The Icarus Hunt

CHAPTER 16

THE FIRST LEG of the trip was uneventful enough. There was plenty of lightcoming in behind me, the zero gee made precision movement reasonably easy, andI had a mostly clear path up to the gap I'd pointed out to Tera. I held theelectronic-field sensor at arm's length in front of me the whole way like amystical talisman, keeping a close eye on its readings and pausing to checkout the source of anything that made its indicators so much as twitch.

There was current flowing in here, all right, plenty of it. Fortunately forpurposes of navigation, the strongest sources seemed to be the handful ofpanels spaced irregularly along the inner surface. From the limited view I'd had fromthe access hole the nature of the panels had been a mystery; up close anddirect, the situation wasn't much clearer. They might have been readoutdisplays, giving ever-changing equipment-status reports in a strange andincomprehensible alien script. Unfortunately, they could just as easily havebeen ever-changing mood lights there for the edification of whoever it was themindless electronics thought was on duty in here. All in all, I decided, Ishould probably stick with flying starships and leave the more esoteric alienevaluations alone.

After a few minutes I reached the gap, only to discover that my earlierinterpretation of its significance was not nearly as clear-cut as I'd thought.

It turned out, in fact, to be far from certain that the opening was proof of ahuman-sized body having gone through that direction at all. Partly it was amatter of that particular region being clearer than the surrounding area; partlyit was a trick of perspective that had made the spot seem more open than itreally was.

And it wasn't particularly open. There were at least a dozen wirescrisscrossingthe gap a half meter farther in, which I hadn't been able to see from myprevious vantage point. If Cameron had come this way, he'd done a good job ofsmoothing out his footprints behind him.

Which further meant that it was suddenly far from certain that Cameron hadever come in here at all, let alone that he was floating unconscious or deadsomewhere inside.

For a minute I played my light through the gap into the darkness beyond, watching the glints as the beam reflected off bits of alien metal or plasticor ceramic, wondering what I should do now. If Cameron wasn't in here, thencontinuing on would be not only unnecessary but probably dangerous as well.

Of course, if Cameron wasn't in here, then we were back to the sticky questionof where in blazes he'd gotten to. If he'd left the Icarus at Potosi, voluntarily or otherwise, then he was likely in worse trouble than if he werein here. In fact, as I thought about it, I realized his abduction on Potosi mightexplain why the Najik had identified the Icarus so quickly at Utheno. Thoughthat could equally be the Potosi customs report catching up with us.

On the other hand, whether Cameron was in here or not, we still had to figureout how the stardrive worked if we were going to pussyfoot our way out of thePatth net. Still, it would definitely be the better part of valor for mecarefully to back out of here at this point and postpone any other plans untilPax came back with his report.

And then, even as I gave the light one last sweep around, I heard a soft, distant sound. Unlike the noise I'd heard while talking with Tera, though, this one was very familiar. It was the screech of a startled Kalixiri ferret, thekind of verbal reaction that usually went quickly up the tonal scale and thenjust as quickly back down again.

Only this one didn't. It went halfway up the scale, then abruptly cut off.

And with the sudden silence ringing in my ears, I stared into the darkness, feeling sweat beading up on my forehead and neck. There hadn't been even thewhisper of a trailing edge to that call; no whimper, no gasp, no sigh. None ofthe sounds that should have come from the last escaping bit of air in Pax'slungs as he collapsed into sleep or unconsciousness.

Which meant he hadn't collapsed into sleep or unconsciousness. He was dead.

And something in here had killed him.

I looked back toward the access hole, the movement of my head sending dropletsof sweat flying off my face to drift their way to oblivion among the maze ofcircuitry. If Tera had heard that abbreviated death cry, she would be stickingher head into view any second now to demand an explanation. But the secondsticked by, and there was no Tera, and I realized with decidedly mixed feelingsthat I alone knew what had just happened.

Which meant that the decision of what to do next was also mine alone. Probablyjust as well. Wiping the surface layer of sweat off my forehead with my leftsleeve, I eased the blocking wires out of the way and headed cautiously in.

I'd told Ixil and Tera that we weren't in any particular hurry here. WithPax's screech echoing through my memory, I was even less inclined to takeunnecessarychances. I kept it slow and careful, checking every wire and conduit in mypath, both visually and with my field sensor, before getting anywhere near it.

Before moving it aside I also made sure to trace along it as best I could through thetangle, trying to see where it intersected the wall or other components andmaking sure it had enough slack for me to safely push it aside withoutstraininganything. If it didn't have that slack, if it even looked marginal, I changedcourse and found another route.

It took me nearly an hour to work my way through that first three and a halfmeters; and I was just beginning to wonder if I was going to be able to do thewhole ten meters to the center in one try when I eased through a gap in afish-net-style mesh and abruptly found myself in open space.

I held on to the mesh with one hand, balancing myself parallel to it in thezero gee, and played my light around. The space wasn't quite as empty, I could seenow, as it had looked in that first glance. A dozen different cable loops thathad worked their way through the holes in the mesh were bobbing gently aroundthe edges, looking like some exotic form of seaweed drifting in a calmcurrent.

Half a dozen of the lighted displays I'd seen against the walls were also atthe edge of the open area, fastened by wires through the mesh and facing inwardtoward the center; from one of them a slender, articulatedblack-and-silver-banded extension arm stretched right to the point six and ahalf meters away from me where the center of the sphere should be. All thedisplay lights were red, giving the area an eerie, blood-tinged look. I movedmylight around the room again, steeling myself for what would probably be theveryunpleasant sight of a dead ferret. But there was no sign of his body.

Apparently, he hadn't made it through the wire maze before he died.

And then, abruptly, I caught my breath, swinging my light back toward thecenter again. So intent was I on looking for Pax's body that it had only now occurredto me that there should have been something else in here: the resonancecrystaland control board that Nicabar and Chort said a stardrive like this was supposedto come equipped with.

Unfortunately, this one wasn't.

Carefully, I ran my light over every square centimeter of the place, a tightknot twisting like a case-hardened drill bit into my stomach. I'd pinned a lot on Tera's assumption that the Icarus concealed an alien stardrive, but notuntil that moment did I realize just how much pinning I had actually done. If wecouldn't get this thing to jump us past the Patth net, then we'd had it, pureand simple. I remembered Shawn's question on that point, and how glibly I'dbrushed him off with the suggestion that we would be no worse off if Cameron'sarchaeologists had been wrong.

But I'd been the one who'd been wrong. All the work we'd done had indeed beenfor nothing, just as Shawn had warned. Worse, my brilliant scheme had cost usprecious time, a loss I realized now we were going to sorely regret. Not onlyhad the Patth been given the opportunity to consolidate and perhapsreconfiguretheir hunt for us, but the lost days had let Shawn's medical conditiondeteriorate to the point where there were probably no more than three or fourplanets we could reach in time to get him the borandis he would soon beneeding.

And to top it off, if the Patth had guessed we had had to go to ground forrepairs or recalibration after the Utheno attack, then they would beconcentrating everything they had on this region. The region that, sooner orlater, we were going to have to pop up into.

On the other hand, if this electrician's nightmare wasn't a stardrive, whatthe hell would the Patth want with it anyway? A possibly reassuring thought; butnot, I realized immediately, nearly as reassuring as it might have been. TheIcarus could still be the massive alien stardrive Cameron's people suspected, only with the vital crystal either removed or crumbled into dust. That wouldputus in the depressing position of having something that was totally useless tous, yet was still worth killing us to get.

Unless...

I played the light around again. If it was merely a matter of finding therightkind of crystal, that was the kind of miracle we still had an outside chanceof pulling off. I doubted such a rock would be an off-the-shelf item these days, but if I could get a message to Uncle Arthur, he might be able to dig one upfrom somewhere and get it to us.

I let go of the mesh, hovering in midair as I wiped some more sweat from myface. And as I did so, I suddenly heard a sound like two pieces of metalscratching together. The same sound, I realized, that I'd heard while sittingout in the big sphere with Tera.

Only this time it was coming from somewhere nearby.

I swung my light around, hoping to catch a glimpse of moving machinery. Butthe sound had stopped before I could get the light more than a fraction of the wayaround, despite the fact that I'd whipped my arm fast enough to send the restof my body into a slow tumble. Cursing under my breath, I reached back out forthe mesh.

My fingers closed on thin air. The mesh was out of my reach.

I tried again, swinging my body awkwardly over as I tried to get enoughextension, frowning at the complete illogic of the situation. I'd beenmotionless relative to the mesh when I'd started; and no matter how much I'dtwisted and turned, my center of mass should have remained that same distanceaway from it. That was basic level-one physics.

Yet there the mesh was, sitting a good five centimeters outside my best reach.

I knew I hadn't bumped the mesh, which might have given me the necessary push, and any air current strong enough to account for this much movement ought to havebeen whistling in my ears, which it wasn't. Muttering a curse, I reached to mytool pouch for the longest probe I had with me. The patented McKell luck wasrunning true to form, gumming up my life with complications I didn't need, didn't want, and most certainly didn't have time to deal with. I got a goodgripon the end of the probe and stretched it out to the mesh.

It didn't reach.

I stared at the gap between mesh and probe, a bad taste suddenly tinglingagainst my tongue. I was moving away from the mesh, all right. Slowly andsubtly, but now that I was looking for it I could definitely see the meshreceding. And the only way I could be moving like this was if the small spherehad suddenly developed a gravitational field like its big brother beside it.

I looked around again, paying special attention to the loops of cable hangingthrough to my side of the mesh. No, the field wasn't exactly like that of itsbig brother, I corrected myself. It was, instead, an exact inverse of it.

Instead of pulling everything toward the outer wall, this one was pushingeverything toward the center. I tried to think how it could be pulling thatone off, but my mind wasn't up to it.

Besides, I had more urgent things to think about at the moment. If the fieldwas focused toward the center of the sphere—and that was certainly how it lookedfrom the way the hanging cables were now pointed inward—then once I hit thezero mark I would be pretty well stuck there. Any direction I turned I would belooking uphill; and with absolutely nothing available to kick or push offagainst, I would be as solidly pinned as a mosquito in a spiderweb.

I picked another curse out of my repertoire, a heavy-duty one this time, as Iswung my light around looking for inspiration. There were the hanging cables, of course, now resembling Spanish moss more than they did floating seaweed. Butwithout knowing what any of them were for I would have to be pretty desperatebefore I'd risk damage to either the Icarus or myself by tugging at them.

Besides which, a second look showed that I wasn't going to get anywhere withingrabbing range of any of them.

Still, once I'd choked down the panic reaction and forced myself to thinkrationally, I realized that I was hardly in dire straits. Tera knew I was inhere, and once I failed to emerge it would only be a matter of time beforeIxil or one of the others ventured in to find out what had happened to me. A ropebelayed outside and carefully threaded in through the tangle of wires, and Icould pull myself to the mesh and ultimately to safety. Tera's insistence thatI bring food and water in here might turn out to have been a good idea afterall.

I seemed to be drifting faster now, though it was difficult to tell for sure.

A

sudden yellow glow appeared from the corner of my eye, and I turned to seethat one of the flat displays that had been showing the same red symbols as all theothers had suddenly changed to a grid pattern of yellow-and-black squares.

Even as I studied it another of the displays also changed, this one to squares of orange and black. For a minute I glanced between them, trying to see if therewas any pattern in the layout of their colored squares. But if there was itwas too subtle for me to pick out.

I was about two meters from the center, still drifting at a leisurely pace, when it suddenly occurred to me that if I kept on this same course I was going torun directly into the articulated arm angling across my path.

I played my light over the arm, feeling a fresh batch of sweat leaching ontomyface as I did so. I'd already noted that the arm was composed of analternatingseries of black-and-silver bands; what I hadn't noticed until then was that atthe very tip of the arm the color scheme changed to about twenty centimetersof a disturbingly luminescent gray. My field sensor wasn't picking up anythingfrom it yet, but I was still too far away for any current less than a couplehundred volts to register. The arm didn't look like any of the power cables I'd had tosneak through on my way in, but considering the alien origin of this placethat didn't give me much comfort.

What was clear, and of no comfort whatsoever, was that even if the armsuddenlycame to life with enough power to light up New Cleveland, there was still nowayin space for me to miss running into it. About all I could think of to do wasto try to get a careful grip on it as I approached and use it as a fulcrum toswingthe bulk of my body around it instead of hitting it full force.

The problem with that idea was that if it didn't have the structural strengthnecessary to handle that kind of sudden stress, the gray end was probablygoingto break off in my hand. On the other hand, if it was that weak and I didn'tgrab it, it would probably break anyway as I slammed into it.

And as my train of thought reached that depressingly no-win conclusion, I wasthere. Clenching my teeth, feeling rather like someone trying to sneak up andgrab a sleeping pit viper, I reached out with my right hand and got a carefulgrip on the arm.

Too careful. The material was far more slippery than it looked, and before Iknew it my hand was sliding straight down the striped section toward the grayend. I squeezed harder, simultaneously trying to swing my body around as I'doriginally planned. But my lack of purchase on the arm meant I had no leverageat all, and I found myself instead sliding along the arm in a sort oflow-gravity version of a fireman and his pole.

It was hardly the way I'd planned things, but at least the arm was clearlystronger than my worst-case scenario had anticipated. Even with my full weightpressing on it via my one-handed grip, it was showing no sign of breaking oreven bending. Maybe even strong enough that I'd be able to use it to climbback out to the mesh.

Assuming, of course, I could figure out how to get a solid grip on the damnthing. Swinging my body partially around, I got my other hand in place andgrabbed as hard as I dared.

The two-handed grip helped some, but not enough. I was still sliding serenelydown the arm, now almost to the gray section at the end. If I couldn't stopmyself, I knew, my momentum would cause me to overshoot the end of the arm andgo straight through the sphere's center. Hardly a catastrophe, since there wasnothing over there for me to crash into, but it would cost me more of ourincreasingly precious minutes while I waited for the gravitational field toslow me to a stop and bring me back to the center again.

And then I was to the gray section of the arm. Clenching my teeth, knowingthis was my last chance to stop myself with a modicum of dignity, I squeezed ithard.

It was as if I'd grabbed hold of a live hundred-volt wire. Suddenly my wholebody was tingling, the hairs on my neck and arms standing straight up, myclenched teeth trying to vibrate against each other. And on top of all of itwas the chagrin that after all of my exaggerated caution and borderline paranoia, I'd finally hit a live wire. What made it even worse was that I'd even hit itentirely on purpose.

And yet, at the same time, the small part of my mind that hadn't gone intoinstant panic mode was noticing that if this was an electric shock it was likenone I'd ever experienced before. There was no pain, for one thing, and noneof the subtle promises of future pain, either. In addition, the tingling wasrunning uniformly through my entire body, not simply along my arms and chestas a normal current ought to flow. There was a distant sound like the awfulrippingthunder crack from a too-close lightning strike, and everything went black.

It didn't stay black long. Almost before the darkness had a chance toregister, the lights came back on again. Not the harsh, sharp-edged beam of myflashlight, but a softer, much more muted glow. For a second I wondered if I had blackedout, but both the darkness and the light had come without any of the normalcues and sensations of a loss and regaining of consciousness.

It was at about that point in my slow-motion cogitation that I suddenlynoticed the striped arm with the booby-trapped end was gone. So was the tangle ofwiringand geometric monitor shapes I'd been facing across the small sphere.

So, for that matter, was the small sphere.

Belatedly, I focused my eyes straight ahead of me on the now familiar curvinggray hull. So I had blacked out in there, at least long enough for the jolt tokick me out here to the center of the Icarus's big resonance sphere. I wincedas I thought of all the stuff I must have torn through on my way out—I wasprobablylucky I hadn't been electrocuted for real.

Though if I'd wrecked enough of the alien electronics to render the stardriveinoperable I would probably soon wish I had been crisped. Twisting around inthe catlike, half-swimming movements of standard zero-gee maneuvering technique, Iworked myself around toward the access hole, wondering why Tera wasn'tscreamingher head off at me.

The reason was very simple. Tera wasn't there.

Neither was the tool kit I'd left beside the opening. Neither was the ship'scomputer that had been more or less permanently mounted there. Neither, forthat matter, were the stacks of meter-square panels, the piles of mechanicalequipment, or the consolidated bits of personal effects.

I was in the large sphere, all right. Problem was, I wasn't in the Icarus.

A familiar sense of falling permeated my confusion: The sphere's gravitationalfield had taken hold and was pulling me gently down toward the inner surface.

Too slowly, or so it seemed, considering the .85-gee pull we had on theIcarus.

I had just about decided that this sphere's field was set lower when I gotwithin a meter of the surface and the field abruptly increased dramatically. Ibarely got my knees prepared for the impact before I was down, hitting themetal with a dull thud. Clearly, the gravitational field was a lot more radiallyvariable than I'd realized, though how they were managing that trick Icouldn't even begin to guess.

And then, as the echo of my landing faded away, I heard another sound. Faint, distant, but extremely familiar. A sort of thoughtful squeak, coming from thedirection of the access hole leading into the smaller sphere.

It sounded like Pax.

I had my plasmic in my hand before I'd taken two steps toward the smallsphere.

Pure reflex on my part, of course—Lord knew I had no idea what I was going todo with it. I certainly couldn't shoot or even threaten to shoot whoever orwhatever I found in there. Not if I ever wanted to find out what the hell was going on here.

I did the last three meters to the access hole in a low crouch, listening ashard as I could with the noise of my heart thudding in my ears. I could hearfaint ferret snufflings now from inside; more to the immediate point, I couldalso hear the subtle sounds of something else moving around in there with him.

And if I didn't dare open fire indiscriminately, there was no guarantee thatwhatever was in there would have any such qualms itself. Dropping flat on thedeck, I inched my way the last half meter and cautiously looked in.

At first glance the interior of the small sphere seemed to be nothing at alllike the setup I'd seen back on the Icarus. A second, closer look showed thatat least most of the apparent difference was due to the fact that all the coupleof meters' worth of loose wiring I'd waded through in the Icarus's sphere washere neatly packed against the inner surface, held in place by a tighter version ofthe netting I'd had to maneuver through there. The same type of displays werescattered around various spots on the netting, their multicolored lightsproviding the glow I'd seen out in the larger sphere. Theblack-and-silver-striped arm I'd played alien water slide with was also there, stretching its slightly angled way from the mesh to the center.

In some ways having all the wiring squeezed together this way made it lookeven more tangled than it had when it was spread out over a larger volume. Itcertainly made the whole spectacle more colorful, which was probably why ittook me another couple of seconds before I noticed the movement a little way to myright. It was Pax, all right, looking hale and hearty and perfectly at home as he strolled across the netting toward me, sniffing curiously at everything in sight.

"Hello, McKell," a voice called out, the unexpectedness of it making me jump.

"You certainly took your time getting here."

I looked in the direction of the voice. A quarter of the way around the sphere, almost hidden in the glare from one of the sets of displays, a figure was sitting on the netting. Gazing up at one of the other displays, he was scribbling madly on a notepad balanced across his knee.

It was Arno Cameron.