"Which is precisely why I picked it," I told him. Pix and Pax had finishedtheir deck-level tour of the bridge now and had scampered out the door into thecorridor. I sent up a silent prayer that they wouldn't run across Everett; with his bulk, the big medic might step on them before he even noticed they wereunderfoot. "Paperwork accuracy has never been exactly a high priority with thePort Authority there, particularly if you're a few commarks heavy on thedockingfees. I figure that the eighty-two hours it'll take to get there should belongenough for us to create a new identity for the Icarus that'll be good enoughto pass muster."
"I'm sure we can put something together," he rumbled, eyeing me speculatively.
"Did your tangle with the Lumpy Brothers bother you that much?"
"More than you know," I assured him grimly. "You see, according to theschedule Cameron left me—the schedule he presumably filed with the Meima PortAuthority—the Icarus's first stop was going to be Trottsen. We weren'tsupposedto be on Xathru at all."
His squashed-iguana face hardened. "Yet the Lumpy Brothers knew you werethere."
"And called me by name," I nodded. "Granted, they may have tagged me when myturn was called at the StarrComm building—I had no reason at the time not togive my right name there. But why pick on me at all?"
Ixil nodded thoughtfully. "Can't be one of the crew," he murmured, half tohimself. "If someone here wanted the cargo, he would have simply stolen ithimself after everyone else left the ship."
"Depending on whether he could get through Cameron's security sealing," Isaid.
"But at the very least he would have made sure the Icarus didn't lift. And allhe needed to do to accomplish that was to phone the Port Authority with ananonymous report about a pair of crisped bodies lying next to a cul-de-sacloading dock."
Ixil cocked his head to the side. "In other words, he could have used the sametechnique that got you detained on Meima."
"Yes," I agreed. "And the fact that it didn't happen on Xathru implies to methat it wasn't someone aboard who pulled that stunt on Meima. But it doessuggest a reason why the Lumpy Brothers latched on to me but not on to anyoneelse aboard."
Ixil nodded. "The Meima Port Authority report had your name."
"Not only my name, but my name linked with Cameron's," I said. "Someone gothold of that near-arrest report and disseminated it to assorted associates acrossthe Spiral with instructions to be on the lookout for me. The Lumpy Brothers justhappened to get lucky."
"Or else backtracked your name to the Stormy Banks and looked up my flightschedule," Ixil suggested. "That might explain how they happened to be hangingaround the StarrComm building."
"I hadn't thought of that part," I acknowledged. "You're probably right."
"It also indicates our employer is probably still at large," Ixil continued, stroking his cheek thoughtfully. "I imagine he remembers all the rest of thenames of the people he hired on Meima, in which case the private alert oughtto have included their names as well."
"Good point," I said, grimacing. What had become of Cameron was still high onmylist of annoying loose ends. "Though that's not definitive—I doubt any of theothers had their names called over a loudspeaker in the market."
"Which leaves us only the question of who's behind all this," Ixil concluded.
"And how we smoke him or them out into the open."
"Maybe that's your only unanswered question," I said. "Personally, I'm alreadyon page two of that list. And as to who's pulling the strings in thebackground, I'm not at all sure we even want to go poking that direction. It seems to methat our job right now is to get the Icarus and its cargo to Earth, preferablywith it and us in one piece. Well, one piece each, anyway."
"You may be right." He hesitated. "You said you called Brother John to discussthis sudden change in plans. You didn't say whether or not you'd also spokenwith Uncle Arthur."
I grimaced. "No," I said. "I was hoping we could—oh, I don't know. Surprisehim, maybe?"
Even without the ferrets on his shoulders to do their twitching thing, I hadno trouble reading Ixil's reaction to that one. "I won't waste time by asking ifyou seriously believe that to be a good idea," he said. "I'll make you a smallwager: that he won't be any happier at your accepting this job than BrotherJohn was."
"If you're expecting me to cover that bet, you can forget it," I said sourly, the proverbial admonition against trying to serve two masters running throughmymind. No, Uncle Arthur would definitely not be happy with me over this one.
And the longer I put off calling him, the unhappier he was likely to get. "Oh, allright," I sighed. "I'll call him as soon as we hit Dorscind's World."
"That's the spirit," he said, with all the cheerful enthusiasm of someone whowould probably find himself unavoidably busy tightening bolts on the Icaruswhile I was sweating it out under Uncle Arthur's basilisk glare in a StarrCommbooth. "What's our plan until then?"
"To create a new identity for the Icarus, and to keep an eye on our backs," Isaid. Across at the bridge door, the two ferrets reappeared and headedstraightup Ixil's legs. "As far as I'm concerned, we still don't have a satisfactoryexplanation of what happened to Jones and Chort—"
The ferrets reached Ixil's shoulders; and abruptly, he made a quick doubleslashing motion across his throat with his fingertips. "—makes the best applebrandy anywhere in the Spiral," I said, shifting verbal gears as smoothly as Icould manage. The voice of someone speaking, I knew, could be heard wellbefore the actual words could be made out, as could the sharp break of that voicebeingsuddenly cut off. "In fact, I'd put it up against anything made on Taurus oreven Earth—"
I caught a movement from the corner of my eye; at the same time Ixil turnedhis head in that direction and nodded courteously. "Good evening, Tera," he said, breaking into my improvised babbling. "What can we do for you?"
I turned to face the door. Tera was standing in the doorway, a slight frown onher face as she took in Ixil seated in the restraint chair with me on the swivel stool. "You can get yourself out of that chair, that's what," she said. "Theclock on the wall—and Mercantile regs—say it's time for a shift change. It'smyturn for the bridge."
I frowned at my watch. Preoccupied with everything else that was happening, Ihadn't even thought about that. "You're right," I acknowledged. "Sorry—I'm notused to flying a ship where there are real shift changes and everything."
"Which I presume also explains why your mechanic's in the control chairinstead of you," she countered. "You, Ixil, need to take over for Nicabar in theengineroom; and you, McKell, need to hit the sack."
"I'm fine," I insisted, getting to my feet. In that moment, though, I realizedthat she was right. Overall lack of sleep plus general tension level hadcombined with the Lumpy Brothers incident and my still-sore leg to suddenlythrow a haze of wooziness over the universe. "On the other hand, maybe itwould be a good idea to go under for a couple of hours," I amended.
"Make it eight of them and you've got a deal," she said, jerking a thumb backdown the corridor. "Go on—I'll let you know if there's any trouble. You're inone of the cabins on the lower level, right?"
"Right," I said. "Number Eight."
"Fine," she said, settling herself into the chair Ixil had just vacated.
"Pleasant dreams."
I stepped out the door and clanked my way down the bare-metal rungs of theladder to the lower deck. The central corridor—as with the mid-deck, there wasonly one—was deserted. No big surprise, since aside from storage and recyclingequipment there were only two sleeping cabins down here, mine and the one Ixilhad moved into. A quiet part of the ship, where the rhythmic humming of thevarious machines would be quite conducive to lulling a weary traveler tosleep.
But I wasn't going to sleep. Not yet. Instead, I walked the length of thecorridor to the aft ladder and headed back up to the mid deck, treading asquietly on the rungs as I could.