Part 38 (2/2)

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 s.h.i.+p'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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p? 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?”

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