The Icarus Hunt (13 page)

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.

And I certainly hadn’t imagined Arno Cameron, amateur archaeologist and head of one of the largest and most influential industrial combines in the Spiral, sitting in a grimy Vyssiluyan taverno and all but begging me to fly the
Icarus
to Earth for him.

No, the facts were there, at least some of them. What they meant, though, I didn’t have the foggiest idea.

But a small group of unclearly related facts can chase each other around a single overtired brain for only so long. Eventually, I fell asleep.

The port facilities on Xathru had been a couple of steps above those on Meima. The single commercial port on Dorscind’s World, in contrast, was at least five steps back down again.

Not that the equipment itself was a problem. On the contrary, the landing cradle was the best the
Icarus
had seen yet, with the kind of peripheral and support equipment that a place like Meima could only dream of. It was, rather, the port’s clientele that put Dorscind’s World well below the standards set by the Spiral’s tour cruise directors. Planned by its developers as a high-class gambling resort, things hadn’t quite worked out that way for the colony. It had been slipping since roughly day two, with the big money and high-spinners fading equally rapidly into the sunset.

The only thing that had kept the place from vanishing from the map altogether was its gradual and reluctant transformation into the sort of place where questionable papers and shady cargoes were generally winked at. With the Patth shipping domination, the
shady-cargo slice of the pie chart had been steadily growing among non-Patth carriers.

And as a result, business at the Dorscind’s World port was booming.

There was of course no record of a freighter named the
Second Banana
having filed a flight plan for Dorscind’s World. But as I’d expected, minor technicalities of that sort didn’t even raise an eyebrow here. The usual docking fee, plus a few more of Cameron’s hundred-commark bills, and we had our landing cradle. I paid off the port official who came to the ramp to collect, made arrangements for refueling, and ordered delivery of replacement foodstuffs and some more of Chort’s magic hull-repair goo.

And after that, it was time for me to venture out into the dubious charm of the port city. Leaving the rest of the
Icarus
’s crew behind.