Part 14 (2/2)

And then, in the distance ahead of me, I saw a faint glow appear, so faint that I wasn't sure at first whether I was simply imagining it. My first thought was that our convoluted intertwined wanderings had brought us back to the vicinity of my cabin and the open inner-hull plate. But even as I realized that the combined gravity vector was wrong for that, the distant glow vanished, accompanied by a dull, metallic thud. A sound like two pieces of metal clanking hollowly against each other.

The same sound I'd heard from the wraparound after my talk with Nicabar, and had been trying to track down for nearly two days.

I kept going, but there was clearly no point in hurrying. My quarry had led me around the barn a couple of times and had now popped back through his rabbit hole to the safe anonymity of the Icarus proper. By the time I reached the spot where the glow had been, a.s.suming I could pinpoint it at all, he would have the connectors back in place and it would be just one more of seventeen thousand other inner-hull plates.

A couple of minutes later I reached the vicinity where I estimated the glow had been. As expected, every one of the hull plates in the area looked exactly alike, and I still had no idea where exactly I was. Briefly, I thought about trying to dig my way through, but a single glance was all it took to see that the hull-plate connectors couldn't be removed from this side.

But maybe there was another way to mark my place here.

I played my light across the inner-hull plates over my head, searching among the haphazard arrangement of piping and wires until I found what I was looking for: the telltale power wires and coax cable of an intercom, their ends disappearing through the inner hull half a meter to the side of my estimated position for my quarry's escape hatch.I'd left my mult.i.tool back on my cabin floor, but the contact edge of my plasmic's power pack was rough enough for my purposes, and it took only a few minutes of work for me to abrade the insulation on the power wires enough to leave a small section of bare wire on each of them. Putting the plasmic aside, I.

touched the two bare spots together.

There was no spark-the power level was far too low for that-but what the operation lacked in pyrotechnic dramatics it more than made up in personal satisfaction. Somewhere in the bowels of the Icarus, I knew, a circuit breaker had just popped in response to the short circuit I'd created. All I had to do was find which one, and I'd have my suspect intercom identified. And with it, the saboteur's rabbit hole.

Making sure the bare spots stayed together, I wrapped the wires as best I could to hold them that way. On most stars.h.i.+ps the main computer's nursemaid program would pick this up in a flash and send a maintenance flag to both the bridge and engine-room status boards. With the Icarus's archaic system, though, I doubted that it had such a program. Even if it did, there would be no way to reset the circuit breaker until the wires were unjinxed.

Which left only the problem of finding my way back to my cabin and hunting up the appropriate breaker box before my adversary tumbled to what I'd done and fixed the short circuit.

Now that I was no longer engaged in a chase, the navigational task was straightforward if a bit tedious. Holding my light loosely by finger and thumb, I held it near the edge of the inner hull and watched which way it tried to turn. That gave me the direction of s.h.i.+p's down, and I headed that way until further measurements with my impromptu pendulum showed I was at the sphere's South Pole. Picking a direction at random, I moved along it for a few meters, then began circling at that lat.i.tude until I spotted the glow of my cabin light filtering through the opening. Three minutes after that, I was back.

With everything else that had happened, I almost forgot to check my own intercom's coax cable for tampering, which had, after all, been the original purpose of this exercise. Not that I was expecting to find anything else, but for completeness it seemed the proper thing to do. A cursory examination was all it took to discover that it had indeed been tapped into.

I climbed back into my cabin, noting as I did so the curious fact that the hull's gravitational field seemed to hold on to me more strongly now that I'd been all the way into it than it had before I'd first landed on the outer hull.

Possibly it was just my imagination; but on the other hand this field was so unlike anything I'd ever experienced anyway, I was perfectly willing to grant it one more bit of inexplicable magic. Between this and the Lumpy Brothers'

exotic weaponry, the strange technology was starting to get a little too thick on the ground for my taste.

Putting hull-plate connectors back in with a mult.i.tool was a different skill entirely from taking them out, but it wasn't that hard and I wasn't going to bother with more than the four corners for now anyway. A few minutes of leafing through Ixil's sheaf of schematics and I had the proper breaker box identified: up on the top deck with the rest of the crew cabins.The general stir that had accompanied Ixil's injuries had long since faded away, and the Icarus was again quiet. I climbed the aft ladder to the top deck and moved silently down the corridor, half expecting one of the cabin doors to open and someone to take a potshot at me. But no one did, and I reached the breaker box without incident. It was recessed into the bulkhead at the forward end of the corridor with five other breaker boxes, just beyond the forward ladder. It was also quite small, though given that it apparently only contained the s.h.i.+p's twenty-six intercom breakers I shouldn't have expected anything very big.

Not surprisingly, given the Icarus's designer's overly optimistic faith in the goodness of his fellow men, none of the breaker boxes was locked. The hinges squeaked slightly as I pulled the proper one open, but not loudly enough to wake up any of the sleepers nearby. With a tingling sense of antic.i.p.ation, I s.h.i.+ned my light inside.

According to Ixil's schematic, the box held twenty-six low-voltage circuit breakers. At the moment, however, all it held was twenty-six circuit-breaker sockets.

I gazed at the empty box for a few more seconds, twenty-twenty hindsight turning my antic.i.p.ation into a sour taste in my mouth. With the wires still touching behind the intercom, the saboteur had, of course, been unable to reset the telltale breaker. So he'd simply taken them all out.

Score one more round to him. This was getting to be a very bad habit.

With the same faint squeak of the hinges I closed the cabinet door again.

There might be some spare breakers aboard, but since virtually nothing ever went wrong with the things there very well might not be. Besides, anyone smart enough to have antic.i.p.ated my actions in the 'tweenhull s.p.a.ce was probably already ahead of me there, too. By the time I found the spares-or found and cannibalized another set of same-sized ones from a different box-he would undoubtedly have the intercom wires fixed again.

The walk back down to my cabin seemed longer somehow than the upward trip had been a few minutes earlier. I retrieved a connector tool from the mechanics room on my way and finished sealing the hull plate back into position, then lay back down on my bunk and tried to think. I thought for a while, but it didn't seem to be getting me anywhere, so I went back up to the mid deck to check on the bridge.

Tera was still faithfully on duty, or was once again faithfully on duty if she'd been the one scooting around between the Icarus's hulls. I volunteered to take over for her while she grabbed something to eat from the dayroom, and as she pa.s.sed by me I tried to see if I could spot any oil stains on her clothing or smell any lingering aromas. There was nothing out of the ordinary that I could detect.

But then, I didn't seem to have picked up any stains or smells while I was between decks, either. Inconclusive, either way.

As soon as she was out of sight I did a complete check of the bridge, equipment and course heading both. Tera was still reasonably high on my list of suspects;and even if she wasn't the one sporting the brand-new collector's set of circuit breakers, there was no reason a saboteur who liked fiddling with intercoms couldn't extend his hobby to more vital equipment.

But everything checked out perfectly. Sinking wearily into the command chair, I.

propped my elbows on the armrests and my chin on my hands and stared at the hypnotic flickering of the lights on the status display until Tera returned.

We exchanged good-nights, and I went back to my cabin. Giving up my efforts at thinking as at least temporarily unproductive, I lay down on my bunk and went to sleep.

CHAPTER 9.

POTOSI WAS THE most populous world we'd hit yet, big enough that it was no longer a colony but a full-fledged member of the Najiki Archipelago, a series of thirty or so Najiki worlds scattered across several hundred light-years and winding its way through at least three other species' claimed regions or spheres of influence. That the other species tolerated what might otherwise have been seen as an unacceptable intrusion on their sovereign territories was a tribute to Najiki diplomacy and bargaining skill.

That, plus their unique gift for creating wealth and their willingness to share that wealth with governments who were generous enough in turn to grant them right-of-way corridors through their s.p.a.ce. The cynics, of course, would put it rather more strongly.

There were five major InterSpiral-cla.s.s s.p.a.ceports on the Potosi surface, the largest and most modern of which was heavily dominated by the Patth mercantile fleet. As soon as we were in range, I contacted the controller and asked for a landing bay in the port farthest away from it. Under some circ.u.mstances, I knew, a request that specific might have raised eyebrows, or whatever the Najik used for eyebrows. But the Patth near monopoly on s.h.i.+pping had hit this area particularly hard, leaving an almost-universal hatred for them in its wake, and I knew that the controllers would take it in stride.

Unfortunately, that same universal hatred also meant that every other incoming non-Patth s.h.i.+p was also making the same demand; and most of them were regular visitors here. In the end, in a result that fit all too well with the depressing pattern of the entire trip so far, not only were we not granted a slot half a continent away as requested, but were instead put down square in the middle of the Patth hub.

Once again, I told the rest of the crew to stay aboard while I went out shopping. Once again, they weren't at all happy about it.

”I don't think you understand the situation,” Everett rumbled, staring disapprovingly down at me from his raised position on the slanted deck. ”It seems to me that if we could simply take Shawn to the port med center and show them his symptoms-”

”We could then all sit around a quiet room somewhere,” I finished for him.

”Explaining to the nice Najik from the Drug Enforcement Division just how it washe got a borandis addiction in the first place. Remember the hijacking threat-this would not be a good place to make ourselves conspicuous.”

He snorted. ”No one would try a hijacking here in the middle of a major s.p.a.ceport.”

”You must be kidding,” I growled. ”With strangers wandering around all over the place, and no one knowing anyone else, either s.p.a.cers or ground personnel?

It's a perfect spot for it.”

His lips compressed briefly. ”What about you?” Tera spoke up, gesturing at my newly recolored hair and eyes and the set of false scars I'd applied to my cheek. ”You think that disguise is going to get you past the people looking for you?”

”Someone has to go hunt up a drug dealer,” I reminded her patiently. ”Would you rather do it yourself?”

”I just don't want you to get caught,” she shot back angrily. ”If you do, that ends it for all of us.”

”I won't get caught,” I a.s.sured her. ”I won't even be noticed. The picture they've got of me is old, and I know the sort of people the Patth are recruiting. They won't be able to get past the hair and eyes, believe me.”

”Interesting,” Nicabar murmured. ”I wonder how one gets to be an expert on how people like that think.”

”Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to,” I warned him acidly.

Maybe a little too acidly; but time was getting tight. And besides, I really didn't want to go out there, either.

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