Timothy Zahn - The Icarus Hunt

And suddenly, with another stomach-wrenching disorientation, I fell down hardinto my chair.

Shawn yelped in surprise and pain as he dropped like a rock to the deck besideme. But I hardly noticed. Incredibly, impossibly, the Icarus's gravity fieldhad gone back on.

And as I watched in helpless horror, Chort slammed against the side of thecargosphere, caromed off the wraparound, and disappeared off the monitor screen.

"Revs!" I barked toward the intercom, twisting the camera control hard over.

"Turn it off!"

"I didn't turn it on," he protested.

"I don't give a damn who turned it on!" I snarled. I had Chort on the screennow, hanging limply like a puppet on a string at the end of his secondary lineat the bottom of the artificial "down" the Icarus's gravity generator hadimposed on this small bubble of space. "Just shut it down."

"I can't," he bit back. "The control's not responding."

I ground my teeth viciously. "Tera?"

"I'm trying, too," her voice joined in. "The computer's frozen up."

"Then cut all power to that whole section," I snapped. "You can do that, can'tyou? One of you?"

"Working on it," Nicabar grunted.

"Computer's still frozen," Tera added tautly. "I can't see him—is he allright?"

"I don't know," I told her harshly. "And we won't know until we get him back—"

I broke off suddenly, my breath catching horribly in my throat. Concentratingfirst on Chort's fall, and then on getting the gravity shut down, it hadn'teven occurred to me to wonder why Chort had fallen that far in the first place. WhyJones hadn't had the slack in the primary line properly taken up, or for thatmatter why he hadn't already begun reeling the Craea back into the wraparound.

But now, looking at the outside of the entryway for the first time since theaccident, I could see why. Hanging limply over the sill of the hatchway besidethe equally limp primary line was a vacsuited hand. Jones's hand.

Not moving.

"Revs, do you have a suit back there?" I called, cursing under my breath, tryingto key the camera for a better look inside the entryway. No good; Jones hadturned the overhead light off and the shadow was too intense for the camera topenetrate.

"No," he called back. "What's the—oh, damn."

"Yeah," I bit out, my mind racing uselessly. With the entryway open to space, the wraparound was totally isolated from the rest of the ship by the pressuredoors at either end. I could close the hatch from the bridge; but the wayJones was lying, his hand would prevent it from sealing.

The only other way to get to him would be to depressurize one side of the shipso we could open the door. But we couldn't depressurize the sphere—there wereonly two vac suits left for the four of us still in here, and I wasn't aboutto trust the room or cabin doors to hold up against hard vacuum. And without asuit for Nicabar, we couldn't depressurize the engine room, either. My eyes flickeduselessly over the monitors, searching for inspiration—

"He's moving," Nicabar called suddenly. "McKell—Chort's moving."

I felt my hands tighten into fists. The Craea's body was starting to twitch, his limbs making small random movements like someone having a violent dream.

"Chort?" I called toward the microphone, "Chort, this is McKell. Snap out ofit—we need you."

"I am here," Chort's voice came, sounding vague and tentative. "Whathappened?"

"Ship's gravity came on," I told him. "Never mind that now. Something'shappenedto Jones—he's not responding, and I think he's unconscious. Can you climb upyour line and get to him?"

For a long moment he didn't reply. I was gazing at the monitor, wondering ifhe'd slipped back into unconsciousness, when suddenly he twitched again; and asecond later he was pulling himself up the line with spiderlike agility.

Thirty seconds later he was in the wraparound, pulling Jones out of the way ofthe door. I was ready, keying for entryway seal and repressurization of thewraparound.

Two minutes later, we had them back in the ship.

THE EFFORT, AS it turned out, was for nothing.

"I'm sorry, McKell," Everett said with a tired sigh, pulling a thin blanketcarefully over Jones's face. "Your man's been gone at least ten minutes.

There's nothing I can do."

I looked over at the body lying on the treatment table. The terminallysociable type, I'd dubbed him back at the spaceport. He'd been terminal, all right. "Itwas the rebreather, then?"

"Definitely." Everett picked up the scrubber unit and peeled back thecovering.

"Somewhere in here the system stopped scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the airand started putting carbon monoxide in. Slowly, certainly—he probably didn'teven notice it was happening. Just drifted to sleep and slipped quietly away."

I gazed at the hardware cradled in those large hands. "Was it an accident?"

He gave me an odd look. "You work with air scrubbers all the time. Couldsomething like this have happened by accident?"

"I suppose it's possible," I said, the image of that massive search Ixil and Ihad spotted out in the Meima wilderness vivid in my memory. No, it hadn't beenany accident. Not a chance in the world of that. But there was no sensepanicking Everett, either.

"Hm," Everett said. For another moment he looked at the scrubber, thensmoothed back the covering and put it aside. "I know you're not in the mood right nowto count your blessings, but bear in mind that if Chort had died or broken hisneck in that fall, we'd have lost both of them."

"Blessings like this I can do without," I said bitterly. "Have you looked atChort yet?"

He grunted. "Chort says he's fine and unhurt and refuses to be looked at. Ifyouwant me to run a check on him, you'll have to make it an order."

"No, that's all right," I told him. I'd never heard anything about the Craeanculture being a particularly stoic one. If Chort said he was all right, heprobably was.

But whether he would stay that way was now open to serious question. With that phony murder charge someone had apparently succeeded in scaring Cameron offthe Icarus, and the guilt-by-association bit had nearly bounced me, as well. Now, Jones had been rather more permanently removed from the crew list, and Chorthad come within a hair of joining him.

And all this less than eight hours into the trip. The universe was spendingthe Icarus's quota of bad luck with a lavish hand.

"A pity, too," Everett commented into my musings. "Jones being the mechanic, Imean. He might have been the only one on board who could have tracked downwhat went wrong with the grav generator. Now we may never know what happened."

"Probably," I agreed, putting the heaviness of true conviction into my voice.

If Everett—or anyone else, for that matter—thought I was just going to chalk anyof this up to mysterious accident and let it go at that, I had no intention ofdisillusioning them. "That's usually how it goes with this sort of thing," Iadded. "You never really find out what went wrong."

He nodded in commiseration. "So what happens now?"

I looked over at Jones's body again. "We take him to port and turn him over tothe authorities," I said. "Then we keep going."

"Without a mechanic?" Everett frowned. "A ship this size needs all eightcertificates, you know."

"That's okay," I assured him, backing out the door. "Nicabar can cover for thefew hours it'll take to get to port. After that, I know where we can pick upanother mechanic. Cheap."

He made some puzzled-sounding reply, but I was already in the corridor anddidn't stop to hear it. Cameron's course plan had put our first fueling stopat Trottsen, seventy-two more hours away. But a relatively minor vector changewould take us instead to Xathru, only nine hours from here, where Ixil and theStormy Banks were due to deliver Brother John's illegal cargo. We needed areplacement mechanic, after all, and Ixil would fit the bill perfectly.