The Icarus Hunt

by Timothy Zahn

  Unfortunately, our nervous type either didn’t understand such subtleties or just didn’t care. “Oh, give it a rest,” he growled. “He saw your luggage, Chort—you can tell there’s a vac suit in there.”

  The blue-green scales edged with the pale red of surprise. “Oh,” Chort said. “Of course. There’s certainly that, too.”

  “Don’t mind him,” I told the Craea, controlling my annoyance with a supreme effort. “He’s our certified diplomacy expert.”

  Jones chuckled, and the kid scowled. “I am not,” he insisted. “I’m electronics.”

  “Do you have a name?” Nicabar asked. “Or are we going to have to call you Twitchy for the rest of the trip?”

  “Har, har,” he said, glowering at Nicabar. “I’m Shawn. Geoff Shawn.”

  “Which just leaves you,” I said, turning to the woman. She was slim, with black hair and hazel eyes, probably no older than her mid-twenties, with the sort of lightly tanned skin of someone who played a lot outdoors. Like Shawn, she seemed more interested in the passing pedestrian traffic than she was in our little get-acquainted session. “Do you cover both the computer and medical specialties?”

  “Just computers,” she said briefly, her eyes flicking to me once in quick evaluation, then turning away again. “My name’s Tera.”

  “Tera what?” Jones asked.

  “Just Tera,” she repeated, giving him a coolly evaluating look.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Just Tera,” I cut Jones off, warning him with my eyes to drop it. She might just be the shy type; but there were also several religious sects I knew of who made it a policy to never give their full names to outsiders. Either way, pressing her about it would be pointless and only add more friction to a crew that, by the looks of things, was already rapidly reaching its quota.

  “Means we’re missing our medic,” Nicabar put in, smoothly stepping in and filling the conversational awkwardness. “I wonder where he is.”

  “Maybe he’s having a drink with Borodin,” Shawn said acidly. “Look, this is stupid. Are you sure that entryway’s sealed?”

  “You’re welcome to try it yourself,” I told him, waving at the keypad and wishing I knew what our next move should be. I certainly didn’t want to leave Cameron behind, particularly not with a murder charge outstanding against him. But if the Ihmisits had already picked him up, there wasn’t much point in our hanging around, either. Maybe I should give Ixil a call over at the Stormy Banks and have him do a quiet search.

  From above me came the ka-thunk of released seals and the hissing of hydraulics, and I spun around to see the entryway door swinging ponderously open. “What did you do?” I demanded, looking at Shawn.

  “What do you mean, what did I do?” he shot back. “I pushed the damn OPEN button, that’s what I did. It was unlocked the whole time, you morons.”

  “Borodin must have had it on a time lock,” Jones said, frowning. “I wonder why.”

  “Maybe he’s not coming,” Tera suggested. “Maybe he never intended to in the first place.”

  “Well, I’m not going anywhere without the advance he promised,” Shawn said flatly.

  “Besides which, we don’t know exactly where we’re supposed to go,” I reminded them, stepping past him and peering up the stairway. It canted to the right at a slight angle, one more example of slightly shoddy workmanship to add to my growing list. I could see a glowing ceiling light over the hatch inside the wraparound, but nothing else was visible from this angle.

  “He told me we were going to Earth,” Chort offered.

  “Right, but Earth’s a big place,” I reminded him. “With lots of different parking spaces. Still, we might as well go in.” I picked up my bag and started toward the stairway—

  “Hang on a second, Jordan,” Jones cut me off. “Someone’s coming.”

  I turned around. From around the stern of one of the nearby ships a large, bulky man was jogging toward us like a trotting hippo, a pair of travel bags bouncing in his grip. “Hold on!” he called. “Don’t leave yet. I’m here.”

  “And who are you?” I called back.

  “Hayden Everett,” he said, coasting to a stop beside Tera and taking a deep breath. “Medic certificate. Whew! Had some trouble at the gate—didn’t think I was going to make it.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re not the last,” Jones said. “Our employer hasn’t shown up yet, either.”

  “Really?” Everett said, frowning. He had short black hair and blue eyes, and the slightly squashed features I usually associated with professional high-contact sports types. Up close, I could see now that, unlike Jones and Nicabar, most of his impressive body mass ran to fat, though there were indications there’d been a fair amount of muscle there once upon a time. He was also crowding fifty, considerably older than the rest of our group, with an impressive network of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth.

  I could also see that despite the implication that he’d jogged along the slideways all the way from the gate, there was no sheen of sweat on his face, nor was he even breathing all that hard. Despite his age and surface fat, his cardiovascular system was apparently in pretty decent shape.

  “Really,” Jones assured him. “So what do we do now, McKell?”

  “Like I said, we go inside,” I told him, starting up the steps. “Revs, you get to the engine room and start your preflight; I’ll find the bridge and get things started from that end. The rest of you, bring your luggage and find your stations.”

  Given the Icarus’s iconoclastic design I knew that that last order was going to be a challenge. To my mild surprise, someone had anticipated me. The wraparound tunnel curved around the smaller sphere to a pressure door at the surface of the larger sphere—apparently, the whole wraparound served as the ship’s airlock—and attached to the wall of the corridor on the far side of the pressure door was a basic layout of the ship.

  “Well, that’s handy,” Tera commented as the six of us crowded around it, Nicabar having already disappeared in the other direction along the wraparound to the engine room. “Where’s the computer room?—oh, there it is. Odd placement.”

  There was a murmur of general agreement. The interior layout was fully as odd as the exterior design, with the three levels of the sphere laid out in possibly the most arbitrary fashion I’d ever seen. The bridge was in its standard place, nestled just behind the nose cone on the mid deck; but the computer room, instead of being connected to the bridge as usual, was at the opposite end of the sphere, pressed up against the wall of the smaller sphere on the starboard side of the centerline, directly behind the wall we were currently looking at. The machine shop, electronics shop, and EVA prep area were slapped together on the port side, where vibrations and electronic noise from one would inevitably slop over into the other, with the sick bay and galley/dayroom across the corridor from them just forward of the computer room.

  The top deck consisted of six cracker-box-sized sleeping cabins and an only slightly larger head, plus two main storage rooms; the lower deck was two more sleeping cabins, another head, the main bulk of the ship’s stores, and the air- and water-scrubbing and reclamation equipment. There were other, smaller storage cabinets scattered around everywhere, apparently wherever and however the designer’s mood had struck. The three decks were linked together by a pair of ladders, one just behind the bridge, the other aft near the wraparound.

  I also noticed that while the wraparound and engine section were drawn with a certain minimal detail, the smaller sphere was drawn as a solid silhouette, labeled simply CARGO, with no access panels or hatches shown. When Cameron had said the cargo was sealed, he’d meant it.

  “This has got to be the dumbest ship I’ve ever been on,” Shawn declared in obvious disgust. “Who built this thing, anyway?”

  “It’ll be listed on the schematics,” I told him. “Tera, that’ll be your first job after you get the computer up and running: Pull up the plans so we can see what exactly we’ve got to work with. Everyone else, go get
settled. I’ll be on the bridge if you need me.”

  I headed up the corridor—literally up it; the Icarus’s floors were sloped at the same ten-degree angle as the ship itself—and touched the release pad set into the center of the door.

  Considering all the extra space the Icarus had over the Stormy Banks, I might have expected the bridge to be correspondingly larger, too. It wasn’t. If anything, it was a little smaller. But whatever other corners Cameron and his cronies had cut with this ship, at least they hadn’t scrimped on vital equipment. The piloting setup, to my right as I stood in the doorway, consisted of a full Wurlitz command console wrapped around a military-style full-active restraint chair, a half-dozen Valerian monitor displays to link me to the rest of the ship, and a rather impressive Hompson RealiTeev main display already activated and showing the view out the bow of the ship. To my left, the other half of the room was dominated by a Gorsham plotting table connected to a Kemberly nav database records system.

  And sitting in the center of the plotting table were an envelope and a large metal cash box.

  I stepped over to the table and crouched down, giving the box a long, careful look. There were no wires that I could see; no discolorations, no passive triggers, nothing that struck me as an obvious booby trap. Holding my breath, I picked it up and eased it open a crack.

  Nothing snapped, flashed, hissed, or blew up in my face. Perhaps I was getting paranoid in my old age. Exhaling quietly, I opened it the rest of the way.

  Inside was money. Crisp one-hundred-commark bills. Lots of them.

  I looked at the cash for another moment, then set the box back on the plotting table and opened the envelope. Inside were a set of cards, the originals of the registration and clearance papers Cameron had showed me in the taverno last night, plus a single sheet of paper with a hand-printed message on it:

  To the captain:

  Due to circumstances beyond my control, I will not be able to accompany you and the Icarus after all. I must therefore trust in your honor to take the ship and its cargo to Earth without me.

  When you reach Earth orbit, please contact Stann Avery at the vid number listed at the bottom of the page. He will give you specific delivery instructions for your cargo and arrange your final payment. The settlement will include a substantial bonus for you and the others of the crew, over and above what we’ve already agreed to, provided the ship and cargo are delivered intact.

  In the meantime, the initial payments for all of you are in the box, as well as the money for fuel and docking fees you’ll need along the way.

  Again, my apologies for any inconvenience this sudden change of plan may cause you. I would not be exaggerating when I say that delivering the Icarus and its cargo safely will be the most significant accomplishment any of you will ever do in your lives. It may in fact be the most significant deed any human being will perform during the remainder of this century.

  Good luck, and do not fail me. The future of the human race could well lie within your hands.

  It was signed “Alexander Borodin.”

  My first thought was that Cameron really needed to cut back on those melodramas and star-thrillers he was watching in the evenings after work. My second was that this was one hell of a hot potato for him to have dropped into my lap on no notice whatsoever.

  “McKell?” a female voice called from behind me.

  I turned to see Tera making her way uphill into the bridge. “Yes, what is it?”

  “I wanted to check out the bridge,” she said, glancing around the room. “I was kind of hoping the main computer might be stashed in here.”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about? Isn’t it back in the computer room?”

  “Yes, I guess it is,” she said with a grimace. “I was hoping that piece of junk was the backup.”

  Those cold ferret feet started their wind sprints up my back again. The computer was very literally the nerve center of the entire ship. “Just how bad a piece of junk is it?” I asked carefully.

  “Noah had a better one on the ark,” she said flatly. “It’s an old Worthram T-66. No decision-assist capabilities, no vocal interface, no nanosecond monitoring. Programming like I haven’t seen since high school, no autonomic functions or emergency command capabilities—shall I go on?”

  “No, I get the picture,” I said heavily. Compared to normal starship operation, we were starting out half-blind, half-deaf, and slightly muddled—rather like a stroke victim, actually. No wonder Cameron had decided to jump ship. “Can you handle it?”

  She lifted her hands. “Like I said, it’s an echo from a distant past, but I should be able to work it okay. It may take me a while to remember all the tricks.” She nodded toward the letter in my hand. “What’s that?”

  “A note from the camp counselor,” I told her, handing it over. “You were right; it seems we’re going on this hike by ourselves.”

  She read it, her frown turning to a scowl as she did so. “Well, this is awkward, I must say,” she said, handing it back. “He must have left this last night, before the spaceport closed.”

  “Unless he managed to get in and out this morning,” I suggested.

  “Well, if he did, he must have been really traveling,” she growled. “I know I got here about as fast as I could. So what do we do now?”

  “We take the Icarus to Earth, of course,” I told her. “That’s what we agreed to. Unless you have a date or something.”

  “Don’t be cute,” she growled. “What about our advance pay? He promised me a thousand commarks up front.”

  “It’s all here,” I assured her, patting the cash box. “As soon as I get the preflight started I’ll go pass it out and let the rest know about the change in plans.”

  Her eyes lingered momentarily on the box, then shifted back to me. “You think they’ll all stay?”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, as long as I get paid, a job’s a job. I’m not expecting any of the others to feel differently.”

  “Does that mean you’re officially taking command of the ship and crew?”

  I shrugged. “That’s how the Mercantile Code lays it out. Command succession goes owner, employer, master, pilot. I’m the pilot.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “I was just making sure. For the record.”

  “For the record, I hereby assume command of the Icarus,” I said in my most official voice. “Satisfied?”

  “Ecstatic,” she said with just a trace of sarcasm.

  “Good,” I said. “Go on back to your station and start beating that T-66 into submission. I’ll be along in a few minutes with your money.”

  She glanced at the cash box one last time, then nodded and left the bridge.

  I set the box and papers on my lap and got to work on the preflight, trying to ignore the hard knot that had settled into my stomach. Cameron’s note might have been overly dramatic, but it merely confirmed what I’d suspected ever since he’d invited himself over to my taverno table and offered me a job.

  Somewhere out in the Meima wasteland, that archaeological team had stumbled onto something. Something big; something—if Cameron’s rhetoric was even halfway to be believed—of serious importance.

  And that same something was sitting forty meters behind me, sealed up inside the Icarus’s cargo hold.

  I just wished I knew what the hell it was.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Even with the clearance codes and papers Cameron had left with his note, I was fully expecting there to be trouble getting the Icarus off the ground. To my mild and cautiously disbelieving surprise, there wasn’t. The tower gave us permission to lift, the landing-pad repulsor boost got us up off the ground and into range of the perimeter grav beams, and a few minutes later we were hauling for space under our own power.

  After Tera’s revelation about the archaic computer system we’d been saddled with, I had been wondering just what kind of shape the drive would be in. But there, too, my pessimism turned out t
o be unnecessary, or at least premature. The thrusters roared solidly away, driving us steadily through the atmosphere toward the edge of Meima’s gravity well, and with each of my periodic calls back to the engine room Nicabar assured me all was going just fine.

  It wouldn’t last, though. I knew it wouldn’t last; and as the capacitors in the nose cone discharged into the cutter array and sliced us a link hole into hyperspace, I warned myself that things were unlikely to continue running this smoothly. Somewhere along the way, we were going to run into some serious trouble.

  Six hours out from Meima, we hit our first batch of it.

  My first warning was a sudden, distant-sounding screech sifting into the bridge, sounding rather like a banshee a couple of towns over. I slapped the big red KILL button, throwing a quick look at the monitors as I did so, and with another crack from the capacitors we were back in space-normal.

  “McKell?” Nicabar’s voice came from the intercom. “You just drop us out?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “I think we’ve got a pressure crack. You reading any atmosphere loss?”

  “Nothing showing on my board,” he said. “Inner hull must still be solid. I didn’t hear the screech, either—must be somewhere at your end of the ship.”

  “Probably,” I agreed. “I’ll roust Chort and have him take a look.”

  I called the EVA room, found that Chort was already suiting up, and headed aft. One of the most annoying problems of hyperspace travel was what the experts called parasynbaric force, what we nonexperts called simply hyperspace pressure. Ships traveling through hyperspace were squeezed the whole way, the pressure level related through a complicated formula to the ship’s mass, speed, and overall surface area. The earliest experimental hyperspace craft had usually wound up flattened, and even now chances were good that a ship of any decent size would have to drop out at least once a trip to have its hull specialist take a look and possibly do some running repairs.