The Icarus Hunt

CHAPTER 12

FOR THE SPACE of a dozen heartbeats I thought she was going to try to play outthe masquerade. She lay there on her bunk, propped up on one elbow, and staredat me, a dozen expressions flicking across her face. And then, the one hand Icould see tightened into a fist, and I knew she'd given up. "What gave meaway?" she asked calmly.

"It wasn't anything you said or did," I assured her. "Though now in retrospectI can see hints that you were more than you seemed. That nicely fortuitoustimingwhen you first came to the bridge, for instance, making sure that I didn'tjust 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 theinteresting note that Cameron's daughter hadn't been seen for a while. Ourinformant 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 offwithout him."

I shook my head. "Sorry, but that won't wash. The whole planet was looking tohang a murder charge on him, and there aren't a hell of a lot of places therewhere a human could hide."

"Which means he was already aboard when you left," Ixil added. "I presume hewas the one Jordan chased briefly around the 'tweenhull area?"

Tera grimaced. So did I, feeling like a complete fool. All the way up from thelower deck knowing she was Cameron's daughter, and that part had never evenoccurred to me. "So he's the one who tapped into my intercom," I said. "Andwho tried to kill Ixil with the cutting torch."

"Dad wasn't trying to hurt him," Tera snapped, her face flushing. "Not Ixil oranyone else." She transferred her glare to Ixil. "He thought you'd beprofessional enough to check the torch before you tried lighting it."

"I'd already done so," he said calmly. "Under the circumstances, I should haveknown to check it again."

"I'm sorry," she growled, her expression one of anger mixed with guilt. "Forwhatever 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 toyourfather 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 entireregion; 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 thingswere gone."

Ixil rumbled in his throat. "You'll forgive me if I say that makes no sensewhatsoever."

"You can search the ship yourselves if you want," she countered tartly. "Itell you, he's not here."

"Let's go back to the beginning," I interrupted them, not about to let thisdegenerate into a reality-versus-logic argument if I could help it. "Let'sstart with how you got to Meima and why you're aboard the Icarus under thissemiassumed identity."

Tera looked back and forth between us, a wary look on her face. "Why should Itell either of you anything?" she demanded. "You've already admitted yoursouls 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 creware 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 heardyou talking about it in your cabin."

"All right," I said. "Then remember back to Potosi, where one of our fellowcrewers called in a tip that nearly got us impounded by the Najiki Customsagents."

"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 nameSleeping Beauty at the time," I said. "If I hadn't gotten us out of that whenI did, the Icarus would inevitably have wound up in Patth hands. That ought toprove 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. "Icould have turned you in on Dorscind's World, too. In fact, I risked gettingshot in order not to."

I waved a hand at Ixil. "And as for Ixil here, someone aboard—and I presumeit's all the same person—is apparently trying to scare him off the ship. While therest of you were out searching for Shawn on Potosi, he left the makings forpoison 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," Iconcluded, "is for you to tell us which were Cameron and Daughter Productionsand which weren't." No doubt about it, I decided, Ixil and I could be dazzlingin our logic when we wanted to be. "So: back to the beginning. How did you endup aboard the Icarus?"

If Tera was dazzled, she was hiding it well. But if she wasn't totallyconvinced, she was nevertheless convinced enough. "Dad was funding anarchaeological dig on Meima," she said, pulling off the blanket and swingingher legs over the side of the bunk. She was fully dressed, I noted, the sort ofthing that someone who's expecting trouble automatically does. She hadn'tneeded our arguments to know there was trouble aboard. "About three months ago theysent word that they'd found something big, something that could conceivablychange the course of history."

"Archaeologists do get a bit dramatic sometimes," I murmured. "Especially atfunding time."

"In this instance they may have understated the case," Tera said, droppingonto 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 atech team in with the Icarus packed in pieces in shipping crates. Theyassembled the ship underground, the only place they could do it where they wouldn't beseen. 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 commercialliner 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 lipsbrieflybefore vanishing again. "Or so he said. None of the others were to know I wasthere—as he pointed out, you can't leak information you don't have. My job wasto keep an eye on the Ihmisit authorities and try to get us a heads up ifanyonestarted showing undue interest in our activities."

"Having a starship suddenly appear out in the middle of nowhere would probablydo that," I said.

"It wasn't supposed to happen that way," Tera said, glaring at me. "Give us alittle credit. Dad had another team building a copy of the Icarus at one ofhis 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 alllegally inspected at the Meima port. Then it would fly out to the dig, we'dmake a switch, and fly the original out. By the time anyone stumbled across thecopyhidden 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 towake 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'tthere, but Dad said their weapons burned him alive."

"Yes, I've seen them in action," I said, feeling my own stomach turning withthe 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 reactionwould be if I told her that far from trying to wake the Lumpies up, Jenniferhad instead been dabbing them with soporific from an injector ring to make suretheir blissful sleep lasted until well after the Icarus was off the planet. "Ihope you did something similar with your batch."

She shivered. "We killed them, yes," she said quietly. "Like you, inself-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 aconcoction that would scramble the spaceport sensors, blew the roof off thecavern, and Dad and the Mensana's pilot sneaked the ship up and off theplanet."

"Why turn around and come back?" I asked. "Why didn't they put everyone aboardwhile they could and head straight out?"

"Because not everyone was ready to go," she sighed. "There were several keypeople out of the immediate area, and we didn't want to leave without them. Wealso knew that after the explosion the Ihmisits would come to investigate, andwe thought having the whole group still there would alleviate any suspicionsthey might have about the explosion."

She shook her head. "We never expected the official reaction to be sointense."

"That's because the Patth were already involved," I said, nodding heavily.

"Onlythere was no way you could know that. The Lumpies seem to be their hiredmuscle of choice."

"I guess so," she said. "Anyway, the Ihmisits descended on the dig like a packof jackals, found Dr. Chou and the two alien bodies, and arrested everyone insight. One of the techs managed to slip out of the noose long enough to get totown and warn Dad, but he was then picked up an hour later. They got Dad'spilot, 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 theybacktracked the pilot to his ship, he'd already hired all the crewers heneeded.

Luckily, the computer the group had been using for their analysis—the WorthramT-66 down there—was one of the few computer systems I actually knew how tooperate, 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 meas his ace, and he didn't want to risk us even being seen in the same tavernotogether."

"Too bad," Ixil said. "It might have been useful to compare everyone'srecruiting story with an independent source."

"I can't help you there," Tera said. "Anyway, after everything was set he wentto 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. "Justaft of the smaller sphere. He climbed up a collapsible ladder set into thestarboard side and went in, taking the ladder in with him. It and the hatchboth 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 engineeringhull were for: anchor points for the ladder. "And since the guidance tags he'dgiven out would bring all of us to the ship from the port side, he figuredthat even if one of us got there before he was all the way inside he'd still be allright."

"You being the single question mark," she said. "I spotted you waiting at thesouth gate, ready to go charging in as soon as they opened up. Dad was goingin the west gate, but the south gate was slightly closer, and I was afraid you'dget there ahead of him."

"Hence, you called in an anonymous tip," I said sourly. "And pegged it to yourfather, knowing that that was something they'd take seriously enough to pullme in for."

"Basically," she said. "I gave it a few minutes, then called in the second tipto discredit the first and spring you."

"Brilliant," I said. "Really brilliant. I don't suppose it occurred to youthat attaching my name to Cameron's right at the beginning meant they would nowhave two faces to circulate instead of just one? And me with no idea anyone waseven 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 trustyou. I still don't."

I thought about reprising our logical argument on that point, decided that ifit hadn't worked the first time a second rendition was unlikely to make thedifference. "We'll just have to work on that, I guess," I said instead, handingher gun back to her. "Still, it looks like the Patth were playing things alittle too close to their chests, too. Port Director Aymi-Mastr, for one, wasclearly out of the loop of what was really going on, or she'd never have letme go so easily."

"Or let the ship lift," Ixil added.

"Right," I said. "Okay; so much for background. Let's move on to thesuspicious-activities list. I assume now that you were the one who turned onthe grav generator during that first spacewalk and dumped Chort down the side ofthe ship. I'd told him to check the engine section for hull ridges, and you wereafraid 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, theanonymous smuggling tip to Najiki Customs?"

"That wasn't me, either," Tera said. "You think I would want to draw officialattention to us in the middle of a Patth spaceport?"

"Just making sure," I said. "And we've already established that your fatherwas the one playing with cutting torches and intercoms. And circuit breakers, Ipresume?"

"That one was me, actually," she said. "He'd gotten out of the 'tweenhull areaand was warning me that he might have been spotted when the intercom wentdead.

I was up in my cabin, and on a hunch I checked the breaker box. When Icouldn't get the one to reset, I guessed what you were up to. There wasn't enough timeto 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 yourcomputer-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 timeyoucame charging in on me."

"I also heard it from sick bay once when I was talking to Shawn there," Iremembered. "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 kidgetaway."

"You think that was deliberate?" Tera asked, frowning.

"Of course it was," I said. "Our Mr. X couldn't very well poke around Ixil'sroom 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 tostayput, 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 themore important point here," he said. "Bear in mind that while everyone wasconveniently off the ship, Arno Cameron vanished. Not necessarily of his ownvolition."

I looked at Tera, saw her face pale. "But how could they have done it?" shebreathed. "How could they have even known he was there?"

"The same way I figured it out, maybe," I said, the ominous implications of aCameron kidnapping tumbling over each other like leaves in a brisk autumnwind.

"Or else he heard one of those clunks and discovered you two talkingtogether."

"Perhaps that was the true purpose for the customs inquiry, in fact," Ixilsaid.

"To delay the moment when his disappearance would be discovered. And to ensurewe left Potosi afterward as quickly as we could, so that by the time anyonedid notice we'd be long gone from the scene."

"But why would they take all his things with him?" Tera persisted. Clearly, this wasn't a scenario she was at all willing to accept. "He had a full campingsetup: food and water packs, a roll-up mattress, even one of those littlecatalytic waste handlers."

"Where did he get all that?" I asked.

"I bought most of it for him during our stopover on Xathru," she said. "He'dplanned to come out after the first stop, but after Jones's death we decidedhe should stay hidden a while longer."

"Ah," I said, remembering now all the bags she'd brought aboard at Xathru, andhow annoyed she'd been that I'd cut her shopping spree short.

"But why would anyone bother to take all of it along?" she asked again.

"Perhaps they wanted to eliminate any evidence that he was ever here," Ixilsaid. "Their contact would have told them that your father had kept hispresenceaboard a secret. At this point it would be basically your word againsttheirs."

"If it ever even came to that," I added. "They may have something else plannedfor you down the line."

She tried glaring at me again, but her heart wasn't in it. "You're a realcomfort to have around, McKell," she growled. "Both of you."

"Yes, well, we haven't exactly gotten what we signed up for, either," Icountered. "What I want to know is why this ship is still flying. We've beenhalf a grab away from them at least twice now. Why haven't they simply pickedus up?"

She sighed. "I don't know."

"Perhaps it would help," Ixil suggested, "if we knew what exactly thismysterious cargo is."

For a long minute Tera remained silent, her eyes flicking between our faces, clearly trying to decide just how far she was willing to trust us. Or perhapsjust trying to come up with a convincing lie. "All right," she said at last.

"The Icarus isn't carrying any cargo. The Icarus is the cargo."

She waved a hand around her. "This is what the team uncovered on Meima: two spheres, connected together, the larger one empty except for its radialgravitygenerator, the smaller one crammed with alien electronics."

"How alien?" Ixil asked.

"Very alien," she said grimly. "It was like nothing they'd ever seen before, with markings and notations that were also totally unknown. We still don'tknow whether it predates the Spiral civilizations, or is simply from outside knownterritory. That's why that old Worthram T-66 is aboard—it was the one thearchaeologists already had hooked up to study the small sphere, and when theybuilt the Icarus they just basically assembled the computer room around it."

"So that's where the spare gravity inside the outer hull came from," I said.

"I'd been planning to ask you how and why you'd set that up."

"We had nothing to do with it," Tera said. "And we have no idea what it's for.

All we know is that it runs about eighty-five percent Earth standard, and iscompletely self-adjusting, which is why it isn't fazed by the Icarus's owngravity generator."

She smiled wanly. "I understand it worked the same way on Meima. Even while itwas sitting there in a full planetary gravitational field, you could stillwalk all the way around inside the sphere without falling off."

"Must have been quite an experience," I murmured.

"Half of them loved it; the other half couldn't stand it," she said. "Anyway, that's why they built the inner hull so far away from the outer one—all themetal seems to inhibit the sphere's gravity field somehow, but if you put thetwo hulls any closer together you get a terrible disorientation at the edgeswhere the two grav fields intersect."

"And that's what the Patth are all hot and bothered over?" I asked. "The chance to get their hands on a new-style grav generator? Hardly seems worthcommittingmurder for."

She shook her head. "I'm not sure the Patth even know about the gravgenerator," she said; and there was something in her voice that sent a shiver up my back.

"I said the team couldn't decipher the markings on anything in the two spheres.

But the grav generator wasn't the only thing still working. A lot of theelectronics in the small sphere were on what appeared to be some kind of standby, and theywere able to take a lot of readings. Waveform analyses, pattern operations—

that sort of thing."

She took a deep breath. "They're not sure," she said quietly. "There's a lotthey still don't understand. Most of it, actually. But from what they coulddecipher of the patterns and power levels and even the geometric shapes ofsome of the components... well, they think this whole thing could be a stardrive."

I looked at Ixil. "What kind of stardrive?" I asked carefully.

"A fast one," she said. "A very fast one. From the readings, they think itcould be as much as twenty times faster than the Patth Talariac."

"And that," Ixil said softly, "is worth committing murder over."