The Icarus Hunt (17 page)

“I don’t know,” he said slowly, the look still there. “Something’s not quite right. I can’t put my finger on it.”

I was on my knees now, plasmic in hand, my full attention on the deck where the ferrets had emerged from beneath the bunk. Carefully, one hand on the edge of the bunk to steady myself, I leaned over and looked underneath.

Nothing. No one scrunched up in hiding, no mysterious packages ready to go boom in the quiet watches of the night, no indication of hidden bugs or bottles of poisonous spiders, no evidence of tampering at all. Just a plain metal deck with a plain metal hull beyond it.

I got back to my feet. “Nothing there,” I reported, brushing off my knees with my free hand.

“Of course not,” Ixil said, his face wrinkling in a different way. “We would certainly have seen and recognized anything obvious.”

I knew that, of course. On the other hand, it wasn’t his bunk in his cabin. “So how unobvious is it?” I asked.

“Very,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s rather like one of those ideas or memories that floats around the edge of your mind, but which you can’t quite tease out into the open.”

“Keep trying,” I told him.

“I will,” he promised, throwing one last frown at the bunk and turning toward the door. He was reaching for the release pad when, beside the middle bunk, the intercom crackled. “Captain McKell, this is Chort,” the Craea’s familiar voice whistled through the speaker, the rhythmic thuds and hums of the engine room in the background. “Is Mechanic Ixil there with you?”

I stepped around the bunks to the intercom and tapped the key. “Yes, he is,” I told him. “Trouble?”

“Nothing serious, I don’t think,” Chort assured me. “But I am in need of his assistance. The readings indicate an intermittent fault in the Darryen modulator relay, with possible location in the power-feed couplings.”

“Probably the connectors,” Ixil rumbled from behind me. “Those go out all the time.”

“So I understand,” Chort agreed. “I thought perhaps you and your outriders could either confirm or deny that possibility before I wake Drive Specialist Nicabar and ask him to open the conduit.”

“No problem,” Ixil said, tapping the door-release pad. “I’ll be right there.”

He stepped into the corridor and headed for the aft
ladder. “Thank you,” Chort said as the door closed again. The intercom clicked off, and I was alone.

For a few minutes I stood there, listening to the various hums and clanks and throbbings, staring at my bunk and the wall behind it. I’ve never had any particular problems with the loneliness or unpleasant self-evaluation that for some people make solitude something to be avoided. For that matter, given that much of my human interaction lately had been with people like Brother John, solitude was in fact something to be actively sought out. I was tired, I’d been running low on sleep since even before that taverno run-in with Cameron, and under normal circumstances I would have been on my bunk and asleep in three minutes flat.

But if there was one thing certain about the
Icarus
, it was that nothing here ever approached what one might consider normal circumstances. And at this point, the latest express delivery of abnormal circumstances seemed to be whatever the nameless oddity was that existed around, under, or inside my bunk.

Plasmic still in hand, I eased carefully onto my stomach on the deck again and just as carefully wiggled my way under the bunk. It was a tight squeeze—a three-tier bunk hasn’t got a lot of space underneath it—but I was able to get my head and most of my upper body under without triggering any bouts of latent claustrophobia. I wished I’d thought to snag the flashlight from my jacket, but enough of the cabin’s overhead light was diffusing in to give me a fairly reasonable view.

The problem was, as I’d already noted, there was nothing there to see. I was surrounded by a bare metal deck, a bare metal wall, and a wire-mesh-and-mattress bunk of the type that had been around for centuries for the simple reason that no one yet had come up with a better compromise between marginal comfort and minimal manufacturing cost.

I wiggled my way back out, got to my feet, and spent a few more minutes going over the entire room
millimeter by millimeter. Like the area under the bunk, there wasn’t anything to see.

Nothing obvious, at least. But I knew Ixil, and if he said his outriders had found something odd, then they’d found something odd; and suddenly I decided I didn’t much care for the silence and solitude of my cabin. Replacing my plasmic in its holster, I pulled my jacket on over it and left.

I didn’t expect there to be much happening aboard the
Icarus
at that hour, and as I climbed the aft ladder to the mid deck I discovered I was right. Tera was on bridge-monitor duty—with, typically for her, the door closed—Chort and Ixil were back in the engine room, and Everett, Nicabar, and Shawn were presumably in their cabins on the upper deck. I thought I might find someone in the dayroom, either eating or watching a vid, but the place was as deserted as the corridor outside it. Either everyone had felt more in need of sleep than food, or else the camaraderie temperature reading aboard the
Icarus
was still hovering down around the liquid-nitrogen mark. Somewhere in the same vicinity, I decided sourly, as my progress at figuring out what was going on.

Just aft of the dayroom was the sick bay. On impulse, wondering perhaps if Everett might still be up, I touched the release pad and opened the door.

There was indeed someone there, dimly visible in the low night-light setting. But it wasn’t Everett. “Hello?” Shawn called, lifting his head from the examination table to peer across the room at me. “Who is it?”

“McKell,” I told him, turning up the light a bit and letting the door slide shut behind me. “Sorry to disturb you—I was looking for Everett.”

“He’s on the bridge,” Shawn said, nodding toward the intercom beside the table. “Said it was his turn to earn his keep around here and told Tera to go to bed. You can call him if you want.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said, suppressing a flicker of
annoyance. Strictly speaking, Tera should have cleared any such shift changes with me, but she and Everett had probably thought I was trying to catch up on my own sleep and hadn’t wanted to disturb me. And the ship’s medic
was
supposed to be available for swing shifts if any of the regular crewers were unable to cover theirs. “How come you’re still here?” I asked, crossing the room toward him.

He smiled wanly. “Everett thought it would be best if I stayed put for a while.”

“Ah,” I said intelligently, belatedly spotting the answer to my question. With the dim light and the way the folds in his clothing lay, I hadn’t seen until now the straps pinning his arms and legs gently but firmly to the table. “Well …”

My discomfort must have been obvious. “Don’t worry,” he hastened to assure me. “Actually, the straps were my suggestion. It’s safer for everyone this way. In case the stuff he gave me wears off too quickly. I guess you didn’t know.”

“No, I didn’t,” I admitted, feeling annoyed with myself. With the unexpected entry of the Patth into this game dominating my thoughts, I’d totally forgotten about Shawn’s performance at the airlock. “I guess I just assumed Everett had given you a sedative and sent you off to bed in your own cabin.”

“Yes, well, sedatives don’t work all that well with my condition,” Shawn said. “Unfortunately.”

“You
did
say he’d given you something, though, right?” I asked, swinging out one of the swivel stools and sitting down beside him. Now, close up, I could see that beneath the restraints his arms and legs were trembling.

“Something more potent at quieting nerves,” he told me. “I’m not sure exactly what it was.”

“And why do your nerves need quieting?” I asked.

A quick series of emotions chased themselves across his face. I held his gaze, letting him come to the decision
at his own speed. Eventually, he did. “Because of a small problem I’ve got,” he said with an almost-sigh. “Sort of qualifies as a drug dependency.”

“Which one?” I asked, mentally running through the various drug symptoms I knew and trying without success to match them to Shawn’s behavior patterns. Ixil had suggested earlier that the kid’s emotional swings might be drug-related, but as far as I knew he hadn’t been able to nail down a specific type, either.

And Shawn’s answer did indeed come as a complete surprise. “Borandis,” he said. “Also sometimes called jackalspit. I doubt you’ve ever heard of it.”

“Actually, I think I have,” I said carefully, the hairs rising unpleasantly on the back of my neck even as I tried to put some innocent uncertainty into my voice. I knew about borandis, all right. Knew it and its various charming cousins all too well. “It’s one of those semilegit drugs, as I recall. Seriously controlled but not flat-out prohibited.”

“Oh, it’s flat-out prohibited most places,” he said, frowning slightly as he studied me. Maybe my uncertainty act hadn’t been enough; maybe he didn’t think a simple cargo hauler should even be aware of such sinful things, let alone know any of the details. “But in most human areas it’s available by prescription. If you have one of the relevant diseases, that is.”

“And?” I invited.

His lips tightened briefly. “I’ve got the disease. Just not the prescription.”

“And why don’t you have the prescription?”

He smiled tightly. “Because I had the misfortune to pick up the disease in a slightly illegal way. I—well, some friends and I went on a little private trip to Ephis a few years ago.”

“Really,” I said. That word wasn’t the first thing that popped into my mind; the phrase
criminal stupidity
held that honor. “
That
one I’ve definitely heard of. Interdicted world, right?”

His smile went from tight to bitter. “That’s the place,” he said. “And I can tell you right now that not a single thing you’ve heard about that hellhole is hyperbole.” His mouth twitched. “But of course, sophisticated college kids like us were too smart to be taken in by infantile governmental scare tactics. And we naturally didn’t believe bureaucrats had any right to tell us where we could or couldn’t go—”

He broke off, a violent shiver running through him once before his body settled back down to its low-level trembling. “It’s called Cole’s disease,” he said, his voice sounding suddenly very tired. “It’s not much fun.”

“I don’t know many diseases that are,” I said. “Are the rules for interdicted planets really that strict? That you can’t even get a prescription for your medicine, I mean?”

He snorted softly, and for a moment a flicker of the old Shawn pierced the fatigue and trembling, the arrogant kid who knew it all and looked down with contempt on mere mortals like me who weren’t smart or educated or enlightened enough. “Strict enough that even admitting I’d been to Ephis would earn me an automatic ten-year prison sentence,” he bit out. “I don’t think a guaranteed supply of borandis is quite worth that, do you?”

“I guess not,” I said, making sure to sound properly chastened. People like Shawn, I knew, could often be persuaded to offer up deep, dark secrets for no better reason than to prove they had them. “So how do you get by?”

He shrugged, a somewhat abbreviated gesture given the strictures of the restraints. “There are always dealers around—you just have to know how to find them. Most of the time it’s not too hard. Or too expensive.”

“And what happens if you don’t get it?” I asked. Drugs I knew, interdicted worlds I knew; but exotic diseases weren’t part of my standard repertoire.

“It’s a degenerative neurological disease,” he said,
his lip twitching slightly. “You can see the muscular trembling has already started.”

“That’s not just the borandis withdrawal?”

“The withdrawal is part of it,” he said. “It’s hard to tell—the symptoms kind of mix together. That’s followed by irritability, severe mood swings, short-term memory failure, and a generally high annoyance factor.” Again, that bitter smile. “You may have noticed that last one when I first got to the ship on Meima. I’d just taken a dose, but I’d pushed the timing a little and it hadn’t kicked in yet.”

I nodded, remembering how much calmer, even friendly, he’d been a few hours later during Chort’s ill-fated spacewalk. “Remind me never to go into a spaceport taverno with you before your pill,” I said. “You’d get both our necks broken within the first three minutes.”

He shivered. “Sometimes I think that would be a better way to go,” he said quietly. “Anyway, if I still don’t get a dose, I get louder and more irrational and sometimes even violent.”

“Is that still a mixture of withdrawal and disease?”

“That one’s mostly withdrawal,” he said. “After that, the disease takes over and we start edging into neural damage. First the reversible kind, later the nonreversible. Eventually, I die. From all reports, not especially pleasantly.”

Offhand, I couldn’t think of many pleasant ways to die, except possibly in your sleep of old age, which given my early choices in life wasn’t an option I was likely to face. If Shawn persisted in pulling stunts like sneaking onto interdicted worlds, it wasn’t likely to remain one of his options, either.

Still, there was no sense in letting the old man with the scythe get at any of us too easily. “How long before the neural damage starts?” I asked.

He gave another of his abbreviated shrugs. “We’ve
got a little time yet,” he said. “Nine or ten hours at least. Maybe twelve.”

“From right now?”

“Yes.” He smiled. “Of course, you probably won’t want to be anywhere around me well before that. I’m not going to be very good company.” The smile faded. “We
can
get to a supplier before then, can’t we? I thought I heard Tera say it was only about six hours away to wherever the hell we’re headed.”

“Mintarius,” I said, making a show of consulting my watch. In reality, I was thinking hard. I’d originally picked Mintarius precisely because it was close, small, quiet, and unlikely to have the equipment to distinguish our latest ship’s ID from a genuine one. A perfect place to slip in, get the fuel our unexpectedly quick exit from Dorscind’s World had lost us, and slip out again.