Timothy Zahn - The Icarus Hunt

Everett was not, as I'd expected, waiting for me in the expansive foyer whereI'd left him. He had instead found his way to the dining room and seatedhimself at the far end of one of the rustic hewn-wood tables. Shawn, Tera, and Nicabarhad reappeared from their rooms and were in the process of choosing seats oftheir own at the table, with Chort and Ixil just lugging in a large steamingstewpot containing whatever it was I'd smelled earlier. Four seats were still empty: one on each side of Everett at the far end, one beside Shawn, thefourth at the end of the table closest to me, the seat facing away from the entrancearchway. Choosing that one, leaving Chort and Ixil to fight over the otherthree chairs, I sat down.

Dinner was a curious affair, full of odd contrasts. The couple of hours ofprivacy had done small but noticeable wonders for the civility level among thegroup, particularly for Tera and Shawn, who mentioned that they'd spent theirtime catching up on badly needed sleep. The fact that the quiet surroundingslent themselves to a sense of security was also undoubtedly a calming factor.

At the same time, though, there was an underlying tension permeating the wholeevent, a tension that showed up in a hundred little ways, from the slightlystilted conversation and long uncomfortable silences to the way everyone'seyesperiodically and suddenly darted to the archway behind me as if expecting theentire population of the Patth homeworld Aauth to suddenly come charging in onus. Tera seemed the worst in this respect, though Shawn's natural twitchinessbrought him in a close second. By a sort of unspoken mutual consent we avoidedthe topic of the rest of our trip, and our chances of actually getting toEarth with the whole Spiral breathing down our necks.

I gave it half an hour, until the stew was gone and the conversation had againlagged and they were starting to make the small but unmistakable signs ofgetting ready to take their leave. Then, clearing my throat, I lifted my lefthand for attention. "I know you're all tired and anxious to start settlingdown for the night," I said. "But there are one or two matters we still need todeal with."

Their expressions could hardly be considered hostile, but there certainly wasno particular enthusiasm I could detect. "Can't it wait until morning?" Everettasked from the far end of the table. "My leg's starting to hurt again, and I'dlike to go somewhere where I can prop it up."

"This will only take a few minutes," I assured him. "And no, it really can'twait."

"Of course not," Shawn muttered under his breath. "Not when McKell thinks it'simportant."

"First of all," I said, nodding toward Chort and then Ixil, "we need to thankChort and Ixil for the excellent dinner we've just eaten. Especially Chort, who I understand did most of the preparation."

There was a somewhat disjointed chorus of nods and thank-yous, accompanied bythe gentle scraping of chair legs on the floor as Shawn and Nicabar pushedtheir seats back in preparation for getting up. "Anything else?" Everett asked, halfstanding.

"Actually, yes," I said, lifting my right hand above the level of the table toreveal the plasmic I was holding. "If you'll all sit back down again and putyour hands on the table," I said into the suddenly shocked silence, "there's amurderer I'd like you to meet."

FOR A HALF-DOZEN heartbeats they stood or sat in utter silence like carvedmarble statues, every eye staring either at my face or else the gun in my hand.

I didn't move or speak either, giving them as much time as they needed tocatch up with the bombshell I'd just dropped in their laps.

Everett recovered first, easing back down onto his chair as if there were arow of eggs waiting there and he didn't want to break any of them. As if that werea signal, Shawn and Nicabar just as carefully unfroze and hitched their ownchairs back to the table. The three men and Ixil already had their hands on the tableas instructed; I sent a querying look at Chort and Tera and they reluctantlyfollowed suit.

"Thank you," I said, leaning back in my chair but keeping my plasmic ready.

"We have had, from the very beginning of this trip, a number of unexplained and, at least on the surface, inexplicable events dogging our heels. We had the ship'sgravity go on unexpectedly while Chort was working on that first hull ridge, which could presumably have seriously injured or even killed him if he'd hitsomething wrong on his way down. We had the malfunction with the cutting torchthat gave Ixil some bad burns and would probably have killed him if Nicabarand I hadn't been able to shut it off in time. We also had a combination of potentially lethal chemicals put inside Ixil's cabin and the cabin doorrelease smashed while he was recovering from those burns.

"There are others, but I mention these particular three first because it turnsout they're the most easily and innocently explained. It seems that Tera wasthe one who turned on the gravity during the spacewalk in order to keep Chort fromdiscovering a secret about the ship that she didn't want revealed."

All eyes, which had been locked on me, now turned as if pulled by a set ofinvisible puppet strings to Tera. "That she didn't want revealed?" Nicabarasked.

"Specifically, a secondary hatchway on the top of the engine section," I said.

"A hatch her father had used to sneak into the ship that morning on Meima."

"Wait a minute," Shawn said, sounding bewildered. "Tera is... she's Borodin'sdaughter?"

"Exactly," I said, nodding approvingly and trying to ignore the aghast look onTera's face. "Except that the man who called himself Alexander Borodin was infact a rather better-known industrialist by the name of Arno Cameron."

There was the sound of jaws dropping all around the table. "Arno Cameron?"

Everett all but gasped. "Oh, my God."

"I wondered about that," Nicabar murmured. "Someone had to have had tremendousresources to put a ship like the Icarus together in the first place."

"And if there's one thing Cameron's got, it's tremendous resources," I agreed.

"It also turns out that Cameron was the one who sabotaged the cutting torch, though Ixil getting burned was an accident. He'd eavesdropped on Ixil and meas we discussed cutting a hole into the cargo area, and for obvious reasonsdidn't want us to do that. Gimmicking the torch was the only way he could come upwith to stop us in the limited time he had to work with."

"Borodin—I mean, Cameron—was aboard the Icarus with us?" Shawn asked. "Where was he hiding?"

"He must have been in the gap between the inner and outer hulls," Nicabarsaid.

"It was the perfect hiding place. None of us even knew there was that muchspacein there until we started taking the ship apart."

"That's exactly it," I confirmed. "He surfaced once or twice to touch basewith Tera, or to check our course heading on the computer-room repeater displays.

But mostly he just lay low."

"So where is he now?" Everett asked. "I trust you're not going to try to tellus he's still hidden aboard somewhere?"

"I'd be very surprised to find that he was," I said. "Getting back to the mainpoint, it turns out Cameron was the one responsible for those lethal chemicalsbeing in Ixil's cabin in the first place."

"You're wrong," Tera snapped, her eyes blazing. "I already told you Dad didn'twant to hurt him or anyone else."

"I didn't say he did," I said mildly. "Actually, his part in all that was tosave Ixil's life. But I'll come back to that.

"So as I said, some of these incidents can be explained away," I continued, letting my gaze sweep around the table. "But not all of them, unfortunately.

Which brings us to the murder—the deliberate murder—of our first mechanic, Jaeger Jones."

"Murder?" Chort said, his voice almost too whistly in his agitation for me tounderstand. "I thought it was an accident."