I found Everett stretched out on his cot in the main sphere, leafing through the ship"s pharmaceutical listing, his injured leg propped up on one of the medical kits. "The wraparound get too boring for you?" I asked as I made my way toward him.
"It got too chilly," he said. "What"s happening out there?"
"Absolutely nothing," I said. "Oh, except that dinner is going to be ready soon.
Thought you might want to join us."
"What are we having?" he asked.
"No idea," I admitted. "However, Chort"s in charge of preparation, so I expect it"ll at least be palatable."
"Probably," Everett said, wincing slightly as he shifted his leg.
"Unfortunately, I don"t know if I"m up to the walk."
"Really," I said, frowning, as I squatted down beside him. "I didn"t realize it was bothering you that badly or I wouldn"t have jumped on you earlier. Sorry."
He waved the apology away. "Don"t worry about it. You were right-it should be mostly healed by now. Maybe it"s the cold and lower air pressure up here that"s bothering it."
"Then the lodge and a real bed are exactly what you need," I said briskly, straightening up and reaching down to him. "Come on-I"ll give you a hand."
"No, that"s all right," he said. "Let me just rest it a while longer, and I"llcome up later."
"You"re going to join us for dinner, Everett," I said firmly. "This is the first decent meal we"ll have had since I don"t know when, and you and your leg aren"t going to miss out on it."
"Look, I appreciate the thought. But-"
"Besides, we have to have a serious talk about what we"re going to do after we leave here," I said. "And that"s going to concern all of us. So, bottom line: Either you let me help you up to the lodge, or I"m going to send Nicabar and Ixil to carry you. Your choice."
"You win," he said, putting down the listing and smiling wryly. "They wound up mostly carrying me back to the Icarus on Palmary, and I"m not in any hurry to repeat the experience."
We made our way around the curve of the hull and into the wraparound.
Everett"s leg didn"t seem to be giving him all that much trouble that I could see, but I nevertheless kept a hand ready to a.s.sist if it should suddenly go weak on him.
I.
turned on the entryway floodlights for better lighting and preceded him down the ladder. He reached the ground safely, and we headed toward the lodge.
A gentle breeze had started up since I"d entered the Icarus, stirring up the cold mountain air and making it feel that much colder, and Everett"s leg reacted by stiffening up even more. It took us over ten minutes to cross the four hundred meters to the lodge, and by the time we made it up the steps to the portico he had given his pride a vacation and was leaning heavily on my arm.
"Sorry about this," he puffed as I steered us to the main door. "I guess I should have let Ixil carry me after all."
"Not a problem," I a.s.sured him. "You"ll be better once we get you out of all this cold night... d.a.m.n."
"What?" he asked.
"The lights," I said, turning around to look behind us. Sure enough, the Icarus was beautifully bathed in the backwash from the floodlights. "I wasn"t even thinking. Too used to always leaving them on in port, I guess."
"You going to go back and turn them off?" Everett asked.
"Unless we want to advertise our presence to anyone who happens to pa.s.s by," I said, getting the door open and helping him limp over the threshold. The delicate aromas coming from the kitchen area made my stomach growl. "Go on in-the dining area"s off to the left, around that corner and through a sort of rectangular archway. I"ll be back in a minute."
"Better grab a flashlight for the way back," he warned as I headed back across the portico. "That ground"s pretty uneven in places."
"I will," I called back over my shoulder. "a.s.suming I can remember where we stashed them. Make sure Chort saves me some of whatever that is, all right?"
"Sure," he called. "Well, probably."
Between the portico lights behind me and the floodlights in front of me I had no problem traversing the terrain this time around. I climbed up the ladder and shut off the floodlights, then headed forward into the main sphere.
Contrary to what I"d implied to Everett, I knew exactly where the flashlights were, and it was the work of ten seconds to unearth one from the pile of machine-shop equipment. But now that I was finally alone in the ship there were other more urgent matters that needed to be attended to, and the excuse ofhunting for a flashlight should give me the time I needed.
I tackled the helm and nav systems first, my familiarity with them permitting me to finish the job in probably two minutes. Tera"s computer was next on my list, another relatively quick and easy job given how much time I"d spent around it lately. After that, making sure to stay well back in the wraparound as I slipped past the open hatchway, I headed back into the engine section.
Even with full lighting the maze of cables and conduits back there was a pain to get through. With only a flashlight, and one that had been adjusted to its lowest setting yet, such a safari was downright dangerous. But I made it through to the control station without garroting myself, and five minutes later I was done.
The hidden access to the inner sphere was sitting wide-open, just as I"d instructed Ixil to leave it. I shined my light briefly inside, but there was nothing to be seen except the usual tangle of wiring. I looped a few turns of conduit over the hinged breaker panel, just to make sure no one thoughtlessly closed it, then left the engine section, making sure that the door to the wraparound was also locked open.
I left my flashlight off as I slipped out of the hatchway and climbed down the ladder. Everett or someone else might be looking in this direction, and I still had one last task to perform before I could head back up for dinner. Careful of my footing, I circled the aft end of the ship and made my way around to the ship"s starboard side.
With the tree branches towering over me blocking out the starlight, this side of the ship was even darker than the port side had been. Even so, it wasn"t difficult to locate the set of latch grooves I"d spotted on my first inspection of the ship back at Meima, the grooves I"d later learned Cameron had anch.o.r.ed a collapsible ladder into for his backdoor entrance into the ship that morning.
Probing carefully with my little finger, I felt in one of the two bottom grooves for the piece of guidance tag I"d wadded up and put inside.
The folded piece of plastic was no longer wedged halfway down the opening as I"d left it. Instead, it had been jammed all the way to the bottom of the groove.
A.
quick check of the other groove showed the other half of the tag had likewise been crammed into the bottom.
Feeling my way along the side of the ship, I circled around the drive thrusters and worked my way back to the base of the ladder. Then, and only then, did I turn on my flashlight and head up to the lodge.
Everett was not, as I"d expected, waiting for me in the expansive foyer where I"d left him. He had instead found his way to the dining room and seated himself at the far end of one of the rustic hewn-wood tables. Shawn, Tera, and Nicabar had reappeared from their rooms and were in the process of choosing seats of their own at the table, with Chort and Ixil just lugging in a large steaming stewpot containing whatever it was I"d smelled earlier. Four seats were stillempty: one on each side of Everett at the far end, one beside Shawn, the fourth at the end of the table closest to me, the seat facing away from the entrance archway. Choosing that one, leaving Chort and Ixil to fight over the other
three.
chairs, I sat down.
Dinner was a curious affair, full of odd contrasts. The couple of hours of privacy had done small but noticeable wonders for the civility level among the group, particularly for Tera and Shawn, who mentioned that they"d spent their time catching up on badly needed sleep. The fact that the quiet surroundings lent themselves to a sense of security was also undoubtedly a calming factor.
At the same time, though, there was an underlying tension permeating the whole event, a tension that showed up in a hundred little ways, from the slightly stilted conversation and long uncomfortable silences to the way everyone"s eyes periodically and suddenly darted to the archway behind me as if expecting the entire population of the Patth homeworld Aauth to suddenly come charging in on us. Tera seemed the worst in this respect, though Shawn"s natural twitchiness brought him in a close second. By a sort of unspoken mutual consent we avoided the topic of the rest of our trip, and our chances of actually getting to Earth with the whole Spiral breathing down our necks.
I gave it half an hour, until the stew was gone and the conversation had again lagged and they were starting to make the small but unmistakable signs of getting ready to take their leave. Then, clearing my throat, I lifted my left hand for attention. "I know you"re all tired and anxious to start settling down for the night," I said. "But there are one or two matters we still need to deal with."
Their expressions could hardly be considered hostile, but there certainly was no particular enthusiasm I could detect. "Can"t it wait until morning?" Everett asked from the far end of the table. "My leg"s starting to hurt again, and I"d like to go somewhere where I can prop it up."
"This will only take a few minutes," I a.s.sured him. "And no, it really can"t wait."
"Of course not," Shawn muttered under his breath. "Not when McKell thinks it"s important."
"First of all," I said, nodding toward Chort and then Ixil, "we need to thank Chort 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 by the gentle sc.r.a.ping of chair legs on the floor as Shawn and Nicabar pushed their seats back in preparation for getting up. "Anything else?" Everett asked, half standing.
"Actually, yes," I said, lifting my right hand above the level of the table to reveal the plasmic I was holding. "If you"ll all sit back down again and put your hands on the table," I said into the suddenly shocked silence, "there"s a murderer I"d like you to meet."
CHAPTER 23.
FOR A HALF-DOZEN heartbeats they stood or sat in utter silence like carved marble statues, every eye staring either at my face or else the gun in myhand.
I didn"t move or speak either, giving them as much time as they needed to catch up with the bombsh.e.l.l I"d just dropped in their laps.
Everett recovered first, easing back down onto his chair as if there were a row of eggs waiting there and he didn"t want to break any of them. As if that were a signal, Shawn and Nicabar just as carefully unfroze and hitched their own chairs back to the table. The three men and Ixil already had their hands on the table as instructed; I sent a querying look at Chort and Tera and they reluctantly followed 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 d.o.g.g.i.ng our heels. We had the ship"s gravity 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 hit something wrong on his way down. We had the malfunction with the cutting torch that gave Ixil some bad burns and would probably have killed him if Nicabar and 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 door release smashed while he was recovering from those burns.
"There are others, but I mention these particular three first because it turns out they"re the most easily and innocently explained. It seems that Tera was the one who turned on the gravity during the s.p.a.cewalk in order to keep Chort from discovering 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 of invisible puppet strings to Tera. "That she didn"t want revealed?" Nicabar asked.
"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"s daughter?"
"Exactly," I said, nodding approvingly and trying to ignore the aghast look on Tera"s face. "Except that the man who called himself Alexander Borodin was in fact 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 G.o.d."
"I wondered about that," Nicabar murmured. "Someone had to have had tremendous resources 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 me as we discussed cutting a hole into the cargo area, and for obvious reasons didn"t want us to do that. Gimmicking the torch was the only way he could come up with 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 washe hiding?"
"He must have been in the gap between the inner and outer hulls," Nicabar said.
"It was the perfect hiding place. None of us even knew there was that much s.p.a.ce in there until we started taking the ship apart."
"That"s exactly it," I confirmed. "He surfaced once or twice to touch base with 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 tell us he"s still hidden aboard somewhere?"
"I"d be very surprised to find that he was," I said. "Getting back to the main point, it turns out Cameron was the one responsible for those lethal chemicals being in Ixil"s cabin in the first place."
"You"re wrong," Tera snapped, her eyes blazing. "I already told you Dad didn"t want to hurt him or anyone else."
"I didn"t say he did," I said mildly. "Actually, his part in all that was to save 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 to understand. "I thought it was an accident."
"It wasn"t," I told him. "But the murderer hoped most of us would think it was.
All of us, in fact, except one person."
"But that"s ridiculous," Everett snorted. "Why would the Patth want to kill Jones?"
"I never said the Patth had anything to do with it," I said. "But since you bring it up, that very question is what had me stymied for so long. You remember Shawn"s disease-crazed escape on Potosi, and the Najiki Customs officials who nearly impounded the ship? That was our murderer"s handiwork, too."
"What do you mean, his handiwork?" Tera asked. "I thought Shawn broke free on his own."
"No, he had help, though he probably doesn"t remember it," I said. "The murderer needed Shawn to run away so that everyone would scatter to search for him and he"d be free to make a couple of private vid calls. The stumbling point here is that our killer seemed h.e.l.l-bent on stopping the Icarus, no matter what he had to do. Yet at every place where he might have turned us over to the Patth, he didn"t do it."
"Sounds like you"re describing a schizophrenic," Everett murmured.
"Or a plain, flat-out psycho," Shawn added, glancing furtively around the table.
"Someone who kills just for the fun of it."
"Actually, there"s nothing unbalanced about him at all," I a.s.sured them. "But all right; let"s a.s.sume for a minute that he is a nutcase. Let me then throw out another question, one that helped me start thinking in the right direction.
Here we have Arno Cameron, creator of an enormous financial and industrial empire,wandering through the hot spots of Meima looking for a crew to get this vitally important piece of hardware back to Earth. Question: Given that Cameron"s success must have been at least partially based on being an excellent judge of character, how in the world did he not catch on to the fact that one of the people he was hiring was a schizophrenic, psychotic potential murderer?"