The Icarus Hunt

by Timothy Zahn

  “They ‘think’ they want it?”

  “Well, I sure can’t see any good reason for chasing us this way,” I told him. “Any cargo that would pass muster well enough on Gamm to earn a sealed-cargo license can’t be all that exciting to anyone. Maybe it’s the ship itself they want, though personally I find that even less plausible.”

  I looked back at Tera. “But whatever the reason, it boils down to the fact that you’re stuck with me. You try finding a replacement pilot from this point on, and you’ll never know whether it’s someone the hijackers deliberately dangled in front of you, either one of their own or someone they’ve hired for the occasion. Not until it’s too late, anyway. Have you noticed that none of your cabin doors have locks?”

  They exchanged glances. Unhappy glances; trapped-and-not-liking-it-at-all glances. But they were stuck, and they knew it. At the moment the only people they had even a hope of trusting were already aboard the Icarus. And it was for sure that none of them could fly this front-heavy fitter’s nightmare.

  “If this is supposed to make us feel better about trusting you, it isn’t,” Nicabar said. “How do we know you aren’t just sticking around hoping to get a better deal?”

  “How do I know you won’t sell out?” I countered. “Or that Tera won’t, or any of the others? Answer: I don’t. If there were better odds to be had anywhere else, I’d grab them. But there aren’t. Not here, not now.”

  “So why should you care what happens to the Icarus?” Nicabar persisted. “Or to any of the rest of us?”

  I looked him straight in the eye. “Because I took a contract to fly this ship to Earth. And that’s what I intend to do.”

  “And we can believe that or not?”

  I sighed, suddenly weary of this whole stupid game. “Believe whatever you want,” I told him. “But if and when we make it to Earth I’ll want a full apology.”

  It would be overly generous to say that he smiled. But some of the implied threat did seem to drain out of his face. I reflected briefly on his former career with the EarthGuard Marines, a career that wouldn’t really have trained him how to read people. “I’ll remember that,” he promised.

  “I may even expect a little groveling,” I warned, shifting my attention back to Tera. “How about you? Willing to rub shoulders with the drink-fetchers a little longer, or are you going to jump ship at the next port?”

  I’d thought the words, or at least the tone, might get another facial reaction out of her. But she simply studied me, those hazel eyes holding more pity than loathing. “I’ll stay,” she said. “I took the contract, too.”

  “Good,” I said briskly. “Then we’re all one big happy family again. How nice. Revs, I believe you’re still on duty?”

  “I’ll stay with the ship for now, McKell,” he said quietly. “But remember what I told you earlier. If I find out we’re carrying drugs or guns, I’m out.”

  I nodded. “I’ll remember,” I promised.

  He regarded me another moment, then nodded back and tapped the door-release pad. It opened, and he disappeared back out into the corridor.

  Tera started to follow, but then paused in the doorway. “You’re not trapped, Jordan,” she said, her voice quiet. Quiet, earnest, and idealistic as all get-out. Generally, it was a combination I hated. On her, oddly enough, it seemed to fit rather naturally. “There’s a way out somewhere. You just have to want to find it badly enough.”

  “I once thought that way,” I told her. “Thought there was a quick and simple solution to every problem.”

  “I didn’t say the solution would be quick or simple,” she said impatiently, the idealism level dropping but the earnestness increasing to more than make up the difference. “I just said that it was there if you really wanted it.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “And while I’m doing that, perhaps you’ll try to remember that job security of any sort is a damn sight better than the starvation diet everyone but the Patth is on these days. It’s easy for a computer jock like you—you don’t have to fly on starships; there are computers everywhere. But I can’t very well fly an accounting firm’s desk, now can I?”

  “I suppose the question is how much security is worth to you,” she said. “Compared with, say, self-respect.” Turning back to the door, she started to stride out of the room.

  “By the way, Tera?” I said.

  Almost reluctantly, probably annoyed at my ruining her dramatic exit, she stopped. “Yes?”

  “Everett told me you were in the mechanics shop when he came to alert everyone about Shawn’s escape,” I said. “What were you doing in there?”

  She regarded me coolly. “I was looking for a jeweler’s screwdriver set,” she said. “One of my displays was going funny and I thought it might need some adjustment.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She gazed at me another heartbeat. “You’re welcome,” she said, turning again and making her exit.

  I watched the door slide closed behind her, gave her and Nicabar a minute to get out of the corridor, then went over and locked the door open again. I like my privacy as much as the next man, but if anyone was planning to go for a stroll around the mid deck, I wanted to hear them doing it.

  Returning to my chair, I resumed my regimen of scowling at the displays. Tera and Nicabar had at least been up front about their suspicions about me. How many of the others, I wondered, were having the same thoughts, only weren’t interested in a confrontation?

  I didn’t care about being popular. Well, I did, actually, as much as anyone else, but I’d long since resigned myself to the knowledge that people who liked me were going to be few and far between. The vital question right now, though, was not popularity but trust and obedience. If there was any chance at all of making it through the ever-tightening Patth noose, it was going to require all of us working together.

  All of us. Including our mysterious saboteur.

  It would help enormously if I could figure out what exactly he was going for. But while I could hammer any three or four of the incidents into a workable theory, trying to put all of them together simply refused to work. If someone knew what was in the Icarus’s cargo hold, and if it was as valuable as we all thought, why hadn’t he turned us in to the Patth on Potosi and claimed the reward? Or had the gem-smuggling tip to Najiki Customs been an abortive attempt to do just that? And how did the attacks on Jones and Ixil fit in?

  Abruptly, I sat up straighter in my chair, my mind flashing back to what I myself had said not ten minutes earlier to Nicabar about the hijackers possibly hiring a pilot for the occasion. The Patth might very well be doing just that—they certainly had enough money to spread around, and I was the one person they knew was aboard. A single well-placed shot could take me out of the picture permanently, and make it vital for the rest to find a new pilot.

  And if the Patth were dangling high-denomination bills in front of ships’ pilots, why not ships’ mechanics as well? Our resident saboteur, no matter what his secret talents and certificates, probably couldn’t fly a ship this size and shape by himself. But two such talented and certified men just might be able to pull it off.

  And if this second man was also a mechanic, then the simplest way to get him aboard was to create an opening in that slot. Our saboteur had succeeded in eliminating Jones; but I’d already had Ixil standing in line to fill the vacancy. Was the implied threat of cyanide poisoning a heavy-handed attempt to scare Ixil off?

  If so, he was going to be sorely disappointed. Kalixiri in general didn’t scare very well, and Ixil was even worse at it than the average.

  Which unfortunately still left the question of why the Icarus wasn’t already in Patth hands; and maybe I’d now come up with an answer to that one, too. Uncle Arthur had said the Patth Director General was personally calling the various governments along our route; but what if he was not, in fact, speaking for the entire Patth government? I’d always assumed the Patth were fairly monolithic, at least insofar as their rel
ations with other species were concerned. But what if that wasn’t the case?

  In that event our saboteur might not have turned us in to the Patth simply because he hadn’t yet run across the right Patth to turn us in to. Maybe the customs flap on Potosi had indeed been an attempt to alert someone, only they hadn’t gotten the message in time. Or else my maneuver with Antoniewicz’s name had gotten us out of trouble and off the planet faster than anyone had anticipated.

  The politics of the situation, I knew, I didn’t have a hope of unraveling without more detailed information about the Patth, which I didn’t expect to be getting anytime soon. However, with this assumption came an unexpected opportunity. Unless our saboteur had been recruited on the spot at the Meima spaceport—which seemed unlikely—it meant that he must have had previous ties to the Patth. Ties that, if I was lucky, would show up in the background reports Uncle Arthur had promised to deliver to me at our next stop.

  I looked over my instruments and displays again, and despite the extra fuel cost involved edged our speed up a little. Suddenly, I was very anxious to get to Morsh Pon.

  CHAPTER

  11

  It was an eighty-four-hour flight from Potosi to Morsh Pon, eighty-four hours that went both smoother and more annoyingly than I’d expected them to. We had to make only two stops along the way for Chort to repair more hull ridges, which considering the Icarus’s haphazard construction was not a bad showing at all. Perhaps the main hull’s spherical design, unlovely though it was, actually stood up better against hyperspace pressure than the lean, graceful lines that I was more used to with starships. Or maybe it was just that all of our good luck was being unidirectionally expended on our hull.

  There were no more attempts at sabotage, at least none that came to light, but we had plenty of other trouble. Successive doses of borandis were able to bring Shawn back from the edge and ensure that he wouldn’t have any permanent neural damage, at least this time around. Unfortunately, he’d apparently been far enough along that it took more of the medicine than normal to get him properly stabilized. Everett thought we would be okay to Morsh Pon and probably the stop after that, but we were going to have to get hold of a new supply sooner than I’d hoped.

  Our archaic computer was another problem that reared its ugly head shortly into the flight. The glitch Tera had mentioned with her display turned out to be nothing as simple as an adjustment problem. Once she opened the computer casing the trouble was instantly obvious: thin layers of almost microscopic dust inside, dust that apparently had just enough electrical conductivity to create flickers of random havoc as the cooling fans blew it across the various boards and components.

  It was equally obvious, at least to Ixil and me, how it had happened. Shoved off to the side somewhere in one of the underground chambers on Meima while Cameron’s techs put the Icarus together, it had had plenty of opportunity to collect dust through its various apertures. But of course none of the rest of our crew knew the ship’s history, and dodging the constant stream of questions and complaints—most of the latter from Shawn, despite the alleged civilizing effects of his medicine—wore pretty thin after a while. Ixil bore the brunt of that one as he spent the better part of seventy hours helping Tera and Shawn disassemble the system, clean it thoroughly, and put it back together again.

  That all by itself scored as both a plus and a minus on my mental tally sheet. A plus because Ixil closeted with Shawn and Tera meant neither of those two would be skulking around crimping torch nozzles or tapping into intercoms; a minus because it meant that for those same seventy hours I was robbed of Ixil’s assistance in anything I might want to do.

  Which meant that by the time we had a chance to send Pix and Pax into the open area between the two hulls for a thorough exploration, there was no longer anything in there for them to find. No footprints in whatever dust might have been present before the multitude of vibrations redistributed it; no leftover tool lying behind one of the supports where its owner might have missed it; no trace of the short-circuited intercom power lines, which had apparently been carefully and unobtrusively fixed. About all the ferrets could come up with was the odd fact that the outer hull didn’t feel, smell, or taste like anything else they’d ever come across. It certainly wasn’t any standard hull metal. At one point I actually wondered if perhaps the Potosi customs people hadn’t been as far off the mark as I’d thought, that all Cameron was doing was smuggling gold or iridium or some other exotic metal plated along the inside edge of the outer hull. But that seemed both too complicated and too petty for someone with Cameron’s reputation and resources. Besides which, it didn’t even start to explain the increasingly obsessive Patth interest in us.

  Earlier I had also taken advantage of Tera’s and Shawn’s preoccupation with the computer to do a quiet check of their cabins, but both searches came up empty. Neither of them had a cache of hidden weapons, secret Patth code books, or instruction manuals on how to sabotage a starship. On the other hand, I found nothing in Tera’s cabin to confirm that she was a member of any of those first-name-only religious sects, either. Perhaps she was just the cautious type who didn’t like giving her full name to strangers.

  Overall, crew morale didn’t fare very well during that leg of the trip. Everett’s private reservations about going to a criminal hellhole like Morsh Pon didn’t stay private very long, and starting about two hours into the trip I had him, Shawn, and Tera all campaigning for me to find someplace else for our next fueling stop. Nicabar and Chort didn’t join in the chorus, but in Nicabar’s case I had the distinct feeling he was wondering if I’d chosen Morsh Pon deliberately to make sure he and Tera couldn’t find anyone more trustworthy to replace me.

  In short, it was a frustrating, aggravating three and a half days for all of us. And with Morsh Pon waiting, I wasn’t expecting it to get any better at the far end.

  It was late afternoon and early evening across the main Morsh Pon colony area when we arrived over the planet, with the sunset line probably an hour past the Blue District that was our destination. We were the only ship incoming, though I spotted a couple of other freighters on their way out, all of them running IDs that were probably as phony as ours. I gave the control center our destination port, got a rectangle assignment, and eased the Icarus down into the darkness.

  The others were all waiting in the wraparound by the time I’d secured the ship, called for a fueling team, and made my way aft. The entryway hatch was unopened; by common consent, apparently, they’d all decided I should get the honor of being first in line for any stray shots that might be flying around out there. Leaving my plasmic in its holster—Nicabar aside, none of the others knew about the weapon, and I didn’t feel the need to enlighten them—I keyed the hatch and waited tautly as it swung ponderously open. This particular spaceport didn’t have any of the nice concave landing cradles we’d had at our last couple of stops, with the result that I was looking out over the landscape from a vantage point ten meters up.

  I’d never actually been on Morsh Pon before, but I couldn’t imagine the view was any better up here than it would be at ground level. Even in the admittedly bad street light, the tavernos, flophouse brothels, and other assorted dives that crowded into the spaces between the various landing-pad clusters looked dingy and unfriendly. Most of the buildings had darkened windows and doorways, adding their individual bits to the overall gloom. Across the strip of buildings facing us was an empty pad cluster, looking rather like a bald spot amid the uneven rows of buildings encircling it. A few stars were visible in the darkening sky, but even they seemed subdued, as if they didn’t really want to look down at the Blue District, either.

  “Interesting,” Ixil murmured from beside me. “Where is everyone?”

  I frowned, looking at the scene with new eyes. He was right. I’d already noted the dark buildings and empty landing-pad cluster directly in front of me; now, leaning partially out of the entryway, I could see that none of the nearest landing clusters was occupied. In the distan
ce I could see what might have been the curved hulls of a pair of ships, and a couple hundred meters off to my right I could see a single taverno with its doorway lights on. But that was it. Virtually no ships, virtually no open businesses, no vehicles except for the fueler I could see heading our way along an access road, and no pedestrians at all. It was as if we’d landed in a ghost town.

  “Hey, Everett, I thought you said this place was crawling with murderers and pirates,” Shawn said accusingly. “So where are they?”

  “I don’t know,” Everett muttered behind me. “Something’s wrong. Something’s very wrong.”

  “Did Landing Control say anything when you checked in?” Nicabar asked. “Disease, plague, quarantine—anything?”

  “Not a word,” I said, studying the single lit taverno I could see. We were too far away for me to read the nameplate, but knowing Uncle Arthur I was willing to bet it was the Baker’s Dozen, the place he’d named in our last conversation. “Maybe they can tell us something in there,” I suggested, pointing to it. “Anyone want to join me for a little stroll?”

  “Not me,” Everett said firmly. “If there’s some disease out there, I don’t want to catch it.”

  “Landing Control’s legally required to alert incoming ships about medical dangers,” I reminded him.

  “And this is Morsh Pon, where they use laws for place mats,” Everett countered firmly. “Thanks, but I’ll stay here.”

  “Me, too,” Shawn seconded.

  “I’ll go with you,” Tera said. “I need to get out of this ship for a while.”

  “Count me in, too,” Nicabar added.

  “Sure,” I said, completely unsurprised by this one. Neither Tera nor Nicabar would be nearly as concerned about possible germs as they would be that I might sneak off and do something they wouldn’t approve of. “Chort? Ixil?”

  “I will come,” Chort said. “Perhaps the taverno will have a bottle of kompri for sale.”