was to have a former EarthGuard Marine to go all suspicious of this setup. “Cameron didn’t show up, so Everett simply pretended he was the one who’d been hired in the first place.”

  “You know, McKell, Everett’s right,” Shawn growled. “This is all Grade-A speculation. You said yourself Cameron got away from you on Meima. How could you possibly know what happened?”

  “It’s not speculation at all,” I said. “You see, I had a brief talk with Cameron after the incident with Ixil’s cabin. He told me he’d tackled someone busily preparing a poison-gas mixture out in the Icarus’s lower corridor; but he further told me that it wasn’t anyone from the crew. His assumption was that it was someone who’d come in from outside the ship; but if one of the crew had let a stranger in, why wasn’t he there with him to help carry out this second murder? No, it’s much simpler to assume that one of his original crewers was replaced right from the start.”

  “You said Everett came aboard to deliver a message,” Tera said. “What did you mean by that?”

  “In Ryland’s eyes, I was flirting with treason,” I said, feeling my fingers tightening on my plasmic as I stared blackly across the length of the table at Everett. “But apparently he thought I could still be redeemed, or at least could be scared back into the fold. And so in his typically crude and heavy-handed way, he ordered Everett to kill my partner.”

  “Your partner?” Tera gasped. “Jones was your partner?”

  “No, of course not,” I bit out, a flood of emotion suddenly washing over me. An innocent man had died, all because of me. “Jones was exactly as advertised: a mechanic Cameron hired off the street for the Icarus. And that’s where Everett made the mistake that so muddied the water that it took me until now to figure it out. He was so convinced that my partner and I were both jumping ship and abandoning Ryland’s contraband on Meima that he just assumed that the Icarus’s mechanic was my partner. Add to that Jones’s natural friendliness and social ease, and it probably looked to him like we’d known each other for years.

  “And so, knowing that it was traditionally the mechanic’s job to assist with any spacewalks, he sabotaged the rebreather on the suit that was Jones’s size and sat back to wait for the inevitable.”

  I gestured toward Everett with my plasmic. “But then you made a slip, a small one, which I didn’t catch until a comment Revs made on Palmary jogged it back to mind. We’d gone to Xathru to turn Jones’s body over to the port authorities and incidentally to pick up Ixil. While we were all out of the ship you called Ryland to report that the foul deed was done, but also told him I’d said something about bringing yet another partner aboard to fill Jones’s slot. Ryland confirmed that you’d missed your intended target, but since his cargo had indeed been delivered on schedule it was all cool now and to just stay aboard and keep an eye on me.”

  “So where was the slip?” Shawn asked. “I don’t see any slip.”

  “The slip came later,” I said, watching Everett’s face. “When you came into the ship while I was talking to Ixil in the wraparound. You took one look at him and said, ‘So this is your partner.’ There’s no reason for you to have put it that way unless you’d already believed someone else was my partner.”

  Everett’s expression didn’t change, but there was just the slightest twitch of his lip. Enough to show that, despite his protests, I’d hit the mark.

  Nicabar cleared his throat. “Question. If everything was so cool, why did he try to kill Ixil on Potosi?”

  “Because between Xathru and Potosi the situation suddenly stopped being cool,” I told him. “The first thing I did when we reached Potosi was to call Ryland to get the location of a dealer I could buy borandis from. By that time the swirl of Patth activity around the Icarus was starting to heat up, and Ryland was none too happy that one of his people—me—was at the center of all the attention.”

  “Why didn’t he just tell you to jump ship?” Shawn asked.

  “Because he knew I wouldn’t do it,” I said. “I’d already told him that part of my cover as a poor but honest ship’s pilot was to stick with the Icarus, and he knew better than to argue the point with me over a StarrComm link. Besides, he already had a plan that would preempt the whole decision.

  “You’d all been told to stay aboard ship while I went to get the borandis. But Everett had orders to check in with Ryland, so he loosened Shawn’s restraints enough that he’d be able to work his way free and escape. Then, while the rest of you were out searching, Everett headed to the StarrComm building. Maybe you even called while I was still talking to him; he was off the line a long time looking up the location of a drug dealer to steer me to.

  “Anyway, Ryland told him to do two things. First, to phone in an anon
ymous tip to Najiki Customs that we had smuggled gemstones aboard; and second, to kill Ixil, who Everett told him was still sleeping off his burns. When customs found a dead body aboard and locked the Icarus down for investigation, Ryland reasoned, I would be out by default.

  “Unfortunately for all his cleverness, everything went wrong from that point on. Cameron caught Everett preparing to kill Ixil, clobbered him, and put the chemical vials inside Ixil’s room where Everett couldn’t easily get at them again.”

  I looked at Tera. “Do you remember, Tera, when you cut into my phone conversation with Everett to tell us you’d found Shawn? Do you remember how he sounded?”

  “He did seem a little odd,” she said, her forehead wrinkled with thought. “A little blurry, as I recall.”

  “He was a lot blurry, actually,” I said. “At the time, I assumed it was because Shawn had hit him during his escape. Now, I know it was because he hadn’t yet recovered from your father’s one-two punch.”

  “Dad keeps in pretty good shape,” Tera said. “I’ll bet he still can pack a wallop.”

  “Especially when properly inspired,” I agreed. “I’ll have to look up your throw-boxing record, Everett, and see if you had a history of easy knockouts or whether Cameron was just lucky. At any rate, when Everett came to, he knew he wouldn’t have time to come up with a Plan B before the Najik arrived, so he hightailed it off the ship, remembering to lock the hatchway behind him the way it had been when you’d all scattered to look for Shawn.

  “Sure enough, the Najik arrived in force and prepared to open the ship the hard way. And there Everett’s second stroke of bad luck came in: Chort returned to the ship about the same time and decided they shouldn’t go in without the captain being there. So he blocked their path; and no one in the Spiral goes out of their way to irritate Crooea. The Najik were probably in the process of discussing protocol with their HQ when the third and final bit of bad luck arrived.”