The Icarus Hunt Part 6

None of the dozen or so people present shouted in triumph or whipped out a weapon. In fact, none of them gave me so much as a second glance as I made my way back down the corridor to the main lobby. Aiming for an unoccupied corner where I could have at least a modic.u.m of privacy, I pulled out my phone and punched Ixil's number.

He answered on the third vibe. "Yes?"

"It's Jordan," I told him. "What's your status?"

"I've landed and finished the entry forms," he said. I had to hand it to him; not a single cue anywhere in words or tone to indicate the surprise he was undoubtedly feeling at hearing from me here on Xathru. I could imagine Pix and Pax were doing some serious twitching, though. "I've also made contact with the local representative and started off-loading the cargo."

"Good." So we were almost rid of Brother John's happyjam. Best news I'd heard all day. "When you're finished, upgrade to a long-term docking permit, lock down the s.h.i.+p, and get yourself over to Dock Rec Three-Two-Seven."

There was just the briefest pause. "Trouble?"

"You could say that, yes," I told him. "Our mechanic was killed during the flight, and I need a replacement. You're it."

"An accident?"

I grimaced. "At this point I'm not really sure. Better come prepared."

Once again, he took it all in stride. "I'll be there in forty minutes," he saidcalmly.

"I'll be there in thirty," I said, hoping fervently that I wasn't being overly optimistic. "See you soon."

I keyed off and, squaring my shoulders, crossed the lobby and headed out into the sunlight, tension and uncertainty mixing together to make the skin on my back crawl. Just because nothing had happened to me in the StarrComm building didn't mean it wasn't going to happen somewhere else between here and the Icarus.

"Hey, Hummer," a crackly voice came from my left.

I jumped, hand twitching automatically toward my hidden gun. But it was only a Grifser, his tiny eyes peering up at me from leprous-looking skin, his spindly paws held out pleadingly. Brother John might use aliens from time to time when they suited his purposes, but he would never use them to discipline one of his own people, even a lowly smuggler in his final disgrace. Like most of the Spiral's criminal organizations-human and alien both-the Antoniewicz organization was oddly but vehemently ethnocentric. "What?" I asked.

"You got any caff?" the alien asked plaintively. "I pay. You got any caff?"

"Sorry," I said, brus.h.i.+ng past. Grifsers were absolutely nuts for Earth-style caffeinated beverages or snacks-it actually qualified as a drug for them, putting it on the controlled substance list anyplace they had a decent-sized enclave. Elsewhere in the Spiral, they created nuisances of themselves around s.p.a.ceport entrances and tavernos, but most of them knew how to more or less graciously take no for an answer. Those who weren't feeling all that gracious were usually at least smart enough not to press the point with beings half again their size and twice their weight.

This particular Grifser was apparently on the trailing edge of both those bell curves. "No!" he insisted, darting around behind me and coming up again on my right. "Caff caff-now now! Will pay for it."

"I said no," I snapped, reaching out to push him away. I didn't have time for this nonsense.

"Caff!" he insisted, grabbing my arm and hanging on to it like a mottled-skin leech. "Give me caff!"

Swearing under my breath, I grabbed one of his paws and pried it off. I was working on prying the other away when a long arm snaked its way around my back from my left to an overly familiar resting place just beneath the right side of my rib cage. "h.e.l.lo, old Hummer chum," a voice crooned into my left ear.

I turned my head to find myself gazing at close range into an alien face that looked like a topographical map of the Pyrenees. "If you don't mind, friend-"

"Ah-but I do mind," he said. His hand s.h.i.+fted slightly, clipping expertly under the edge of my jacket and then burrowing upward to rest against my rib cage again.

And suddenly the hard knot of his fist was joined by something else. Something that felt cold through my s.h.i.+rt and very, very sharp. "It's a wrist knife," my a.s.sailant confirmed in a low voice. "Don't make me use it."

"Not a problem," I a.s.sured him, feeling chagrined, scared, and stupid all at the same time. Brother John had totally blindsided me on this one, catching me like some fool fresh off the cabbage truck.

From my right another of his species appeared, tossing a four-pack of cola to the Grifser with one hand as he reached under my jacket and relieved me of my plasmic with the other. "Now," the first said as their decoy ran off gurgling with delight over his prize. "Let's go have ourselves a nice little chat."

Flanking me on either side like a couple of long-lost friends, they guided methrough the usual crowd of s.p.a.ceport traffic, along a couple of narrow and increasingly depopulated service streets, and eventually into a blind alley blocked off at the far end by a warehouse loading dock. It was a long way to go, I thought, for what was going to be only tentative privacy.

But more importantly, from my point of view anyway, the trip itself was already a major blunder on their part. The ten-minute walk had given me enough time to recover from the shock and start thinking again, and that thinking had persuaded me that my original a.s.sessment had indeed been the correct one. Whoever these thugs were, they weren't Brother John's enforcers. Not just because he didn't like aliens, but because his boys would have dropped me right there in front of the StarrComm building instead of engaging in all this unnecessary exercise.

All of which boiled down to the fact that, whatever I wound up having to do to them, no one was likely to care very much. At least, that's what I hoped it boiled down to.

They settled me with my back against the loading dock and took a prudent couple of steps away. The first was now holding his wrist knife openly: a kind of push knife sticking out from his palm at right angles to his arm, the weapon strapped to his hand and wrist so that it couldn't be s.n.a.t.c.hed or kicked out of his hand.

The other was holding my plasmic loosely at his side, not cra.s.sly pointed but ready if it was needed. Both aliens were roughly human in height and build, I could see now, except with simian-length arms and foreshortened torsos. The relief-map look of their faces was repeated over their entire bodies, or at least the parts that were visible sticking out of the long brown neo-Greek tunics they were wearing.

"If this is a shakedown, I'm already broke," I warned, getting in the first word just to irritate them as I gave their outfits a casual once-over. There were no bulges or asymmetric bagginess that I could see. Either they didn't have any backup weapons at all-which would be pretty careless on their part-or else they were holstered behind their backs.

"It's not a shakedown," Lumpy One said, waving his wrist knife back toward the main docking area. "We want your cargo."

I blinked in surprise. "You want to steal fifty cases of combine machine parts?"

I asked incredulously.

They exchanged furtively startled glances. "That's not what you're carrying,"

Lumpy Two growled.

I shrugged. "That's what it says on the manifest and the crates. If there's anything else in there, the Barnswell Depot is going to have a lot of explaining to do."

For a long second Lumpy One seemed at a loss for words. Then his crack of a mouth cracked a little wider in what I decided was probably his version of a sly smile. "Clever," he said. "But not clever enough. You are Jordan McKell, you came here from Meima, and you have a highly valuable cargo aboard your s.h.i.+p.

Wewant it."

"Jordan who?" I asked. "Sorry, boys, but you missed completely on this one. My name's Ivo Khachnin, I'm flying a s.h.i.+p called the Singing Buffalo, and I'm carrying fifty cases of farm-equipment parts. Here-I can prove it." I reached a hand into my jacket- "Stop!" Lumpy One barked, leaping forward with knife held ready. "I'll get it."

"Sure, pal," I said, managing to sound both startled and bewildered by his violent reaction. In point of fact, I'd been counting on it. "Fine. Help yourself."

He approached at a cautious angle, staying out of his partner's line of fire, which at least proved he hadn't picked up his street-mugging technique solely from watching Grade-B star-thrillers. Carefully, he set the point of his wrist knife against my throat and reached into my inside jacket pocket. The probing fingers located my ID folder and pulled it out, holding it cautiously by a corner as if expecting it to be b.o.o.by-trapped.

And as it came free from my jacket, the bills I'd slipped carelessly inside in the StarrComm booth slid out and fluttered colorfully to the ground.

It was a small distraction, but it was all I needed. As their eyes flicked involuntarily to the floating commarks, I jerked my head back and around, moving it out of contact with Lumpy One's knife, simultaneously snapping up my left hand to catch his wrist behind the knife strap. Pus.h.i.+ng his arm high, I ducked under it and spun 180 degrees around, ending up standing behind him with his knife arm between us, bent upward toward his neck at what I very much hoped was a painful angle.

"Release him!" Lumpy Two spat. He was holding my plasmic straight out at me now, clutched in a two-handed grip, his whole body trembling.

"Make me," I grunted, looping my right arm around Lumpy One's throat and pulling him hard back against me. If I'd guessed wrong about this-if he did not in fact have a backup weapon-I was now officially in serious trouble.

But he did. There it was, a hard flat object pressing against my abdomen as I held him to me. Cranking his arm up another couple of centimeters, eliciting a gasped phrase that was probably an unfavorable comment on my parentage, I twisted the knife tip down and jabbed it into the fabric of his tunic. With the jammed knife preventing him from lowering his arm, and the limits of his own tendon structure preventing him from raising it, the limb was effectively self-immobilized, freeing my left hand. Reaching up the back of his tunic, I grabbed his weapon.

Lumpy One shouted something, probably a warning, to his companion. But by then it was already too late. Almost too late, anyway. Lumpy Two got off a shot that nearly scorched the side of my face as the superheated plasma ball made a near miss, and fired another that would have seared my right arm and possibly killed Lumpy One outright if I hadn't bent my knees suddenly, driving my kneecaps into the backs of Lumpy One's legs and dropping us both halfway to the ground. The jolt of the sudden movement sent the embedded knife tip tearing a couple of centimeters farther into the cloth and, judging from Lumpy One's gasp, into theskin beneath it as well.

And then I had his weapon out and pointed over his shoulder. The gun wasn't remotely like anything I was familiar with, but I didn't have time to do anything except hope like h.e.l.l it had some stopping power behind it. Flicking a thumb key that I hoped was the safety, I squeezed the trigger.

From the size and shape of the weapon, I would have guessed it to be a flechette thrower or maybe a two-shot scattergun. It wasn't. My hair and skin tingled with electrical discharge; and suddenly Lumpy Two was writhing in agony in the middle of a sheathing of blue-white coronal fire.

The electrical firestorm lasted about two seconds. From the looks of things, Lumpy Two himself didn't last nearly that long.

Under other circ.u.mstances I would probably have taken a few seconds to gape at the unexpected display of firepower I'd just unleashed. But I wasn't given that chance. Mouthing obvious obscenities, Lumpy One broke out of my grasp with a sudden lurch and spun around to face me, the sound of tearing cloth warning that he was half a second away from freeing his knife hand. I jumped to the side, swinging the alien weapon around; and as he got his arm free and lunged toward me, I fired again.

With the same result. Three seconds later, I was standing alone over two alien bodies, both of them charred literally beyond recognition.

I had seen a lot of repulsive things in my years of knocking around the Spiral, but this one definitely took the cake. Glancing around for any sign of witnesses-our little confrontation seemed to have gone unnoticed-I squatted down beside the corpses, trying to breathe through my mouth as I forced myself to sift through what was left of their clothing.

But there was nothing. No ID folders, no cash wallets, not even any bank cards.

Or at least, I amended to myself, nothing that had survived the attack.

Lumpy Two was wearing a duplicate of the alien handgun in a half-melted holster at the small of his back. I managed to pry it loose and pocketed both weapons for future study. I retrieved my ID folder and cash from the ground-Lumpy One had dropped all of it when I jumped him-and returned my now scorched but still functional-looking plasmic to its holster. Taking one final look around, I headed away at a brisk walk.

IXIL WAS WAITING for me at the Icarus's entryway. "I thought you were going to be here in thirty minutes," he greeted me as I came up.

"I ran into a little trouble," I told him. "Why didn't you go inside?"

"I thought it would be better if you were here to introduce me," he said.

"Besides, the entryway appears to be double-locked."

"Great," I scowled, punching the new code I'd set up after leaving Meima into the keypad. A double-locked entryway in port either meant the rest of the crew had sacked out for a couple of hours' sleep or, more likely, they'd scattered to the four winds the minute my back was turned.

"Had you told them to stay with the s.h.i.+p?" Ixil asked as the hatch swung open.

"No, I was too busy making arrangements to get Jones's body to the PortAuthority and worrying about what I was going to say to Brother John," I said.

"Under the circ.u.mstances, I wish I had, though."

"I thought you smelled a bit singed," he said. "Why don't we go inside and you can tell me all about it."

"Let's talk here instead," I said, sitting down inside the wraparound where I could look out into the docking area. "If people with guns start wandering casually toward the s.h.i.+p, I'd like to see them before they get here."

"Reasonable," Ixil agreed, sitting down a couple of meters away from me where he could cover a different field of view from mine. As he settled down, Pix and Pax hopped off his shoulders and skittered down the ramp, vanis.h.i.+ng in opposite directions around the s.h.i.+p. "Now," Ixil said, "why don't you start at the beginning."

So I started at the beginning, with my near arrest on Meima, and gave him the whole story, finis.h.i.+ng with my near death on Xathru half an hour earlier. The two ferrets came in twice while I was talking, dumping their scouting information on Ixil and presumably getting new instructions before scampering off again. Given that Ixil didn't know anyone involved in any of this, I wondered what exactly he was having the outriders look for. Maybe it was just pure Kalix hunters' instinct.

"I seem to have missed all the excitement," he said when I finished. "A pity."

"I wouldn't worry about it if I were you," I warned. "It's still a long way to Earth."

"It is that," he conceded. "You said you took the aliens' weapons?"

I pa.s.sed them over to him. He looked at the charred one for a moment, his nose wrinkling at the smell, then exchanged it for the other. "Interesting," he said, studying it closely. "Coronal-discharge weapons aren't exactly new-I presume from your description that that's what these are-but I've never heard of such compact ones before."

"I've never seen one of any size," I said. "I can tell you one thing, though: These things really mess up victim identification."

"I can imagine," he said soberly. "Face, retinas, and prints, plus any IDs or datadisks the victim happens to be carrying, all destroyed or badly damaged. A convenient little side effect of the killing shot."

"You have such a way with words," I growled. "I just hope these things don't catch on with the taverno brawling crowd."

"I think that highly unlikely," Ixil a.s.sured me. "Aside from the tremendous manufacturing costs involved and the relative ease of detection, corona weapons by their nature have a very short range. Three meters, I'd guess; four at the outside."

I s.h.i.+vered. In an uncomfortably large number of situations, a four-meter range would be perfectly adequate for the purpose. "Remind me to practice up on my distance shots."

"Good idea." He dropped the guns into his hip pouch. "I'll try taking one apart later and see if I can figure out where it was made. Right now, I'm more curious about this deadly accident of yours."

"I'll admit right up front that it's got me stumped," I said, feeling disgusted with myself. Strange and unpleasant things were happening all around me, and so far I didn't have a handle on any of it. "I ran a diagnostic across the whole system, and I can't figure how the grav generator kicked in when it did.""You are, of course, hardly an expert in such things," Ixil pointed out, not unkindly. "There are three main locations where the generator can be turned on: the bridge, engineering, and computer."

"Right," I said. That much I knew. "I was on the bridge-and I didn't do it- Revs Nicabar was in engineering, and Tera was handling the computer."

"Both of them alone, I take it?"

"Nicabar definitely was," I said. "The only way back there is through the wraparound, which was serving as airlock at the time."

"Odd design," Ixil murmured, glancing around.

"Tell me about it," I said dryly. "I don't know if Tera was alone, but the only person who could have been with her was Hayden Everett, our medic."

"Who you also said helped Jones on with his suit before the incident," Ixil said thoughtfully.

"You think there's a connection?"

He shrugged, a human gesture he'd picked up from me. "Not necessarily; I merely note the fact. I also note the fact that if Everett wasn't with Tera, that means all the rest of the crew were alone."

"Actually, no," I corrected him. "Geoff Shawn, the electronics man, had come to the bridge to watch Chort's s.p.a.cewalk on my monitors."

"Really," he said. "Interesting."

I c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. "In what way?"

"I said there were three main places where the grav generator could be turned on," he said, stroking his cheek thoughtfully with stubby fingertips. "But there are probably several other places where someone could jump power into the system."

"I was afraid of that," I said heavily. "I suppose it would be too much to ask that there would be no way to set that sort of thing up with a timer."

"You mean so that Shawn's appearance on the bridge might have been solely to establish an alibi for himself?"

"Something like that."

He shrugged again. "If he could tap into the system, I see no reason he couldn't set it up on a timer, too." He paused. "Of course, for that matter, the same thing goes for Chort and Jones."

I frowned. "You must be kidding."

"Must I?" he countered. "Look at the facts. Chort wasn't injured in the fall, at least not very seriously. And if Jones set it up, he may have planned to catch him before he fell too far."

"And his motive?"