The Icarus Hunt

CHAPTER 8

"ALL I CAN say is that you were very lucky," Everett said, shaking his head ashe finished sealing the last burn pad around Ixil's leg and picked up themedical scanner again. "Very lucky indeed. I know my hearing's not up topickingup sounds that subtle, especially through two doors. If I'd still been on thebridge instead of McKell, I'd be pulling a blanket over your face about now."

"Yes, I know," Ixil said, his voice and manner the subdued humility of someonewho knows he's done something stupid that has put himself in danger and madetrouble for everyone else. Glancing over at the med-room doorway, whereNicabar, Tera, and Chort were silently watching the procedure, I could see traces ofsympathetic embarrassment in their faces, the normal reaction of polite peoplehaving to witness another person's private shame.

I didn't feel any such embarrassment myself. But then, I knew full well thatthis humility bit was completely out of character for Ixil, that it was allmerely for show in the hopes of allaying any suspicions anyone might haveabout the sort of person he really was.

Vaguely, I wondered if one of the observers standing in the doorway wasputting on a similar performance.

"Next time I suggest checking all the equipment before you start it up,"

Everett went on sternly, running the scanner slowly along Ixil's burned leg as hefrowned at the readings. Not surprisingly, Cameron's people had failed toinclude a Kalixiri module with their med computer, and I could almostguaranteethe readings were like nothing Everett had ever seen before. Fortunately, Ixilhad another, uninjured leg to use for comparison.

"I'll second that," I put in, throwing a glance at the other end of the room.

Still strapped to the examination table, Shawn's face—for that matter, hisentire body—was practically dripping with impatience and a near-total contemptfor Ixil and his injuries, a marked contrast to the solicitude everyone elsewas showing. Still, aside from a single sour question about what the hell wasgoingon as we'd hustled Ixil inside, he'd kept his mouth shut. Maybe hisborandis-withdrawal sarcasm was under better control than he'd implied, ormaybehe was in the calm side of one of the mood swings he'd mentioned. Or maybehe'd seen Ixil's expression and was possessed of a finer-tuned survival instinctthan I'd thought. "The shape this whole ship is in," I added diplomatically, turningback to Ixil, "it's a wonder more of the equipment hasn't fallen apart."

"I know," Ixil said again. "I heartily promise to be more careful next time."

"We can all consider ourselves lucky the lesson wasn't learned morepainfully,"

Everett said, shifting the scanner from Ixil's leg to the impressivelyswellingbruise on his forehead where the torch head had slammed into him when it sheared apart, the impact throwing him back against the lockers and knocking him outcold.

He didn't remember that last part himself, of course, having been unconsciousat the time. But the ferrets hadn't been injured in the accident, and once I'dcoaxed them out from behind the row of lockers where they'd gone to groundIxil had been able to sample their memories and confirm the entire sequence ofevents.

"At any rate, that's all I can do for now," Everett concluded, putting thescanner aside and smoothing the burn pads one last time. "Except for apainkiller or sedative, of course. Either would help you sleep."

"Don't worry, I'll sleep just fine," Ixil assured him. "There really isn't allthat much pain."

Everett looked doubtful, but he nodded and headed for the sonic scrubber. "Asyou wish," he said as he started cleaning his hands. "If you change your mindjust let me know. I'm sure there's something aboard that will work on aKalix."

"I'll keep that in mind," Ixil promised, easing off the stool where Everetthad been working on him and standing up.

Or more accurately, trying to stand up. His leg wobbled beneath him, and hegrabbed at the wall for balance.

As cues went, it was one of the more obvious ones I'd ever been tossed. "Hang on, I'll give you a hand," I said quickly, stepping to his side as I juggledPix and Pax around to free up one of my hands. The furry little beasts were lessthan cooperative—they'd gone back to Ixil's shoulders long enough for him togettheir version of the accident, but he was still in pain and they weren't atall interested in sharing in it. But with a little creative shuffling I got themsettled in on shoulder and forearm and was able to assist a limping Ixil outpast the group at the doorway. "Excitement's over for the night," I told themas we made our slow way down the corridor. "Tera, I'd appreciate it if you'd takeover on the bridge."

"Consider it done," she said.

Ixil had a lot of qualities that I admired, but a sylphlike body frame wasn'tone of them. Fortunately, the wounded-warrior act lasted only as long as ittook us to get down the ladder and out of sight of any of the gallery that mighthave lingered behind after the show. Once on the lower deck, he made it the rest ofthe way to his cabin under his own steam.

"An interesting experiment," he commented as he maneuvered his way onto thecenter bunk. "Not that it's one I would have chosen on my own. Thank you foryour help, by the way. I owe you one."

"We'll add it to your side of the ledger," I said briefly, resisting the urgeto bring up all the times he'd hauled me bodily out of similar predicaments. TheKalixiri way of handling injuries was to go into a deep, comalike sleep whilehealing, and from the looks of Ixil's drooping eyelids he was three-quartersof the way there already. The fact that he hadn't dropped off the second he hitthe bunk implied there was something he wanted or needed to say to me before hewent under, and it certainly wasn't to go over our personal win/loss score sheet.

"I believe we can safely cross Jones off our suspect list," he murmured, hiseyelids closing completely and then opening partway again, like sliding doorswith a bad feedback loop. "I didn't just turn that torch on tonight withoutdoing a complete equipment check, Jordan. I looked it over two days ago, justafter I came aboard at Xathru. The sabotage has to have been done since then."

I stared at him, something large and invisible taking me by the throat andgently squeezing. A cutting torch was a totally innocuous tool to have aboarda starship, and there was no reason whatsoever for anyone to sabotage it thatway.

Unless, of course, someone really, really didn't want us cutting our way intothe sealed cargo hold.

The only catch was that no one else should have known we were even consideringsuch an action. That conversation had taken place less than an hour ago, withonly Ixil and me present, in the privacy of my cabin.

Apparently, someone had taken it upon himself to listen in.

I opened my mouth to ask Ixil how this bit of auditory legerdemain might havebeen accomplished, closed it again with the question unvoiced. Ixil's eyeswere squeezed shut, his breathing slow and even. He'd delivered his message, wasdown for the count, and barring an extremely urgent and probably extremely loud catastrophe he was going to stay that way for however many hours it took toheal his leg and head.

And for that same number of hours, I was going to be on my own.

Ixil had made up the lower bunk for Pix and Pax, bunching the blanket up forthem to snuggle into and putting their food and water containers where theycould easily get to them. I spent a few minutes getting them settled there, then pulled the blanket off the top bunk and tucked it under Ixil's mattress, wedgingits center under the lower bunk beside the ferrets' nest and letting the restdrape down from there onto the floor. Assured that they could get to the floorif they wanted exercise or to Ixil if they wanted company, I turned off thelight and left the cabin.

There were no locks on any of the Icarus's interior doors. Up till now Ihadn't really worried much about that; but up till now my partner hadn't been lyingcomatose and reasonably helpless after what might or might not have been aneffort to kill him. Pulling out my multitool, checking both ways down thecorridor to make sure I was unobserved, I removed the cover of the release padfrom the center of the door and pulled out the control chip. On the underside, snugged inconspicuously between two of the connector feet, was what I waslooking for: the timing dial, which told the door how many seconds it was tostay open unless you overrode it by locking the door in place. Using thenarrowest screwdriver from the multitool, I eased the dial from its presetposition all the way to zero, then returned the chip to its socket.

Experimentally, I touched the release pad. Not only did the door open barelyten centimeters before slamming shut again, it did so with a startlingly loudclunk as the buffer mechanism that normally provided for a smoother closing failedto engage. For a moment I flashed back to the metal-on-metal sound I'd heard atleast twice now aboard the Icarus, wondering if there could simply be a badbuffer in one of the doors. But even allowing for the sound to be filtered bydistance, I knew this wasn't it.

I put the cover back on the pad and went down the corridor to my own cabin. Itwas far from a perfect solution—anyone bent on unscrupulous deeds, after all, could presumably open the release pad himself and ungimmick it as easily as Ihad, assuming he knew about the adjustment dial, which most people didn't. Butfor the moment it was the best I could do. At least this way any attempt togetto Ixil would generate a noise and vibration that I ought to be able to hearfrom my own cabin. Ixil himself, of course, with a completely separate touch- padmechanism on his side of the door, could come out anytime he wanted. I reachedmy cabin, dithered momentarily about whether I should gimmick my own door as Ihad Ixil's, decided against it, and went in.

The room was still as small and as unadorned as it had always been, but as Iputmy back against the door I found myself looking at it with new eyes. Somehow, someone had overheard our last conversation in here, and had overheard itclearly enough to nip up to the mechanics room and sabotage the cutting torch.

The question was how.

The wall separating the cabin from the corridor was solid metal, a good fivecentimeters thick. The bulkheads were even thicker, probably nine or tencentimeters, and on the side away from the corridor was the Icarus's inner hull, with no more than another twenty centimeters between it and the outer hull.

Outside the outer hull, of course, was the vacuum of space. There were, Iknew, ways to hear through solid metal walls, but all of them involved fairlysophisticated equipment and even then success was not at all guaranteed aboarda starship where the whole frame was continually vibrating with everything fromengine drone to voices and footsteps two decks away. The bunks were too simpleand flimsy to conceal a hidden transmitter strong enough to punch a radiosignalthrough that much metal; ditto for the lockers. After that tracker incident onMeima, I'd made it a point to regularly signal-scan both myself and Ixil forsuch unwanted hitchhikers, and had just as regularly found nothing. Andfinally, there was nothing on any of the walls that could camouflage any such listeningdevice.

Except the intercom.

I unfastened the cover of the intercom with my multitool, swearing silently atmyself the whole time. It was the oldest trick in the book: Sometime when Iwas out, probably during our stop on Dorscind's World, someone had slipped in hereand rearranged a few wires so that the intercom was continually on, at leastas far as one other specific intercom was concerned. Someone who'd known what hewas doing could have done it in three minutes. Still swearing, still feelinglike a fool, I pulled the cover off the intercom and peered inside.

It was an intercom, all right. A simple, standard, bottom-of-the-line ship'sintercom. The kind you could buy for five commarks in any outfitter's shopanywhere across the Spiral.

And it hadn't been tampered with.

I stared at it for a good three minutes of my own, prodding wires aside withmyscrewdriver as I visually traced every one of them from start to finish atleast five times. Nothing. No gimmicking, no crossed wires, no questionablecomponents, nothing that shouldn't be there. Nothing even left the box excepttwo power wires and a slender coax cable—exactly the right number—whichdisappeared through a tiny hole in the inner hull to join the rest of the mazeof wiring and plumbing laid out in the narrow gap between inner and outerhulls.

Slowly, I replaced the intercom cover, now thoroughly confused. Had we beenwrong about an eavesdropper? Had the accident with the cutting torch been justthat? Or if not an accident, then sabotage simply on general principles bysomeone who didn't want the Icarus's cargo examined, and not a reaction to ourconversation at all?

I didn't believe it for a minute. I'd had only a brief look at the torch headthat had done its best to take off the top of Ixil's skull, but that one lookhad been enough. The screw connector holding the head onto the connected hoseshad had its threads badly crimped, probably with compression pliers, so thatwhen the pressure built up enough it had come loose in that explosive fashion.

As sabotage methods went it had been effective enough; but it had also beenfairly clumsy and, more to the point, extremely quick and simple. Not the sortof job one would expect even an amateur to pull, at least not an amateur withthe time to do the job more subtly.

Which implied our saboteur had been rushed in his task. Which meant it had, infact, been a response to our conversation.

Which meant I was back to square one. How had he overheard us?

I spent the next fifteen minutes going over the lockers and bunks, and foundexactly what I'd expected, namely, nothing. Then, stretching out on my bunk, Istared at the bottom of the bunk above me and tried to think.

When you have eliminated the impossible, Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It wasn't an aphorismI particularly subscribed to, mainly because in real life eliminating all thevarious impossibles was usually a lot trickier than in Holmes's fictionalsetting. However, in this particular case, the list of directions the answercould be hiding in was definitely and distressingly short. In fact, as Iturned the problem over in my mind, I found there was exactly one of Sherlock'simprobables left.

Ixil had mentioned earlier that he'd looked over the full schematics for the Icarus. It was a fair assumption that he'd gone ahead and kept a copy, so Iwent back to his cabin, ungimmicked the door, and went inside. The room lookedexactly the way I'd left it except that Pix and Pax were now up on the middlebunk with Ixil, nosing around the hip pouch where he habitually kept some ofthe little treats they especially liked. I put them back on their bunk where theywouldn't get rolled over on if Ixil shifted in his sleep, raided the pouch andgave them two of the treats each, then checked his locker. The schematics werethere, a sheaf of papers rolled tightly together. I tucked the roll under myarm, regimmicked the door on my way out, and returned to my cabin.

I looked first at the main overview, noting in particular the diameter of themain sphere that made up the forward section of the ship. The number listedwas forty-one-point-three-six meters—a strangely uneven number, I thought, but oneI trusted implicitly. Ship dimensions were critically important when landing-pitassignments were being doled out, and no one ever got them wrong. Not morethan once, anyway.

Two sheets down was the one I was most interested in: the schematic for the mid deck. Digging a pen out of my inside jacket pocket, I turned the first sheetover for some clean space and started jotting down numbers.

Even given the inherent problem of fitting mainly rectangular spaces into agiant sphere, the Icarus's various rooms were quite oddly shaped, and thesemirandom placement of storage lockers, equipment modules, and pump andair-quality substations only added to the layout mess. But I was in no mood tobe balked by a set of numbers, even messy ones, and I set to work.

And in the end, they all matched.

It was not the answer I'd been expecting, and for several minutes afterrechecking my math I sat in silence scowling at the schematics. I'd been sosure that Sherlock and I had finally been on the brink of figuring this one out.

But the numbers added up perfectly, and numbers don't lie.

Or do they?

One page farther down was the lower-deck schematic, the deck I was currentlyon.

A few more minutes' work confirmed that these numbers, too, matched just fine.

But that was just the theoretical part of this project. Now it was time tomove on to the experimental work.

A laser measure would have been the most convenient, but after what hadhappenedto Ixil I was a bit leery about scrounging tools out of the Icarus's mechanicsroom. Fortunately, I didn't have to. I'd seen the printer up in Tera'scomputerroom, and I knew the size paper it used. Laying the schematics out on thefloor, I set about using them to measure my cabin. It took just over two minutes, andwhen I was done I took a couple of the sheets out into the corridor andmeasured that, too.

And when I was finished, the numbers had stopped matching.

Each of the inner-hull plates was about a meter square and held in place bysixteen connectors. The average spacer's multitool isn't really the propergadget to use for removing hull plates, but mine was a somewhat better modelthan the average and had a couple of additional blades those missed out on. Bythe time I was down to the final four—the ones in the corners—I was gettingpretty adept at the procedure. I paused long enough at that point to dig outmyflashlight and set it on the deck where it would be handy; after a moment'sthought I drew my plasmic and put it down beside the light. Then I removed thelast four connectors and eased the plate out of place.

And there, dimly seen by the reflected overhead light from my cabin, was thegray metal of the outer hull. Not twenty centimeters beyond the inner hulllike it was supposed to be, but a solid meter and a half away.

Plasmic in one hand and flashlight in the other, I leaned my head cautiouslyinto the opening and looked around. The pipes and cables and conduits thatnormally ran through the 'tweenhull area were all in evidence, fastenedsecurelyto the inner hull just the way they were supposed to be. The rest of the spacewas completely empty except for the series of struts that fastened the twohulls together. Struts, I decided, that would provide a strenuous but workablejungle-gym walkway for anyone who wanted to move unseen about the ship.

As well as a convenient work platform for, say, someone desiring to tap intothe coax cable from an intercom. Specifically, my intercom. I turned my light onthe spot off to the left where the relevant wires emerged, but it was too far awayand my angle too shallow to see with certainty whether or not anything hadbeen tampered with.

The nearest support strut in that direction was nearly half a meter away.

Layingmy gun and light on the deck beside me, I gathered my feet under me, gaugedthe distance, and leaped carefully toward it.

And with a sudden stomach-twisting disorientation, I jerked sideways andslammed hard onto my right shoulder and leg against the outer deck.

It says a lot for the shock involved that my first stunned thought was thatthe Icarus's grav generator had malfunctioned again, shutting off at the precisemoment I jumped—this despite the fact that I was now lying flat on my sideagainst the outer hull. It took another several seconds before my brain caught up with the fact that I was, in fact, lying against the outer hull, the term"lying" automatically implying a gravitational field.

Except that this gravitational field was roughly at right angles to the oneI'd just left in my cabin. The only one that the Icarus's generator could create.

The only one, in fact, that had any business existing here at all.

Slowly, carefully, I turned my head to what was now "up" from my new frame ofreference. There was my cabin, a meter above my head, with my plasmic andlightclinging unconcernedly to what was from my perspective a sheer wall. Even morecarefully, I leaned my torso up away from the hull, half expecting that thismagic grip would suddenly cease if I let go of the hull and send me slidingdown to the underside of the Icarus.

I needn't have worried. Except for the total impossibility of its vector, thisfield behaved more or less like the one created by a normal ship's gravgenerator. I reached up toward my cabin, and because I was paying closeattention I was able to feel where the two gravity vectors began to conflictwith each other a few millimeters my side of the inner hull. At least now Iknew what the anomaly was that Pix and Pax had detected while scampering beneath mybunk, and why neither they nor Ixil had been able to interpret it.

It also explained how our mysterious eavesdropper/saboteur had been able tomove around so easily. No dangerous or athletic strut-leaping required; all he hadto do was crawl around like a spider on a wall. I snagged my light and gun andbrought them to me, nearly dropping the plasmic when its weight suddenlyshifted in my grip. It might not take great athletic ability to move around in here, Iamended, but it did take some getting used to. Holstering the weapon, Ishifted myself cautiously toward my intercom, still not entirely trusting thisphenomenon.

I was easing up to get a closer look at the wires when I heard a smallscrapingsound in the distance.

For a moment I thought I'd imagined it, or else that it had merely been somenormal ship's noise distorted by the echo chamber I was lying in. But then thesound came again, and I knew I'd been right the first time.

There was someone else in here with me.

Silently, I shut off my light and put it in my pocket, at the same timedrawingmy plasmic. Then, not nearly as silently, but as silently as I could manage, Iset off down the curving hull.

It was, in retrospect, probably not the most brilliant thing I'd ever done inmylife. However it was he'd discovered this cozy little back stairway, oursaboteur surely had a better idea of the lay of the land in here than I did, including knowing where all the best hiding places and ambush sites were. Hewas furthermore presumably already acclimated to the place, whereas I was stilldistracted by the nagging feeling that at any minute the hull's peculiargravitywould fail and I would become the cue ball in a giant spherical game of bumperbilliards. But at the moment all that I could think of was that I had a chance to nail him dead to rights, and I was going to take it.

I started off by scooting along the hull on my backside, but quickly gave thatup as not nearly quiet enough, not to mention being a posture that tended toleave me with my back to the direction I was going. I tried switching to astandard hands-and-knees crawl, but after a couple of meters decided that thatwas no good either, leaving my gun hand as it did too far out of line to getoff a quick shot if necessary. The only other option I could think of was the oneI finally adopted, a crouching sort of duck waddle that was hard on the kneesand undignified in the extreme, but at least had the advantage of leaving my gunand me pointed in the same direction.

The sound had seemed to come from above me, the term "above" referring to thedirection toward the Icarus's top deck, so that was the direction I headed. Itwas slower going than I'd expected, partly because of the awkwardness of mystance and the need for silence, but also because of the unpleasant vertigoeffect of having my head bobbing along just about where the two competinggravity fields mixed at roughly equal strength. The effect became steadilymore pronounced as I passed the mid deck and continued around toward the top of theship, with the angle between the gravity vectors gradually veering from ninetydegrees toward an even more disconcerting 180.

I don't know how long the slow-motion chase went on. Not long, I think, notmore than fifteen or twenty minutes' total. Between my aching knees and swimminghead and the fact that I was alone in a dark space with a man who had alreadykilled once, my time sense wasn't at its best that night. Every thirty seconds or soI paused to listen, stretching out with all my senses over the rumblingbackgroundnoise and vibration of the ship, trying for a new estimate of where he was.

It was on the fifth or sixth such halt that I realized that what had up tillnow been occasional incautious scraping sounds had suddenly become something farmore steady. Steady scraping noises, yet paradoxically quieter than they hadbeen up till then.

My quarry knew I was here.

Earlier, I had come up with the image of being a spider on a wall. Now, suddenly, the image changed from a spider to a fly. A fly pinned by a lightagainst a very white wall. For a dozen heartbeats I squatted theremotionlessly, sweating in the darkness as I strained to listen, trying to determine whetherthe sounds were moving toward or away from me. The latter would mean he wastrying to escape, the former that he had yet another violent accident on hismind. And if there was one thing certain here, it was that I couldn't affordto guess wrong.

For those dozen heartbeats I listened; and then I knew. The sounds weredefinitely moving away, probably downward to my right, though the echo effectmade it difficult to tell for sure.

All the reasons why I shouldn't have come in here after him in the first placeonce again flashed through my mind. Once again, I shoved them aside. I'dalreadylost several rounds to this man, and I was getting damned tired of it. Picking a

vector that would theoretically intersect his, I set off after him.

To this point it had been a slow-motion chase. Now, it became an equallyslow-motion game of hounds and hares. I was stopping ever more frequently tolisten; but my quarry was doing the same, and as often as not I would pauseonlyto find he had changed direction again. Doggedly, I kept at it, my earlierthought about the possibility of ambush spots never straying too far from mymind. So far our saboteur had shown no indication of being armed, but everyoneelse I'd run into on this trip had been and there was no reason to expect thatwhoever had been handing out the guns with such generosity would haveneglectedhis friend here aboard the Icarus.

More than once I also considered banging the butt of my plasmic against theinner hull and trying to rouse the rest of the crew to help in the search. Butby then I was so thoroughly lost that I had no idea whether I was even nearenough to any of the others scattered around the ship for my pounding to doanygood. And whether any of them heard me or not, my playmate in here certainlywould, and at the first sign of an attempted alarm he might well postpone hisescape plan in favor of shutting me up first.

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

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

I kept going, but there was clearly no point in hurrying. My quarry had led mearound the barn a couple of times and had now popped back through his rabbithole to the safe anonymity of the Icarus proper. By the time I reached thespotwhere the glow had been, assuming I could pinpoint it at all, he would havethe connectors back in place and it would be just one more of seventeen thousandother inner-hull plates.

A couple of minutes later I reached the vicinity where I estimated the glowhad been. As expected, every one of the hull plates in the area looked exactlyalike, and I still had no idea where exactly I was. Briefly, I thought abouttrying to dig my way through, but a single glance was all it took to see thatthe 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 amongthe haphazard arrangement of piping and wires until I found what I was lookingfor: the telltale power wires and coax cable of an intercom, their endsdisappearingthrough the inner hull half a meter to the side of my estimated position formyquarry's escape hatch.

I'd left my multitool back on my cabin floor, but the contact edge of myplasmic's power pack was rough enough for my purposes, and it took only a fewminutes of work for me to abrade the insulation on the power wires enough toleave a small section of bare wire on each of them. Putting the plasmic aside, touched the two bare spots together.

There was no spark—the power level was far too low for that—but what theoperation lacked in pyrotechnic dramatics it more than made up in personalsatisfaction. Somewhere in the bowels of the Icarus, I knew, a circuit breakerhad just popped in response to the short circuit I'd created. All I had to dowas 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 Icould to hold them that way. On most starships the main computer's nursemaid programwould pick this up in a flash and send a maintenance flag to both the bridgeand engine-room status boards. With the Icarus's archaic system, though, I doubtedthat it had such a program. Even if it did, there would be no way to reset thecircuit breaker until the wires were unjinxed.

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

Now that I was no longer engaged in a chase, the navigational task wasstraightforward if a bit tedious. Holding my light loosely by finger andthumb, I held it near the edge of the inner hull and watched which way it tried toturn. That gave me the direction of ship's down, and I headed that way untilfurther measurements with my impromptu pendulum showed I was at the sphere'sSouth Pole. Picking a direction at random, I moved along it for a few meters, then began circling at that latitude until I spotted the glow of my cabinlightfiltering through the opening. Three minutes after that, I was back.

With everything else that had happened, I almost forgot to check my ownintercom's coax cable for tampering, which had, after all, been the originalpurpose of this exercise. Not that I was expecting to find anything else, butfor completeness it seemed the proper thing to do. A cursory examination wasall 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 thehull's gravitational field seemed to hold on to me more strongly now that I'dbeen all the way into it than it had before I'd first landed on the outerhull.

Possibly it was just my imagination; but on the other hand this field was sounlike anything I'd ever experienced anyway, I was perfectly willing to grantit 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 theground for my taste.

Putting hull-plate connectors back in with a multitool was a different skillentirely from taking them out, but it wasn't that hard and I wasn't going tobother with more than the four corners for now anyway. A few minutes ofleafingthrough Ixil's sheaf of schematics and I had the proper breaker boxidentified: up on the top deck with the rest of the crew cabins.

The general stir that had accompanied Ixil's injuries had long since fadedaway, and the Icarus was again quiet. I climbed the aft ladder to the top deck andmoved silently down the corridor, half expecting one of the cabin doors toopenand someone to take a potshot at me. But no one did, and I reached the breakerbox 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. Itwas also quite small, though given that it apparently only contained theship'stwenty-six intercom breakers I shouldn't have expected anything very big.

Not surprisingly, given the Icarus's designer's overly optimistic faith in thegoodness of his fellow men, none of the breaker boxes was locked. The hingessqueaked slightly as I pulled the proper one open, but not loudly enough towake up any of the sleepers nearby. With a tingling sense of anticipation, I shinedmy light inside.

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

I gazed at the empty box for a few more seconds, twenty-twenty hindsightturningmy anticipation into a sour taste in my mouth. With the wires still touchingbehind the intercom, the saboteur had, of course, been unable to reset thetelltale 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 wentwrongwith the things there very well might not be. Besides, anyone smart enough tohave anticipated my actions in the 'tweenhull space was probably already aheadof me there, too. By the time I found the spares—or found and cannibalizedanother set of same-sized ones from a different box—he would undoubtedly havethe intercom wires fixed again.

The walk back down to my cabin seemed longer somehow than the upward trip hadbeen 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 layback down on my bunk and tried to think. I thought for a while, but it didn't seemto be getting me anywhere, so I went back up to the mid deck to check on thebridge.

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

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

As soon as she was out of sight I did a complete check of the bridge, equipmentand course heading both. Tera was still reasonably high on my list ofsuspects; and even if she wasn't the one sporting the brand-new collector's set ofcircuit breakers, there was no reason a saboteur who liked fiddling with intercomscouldn'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 thehypnotic 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 atthinking as at least temporarily unproductive, I lay down on my bunk and wentto sleep.