The Icarus Hunt (25 page)

We led him away from the door and the pedestrian traffic to the narrow passageway between the outfitter’s store and the next building over, Tera murmuring soothingly in his ear the whole way. When we were as far out of the public eye as we were likely to get, I dug out the cassette and fed him one of the borandis capsules. He seemed to be having trouble getting it down until Tera filled her cupped hands with rainwater and gave him a drink.

The effects were quite amazing. Almost immediately his trembling began to subside, and within a couple of minutes he seemed almost back to normal.

At least physically. “You sure took your sweet time about it,” he growled, breathing heavily as he brushed his wet hair impatiently out of his face. “Where the hell are we, anyway? You said we were going to Mintarius. This isn’t Mintarius. I know—I’ve been there.”

“Change of plans,” I told him shortly, peering closely at his eyes. His pupils, strongly dilated when we’d first grabbed him, seemed to be shrinking back to normal size.

“Yeah, well, that change of plans might have killed me,” he snapped. “Did you ever think of that? This place must be at least three hours farther than Mintarius was.”

“No, just two,” I said. He was well enough to travel, I decided; and even if he wasn’t, we were going. The sooner he was aboard the
Icarus
and shut away where I didn’t have to listen to him, the better. Taking his arm, I pulled him back out toward the main thoroughfare.

“Wait a minute, what’s the rush?” he growled, leaning back against my pull. His strength was also making a remarkable comeback. “We just got here. How about just for once sticking around some planet more than five minutes, huh?”

“Shut up and come on,” Tera snapped, grabbing his other arm. From the look of surprise that flicked across his face, I guessed she was digging her nails into his skin more than was necessary to maintain the grip. Certainly more than I was; but then, I’d only been irritated by his disappearing act for the past five minutes. Tera had had a whole hour of slogging through the rain in which to work up resentment.

Between her voice, her grip, and whatever he saw in her face, Shawn apparently realized that, too. He shut up as ordered, and docilely followed us down the street and through the spaceport gate. We caught the slideway and headed in.

I kept a careful eye behind us, as well as on the slideways that passed or intersected ours, but I saw no sign of anyone tailing us. I had thought Torsk might have second thoughts about letting me leave so easily, but apparently he’d decided that discretion was the better part of continued employment and had decided to leave well enough alone.

We reached the last freighter parked between us and the
Icarus;
and finally, it seemed, we were out of the woods. We had the borandis, we had Shawn, and no one had pointed toward me and yelled for the Patth. Now, if the
Icarus
had just been fueled properly, we would be in business. Hoping distantly that we wouldn’t find the fuelers still trying to figure out how to get the hose into the
Icarus
’s intake, we came around the side of the freighter.

The fuelers weren’t there. What was there was a group of ten Najik wearing the black-and-red tunics of customs officers. Standing by the entry ramp.

Waiting for us.

Beside me, Shawn made a strangled sort of sound deep in his throat. “Oh, God,” he breathed. “We’re dead.”

“Quiet,” I muttered back, taking a second, closer look at the scene, hoping it wasn’t as bad as I’d first thought.

It was. The ten Najik were still there, tall and spindly, with those hairy arms and legs that always made me think of giant four-limbed tarantulas. They were still wearing the customs uniforms, and there was an impatient look in their multiple eyes as they glanced over our direction through the pouring rain.

On the other hand, it could also have been worse. Locks or no locks, customs officers on the prowl normally didn’t bother to wait for the captain before going inside a target ship, but simply popped the hatch and apologized later for the damage if apologies were called for. Now, with my second look, I saw why they were still out here getting rained on.

Standing square in the center of the ramp, looking for all the world like a feathery-scaled Horatius holding
the bridge, was Chort. From the water running steadily off his fingertips it was clear he’d been there for a while; from the settled look of his stance, it was equally clear he was prepared to stay as long as necessary.

Normally, the presence of such an obstacle wouldn’t have slowed down a customs officer any more than a locked hatch would. But Chort was hardly your normal obstacle. He was a Craea; and with Crooea and their spacewalker skills so highly in demand around the Spiral, I could understand why the Najik were reluctant to offend him by shoving their way past into the ship. Especially a locked and apparently unoccupied ship.

Except that it wasn’t strictly unoccupied, and for a brief, time-stretched second I tried to think of how to turn that to our advantage. If Tera, Shawn, and I could walk casually past the
Icarus
as if we weren’t connected with it at all; and if I could get Ixil on the phone—

We hadn’t gotten two steps before any such decisions were taken out of my hands. “There,” Chort called out, pointing to me. “There is the captain. You may address your questions to him.”

I sighed. “You two stay back,” I murmured to Tera and Shawn. There was a rustle as Tera took Shawn’s left arm, pulling him subtly to a halt as I continued on toward the ramp. The Najik in the center of the group took a step toward me in response, and now that he was facing me I could see the insignia of a
gokra
—the equivalent of a senior lieutenant—on his collar. Apparently, Customs HQ was taking this very seriously.

“Good day,
Gokra
,” I greeted him as we sloshed through the puddles to within a few steps of each other. “Is there a problem?”

“You are the captain of the
Sleeping Beauty
?” he asked. His tone was decidedly neutral.

“I am,” I said, wondering fleetingly if Chort might
have slipped up and given them my real name, realized immediately that he hadn’t. If he had—if the Najik knew beyond a doubt what they had here—they wouldn’t be bothering with a few measly customs officers. They’d have an army battalion here, plus the local Patth ambassador and his staff, plus probably a military marching band thrown in for color. “Is there a problem?”

“You will unseal the hatch,” he said, waving back toward the
Icarus
. “You will tell your crewer to move aside, and you will allow us to go in.”

“Of course,” I said, not moving. “May I ask what the problem is?”

For a moment he seemed disinclined to tell me, but apparently decided there was no harm in playing by the proper Mercantile Code rules. “We have received a report that this ship is engaged in illegal smuggling activities,” he said.

The rest of me was soaking wet. My mouth, however, was suddenly dry. “Smuggling activities?” I managed, hoping I sounded more bewildered than guilty.

“Yes,” the
gokra
said. “Specifically, that you have unregistered gemstones hidden aboard.”

I stared at him, not needing to feign any bewilderment this time. “
Gem
stones?” I echoed. “That’s crazy. We’re not carrying any gemstones.”

“You will please tell your Craea to stand aside,” the Najik said, not even bothering to acknowledge my protest. I couldn’t blame him; he’d probably heard variants of it twice a day throughout his entire career. “Then you will unseal the hatch and allow us inside. I will need to see your personal identification, as well.”

“Of course,” I said, brushing some of the water out of my eyes and trying to figure out what the hell was going on. The gemstone story was utter nonsense, of course—you could fill fifty ships the size of the
Icarus
from deck to ceiling with Dritar opals without so much as lifting a Patth eyebrow. But if they suspected the
ship in front of us might be the
Icarus
, why bother with this subterfuge?

Answer: they wouldn’t. Which meant that they
didn’t
know it was the
Icarus
.

Which further meant the Patth weren’t involved in this; that it was a purely Najiki affair, with the whole gemstone thing being either a ridiculous bureaucratic error or else a horrifying coincidence. I’d chosen the name
Sleeping Beauty
for our current ship’s ID on the assumption that few people in the Spiral were going to name their ships after obscure nineteenth-century Russian ballets. It would be the height of irony if I’d not only guessed wrong, but had managed to pick the name of a bona fide smuggling ship in the bargain.

Unfortunately, in about five minutes the how and why of it weren’t going to matter anymore. There were a dozen different numbers etched on engines and consoles all over the ship, numbers that were on various lists all across the Spiral. If Cameron had done a proper job of creating a history for his phantom freighter, those numbers would be in a Mercantile file labeled
Icarus
, and the minute the Najik started checking them we would be finished. If Cameron hadn’t filed the numbers, it would simply take a little longer for the soap bubble to burst.

The Najik were still waiting. “Of course,” I said again, turning back and stepping to where Tera was still clinging to Shawn’s left arm. There was one very tenuous hope here, a hope based on Brother John’s offhanded comment earlier about the Najik, and my own hopefully not-too-cynical interpretation of it. “Let me get the hatch unlocked first and get us in out of the rain. Especially Geoff here—he’s not well.”

Someone in the group gave a deep-bass rumble, the Najiki equivalent of a guffaw, as I took Shawn’s right upper arm. Not an unreasonable response, given that Shawn looked more drunk than he did sick, and I took it as a good sign. Customs HQ might be taking this
seriously, but apparently not all the officers themselves were. Together Tera and I led Shawn through the Najiki cordon to the near end of the ramp. I keyed in the combination on the pad and, behind Chort, the hatch swung open. Without waiting for permission from the Najik, I moved us forward onto the ramp.

“Keep going,” I murmured to Tera, letting go my grip on Shawn’s arm and sliding my left arm through his, freeing up that hand while still giving the appearance that I was holding on to him. Extending my reach as much as I could, I dipped into my side jacket pocket for the folded city map I’d stuffed in there earlier. My other hand had already slipped inside my jacket for my pen; and as we passed out of the rain into the shelter of the wraparound I scribbled briefly on the front of the map.

“An interesting ship design,” the
gokra
commented from right behind me. He might be courteous enough to let me precede him into my own ship, but that didn’t mean he was going to let me get too much of a lead on him. “Ylpea-built, I presume?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. Now that he mentioned it, I could see an echo of the Ylpean love of French curves in the
Icarus
’s double-sphere shape. Had that been what Cameron had been going for? Regardless, something worth remembering. “I’m just the pilot, not the owner. I don’t know anything about its history.”

“Ah.”

We had moved along the wraparound, and were now coming up on the main sphere. Behind the
gokra
the rest of the Najik had filed in, with a silent Chort bringing up the rear. “But you’re not here for a history lesson anyway,” I added, pulling my ID folder from inside my jacket and surreptitiously sliding the map inside it. “Here’s my ID.”

I handed it to him, mentally crossing my fingers. If I’d guessed wrong, it wasn’t even going to take until
the Najik started calling in console numbers for me to be in big trouble.

He took the folder and opened it. The multiple eyes twitched in unison as he saw the map nestled inside; twitched again as he spotted the note I’d written on it. For a long minute he just stared at it. Once again I was suddenly conscious of the weight of my plasmic against my ribs, knowing full well that opening fire in such a confined space against ten armed opponents would be a quick way of committing suicide. Beside me, Shawn seemed to have stopped breathing, and I could sense a similar tension in Tera on his other side.

Then, almost delicately, the
gokra
closed the folder without even looking behind the map at my actual ID and handed it back to me. “Thank you,” he said, almost primly. “We won’t be long.”

And they weren’t. They wandered up and down the various corridors, glanced around the engine room and bridge, casually examined the curving metal of the cargo compartment and confirmed there was no entry hatch, and made a copy of Cameron’s fake Gamm sealed-cargo license to take for their files. Nicabar returned while they were poking around; I told him to get dried off and then get the thrusters ready to go. At one point, almost as an afterthought, the
gokra
also presented me with the bill for our fueling, explaining that he’d taken it from the ground crew when he arrived and found them waiting for my return. He didn’t seem surprised that I paid the bill in cash, or that there were five extra hundred-commark bills in the stack I gave him.

And that was it. Ten minutes after they’d come in out of the rain, they were out in it again, striding briskly toward the slideways and headed home.

“All right, I give up,” Tera murmured from my side as she and I stood in the wraparound and watched them go. “Who is Mr. Antoniewicz, and why won’t he be happy if they find anything?”

I grimaced. I hadn’t thought she would be able to read the note from her angle as I’d scribbled it on the map. “He’s just someone I know,” I said evasively. “He has a certain amount of influence around the Spiral.”

“I’d say he has a great deal of influence,” she said, eyeing me in a way I didn’t much care for. “You know him personally or professionally?”

“I’ve done some business with his people,” I said. A movement outside caught my eye: Everett, our last crewman still unaccounted for, had appeared around the bow of one of the nearby ships and was plodding our way, his big feet kicking up impressive splashes with each step. He looked tired; he must have worn himself out looking for Shawn. Not surprising, really, given that he probably considered it his fault the kid had gotten away in the first place. “Here comes Everett,” I added to Tera, hoping to forestall any further questions, as I dug out the fake cassette. “Tell him to check Shawn and see if he needs another dose yet—here’s the borandis. As soon as he’s aboard, seal the hatch and get to the computer room.”