by Timothy Zahn
“We shall be quick and neat,” she promised. “In the meantime, if you’d like, you can wait in the guest room behind the striped door.”
“I’d rather wait in the hospitality center,” I said stiffly, snagging the handle of my bag and pulling it over to me. “If you’re going to waste my time this way, you can at least let me get some breakfast.”
“As you wish,” Aymi-Mastr said, giving me the Ihmis gesture of farewell. Her phone warbled, and she reached over to pick it up. “We should be finished within the hour,” she added as she held the handset to her neck slits.
I spun on my heel and stalked across the room toward the door, trying to put as much righteous indignation into my posture as I could. They were letting me go, and they hadn’t taken my phone. Either they didn’t seriously suspect me, Aymi-Mastr’s accusations to the contrary, or they did seriously suspect me and were hoping to follow me to wherever I was hiding Cameron.
“Captain McKell?” Aymi-Mastr called from behind me.
For a flickering half second, I considered making a run for it. But the door was too far away, and there were too many Ihmisits between me and it. Bracing myself, I turned back around. “What?” I demanded.
Aymi-Mastr was still on the phone, beckoning me back. I thought again about running, decided it made no more sense now than it had five seconds ago, and headed back.
By the time I reached the desk she had finished the conversation. “My apologies, Captain,” she said, putting down the phone and holding out the tag she’d taken from me. “You may go.”
I frowned suspiciously at the tag like it was some sort of kid’s practical joke that would snap a spring against my finger if I took it. “Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Aymi-Mastr said, sounding midway between embarrassed and disgusted. “My superiors just informed me they’ve heard from our mysterious informant again. It seems the charge has now changed: that you were seen instead in the company of the notorious armed robber Belgai Romss. He attacked a storage depot over in Tropstick three days ago.”
I frowned. What the hell sort of game were they playing? “And, what, you want me to take a look at his photo now?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Aymi-Mastr said, her disgust deepening. “Apparently, our friend missed the follow-up story of Romss’s capture early yesterday morning, before your ship arrived.”
She pushed the tag toward me. “Obviously merely a troublemaker, as you suggested. Again, my apologies.”
“That’s all right,” I said, cautiously taking the tag. No spring snapped out to sting my fingers. “Maybe next time you won’t be so quick to jump on something like this without proof.”
“With a murder investigation, we must always investigate every lead,” she said, drumming her fingers thoughtfully on the top of my file. “A safe journey to you, Captain.”
I turned again and headed for the door, sliding the Stormy Banks tag back into my collar slot but continuing to palm the Icarus one. No one tried to stop me, no one called me back, and two minutes later I was once again out in the open air. It was all over, and I was free to go.
I didn’t believe it for a minute. It was all too pat, too convenient. The Ihmisits were still looking for Cameron, and they still thought I was the one who was going to lead them to him. And they’d turned me loose hoping I’d do exactly that.
And unless they planned to tail me all the way to the Icarus—which was, I supposed, an option—that meant they’d planted a tracker on me.
The question was how. Molecular-chain echo transponders were useless in the radio cacophony inside a major port, so it had to be one of the larger, needle-sized trackers. But I’d watched Aymi-Mastr’s flunky as he searched my bag, and would have been willing to swear in court that he hadn’t planted anything.
Which meant it had to have been planted after the search. And then, of course, it was obvious.
Carefully, I eased the tag out of my collar and took a good look; and there it was, slid neatly and nearly invisibly lengthwise through the bottom edge of the tag. Getting hold of the end with finger and thumbnail, I managed to pull it free of the plastic.
Now came the problem of how to get rid of it without the telltale motionlessness that would occur if I simply tossed it in the nearest trash bin. Fortunately, the opportunity was already close at hand. Coming rapidly through the crowd, three seconds away from intersecting my path, was a short Bunkre with one of those glittering, high-collared landing jackets that always remind me of something you’d see at an Elvis revival. Adjusting my step slightly, I turned my head partially away to make it look accidental, and slammed full tilt into him.
“Sorry,” I apologized, grabbing his shoulders to help him regain his balance. I straightened his collar where the impact of my shoulder had bent it, at the same time pulling a five-commark piece out of my pocket. “My personal fault entirely,” I gave the proper Bunkrel apology as I offered him the coin. “In partial compensation, please have a meal or drink on the labor of my arms.”
He snatched the coin, grunted the proper Bunkrel wheeze of acceptance and forgiveness, and immediately changed course toward the hospitality building. Five commarks was about ten times the compensation the accident warranted, and he was clearly bent on spending the money before the clumsy human realized his mistake and came looking for change.
With luck, he’d also be so busy spending it he wouldn’t notice that while I was straightening his collar I’d left him a small present. I let him get a ten-meter head start, then followed.
The hospitality center straddling the main pathway thirty meters inward from the entrance gate wasn’t much more than your basic Ihmis taverno, just built on a larger scale and with correspondingly higher prices. I walked straight across the crowded dining area, past the line of small private dining chambers, and through the NO ADMITTANCE door into one of the storage rooms.
As I’d expected, the room was empty, the entire staff out serving the rush of opening-hour customers. I crossed to the service door on the far side, shucking off my jacket and again turning it inside out. There was no ID slot on this side, but I could wedge the Icarus tag between the zipper and covering flap where the scanners could read it. Unlocking the door, I stepped out into the spaceport proper again and got onto the nearest of the guidelighted slideways meandering between the various landing pads. We would see now just how alert the Ihmisits were, and how badly they wanted to follow me.
To my mild surprise, they apparently didn’t want it very badly at all. Serious interest on their part would have meant an actual, physical tail on hand to augment the signal from the tracker; but I kept a close watch as I shifted between slideways at the prompting of the guidelights, and saw no indication of anyone performing a similar dance. Either my jaunt through the hospitality building and jacket switch had caught them completely by surprise, or the tracker had just been a token reaction to a possible lead who might still be of interest but probably wasn’t. Or else they had no particular reason to follow me because they had no idea the Icarus even existed.
Or else they knew all about the Icarus and were already waiting for me there, and all of this was simply their helpful way of offering me the rope I would need to hang myself. A wonderfully cheery thought to be having at six in the morning.
I’d been riding along the slideways in what seemed like circles for about fifteen minutes, and was starting to quietly curse the entire Ihmis species, when the yellow guidelights running ahead of me finally turned the pink that indicated I was there. Taking one last surreptitious look around, I hopped off my current slideway, circled the stern of a Trinkian freighter, and came face-to-face with the Icarus.
To say that the first sight was a letdown would be to vastly understate the case. The ship looked like nothing I’d ever seen before; like nothing I’d ever imagined before. Like nothing, for that matter, that had any business flying.
The bow section was built along standard lines, with the necessary splay-finger hyperspace cutter arr
ay melding into the equally standard sensor/capacitor nose-cone arrangement. But from that point on, anything resembling normal starship design went straight out the window. Behind the bow the ship swelled abruptly into a large sphere, a good forty meters across, covered with the same dark gray hull plates as the nose cone. The usual assortment of maneuvering vents were scattered around its surface, connecting aft to the ship’s main thrusters via a series of conduits running through the narrow space between the inner and outer hulls.
Behind the large sphere was a smaller, twenty-meter-diameter sphere squashed up into the aft section of the larger one, with a saddle-surface cowling covering the intersection between them. Behind the second sphere, looking almost like it had been slapped on as an afterthought, was a full-size engine section that looked like it had come off a Kronks ore scutter, and one of the more disreputable ones at that. Hugging the surface of the small sphere here on the ship’s port side, running from the aft part of the large sphere to the forward part of the engine section, was a hard-shell wraparound space tunnel. Near the center of the wraparound was the entryway, currently sealed, with a pair of floodlights stuck to the wraparound just above the top two corners. A collapsible stairway extended the ten meters from the red-rimmed hatch down to the ground, with an entry-code keypad on the handrail near the bottom. There was a landing skid/cushion arrangement propping up the engine section somewhat, but the bulge of the larger sphere still forced the bow cone to point up into the sky at about a ten-degree angle.
The overall visual effect was either that of an old-style rocket that had suddenly lost hull integrity in vacuum and bulged outward in two places, or else some strange metallic creature that had become pregnant with twins, one of them a definite runt. I hadn’t been expecting something sleek and impressive, but this was just ridiculous.
“Looks like something a group of semitrained chimps put together out of a box, doesn’t it?” a cheerful voice commented at my side.
I turned. A medium-sized man in his early thirties with wavy blue-streaked hair and a muscular build had come up beside me, gazing up at the Icarus with a mixture of amusement and disbelief. “Succinctly put,” I agreed, lowering my bag to the ground. “With one of the chimps having first spilled his coffee on the instructions.”
He grinned, setting his bag down next to mine. “I believe that between us we have indeed captured the essence of the situation. You flying with us?”
“So I was told,” I said. “Jordan McKell, pilot and navigator.”
“Jaeger Jones, mechanic,” he identified himself, sticking out his hand. “Boscor Mechanics Guild.”
“Good outfit,” I said, shaking his hand. He had a good solid grip, the sort you’d expect of a starship mechanic. “Been waiting long?”
“No, just a couple of minutes,” he said. “Kind of surprised to be the first one here, actually. From the way Borodin talked last night, I figured he’d be in as soon as the gates opened. But the entry’s locked, and no one answered when I buzzed.”
I stepped over to the base of the stairway and touched the OPEN command on the keypad. There was a soft beep, but nothing happened. “You check to see if there were any other ways inside?” I asked, looking up at the ship again.
“Not yet,” Jones said. “I went around that Trink’s bow first to see if I could see Borodin coming, but there’s no sign of him that direction. You want me to circle the ship and see what’s on the other side?”
“No, I’ll do it,” I said. “You wait here in case he shows up.”
I headed aft along the side, circling the rest of the small sphere, then walking alongside the engine section. Seen up close, some of the hull plates did indeed look like they’d been fastened on by Jones’s semi-trained chimps. But for all the cosmetic sloppiness, they seemed solid enough. I rounded the thruster nozzles—which looked more professionally installed than the hull plates—and continued forward along the starboard side.
I was halfway to the smaller sphere when a pair of indentations in the engine section caught my eye. Thirty centimeters apart, they were about a centimeter wide each, and an exploring finger showed they were about two centimeters deep and five more down, running to an apparent point. Basically like the latch grooves for a snap-fit lifeline, except that I’d never seen two of them set this close together before. Peering up along the side of the hull, squinting in the glare of the rising sun, I could see what looked like four more pairs of the slots rising in a vertical line to the top of the engine section.
I mulled at it for a moment, but I couldn’t come up with any good reason to have a group of latch grooves here. Still, considering how unorthodox the rest of the Icarus’s design was, I wasn’t inclined to waste too much brainpower on the question right now. The ship’s specs should be in the computer; once we were off the ground, I could look them up and see what they were for.
On impulse, I pulled out the now useless guidance tag and tore it in half. Loosely wadding up the pieces, I carefully stuck one into each of the lower two latch grooves, making sure they were out of view. The thin plastic wouldn’t block or impede any connector that might be put into the slot, but the act of insertion would squash the plastic down to the bottom of the groove, leaving proof that something had been there.
I finished the rest of my inspection tour without finding anything else of particular interest. The wraparound tunnel/airlock we’d seen on the port side had no match on the starboard, as I’d thought it might, and there were no other entrances into the ship that I could see. By the time I returned to the stairway, there were four others and their luggage waiting with Jones: two men, a Craean male, and—surprisingly enough, at least to me—a young woman.
“Ah—there you are,” Jones called as I came around the curve of the smaller sphere to join them. “Gentlefolk, this is our pilot and navigator, Captain Jordan McKell.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, giving them a quick once-over as I joined the group. “I sure hope one of you knows what’s going on here.”
“What do you mean, what’s going on?” one of the newcomers demanded in a scratchy voice. He was in his early twenties, thin to the point of being scrawny, with pale blond hair and an air of nervousness that hung off his shoulders like a rain cloak. “You’re the pilot, aren’t you? I thought you pilots always knew everything.”
“Ah—you’ve been reading our propaganda sheets,” I said approvingly. “Very good.”
He frowned. “Propaganda sheets?”
“A joke,” I said, sorry I’d even tried it. Apparently, humor wasn’t his strong point. “I was hired off the street, just like all the rest of you were.”
I sent a casual glance around the group as I spoke, watching for a reaction. But if any of them had had a different sort of invitation to this party, he was keeping it to himself. “I’m sure we’ll all have our questions answered as soon as our employer arrives,” I added.
“If he shows up,” the other man murmured. He was tall, probably around thirty years old, with prematurely gray hair and quietly probing eyes. His musculature was somewhat leaner than Jones’s, but just as impressive in its own way.
“He’ll be here,” I said, trying to put more confidence into my tone than I felt. Having a murder charge hanging over Cameron’s head was going to severely cramp his mobility. “While we’re waiting, how about you starting off the introductions?”
“Sure,” the gray-haired man said. “I’m Almont Nicabar—call me Revs. Engine certification, though I’m cleared to handle mechanics, too.”
“Really,” Jones said, sounding interested. “Where’d you journeyman on your mechanics training?”
“I didn’t go through an actual program,” Nicabar said. “Mostly I just picked it up while I was in the service.”
“No kidding,” Jones said. Apparently our mechanic was the terminally sociable type. “Which branch?”
“Look, can’t we save the social-club chat till later?” the nervous kid growled, his head bobbing restlessly as he checked out
every spacer that came into sight along the walkways.
“I’m open to other suggestions,” I said mildly. “Unfortunately, as long as the entryway’s locked—”
“So why don’t we open it?” he cut me off impatiently, peering up at the wraparound. “A cheeseball hatch like that—I could pop it in half a minute.”
“Not a good idea,” Jones warned. “You can break the airlock seal that way.”
“And that would leave our hull/EVA specialist with nothing to do,” I said, turning to the Craea. “And you are, sir?”
“I am Chort,” the alien said, his voice carrying the typical whistly overtones of his species, a vaguely ethereal sound most other beings either found fascinating or else drove them completely up a wall. “How did you know I was the spacewalker?”
“You’re far too modest,” I told him, bowing respectfully. “The reputation of the Crooea among spacewalkers far precedes you. We are honored to have you with us.”
Chort returned the bow, his feathery blue-green scales shimmering where they caught the sunlight. Like most of his species, he was short and slender, with pure white eyes, a short Mohawk-style feathery crest topping his head, and a toothed bird’s bill for a mouth. His age was impossible to read, but I tentatively put it somewhere between fifteen and eighty. “You’re far too generous,” he replied.
“Not at all,” I assured him, putting all the sincere flattery into my voice that I figured I could get away with. The entire Craean species loved zero gee, whether working in it or playing in it, with the lithe bodies and compact musculature that were perfect for climbing around outside ships. On top of that, they seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to the depressingly regular hull problems created by hyperspace pressure, plus the ability to evaluate the condition of a plate through touch alone.
All of which meant they were highly in demand for hull/EVA positions aboard starships, to the point where ship owners frequently tried to cajole, bribe, or otherwise steal them away from rivals in port. I wasn’t sure how Cameron had managed to get him to sign on with us, but a little ego-massage here and there wouldn’t hurt our chances of keeping him here.
