I felt my hands tighten into fists. The Craea's body was starting to twitch, his limbs making small random movements like someone having a violent dream.
"Chort?" I called toward the microphone, "Chort, this is McKell. Snap out ofit—we need you."
"I am here," Chort's voice came, sounding vague and tentative. "Whathappened?"
"Ship's gravity came on," I told him. "Never mind that now. Something'shappenedto Jones—he's not responding, and I think he's unconscious. Can you climb upyour line and get to him?"
For a long moment he didn't reply. I was gazing at the monitor, wondering ifhe'd slipped back into unconsciousness, when suddenly he twitched again; and asecond later he was pulling himself up the line with spiderlike agility.
Thirty seconds later he was in the wraparound, pulling Jones out of the way ofthe door. I was ready, keying for entryway seal and repressurization of thewraparound.
Two minutes later, we had them back in the ship.
THE EFFORT, AS it turned out, was for nothing.
"I'm sorry, McKell," Everett said with a tired sigh, pulling a thin blanketcarefully over Jones's face. "Your man's been gone at least ten minutes.
There's nothing I can do."
I looked over at the body lying on the treatment table. The terminallysociable type, I'd dubbed him back at the spaceport. He'd been terminal, all right. "Itwas the rebreather, then?"
"Definitely." Everett picked up the scrubber unit and peeled back thecovering.
"Somewhere in here the system stopped scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the airand started putting carbon monoxide in. Slowly, certainly—he probably didn'teven notice it was happening. Just drifted to sleep and slipped quietly away."
I gazed at the hardware cradled in those large hands. "Was it an accident?"
He gave me an odd look. "You work with air scrubbers all the time. Couldsomething like this have happened by accident?"
"I suppose it's possible," I said, the image of that massive search Ixil and Ihad spotted out in the Meima wilderness vivid in my memory. No, it hadn't beenany accident. Not a chance in the world of that. But there was no sensepanicking Everett, either.
"Hm," Everett said. For another moment he looked at the scrubber, thensmoothed back the covering and put it aside. "I know you're not in the mood right nowto count your blessings, but bear in mind that if Chort had died or broken hisneck in that fall, we'd have lost both of them."
"Blessings like this I can do without," I said bitterly. "Have you looked atChort yet?"
He grunted. "Chort says he's fine and unhurt and refuses to be looked at. Ifyouwant me to run a check on him, you'll have to make it an order."
"No, that's all right," I told him. I'd never heard anything about the Craeanculture being a particularly stoic one. If Chort said he was all right, heprobably was.
But whether he would stay that way was now open to serious question. With that phony murder charge someone had apparently succeeded in scaring Cameron offthe Icarus, and the guilt-by-association bit had nearly bounced me, as well. Now, Jones had been rather more permanently removed from the crew list, and Chorthad come within a hair of joining him.
And all this less than eight hours into the trip. The universe was spendingthe Icarus's quota of bad luck with a lavish hand.
"A pity, too," Everett commented into my musings. "Jones being the mechanic, Imean. He might have been the only one on board who could have tracked downwhat went wrong with the grav generator. Now we may never know what happened."
"Probably," I agreed, putting the heaviness of true conviction into my voice.
If Everett—or anyone else, for that matter—thought I was just going to chalk anyof this up to mysterious accident and let it go at that, I had no intention ofdisillusioning them. "That's usually how it goes with this sort of thing," Iadded. "You never really find out what went wrong."
He nodded in commiseration. "So what happens now?"
I looked over at Jones's body again. "We take him to port and turn him over tothe authorities," I said. "Then we keep going."
"Without a mechanic?" Everett frowned. "A ship this size needs all eightcertificates, you know."
"That's okay," I assured him, backing out the door. "Nicabar can cover for thefew hours it'll take to get to port. After that, I know where we can pick upanother mechanic. Cheap."
He made some puzzled-sounding reply, but I was already in the corridor anddidn't stop to hear it. Cameron's course plan had put our first fueling stopat Trottsen, seventy-two more hours away. But a relatively minor vector changewould take us instead to Xathru, only nine hours from here, where Ixil and theStormy Banks were due to deliver Brother John's illegal cargo. We needed areplacement mechanic, after all, and Ixil would fit the bill perfectly.
Besides which, I suddenly very much wanted to have Ixil at my side. Or perhapsmore precisely, to have him watching my back.
CHAPTER 4
THE PARQUET DOCKYARD on Xathru was like a thousand other medium-sized spaceportsscattered across the Spiraclass="underline" primitive compared to Qattara Axial or one of theother InterSpiral-class ports, but still two steps above small regional hubslike the one we'd taken off from on Meima. The Parquet's landing pits werecradle-shaped instead of simply flat, smoothly contoured to accommodate avariety of standard ship designs.
Of course, no one in his right mind would have anticipated the Icarus'slopsidedshape, so even with half its bulk below ground level the floors still slopedupward. But at least here the entryway ladder could be reconfigured as a shortramp with a rise of maybe two meters instead of the ten-meter climb we had hadwithout it. Progress.
Nicabar volunteered to help Everett take Jones's body to the Port Authority, where the various death forms would have to be filled out. I ran through thebasic landing procedure, promised the tower that I would file my own set ofaccident report forms before we left, then grabbed one of the little runaround cars scattered randomly between the docking rectangles and headed out to theStarrComm building looming like a giant mushroom at the southern boundary ofthe port.
Like most StarrComm facilities, this one was reasonably crowded. But also asusual, the high costs involved with interstellar communication led togenerallyshort conversations, with the result that it was only about five minutesbefore my name was called and I was directed down one of the corridors to mydesignatedbooth. I closed the door behind me, made sure it was privacy-sealed, and afteronly a slight hesitation keyed for a full vid connect. It was ten times asexpensive as vidless, but I had Cameron's thousand-commark advance money andwas feeling extravagant.
Besides, reactions were so much more interesting when face and body languagewere there in addition to words and tone. And unless I missed my guess, thecoming reaction was going to be one for the books. Feeding one of Cameron'shundred-commark bills into the slot, I keyed in Brother John's private number.
Somewhere on Xathru, StarrComm's fifty-kilometer-square star-connect arrayspata signal across the light-years toward an identical array on whichever worldit was where Brother John sat in the middle of his noxious little spiderweb. Ididn't know which world it was, or even whether it was the same world eachtime or if he continually moved around like a touring road show.
Neither did InterSpiral Law Enforcement or any of the other more regionalagencies working their various jurisdictions within the Spiral. They didn'tknow where he was, or where the records of his transactions were, or how to gethold of either him or them. Most every one of the beings working those agencieswould give his upper right appendage to know those things. Brother John's influencestretched a long way across the stars, and he had ruined a lot of lives andangered a lot of people along the way.
Considering my current relationship with the man and his organization, I couldonly hope that none of those eager badgemen found him anytime soon.