by Timothy Zahn
“All right,” he said suddenly, stepping close behind me and getting a grip on my jacket collar as he again jammed his gun warningly into my kidney. “Take it out slow—two fingers, left hand.”
Carefully, I eased my jacket open and just as carefully pulled out my phone. “Okay?” I asked, holding it up for his approval. Without waiting for an answer, I shifted my grip on the phone and brought it to my ear.
Or rather, tried to do so. Somewhere along the way my fingers suddenly fumbled and the phone squirted out of my hand to clatter onto the slideway in front of me.
“Damn!” I muttered, taking a long step forward.
If I’d given Fulbright half a second to think, he probably wouldn’t have fallen for it. But I didn’t; and he did. Just as it was perfectly natural for me to try to retrieve my phone, so, too, was it perfectly natural for him to courteously let go of my jacket to enable me to do so. I dropped to one knee and snagged the phone just as it was about to skitter off the edge of the slideway; and with a quick jerk I jammed the lower end through the hole in the belt and into the gridwork beneath.
For a split second the slideway faltered, just a brief instant before the sheer inertia of the system overcame the slender piece of plastic and metal and tore the phone to shreds. But it was enough. Caught completely flatfooted, Fulbright lost his balance and stumbled forward, his knees coming up short against my side, the impact sending him tumbling helplessly over my back to sprawl on the slideway.
I was on him in an instant, locking his right wrist in place with one hand and trying to get a clear shot at his neck or stomach with the other. He struggled furiously, mouthing curses that would have frosted glass, but he didn’t have a chance and he knew it. He was lying on his free left arm, and with me keeping his right hand trapped in his pocket he couldn’t even bring his gun to bear on me. Besides all of which, I was bigger than he was.
I got an opening and slammed my fist into his neck just behind his ear. He twitched and gave a weak roar that was more than half whimper. I hit him again, and he collapsed and lay still.
I took a few seconds to catch my breath and take a quick look around. No one was visible. Keeping a cautious hold on his gun hand, I worked the weapon out of his grip and pulled it out of the pocket. It was a Kochran-Uzi compact three-millimeter semiautomatic, a nasty enough weapon in a taverno fight but an extremely stupid thing to carry aboard a starship, where a bullet can go through machinery and hulls with all sorts of unpleasant consequences. Dropping the gun into my pocket, I hauled the unconscious man half to his feet and half leaped, half fell off the slideway.
About ten meters to my right was a stack of empty forklift pallets piled up against the corner of one of the buildings. Getting a grip under Fulbright’s arms, I dragged him over and laid him down on the ground facing them. His jacket, like mine, was leather, but his shirt was made of a thick but more pliable cloth. I pulled his right arm out of the jacket sleeve, carefully sliced off the exposed shirtsleeve with my pocketknife, put the jacket back on him, and cut the sleeve into thick strips.
Two minutes later, his hands were tied securely behind him and he had a gag in his mouth. Another three minutes’ work and I had manhandled one of the pallets down off the top of the stack and had the edge of it resting more or less comfortably across his legs, with most of the weight being supported by the stiff soles of his boots.
Fulbright wasn’t going anywhere for a while, and for a long moment I was tempted to leave it at that and get out while I could. But that five-thousand-commark reward meant that someone out there had upped the ante on this game, and I still didn’t have the foggiest idea what the stakes were or even what the game was.
But with a little luck, maybe I could at least find out who some of the other players were.
Fulbright’s phone was in the same pocket as the flyer. I pulled out both, consulted the flyer, then punched in the local number it listed.
A voice answered on the second vibe; a voice, I decided, that definitely fit with the wimpish accountant description. “Thompson,” he said briskly.
“My name’s James,” I said, imitating Fulbright’s voice as best I could. Odds were Thompson wouldn’t even remember James Fulbright, let alone his voice, but I’d already taken more chances than I cared to for one day. “That guy you’re looking for—Jordan McKell? You said five thousand for finding him. How much for delivering him all trussed up?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Ten thousand,” he said. “Do you have him there now?”
I felt my throat tighten, my somewhat snide preconception of the man vanishing in a puff of unpleasant smoke. No accountant I’d ever met was anywhere near that quick and free with the money they handled. Whoever Thompson was, he was no simple flunky. “Yeah, I got him,” I said. “I’ll be waiting for you off the north spaceport slideway, next to the Number Twelve machine shop. Bring the money.”
“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he promised, and hung up.
I put the phone away, scowling to myself. We. That meant he was bringing friends, almost certainly friends with muscle. I would have liked to have told him to come alone, but that would have looked suspicious—a man who passes out hundred-commark bills as a come-on would hardly try to stiff a customer, certainly not over ten grand. Once again, I considered that the better part of valor would be to run for it; once again, I made myself stay put. I set the stage as best I could, then settled down to wait.
He was there well within his promised fifteen minutes, and he did indeed have muscle with him. Unpleasantly familiar muscle: two more members of the Lumpy Clan. Apparently these things liked to travel in pairs.
“Mr. James?” Thompson called toward me as he and the Lumpies hopped off the slideway.
“Right here,” I called back, half turning to look vaguely over my shoulder at them as I waved a hand in invitation. I was squatting down facing the now conscious Fulbright with my back to them, a position I hoped would disguise any of the height-and-build cues that might give away my identity. “Come on, hurry,” I added. “I think he’s coming to.”
Lying on his left side with his back also to them, Fulbright had his head twisted around and was glaring daggers up at me. But with his gag still in place, and his hands and feet still immobilized, there wasn’t a lot he could do about the situation. Even without the gag he probably wouldn’t have had much to say, not with my plasmic half-concealed inside my jacket digging into his side. If we both made it off Dorscind’s World intact, I suspected, he wasn’t going to be smiling cheerfully the next time we ran into each other.
But at the moment I couldn’t be bothered about such vague and uncertain futures. Right now my sole concern was whether or not I could survive the next ten seconds.
I needn’t have worried. Thompson might be more than a flunky, and the Lumpies were professional enough in their own right, but it apparently never occurred to any of them that their quarry might pull something this insane. They hurried incautiously forward, the Lumpies pulling a pace or two ahead of Thompson; and then, as they got within three steps of me, I snapped my head left as if I’d suddenly seen something and jabbed a finger toward a gap between two of the maintenance buildings. “Watch out!” I barked.
The Lumpies were professionals, all right. Braking to an instant halt, they jumped backward in unison, putting themselves between Thompson and the unknown danger. I jumped back, too, landing upright beside Thompson; and as the Lumpies yanked their guns out of their back holsters, I slid around behind Thompson, got an arm around his neck, and pressed my plasmic into his right ear. “Don’t turn around,” I said conversationally. “But do set your weapons on the ground.”
Again in unison, and flagrantly ignoring my orders, they started to swivel around. I shifted my aim and sent a plasma blast directly between them to spatter off the ground ahead. “I said not to turn around,” I reminded them, returning my plasmic to its previous resting place against Thompson’s sideburn. He flinched away from the residual muzzle heat, but I presse
d it hard against the skin. It wouldn’t damage him, and I’d always found that a little mild pain did wonders for cooperation. Especially with people who weren’t used to it.
Thompson was apparently very unused to pain. “Don’t move,” he seconded hastily, his voice breaking slightly at the top. “Do what he says—he means it.”
“I do indeed,” I agreed. “Anyway, heroics would be wasted. I’m not going to hurt anyone unless I have to—don’t forget I could have shot both of you in the back just now. So be smart and put your guns on the ground in front of you—slowly, of course—and then take two steps past them.”
They obeyed quickly and without argument, raising my estimation of Thompson’s status another couple of notches. He might look like an accountant with no stomach for even potential conflict; but when he talked, even in a squeaky voice, people listened.
More importantly, they obeyed. The Lumpies became models of cooperation, dutifully stepping past their weapons and lying facedown as I ordered with their hands visible. I retrieved their guns—between them and Fulbright and the first set of Lumpies, I was starting to make a nice little weapons collection here—and had Thompson relieve them of the restraints I knew they would have brought with them.
He came up with two sets, which seemed to be one set too many unless they either had planned to stiff Fulbright or else intended to shackle me hand and foot and carry me away draped over someone’s shoulder like a bag of cement. But whatever the reason, it was certainly a convenient number for my purposes. A minute later I had the Lumpies cuffed together through one of the slots in the bottom pallet with Thompson cuffed on the other side of the stack. With the weight of the rest of the stack on top, and the utter lack of leverage any of them had to work with, I was pretty sure they would stay put until someone happened by, which from the evidence would probably not be until the next shift change at the maintenance buildings. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be for at least another couple of hours.
“You won’t get away with this,” Thompson warned as I went quickly through his pockets. “Not a chance in the universe. If you release me now, I promise nothing will happen to you because of this incident.”
“Nothing over and above what you planned to do to me anyway?” I suggested. “Thanks, but I’ll take my chances.”
“Your chances don’t exist, McKell,” he said flatly. “And we don’t want you, anyway. All we want is the Icarus. All of you are free to go.” He cocked his head to the side as he looked up at me, a gesture that somehow made him look even more like an accountant. “I’ll do better, in fact. I can promise you that if you’ll turn the Icarus over to me, you’ll profit quite handsomely on the deal.”
“Thanks, but this will do,” I said, withdrawing a neat stack of hundred-commark bills from one of his inside pockets. “I know it’s not nice to steal,” I added, slipping the stack into my pocket, “but we’re likely to have some unexpected expenses along the way. If you’ll give me your name and address, I’ll make sure you’re properly reimbursed.”
“Fifty thousand, McKell,” he said, staring unblinkingly into my eyes. “Fifty thousand commarks to take me to the Icarus and walk away.”
I gazed down at him, a hard lump forming in my throat. What in hell’s name were we carrying, anyway? “I appreciate the offer,” I said, checking the other inside pocket. This one yielded a phone and a slim documents folder. “But I’m already under contract.”
“A hundred thousand,” he said. “Five hundred thousand. Name your price.”
I patted his shoulder and stood up. “You might be surprised sometime to find out what money can’t buy,” I said, tossing his phone onto the stack of pallets where none of them could reach it and pocketing the documents folder. “See you around.”
“You’re making a big mistake, McKell,” he said. His voice was quiet, but it held an absolute conviction that sent a chill up my back. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
“Maybe this will tell me,” I countered, tapping the pocket where I’d put his folder.
I passed around to the other side of the pallets, where Fulbright was still lying trussed up glaring at me. “Sorry about this, James,” I apologized. “I’ll make it up to you next time, all right?”
The look in his eyes made it abundantly clear what his plans were for the next time. But again, that was a future too distant to worry about right now.
I hopped on the southbound slideway and headed back toward the spaceport center, keeping an eye on the Lumpies and Thompson as long as they were in sight. The minute they were lost to view I got off the slideway and headed east toward the Icarus’s landing cradle, walking quickly along until I reached a properly directed slideway and getting on it.
And there, with finally a moment of breathing space, I opened Thompson’s folder and started going through his papers. I was only halfway through when I put them back into my pocket and pulled out Fulbright’s phone.
“Yes?” Ixil’s melodic voice answered.
“It’s me,” I said. “How’s the fueling going?”
“Probably no more than a quarter finished,” he said. “They only got here fifteen minutes ago.”
“Tell them to quit and seal the ship back up,” I told him. “And get the bridge and drive preflights started. We’re out of here as soon as I get back.”
There was just the briefest pause. “What did Uncle Arthur say?”
“I never got to talk to Uncle Arthur,” I told him. “And I’ll explain as much as I can when I get there. Just get us ready to fly, all right?”
“Got it,” he said. “We’ll be ready when you are.”
The Icarus was buttoned down, with no fuelers in sight, by the time I retracted the ramp and sealed the hatchway. Tera and Everett tried to collar me in the corridor, demanding to know what the rush was; I ordered them back to their stations in no uncertain terms and headed to the bridge.
Ixil was waiting for me there. “All set,” he said, standing up and relinquishing the control chair to me. “Nicabar is ready with the drive, the fuelers are paid off, and I’ve got lift permission from the tower.”
“Good,” I said, sliding into the chair and sounding the lift alert. “Let’s get out of here.”
We were off the ground, nearly out of Dorscind’s World’s atmosphere, and driving for the blackness of space when he finally broke the silence. “Well?”
I leaned back in my seat. “Someone out there wants to get hold of the Icarus,” I said. “They want it very badly.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“I don’t know why,” I said, pulling Thompson’s documents out of my pocket and handing them over. “But I do know who.”
He leafed through the papers, and stopped at the same place I had. Staring at the plain ID card with its operative number and ornate governmental seal and nothing else, the ferrets on his shoulders twitching with his astonishment. “I don’t believe it,” he said mechanically, looking up at me.
“I don’t believe it either,” I agreed grimly. “But it’s true. We, my friend, are being chased by the Patth.”
CHAPTER
7
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Ixil protested.
“On the contrary, it makes perfect sense,” I countered. “It has to. We just don’t know what that sense is yet, that’s all.”
Ixil muttered something in his own language, rubbing a fingertip along the corner of my locker. We had retired to my cabin as the most private place on the ship to talk after I’d gotten us into hyperspace and turned the bridge over to Tera. Technically, it was Shawn’s shift, with Chort on watch in the engine room, but given the shape Shawn had been in when I left earlier I wouldn’t have trusted him to butter bread for me, let alone watch over a ship I was on.
And between then and now, I’d had time to do some serious thinking. “Look, it’s very simple,” I went on. “At least, the basics of it are. The archaeological dig on Meima found something big—that much is clear from the fact that Cameron himself c
ame out there to take a look. They brought in the Icarus—”
“Wait a minute,” Ixil put in. “How did they bring it in without the Port Authority having a record of it?”
“Probably in pieces,” I said. “You’ve seen what this thing looks like—odds are Cameron flew it in in sections, along with some of his tech people to put it together, and maybe with the archaeological team helping with some of the gruntwork. They probably built it underground, which would explain why none of the normal incoming traffic noticed it on the surface.”
“Then that massive explosion Director Aymi-Mastr told you about was to blow the roof off one of those underground caverns and let the ship out.”
“Right,” I nodded. “Along with conveniently scrambling the spaceport sensors so that its departure wouldn’t be noticed. I’d give a lot to know what they added to the explosive or the dirt strata to pull that off—again, it was probably Cameron’s techs who handled that one.”
“So why didn’t they just leave then?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Either they didn’t have a crew put together yet, or else they wanted an official spaceport stamp to add legitimacy to things.”
“Or perhaps were planning to bring the entire archaeological group out together,” Ixil suggested. “There’s certainly plenty of extra carrying capacity aboard.”
“Good point,” I agreed, glancing over at the three-bunk tier. “And they couldn’t all get on board and leave right then because they knew the authorities would come to investigate the explosion. Finding the site deserted would raise red flags from here to Thursday, which was exactly what they didn’t want.
“Anyway, so the Icarus lifted up under cover of the cloud, maybe circled the planet once, and joined the line of incoming ships waiting clearance to land. They put down, showed their forged Gamm Port Authority sealed-cargo license, and were in. The crew left the ship, planning to take off again in the morning with the whole crowd aboard and a genuine lift document that would get them back to Earth with no raised eyebrows from anyone.”
