The Icarus Hunt (45 page)

All of which boiled down to about as ideal a situation as I could have asked for. Even if the Patth and their lumpy Iykami allies were out there looking for us, the sheer volume of people they would have to sift through ought to make this as quick and clean as possible. Getting my bearings toward the nearest spur of the tram lines Nicabar had mentioned, I headed down the ladder and elbowed my way into the river of pedestrians.

My first thought had been to try to corral one of the cars for myself. But there weren’t any unused ones in sight, so I set off on foot. Which was just as well, I quickly realized, as I saw how easily the cars were getting snarled up in the traffic flow. The tram spur wasn’t that far away, and I could use the exercise. And the time to do some hard thinking.

But not about how I was going to acquire Shawn’s borandis. Despite my somewhat melodramatic pronouncement to Tera about doing whatever I had to, that part was actually going to be the least of my worries. With borandis a perfectly legal substance for at
least a dozen of the species jostling against me, every pharmacy on the planet would have the stuff in stock, with few if any questions asked. No, the immediate and burning question right now was the same one that had been gnawing at me for quite a while: how to get the
Icarus
to Earth ahead of the Patth.

Along with the subsidiary question of whether that was even the smart thing for me to do.

Because lurking in the back of my mind was my most recent conversation with Ixil, and his half-joking question of whether I would be offering the
Icarus
to Brother John instead. Then, I’d assured him I had no intention of doing so; now, though, I wasn’t nearly so sure it wasn’t the best solution we had. It would keep the stargate in human hands—bloody hands, certainly, but human nevertheless—as well as giving me the kind of career boost someone in my position could usually only dream of. I might even get to meet the elusive Mr. Antoniewicz, which would put me in exalted company indeed.

Cameron wouldn’t be pleased by such a move, of course. Neither would Tera; and if Tera wasn’t happy, Nicabar probably wouldn’t be happy, either. The two of them seemed to have become quite chummy since that confrontation on the bridge regarding my shadier business associations. Still, at this point, other people’s happiness or lack thereof wasn’t particularly high on my priority list. We’d covered barely a fifth of the distance from Meima to Earth, and already we’d had far too many close calls than I cared to think about. The others, believing that the
Icarus
was a superfast alien stardrive, undoubtedly still had their hopes pinned on using it to beat out the Patth net; Ixil and I, on the other hand, knew that hope was nonexistent.

On almost every level I could think of, the idea made sense. And Cameron and Tera would surely get over their pique eventually. Still, I reluctantly concluded,
I wasn’t quite ready to make such a decision. Not yet. Maybe once we were off Palmary.

The tram line, for all its obviously quick assembly, was still more comfortable and professional than transports I’d used on a lot of supposedly more advanced worlds. I arrived at the platform to find a pair of trams already waiting, one each heading in to the cities of Drobney and k’Barch. I picked the k’Barch one, reasoning that the place with a k’Tra name would probably have a more frenetic celebration level, and hence more cover for a man on the run.

Most of my fellow travelers had apparently come to a similar conclusion, though undoubtedly with different motivations. I let the traffic flow carry me in through the doors and to a standing point midway down one of the cars, jammed between a group of sweaty Narchners and a group of clean but equally aromatic Saffi.

We headed out. I had enough of a view out one of the side windows to see that Nicabar’s assumption had been correct: Not only was there a good-sized outfitters’ store at the junction of the two tram lines, but also a collection of restaurants, tavernos, and gawk-shops. Even StarrComm had gotten into the act, setting up a prefab satellite station so that spacers who felt the need to get in touch with the outside universe wouldn’t have to go to wherever their main building was in the twin-city area. Once again, I raised my estimate of how much money this Grand Feast must pour into the Palmary economy.

We rumbled our way to the end of the line, which from the look of things was relatively close to the middle of k’Barch and perilously near the epicenter of the upcoming celebrations. The earlier flow through the tram doors reversed itself, and a few chaotic minutes later I was maneuvering my way down a sidewalk that was only marginally less crowded than the inside of the tram had been. About a block ahead, I could see the
rustling display flag of a pharmacy, and I concentrated on making my way toward it.

I had reached the shop and was working my way sideways through the crowd toward the door, when something exploded against the back of my neck, plunging me into darkness.

I came to slowly, drifting back toward consciousness in gradual and tortured stages. There was a vague sensation of discomfort, which first coalesced into an overall chill and stiffness before zeroing in on a throbbing somewhere in the back of my head. There was something wrong with my arms, though I couldn’t figure out exactly what. There was light somewhere, too, though as vague and undefined as the discomfort had originally been, and the distant thought occurred to me that if I turned my head maybe I could figure out where it was coming from. It took some time and effort to remember how that could be done, but finally I had it doped out. Feeling rather pleased with my accomplishment, I turned my head a little to the side.

And instantly came fully awake as a flare of pain burned through the back of my skull. Someone, apparently, was doing his best to rip my head off my spine with his bare hands. Clenching my teeth, I waited until the pain had mostly subsided; then, keeping my head as motionless as possible, I eased open my eyes.

I was sitting in a plain wooden armchair, unpadded, my head lolled forward with my chin resting on my chest. What was wrong with my arms was quickly apparent: both wrists were handcuffed to the chair arms on which they were resting. Experimentally, I shifted my right foot a bit and found that they hadn’t bothered to lock my feet in place as they had my arms. In the background I could hear the faint sounds of distant music; closer at hand, somewhere just in front of me, I could also hear the sounds of quiet alien conversation. Slowly, mindful of the trip-hammer waiting to resume work on the back of my skull, I carefully raised my head to look.

And immediately wished I hadn’t. I was in a medium-sized room, plain and largely unfurnished, with a single light in the ceiling and a single closed door maybe four meters directly ahead of me. Seated behind a low wooden table midway between the door and me, my partially disassembled phone on the tabletop in front of them, were two more members of the lumpy Iykami Clan.

At the moment, though, they weren’t paying any attention to the phone, nor to any of the rest of my pocket equipment that had been unceremoniously dumped out onto the table. My efforts at stealthy wakefulness to the contrary, they were looking straight at me.

And not, as near as I could tell from those alien faces, with particularly friendly expressions. They were more the sort of expressions worn by people who have orders to keep a prisoner alive and mostly well, but who are at the same time secretly longing for said prisoner to make trouble and thus provide them with an excuse to beat the living daylights out of him.

Cooperative type that I was, it seemed a shame to disappoint them.

I came up on my feet, hunched forward for balance as I gripped the arms to hold the chair more or less in
place against my back and rear. Their secret hopes notwithstanding, a sudden and clearly suicidal attack on my part was probably the last thing they were actually expecting; and the shock had just enough time to register on their faces as I took two quick steps forward and swung 180 degrees around, taking care not to let my chair get hung up on the edge of their table. With all the strength I could muster, I heaved myself and the chair as hard as I could squarely on top of them.

They saw it coming, of course. But seated with their legs under the table, there wasn’t a single thing they could do about it. We all went down together in a confused and thunderous crash of splintering wood and alien curses. Still handcuffed to the chair, my movements were severely limited, but even so I was in a far better fighting position than my opponents. Flailing back and forth, hammering them with the chair and keeping them pinned beneath me, I lashed out with my feet, throwing kick after kick to head and torso and anything else I could reach. After what seemed like forever through the haze of pain from my head, they stopped moving. I gave them each another couple of kicks, just in case they were faking, then collapsed in a panting heap amid the carnage.

I didn’t stay collapsed long, though. It had been a serious gamble on my part, taking them on just after waking up, but I hadn’t had much choice in the matter. Two-to-one odds were as good as I was likely to get; and if I’d waited for them to call whoever was in charge with the news that the sacrificial Voodoo doll was awake and ready to have pins stuck in him, I’d never have left the room alive.

An unhappy ending that could still very easily happen. The brief fight had been anything but quiet, and the music I could hear in the distance meant that there was at least
someone
else in the immediate vicinity. My chair had suffered some damage in the fight, but enough of it had survived to keep me pinioned. Rolling
around awkwardly, keeping an ear cocked for the inevitable reaction, I started checking my unconscious jailers for the keys to my handcuffs.

They were wearing the same sort of neo-Greek tunics as the two who’d jumped me on Xathru, and it didn’t take long to find out that the limited pocket space that came with the outfits included no handcuff keys. One had a belt pouch, similarly bereft of keys. Neither was carrying a weapon.

But a couple of meters away on the floor where it had fallen at the table’s collapse was my phone.

My imprisoning chair had gotten itself caught in a slight hollow formed by the bodies of the two Iykams, but a little rocking broke me free. I rolled up onto my knees, got to my feet, and picked my way through the debris to the phone. At this range I could see the Iykams hadn’t gotten any further in their disassembly of the device than merely pulling the back off, though why they’d even done that I didn’t know. Perhaps they were hoping to tease a latent phone number or two out of the memory that they could use.

If so, they were out of luck. That was the phone I’d taken from James Fulbright on Dorscind’s World, and there were no incriminating numbers connected with me anywhere in there, latent or otherwise.

Still, I was glad they’d kept the phone around long enough to try, since it had now put communication with the outside world in my hands. Easing onto my side on the floor within reach of the phone, I rolled the device onto its back. I was still in big trouble, but a quick call to Ixil would at least alert the others that the Patth were here and on the hunt. With one final glance at the door, I keyed it on and reached an outstretched finger toward the keypad.

And paused.

There was something too easy about this. Something
far
too easy. Where were the alert reinforcements rushing in to save the day? Why were these two Iykams
fiddling with my phone instead of someone in a properly equipped workroom? For that matter, why only two guards in the first place?

I keyed off the phone and turned it over again, angling it so that I could get a really good look at the exposed circuitry. And this time, knowing what to look for, it wasn’t hard to spot.

My clever little playmates had wired a repeater chip into the transmitter line, on the upstream side of the encryption sticker. I couldn’t read the fine print on the chip, but it almost didn’t matter. With the simpler Mark VI chip they would be able to eavesdrop on any conversation I might have. With the more advanced Mark IX version and a properly equipped phone elsewhere in the city they’d not only be able to listen in but could also triangulate through the local phone system to get the location of the other end of the conversation. I’d been wrong about the Voodoo pins; they intended to get hold of the
Icarus
the easy way.

I was willing to help out guards who wanted me to make trouble, but my cooperation with the enemy only went so far. Rolling back up to my knees, I left the phone where it was and headed toward where my plasmic lay next to my ID folder.

I was just leaning down to pick it up when the door slammed open.

I dropped the rest of the way to the floor, my outstretched hand snatching up the weapon as I hit the ground hard enough to reignite the blazing pain in my head. Ignoring the red haze that had suddenly dropped in front of my eyes, I swiveled both my body and the plasmic to face the door.

It was, I had to admit, an impressive sight. Four Iykams stood in a semicircle just inside the doorway, each holding one of those nasty coronal-discharge weapons, their alert motionlessness giving them the appearance of transplanted gargoyles. Behind them, I could see a couple more of the ugly beasts outside the
door, undoubtedly waiting eagerly for their chance at me.

And standing right in the middle of the doorway between the two groups was a gray-robed Patth.

“Don’t bother with the weapon, Mr. McKell,” he said. His voice was typical Patth, managing to mix sincere, contemptuous, and smarmy into a sound that was as distinctive in its own way as Chort’s Craean whistling. “You don’t seriously believe we would leave you a functional weapon, do you?”

“After that rather heavy-handed trick you tried with my phone, not really,” I agreed. It was hard to aim properly with my gun hand cuffed to a chair arm, but insofar as I was able I pointed the plasmic squarely at the center of his torso. “At least, not on purpose. You ever hear of a three-pop?”