The Icarus Hunt (20 page)

The question was how.

The wall separating the cabin from the corridor was solid metal, a good five centimeters thick. The bulkheads were even thicker, probably nine or ten centimeters, and on the side away from the corridor was the
Icarus
’s inner hull, with no more than another twenty centimeters between it and the outer hull. Outside the outer hull, of course, was the vacuum of space. There were, I knew, ways to hear through solid metal walls, but all of them involved fairly sophisticated equipment and even then success was not at all guaranteed aboard a starship where the whole frame was continually vibrating with everything from engine drone to voices and footsteps two decks away. The bunks were too simple and flimsy to conceal a hidden transmitter strong enough to punch a radio signal through that much metal; ditto for the lockers. After that tracker incident on Meima, I’d made it a point to regularly signal-scan both myself and Ixil for such unwanted hitchhikers, and had just as regularly found nothing. And finally, there was nothing on any of the walls that could camouflage any such listening device.

Except the intercom.

I unfastened the cover of the intercom with my multitool, swearing silently at myself the whole time. It was the oldest trick in the book: Sometime when I was out, probably during our stop on Dorscind’s World, someone had slipped in here and rearranged a few wires so that the intercom was continually on, at least as far as one other specific intercom was concerned. Someone who’d known what he was doing could have done it in three minutes. Still swearing, still feeling like a fool, I pulled the cover off the intercom and peered inside.

It was an intercom, all right. A simple, standard, bottom-of-the-line ship’s intercom. The kind you could buy for five commarks in any outfitter’s shop anywhere across the Spiral.

And it hadn’t been tampered with.

I stared at it for a good three minutes of my own, prodding wires aside with my screwdriver as I visually traced every one of them from start to finish at least five times. Nothing. No gimmicking, no crossed wires, no questionable components, nothing that shouldn’t be there. Nothing even left the box except two power wires and a slender coax cable—exactly the right number—which disappeared through a tiny hole in the inner hull to join the rest of the maze of wiring and plumbing laid out in the narrow gap between inner and outer hulls.

Slowly, I replaced the intercom cover, now thoroughly confused. Had we been wrong about an eavesdropper? Had the accident with the cutting torch been just that? Or if not an accident, then sabotage simply on general principles by someone who didn’t want the
Icarus
’s cargo examined, and not a reaction to our conversation at all?

I didn’t believe it for a minute. I’d had only a brief look at the torch head that had done its best to take off the top of Ixil’s skull, but that one look had been enough. The screw connector holding the head onto the connected hoses had had its threads badly crimped, probably with compression pliers, so that when the pressure built up enough it had come loose in that explosive fashion. As sabotage methods went it had been effective enough; but it had also been fairly clumsy and, more to the point, extremely quick and simple. Not the sort of job one would expect even an amateur to pull, at least not an amateur with the time to do the job more subtly.

Which implied our saboteur had been rushed in his task. Which meant it had, in fact, been a response to our conversation.

Which meant I was back to square one. How had he overheard us?

I spent the next fifteen minutes going over the lockers and bunks, and found exactly what I’d expected,
namely, nothing. Then, stretching out on my bunk, I stared at the bottom of the bunk above me and tried to think.

When you have eliminated the impossible, Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It wasn’t an aphorism I particularly subscribed to, mainly because in real life eliminating all the various impossibles was usually a lot trickier than in Holmes’s fictional setting. However, in this particular case, the list of directions the answer could be hiding in was definitely and distressingly short. In fact, as I turned the problem over in my mind, I found there was exactly one of Sherlock’s improbables left.

Ixil had mentioned earlier that he’d looked over the full schematics for the
Icarus
. It was a fair assumption that he’d gone ahead and kept a copy, so I went back to his cabin, ungimmicked the door, and went inside. The room looked exactly the way I’d left it except that Pix and Pax were now up on the middle bunk with Ixil, nosing around the hip pouch where he habitually kept some of the little treats they especially liked. I put them back on their bunk where they wouldn’t get rolled over on if Ixil shifted in his sleep, raided the pouch and gave them two of the treats each, then checked his locker. The schematics were there, a sheaf of papers rolled tightly together. I tucked the roll under my arm, regimmicked the door on my way out, and returned to my cabin.

I looked first at the main overview, noting in particular the diameter of the main sphere that made up the forward section of the ship. The number listed was forty-one-point-three-six meters—a strangely uneven number, I thought, but one I trusted implicitly. Ship dimensions were critically important when landing-pit assignments were being doled out, and no one ever got them wrong. Not more than once, anyway.

Two sheets down was the one I was most interested
in: the schematic for the mid deck. Digging a pen out of my inside jacket pocket, I turned the first sheet over for some clean space and started jotting down numbers.

Even given the inherent problem of fitting mainly rectangular spaces into a giant sphere, the
Icarus
’s various rooms were quite oddly shaped, and the semirandom placement of storage lockers, equipment modules, and pump and air-quality substations only added to the layout mess. But I was in no mood to be balked by a set of numbers, even messy ones, and I set to work.

And in the end, they all matched.

It was not the answer I’d been expecting, and for several minutes after rechecking my math I sat in silence scowling at the schematics. I’d been so sure that Sherlock and I had finally been on the brink of figuring this one out. But the numbers added up perfectly, and numbers don’t lie.

Or do they?

One page farther down was the lower-deck schematic, the deck I was currently on. A few more minutes’ work confirmed that these numbers, too, matched just fine.

But that was just the theoretical part of this project. Now it was time to move on to the experimental work.

A laser measure would have been the most convenient, but after what had happened to Ixil I was a bit leery about scrounging tools out of the
Icarus
’s mechanics room. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. I’d seen the printer up in Tera’s computer room, and I knew the size paper it used. Laying the schematics out on the floor, I set about using them to measure my cabin. It took just over two minutes, and when I was done I took a couple of the sheets out into the corridor and measured that, too.

And when I was finished, the numbers had stopped matching.

Each of the inner-hull plates was about a meter
square and held in place by sixteen connectors. The average spacer’s multitool isn’t really the proper gadget to use for removing hull plates, but mine was a somewhat better model than the average and had a couple of additional blades those missed out on. By the time I was down to the final four—the ones in the corners—I was getting pretty adept at the procedure. I paused long enough at that point to dig out my flashlight and set it on the deck where it would be handy; after a moment’s thought I drew my plasmic and put it down beside the light. Then I removed the last four connectors and eased the plate out of place.

And there, dimly seen by the reflected overhead light from my cabin, was the gray metal of the outer hull. Not twenty centimeters beyond the inner hull like it was supposed to be, but a solid meter and a half away.

Plasmic in one hand and flashlight in the other, I leaned my head cautiously into the opening and looked around. The pipes and cables and conduits that normally ran through the ’tweenhull area were all in evidence, fastened securely to the inner hull just the way they were supposed to be. The rest of the space was completely empty except for the series of struts that fastened the two hulls together. Struts, I decided, that would provide a strenuous but workable jungle-gym walkway for anyone who wanted to move unseen about the ship.

As well as a convenient work platform for, say, someone desiring to tap into the coax cable from an intercom. Specifically,
my
intercom. I turned my light on the spot off to the left where the relevant wires emerged, but it was too far away and my angle too shallow to see with certainty whether or not anything had been tampered with.

The nearest support strut in that direction was nearly half a meter away. Laying my gun and light on the deck beside me, I gathered my feet under me, gauged the distance, and leaped carefully toward it.

And with a sudden stomach-twisting disorientation, I jerked sideways and slammed hard onto my right shoulder and leg against the outer deck.

It says a lot for the shock involved that my first stunned thought was that the
Icarus
’s grav generator had malfunctioned again, shutting off at the precise moment I jumped—this despite the fact that I was now lying flat on my side against the outer hull. It took another several seconds before my brain caught up with the fact that I
was
, in fact, lying against the outer hull, the term “lying” automatically implying a gravitational field.

Except that this gravitational field was roughly at right angles to the one I’d just left in my cabin. The only one that the
Icarus
’s generator could create. The only one, in fact, that had any business existing here at all.

Slowly, carefully, I turned my head to what was now “up” from my new frame of reference. There was my cabin, a meter above my head, with my plasmic and light clinging unconcernedly to what was from my perspective a sheer wall. Even more carefully, I leaned my torso up away from the hull, half expecting that this magic grip would suddenly cease if I let go of the hull and send me sliding down to the underside of the
Icarus
.

I needn’t have worried. Except for the total impossibility of its vector, this field behaved more or less like the one created by a normal ship’s grav generator. I reached up toward my cabin, and because I was paying close attention I was able to feel where the two gravity vectors began to conflict with each other a few millimeters my side of the inner hull. At least now I knew what the anomaly was that Pix and Pax had detected while scampering beneath my bunk, and why neither they nor Ixil had been able to interpret it.

It also explained how our mysterious eavesdropper/saboteur had been able to move around so easily. No
dangerous or athletic strut-leaping required; all he had to do was crawl around like a spider on a wall. I snagged my light and gun and brought them to me, nearly dropping the plasmic when its weight suddenly shifted in my grip. It might not take great athletic ability to move around in here, I amended, but it did take some getting used to. Holstering the weapon, I shifted myself cautiously toward my intercom, still not entirely trusting this phenomenon.

I was easing up to get a closer look at the wires when I heard a small scraping sound in the distance.

For a moment I thought I’d imagined it, or else that it had merely been some normal ship’s noise distorted by the echo chamber I was lying in. But then the sound came again, and I knew I’d been right the first time.

There was someone else in here with me.

Silently, I shut off my light and put it in my pocket, at the same time drawing my plasmic. Then, not nearly as silently, but as silently as I could manage, I set off down the curving hull.

It was, in retrospect, probably not the most brilliant thing I’d ever done in my life. However it was he’d discovered this cozy little back stairway, our saboteur surely had a better idea of the lay of the land in here than I did, including knowing where all the best hiding places and ambush sites were. He was furthermore presumably already acclimated to the place, whereas I was still distracted by the nagging feeling that at any minute the hull’s peculiar gravity would fail and I would become the cue ball in a giant spherical game of bumper billiards. But at the moment all that I could think of was that I had a chance to nail him dead to rights, and I was going to take it.

I started off by scooting along the hull on my backside, but quickly gave that up as not nearly quiet enough, not to mention being a posture that tended to leave me with my back to the direction I was going. I tried switching to a standard hands-and-knees crawl,
but after a couple of meters decided that that was no good either, leaving my gun hand as it did too far out of line to get off a quick shot if necessary. The only other option I could think of was the one I finally adopted, a crouching sort of duck waddle that was hard on the knees and undignified in the extreme, but at least had the advantage of leaving my gun and me pointed in the same direction.

The sound had seemed to come from above me, the term “above” referring to the direction toward the
Icarus
’s top deck, so that was the direction I headed. It was slower going than I’d expected, partly because of the awkwardness of my stance and the need for silence, but also because of the unpleasant vertigo effect of having my head bobbing along just about where the two competing gravity fields mixed at roughly equal strength. The effect became steadily more pronounced as I passed the mid deck and continued around toward the top of the ship, with the angle between the gravity vectors gradually veering from ninety degrees toward an even more disconcerting 180.

I don’t know how long the slow-motion chase went on. Not long, I think, not more than fifteen or twenty minutes’ total. Between my aching knees and swimming head and the fact that I was alone in a dark space with a man who had already killed once, my time sense wasn’t at its best that night. Every thirty seconds or so I paused to listen, stretching out with all my senses over the rumbling background noise and vibration of the ship, trying for a new estimate of where he was.