Timothy Zahn - The Icarus Hunt

"Which leaves us only the question of who's behind all this," Ixil concluded.

"And how we smoke him or them out into the open."

"Maybe that's your only unanswered question," I said. "Personally, I'm alreadyon page two of that list. And as to who's pulling the strings in thebackground, I'm not at all sure we even want to go poking that direction. It seems to methat our job right now is to get the Icarus and its cargo to Earth, preferablywith it and us in one piece. Well, one piece each, anyway."

"You may be right." He hesitated. "You said you called Brother John to discussthis sudden change in plans. You didn't say whether or not you'd also spokenwith Uncle Arthur."

I grimaced. "No," I said. "I was hoping we could—oh, I don't know. Surprisehim, maybe?"

Even without the ferrets on his shoulders to do their twitching thing, I hadno trouble reading Ixil's reaction to that one. "I won't waste time by asking ifyou seriously believe that to be a good idea," he said. "I'll make you a smallwager: that he won't be any happier at your accepting this job than BrotherJohn was."

"If you're expecting me to cover that bet, you can forget it," I said sourly, the proverbial admonition against trying to serve two masters running throughmymind. No, Uncle Arthur would definitely not be happy with me over this one.

And the longer I put off calling him, the unhappier he was likely to get. "Oh, allright," I sighed. "I'll call him as soon as we hit Dorscind's World."

"That's the spirit," he said, with all the cheerful enthusiasm of someone whowould probably find himself unavoidably busy tightening bolts on the Icaruswhile I was sweating it out under Uncle Arthur's basilisk glare in a StarrCommbooth. "What's our plan until then?"

"To create a new identity for the Icarus, and to keep an eye on our backs," Isaid. Across at the bridge door, the two ferrets reappeared and headedstraightup Ixil's legs. "As far as I'm concerned, we still don't have a satisfactoryexplanation of what happened to Jones and Chort—"

The ferrets reached Ixil's shoulders; and abruptly, he made a quick doubleslashing motion across his throat with his fingertips. "—makes the best applebrandy anywhere in the Spiral," I said, shifting verbal gears as smoothly as Icould manage. The voice of someone speaking, I knew, could be heard wellbefore the actual words could be made out, as could the sharp break of that voicebeingsuddenly cut off. "In fact, I'd put it up against anything made on Taurus oreven Earth—"

I caught a movement from the corner of my eye; at the same time Ixil turnedhis head in that direction and nodded courteously. "Good evening, Tera," he said, breaking into my improvised babbling. "What can we do for you?"

I turned to face the door. Tera was standing in the doorway, a slight frown onher face as she took in Ixil seated in the restraint chair with me on the swivel stool. "You can get yourself out of that chair, that's what," she said. "Theclock on the wall—and Mercantile regs—say it's time for a shift change. It'smyturn for the bridge."

I frowned at my watch. Preoccupied with everything else that was happening, Ihadn't even thought about that. "You're right," I acknowledged. "Sorry—I'm notused to flying a ship where there are real shift changes and everything."

"Which I presume also explains why your mechanic's in the control chairinstead of you," she countered. "You, Ixil, need to take over for Nicabar in theengineroom; and you, McKell, need to hit the sack."

"I'm fine," I insisted, getting to my feet. In that moment, though, I realizedthat she was right. Overall lack of sleep plus general tension level hadcombined with the Lumpy Brothers incident and my still-sore leg to suddenlythrow a haze of wooziness over the universe. "On the other hand, maybe itwould be a good idea to go under for a couple of hours," I amended.

"Make it eight of them and you've got a deal," she said, jerking a thumb backdown the corridor. "Go on—I'll let you know if there's any trouble. You're inone of the cabins on the lower level, right?"

"Right," I said. "Number Eight."

"Fine," she said, settling herself into the chair Ixil had just vacated.

"Pleasant dreams."

I stepped out the door and clanked my way down the bare-metal rungs of theladder to the lower deck. The central corridor—as with the mid-deck, there wasonly one—was deserted. No big surprise, since aside from storage and recyclingequipment there were only two sleeping cabins down here, mine and the one Ixilhad moved into. A quiet part of the ship, where the rhythmic humming of thevarious machines would be quite conducive to lulling a weary traveler tosleep.

But I wasn't going to sleep. Not yet. Instead, I walked the length of thecorridor to the aft ladder and headed back up to the mid deck, treading asquietly on the rungs as I could.

Ixil was nowhere in sight, having apparently already disappeared into thewraparound to relieve Nicabar in the engine room. At the forward end of thecorridor, I saw that Tera had rather pointedly closed the bridge door behindher. A girl who liked her privacy, I decided, though there might not beanythingmore to it than the natural reticence of a lone woman locked in a flying tincan with four unfamiliar men and two alien males. But whatever the reason, it wasgoing to make my current project that much safer.

The computer-room door was closed, too, but that was all right; near as Icould tell, none of the Icarus's doors locked. Taking one last look around to makesure I wasn't being observed, I opened the door and went inside, closing itbehind me.

The room looked exactly the way it had when I'd last seen it, except of coursethat Tera wasn't there. The Worthram T-66 computer dominated the space, pressingup against the aft bulkhead and covering much of the starboard wall as well.

Fastened to the forward bulkhead was a two-sectioned metal cabinet with the hard-copy printer on one side and a set of shelves crammed with referencematerial and datadisks on the other. Squeezed in between the two was thecomputer control desk where Tera fought to beat the archaic machine intosubmission.

And where, allegedly, she'd been sitting when she hit her head hard enough forme to hear from the wraparound.

I went over and sat down in the chair. It wasn't nearly as fancy as the one onthe bridge; but then, in emergency maneuvers it was far more important for thepilot to stay in his seat than the computer jock. Taking a deep breath, Ileaned forward and banged my head experimentally against the edge of the controlpanel.

Even granted that I was hearing it from a more personal angle, the thud didn'tsound anything like what I'd heard earlier. That one had definitely beenmetallic; this one sounded exactly like a skull whacked against a controlboard.

Rubbing thoughtfully at my forehead and the dull ache that had joined thechorus throughout my body, I looked slowly around the room. So there were twopossibilities. Either Tera had coincidentally hit her head against somethingat about the same time I'd heard that metal-on-metal sound, or else she waslying.

If the former, then I needed to look elsewhere; if the latter, there wassomething else in here that had in fact made the noise.

The problem was, what? Unlike Ixil's machine shop, there weren't any toolslyingaround or hanging on racks that might fall and clatter against the deck. Therewere plenty of cables and connectors, but they were for the most part lightand rubber-coated. The cabinet was plain metal, but it was bolted to the bulkhead.

Besides, if it had tipped over, it would have left a mess of manuals anddatadisks scattered on the deck which she wouldn't have had time to pick up.

The manuals themselves, it went without saying, couldn't possibly make such asound.

Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, one of the manuals wasn't what it seemed.