The Icarus Hunt (36 page)

And then I frowned, a brand-new set of warning bells going off in the back of my head. There was something wrong here, something ominously wrong. I knew how ion beams worked—I’d been on the receiving end of them more times than I cared to remember—and these were taking
way
too long to show their teeth. I keyed the hull-monitor cameras toward the bow and focused in on the cutter array.

And felt the breath catch in my throat. The ion beams were converging on the
Icarus
, all right, just as the sensor display showed. But in the last meter or so before they reached the array, something completely unexpected was happening. Instead of maintaining their nice clean collimation, the beams were defocusing madly, the ions scattering wildly to hell and gone. Which meant that instead of building up the sort of localized charge that would create a devastating spark, all they were doing was dumping ions into the hull plates, where the charge could cheerfully build up without doing much of anything at all.

“It’s the hull,” Ixil said suddenly, his voice sounding as awestruck as I felt. “The radial gravitational field in the hull.”

And then, of course, it all clicked into place. Chort’s spacewalks had shown that the alien gravitational field inside the main hull was too weak to be felt outside the ship, but apparently the effect was strong enough to disrupt a beam of subatomic particles. Either that, or it was something else in the field generator that was flummoxing them.

And suddenly we had a chance again. Lunging to my control board, I keyed for more yaw. “McKell?” Nicabar called over the intercom. “What are you doing?”

“The fighters’ ion beams aren’t catching the cutter array,” I called back, shifting my attention over to the destroyer. It was no longer waiting patiently for us to be driven into its arms, but was burning space in our direction, its own ion beam blazing away even though it was still well out of range. “I suspect the destroyer’s beam won’t affect it, either; but it almost certainly
will
be able to punch through the engineering hull and scramble your systems back there. So I’m turning the
Icarus
to put the main hull between you and them.”

“Which will then leave the engine section open to the fighters,” Ixil murmured from the plotting table. “And they’re closer than the destroyer.”

“But their beams are also weaker than the destroyer’s,” I reminded him. “There’s an even chance the heavier metal back there will protect us from them. Anyway, we don’t have a lot of choices right now. Revs, where’s the countdown?”

“One minute twenty,” he said. “At the rate that destroyer’s closing, it’s going to be close.”

“Yes,” I murmured, slowing our spin as the
Icarus
’s aft end turned to the incoming fighters, feeling sweat breaking out on my forehead. The fighters probably didn’t have the kind of sensor magnification that would let them see just how peculiarly their ion beams were behaving. The destroyer, unfortunately, just as probably did. Sooner or later, the commander would get around to taking a close look at our cutter array and realize that it wasn’t just poor aim on his gunners’ part that was saving us. If he did, or even if he didn’t, at some point he would open up with heavier weaponry rather than risk letting us get away.

Unless someone gave him a reason why that might be a bad idea.

I keyed to the frequency the Najiki orders had come in on. “Najiki Task Force, this is the
Icarus
,” I announced. “I’d be careful with those ion beams if I were you. We have a lot of sensitive electronics aboard, and I’ll make you a small wager the Patth will be extremely unhappy if you damage any of them.”

“Freighter
Icarus
, this is Utheno Military Command,” the Najiki voice came back. It didn’t sound nearly so calm now as it had earlier. “This is your final warning. You will shut down your thrusters or we will shut them down for you.”

“Of course, I’m sure it’s occurred to you that anything the Patth are this anxious to get hold of will be equally valuable to anyone else who possesses it,” I went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “The Najiki Archipelago, for instance. Your superiors might want to think
long and hard about that before you just turn us over to them.”

“Freighter
Icarus
, you will shut down your thrusters,” the voice came back. A being with a one-track mind, obviously, and not one to be drawn into a discussion of political matters outside his control.

On the other hand, he hadn’t opened up with his lasers yet, either. If he held off another forty seconds, I decided as I keyed off the comm, I could call this one a victory. “Revs?”

“Still on track,” he reported. “I’m getting small sparks from the starfighters’ ion beams, but so far they’re confined to the peripheral equipment. What in hell’s name is keeping the destroyer off the cutter array?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said, one eye on the dark stardrive section of my control board and the other on my displays. I was still pulling evasive maneuvers, if that was the right term for the graceless wallowing that was all the
Icarus
was capable of; but if the destroyer was showing a new caution toward us, the same could not be said of the fighters. They had increased their speed and split up their formation, still playing their ion beams across the engine section but clearly intent on bypassing that area, driving up along the hull from the rear, and converging on the cutter array from three different directions.

And while they might give their ion beams one last chance once they got there, they wouldn’t waste much more time with them before switching over to their lasers and what at that range would be an almost-trivial surgical-quality operation. “Revs?” I barked.

“Thirty seconds,” he called.

“We don’t have thirty seconds,” I snapped back. The fighters were sweeping past the engine section now, keeping close to the hull in case we had some recessed weaponry nodes hidden among the maneuvering vents. “We’ve got maybe ten.”

“Can’t do it,” he insisted. “Try to stall them off.”

I clenched my teeth. “Then hang on.”

And jamming my hands across the whole line of control keys, I sent the thruster exhaust blasting out the entire group of maneuvering vents at once.

The
Icarus
jerked like a horse trying to dash madly off in all directions. But even with that, our reaction wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as that of the three fighters. Caught directly in the multiple blasts of superheated gas, they wobbled outward, their nice neat pacing vectors thrown completely off target. Then they were out of the gusts, their own maneuvering vents blowing steam as they fought to correct from the outward boosts they’d just been given. I slapped all the vents back off except for the main starboard ones, sending the
Icarus
into another of its slow-motion turns. One of the fighters’ tail fins scraped against our hull as he wasn’t quite able to get out of the way in time, and all of them were forced to again correct their vectors. I caught the muted reflection from one of the fighters as the armorplate irised away from its forward laser cluster.

And then, with a similarly muted but far more welcome flicker of light, the stardrive section of my control board lit up. “Up and green,” Nicabar shouted.

I didn’t answer; my fingers were already jabbing at the activation switches and the preprogrammed course code I’d laid in. There was a noise from the comm—the Najiki commander, no doubt, saying something extremely rude—and then the cutter array did its electronic magic, and the stars vanished from around us.

“Well done,” Ixil murmured.

He’d spoken too soon. I was just starting to breathe again when the deck under me lurched violently. “Revs?” I snapped.

“Spark damage,” he called back. “Half the calibrations have been scrambled. We have to shut down.”

“Do it,” I said, keying off the controls from my end.

The stars reemerged, only this time with no planet or nearby sun anywhere in sight. I gave the area a quick scan, but it was pure reflex: Our brief flight had put us in the center of nowhere, light-years from anywhere. For the moment, at least, we were completely safe from any outside trouble.

“Okay, we’re closed down,” Nicabar reported a minute later.

“Damage?”

“Doesn’t look like anything major,” he said. “A few popped circuit breakers, probably a tube or two that’ll need replacing, but I know we’ve got spares. And of course, a lot of recalibrating will have to be done. Time-consuming but relatively straightforward.”

“Ixil can help with that,” I told him, closing the rest of my board down to standby. No point leaving it active; we weren’t going anywhere for a while.

“That can wait,” Nicabar said. “You said you’d tell me later how we were shrugging off those ion beams. Well, it’s later.”

I grimaced. But he was right. It was time I clued the rest of them in on just what it was we were sitting on here. “It is indeed,” I acknowledged, keying the intercom for all-ship. “Everyone, get your stuff shut down and then assemble in the dayroom. I’ve got a little story to tell you.”

They sat in silence, looking slightly sandbagged for the most part, while I gave them the whole thing.

Most of it, anyway. I left out Tera’s true identity and inside-person status, and the fact that Cameron—Alexander Borodin, rather—had been a secret passenger for the first part of our trip. I also glossed over the part Tera had played in the various incidents that had had me tied up in mental knots for most of that time. The latter part didn’t take much glossing, actually, given
that Ixil and I were the only ones who’d known about most of them anyway.

I also left Jones’s death out of the picture, leaving it as an implied accident. Confronting a group of suspects with the knowledge that one of them is a killer might be an effective way to spark a guilty reaction, but at the moment my foremost interest was getting the
Icarus
to Earth, and for that I needed full cooperation from all of them. Time enough to sort out Jones’s murder if and when we made it that far.

While the rest were busy looking flabbergasted, Tera was equally busy glaring at me in menacing silence, from which I gathered she thought I should have cleared this grand revelation with her before I let everyone else in on the big secret. I could sympathize with that attitude; but if I
had
consulted her she would probably have forbidden me to do so. Then I would have had to go directly against her wishes, which would have left her madder at me than she was already.

To say they were stunned would have been an understatement. To say they were suspicious and unbelieving, however, would have been right on the money. “You must think we’re idiots, McKell,” Shawn snorted when I’d finished. “Mysterious alien technology? Oh, come
on
.”

“And with the whole of the Patth race panting down our necks to get at it,” Everett added, shaking his head. “Really, McKell, you should have had time to come up with something better than this one.”

“I expected this reaction,” I said, looking over at Ixil. “You have the necessary?”

Silently, he produced the connector tool he’d brought from the mechanics room. Just as silently, he crossed to the back of the dayroom and removed one of the inner hull plates.

One by one, they went down into the ’tweenhull area to experience the alien gravitational field for themselves.
Some took longer than others; but by the time they came up they were all convinced.

They were also, to a man, scared right down to their socks.

“This is crazy,” Everett said, hunched over a tall whiskey sour. Alcoholic drinks of one sort or another had somehow been the beverage of choice for each of them as he came out of the ’tweenhull area. “Crazy. This is a job for professionals, not a bunch of loose spacers picked off the Meima streets.”

“Believe me, I’d like nothing better than to have a squad of EarthGuard Marines on this instead of us,” I agreed wholeheartedly. “But they’re not here. We are.”

“I presume you realize that if the Patth get their hands on us we’re dead,” Nicabar pointed out darkly, peering into his own drink. “Not a chance in the world they’d let us go. Not with what we know about this ship.”

“And what
do
we know about it?” Shawn countered, his fingertips tapping nervously on the table. “Seriously, what do we know? McKell says he thinks it’s an alien stardrive. So what makes
him
the big expert?”

“No, he may be right,” Chort said before I could reply. “Early Craean stardrives used a very similar dual-sphere design, with an open resonance chamber as one of them. Though much smaller, of course.”

“Yeah, but did they work?” Shawn asked. “
I
never heard of any design like that.”

“Which means it can’t possibly have been of any use,” Tera murmured. “Not if
you
never heard of it.”

Shawn turned a glare toward her. “Double-sphere designs work just fine,” Nicabar put in, the firm authority in his tone cutting short any further argument. “The only reason they’re not used is that the Möbius-strip arrangement is more stable.”

“Terrific,” Shawn said with a sniff. “An unstable stardrive. Just what we need. Just what the Spiral needs.”

“It’s not unstable that way,” Nicabar insisted, starting to sound annoyed. “The theory shows that oscillations can form in the upper harmonics under high-stress conditions, that’s all.”

Shawn snorted. “Sure, but if—”

“Look, if you two want to discuss stardrive theory, go do it on your own time,” Tera cut him off acidly. “What
I
want to know is how we’re going to get through this gauntlet and to Earth.”

“Why Earth?” Shawn demanded. Clearly, he was intent on alienating everybody aboard today. I wondered uneasily if we were getting low on his medicine again. “Just because the majority of us are human?”

“Speaking as one who is not,” Ixil interjected calmly, “I would say that Borodin’s ownership of the device should adequately define our final destination and cargo disposition.”

“What ownership?” Shawn countered. “He dug it out of a desert on someone else’s planet. What gives him any more rights than the Ihmisits who already live there?”