The Icarus Hunt

by Timothy Zahn

  Which implied our saboteur had been rushed in his task. Which meant it had, in fact, been a response to our conversation.

  Which meant I was back to square one. How had he overheard us?

  I spent the next fifteen minutes going over the lockers and bunks, and found exactly what I’d expected, namely, nothing. Then, stretching out on my bunk, I stared at the bottom of the bunk above me and tried to think.

  When you have eliminated the impossible, Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It wasn’t an aphorism I particularly subscribed to, mainly because in real life eliminating all the various impossibles was usually a lot trickier than in Holmes’s fictional setting. However, in this particular case, the list of directions the answer could be hiding in was definitely and distressingly short. In fact, as I turned the problem over in my mind, I found there was exactly one of Sherlock’s improbables left.

  Ixil had mentioned earlier that he’d looked over the full schematics for the Icarus. It was a fair assumption that he’d gone ahead and kept a copy, so I went back to his cabin, ungimmicked the door, and went inside. The room looked exactly the way I’d left it except that Pix and Pax were now up on the middle bunk with Ixil, nosing around the hip pouch where he habitually kept some of the little treats they especially liked. I put them back on their bunk where they wouldn’t get rolled over on if Ixil shifted in his sleep, raided the pouch and gave them two of the treats each, then checked his locker. The schematics were there, a sheaf of papers rolled tightly together. I tucked the roll under my arm, regimmicked the door on my way out, and returned to my cabin.

  I looked first at the main overview, noting in particular the diameter of the main sphere that made up the forward section of the ship. The number listed was forty-one-point-three-six meters—a strangely uneven number, I thought, but one I trusted implicitly. Ship dimensions were critically important when landing-pit assignments were being doled out, and no one ever got them wrong. Not more than once, anyway.

  Two sheets down was the one I was most interested in: the schematic for the mid deck. Digging a pen out of my inside jacket pocket, I turned the first sheet over for some clean space and started jotting down numbers.

  Even given the inherent problem of fitting mainly rectangular spaces into a giant sphere, the Icarus’s various rooms were quite oddly shaped, and the semirandom placement of storage lockers, equipment modules, and pump and air-quality substations only added to the layout mess. But I was in no mood to be balked by a set of numbers, even messy ones, and I set to work.

  And in the end, they all matched.

  It was not the answer I’d been expecting, and for several minutes after rechecking my math I sat in silence scowling at the schematics. I’d been so sure that Sherlock and I had finally been on the brink of figuring this one out. But the numbers added up perfectly, and numbers don’t lie.

  Or do they?

  One page farther down was the lower-deck schematic, the deck I was currently on. A few more minutes’ work confirmed that these numbers, too, matched just fine.

  But that was just the theoretical part of this project. Now it was time to move on to the experimental work.

  A laser measure would have been the most convenient, but after what had happened to Ixil I was a bit leery about scrounging tools out of the Icarus’s mechanics room. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. I’d seen the printer up in Tera’s computer room, and I knew the size paper it used. Laying the schematics out on the floor, I set about using them to measure my cabin. It took just over two minutes, and when I was done I took a couple of the sheets out into the corridor and measured that, too.

  And when I was finished, the numbers had stopped matching.

  Each of the inner-hull plates was about a meter square and held in place by sixteen connectors. The average spacer’s multitool isn’t really the proper gadget to use for removing hull plates, but mine was a somewhat better model than the average and had a couple of additional blades those missed out on. By the time I was down to the final four—the ones in the corners—I was getting pretty adept at the procedure. I paused long enough at that point to dig out my flashlight and set it on the deck where it would be handy; after a moment’s thought I drew my plasmic and put it down beside the light. Then I removed the last four connectors and eased the plate out of place.

  And there, dimly seen by the reflected overhead light from my cabin, was the gray metal of the outer hull. Not twenty centimeters beyond the inner hull like it was supposed to be, but a solid meter and a half away.

  Plasmic in one hand and flashlight in the other, I leaned my head cautiously into the opening and looked around. The pipes and cables and conduits that normally ran through the ’tweenhull area were all in evidence, fastened securely to the inner hull just the way they were supposed to be. The rest of the space was completely empty except for the series of struts that fastened the two hulls together. Struts, I decided, that would provide a strenuous but workable jungle-gym walkway for anyone who wanted to move unseen about the ship.

  As well as a convenient work platform for, say, someone desiring to tap into the coax cable from an intercom. Specifically, my intercom. I turned my light on the spot off to the left where the relevant wires emerged, but it was too far away and my angle too shallow to see with certainty whether or not anything had been tampered with.

  The nearest support strut in that direction was nearly half a meter away. Laying my gun and light on the deck beside me, I gathered my feet under me, gauged the distance, and leaped carefully toward it.

  And with a sudden stomach-twisting disorientation, I jerked sideways and slammed hard onto my right shoulder and leg against the outer deck.

  It says a lot for the shock involved that my first stunned thought was that the Icarus’s grav generator had malfunctioned again, shutting off at the precise moment I jumped—this despite the fact that I was now lying flat on my side against the outer hull. It took another several seconds before my brain caught up with the fact that I was, in fact, lying against the outer hull, the term “lying” automatically implying a gravitational field.

  Except that this gravitational field was roughly at right angles to the one I’d just left in my cabin. The only one that the Icarus’s generator could create. The only one, in fact, that had any business existing here at all.

  Slowly, carefully, I turned my head to what was now “up” from my new frame of reference. There was my cabin, a meter above my head, with my plasmic and light clinging unconcernedly to what was from my perspective a sheer wall. Even more carefully, I leaned my torso up away from the hull, half expecting that this magic grip would suddenly cease if I let go of the hull and send me sliding down to the underside of the Icarus.

  I needn’t have worried. Except for the total impossibility of its vector, this field behaved more or less like the one created by a normal ship’s grav generator. I reached up toward my cabin, and because I was paying close attention I was able to feel where the two gravity vectors began to conflict with each other a few millimeters my side of the inner hull. At least now I knew what the anomaly was that Pix and Pax had detected while scampering beneath my bunk, and why neither they nor Ixil had been able to interpret it.

  It also explained how our mysterious eavesdropper/saboteur had been able to move around so easily. No dangerous or athletic strut-leaping required; all he had to do was crawl around like a spider on a wall. I snagged my light and gun and brought them to me, nearly dropping the plasmic when its weight suddenly shifted in my grip. It might not take great athletic ability to move around in here, I amended, but it did take some getting used to. Holstering the weapon, I shifted myself cautiously toward my intercom, still not entirely trusting this phenomenon.

  I was easing up to get a closer look at the wires when I heard a small scraping sound in the distance.

  For a moment I thought I’d imagined it, or else that it had merely been some normal ship’s noise distorted by the echo cha
mber I was lying in. But then the sound came again, and I knew I’d been right the first time.

  There was someone else in here with me.

  Silently, I shut off my light and put it in my pocket, at the same time drawing my plasmic. Then, not nearly as silently, but as silently as I could manage, I set off down the curving hull.

  It was, in retrospect, probably not the most brilliant thing I’d ever done in my life. However it was he’d discovered this cozy little back stairway, our saboteur surely had a better idea of the lay of the land in here than I did, including knowing where all the best hiding places and ambush sites were. He was furthermore presumably already acclimated to the place, whereas I was still distracted by the nagging feeling that at any minute the hull’s peculiar gravity would fail and I would become the cue ball in a giant spherical game of bumper billiards. But at the moment all that I could think of was that I had a chance to nail him dead to rights, and I was going to take it.

  I started off by scooting along the hull on my backside, but quickly gave that up as not nearly quiet enough, not to mention being a posture that tended to leave me with my back to the direction I was going. I tried switching to a standard hands-and-knees crawl, but after a couple of meters decided that that was no good either, leaving my gun hand as it did too far out of line to get off a quick shot if necessary. The only other option I could think of was the one I finally adopted, a crouching sort of duck waddle that was hard on the knees and undignified in the extreme, but at least had the advantage of leaving my gun and me pointed in the same direction.

  The sound had seemed to come from above me, the term “above” referring to the direction toward the Icarus’s top deck, so that was the direction I headed. It was slower going than I’d expected, partly because of the awkwardness of my stance and the need for silence, but also because of the unpleasant vertigo effect of having my head bobbing along just about where the two competing gravity fields mixed at roughly equal strength. The effect became steadily more pronounced as I passed the mid deck and continued around toward the top of the ship, with the angle between the gravity vectors gradually veering from ninety degrees toward an even more disconcerting 180.

  I don’t know how long the slow-motion chase went on. Not long, I think, not more than fifteen or twenty minutes’ total. Between my aching knees and swimming head and the fact that I was alone in a dark space with a man who had already killed once, my time sense wasn’t at its best that night. Every thirty seconds or so I paused to listen, stretching out with all my senses over the rumbling background noise and vibration of the ship, trying for a new estimate of where he was.

  It was on the fifth or sixth such halt that I realized that what had up till now been occasional incautious scraping sounds had suddenly become something far more steady. Steady scraping noises, yet paradoxically quieter than they had been up till then.

  My quarry knew I was here.

  Earlier, I had come up with the image of being a spider on a wall. Now, suddenly, the image changed from a spider to a fly. A fly pinned by a light against a very white wall. For a dozen heartbeats I squatted there motionlessly, sweating in the darkness as I strained to listen, trying to determine whether the sounds were moving toward or away from me. The latter would mean he was trying to escape, the former that he had yet another violent accident on his mind. And if there was one thing certain here, it was that I couldn’t afford to guess wrong.

  For those dozen heartbeats I listened; and then I knew. The sounds were definitely moving away, probably downward to my right, though the echo effect made it difficult to tell for sure.

  All the reasons why I shouldn’t have come in here after him in the first place once again flashed through my mind. Once again, I shoved them aside. I’d already lost several rounds to this man, and I was getting damned tired of it. Picking a vector that would theoretically intersect his, I set off after him.

  To this point it had been a slow-motion chase. Now, it became an equally slow-motion game of hounds and hares. I was stopping ever more frequently to listen; but my quarry was doing the same, and as often as not I would pause only to find he had changed direction again. Doggedly, I kept at it, my earlier thought about the possibility of ambush spots never straying too far from my mind. So far our saboteur had shown no indication of being armed, but everyone else I’d run into on this trip had been and there was no reason to expect that whoever had been handing out the guns with such generosity would have neglected his friend here aboard the Icarus.

  More than once I also considered banging the butt of my plasmic against the inner hull and trying to rouse the rest of the crew to help in the search. But by then I was so thoroughly lost that I had no idea whether I was even near enough to any of the others scattered around the ship for my pounding to do any good. And whether any of them heard me or not, my playmate in here certainly would, and at the first sign of an attempted alarm he might well postpone his escape plan in favor of shutting me up first.

  And then, in the distance ahead of me, I saw a faint glow appear, so faint that I wasn’t sure at first whether I was simply imagining it. My first thought was that our convoluted intertwined wanderings had brought us back to the vicinity of my cabin and the open inner-hull plate. But even as I realized that the combined gravity vector was wrong for that, the distant glow vanished, accompanied by a dull, metallic thud. A sound like two pieces of metal clanking hollowly against each other.

  The same sound I’d heard from the wraparound after my talk with Nicabar, and had been trying to track down for nearly two days.

  I kept going, but there was clearly no point in hurrying. My quarry had led me around the barn a couple of times and had now popped back through his rabbit hole to the safe anonymity of the Icarus proper. By the time I reached the spot where the glow had been, assuming I could pinpoint it at all, he would have the connectors back in place and it would be just one more of seventeen thousand other inner-hull plates.

  A couple of minutes later I reached the vicinity where I estimated the glow had been. As expected, every one of the hull plates in the area looked exactly alike, and I still had no idea where exactly I was. Briefly, I thought about trying to dig my way through, but a single glance was all it took to see that the hull-plate connectors couldn’t be removed from this side.

  But maybe there was another way to mark my place here.

  I played my light across the inner-hull plates over my head, searching among the haphazard arrangement of piping and wires until I found what I was looking for: the telltale power wires and coax cable of an intercom, their ends disappearing through the inner hull half a meter to the side of my estimated position for my quarry’s escape hatch.

  I’d left my multitool back on my cabin floor, but the contact edge of my plasmic’s power pack was rough enough for my purposes, and it took only a few minutes of work for me to abrade the insulation on the power wires enough to leave a small section of bare wire on each of them. Putting the plasmic aside, I touched the two bare spots together.

  There was no spark—the power level was far too low for that—but what the operation lacked in pyrotechnic dramatics it more than made up in personal satisfaction. Somewhere in the bowels of the Icarus, I knew, a circuit breaker had just popped in response to the short circuit I’d created. All I had to do was find which one, and I’d have my suspect intercom identified. And with it, the saboteur’s rabbit hole.

  Making sure the bare spots stayed together, I wrapped the wires as best I could to hold them that way. On most starships the main computer’s nursemaid program would pick this up in a flash and send a maintenance flag to both the bridge and engine-room status boards. With the Icarus’s archaic system, though, I doubted that it had such a program. Even if it did, there would be no way to reset the circuit breaker until the wires were unjinxed.

  Which left only the problem of finding my way back to my cabin and hunting up the appropriate breaker box before my adversary tumbled to what I’d done and fixed the short circu
it.

  Now that I was no longer engaged in a chase, the navigational task was straightforward if a bit tedious. Holding my light loosely by finger and thumb, I held it near the edge of the inner hull and watched which way it tried to turn. That gave me the direction of ship’s down, and I headed that way until further measurements with my impromptu pendulum showed I was at the sphere’s South Pole. Picking a direction at random, I moved along it for a few meters, then began circling at that latitude until I spotted the glow of my cabin light filtering through the opening. Three minutes after that, I was back.

  With everything else that had happened, I almost forgot to check my own intercom’s coax cable for tampering, which had, after all, been the original purpose of this exercise. Not that I was expecting to find anything else, but for completeness it seemed the proper thing to do. A cursory examination was all it took to discover that it had indeed been tapped into.

  I climbed back into my cabin, noting as I did so the curious fact that the hull’s gravitational field seemed to hold on to me more strongly now that I’d been all the way into it than it had before I’d first landed on the outer hull. Possibly it was just my imagination; but on the other hand this field was so unlike anything I’d ever experienced anyway, I was perfectly willing to grant it one more bit of inexplicable magic. Between this and the Lumpy Brothers’ exotic weaponry, the strange technology was starting to get a little too thick on the ground for my taste.

  Putting hull-plate connectors back in with a multitool was a different skill entirely from taking them out, but it wasn’t that hard and I wasn’t going to bother with more than the four corners for now anyway. A few minutes of leafing through Ixil’s sheaf of schematics and I had the proper breaker box identified: up on the top deck with the rest of the crew cabins.

  The general stir that had accompanied Ixil’s injuries had long since faded away, and the Icarus was again quiet. I climbed the aft ladder to the top deck and moved silently down the corridor, half expecting one of the cabin doors to open and someone to take a potshot at me. But no one did, and I reached the breaker box without incident. It was recessed into the bulkhead at the forward end of the corridor with five other breaker boxes, just beyond the forward ladder. It was also quite small, though given that it apparently only contained the ship’s twenty-six intercom breakers I shouldn’t have expected anything very big.