by Timothy Zahn
Her eyes flicked to her gun in my hand. Reluctantly, I thought, she nodded. “Good,” I said, nodding to Ixil.
He pulled his hands away slowly, ready to put them back again if she reneged on her promise. “What do you want?” she said in a low voice. There was a fair degree of tension in her face, I saw, but whatever panic there might have been had already disappeared.
“Like I said, to talk,” I told her. “We want to find out what you know about this ship, Tera.” I lifted my eyebrows. “Or should I call you Elaina?”
The corner of her mouth twitched. Not much, but enough to show I’d hit the bull’s-eye. Uncle Arthur had indeed come through. “Elaina?” she asked cautiously.
“Elaina,” I said. “Elaina Tera Cameron. Daughter of Arno Cameron. The man who put all of us aboard this ship.”
CHAPTER
12
For the space of a dozen heartbeats I thought she was going to try to play out the masquerade. She lay there on her bunk, propped up on one elbow, and stared at me, a dozen expressions flicking across her face. And then, the one hand I could see tightened into a fist, and I knew she’d given up. “What gave me away?” she asked calmly.
“It wasn’t anything you said or did,” I assured her. “Though now in retrospect I can see hints that you were more than you seemed. That nicely fortuitous timing when you first came to the bridge, for instance, making sure that I didn’t just pocket the money your father had left for us and stroll casually off the ship. No, we simply picked up some additional information which included the interesting note that Cameron’s daughter hadn’t been seen for a while. Our informant was kind enough to include a photo that was just barely adequate.”
“I see,” she said. “Where exactly did this information come from?”
“You know how we’re connected,” I said, my voice heavy with significance. “Just leave it at that.”
She seemed to measure me with her eyes. “All right,” she said. “So. Now what?”
“Now what is that you tell us what the hell this is all about,” I said. “Starting with where your father is.”
“He’s back on Meima, of course,” she said. “You ought to know—you took off without him.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, but that won’t wash. The whole planet was looking to hang a murder charge on him, and there aren’t a hell of a lot of places there where a human could hide.”
“Which means he was already aboard when you left,” Ixil added. “I presume he was the one Jordan chased briefly around the ’tweenhull area?”
Tera grimaced. So did I, feeling like a complete fool. All the way up from the lower deck knowing she was Cameron’s daughter, and that part had never even occurred to me. “So he’s the one who tapped into my intercom,” I said. “And who tried to kill Ixil with the cutting torch.”
“Dad wasn’t trying to hurt him,” Tera snapped, her face flushing. “Not Ixil or anyone else.” She transferred her glare to Ixil. “He thought you’d be professional enough to check the torch before you tried lighting it.”
“I’d already done so,” he said calmly. “Under the circumstances, I should have known to check it again.”
“I’m sorry,” she growled, her expression one of anger mixed with guilt. “For whatever it’s worth, he felt very bad about you getting hurt.”
Ixil inclined his head. “I accept his apology.”
“Accept it in person, why don’t you,” I put in. “Elaina, we need to talk to your father right away.”
“Tera,” she corrected me. “And Dad’s not here. He got off at Potosi.”
I threw a glance at Ixil. The biggest Patth shipping facility in the entire region; and that was where Cameron had chosen to jump ship? “Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t say anything about it to me beforehand. All I know is that when we all got back after looking for Shawn, he and his things were gone.”
Ixil rumbled in his throat. “You’ll forgive me if I say that makes no sense whatsoever.”
“You can search the ship yourselves if you want,” she countered tartly. “I tell you, he’s not here.”
“Let’s go back to the beginning,” I interrupted them, not about to let this degenerate into a reality-versus-logic argument if I could help it. “Let’s start with how you got to Meima and why you’re aboard the Icarus under this semiassumed identity.”
Tera looked back and forth between us, a wary look on her face. “Why should I tell either of you anything?” she demanded. “You’ve already admitted your souls are owned by a crime boss. Why should I trust you?”
“Because you have to trust someone,” I told her, putting on my quietly earnest face and gunning it for all it was worth. “And as far as this ship and crew are concerned, we’re it. Did you know the Patth are hunting for us?”
She swallowed. “Yes. There were hints even before we left Meima, and Dad heard you talking about it in your cabin.”
“All right,” I said. “Then remember back to Potosi, where one of our fellow crewers called in a tip that nearly got us impounded by the Najiki Customs agents.”
“How do you know it was one of us?” she asked.
“Because no one except the seven of us knew we were running under the name Sleeping Beauty at the time,” I said. “If I hadn’t gotten us out of that when I did, the Icarus would inevitably have wound up in Patth hands. That ought to prove I’m on your side.”
“And which is my side?”
“The side of getting the Icarus and its cargo to Earth intact,” I told her. “I could have turned you in on Dorscind’s World, too. In fact, I risked getting shot in order not to.”
I waved a hand at Ixil. “And as for Ixil here, someone aboard—and I presume it’s all the same person—is apparently trying to scare him off the ship. While the rest of you were out searching for Shawn on Potosi, he left the makings for poison gas inside the door of Ixil’s cabin. And then, for good measure, smashed the release pad to keep everyone else out.”
Tera stared at me. “No. I don’t believe it.”
I shrugged. “You can ask Everett. He was there when we found the stuff.”
“The point is that someone’s been operating behind the scenes,” Ixil said. “But apparently, so have you and your father, for whatever reasons of your own.”
“And the only way we’re going to figure out who this other person is,” I concluded, “is for you to tell us which were Cameron and Daughter Productions and which weren’t.” No doubt about it, I decided, Ixil and I could be dazzling in our logic when we wanted to be. “So: back to the beginning. How did you end up aboard the Icarus?”
If Tera was dazzled, she was hiding it well. But if she wasn’t totally convinced, she was nevertheless convinced enough. “Dad was funding an archaeological dig on Meima,” she said, pulling off the blanket and swinging her legs over the side of the bunk. She was fully dressed, I noted, the sort of thing that someone who’s expecting trouble automatically does. She hadn’t needed our arguments to know there was trouble aboard. “About three months ago they sent word that they’d found something big, something that could conceivably change the course of history.”
“Archaeologists do get a bit dramatic sometimes,” I murmured. “Especially at funding time.”
“In this instance they may have understated the case,” Tera said, dropping onto the deck and sitting down on the middle bunk. “Dad heard their description, and decided we needed to get it back to Earth as quickly and secretly as possible. It took him a month to make the necessary preparations, after which he flew a tech team in with the Icarus packed in pieces in shipping crates. They assembled the ship underground, the only place they could do it where they wouldn’t be seen. A week ago Dad and I flew into Meima ourselves to oversee the final stages. He came in on his private ship, the Mensana, while I took a commercial liner under a false ID.”
“Why?” Ixil asked. “Why did you come in by liner, I mean?”
“I was the ace
up his sleeve,” she said, a tight smile touching her lips briefly before vanishing again. “Or so he said. None of the others were to know I was there—as he pointed out, you can’t leak information you don’t have. My job was to keep an eye on the Ihmisit authorities and try to get us a heads up if anyone started showing undue interest in our activities.”
“Having a starship suddenly appear out in the middle of nowhere would probably do that,” I said.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen that way,” Tera said, glaring at me. “Give us a little credit. Dad had another team building a copy of the Icarus at one of his heavy construction plants on Rachna. The idea was for the copy to fly in, creating a nice official presence and data trail along the way, and get all legally inspected at the Meima port. Then it would fly out to the dig, we’d make a switch, and fly the original out. By the time anyone stumbled across the copy hidden in the cavern, we figured we’d be on Earth.”
“What went wrong?” Ixil asked.
Tera grimaced. “Two of those bumpy aliens that slut Jennifer was trying to wake up at the Morsh Pon taverno sneaked into the dig somehow,” she said bitterly. “They got Dr. Chou before they could be stopped. It was horrible—I wasn’t there, but Dad said their weapons burned him alive.”
“Yes, I’ve seen them in action,” I said, feeling my own stomach turning with the memory. “It is definitely not pretty.”
Her forehead creased. “That’s right; she said you’d killed a couple of them, didn’t she?”
“In self-defense only, I assure you,” I told her, wondering what her reaction would be if I told her that far from trying to wake the Lumpies up, Jennifer had instead been dabbing them with soporific from an injector ring to make sure their blissful sleep lasted until well after the Icarus was off the planet. “I hope you did something similar with your batch.”
She shivered. “We killed them, yes,” she said quietly. “Like you, in self-defense.”
“But you knew they would have friends?” Ixil prompted.
“Yes.” Visibly, Tera shook the thoughts of death away from her. “We—they, rather—knew they had to get the Icarus out right away. So they mixed up a concoction that would scramble the spaceport sensors, blew the roof off the cavern, and Dad and the Mensana’s pilot sneaked the ship up and off the planet.”
“Why turn around and come back?” I asked. “Why didn’t they put everyone aboard while they could and head straight out?”
“Because not everyone was ready to go,” she sighed. “There were several key people out of the immediate area, and we didn’t want to leave without them. We also knew that after the explosion the Ihmisits would come to investigate, and we thought having the whole group still there would alleviate any suspicions they might have about the explosion.”
She shook her head. “We never expected the official reaction to be so intense.”
“That’s because the Patth were already involved,” I said, nodding heavily. “Only there was no way you could know that. The Lumpies seem to be their hired muscle of choice.”
“I guess so,” she said. “Anyway, the Ihmisits descended on the dig like a pack of jackals, found Dr. Chou and the two alien bodies, and arrested everyone in sight. One of the techs managed to slip out of the noose long enough to get to town and warn Dad, but he was then picked up an hour later. They got Dad’s pilot, too, and the rest of those who’d been off the dig site.”
“Did the Ihmisits know your father was on Meima?” Ixil asked.
“Not at first,” she said. “I’m sure that’s what saved him. By the time they backtracked the pilot to his ship, he’d already hired all the crewers he needed. Luckily, the computer the group had been using for their analysis—the Worthram T-66 down there—was one of the few computer systems I actually knew how to operate, so he decided I would come aboard as the computer tech.”
“Were you involved with the rest of the hiring?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He wanted me completely out of it. He still thought of me as his ace, and he didn’t want to risk us even being seen in the same taverno together.”
“Too bad,” Ixil said. “It might have been useful to compare everyone’s recruiting story with an independent source.”
“I can’t help you there,” Tera said. “Anyway, after everything was set he went to ground somewhere for the night, and in the morning headed for the ship.”
“How did he get in?” I asked. “I checked the time lock he’d set on the hatch, and it hadn’t been opened.”
“There’s a secondary hatch on the top of the engine section,” she said. “Just aft of the smaller sphere. He climbed up a collapsible ladder set into the starboard side and went in, taking the ladder in with him. It and the hatch both are hidden behind all that tangle of pipes and cables back there.”
So that was what the twin lines of latch grooves I’d seen on the engineering hull were for: anchor points for the ladder. “And since the guidance tags he’d given out would bring all of us to the ship from the port side, he figured that even if one of us got there before he was all the way inside he’d still be all right.”
“You being the single question mark,” she said. “I spotted you waiting at the south gate, ready to go charging in as soon as they opened up. Dad was going in the west gate, but the south gate was slightly closer, and I was afraid you’d get there ahead of him.”
“Hence, you called in an anonymous tip,” I said sourly. “And pegged it to your father, knowing that that was something they’d take seriously enough to pull me in for.”
“Basically,” she said. “I gave it a few minutes, then called in the second tip to discredit the first and spring you.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “Really brilliant. I don’t suppose it occurred to you that attaching my name to Cameron’s right at the beginning meant they would now have two faces to circulate instead of just one? And me with no idea anyone was even looking for me?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, dropping her eyes. “Again, all I can say is that I didn’t know how involved the Patth were. If I had …”
She eyed me, some of her latent suspicion drifting up to the surface again. “Frankly, I don’t know what I’d have done. I didn’t know then if I could trust you. I still don’t.”
I thought about reprising our logical argument on that point, decided that if it hadn’t worked the first time a second rendition was unlikely to make the difference. “We’ll just have to work on that, I guess,” I said instead, handing her gun back to her. “Still, it looks like the Patth were playing things a little too close to their chests, too. Port Director Aymi-Mastr, for one, was clearly out of the loop of what was really going on, or she’d never have let me go so easily.”
“Or let the ship lift,” Ixil added.
“Right,” I said. “Okay; so much for background. Let’s move on to the suspicious-activities list. I assume now that you were the one who turned on the grav generator during that first spacewalk and dumped Chort down the side of the ship. I’d told him to check the engine section for hull ridges, and you were afraid he’d spot that extra hatch.”
“Yes,” she said, another twinge of guilt crossing her face. “It’s camouflaged, but up close it’s pretty easy to spot.”
“And Jones’s death?”
“No,” she said emphatically. “Neither Dad nor I had anything to do with that.”
“So we can chalk that one up to our Mr. X,” I said. “As we can, I presume, the anonymous smuggling tip to Najiki Customs?”
“That wasn’t me, either,” Tera said. “You think I would want to draw official attention to us in the middle of a Patth spaceport?”
“Just making sure,” I said. “And we’ve already established that your father was the one playing with cutting torches and intercoms. And circuit breakers, I presume?”
“That one was me, actually,” she said. “He’d gotten out of the ’tweenhull area and was warning me that he might have been spotted when the intercom went dead. I was up
in my cabin, and on a hunch I checked the breaker box. When I couldn’t get the one to reset, I guessed what you were up to. There wasn’t enough time to fix the short circuit, so I just pulled all the breakers and hid them.”
“It was clever,” I conceded. “Annoying, but clever. I presume it was your computer-room intercom I’d gimmicked?”
She nodded. “The access panel we’d improvised in the wall wasn’t quite square, and sometimes I had to bang it into place. That was what you heard the time you came charging in on me.”
“I also heard it from sick bay once when I was talking to Shawn there,” I remembered. “He’d heard it a few times, too. There’s another job to pin on Mr. X, by the way: loosening Shawn’s straps or whatever he did that let the kid get away.”
“You think that was deliberate?” Tera asked, frowning.
“Of course it was,” I said. “Our Mr. X couldn’t very well poke around Ixil’s room with his toolbox and junior poisoner’s kit while the rest of you were still aboard—too much risk someone would catch him at it. But I’d told you all to stay put, so he had to come up with a good reason to get you outside.”
Ixil cleared his throat delicately. “I’m afraid you both may be missing the more important point here,” he said. “Bear in mind that while everyone was conveniently off the ship, Arno Cameron vanished. Not necessarily of his own volition.”
I looked at Tera, saw her face pale. “But how could they have done it?” she breathed. “How could they have even known he was there?”
“The same way I figured it out, maybe,” I said, the ominous implications of a Cameron kidnapping tumbling over each other like leaves in a brisk autumn wind. “Or else he heard one of those clunks and discovered you two talking together.”
“Perhaps that was the true purpose for the customs inquiry, in fact,” Ixil said. “To delay the moment when his disappearance would be discovered. And to ensure we left Potosi afterward as quickly as we could, so that by the time anyone did notice we’d be long gone from the scene.”
