The Icarus Hunt (21 page)

It was on the fifth or sixth such halt that I realized that what had up till now been occasional incautious scraping sounds had suddenly become something far more steady. Steady scraping noises, yet paradoxically quieter than they had been up till then.

My quarry knew I was here.

Earlier, I had come up with the image of being a spider on a wall. Now, suddenly, the image changed
from a spider to a fly. A fly pinned by a light against a very white wall. For a dozen heartbeats I squatted there motionlessly, sweating in the darkness as I strained to listen, trying to determine whether the sounds were moving toward or away from me. The latter would mean he was trying to escape, the former that he had yet another violent accident on his mind. And if there was one thing certain here, it was that I couldn’t afford to guess wrong.

For those dozen heartbeats I listened; and then I knew. The sounds were definitely moving away, probably downward to my right, though the echo effect made it difficult to tell for sure.

All the reasons why I shouldn’t have come in here after him in the first place once again flashed through my mind. Once again, I shoved them aside. I’d already lost several rounds to this man, and I was getting damned tired of it. Picking a vector that would theoretically intersect his, I set off after him.

To this point it had been a slow-motion chase. Now, it became an equally slow-motion game of hounds and hares. I was stopping ever more frequently to listen; but my quarry was doing the same, and as often as not I would pause only to find he had changed direction again. Doggedly, I kept at it, my earlier thought about the possibility of ambush spots never straying too far from my mind. So far our saboteur had shown no indication of being armed, but everyone else I’d run into on this trip had been and there was no reason to expect that whoever had been handing out the guns with such generosity would have neglected his friend here aboard the
Icarus
.

More than once I also considered banging the butt of my plasmic against the inner hull and trying to rouse the rest of the crew to help in the search. But by then I was so thoroughly lost that I had no idea whether I was even near enough to any of the others scattered around the ship for my pounding to do any good. And whether
any of them heard me or not, my playmate in here certainly would, and at the first sign of an attempted alarm he might well postpone his escape plan in favor of shutting me up first.

And then, in the distance ahead of me, I saw a faint glow appear, so faint that I wasn’t sure at first whether I was simply imagining it. My first thought was that our convoluted intertwined wanderings had brought us back to the vicinity of my cabin and the open inner-hull plate. But even as I realized that the combined gravity vector was wrong for that, the distant glow vanished, accompanied by a dull, metallic thud. A sound like two pieces of metal clanking hollowly against each other.

The same sound I’d heard from the wraparound after my talk with Nicabar, and had been trying to track down for nearly two days.

I kept going, but there was clearly no point in hurrying. My quarry had led me around the barn a couple of times and had now popped back through his rabbit hole to the safe anonymity of the
Icarus
proper. By the time I reached the spot where the glow had been, assuming I could pinpoint it at all, he would have the connectors back in place and it would be just one more of seventeen thousand other inner-hull plates.

A couple of minutes later I reached the vicinity where I estimated the glow had been. As expected, every one of the hull plates in the area looked exactly alike, and I still had no idea where exactly I was. Briefly, I thought about trying to dig my way through, but a single glance was all it took to see that the hull-plate connectors couldn’t be removed from this side.

But maybe there was another way to mark my place here.

I played my light across the inner-hull plates over my head, searching among the haphazard arrangement of piping and wires until I found what I was looking for: the telltale power wires and coax cable of an intercom, their ends disappearing through the inner hull
half a meter to the side of my estimated position for my quarry’s escape hatch.

I’d left my multitool back on my cabin floor, but the contact edge of my plasmic’s power pack was rough enough for my purposes, and it took only a few minutes of work for me to abrade the insulation on the power wires enough to leave a small section of bare wire on each of them. Putting the plasmic aside, I touched the two bare spots together.

There was no spark—the power level was far too low for that—but what the operation lacked in pyrotechnic dramatics it more than made up in personal satisfaction. Somewhere in the bowels of the
Icarus
, I knew, a circuit breaker had just popped in response to the short circuit I’d created. All I had to do was find which one, and I’d have my suspect intercom identified. And with it, the saboteur’s rabbit hole.

Making sure the bare spots stayed together, I wrapped the wires as best I could to hold them that way. On most starships the main computer’s nursemaid program would pick this up in a flash and send a maintenance flag to both the bridge and engine-room status boards. With the
Icarus
’s archaic system, though, I doubted that it had such a program. Even if it did, there would be no way to reset the circuit breaker until the wires were unjinxed.

Which left only the problem of finding my way back to my cabin and hunting up the appropriate breaker box before my adversary tumbled to what I’d done and fixed the short circuit.

Now that I was no longer engaged in a chase, the navigational task was straightforward if a bit tedious. Holding my light loosely by finger and thumb, I held it near the edge of the inner hull and watched which way it tried to turn. That gave me the direction of ship’s down, and I headed that way until further measurements with my impromptu pendulum showed I was at the sphere’s South Pole. Picking a direction at random,
I moved along it for a few meters, then began circling at that latitude until I spotted the glow of my cabin light filtering through the opening. Three minutes after that, I was back.

With everything else that had happened, I almost forgot to check my own intercom’s coax cable for tampering, which had, after all, been the original purpose of this exercise. Not that I was expecting to find anything else, but for completeness it seemed the proper thing to do. A cursory examination was all it took to discover that it had indeed been tapped into.

I climbed back into my cabin, noting as I did so the curious fact that the hull’s gravitational field seemed to hold on to me more strongly now that I’d been all the way into it than it had before I’d first landed on the outer hull. Possibly it was just my imagination; but on the other hand this field was so unlike anything I’d ever experienced anyway, I was perfectly willing to grant it one more bit of inexplicable magic. Between this and the Lumpy Brothers’ exotic weaponry, the strange technology was starting to get a little too thick on the ground for my taste.

Putting hull-plate connectors back in with a multitool was a different skill entirely from taking them out, but it wasn’t that hard and I wasn’t going to bother with more than the four corners for now anyway. A few minutes of leafing through Ixil’s sheaf of schematics and I had the proper breaker box identified: up on the top deck with the rest of the crew cabins.

The general stir that had accompanied Ixil’s injuries had long since faded away, and the
Icarus
was again quiet. I climbed the aft ladder to the top deck and moved silently down the corridor, half expecting one of the cabin doors to open and someone to take a potshot at me. But no one did, and I reached the breaker box without incident. It was recessed into the bulkhead at the forward end of the corridor with five other breaker boxes, just beyond the forward ladder. It was also
quite small, though given that it apparently only contained the ship’s twenty-six intercom breakers I shouldn’t have expected anything very big.

Not surprisingly, given the
Icarus
’s designer’s overly optimistic faith in the goodness of his fellow men, none of the breaker boxes was locked. The hinges squeaked slightly as I pulled the proper one open, but not loudly enough to wake up any of the sleepers nearby. With a tingling sense of anticipation, I shined my light inside.

According to Ixil’s schematic, the box held twenty-six low-voltage circuit breakers. At the moment, however, all it held was twenty-six circuit-breaker sockets.

I gazed at the empty box for a few more seconds, twenty-twenty hindsight turning my anticipation into a sour taste in my mouth. With the wires still touching behind the intercom, the saboteur had, of course, been unable to reset the telltale breaker. So he’d simply taken them all out.

Score one more round to him. This was getting to be a very bad habit.

With the same faint squeak of the hinges I closed the cabinet door again. There might be some spare breakers aboard, but since virtually nothing ever went wrong with the things there very well might not be. Besides, anyone smart enough to have anticipated my actions in the ’tweenhull space was probably already ahead of me there, too. By the time I found the spares—or found and cannibalized another set of same-sized ones from a different box—he would undoubtedly have the intercom wires fixed again.

The walk back down to my cabin seemed longer somehow than the upward trip had been a few minutes earlier. I retrieved a connector tool from the mechanics room on my way and finished sealing the hull plate back into position, then lay back down on my bunk and tried to think. I thought for a while, but it didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere, so I went back up to the mid deck to check on the bridge.

Tera was still faithfully on duty, or was once again faithfully on duty if she’d been the one scooting around between the
Icarus
’s hulls. I volunteered to take over for her while she grabbed something to eat from the dayroom, and as she passed by me I tried to see if I could spot any oil stains on her clothing or smell any lingering aromas. There was nothing out of the ordinary that I could detect.

But then, I didn’t seem to have picked up any stains or smells while I was between decks, either. Inconclusive, either way.

As soon as she was out of sight I did a complete check of the bridge, equipment and course heading both. Tera was still reasonably high on my list of suspects; and even if she wasn’t the one sporting the brand-new collector’s set of circuit breakers, there was no reason a saboteur who liked fiddling with intercoms couldn’t extend his hobby to more vital equipment.

But everything checked out perfectly. Sinking wearily into the command chair, I propped my elbows on the armrests and my chin on my hands and stared at the hypnotic flickering of the lights on the status display until Tera returned. We exchanged good-nights, and I went back to my cabin. Giving up my efforts at thinking as at least temporarily unproductive, I lay down on my bunk and went to sleep.

Potosi was the most populous world we’d hit yet, big enough that it was no longer a colony but a full-fledged member of the Najiki Archipelago, a series of thirty or so Najiki worlds scattered across several hundred light-years and winding its way through at least three other species’ claimed regions or spheres of influence. That the other species tolerated what might otherwise have been seen as an unacceptable intrusion on their sovereign territories was a tribute to Najiki diplomacy and bargaining skill.

That, plus their unique gift for creating wealth and their willingness to share that wealth with governments who were generous enough in turn to grant them right-of-way corridors through their space. The cynics, of course, would put it rather more strongly.

There were five major InterSpiral-class spaceports on the Potosi surface, the largest and most modern of which was heavily dominated by the Patth mercantile fleet. As soon as we were in range, I contacted the controller and asked for a landing bay in the port farthest
away from it. Under some circumstances, I knew, a request that specific might have raised eyebrows, or whatever the Najik used for eyebrows. But the Patth near monopoly on shipping had hit this area particularly hard, leaving an almost-universal hatred for them in its wake, and I knew that the controllers would take it in stride.

Unfortunately, that same universal hatred also meant that every other incoming non-Patth ship was also making the same demand; and most of
them
were regular visitors here. In the end, in a result that fit all too well with the depressing pattern of the entire trip so far, not only were we not granted a slot half a continent away as requested, but were instead put down square in the middle of the Patth hub.

Once again, I told the rest of the crew to stay aboard while I went out shopping. Once again, they weren’t at all happy about it.

“I don’t think you understand the situation,” Everett rumbled, staring disapprovingly down at me from his raised position on the slanted deck. “It seems to me that if we could simply take Shawn to the port med center and show them his symptoms—”

“We could then all sit around a quiet room somewhere,” I finished for him. “Explaining to the nice Najik from the Drug Enforcement Division just how it was he got a borandis addiction in the first place. Remember the hijacking threat—this would not be a good place to make ourselves conspicuous.”

He snorted. “No one would try a hijacking here in the middle of a major spaceport.”

“You must be kidding,” I growled. “With strangers wandering around all over the place, and no one knowing anyone else, either spacers or ground personnel? It’s a perfect spot for it.”

His lips compressed briefly. “What about you?” Tera spoke up, gesturing at my newly recolored hair and eyes and the set of false scars I’d applied to my
cheek. “You think that disguise is going to get you past the people looking for you?”

“Someone has to go hunt up a drug dealer,” I reminded her patiently. “Would you rather do it yourself?”