The Icarus Hunt Part 9

"Why have we stopped?" I demanded.

Her eyebrows lifted a bit higher. "We've got another hull ridge," she said calmly. "Chort's getting ready to go out and fix it."

I scowled past her at the displays. Sure enough, the new camera I'd had Ixil and Shawn install in the wraparound showed two s.p.a.ce-suited figures just sealing the pressure door behind them. One was obviously Chort; the other was just as obviously Ixil. "You should have called me," I growled.

"Why?" she countered. "There's nothing to this operation that the pilot needs to have a hand in. Besides, you're off-duty, remember? Go back to bed."

The radio speaker clicked. "We're ready, Tera," Ixil's voice said. "You can shut down the grav generator."

"Acknowledged," Tera said, flipping back the safety cover and turning the switch ninety degrees. "Shutting off gravity generator now."

She pushed the switch, and I went through the usual momentary disorientation before my stomach settled down. "Go back to bed," Tera repeated, her eyes on the monitors. "I'll call you if there's a problem."

"I'm sure you would," I said shortly. Once again, it seemed, I had managed to embarra.s.s myself in front of this woman. This was getting to be a very bad habit. "I'll stay a bit."

"I don't need you," she said flatly, flicking a single glowering glance at me and then turning her attention back to the monitors. "More to the point, I don't want you. Go away."

"Do we know where the ridge is?" I asked, ignoring the order.

"Big sphere; starboard side," she said. "Chort thinks it's a small one."

"Let's hope he's right."

She didn't answer. For a few minutes we watched the monitors together in silence, anxious silence on my part, frosty silence on hers. I presumed that Ixil had made it his business to make sure the grav generator couldn't impulsively go on-line again; but I didn't know for sure, and I didn't want to ask him about it on an open radio channel. I tried to figure out how I wouldlock down the generator if it was up to me, but I didn't know enough about the intricacies of the system.

"You two been flying together long?" Tera broke into my thoughts.

I blinked at her in mild surprise. Casual conversation from Tera was something new in my admittedly brief acquaintance with her. "Six years," I told her. "I took him on about a year after I bought the Stormy Banks. I figured having a partner would help me run cargoes faster and more efficiently and bring in more money."

"I take it it didn't work?"

"What makes you say that?" I countered, long experience with that question putting automatic defensiveness into my voice.

"You're here, aren't you?" she said. "Sorry-I didn't mean that the way it sounded. With the Patth handling almost everything worth shipping these days, it's a wonder everyone else hasn't been driven out of business."

"Give them a few more years," I said sourly. "The way they're going, it won't be long before they have it all."

"At least everything legitimate," she said, giving me a sideways look. "You do run legitimate cargoes, don't you, McKell?"

"Every single chance I get," I said, trying to put a touch of levity into my tone as I gazed at her profile, wishing I could read what was going on behind those hazel eyes of hers. Had she talked to someone while we were on Xathru?

Heard something, perhaps, about my forced affiliation with Brother John and the Antoniewicz organization? "What about you?" I asked, hoping to change the subject. "How long have you been flying?"

"Not long," she said. "What do you do when you can't get legitimate work?"

So much for changing the subject. "Sometimes we're able to pick up intrasystem cargoes," I told her. "Occasionally we have to find temp jobs in whatever port we're stuck in until something comes along. Mostly, we eat real light."

"You're not a big fan of the Patth, then, I take it?"

"No one who hauls cargo for a living is a fan of the Patth," I said darkly, my conversation with Nicabar flashing to mind. "Is this your subtle way of suggesting we might be carrying a Patth cargo?"

There were a lot of things, I knew, that a competent actress could do with her body, voice, and expression. But the last time I checked, the red flush that rose to briefly color Tera's cheeks wasn't one of them. "We'd better not be,"

she said, the studied casualness in her voice a sharp contrast to the emotion implicit in that reddened skin. "Though I doubt we'll find out for sure anywhere this side of Earth."

"If even then," I pointed out. "Whoever Borodin's got working that end isn't under any obligation to let us watch while he cuts the cargo bay open."

"No, of course not," she murmured, almost as if talking to herself. "I wonder why he lied to us about coming along."

"Who, Borodin? What makes you think he did lie?"

She shrugged. "You saw that note he left. He had to have written it before the Ihmisits closed the port down for the night."

I thought about Director Aymi-Mastr of the Meima Port Authority and that murder charge she'd talked about. "Unless he just had it here as a precaution," I suggested. "Maybe he fully intended to join us, but circ.u.mstances prevented him."

She snorted. "Right. A full bottle, or a warm bed. Circ.u.mstances."

"Or a small matter of murder," I said.

She looked at me, her eyes narrowing. "Murder?""That's right," I said. "I was told there was a warrant out for his arrest on a possible murder charge."

She shook her head. "Hard to believe," she said. "He seemed like such a normal, upstanding man."

"That's exactly what I said when they asked me about it," I said approvingly.

"Nice to know there's at least one thing we agree on."

"Well, now, wait a minute," she warned cautiously. "I never said I thought he didn't do it, I just said it was hard to believe. I don't know anything about the man."

"Sure, I understand," I a.s.sured her. In fact, I understood far more than she probably realized. Just as her involuntary blush when talking about the Patth had given me a glimpse into her emotional state, so, too, had the complete lack of any such coloring when I told her about Cameron's murder charge. And that despite her alleged total surprise at hearing such shocking news.

Maybe she'd already used up all of her emotional reactions for one day. Or maybe she hadn't been surprised by the murder charge for the simple reason that she'd already known all about it.

"Computer Specialist Tera?" Chort's whistly voice came over the speaker. "I believe I'm finished here. Shall I check the rest of the hull?"

I was still watching Tera closely, which was why I caught the slight but unmistakable tightening of her facial muscles. Perhaps she was thinking along the same line that had suddenly occurred to me: that it had been just as Chort had set off on a similar check of the cargo and engine hulls his last time out that the accident with the grav generator had occurred.

If it was, in fact, an accident. Perhaps someone aboard didn't want anyone taking a close look at the outside of the cargo sphere.

For a moment I was tempted to tell him to go ahead, just to see if our theoretical spoilsport still had his same access to switches or junction boxes or whatever. But only for a moment. Ixil was sharing the hot spot with Chort, and the spoilsport might decide he didn't like Ixil any more than he'd liked Jones. I had no interest in risking Ixil's life or health, at least not then.

Certainly not over a theory that hadn't even occurred to me until five seconds ago.

"This is McKell," I said toward the speaker before Tera could answer. "Don't bother, Chort-we don't have time for it. You and Ixil just get back in and b.u.t.ton up."

"Acknowledged," he whistled.

"That was my job," Tera reminded me, throwing a brief glare in my direction.

But to my hypersensitive eye, the glare didn't seem to have the kind of fire behind it that I would have expected. Maybe she and I had indeed been thinking along the same lines, or maybe her chip-shoulder act was starting to wear a little thin. "You're off-duty, remember?"

"Right," I said. "I keep forgetting. You can handle things here?"

She didn't even bother to answer that one, just gave me a look that said volumes all by itself and turned back to the monitors. Properly chastened, I floated out of the bridge, maneuvered down the ladder well, and returned to my cabin. I was once again stripping off my jacket when the warning tone sounded and gravitycame back on.

For a long time after that I just lay in my bunk, staring at the closed door in the dim light, as I ran that last conversation through endless repeats in my mind. Tera was an enigma, and in general I hated enigmas. In my experience, they nearly always spelled trouble.

Unless I had been reading her words and her reactions all wrong. Or, worse, had somehow imagined them entirely. It certainly wouldn't be the first time I had oh-so-cleverly Sherlocked myself straight down a blind alley.

But I hadn't imagined the mishap with the grav generator or Jones's death. I hadn't imagined my brief detention on Meima, or the Lumpy Brothers, or their unreasonably advanced hand weaponry.

And I certainly hadn't imagined Arno Cameron, amateur archaeologist and head of one of the largest and most influential industrial combines in the Spiral, sitting in a grimy Vyssiluyan taverno and all but begging me to fly the Icarus to Earth for him.

No, the facts were there, at least some of them. What they meant, though, I didn't have the foggiest idea.

But a small group of unclearly related facts can chase each other around a single overtired brain for only so long. Eventually, I fell asleep.

CHAPTER 6.

THE PORT FACILITIES on Xathru had been a couple of steps above those on Meima.

The single commercial port on Dorscind's World, in contrast, was at least five steps back down again.

Not that the equipment itself was a problem. On the contrary, the landing cradle was the best the Icarus had seen yet, with the kind of peripheral and support equipment that a place like Meima could only dream of. It was, rather, the port's clientele that put Dorscind's World well below the standards set by the Spiral's tour cruise directors. Planned by its developers as a high-cla.s.s gambling resort, things hadn't quite worked out that way for the colony. It had been slipping since roughly day two, with the big money and high-spinners fading equally rapidly into the sunset.

The only thing that had kept the place from vanishing from the map altogether was its gradual and reluctant transformation into the sort of place where questionable papers and shady cargoes were generally winked at. With the Patth shipping domination, the shady-cargo slice of the pie chart had been steadily growing among non-Patth carriers.

And as a result, business at the Dorscind's World port was booming.

There was of course no record of a freighter named the Second Banana having filed a flight plan for Dorscind's World. But as I'd expected, minor technicalities of that sort didn't even raise an eyebrow here. The usual docking fee, plus a few more of Cameron's hundred-commark bills, and we had our landing cradle. I paid off the port official who came to the ramp to collect, made arrangements for refueling, and ordered delivery of replacement foodstuffs and some more of Chort's magic hull-repair goo.

And after that, it was time for me to venture out into the dubious charm of theport city. Leaving the rest of the Icarus's crew behind.

The rest of the crew wasn't happy about that. Not one bit. "This is insane,"

Shawn snarled as I faced down the pack of them at the forward wraparound pressure door, a task made all that harder psychologically by the upward tilt of the Icarus's decks that had them all looming over me. "I've been to a dozen places like this-it's no more dangerous than downtown Tokyo as long as you mind your own business."

"It would be nice to get out into the open air," Everett seconded. "Medically speaking, recycled air starts wearing on a person after a while. Besides, the exercise would do us good."

"The exercise could also get you killed," I told him bluntly, charitably pa.s.sing up the obvious comment about how his bulk hardly indicated that exercise would be his top priority out there. "Or weren't any of you listening to what I said about what happened to me on Xathru?"

"We were all listening, McKell," Tera said. "As far as I'm concerned, that's a reason for you to stay out of sight, not us."

"Believe me, I wish I could," I said with one hundred percent honesty. The last thing I wanted to do was face down more of the Lumpy Clan and their coronal-discharge weapons. Though to be honest, without having a flight schedule to guide them, the chances they could have tracked me here were vanishingly small. "Unfortunately, I have an errand to take care of out there. One which I have to do personally."

Which wasn't quite as hundred-percent honest as the first part had been. Ixil could make the long-overdue call to Uncle Arthur as well as I could. But Ixil had made it abundantly clear that he really didn't want to field that one; more to the point, I wanted him and the ferrets here to watch over the Icarus. "But none of that matters," I went on. "What matters is that as pilot, I'm also the captain. And I say you're staying here."

"So that's where the pig stick goes, huh?" Shawn snarled, his face working as he glared at me with blazing eyes. Once again, as it had when we'd first met, Shawn's veneer of civility had cracked badly, revealing the callously rude young brat underneath. "You little tin-plate dictator-you love this, don't you?

Well, forget it-just forget it. I'm not sitting here staring at the walls while you're out having fun. Neither is anyone else."

"That's enough, Shawn," Nicabar said quietly. Quietly, but with the full weight of all those years as an EarthGuard Marine in his voice.

Shawn either didn't notice or didn't care. "Well, runny muck to you, too," he bit out at Nicabar. His whole body was trembling now, his fists opening and closing like relays in an unstable feedback loop, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Ixil ease a little closer beside him. "I'm not staying cooped up in here-I'm not."

"Look, son, I understand how you feel," Everett said, laying a hand on Shawn's shoulder. "But he is our captain-"

"I don't care," Shawn snapped, shrugging off the hand. "I'm going out. Now!"

And with that, he bunched his hands into fists and dived straight toward me.

He didn't get very far. Ixil was ready on his right and Nicabar on his left,and each of them grabbed an arm right in mid-leap. For a moment Shawn struggled in their grip, mouthing obscenities and threats mixed liberally with snarls in an alien language I didn't understand. But he might as well have tried to walk away with the Icarus resting on his foot. Ixil and Nicabar held on; and without warning, Shawn suddenly collapsed in their grip, whimpering softly under his breath.

"Bring him back here," Everett said quietly, gesturing as he backed down the corridor toward the sick bay. "I'll give him something."

Ixil caught Nicabar's eye; the tall man nodded understanding and shifted around behind Shawn, taking his other arm from Ixil and half guiding, half carrying the moaning kid down the corridor behind Everett. They all disappeared inside, the door closed behind them, and Ixil looked back at me. "That was interesting,"

he said.

"Is he ill?" Chort asked, his alien face as usual impossible to read. "Perhaps we should take him to a full-service medical center."

"Let's see what Everett can do with him first," I said, throwing a glance at Tera. Her face, too, was unreadable. "Look, I've got to go. I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Go ahead," Ixil said. "We'll handle things here."

I headed down the ramp-as on Xathru, the landing cradle here was concave, putting part of the Icarus's bulk beneath ground level and making a long climb unnecessary-and crossed to the edge of our landing square. A high-speed slideway ran past two landing squares over, with two short layers of lower-speed transfer slideway beside it, and in a minute I was being carried briskly westward toward the edge of the s.p.a.ceport where the map had said the StarrComm building was located.

The port was busy today, I noticed with some concern as I studied my fellow slideway travelers with the same casual and nonintrusive glances they were using back on me. The extra anonymity provided by a crowd was always useful, but crowded slideways also often meant crowded StarrComm booths. Even before we'd landed I had wanted to make this stop as brief as possible. Now, after Shawn's performance back there, I wanted it even more.

It took me nearly fifteen minutes to reach the StarrComm building, only to find my fears had been realized. The entire place was in use, with estimated waiting times for a booth hovering around half an hour. I tried to talk my way higher on the waiting list, but on a place like Dorscind's World the operators were used to much more serious threats and bullying than I was willing to try and wouldn't budge. Conceding defeat, I accepted the numbered card they handed me-no one asked for or gave out names here-and retreated across the lobby to the waiting-room taverno. Not surprisingly, it, too, was doing a brisk business, but I was lucky enough to arrive just as a pair of Mastanni were leaving a small table near the entrance and was able to grab it. I glanced at the menu,punched up the cheapest drink they had, and sat back to glower at the large display over the bar indicating which customers were currently next in line for the booths.

It wasn't an encouraging sight. At the leisurely rate the numbers were crawling upward, I decided darkly, the operator's estimation of thirty minutes was entirely too optimistic. I hadn't wanted to make this call to Uncle Arthur, but being forced to sit here and wait for the chance to have myself verbally flensed was just adding insult to injury. I tried to come up with a clever way to circ.u.mvent the system, but it was really only mental steam-venting. On Dorscind's World, the people I'd be cutting in line in front of would not be the sort to greet such attempts with genial smiles. I had enough trouble in my life already without going out and finding more.

A shadow pa.s.sed over me; and to my annoyance a thin, wiry man with dark hair and a scraggly beard plopped himself down in the chair across from me. "Hey, old buddy," he greeted me expansively. "How's it going?"

"It's going just fine," I told him automatically, frowning. His tone and expression implied we knew each other, and he did indeed look vaguely familiar, but for the life of me I couldn't place him.

He apparently picked up on my uncertainty. "Aw, come on, Jordie old buddy," he said, sounding hurt. "Don't tell me you don't remember your old drinking pal."

And in that moment, it all came disgustingly back. James Fulbright, small-time gunrunner and smuggler, the only person I'd ever met who was either too stupid or too stubborn for me to break of using the hated nickname Jordie. I'd been trying to negotiate a deal with his group when Uncle Arthur had fixed me up with Brother John instead. The drinking bouts that had been a centerpiece of Fulbright's negotiations had been one of the definite low points in my life.

"h.e.l.lo, James," I sighed. "Small Spiral, isn't it?"