Ixil was nowhere in sight, having apparently already disappeared into thewraparound to relieve Nicabar in the engine room. At the forward end of thecorridor, I saw that Tera had rather pointedly closed the bridge door behindher. A girl who liked her privacy, I decided, though there might not beanythingmore to it than the natural reticence of a lone woman locked in a flying tincan with four unfamiliar men and two alien males. But whatever the reason, it wasgoing to make my current project that much safer.
The computer-room door was closed, too, but that was all right; near as Icould tell, none of the Icarus's doors locked. Taking one last look around to makesure I wasn't being observed, I opened the door and went inside, closing itbehind me.
The room looked exactly the way it had when I'd last seen it, except of coursethat Tera wasn't there. The Worthram T-66 computer dominated the space, pressingup against the aft bulkhead and covering much of the starboard wall as well.
Fastened to the forward bulkhead was a two-sectioned metal cabinet with the hard-copy printer on one side and a set of shelves crammed with referencematerial and datadisks on the other. Squeezed in between the two was thecomputer control desk where Tera fought to beat the archaic machine intosubmission.
And where, allegedly, she'd been sitting when she hit her head hard enough forme to hear from the wraparound.
I went over and sat down in the chair. It wasn't nearly as fancy as the one onthe bridge; but then, in emergency maneuvers it was far more important for thepilot to stay in his seat than the computer jock. Taking a deep breath, Ileaned forward and banged my head experimentally against the edge of the controlpanel.
Even granted that I was hearing it from a more personal angle, the thud didn'tsound anything like what I'd heard earlier. That one had definitely beenmetallic; this one sounded exactly like a skull whacked against a controlboard.
Rubbing thoughtfully at my forehead and the dull ache that had joined thechorus throughout my body, I looked slowly around the room. So there were twopossibilities. Either Tera had coincidentally hit her head against somethingat about the same time I'd heard that metal-on-metal sound, or else she waslying.
If the former, then I needed to look elsewhere; if the latter, there wassomething else in here that had in fact made the noise.
The problem was, what? Unlike Ixil's machine shop, there weren't any toolslyingaround or hanging on racks that might fall and clatter against the deck. Therewere plenty of cables and connectors, but they were for the most part lightand rubber-coated. The cabinet was plain metal, but it was bolted to the bulkhead.
Besides, if it had tipped over, it would have left a mess of manuals anddatadisks scattered on the deck which she wouldn't have had time to pick up.
The manuals themselves, it went without saying, couldn't possibly make such asound.
Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, one of the manuals wasn't what it seemed.
It took me the better part of ten minutes to pull each of the manuals off theshelf, examine it carefully, and put it back in its place. Ten wasted minutes.
None of them was anything other than it appeared, and none of them could havemade that noise.
Which left only one possibility. Whatever Tera had dropped, she was carryingit with her. A wrench, possibly, though what she would need a wrench for Icouldn't imagine.
Or a gun.
The mid-deck corridor was still deserted as I left the computer room and mademyway down the aft stairway. I was tired, my head was now competing with my legto see which could ache the most, and I had the annoying sense that I was chasingmy own tail. Even if Tera did have a weapon, that didn't necessarily mean shewas up to anything. Besides, it was still entirely possible that the noise hadcome from somewhere else. I didn't really believe it, but it was possible.
The Number Eight sleeping cabin was like the other seven aboard the Icarus: small and cramped, with a triple bunk against the inner hull and a triplelocker facing it from the corridor-side wall. An intercom was set into the inner hullbeside the triple bunk, with a meter of empty hull space on its other sidewhere a lounge seat or computer desk would have gone on a properly furnished ship.
Clearly the ship had been designed to carry a lot more passengers than werecurrently aboard; as it was, we all conveniently got a cabin to ourselves, with one on the upper deck as a spare. The privacy was useful in that it gave me afair amount of freedom of movement; not so useful in that it offered that samefreedom to everyone else, too.
The light switch was by the door. I punched it to nighttime dim, then crossedthe room and lay down on the bottom bunk. Unrolling the blanket over me, Islid my plasmic under the pillow, where it would be available if needed, and closedmy eyes. With unpleasant images of a frowning Uncle Arthur flickering behind my eyelids, I fell asleep.
I AWOKE SLOWLY, in slightly disoriented stages, vaguely aware that something was wrong but not exactly sure what. The light was still at the dim level I'd set, the door was still closed, and I was still alone in the cabin. The rhythmic drone of the environmental system was still vibrating gently through the air and hull around me. The deeper hum of the stardrive—
The deeper hum of the stardrive wasn't there.
The Icarus had stopped.
I had my boots and jacket on in fifteen seconds flat, almost forgetting to grab my plasmic in my rush to get out of the room. I hurried out into the corridor, went up the forward ladder like a cork out of a bottle, and charged into the bridge.
Seated in the restraint chair, Tera turned a mildly questioning eye in my direction. "I thought you were asleep," she said.
"Why have we stopped?" I demanded.
Her eyebrows lifted a bit higher. "We've got another hull ridge," she said calmly. "Chort's getting ready to go out and fix it."
I scowled past her at the displays. Sure enough, the new camera I'd had Ixil and Shawn install in the wraparound showed two space-suited figures just sealing the pressure door behind them. One was obviously Chort; the other was just as obviously Ixil. "You should have called me," I growled.
"Why?" she countered. "There's nothing to this operation that the pilot needs to have a hand in. Besides, you're off-duty, remember? Go back to bed."
The radio speaker clicked. "We're ready, Tera," Ixil's voice said. "You can shut down the grav generator."
"Acknowledged," Tera said, flipping back the safety cover and turning the switch ninety degrees. "Shutting off gravity generator now."
She pushed the switch, and I went through the usual momentary disorientation before my stomach settled down. "Go back to bed," Tera repeated, her eyes on the monitors. "I'll call you if there's a problem."
"I'm sure you would," I said shortly. Once again, it seemed, I had managed to embarrass myself in front of this woman. This was getting to be a very bad habit. "I'll stay a bit."
"I don't need you," she said flatly, flicking a single glowering glance at me and then turning her attention back to the monitors. "More to the point, I don't want you. Go away."
"Do we know where the ridge is?" I asked, ignoring the order.
"Big sphere; starboard side," she said. "Chort thinks it's a small one."
"Let's hope he's right."
She didn't answer. For a few minutes we watched the monitors together in silence, anxious silence on my part, frosty silence on hers. I presumed that Ixil had made it his business to make sure the grav generator couldn't impulsively go on-line again; but I didn't know for sure, and I didn't want to ask him about it on an open radio channel. I tried to figure out how I would lock down the generator if it was up to me, but I didn't know enough about theintricacies of the system.
"You two been flying together long?" Tera broke into my thoughts.
I blinked at her in mild surprise. Casual conversation from Tera was somethingnew in my admittedly brief acquaintance with her. "Six years," I told her. "Itook him on about a year after I bought the Stormy Banks. I figured having apartner would help me run cargoes faster and more efficiently and bring inmore money."