by Timothy Zahn
“Except that something went wrong,” Ixil said heavily. “The question is, what?”
“Somebody tumbled to the scheme, obviously,” I said. “Not the Patth themselves, I don’t think. Or if it was, they didn’t realize right away the full significance of what Cameron’s people had dug up—if they had, they’d have pushed the Ihmisits into locking down the port completely.”
“The Lumpy Brothers or their friends, perhaps?”
“Possibly,” I agreed, “though I’m still not sure how they fit into this. But whoever it was, and however they tumbled to it, they were interested enough to raid the dig, grab everyone in sight, and send the Ihmisits hunting for anyone who may have slipped through the net.”
“Like Cameron?”
“Like Cameron,” I nodded. “And so there he was, alone on Meima, with the authorities on his tail, a hot ship locked away behind a fence where he couldn’t get at it, and no one to fly it even if he could.”
Ixil shook his head. “Not a situation I’d want to find myself in.”
“The way things are going, you may get your chance at it yet,” I warned. “Still, Arno Cameron didn’t build a multitrillion-commark industrial empire by lying down and giving up when things got tough. He started going through the periphery tavernos, probably very systematically, looking for enough spacers at loose ends to put together a new crew.”
“And to all appearances he succeeded,” Ixil said. “Which leads immediately to the question of why he didn’t fly out with you.”
“That one’s got me stumped, too,” I conceded. “Clearly, they hadn’t caught him yet—Director Aymi-Mastr and her frog-eyed heavies grabbing me on the way into the port proved that much. He may have decided that trying to walk through a relatively narrow port gate under the gaze of a pair of Ihmis door wardens would be pushing his luck too far.”
“Even if staying behind meant they would eventually run him down?”
“He might have decided that giving the Icarus a head start was worth that risk.” I grimaced. “Which he may now have lost. Unlike the Lumpy Brothers, our generous Patth agent with the stack of hundreds knew the Icarus’s name.”
“Possibly,” Ixil said. “On the other hand, we presume they had the rest of the group already in custody. Perhaps one of them finally talked.” He paused, his eyes narrowing in thought. “There is, of course, another possible explanation for Cameron’s absence, given the accidents that have happened on board. Perhaps one of the spacers he hired was not the innocent out-of-work drifter he seemed. Particularly now that we know that the Patth do have non-Patth agents on retainer.”
“That thought has spent a lot of time twirling around my brain, too,” I acknowledged. “The problem is, why hasn’t he done anything recently? If he’s trying to damage the crew or slow down the ship, why haven’t there been more such accidents?”
“Be careful what you wish for,” Ixil warned.
“I’m not wishing for it,” I assured him fervently. “I’m just trying to understand it. Okay, he killed Jones and shook up Chort a little, but that was about it. He certainly wasn’t busy throwing wrenches in the gears while we were on Xathru and Dorscind’s World.”
“He didn’t call in the authorities at either place, either,” Ixil agreed. “As I see it, there are two other possibilities we haven’t yet addressed. First, that the attack on Jones was personal to Jones. Once he was dead, the perpetrator stopped perpetrating because his job was finished.”
“But why pick on Jones?” I countered. “No one aboard knew anyone else prior to boarding.”
“So we assume,” Ixil said. “That may turn out not to be the case. Second, and possibly more intriguing, the attack on Jones may have been staged by Jones himself.”
I frowned. “To what end?”
“To the end of allowing him to jump ship without any attached suspicion,” Ixil said. “Think about it. If the carbon monoxide hadn’t killed him, you would certainly have put him off the ship on Xathru for a complete medical check. That would have left him with names and complete descriptions of you and the rest of the crew, details of the Icarus itself, and very possibly the itinerary Cameron had planned for the trip to Earth. And he would have had complete freedom of movement.”
“The itinerary wouldn’t have done him any good,” I said mechanically. This angle had never even occurred to me. “We’re already way off Cameron’s plan, and will be staying that way as long as the docking-fee bribe money holds out. You’re suggesting he just miscalculated, then?”
“I don’t know.” Ixil paused. “There is, of course, one other possibility we haven’t touched on. Did you think to search Jones’s body before it was taken off the ship?”
A tight knot formed in the center of my stomach. “No, I didn’t,” I said. “It never even occurred to me.”
“It’s possible whoever killed him did so in order to use his body as a receptacle for passing information,” Ixil suggested. “Hard data, perhaps, such as photos or schematics that couldn’t easily be sent via phone.”
“But why bother?” I asked. “They all had complete freedom of movement on Xathru. Why not just deliver it in person?”
“Perhaps the murderer didn’t want to risk being seen in the company of the wrong people.”
I mulled that one over. “Which would imply we were dealing with a genuine professional here.”
Ixil nodded. “Yes. It would.”
I hissed thoughtfully between my teeth. There were indeed people out there, I knew, who would go to such lengths to complete a mission. But to have one of them just happen to be aboard the Icarus was pushing the bounds of credibility way beyond even their normal elasticity range. “Again, though, if someone wanted the Icarus badly enough to slip that kind of professional aboard, why haven’t we been stopped already?”
“That is indeed a key question,” Ixil conceded. “I’m afraid, Jordan, that there are still too many missing pieces to this puzzle.”
“The biggest of which is sitting back there in our cargo hold,” I agreed grimly. “I’m starting to think it’s about time we had ourselves a close look at it.”
Ixil rubbed his cheek. “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “I’ve looked over the schematics Tera pulled from the computer. There aren’t any access panels shown at all.”
“You’ve got a cutting torch in the mechanics shop, don’t you?” I pointed out. “An access hole is basically wherever we want to make one.”
“I wasn’t thinking so much about getting in as I was of covering up afterward the fact that we’d done so,” Ixil said mildly. “If Jones didn’t engineer his own accident—and to be honest, I really don’t think he did—then whoever did is still aboard. We may not want to set up a situation where he would be able to get a look of his own into the hold.”
Unfortunately, he was right. “All right,” I said reluctantly. “We’ll play along a while longer. But you might want to get your cutting equipment ready just the same. At some point I don’t think we’re going to be able to afford to continue flying blind.”
“Perhaps,” Ixil said. “How much of this are you planning to tell the others?”
“As little as possible,” I said. “I’ve already told Tera I ran afoul of someone back there who had decided to make it his business to hijack the Icarus.”
“Which is more or less true.”
“Eminently true,” I agreed. “I also mentioned the murder charge against Cameron to her, just to see what kind of reaction I’d get.”
“And that was?”
“Protests of surprise, but no visible evidence of it,” I told him. “Though I’m not sure where exactly that leaves us. I think that the rest of the details, including the fact that the Patth are involved, should be left out of the story for the moment. We’ve got enough trouble as it is explaining why we’re running under fake IDs and why no one should mention the name ‘Icarus’ in groundside conversations. There’s no need to scare them, too.”
“I agree,” Ixil said, l
ooking around and snapping his fingers twice. Pix and Pax scampered out from under my bunk and whatever they’d found to explore there and climbed up his legs and torso back to his shoulders. “I’ll go up and …”
He trailed off, an odd look on his face. “What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly, the look still there. “Something’s not quite right. I can’t put my finger on it.”
I was on my knees now, plasmic in hand, my full attention on the deck where the ferrets had emerged from beneath the bunk. Carefully, one hand on the edge of the bunk to steady myself, I leaned over and looked underneath.
Nothing. No one scrunched up in hiding, no mysterious packages ready to go boom in the quiet watches of the night, no indication of hidden bugs or bottles of poisonous spiders, no evidence of tampering at all. Just a plain metal deck with a plain metal hull beyond it.
I got back to my feet. “Nothing there,” I reported, brushing off my knees with my free hand.
“Of course not,” Ixil said, his face wrinkling in a different way. “We would certainly have seen and recognized anything obvious.”
I knew that, of course. On the other hand, it wasn’t his bunk in his cabin. “So how unobvious is it?” I asked.
“Very,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s rather like one of those ideas or memories that floats around the edge of your mind, but which you can’t quite tease out into the open.”
“Keep trying,” I told him.
“I will,” he promised, throwing one last frown at the bunk and turning toward the door. He was reaching for the release pad when, beside the middle bunk, the intercom crackled. “Captain McKell, this is Chort,” the Craea’s familiar voice whistled through the speaker, the rhythmic thuds and hums of the engine room in the background. “Is Mechanic Ixil there with you?”
I stepped around the bunks to the intercom and tapped the key. “Yes, he is,” I told him. “Trouble?”
“Nothing serious, I don’t think,” Chort assured me. “But I am in need of his assistance. The readings indicate an intermittent fault in the Darryen modulator relay, with possible location in the power-feed couplings.”
“Probably the connectors,” Ixil rumbled from behind me. “Those go out all the time.”
“So I understand,” Chort agreed. “I thought perhaps you and your outriders could either confirm or deny that possibility before I wake Drive Specialist Nicabar and ask him to open the conduit.”
“No problem,” Ixil said, tapping the door-release pad. “I’ll be right there.”
He stepped into the corridor and headed for the aft ladder. “Thank you,” Chort said as the door closed again. The intercom clicked off, and I was alone.
For a few minutes I stood there, listening to the various hums and clanks and throbbings, staring at my bunk and the wall behind it. I’ve never had any particular problems with the loneliness or unpleasant self-evaluation that for some people make solitude something to be avoided. For that matter, given that much of my human interaction lately had been with people like Brother John, solitude was in fact something to be actively sought out. I was tired, I’d been running low on sleep since even before that taverno run-in with Cameron, and under normal circumstances I would have been on my bunk and asleep in three minutes flat.
But if there was one thing certain about the Icarus, it was that nothing here ever approached what one might consider normal circumstances. And at this point, the latest express delivery of abnormal circumstances seemed to be whatever the nameless oddity was that existed around, under, or inside my bunk.
Plasmic still in hand, I eased carefully onto my stomach on the deck again and just as carefully wiggled my way under the bunk. It was a tight squeeze—a three-tier bunk hasn’t got a lot of space underneath it—but I was able to get my head and most of my upper body under without triggering any bouts of latent claustrophobia. I wished I’d thought to snag the flashlight from my jacket, but enough of the cabin’s overhead light was diffusing in to give me a fairly reasonable view.
The problem was, as I’d already noted, there was nothing there to see. I was surrounded by a bare metal deck, a bare metal wall, and a wire-mesh-and-mattress bunk of the type that had been around for centuries for the simple reason that no one yet had come up with a better compromise between marginal comfort and minimal manufacturing cost.
I wiggled my way back out, got to my feet, and spent a few more minutes going over the entire room millimeter by millimeter. Like the area under the bunk, there wasn’t anything to see.
Nothing obvious, at least. But I knew Ixil, and if he said his outriders had found something odd, then they’d found something odd; and suddenly I decided I didn’t much care for the silence and solitude of my cabin. Replacing my plasmic in its holster, I pulled my jacket on over it and left.
I didn’t expect there to be much happening aboard the Icarus at that hour, and as I climbed the aft ladder to the mid deck I discovered I was right. Tera was on bridge-monitor duty—with, typically for her, the door closed—Chort and Ixil were back in the engine room, and Everett, Nicabar, and Shawn were presumably in their cabins on the upper deck. I thought I might find someone in the dayroom, either eating or watching a vid, but the place was as deserted as the corridor outside it. Either everyone had felt more in need of sleep than food, or else the camaraderie temperature reading aboard the Icarus was still hovering down around the liquid-nitrogen mark. Somewhere in the same vicinity, I decided sourly, as my progress at figuring out what was going on.
Just aft of the dayroom was the sick bay. On impulse, wondering perhaps if Everett might still be up, I touched the release pad and opened the door.
There was indeed someone there, dimly visible in the low night-light setting. But it wasn’t Everett. “Hello?” Shawn called, lifting his head from the examination table to peer across the room at me. “Who is it?”
“McKell,” I told him, turning up the light a bit and letting the door slide shut behind me. “Sorry to disturb you—I was looking for Everett.”
“He’s on the bridge,” Shawn said, nodding toward the intercom beside the table. “Said it was his turn to earn his keep around here and told Tera to go to bed. You can call him if you want.”
“No, that’s all right,” I said, suppressing a flicker of annoyance. Strictly speaking, Tera should have cleared any such shift changes with me, but she and Everett had probably thought I was trying to catch up on my own sleep and hadn’t wanted to disturb me. And the ship’s medic was supposed to be available for swing shifts if any of the regular crewers were unable to cover theirs. “How come you’re still here?” I asked, crossing the room toward him.
He smiled wanly. “Everett thought it would be best if I stayed put for a while.”
“Ah,” I said intelligently, belatedly spotting the answer to my question. With the dim light and the way the folds in his clothing lay, I hadn’t seen until now the straps pinning his arms and legs gently but firmly to the table. “Well …”
My discomfort must have been obvious. “Don’t worry,” he hastened to assure me. “Actually, the straps were my suggestion. It’s safer for everyone this way. In case the stuff he gave me wears off too quickly. I guess you didn’t know.”
“No, I didn’t,” I admitted, feeling annoyed with myself. With the unexpected entry of the Patth into this game dominating my thoughts, I’d totally forgotten about Shawn’s performance at the airlock. “I guess I just assumed Everett had given you a sedative and sent you off to bed in your own cabin.”
“Yes, well, sedatives don’t work all that well with my condition,” Shawn said. “Unfortunately.”
“You did say he’d given you something, though, right?” I asked, swinging out one of the swivel stools and sitting down beside him. Now, close up, I could see that beneath the restraints his arms and legs were trembling.
“Something more potent at quieting nerves,” he told me. “I’m not sure exactly what it was.”
“And why do your ner
ves need quieting?” I asked.
A quick series of emotions chased themselves across his face. I held his gaze, letting him come to the decision at his own speed. Eventually, he did. “Because of a small problem I’ve got,” he said with an almost-sigh. “Sort of qualifies as a drug dependency.”
“Which one?” I asked, mentally running through the various drug symptoms I knew and trying without success to match them to Shawn’s behavior patterns. Ixil had suggested earlier that the kid’s emotional swings might be drug-related, but as far as I knew he hadn’t been able to nail down a specific type, either.
And Shawn’s answer did indeed come as a complete surprise. “Borandis,” he said. “Also sometimes called jackalspit. I doubt you’ve ever heard of it.”
“Actually, I think I have,” I said carefully, the hairs rising unpleasantly on the back of my neck even as I tried to put some innocent uncertainty into my voice. I knew about borandis, all right. Knew it and its various charming cousins all too well. “It’s one of those semilegit drugs, as I recall. Seriously controlled but not flat-out prohibited.”
“Oh, it’s flat-out prohibited most places,” he said, frowning slightly as he studied me. Maybe my uncertainty act hadn’t been enough; maybe he didn’t think a simple cargo hauler should even be aware of such sinful things, let alone know any of the details. “But in most human areas it’s available by prescription. If you have one of the relevant diseases, that is.”
“And?” I invited.
His lips tightened briefly. “I’ve got the disease. Just not the prescription.”
“And why don’t you have the prescription?”
He smiled tightly. “Because I had the misfortune to pick up the disease in a slightly illegal way. I—well, some friends and I went on a little private trip to Ephis a few years ago.”
