"Never mind how he did it," I cut him off. "The recriminations can wait. Which direction did he go?"
"I don"t know," Everett said. "I didn"t see him leave. We"re all out looking for him."
"All of you?"
"All but Ixil-we pounded on his door, but he didn"t answer, and the door wasn"t working right. It"s okay-we locked the hatch-"
There was a quiet sputtering click as another phone joined the circuit.
"Everett, this is Tera," her voice came excitedly. "I"ve found him."
"Where?" I snapped, pulling my city map out and trying to shake it open with my free hand.
"McKell?" she asked, sounding both surprised and wary.
"Yes," I said. "Where is he?"
"Outside an outfitter"s store at Ude"n Corner," she said. "He"s accosting people as they go in.""That"s a good way to get all his troubles ended permanently," I growled, locating the spot on my map. It was only a short block away from Gate 2, where I.
was headed anyway. "Keep him in sight, but try not to let him see you," I told her. "I"ll be there in a couple of minutes and we"ll bring him back together.
Everett, call Nicabar and Chort and the three of you head back to the ship.
Get it ready to fly."
"Now?" Everett asked, sounding surprised. "What about the borandis?"
"Done and done," I told him. "Make sure-"
"You"ve got it?" Everett asked. "Already?"
"I"m very good at what I do," I told him, trying hard to be patient. "Make sure we"ve been fueled and are ready to lift as soon as Tera and I get back with Shawn."
Another faint hiss. "All right. We"ll see you back at the ship."
There was a click as he disconnected. "Tera?" I called.
"Still here," she confirmed tightly. "And I think people are starting to get irritated by Shawn"s ravings. You"d better hurry."
"Trust me," I a.s.sured her, wincing as I turned part of my attention back to the automotive drama taking place around me. "He must have made good time to be out of the s.p.a.ceport already. How long since he jumped ship?"
"About an hour ago," she said. "Just after you left to-"
"An hour?" I cut her off in disbelief, a white-hot flash of anger slicing through me. "An hour? And you didn"t think it worth mentioning to me?"
"We didn"t want to bother you," she protested, clearly startled by my sudden anger. "You already had the medicine to find-"
"I don"t care if I"ve got the crown jewels to steal," I snarled. "Something like this happens, you get on the phone and tell me about it. Let me worry about what it does to my schedule. Is that clear?"
"Clear," she said, more subdued than I"d ever heard her. For a moment I considered taking another verbal slice of flesh out of her, decided regretfully that it probably wasn"t her fault, and kept my mouth shut. Possibly it wasn"t any of their faults. Ixil would have known what to do; but Ixil was in his cabin in a coma, and it was painfully obvious that none of the others had anywhere near our experience with this sort of thing.
Instead, I vented my frustration on the map lying open beside me, folding it back up with far more force than was necessary and shoving it into my jacket"s left side pocket.
"McKell?" Tera said, her voice suddenly tight. "I think I see a police car heading this way. Red and blue, with a flashing blue light on top, moving very fast."
"Don"t worry," I told her. "It"s a cab, and I"m in it. Flag me in, will you?"
A block ahead, I saw her step to the curb and raise her hand, a vision of loveliness standing there in the downpour in her stylish drowned-rat look. I directed the driver over to her, dropped two hundred-commark bills on the seat beside him as I got out, and pulled Tera quickly away from the curb as he shot off again in a foaming wave. Maybe I"d wasted all that tip money; maybe that was the way he always drove anyway.
"There," Tera said, pointing across the street."I see him," I said. Considering the way Shawn was bouncing around the store entrance waving his arms at everyone in sight, he would have been hard to miss.
Taking Tera"s arm again, I steered us through the traffic flow toward him.
After everything else that had happened, the capture itself was rather anticlimactic. Pleading and screeching and cursing at the pa.s.sersby, his wet hair plastered half across his face, Shawn was in no shape to see anything happening around him, Tera and I could have driven up to him in an armored personnel carrier without him noticing. As it was, we simply moved in from opposite sides and grabbed his arms. He gave a single terrific lurch, but there wasn"t much strength left in him, and after that one attempt to break free he just stood there shaking in our grip.
We led him away from the door and the pedestrian traffic to the narrow pa.s.sageway between the outfitter"s store and the next building over, Tera murmuring soothingly in his ear the whole way. When we were as far out of the public eye as we were likely to get, I dug out the ca.s.sette and fed him one of the borandis capsules. He seemed to be having trouble getting it down until Tera filled her cupped hands with rainwater and gave him a drink.
The effects were quite amazing. Almost immediately his trembling began to subside, and within a couple of minutes he seemed almost back to normal.
At least physically. "You sure took your sweet time about it," he growled, breathing heavily as he brushed his wet hair impatiently out of his face.
"Where the h.e.l.l are we, anyway? You said we were going to Mintarius. This isn"t Mintarius. I know-I"ve been there."
"Change of plans," I told him shortly, peering closely at his eyes. His pupils, strongly dilated when we"d first grabbed him, seemed to be shrinking back to normal size.
"Yeah, well, that change of plans might have killed me," he snapped. "Did you ever think of that? This place must be at least three hours farther than Mintarius was."
"No, just two," I said. He was well enough to travel, I decided; and even if he wasn"t, we were going. The sooner he was aboard the Icarus and shut away where I.
didn"t have to listen to him, the better. Taking his arm, I pulled him back out toward the main thoroughfare.
"Wait a minute, what"s the rush?" he growled, leaning back against my pull.
His strength was also making a remarkable comeback. "We just got here. How about just for once sticking around some planet more than five minutes, huh?"
"Shut up and come on," Tera snapped, grabbing his other arm. From the look of surprise that flicked across his face, I guessed she was digging her nails into his skin more than was necessary to maintain the grip. Certainly more than I was; but then, I"d only been irritated by his disappearing act for the past
five.
minutes. Tera had had a whole hour of slogging through the rain in which to work up resentment.
Between her voice, her grip, and whatever he saw in her face, Shawn apparently realized that, too. He shut up as ordered, and docilely followed us down the street and through the s.p.a.ceport gate. We caught the slideway and headed in.I kept a careful eye behind us, as well as on the slideways that pa.s.sed or intersected ours, but I saw no sign of anyone tailing us. I had thought Torsk might have second thoughts about letting me leave so easily, but apparently he"d decided that discretion was the better part of continued employment and had decided to leave well enough alone.
We reached the last freighter parked between us and the Icarus; and finally, it seemed, we were out of the woods. We had the borandis, we had Shawn, and no
one.
had pointed toward me and yelled for the Patth. Now, if the Icarus had just been fueled properly, we would be in business. Hoping distantly that we wouldn"t find the fuelers still trying to figure out how to get the hose into the Icarus"s intake, we came around the side of the freighter.
The fuelers weren"t there. What was there was a group of ten Najik wearing the black-and-red tunics of customs officers. Standing by the entry ramp.
Waiting for us.
CHAPTER 10.
BESIDE ME, SHAWN made a strangled sort of sound deep in his throat. "Oh, G.o.d,"
he breathed. "We"re dead."
"Quiet," I muttered back, taking a second, closer look at the scene, hoping it wasn"t as bad as I"d first thought.
It was. The ten Najik were still there, tall and spindly, with those hairy arms and legs that always made me think of giant four-limbed tarantulas. They were still wearing the customs uniforms, and there was an impatient look in their multiple eyes as they glanced over our direction through the pouring rain.
On the other hand, it could also have been worse. Locks or no locks, customs officers on the prowl normally didn"t bother to wait for the captain before going inside a target ship, but simply popped the hatch and apologized later for the damage if apologies were called for. Now, with my second look, I saw why they were still out here getting rained on.
Standing square in the center of the ramp, looking for all the world like a feathery-scaled Horatius holding the bridge, was Chort. From the water running steadily off his fingertips it was clear he"d been there for a while; from the settled look of his stance, it was equally clear he was prepared to stay as long as necessary.
Normally, the presence of such an obstacle wouldn"t have slowed down a customs officer any more than a locked hatch would. But Chort was hardly your normal obstacle. He was a Craea; and with Crooea and their s.p.a.cewalker skills so highly in demand around the Spiral, I could understand why the Najik were reluctant to offend him by shoving their way past into the ship. Especially a locked and apparently unoccupied ship.
Except that it wasn"t strictly unoccupied, and for a brief, time-stretched second I tried to think of how to turn that to our advantage. If Tera, Shawn, and I could walk casually past the Icarus as if we weren"t connected with it at all; and if I could get Ixil on the phone- We hadn"t gotten two steps before any such decisions were taken out of myhands.
"There," Chort called out, pointing to me. "There is the captain. You may address your questions to him."
I sighed. "You two stay back," I murmured to Tera and Shawn. There was a rustle as Tera took Shawn"s left arm, pulling him subtly to a halt as I continued on toward the ramp. The Najik in the center of the group took a step toward me in response, and now that he was facing me I could see the insignia of a gokra- the equivalent of a senior lieutenant-on his collar. Apparently, Customs HQ was taking this very seriously.
"Good day, Gokra," I greeted him as we sloshed through the puddles to within a few steps of each other. "Is there a problem?"
"You are the captain of the Sleeping Beauty?" he asked. His tone was decidedly neutral.
"I am," I said, wondering fleetingly if Chort might have slipped up and given them my real name, realized immediately that he hadn"t. If he had-if the Najik knew beyond a doubt what they had here-they wouldn"t be bothering with a few measly customs officers. They"d have an army battalion here, plus the local Patth amba.s.sador and his staff, plus probably a military marching band thrown in for color. "Is there a problem?"
"You will unseal the hatch," he said, waving back toward the Icarus. "You will tell your crewer to move aside, and you will allow us to go in."
"Of course," I said, not moving. "May I ask what the problem is?"
For a moment he seemed disinclined to tell me, but apparently decided there was no harm in playing by the proper Mercantile Code rules. "We have received a report that this ship is engaged in illegal smuggling activities," he said.
The rest of me was soaking wet. My mouth, however, was suddenly dry.
"Smuggling activities?" I managed, hoping I sounded more bewildered than guilty.
"Yes," the gokra said. "Specifically, that you have unregistered gem-stones hidden aboard."
I stared at him, not needing to feign any bewilderment this time. "Gemstones?"
I.
echoed. "That"s crazy. We"re not carrying any gemstones."
"You will please tell your Craea to stand aside," the Najik said, not even bothering to acknowledge my protest. I couldn"t blame him; he"d probably heard variants of it twice a day throughout his entire career. "Then you will unseal the hatch and allow us inside. I will need to see your personal identification, as well."
"Of course," I said, brushing some of the water out of my eyes and trying to figure out what the h.e.l.l was going on. The gemstone story was utter nonsense, of course-you could fill fifty ships the size of the Icarus from deck to ceiling with Dritar opals without so much as lifting a Patth eyebrow. But if they suspected the ship in front of us might be the Icarus, why bother with this subterfuge?
Answer: they wouldn"t. Which meant that they didn"t know it was the Icarus.
Which further meant the Patth weren"t involved in this; that it was a purely Najiki affair, with the whole gemstone thing being either a ridiculous bureaucratic error or else a horrifying coincidence. I"d chosen the name Sleeping Beauty for our current ship"s ID on the a.s.sumption that few people in the Spiral were going to name their ships after obscure nineteenth-century Russian ballets. It would be the height of irony if I"d not only guessedwrong, but had managed to pick the name of a bona fide smuggling ship in the bargain.
Unfortunately, in about five minutes the how and why of it weren"t going to matter anymore. There were a dozen different numbers etched on engines and consoles all over the ship, numbers that were on various lists all across the Spiral. If Cameron had done a proper job of creating a history for his phantom freighter, those numbers would be in a Mercantile file labeled Icarus, and the minute the Najik started checking them we would be finished. If Cameron hadn"t filed the numbers, it would simply take a little longer for the soap bubble to burst.
The Najik were still waiting. "Of course," I said again, turning back and stepping to where Tera was still clinging to Shawn"s left arm. There was one very tenuous hope here, a hope based on Brother John"s off-handed comment earlier about the Najik, and my own hopefully not-too-cynical interpretation of it. "Let me get the hatch unlocked first and get us in out of the rain.
Especially Geoff here-he"s not well."
Someone in the group gave a deep-ba.s.s rumble, the Najiki equivalent of a guffaw, as I took Shawn"s right upper arm. Not an unreasonable response, given that Shawn looked more drunk than he did sick, and I took it as a good sign.
Customs HQ might be taking this seriously, but apparently not all the officers themselves were. Together Tera and I led Shawn through the Najiki cordon to the near end of the ramp. I keyed in the combination on the pad and, behind Chort, the hatch swung open. Without waiting for permission from the Najik, I moved us forward onto the ramp.
"Keep going," I murmured to Tera, letting go my grip on Shawn"s arm and sliding my left arm through his, freeing up that hand while still giving the appearance that I was holding on to him. Extending my reach as much as I could, I dipped into my side jacket pocket for the folded city map I"d stuffed in there earlier.
My other hand had already slipped inside my jacket for my pen; and as we pa.s.sed out of the rain into the shelter of the wraparound I scribbled briefly on the front of the map.
"An interesting ship design," the gokra commented from right behind me. He might be courteous enough to let me precede him into my own ship, but that didn"t mean he was going to let me get too much of a lead on him. "Ylpea-built, I presume?"
"I really don"t know," I said. Now that he mentioned it, I could see an echo of the Ylpean love of French curves in the Icarus"s double-sphere shape. Had that been what Cameron had been going for? Regardless, something worth remembering.
"I"m just the pilot, not the owner. I don"t know anything about its history."
"Ah."
We had moved along the wraparound, and were now coming up on the main sphere.