The Icarus Hunt (12 page)

“Fine,” I said, pulling out the console’s swivel stool. I sat down facing Ixil, keeping the door visible at the corner of my eye. “I presume you took the opportunity to find out a little about him?”

“Of course,” he said, as if there would be any doubt. “An interesting young man, though he strikes me as something of the rebellious type. He’s quite well traveled—he went on several survey-match trips while in tech school, including one that followed Captain Dak’ario’s famous journey across the Spiral three hundred years ago.”

“Sounds like a flimsy excuse to get out of real classes.” I sniffed. “Which school was it?”

“Amdrigal Technical Institute on New Rome,” he said. “Graduated fifth in his class, or so he says.”

“Impressive, if true,” I admitted grudgingly. “What was he doing on Meima?”

“He was out of work,” Ixil said. “Why, he wouldn’t say—he went rather evasive every time I tried to move us back to that topic. He
did
say that he was sitting in a taverno wearing his class jacket and being picked on by some kids from a rival school when he caught Cameron’s eye.”

“Borodin, please, at least in public,” I cautioned him. “That’s the name everyone else aboard knows him by.”

“Right. Sorry.” He paused, an odd expression flitting across his face. “There’s one other thing that may
or may not mean anything. Have you noticed Shawn seems to have a rather peculiar odor about him?”

I frowned. My first reaction was to think that that was possibly the strangest comment Ixil had ever made, certainly in recent memory. But Ixil was a nonhuman, with access to a pair of even more nonhuman outriders, and all of them had different sensory ranges from mine. “No, I hadn’t,” I said.

“It’s quite subtle,” he said. “But it’s definitely there. My initial thought was that it might be related to a possible medical problem, the odor coming either from the illness itself or induced by medication.”

I felt my throat tighten. “Or it could be coming from some other kind of drug. The illegal type, maybe?”

“Could be,” Ixil said. “Not standard happyjam, I don’t think, but there are any number of variations I’m not familiar with.” He shrugged. “Then again, it could also be a result of something exotic he had for lunch in the port.”

“Nice to have it narrowed down.” Still, in all the years I’d known Ixil his instincts had never steered him wrong in this sort of thing. And there
had
been the attitude change I’d noticed myself in Shawn earlier in the trip, a change that could well have had something to do with drugs. “All right, we’ll keep an eye on him. See if he smells the same tomorrow after a day of shipboard food.”

“I will,” he promised. “Speaking of tomorrow, I notice you’ve scheduled our next fueling stop on Dorscind’s World. I thought I might remind you that Dorscind’s World is not exactly a highlight of the average five-star tourist cruise.”

“Which is precisely why I picked it,” I told him. Pix and Pax had finished their deck-level tour of the bridge now and had scampered out the door into the corridor. I sent up a silent prayer that they wouldn’t run across Everett; with his bulk, the big medic might step on them before he even noticed they were underfoot. “Paperwork
accuracy has never been exactly a high priority with the Port Authority there, particularly if you’re a few commarks heavy on the docking fees. I figure that the eighty-two hours it’ll take to get there should be long enough for us to create a new identity for the
Icarus
that’ll be good enough to pass muster.”

“I’m sure we can put something together,” he rumbled, eyeing me speculatively. “Did your tangle with the Lumpy Brothers bother you that much?”

“More than you know,” I assured him grimly. “You see, according to the schedule Cameron left me—the schedule he presumably filed with the Meima Port Authority—the
Icarus
’s first stop was going to be Trottsen. We weren’t supposed to be on Xathru at all.”

His squashed-iguana face hardened. “Yet the Lumpy Brothers knew you were there.”

“
And
called me by name,” I nodded. “Granted, they may have tagged me when my turn was called at the StarrComm building—I had no reason at the time not to give my right name there. But why pick on me at all?”

Ixil nodded thoughtfully. “Can’t be one of the crew,” he murmured, half to himself. “If someone here wanted the cargo, he would have simply stolen it himself after everyone else left the ship.”

“Depending on whether he could get through Cameron’s security sealing,” I said. “But at the very least he would have made sure the
Icarus
didn’t lift. And all he needed to do to accomplish that was to phone the Port Authority with an anonymous report about a pair of crisped bodies lying next to a cul-de-sac loading dock.”

Ixil cocked his head to the side. “In other words, he could have used the same technique that got you detained on Meima.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “And the fact that it
didn’t
happen on Xathru implies to me that it wasn’t someone aboard who pulled that stunt on Meima. But it
does
suggest a
reason why the Lumpy Brothers latched on to me but not on to anyone else aboard.”

Ixil nodded. “The Meima Port Authority report had your name.”

“Not only my name, but my name linked with Cameron’s,” I said. “Someone got hold of that near-arrest report and disseminated it to assorted associates across the Spiral with instructions to be on the lookout for me. The Lumpy Brothers just happened to get lucky.”

“Or else backtracked your name to the
Stormy Banks
and looked up my flight schedule,” Ixil suggested. “That might explain how they happened to be hanging around the StarrComm building.”

“I hadn’t thought of that part,” I acknowledged. “You’re probably right.”

“It also indicates our employer is probably still at large,” Ixil continued, stroking his cheek thoughtfully. “I imagine he remembers all the rest of the names of the people he hired on Meima, in which case the private alert ought to have included their names as well.”

“Good point,” I said, grimacing. What had become of Cameron was still high on my list of annoying loose ends. “Though that’s not definitive—I doubt any of the others had their names called over a loudspeaker in the market.”

“Which leaves us only the question of who’s behind all this,” Ixil concluded. “And how we smoke him or them out into the open.”

“Maybe that’s
your
only unanswered question,” I said. “Personally, I’m already on page two of that list. And as to who’s pulling the strings in the background, I’m not at all sure we even want to go poking that direction. It seems to me that our job right now is to get the
Icarus
and its cargo to Earth, preferably with it and us in one piece. Well, one piece each, anyway.”

“You may be right.” He hesitated. “You said you called Brother John to discuss this sudden change in
plans. You didn’t say whether or not you’d also spoken with Uncle Arthur.”

I grimaced. “No,” I said. “I was hoping we could—oh, I don’t know. Surprise him, maybe?”

Even without the ferrets on his shoulders to do their twitching thing, I had no trouble reading Ixil’s reaction to that one. “I won’t waste time by asking if you seriously believe that to be a good idea,” he said. “I’ll make you a small wager: that he won’t be any happier at your accepting this job than Brother John was.”

“If you’re expecting me to cover that bet, you can forget it,” I said sourly, the proverbial admonition against trying to serve two masters running through my mind. No, Uncle Arthur would definitely not be happy with me over this one. And the longer I put off calling him, the unhappier he was likely to get. “Oh, all right,” I sighed. “I’ll call him as soon as we hit Dorscind’s World.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said, with all the cheerful enthusiasm of someone who would probably find himself unavoidably busy tightening bolts on the
Icarus
while I was sweating it out under Uncle Arthur’s basilisk glare in a StarrComm booth. “What’s our plan until then?”

“To create a new identity for the
Icarus
, and to keep an eye on our backs,” I said. Across at the bridge door, the two ferrets reappeared and headed straight up Ixil’s legs. “As far as I’m concerned, we still don’t have a satisfactory explanation of what happened to Jones and Chort—”

The ferrets reached Ixil’s shoulders; and abruptly, he made a quick double slashing motion across his throat with his fingertips. “—makes the best apple brandy anywhere in the Spiral,” I said, shifting verbal gears as smoothly as I could manage. The voice of someone speaking, I knew, could be heard well before the actual words could be made out, as could the sharp break of that voice being suddenly cut off. “In fact, I’d put it up against anything made on Taurus
or
even Earth—”

I caught a movement from the corner of my eye; at the same time Ixil turned his head in that direction and nodded courteously. “Good evening, Tera,” he said, breaking into my improvised babbling. “What can we do for you?”

I turned to face the door. Tera was standing in the doorway, a slight frown on her face as she took in Ixil seated in the restraint chair with me on the swivel stool. “You can get yourself out of that chair, that’s what,” she said. “The clock on the wall—and Mercantile regs—say it’s time for a shift change. It’s my turn for the bridge.”

I frowned at my watch. Preoccupied with everything else that was happening, I hadn’t even thought about that. “You’re right,” I acknowledged. “Sorry—I’m not used to flying a ship where there are real shift changes and everything.”

“Which I presume also explains why your mechanic’s in the control chair instead of you,” she countered. “You, Ixil, need to take over for Nicabar in the engine room; and you, McKell, need to hit the sack.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted, getting to my feet. In that moment, though, I realized that she was right. Overall lack of sleep plus general tension level had combined with the Lumpy Brothers incident and my still-sore leg to suddenly throw a haze of wooziness over the universe. “On the other hand, maybe it would be a good idea to go under for a couple of hours,” I amended.

“Make it eight of them and you’ve got a deal,” she said, jerking a thumb back down the corridor. “Go on—I’ll let you know if there’s any trouble. You’re in one of the cabins on the lower level, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Number Eight.”

“Fine,” she said, settling herself into the chair Ixil had just vacated. “Pleasant dreams.”

I stepped out the door and clanked my way down the bare-metal rungs of the ladder to the lower deck. The central corridor—as with the mid deck, there was
only one—was deserted. No big surprise, since aside from storage and recycling equipment there were only two sleeping cabins down here, mine and the one Ixil had moved into. A quiet part of the ship, where the rhythmic humming of the various machines would be quite conducive to lulling a weary traveler to sleep.

But I wasn’t going to sleep. Not yet. Instead, I walked the length of the corridor to the aft ladder and headed back up to the mid deck, treading as quietly on the rungs as I could.

Ixil was nowhere in sight, having apparently already disappeared into the wraparound to relieve Nicabar in the engine room. At the forward end of the corridor, I saw that Tera had rather pointedly closed the bridge door behind her. A girl who liked her privacy, I decided, though there might not be anything more to it than the natural reticence of a lone woman locked in a flying tin can with four unfamiliar men and two alien males. But whatever the reason, it was going to make my current project that much safer.

The computer-room door was closed, too, but that was all right; near as I could tell, none of the
Icarus
’s doors locked. Taking one last look around to make sure I wasn’t being observed, I opened the door and went inside, closing it behind me.

The room looked exactly the way it had when I’d last seen it, except of course that Tera wasn’t there. The Worthram T-66 computer dominated the space, pressing up against the aft bulkhead and covering much of the starboard wall as well. Fastened to the forward bulkhead was a two-sectioned metal cabinet with the hard-copy printer on one side and a set of shelves crammed with reference material and datadisks on the other. Squeezed in between the two was the computer control desk where Tera fought to beat the archaic machine into submission.

And where, allegedly, she’d been sitting when she hit
her head hard enough for me to hear from the wraparound.

I went over and sat down in the chair. It wasn’t nearly as fancy as the one on the bridge; but then, in emergency maneuvers it was far more important for the pilot to stay in his seat than the computer jock. Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward and banged my head experimentally against the edge of the control panel.

Even granted that I was hearing it from a more personal angle, the thud didn’t sound anything like what I’d heard earlier. That one had definitely been metallic; this one sounded exactly like a skull whacked against a control board.

Rubbing thoughtfully at my forehead and the dull ache that had joined the chorus throughout my body, I looked slowly around the room. So there were two possibilities. Either Tera had coincidentally hit her head against something at about the same time I’d heard that metal-on-metal sound, or else she was lying. If the former, then I needed to look elsewhere; if the latter, there was something else in here that had in fact made the noise.

The problem was, what? Unlike Ixil’s machine shop, there weren’t any tools lying around or hanging on racks that might fall and clatter against the deck. There were plenty of cables and connectors, but they were for the most part light and rubber-coated. The cabinet was plain metal, but it was bolted to the bulkhead. Besides, if it had tipped over, it would have left a mess of manuals and datadisks scattered on the deck which she wouldn’t have had time to pick up. The manuals themselves, it went without saying, couldn’t possibly make such a sound.

Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, one of the manuals wasn’t what it seemed.

It took me the better part of ten minutes to pull each of the manuals off the shelf, examine it carefully, and
put it back in its place. Ten wasted minutes. None of them was anything other than it appeared, and none of them could have made that noise.