The Icarus Hunt

by Timothy Zahn

  Not surprisingly, given the Icarus’s designer’s overly optimistic faith in the goodness of his fellow men, none of the breaker boxes was locked. The hinges squeaked slightly as I pulled the proper one open, but not loudly enough to wake up any of the sleepers nearby. With a tingling sense of anticipation, I shined my light inside.

  According to Ixil’s schematic, the box held twenty-six low-voltage circuit breakers. At the moment, however, all it held was twenty-six circuit-breaker sockets.

  I gazed at the empty box for a few more seconds, twenty-twenty hindsight turning my anticipation into a sour taste in my mouth. With the wires still touching behind the intercom, the saboteur had, of course, been unable to reset the telltale breaker. So he’d simply taken them all out.

  Score one more round to him. This was getting to be a very bad habit.

  With the same faint squeak of the hinges I closed the cabinet door again. There might be some spare breakers aboard, but since virtually nothing ever went wrong with the things there very well might not be. Besides, anyone smart enough to have anticipated my actions in the ’tweenhull space was probably already ahead of me there, too. By the time I found the spares—or found and cannibalized another set of same-sized ones from a different box—he would undoubtedly have the intercom wires fixed again.

  The walk back down to my cabin seemed longer somehow than the upward trip had been a few minutes earlier. I retrieved a connector tool from the mechanics room on my way and finished sealing the hull plate back into position, then lay back down on my bunk and tried to think. I thought for a while, but it didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere, so I went back up to the mid deck to check on the bridge.

  Tera was still faithfully on duty, or was once again faithfully on duty if she’d been the one scooting around between the Icarus’s hulls. I volunteered to take over for her while she grabbed something to eat from the dayroom, and as she passed by me I tried to see if I could spot any oil stains on her clothing or smell any lingering aromas. There was nothing out of the ordinary that I could detect.

  But then, I didn’t seem to have picked up any stains or smells while I was between decks, either. Inconclusive, either way.

  As soon as she was out of sight I did a complete check of the bridge, equipment and course heading both. Tera was still reasonably high on my list of suspects; and even if she wasn’t the one sporting the brand-new collector’s set of circuit breakers, there was no reason a saboteur who liked fiddling with intercoms couldn’t extend his hobby to more vital equipment.

  But everything checked out perfectly. Sinking wearily into the command chair, I propped my elbows on the armrests and my chin on my hands and stared at the hypnotic flickering of the lights on the status display until Tera returned. We exchanged good-nights, and I went back to my cabin. Giving up my efforts at thinking as at least temporarily unproductive, I lay down on my bunk and went to sleep.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Potosi was the most populous world we’d hit yet, big enough that it was no longer a colony but a full-fledged member of the Najiki Archipelago, a series of thirty or so Najiki worlds scattered across several hundred light-years and winding its way through at least three other species’ claimed regions or spheres of influence. That the other species tolerated what might otherwise have been seen as an unacceptable intrusion on their sovereign territories was a tribute to Najiki diplomacy and bargaining skill.

  That, plus their unique gift for creating wealth and their willingness to share that wealth with governments who were generous enough in turn to grant them right-of-way corridors through their space. The cynics, of course, would put it rather more strongly.

  There were five major InterSpiral-class spaceports on the Potosi surface, the largest and most modern of which was heavily dominated by the Patth mercantile fleet. As soon as we were in range, I contacted the controller and asked for a landing bay in the port farthest away from it. Under some circumstances, I knew, a request that specific might have raised eyebrows, or whatever the Najik used for eyebrows. But the Patth near monopoly on shipping had hit this area particularly hard, leaving an almost-universal hatred for them in its wake, and I knew that the controllers would take it in stride.

  Unfortunately, that same universal hatred also meant that every other incoming non-Patth ship was also making the same demand; and most of them were regular visitors here. In the end, in a result that fit all too well with the depressing pattern of the entire trip so far, not only were we not granted a slot half a continent away as requested, but were instead put down square in the middle of the Patth hub.

  Once again, I told the rest of the crew to stay aboard while I went out shopping. Once again, they weren’t at all happy about it.

  “I don’t think you understand the situation,” Everett rumbled, staring disapprovingly down at me from his raised position on the slanted deck. “It seems to me that if we could simply take Shawn to the port med center and show them his symptoms—”

  “We could then all sit around a quiet room somewhere,” I finished for him. “Explaining to the nice Najik from the Drug Enforcement Division just how it was he got a borandis addiction in the first place. Remember the hijacking threat—this would not be a good place to make ourselves conspicuous.”

  He snorted. “No one would try a hijacking here in the middle of a major spaceport.”

  “You must be kidding,” I growled. “With strangers wandering around all over the place, and no one knowing anyone else, either spacers or ground personnel? It’s a perfect spot for it.”

  His lips compressed briefly. “What about you?” Tera spoke up, gesturing at my newly recolored hair and eyes and the set of false scars I’d applied to my cheek. “You think that disguise is going to get you past the people looking for you?”

  “Someone has to go hunt up a drug dealer,” I reminded her patiently. “Would you rather do it yourself?”

  “I just don’t want you to get caught,” she shot back angrily. “If you do, that ends it for all of us.”

  “I won’t get caught,” I assured her. “I won’t even be noticed. The picture they’ve got of me is old, and I know the sort of people the Patth are recruiting. They won’t be able to get past the hair and eyes, believe me.”

  “Interesting,” Nicabar murmured. “I wonder how one gets to be an expert on how people like that think.”

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” I warned him acidly. Maybe a little too acidly; but time was getting tight. And besides, I really didn’t want to go out there, either.

  There were apparently no more questions that anyone wanted answers to. “That’s settled, then,” I said into the chilly silence. “Revs, call and get someone out here to fuel up the ship—hopefully, we can get the tanks properly topped off this time. Don’t forget that we’re the Sleeping Beauty now. Everett, keep an eye on Shawn. Keep him quiet until I get back.”

  Everett’s lips compressed again. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “What about Mechanic Ixil?” Chort asked. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s resting in his cabin,” I told them, deliberately bending the truth a bit. If our saboteur didn’t already know about Kalixiri healing comas, I had no intention of enlightening him. “Don’t worry, he’ll come out when he’s ready. I’ll be back in two hours.”

  They were still standing together in the wraparound as I headed down the ramp, looking for all the world like hapless waifs watching the last bus leaving for the orphanage. I hoped they wouldn’t still be standing there like that when the fuelers came by to start filling the tanks. It would look a little odd.

  The slideways here were similar to the ones on Dorscind’s World, only better maintained, as well as being equipped with transparent half-cylinder shields overhead to ward off the elements. At the moment the protection wasn’t necessary, but judging by the dark clouds beginning to gather on the horizon it likely would be soon.

  The port itself was neat, efficient, and as clean as
a port could be, not a great surprise with the Patth directly running three-quarters of it and having a strong say in the operation of the rest. The civilian area just outside the port, though, wasn’t under even their nominal control and was likely to be just as dark, sinister, and vice-ridden as any other spaceport environs in the Spiral. There I would find the dealers in happyjam and other forms of misery, at least one of whom—I hoped—would have borandis in stock.

  The problem, of course, was finding the right needle in the correct haystack. Under normal circumstances that would take a great deal of time, time neither Shawn nor I nor the Icarus had to spare at the moment. I had to cut through the danger and tedium of the search process and go straight to the source.

  Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, I had the source’s phone number.

  The screen lit up to show the same broken-nosed thug who had answered Brother John’s line the last time I’d called. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Jordan McKell,” I said. “I need some information.”

  The scowl lines around his eyes deepened as he frowned at me. “McKell?”

  “Yes; McKell,” I said, striving mightily for patience. I’d already lost twenty minutes of my promised two hours, ten in getting to the StarrComm building and ten more waiting for a free booth, and I wasn’t interested in playing Greek chorus to one of Brother John’s housethugs. “I’m disguised, all right? I need some information—”

  “Hang on,” he interrupted me. “Just hang on.”

  The screen went black. I glared at my watch, suddenly very tired of Brother John and his vicious yet stupid people. The next one on the line would probably be that moon-faced thug in the butler’s outfit, who by now had probably figured out what badinage was and would waste more of my time trying to come up with some.

  The screen cleared; but to my surprise it wasn’t the butler. “Hello, Jordan,” Brother John said. The voice was as smooth as ever, but the usual cherubic smile was nowhere to be seen. “Do you have any idea what kind of stir you’ve been creating out at that end of the Spiral?”

  “Have I, sir?” I asked.

  The chill visibly surrounding him abruptly dropped into the subzero range. “Don’t play innocent with me, McKell,” he snarled, his veneer of civility cracking like a cheap packing crate. “A ship from Meima, they’re all saying—a rogue freighter the Patth are panting like sick dogs to get their callused little hands on. Are you going to sit there and tell me that’s not you?”

  “Yes, sir, it’s me,” I said hastily. It was impossible to grovel properly in a StarrComm booth, but insofar as vocal groveling was possible I was groveling for all I was worth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. I just didn’t realize how much of a stir we were actually causing.”

  The temperature stayed where it was. “I don’t like commotions, McKell,” he warned. “I don’t like them at all. Commotions draw attention, and I don’t like attention. You don’t like attention, either.”

  “I know, sir,” I agreed humbly. “Believe me, I’m trying as hard as I can to get out of the spotlight.”

  “Trying how?” he demanded. “It’s not your ship or your problem—just walk away from it. Where are you? I’ll have you picked up.”

  He had a point, all right. Half of one, anyway. It wasn’t my ship; but it was my problem. “I can’t do that, sir,” I said, bracing myself for another burst of his anger. “I accepted a contract to fly the ship out. A poor but honest independent shipper can’t just break contracts that way. Not and continue to look like a poor but honest shipper.”

  “Who would know?” he countered. His voice was still hard and cold, but at least he hadn’t started screaming at me. Maybe I’d gotten him to start thinking it through.

  “Too many people,” I told him. “A lot of people—some of them spaceport officials—have seen my ID in connection with it. People who might start wondering how an independent shipper could afford to break a contract that way. People who might start wondering if that independent shipper had another source of operating funds.” I shrugged, a brief twitching of my shoulders. “And if they did, I wouldn’t be very effective as an employee anymore.”

  For a long minute he just stared at me, breathing heavily, his face unreadable. I gazed back, visually groveling now, wondering uneasily if I’d pushed my hand too far with that last one. Cutting me loose from our agreement would lose him most of the five hundred thousand in debt I still owed him, but the Antoniewicz organization probably blew that much a month just on paper clips. If, on the other hand, he decided that I had become too much of a liability to be trusted on my own, I would be summarily snuffed out like an atmosphere-test candle.

  And it would be the height of irony if it turned out I was the one who had talked him into doing it.

  “You keep trying to force these decisions on me, Jordan,” he said at last. His voice was still cold, but I thought I could detect a slight thawing of the chill factor. “These faits accomplis. There are to be no more of them.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m really not trying to do that. It’s just that things keep happening too fast, and I keep having to improvise.”

  “No more of them, Jordan,” he repeated in the same tone. “I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Perfectly.”

  “Good. Now, why did you call?”

  I took a careful breath. “I need to find a dealer, sir.”

  He blinked at that, the blink turning into an even deeper frown. “A dealer?” he repeated, the chill factor diving into arctic territory again. For all the misery he caused with his happyjam, Brother John was almost puritanical when it came to his own people using the stuff.

  “One who carries borandis,” I said hastily. “One of my crew is ill with Cole’s disease, and borandis is the treatment for it. It’s also called jackalspit.”

  “Yes, I know.” For a few more seconds those soulless eyes gazed into mine, his face still unreadable but almost certainly wondering if I was telling the truth or simply spinning a line. I held my breath, trying to look as simple and honest as I possibly could.

  And then, to my relief, he shrugged. “Why not? Where are you?”

  I got my lungs working again. “Potosi,” I said. “Kacclint Spaceport.”

  He grunted. “A Najiki world. Decent enough bugeaters.”

  “Yes, sir,” I agreed, mildly surprised that a xenophobe like Brother John would be even that complimentary toward a nonhuman race. Either he genuinely had some grudging respect for the Najik, or else he had business interests in the Archipelago and the Najik were doing a good job of making money for him. If I had to guess, I’d pick the latter. “I need to know if the organization has a dealer here who can help us. And if so, how to find him.”

  “Yes.” Brother John’s eyes flicked to his right. “Just a moment.”

  The screen blanked. I took another deep breath, suddenly aware of the weight of my plasmic against my side under my jacket. So far, it was all looking hopeful. But I knew better than to risk relaxing, even for a moment. Brother John’s moods were notoriously mercurial, and with his already stated displeasure at my being aboard the Icarus he might suddenly decide that letting a sick crew member die would be all to the good, either as an object lesson to me or as an extra push to get me to walk away from the whole situation. If he looked like he was going that direction I would have to remind him that Shawn’s death would only serve to raise the Icarus’s profile that much higher.

  He was gone a long time. Long enough that I began to wonder if perhaps he’d decided that this had become more trouble than it was worth, that both Shawn and I were expendable, and he was off making the appropriate arrangements. I was just thinking about pulling out my phone and seeing if Ixil had come out of his coma when the screen abruptly cleared.

  “All right,” he said briskly. “He’s a Drilie named Emendo Torsk, and he runs his business from a street music stand at Gystr’n Corner. I presume your sick crewman can pay?”

  “We shoul
d have enough, yes,” I assured him. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t call here again, Jordan,” he said quietly. “Not until this is all over. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir, perfectly clear,” I said. If the Icarus was going to go down, and if I was going to be stupid enough to go down with it, he had no intention of being tied in with either of us. “Thank you, sir.”

  “I’ll talk to you when this is all over.” He reached to the side, and the connection was broken.

  I swallowed, noticing only then how dry my mouth had become. Dealing with Brother John was becoming increasingly hard on me, both because of him personally and because of what he represented. To say I’d ever been genuinely happy about our arrangement would have been far too generous a statement; but lately my quiet distaste seemed to have fermented into a galloping revulsion.

  And that was dangerous. Not only because of what it was doing to my own heart and soul, not to mention my stomach, but because men like Brother John have a finely honed sense of people, particularly the people closest to them. I was hardly close to him, just one small employee among thousands, but the Antoniewicz organization hadn’t gotten where it was by letting even small employees become disaffected to the point where they dribbled away money or merchandise or secrets. Especially secrets.

  Brother John was presumably under no illusions about what it was that kept me working for him; I’d already seen how adept he was at making sure that half-million-commark debt would be hanging over my head for a long time to come. But if he was ever able to penetrate my mask and see the emotion swirling beneath it, he might very well decide I was a walking time bomb that needed to be dealt with.