The Icarus Hunt (8 page)

And as I watched in helpless horror, Chort slammed against the side of the cargo sphere, caromed off the wraparound, and disappeared off the monitor screen.

“Revs!” I barked toward the intercom, twisting the camera control hard over. “Turn it off!”

“I didn’t turn it on,” he protested.

“I don’t give a damn who turned it on!” I snarled. I had Chort on the screen now, hanging limply like a puppet on a string at the end of his secondary line at the bottom of the artificial “down” the
Icarus
’s gravity generator had imposed on this small bubble of space. “Just shut it
down
.”

“I can’t,” he bit back. “The control’s not responding.”

I ground my teeth viciously. “Tera?”

“I’m trying, too,” her voice joined in. “The computer’s frozen up.”

“Then cut all power to that whole section,” I snapped. “You can do
that
, can’t you? One of you?”

“Working on it,” Nicabar grunted.

“Computer’s still frozen,” Tera added tautly. “I can’t see him—is he all right?”

“I don’t know,” I told her harshly. “And we
won’t
know until we get him back—”

I broke off suddenly, my breath catching horribly in my throat. Concentrating first on Chort’s fall, and then on getting the gravity shut down, it hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder why Chort had fallen that far in the first place. Why Jones hadn’t had the slack in the primary line properly taken up, or for that matter why he hadn’t already begun reeling the Craea back into the wraparound.

But now, looking at the outside of the entryway for the first time since the accident, I could see why. Hanging limply over the sill of the hatchway beside the equally limp primary line was a vacsuited hand. Jones’s hand.

Not moving.

“Revs, do you have a suit back there?” I called, cursing under my breath, trying to key the camera for a better look inside the entryway. No good; Jones had turned the overhead light off and the shadow was too intense for the camera to penetrate.

“No,” he called back. “What’s the—oh,
damn
.”

“Yeah,” I bit out, my mind racing uselessly. With the entryway open to space, the wraparound was totally isolated from the rest of the ship by the pressure doors at either end. I could close the hatch from the bridge; but the way Jones was lying, his hand would prevent it from sealing.

The only other way to get to him would be to depressurize one side of the ship so we could open the door. But we couldn’t depressurize the sphere—there were only two vac suits left for the four of us still in here, and I wasn’t about to trust the room or cabin doors to hold up against hard vacuum. And without a suit for Nicabar, we couldn’t depressurize the engine room, either. My eyes flicked uselessly over the monitors, searching for inspiration—

“He’s moving,” Nicabar called suddenly. “McKell—Chort’s moving.”

I felt my hands tighten into fists. The Craea’s body was starting to twitch, his limbs making small random movements like someone having a violent dream. “Chort?” I called toward the microphone. “Chort, this is McKell. Snap out of it—we need you.”

“I am here,” Chort’s voice came, sounding vague and tentative. “What happened?”

“Ship’s gravity came on,” I told him. “Never mind that now. Something’s happened to Jones—he’s not responding, and I think he’s unconscious. Can you climb up your line and get to him?”

For a long moment he didn’t reply. I was gazing at the monitor, wondering if he’d slipped back into unconsciousness, when suddenly he twitched again; and a
second later he was pulling himself up the line with spiderlike agility.

Thirty seconds later he was in the wraparound, pulling Jones out of the way of the door. I was ready, keying for entryway seal and repressurization of the wraparound.

Two minutes later, we had them back in the ship.

The effort, as it turned out, was for nothing.

“I’m sorry, McKell,” Everett said with a tired sigh, pulling a thin blanket carefully over Jones’s face. “Your man’s been gone at least ten minutes. There’s nothing I can do.”

I looked over at the body lying on the treatment table. The terminally sociable type, I’d dubbed him back at the spaceport. He’d been terminal, all right. “It was the rebreather, then?”

“Definitely.” Everett picked up the scrubber unit and peeled back the covering. “Somewhere in here the system stopped scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the air and started putting carbon monoxide in. Slowly, certainly—he probably didn’t even notice it was happening. Just drifted to sleep and slipped quietly away.”

I gazed at the hardware cradled in those large hands. “Was it an accident?”

He gave me an odd look. “You work with air scrubbers all the time. Could something like this have happened by accident?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said, the image of that massive search Ixil and I had spotted out in the Meima wilderness vivid in my memory. No, it hadn’t been any accident. Not a chance in the world of that. But there was no sense panicking Everett, either.

“Hm,” Everett said. For another moment he looked at the scrubber, then smoothed back the covering and put it aside. “I know you’re not in the mood right now to count your blessings, but bear in mind that if Chort
had died or broken his neck in that fall, we’d have lost both of them.”

“Blessings like this I can do without,” I said bitterly. “Have you looked at Chort yet?”

He grunted. “Chort says he’s fine and unhurt and refuses to be looked at. If you want me to run a check on him, you’ll have to make it an order.”

“No, that’s all right,” I told him. I’d never heard anything about the Craean culture being a particularly stoic one. If Chort said he was all right, he probably was.

But whether he would stay that way was now open to serious question. With that phony murder charge someone had apparently succeeded in scaring Cameron off the
Icarus
, and the guilt-by-association bit had nearly bounced me, as well. Now, Jones had been rather more permanently removed from the crew list, and Chort had come within a hair of joining him.

And all this less than eight hours into the trip. The universe was spending the
Icarus
’s quota of bad luck with a lavish hand.

“A pity, too,” Everett commented into my musings. “Jones being the mechanic, I mean. He might have been the only one on board who could have tracked down what went wrong with the grav generator. Now we may never know what happened.”

“Probably,” I agreed, putting the heaviness of true conviction into my voice. If Everett—or anyone else, for that matter—thought I was just going to chalk any of this up to mysterious accident and let it go at that, I had no intention of disillusioning them. “That’s usually how it goes with this sort of thing,” I added. “You never really find out what went wrong.”

He nodded in commiseration. “So what happens now?”

I looked over at Jones’s body again. “We take him to port and turn him over to the authorities,” I said. “Then we keep going.”

“Without a mechanic?” Everett frowned. “A ship this size needs all eight certificates, you know.”

“That’s okay,” I assured him, backing out the door. “Nicabar can cover for the few hours it’ll take to get to port. After that, I know where we can pick up another mechanic. Cheap.”

He made some puzzled-sounding reply, but I was already in the corridor and didn’t stop to hear it. Cameron’s course plan had put our first fueling stop at Trottsen, seventy-two more hours away. But a relatively minor vector change would take us instead to Xathru, only nine hours from here, where Ixil and the
Stormy Banks
were due to deliver Brother John’s illegal cargo. We needed a replacement mechanic, after all, and Ixil would fit the bill perfectly.

Besides which, I suddenly very much wanted to have Ixil at my side. Or perhaps more precisely, to have him watching my back.

The parquet dockyard on Xathru was like a thousand other medium-sized spaceports scattered across the Spiral: primitive compared to Qattara Axial or one of the other InterSpiral-class ports, but still two steps above small regional hubs like the one we’d taken off from on Meima. The Parquet’s landing pits were cradle-shaped instead of simply flat, smoothly contoured to accommodate a variety of standard ship designs.

Of course, no one in his right mind would have anticipated the
Icarus
’s lopsided shape, so even with half its bulk below ground level the floors still sloped upward. But at least here the entryway ladder could be reconfigured as a short ramp with a rise of maybe two meters instead of the ten-meter climb we had had without it. Progress.

Nicabar volunteered to help Everett take Jones’s body to the Port Authority, where the various death forms would have to be filled out. I ran through the basic landing procedure, promised the tower that I would file my own set of accident report forms before
we left, then grabbed one of the little runaround cars scattered randomly between the docking rectangles and headed out to the StarrComm building looming like a giant mushroom at the southern boundary of the port.

Like most StarrComm facilities, this one was reasonably crowded. But also as usual, the high costs involved with interstellar communication led to generally short conversations, with the result that it was only about five minutes before my name was called and I was directed down one of the corridors to my designated booth. I closed the door behind me, made sure it was privacy-sealed, and after only a slight hesitation keyed for a full vid connect. It was ten times as expensive as vidless, but I had Cameron’s thousand-commark advance money and was feeling extravagant.

Besides, reactions were so much more interesting when face and body language were there in addition to words and tone. And unless I missed my guess, the coming reaction was going to be one for the books. Feeding one of Cameron’s hundred-commark bills into the slot, I keyed in Brother John’s private number.

Somewhere on Xathru, StarrComm’s fifty-kilometer-square starconnect array spat a signal across the light-years toward an identical array on whichever world it was where Brother John sat in the middle of his noxious little spiderweb. I didn’t know which world it was, or even whether it was the same world each time or if he continually moved around like a touring road show.

Neither did InterSpiral Law Enforcement or any of the other more regional agencies working their various jurisdictions within the Spiral. They didn’t know where he was, or where the records of his transactions were, or how to get hold of either him or them. Most every one of the beings working those agencies would give his upper right appendage to know those things. Brother John’s influence stretched a long way across the stars, and he had ruined a lot of lives and angered a lot of people along the way.

Considering my current relationship with the man and his organization, I could only hope that none of those eager badgemen found him anytime soon.

The screen cleared, and a broken-nosed thug with perpetual scowl lines around his eyes and mouth peered out at me. “Yeah?” he grunted.

“This is Jordan McKell,” I identified myself, as if anyone Brother John had answering the phone for him wouldn’t know all of us indentured slaves by sight. “I’d like to speak with Mr. Ryland, please.”

The beetle brows seemed to twitch. “Yeah,” he grunted again. “Hang on.”

The screen went black. I made a small private wager with myself that Brother John would leave me hanging and sweating for at least a minute before he deigned to come on, despite the fact that fielding calls from people like me was one of his primary jobs, and also despite what this vid connect was costing me per quarter second.

I thought I’d lost my wager when the screen came back on after only twenty seconds. But no, he’d simply added an extra layer to the procedure. “Well, if it isn’t Jordan McKell,” a moon-faced man said in a playfully sarcastic voice, looking even more like a refugee from a mobster movie than the call screener had, his elegantly proper butler’s outfit notwithstanding. “How nice of you to grace our vid screen with your presence.”

“I’m amazingly delighted to see you, too,” I said mildly. “Would Mr. Ryland like to hear some interesting news, or are we just taking this opportunity to help you brush up on your badinage?”

The housethug’s eyes narrowed, no doubt trying to figure out what “badinage” was and whether or not he’d just been insulted. “Mr. Ryland doesn’t appreciate getting interesting news from employees on the fly,” he bit out. The playful part had evaporated, but the sarcasm was still there. “In case you’ve forgotten, you have a cargo to deliver.”

“Done and done,” I told him. “Or it will be soon, if it isn’t already.”

He frowned again; but before he could speak, his face vanished from the screen as a different extension cut in.

And there, smiling cherubically at me, was Brother John. “Hello, Jordan,” he said smoothly. “And how are you?”

“Hello, Mr. Ryland,” I said. “I’m just fine. I’m pleased everyone over there is so cheerful today, too.”

He smiled even more genially. To look at Johnston Scotto Ryland, you would think you were in the presence of a philanthropist or a priest or at the very least a former choirboy—hence, our private “Brother John” nickname for him. And I suspected that there were still people in the Spiral who were being taken in by that winning smile and clear-conscienced face and utterly sincere voice.

Especially the voice. “Why shouldn’t we be happy?” he said, nothing in his manner giving the slightest hint of what was going on behind those dark and soulless eyes. “Business is booming, profits are up, and all my valued employees are working so wonderfully together.”

The smile didn’t change, but suddenly there was a chill in the air. “Except for you, Jordan, my lad. For some unknown reason you seem to have suddenly grown weary of our company.”

“I don’t know what could have given you that impression, Mr. Ryland,” I protested, trying my own version of the innocent act.

“Don’t you,” he said, the temperature dropping a few more degrees. Apparently, innocence wasn’t playing well today. “I’m told the
Stormy Banks
docked on Xathru not thirty minutes ago. And that you weren’t on it.”