The Icarus Hunt (6 page)

“Ah—you’ve been reading our propaganda sheets,” I said approvingly. “Very good.”

He frowned. “Propaganda sheets?”

“A joke,” I said, sorry I’d even tried it. Apparently, humor wasn’t his strong point. “I was hired off the street, just like all the rest of you were.”

I sent a casual glance around the group as I spoke, watching for a reaction. But if any of them had had a different sort of invitation to this party, he was keeping it to himself. “I’m sure we’ll all have our questions answered as soon as our employer arrives,” I added.

“
If
he shows up,” the other man murmured. He was tall, probably around thirty years old, with prematurely gray hair and quietly probing eyes. His musculature was somewhat leaner than Jones’s, but just as impressive in its own way.

“He’ll be here,” I said, trying to put more confidence into my tone than I felt. Having a murder charge hanging over Cameron’s head was going to severely cramp his mobility. “While we’re waiting, how about you starting off the introductions?”

“Sure,” the gray-haired man said. “I’m Almont Nicabar—call me Revs. Engine certification, though I’m cleared to handle mechanics, too.”

“Really,” Jones said, sounding interested. “Where’d you journeyman on your mechanics training?”

“I didn’t go through an actual program,” Nicabar said. “Mostly I just picked it up while I was in the service.”

“No kidding,” Jones said. Apparently our mechanic was the terminally sociable type. “Which branch?”

“Look, can’t we save the social-club chat till later?” the nervous kid growled, his head bobbing restlessly as
he checked out every spacer that came into sight along the walkways.

“I’m open to other suggestions,” I said mildly. “Unfortunately, as long as the entryway’s locked—”

“So why don’t we open it?” he cut me off impatiently, peering up at the wraparound. “A cheeseball hatch like that—I could pop it in half a minute.”

“Not a good idea,” Jones warned. “You can break the airlock seal that way.”

“And that would leave our hull/EVA specialist with nothing to do,” I said, turning to the Craea. “And you are, sir?”

“I am Chort,” the alien said, his voice carrying the typical whistly overtones of his species, a vaguely ethereal sound most other beings either found fascinating or else drove them completely up a wall. “How did you know I was the spacewalker?”

“You’re far too modest,” I told him, bowing respectfully. “The reputation of the Crooea among spacewalkers far precedes you. We are honored to have you with us.”

Chort returned the bow, his feathery blue-green scales shimmering where they caught the sunlight. Like most of his species, he was short and slender, with pure white eyes, a short Mohawk-style feathery crest topping his head, and a toothed bird’s bill for a mouth. His age was impossible to read, but I tentatively put it somewhere between fifteen and eighty. “You’re far too generous,” he replied.

“Not at all,” I assured him, putting all the sincere flattery into my voice that I figured I could get away with. The entire Craean species loved zero gee, whether working in it or playing in it, with the lithe bodies and compact musculature that were perfect for climbing around outside ships. On top of that, they seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to the depressingly regular hull problems created by hyperspace pressure,
plus the ability to evaluate the condition of a plate through touch alone.

All of which meant they were highly in demand for hull/EVA positions aboard starships, to the point where ship owners frequently tried to cajole, bribe, or otherwise steal them away from rivals in port. I wasn’t sure how Cameron had managed to get him to sign on with us, but a little ego-massage here and there wouldn’t hurt our chances of keeping him here.

Unfortunately, our nervous type either didn’t understand such subtleties or just didn’t care. “Oh, give it a rest,” he growled. “He saw your luggage, Chort—you can tell there’s a vac suit in there.”

The blue-green scales edged with the pale red of surprise. “Oh,” Chort said. “Of course. There’s certainly that, too.”

“Don’t mind him,” I told the Craea, controlling my annoyance with a supreme effort. “He’s our certified diplomacy expert.”

Jones chuckled, and the kid scowled. “I am not,” he insisted. “I’m electronics.”

“Do you have a name?” Nicabar asked. “Or are we going to have to call you Twitchy for the rest of the trip?”

“Har, har,” he said, glowering at Nicabar. “I’m Shawn. Geoff Shawn.”

“Which just leaves you,” I said, turning to the woman. She was slim, with black hair and hazel eyes, probably no older than her mid-twenties, with the sort of lightly tanned skin of someone who played a lot outdoors. Like Shawn, she seemed more interested in the passing pedestrian traffic than she was in our little get-acquainted session. “Do you cover both the computer and medical specialties?”

“Just computers,” she said briefly, her eyes flicking to me once in quick evaluation, then turning away again. “My name’s Tera.”

“Tera what?” Jones asked.

“Just Tera,” she repeated, giving him a coolly evaluating look.

“Yes, but—”

“Just Tera,” I cut Jones off, warning him with my eyes to drop it. She might just be the shy type; but there were also several religious sects I knew of who made it a policy to never give their full names to outsiders. Either way, pressing her about it would be pointless and only add more friction to a crew that, by the looks of things, was already rapidly reaching its quota.

“Means we’re missing our medic,” Nicabar put in, smoothly stepping in and filling the conversational awkwardness. “I wonder where he is.”

“Maybe he’s having a drink with Borodin,” Shawn said acidly. “Look, this is stupid. Are you
sure
that entryway’s sealed?”

“You’re welcome to try it yourself,” I told him, waving at the keypad and wishing I knew what our next move should be. I certainly didn’t want to leave Cameron behind, particularly not with a murder charge outstanding against him. But if the Ihmisits had already picked him up, there wasn’t much point in our hanging around, either. Maybe I should give Ixil a call over at the
Stormy Banks
and have him do a quiet search.

From above me came the ka-thunk of released seals and the hissing of hydraulics, and I spun around to see the entryway door swinging ponderously open. “What did you do?” I demanded, looking at Shawn.

“What do you mean, what did I do?” he shot back. “I pushed the damn
OPEN
button, that’s what I did. It was unlocked the whole time, you morons.”

“Borodin must have had it on a time lock,” Jones said, frowning. “I wonder why.”

“Maybe he’s not coming,” Tera suggested. “Maybe he never intended to in the first place.”

“Well, I’m not going
anywhere
without the advance he promised,” Shawn said flatly.

“Besides which, we don’t know exactly where we’re
supposed to go,” I reminded them, stepping past him and peering up the stairway. It canted to the right at a slight angle, one more example of slightly shoddy workmanship to add to my growing list. I could see a glowing ceiling light over the hatch inside the wraparound, but nothing else was visible from this angle.

“He told me we were going to Earth,” Chort offered.

“Right, but Earth’s a big place,” I reminded him. “With lots of different parking spaces. Still, we might as well go in.” I picked up my bag and started toward the stairway—

“Hang on a second, Jordan,” Jones cut me off. “Someone’s coming.”

I turned around. From around the stern of one of the nearby ships a large, bulky man was jogging toward us like a trotting hippo, a pair of travel bags bouncing in his grip. “Hold on!” he called. “Don’t leave yet. I’m here.”

“And who are you?” I called back.

“Hayden Everett,” he said, coasting to a stop beside Tera and taking a deep breath. “Medic certificate. Whew! Had some trouble at the gate—didn’t think I was going to make it.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not the last,” Jones said. “Our employer hasn’t shown up yet, either.”

“Really?” Everett said, frowning. He had short black hair and blue eyes, and the slightly squashed features I usually associated with professional high-contact sports types. Up close, I could see now that, unlike Jones and Nicabar, most of his impressive body mass ran to fat, though there were indications there’d been a fair amount of muscle there once upon a time. He was also crowding fifty, considerably older than the rest of our group, with an impressive network of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth.

I could also see that despite the implication that he’d jogged along the slideways all the way from the gate,
there was no sheen of sweat on his face, nor was he even breathing all that hard. Despite his age and surface fat, his cardiovascular system was apparently in pretty decent shape.

“Really,” Jones assured him. “So what do we do now, McKell?”

“Like I said, we go inside,” I told him, starting up the steps. “Revs, you get to the engine room and start your preflight; I’ll find the bridge and get things started from that end. The rest of you, bring your luggage and find your stations.”

Given the
Icarus
’s iconoclastic design I knew that that last order was going to be a challenge. To my mild surprise, someone had anticipated me. The wraparound tunnel curved around the smaller sphere to a pressure door at the surface of the larger sphere—apparently, the whole wraparound served as the ship’s airlock—and attached to the wall of the corridor on the far side of the pressure door was a basic layout of the ship.

“Well, that’s handy,” Tera commented as the six of us crowded around it, Nicabar having already disappeared in the other direction along the wraparound to the engine room. “Where’s the computer room?—oh, there it is. Odd placement.”

There was a murmur of general agreement. The interior layout was fully as odd as the exterior design, with the three levels of the sphere laid out in possibly the most arbitrary fashion I’d ever seen. The bridge was in its standard place, nestled just behind the nose cone on the mid deck; but the computer room, instead of being connected to the bridge as usual, was at the opposite end of the sphere, pressed up against the wall of the smaller sphere on the starboard side of the centerline, directly behind the wall we were currently looking at. The machine shop, electronics shop, and EVA prep area were slapped together on the port side, where vibrations and electronic noise from one would inevitably
slop over into the other, with the sick bay and galley/dayroom across the corridor from them just forward of the computer room.

The top deck consisted of six cracker-box-sized sleeping cabins and an only slightly larger head, plus two main storage rooms; the lower deck was two more sleeping cabins, another head, the main bulk of the ship’s stores, and the air- and water-scrubbing and reclamation equipment. There were other, smaller storage cabinets scattered around everywhere, apparently wherever and however the designer’s mood had struck. The three decks were linked together by a pair of ladders, one just behind the bridge, the other aft near the wraparound.

I also noticed that while the wraparound and engine section were drawn with a certain minimal detail, the smaller sphere was drawn as a solid silhouette, labeled simply
CARGO
, with no access panels or hatches shown. When Cameron had said the cargo was sealed, he’d meant it.

“This has got to be the dumbest ship I’ve ever been on,” Shawn declared in obvious disgust. “Who built this thing, anyway?”

“It’ll be listed on the schematics,” I told him. “Tera, that’ll be your first job after you get the computer up and running: Pull up the plans so we can see what exactly we’ve got to work with. Everyone else, go get settled. I’ll be on the bridge if you need me.”

I headed up the corridor—literally
up
it; the
Icarus
’s floors were sloped at the same ten-degree angle as the ship itself—and touched the release pad set into the center of the door.

Considering all the extra space the
Icarus
had over the
Stormy Banks
, I might have expected the bridge to be correspondingly larger, too. It wasn’t. If anything, it was a little smaller. But whatever other corners Cameron and his cronies had cut with this ship, at least they hadn’t scrimped on vital equipment. The piloting
setup, to my right as I stood in the doorway, consisted of a full Wurlitz command console wrapped around a military-style full-active restraint chair, a half-dozen Valerian monitor displays to link me to the rest of the ship, and a rather impressive Hompson RealiTeev main display already activated and showing the view out the bow of the ship. To my left, the other half of the room was dominated by a Gorsham plotting table connected to a Kemberly nav database records system.

And sitting in the center of the plotting table were an envelope and a large metal cash box.

I stepped over to the table and crouched down, giving the box a long, careful look. There were no wires that I could see; no discolorations, no passive triggers, nothing that struck me as an obvious booby trap. Holding my breath, I picked it up and eased it open a crack.

Nothing snapped, flashed, hissed, or blew up in my face. Perhaps I was getting paranoid in my old age. Exhaling quietly, I opened it the rest of the way.

Inside was money. Crisp one-hundred-commark bills. Lots of them.

I looked at the cash for another moment, then set the box back on the plotting table and opened the envelope. Inside were a set of cards, the originals of the registration and clearance papers Cameron had showed me in the taverno last night, plus a single sheet of paper with a hand-printed message on it: