The Icarus Hunt (40 page)

Of course, if Cameron wasn’t in here, then we were back to the sticky question of where in blazes he’d gotten to. If he’d left the
Icarus
at Potosi, voluntarily or otherwise, then he was likely in worse trouble than if he were in here. In fact, as I thought about it, I realized his abduction on Potosi might explain why the Najik had identified the
Icarus
so quickly at Utheno. Though that could equally be the Potosi customs report catching up with us.

On the other hand, whether Cameron was in here or not, we still had to figure out how the stardrive worked if we were going to pussyfoot our way out of the Patth net. Still, it would definitely be the better part of valor for me carefully to back out of here at this point and postpone any other plans until Pax came back with his report.

And then, even as I gave the light one last sweep around, I heard a soft, distant sound. Unlike the noise I’d heard while talking with Tera, though, this one was very familiar. It was the screech of a startled Kalixiri ferret, the kind of verbal reaction that usually went quickly up the tonal scale and then just as quickly back down again.

Only this one didn’t. It went halfway up the scale, then abruptly cut off.

And with the sudden silence ringing in my ears, I stared into the darkness, feeling sweat beading up on my forehead and neck. There hadn’t been even the whisper of a trailing edge to that call; no whimper, no gasp, no sigh. None of the sounds that should have come from the last escaping bit of air in Pax’s lungs as he collapsed into sleep or unconsciousness.

Which meant he hadn’t collapsed into sleep or unconsciousness. He was dead.

And something in here had killed him.

I looked back toward the access hole, the movement of my head sending droplets of sweat flying off my face to drift their way to oblivion among the maze of circuitry. If Tera had heard that abbreviated death cry, she would be sticking her head into view any second now to demand an explanation. But the seconds ticked by, and there was no Tera, and I realized with decidedly mixed feelings that I alone knew what had just happened.

Which meant that the decision of what to do next was also mine alone. Probably just as well. Wiping the surface layer of sweat off my forehead with my left
sleeve, I eased the blocking wires out of the way and headed cautiously in.

I’d told Ixil and Tera that we weren’t in any particular hurry here. With Pax’s screech echoing through my memory, I was even less inclined to take unnecessary chances. I kept it slow and careful, checking every wire and conduit in my path, both visually and with my field sensor, before getting anywhere near it. Before moving it aside I also made sure to trace along it as best I could through the tangle, trying to see where it intersected the wall or other components and making sure it had enough slack for me to safely push it aside without straining anything. If it didn’t have that slack, if it even looked marginal, I changed course and found another route.

It took me nearly an hour to work my way through that first three and a half meters; and I was just beginning to wonder if I was going to be able to do the whole ten meters to the center in one try when I eased through a gap in a fish-net-style mesh and abruptly found myself in open space.

I held on to the mesh with one hand, balancing myself parallel to it in the zero gee, and played my light around. The space wasn’t quite as empty, I could see now, as it had looked in that first glance. A dozen different cable loops that had worked their way through the holes in the mesh were bobbing gently around the edges, looking like some exotic form of seaweed drifting in a calm current. Half a dozen of the lighted displays I’d seen against the walls were also at the edge of the open area, fastened by wires through the mesh and facing inward toward the center; from one of them a slender, articulated black-and-silver-banded extension arm stretched right to the point six and a half meters away from me where the center of the sphere should be. All the display lights were red, giving the area an eerie, blood-tinged look. I moved my light around the room again, steeling myself for what would probably
be the very unpleasant sight of a dead ferret. But there was no sign of his body. Apparently, he hadn’t made it through the wire maze before he died.

And then, abruptly, I caught my breath, swinging my light back toward the center again. So intent was I on looking for Pax’s body that it had only now occurred to me that there should have been something else in here: the resonance crystal and control board that Nicabar and Chort said a stardrive like this was supposed to come equipped with.

Unfortunately, this one wasn’t.

Carefully, I ran my light over every square centimeter of the place, a tight knot twisting like a case-hardened drill bit into my stomach. I’d pinned a lot on Tera’s assumption that the
Icarus
concealed an alien stardrive, but not until that moment did I realize just how much pinning I had actually done. If we couldn’t get this thing to jump us past the Patth net, then we’d had it, pure and simple. I remembered Shawn’s question on that point, and how glibly I’d brushed him off with the suggestion that we would be no worse off if Cameron’s archaeologists had been wrong.

But I’d been the one who’d been wrong. All the work we’d done had indeed been for nothing, just as Shawn had warned. Worse, my brilliant scheme had cost us precious time, a loss I realized now we were going to sorely regret. Not only had the Patth been given the opportunity to consolidate and perhaps reconfigure their hunt for us, but the lost days had let Shawn’s medical condition deteriorate to the point where there were probably no more than three or four planets we could reach in time to get him the borandis he would soon be needing. And to top it off, if the Patth had guessed we had had to go to ground for repairs or recalibration after the Utheno attack, then they would be concentrating everything they had on this region. The region that, sooner or later, we were going to have to pop up into.

On the other hand, if this electrician’s nightmare
wasn’t
a stardrive, what the hell would the Patth want with it anyway? A possibly reassuring thought; but not, I realized immediately, nearly as reassuring as it might have been. The
Icarus
could still be the massive alien stardrive Cameron’s people suspected, only with the vital crystal either removed or crumbled into dust. That would put us in the depressing position of having something that was totally useless to us, yet was still worth killing us to get.

Unless …

I played the light around again. If it
was
merely a matter of finding the right kind of crystal, that was the kind of miracle we still had an outside chance of pulling off. I doubted such a rock would be an off-the-shelf item these days, but if I could get a message to Uncle Arthur, he might be able to dig one up from somewhere and get it to us.

I let go of the mesh, hovering in midair as I wiped some more sweat from my face. And as I did so, I suddenly heard a sound like two pieces of metal scratching together. The same sound, I realized, that I’d heard while sitting out in the big sphere with Tera.

Only this time it was coming from somewhere nearby.

I swung my light around, hoping to catch a glimpse of moving machinery. But the sound had stopped before I could get the light more than a fraction of the way around, despite the fact that I’d whipped my arm fast enough to send the rest of my body into a slow tumble. Cursing under my breath, I reached back out for the mesh.

My fingers closed on thin air. The mesh was out of my reach.

I tried again, swinging my body awkwardly over as I tried to get enough extension, frowning at the complete illogic of the situation. I’d been motionless relative to the mesh when I’d started; and no matter how much I’d
twisted and turned, my center of mass should have remained that same distance away from it. That was basic level-one physics.

Yet there the mesh was, sitting a good five centimeters outside my best reach. I knew I hadn’t bumped the mesh, which might have given me the necessary push, and any air current strong enough to account for this much movement ought to have been whistling in my ears, which it wasn’t. Muttering a curse, I reached to my tool pouch for the longest probe I had with me. The patented McKell luck was running true to form, gumming up my life with complications I didn’t need, didn’t want, and most certainly didn’t have time to deal with. I got a good grip on the end of the probe and stretched it out to the mesh.

It didn’t reach.

I stared at the gap between mesh and probe, a bad taste suddenly tingling against my tongue. I was moving away from the mesh, all right. Slowly and subtly, but now that I was looking for it I could definitely see the mesh receding. And the only way I could be moving like this was if the small sphere had suddenly developed a gravitational field like its big brother beside it.

I looked around again, paying special attention to the loops of cable hanging through to my side of the mesh. No, the field wasn’t exactly like that of its big brother, I corrected myself. It was, instead, an exact inverse of it. Instead of pulling everything toward the outer wall, this one was pushing everything toward the center. I tried to think how it could be pulling that one off, but my mind wasn’t up to it.

Besides, I had more urgent things to think about at the moment. If the field was focused toward the center of the sphere—and that was certainly how it looked from the way the hanging cables were now pointed inward—then once I hit the zero mark I would be pretty well stuck there. Any direction I turned I would be looking uphill; and with absolutely nothing available
to kick or push off against, I would be as solidly pinned as a mosquito in a spiderweb.

I picked another curse out of my repertoire, a heavy-duty one this time, as I swung my light around looking for inspiration. There were the hanging cables, of course, now resembling Spanish moss more than they did floating seaweed. But without knowing what any of them were for I would have to be pretty desperate before I’d risk damage to either the
Icarus
or myself by tugging at them. Besides which, a second look showed that I wasn’t going to get anywhere within grabbing range of any of them.

Still, once I’d choked down the panic reaction and forced myself to think rationally, I realized that I was hardly in dire straits. Tera knew I was in here, and once I failed to emerge it would only be a matter of time before Ixil or one of the others ventured in to find out what had happened to me. A rope belayed outside and carefully threaded in through the tangle of wires, and I could pull myself to the mesh and ultimately to safety. Tera’s insistence that I bring food and water in here might turn out to have been a good idea after all.

I seemed to be drifting faster now, though it was difficult to tell for sure. A sudden yellow glow appeared from the corner of my eye, and I turned to see that one of the flat displays that had been showing the same red symbols as all the others had suddenly changed to a grid pattern of yellow-and-black squares. Even as I studied it another of the displays also changed, this one to squares of orange and black. For a minute I glanced between them, trying to see if there was any pattern in the layout of their colored squares. But if there was it was too subtle for me to pick out.

I was about two meters from the center, still drifting at a leisurely pace, when it suddenly occurred to me that if I kept on this same course I was going to run directly into the articulated arm angling across my path.

I played my light over the arm, feeling a fresh batch of sweat leaching onto my face as I did so. I’d already noted that the arm was composed of an alternating series of black-and-silver bands; what I hadn’t noticed until then was that at the very tip of the arm the color scheme changed to about twenty centimeters of a disturbingly luminescent gray. My field sensor wasn’t picking up anything from it yet, but I was still too far away for any current less than a couple hundred volts to register. The arm didn’t look like any of the power cables I’d had to sneak through on my way in, but considering the alien origin of this place that didn’t give me much comfort.

What
was
clear, and of no comfort whatsoever, was that even if the arm suddenly came to life with enough power to light up New Cleveland, there was still no way in space for me to miss running into it. About all I could think of to do was to try to get a careful grip on it as I approached and use it as a fulcrum to swing the bulk of my body around it instead of hitting it full force.

The problem with that idea was that if it didn’t have the structural strength necessary to handle that kind of sudden stress, the gray end was probably going to break off in my hand. On the other hand, if it was that weak and I
didn’t
grab it, it would probably break anyway as I slammed into it.

And as my train of thought reached that depressingly no-win conclusion, I was there. Clenching my teeth, feeling rather like someone trying to sneak up and grab a sleeping pit viper, I reached out with my right hand and got a careful grip on the arm.

Too careful. The material was far more slippery than it looked, and before I knew it my hand was sliding straight down the striped section toward the gray end. I squeezed harder, simultaneously trying to swing my body around as I’d originally planned. But my lack of purchase on the arm meant I had no leverage at all, and
I found myself instead sliding along the arm in a sort of low-gravity version of a fireman and his pole.

It was hardly the way I’d planned things, but at least the arm was clearly stronger than my worst-case scenario had anticipated. Even with my full weight pressing on it via my one-handed grip, it was showing no sign of breaking or even bending. Maybe even strong enough that I’d be able to use it to climb back out to the mesh.

Assuming, of course, I could figure out how to get a solid grip on the damn thing. Swinging my body partially around, I got my other hand in place and grabbed as hard as I dared.

The two-handed grip helped some, but not enough. I was still sliding serenely down the arm, now almost to the gray section at the end. If I couldn’t stop myself, I knew, my momentum would cause me to overshoot the end of the arm and go straight through the sphere’s center. Hardly a catastrophe, since there was nothing over there for me to crash into, but it would cost me more of our increasingly precious minutes while I waited for the gravitational field to slow me to a stop and bring me back to the center again.