The Icarus Hunt (35 page)

“You’re right, Chort,” I said with a sigh, gazing hard at his face and wishing like hell I knew how to decipher that alien expression. “The Patth do indeed want this ship. They think something aboard could be a threat to the economic empire they’ve carved out over the past fifteen years.”

“Is that true?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

For a long minute he sat rigidly, his head bowed toward the table, his fingertips pressed tightly together. That one I knew: a Craean posture of deep thought. I stayed as motionless as he was, afraid that any movement on my part might break the spell, letting the silence
stretch out and wishing even harder I could read Craean expressions. Nicabar had threatened to jump ship if he learned we were carrying contraband. Would Chort make the same threat—or worse, actually carry it out—now that he knew we were in serious danger of bringing Patth anger down on the Crooea?

With a suddenness that startled me, Chort looked back up at me. “This threat to the Patth,” he said. “Could it be of benefit to the Crooea?”

“If it actually is the threat the Patth think it is—and that’s the part I’m not sure of—then the answer is yes.”

“
Would
it be of benefit to the Crooea?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know,” I had to admit. “If it were up to me, you would certainly be one of those to benefit, given your help on this trip. But I can’t even begin to make a promise like that.”

“Ship Master Borodin implied that would be the case,” he reminded me. “Is he not trustworthy?”

“Oh, he’s trustworthy enough,” I assured him. “But we don’t know where he is right now, and the decision may be taken out of his hands. Especially if someone else gets hold of the
Icarus
before we can deliver it to Earth.”

He seemed to consider that. “And if we are able to deliver it to Earth?”

“Again, I can’t make any promises,” I said, feeling sweat breaking out on my forehead. With the perceived future of his entire race hanging in the balance, Chort was clearly figuring the odds and weighing his options.

Unfortunately, there were only three options I could see for him to choose from: jump ship, help us fly the
Icarus
to Earth, or betray us to the Patth the first chance he got in the hopes of buying economic security for his people. Only short-term security, of course—in the long run the Patth were no more grateful than any other species. But balanced against their demonstrated ability for long-term animosity, even a short-term gain
was probably the most logical way to go. In Chort’s place, it was probably the way I would take.

And if he did …

I was suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the weight of my plasmic against my rib cage. We couldn’t afford to have Chort jump ship. Period. Whether he planned to turn us in or simply hoped to vanish into the sunset before the Patth found us, we couldn’t have him running loose with what he knew about the
Icarus
and its crew. We would have to keep him aboard, locked up or tied up if necessary, until this macabre little hide-and-seek game was over.

Abruptly, Chort turned his head toward the back of the dayroom and the hull that lay beyond it. “There is another hull ridge forming,” he said. “You had best stop the ship.”

I hadn’t heard or felt anything, but I didn’t doubt his judgment. I was on my feet even before he finished talking, and was out the dayroom door and halfway to the bridge before it even occurred to me that I hadn’t doubted his judgment. I was on the bridge and reaching for the red
KILL
button when the characteristic screech echoed in from the hull.

It was only much later, after the ridge had been repaired and we were on our way again, that I realized he hadn’t come back to finish our conversation.

Or, rather, we
had
finished the conversation, and I simply hadn’t known it. Just as I didn’t know now which way he had decided to jump on the three choices set out in front of him.

For a while I thought about calling him on the intercom, or even confronting him about it in his cabin. But on further reflection I decided against doing either. I still couldn’t offer him any of the assurances he obviously wanted, and without any such promise there was nothing more I could say to induce him to stick with the
Icarus
. Pressing him further would accomplish
nothing except to make both of us feel uncomfortable at the effort.

Anyway, we were less than three days out from Utheno. Sometime within the first hour after landfall, it would be easy enough to figure out which way he’d jumped.

I didn’t find out within the first hour after landfall on Utheno. I didn’t find out for the simple reason that we never made landfall on Utheno. Though I didn’t know it then, it was going to be a long time before we made landfall anywhere.

My first hint of trouble should have been the cacophony of radio transmissions that lit up the official-frequencies section of my comm board as the hyperspace cutter array sliced the
Icarus
back into space-normal. I couldn’t read any of it through the encryption, of course, but the sheer volume of messages should have told me something big was happening.

At the same time the comm board was lighting up with chatter, the visual displays were also listing out a horrendous tangle of ship traffic wrapped around the planet in a hundred different holding orbits. A recorded message on the main inbound-information channel apologized for the delay, cited a pair of collisions and a ground-station sensor failure as the cause
of the backup, and promised to speed things up as quickly as possible.

And in an uncharacteristic burst of credulity, I believed them. Given that official confusion was made to order for us, I keyed in the orbit slot I was given and headed in.

“Crowded,” of course, was a relative term when applied to planetary holding orbits. Our designated slot was a good fifty kilometers from anything else, with the only two ships at even that distance being a Najiki freighter fifty kilometers to port and a bulky Tleka cargo hauler the same distance to starboard. More from habit than anything else, I keyed for mid-range magnification and had a good look at both ships.

And it was as I was looking at the Tleka cargo hauler that the warning bells belatedly started going off in the back of my head.

I keyed the intercom for the engine room. “Revs, what’s status on the stardrive?”

“Down and green,” he said. “Why?”

“Get it up and green,” I told him shortly. “Fast.”

There was just the barest hesitation. “Startup procedure begun,” he said. “What’s the trouble?”

“We’re being directed into a slot fifty klicks from a Tleka cargo hauler,” I told him, still studying that display. “I can’t be certain, but it looks to me like there’s something lurking around the side of the hauler where I can’t see it.”

“As in a Najiki Customs cruiser?”

“Or something even bigger,” I agreed tightly.

“So why head in at all?” he asked. “Turn around and get us out of here.”

“And let them know we know they’re there?” I countered. “
And
that we’ve got guilty consciences to boot?”

“You’re right,” he conceded reluctantly. “So we act innocent?”

“As the driven snow,” I said. “At least until you’ve
got the stardrive up and running. Let’s just hope they can’t pull any of the telltales with their own sensor readings.”

“These thrusters are pretty noisy, and across a big chunk of the spectrum,” he pointed out. “That ought to mask the stardrive, at least at a fifty-klick distance. Okay; I read thirteen more minutes to full green. I’ll see if I can shave a couple of minutes off that.”

“Good. Do it.”

I took my time bringing us in the rest of the way, managing to eat up nearly five of Nicabar’s thirteen minutes before we finally settled into our designated slot. I kept two of my displays trained on our companions to either side, wondering which of them would make the first move.

The Najiki freighter took that honor. Even as I ran thrust to the forward maneuvering vents to kill some of our momentum, I saw a large side hatch slide open, and three dark gray starfighters appeared. They paused a moment as if getting their bearings, then grouped into formation and headed straight for us.

I keyed the intercom for all-ship. “This is McKell,” I announced. “Everyone get strapped down and find something to hang on to. We’ve got unfriendly company. Revs?”

“Still at least six minutes to go,” he reported. “Probably closer to seven. How long till they get here?”

“Depends on how much of a hurry they’re in,” I told him, watching the fighters closely, hoping even now that it was a false alarm, that they were actually interested in someone else entirely. But they were still coming, and showed no sign that they might suddenly veer off somewhere else. “Keep those thrusters running hot—they get even a hint that we’re firing up the stardrive and they’ll be all over us.”

The words were barely out of my mouth when the Najik made it official. “Freighter
Icarus
, this is Utheno Military Command,” a calm Najiki voice came over
the comm speaker. “You are ordered to shut down your thrusters and prepare to be boarded.”

“The thruster noise must be hurting their ears,” Nicabar said mildly. “What now?”

“We ignore them,” I told him. “That came in broadcast, not narrow beam, and our ID says we’re the
Stewed Brunswick.
It may be they’re still not sure about us and are trying to spark a guilty reaction. Anyway, we don’t dare shut down the thrusters now.”

“You’re going to risk drawing fire,” he warned.

“Not yet,” I said, shifting my attention from the incoming starfighters back to the Tleka cargo hauler. It was a classic, time-tested maneuver: a group of grass-beaters in front noisily and ostentatiously driving the quarry back into the waiting arms of the hunter lurking silently in the bushes. In the bushes, or behind a Tleka cargo hauler, as the case might be.

Except that in this case the hunter was no longer hiding. He was there in full view, his port-side weapons array just coming up around the cargo hauler’s dorsal spine: a Najiki pocket destroyer, its zebra-camo striping giving it an almost-delicate look. As warships went, I suppose, it wasn’t much to brag about; from where we currently stood, it looked about the size of Paris.

“Watch for them to target ion beams,” Ixil’s voice warned from behind me.

“Thank you,” I said, trying not to sound too sarcastic as I threw a quick glance over my shoulder. He was striding in through the doorway, gazing at my displays, his expression as glacially stolid as ever. The ferrets dug in on his shoulders were betraying all that surface calm, though, twitching to beat the band. “You have anything else in the way of insightful advice to offer?” I added.

“I meant as opposed to lasers or disabler missiles,” he said, stepping to the plotting table. “If they’re acting on their own against suspected smugglers they won’t be
as careful to minimize damage as they will if they’re doing this at the behest of the Patth.”

I was about to inform him that they’d already identified us as the
Icarus
when they helpfully made the point for me. “Freighter
Icarus
, this is your final warning,” the Najiki voice announced firmly. “Shut down your thrusters or we will open fire.”

And that one, unfortunately,
had
come in tight beam, for our ears and no one else’s. Which meant they knew who we were, and all hopeful thoughts of fishing expeditions were gone.

As was anything to be gained by playing innocent. “Hang on,” I warned Ixil, bracing myself and throwing power to the thrusters, keying the exhaust to the forward maneuvering vents. Our forward speed dropped precipitously; and with it went our orbital stability. Even as we dropped back behind the incoming fighters, we also began to fall toward the planetary surface five thousand kilometers beneath us.

Unfortunately, “precipitously” was also a sadly relative term. With a fighter or even the enhanced thrust/mass ratio I’d built into the
Stormy Banks
, such a maneuver might have caught our opponents at least partly by surprise. But with the flying cement bag that was the
Icarus
, we didn’t behave so much like a leaping jaguar as we did a hippo jumping backward from a dead stop in deep mud. I could picture the Najik in the fighters and destroyer watching our elephantine escape attempt and laughing themselves silly.

They could laugh all they liked. Their logical assumption—at least, what I hoped was their logical assumption—would be that we hadn’t started activating our stardrive until they’d sprung their trap, from which assumption they would further assume they still had ten to twelve minutes in which to short-circuit that activation and gather us serenely into the hunter’s waiting arms. What they hopefully hadn’t tumbled to yet was that we were in fact less than four minutes from
escape. All I had to do was keep them off us for those four minutes, and we would be home free.

All in all, though, that was a very big
if
. Especially since the Najik in charge of this operation was apparently not the type to dawdle simply because he had a little time to kill. The starfighters were swinging to match my maneuver even before I’d completed it; and as they closed up ranks again faint green lines erupted from the ion-beam ports beneath their noses and tracked toward us.

I threw power to the
Icarus
’s port-side vents, giving us a sideways yaw, hoping to keep the hyperspace cutter array at our bow out of the ion beams. But we turned every bit as ponderously as we braked; and even as I swore helplessly under my breath the beams converged on the cutter array.

And that was that. Clenching my left hand into a fist, I continued the useless maneuvering, waiting for the buildup of localized charge and the subsequent crack of a high-voltage spark that would scramble the array’s electronics and make all of Nicabar’s minute-shaving so much wasted effort.

The beams momentarily drifted off target as I dropped us farther into Utheno’s gravity well, converged again as the Najiki gunners reestablished their aim. Any minute now and the spark would come; and after this much charge buildup it was likely to be a memorable one. Distantly, I wondered if it might even be strong enough to jump some of the current across the fail-safes and fry my bridge controls in the bargain.