"I take it it didn't work?"
"What makes you say that?" I countered, long experience with that questionputting automatic defensiveness into my voice.
"You're here, aren't you?" she said. "Sorry—I didn't mean that the way itsounded. With the Patth handling almost everything worth shipping these days, it's a wonder everyone else hasn't been driven out of business."
"Give them a few more years," I said sourly. "The way they're going, it won'tbe long before they have it all."
"At least everything legitimate," she said, giving me a sideways look. "You dorun legitimate cargoes, don't you, McKell?"
"Every single chance I get," I said, trying to put a touch of levity into mytone as I gazed at her profile, wishing I could read what was going on behindthose hazel eyes of hers. Had she talked to someone while we were on Xathru?
Heard something, perhaps, about my forced affiliation with Brother John andthe Antoniewicz organization? "What about you?" I asked, hoping to change thesubject. "How long have you been flying?"
"Not long," she said. "What do you do when you can't get legitimate work?"
So much for changing the subject. "Sometimes we're able to pick up intrasystemcargoes," I told her. "Occasionally we have to find temp jobs in whatever portwe're stuck in until something comes along. Mostly, we eat real light."
"You're not a big fan of the Patth, then, I take it?"
"No one who hauls cargo for a living is a fan of the Patth," I said darkly, myconversation with Nicabar flashing to mind. "Is this your subtle way ofsuggesting we might be carrying a Patth cargo?"
There were a lot of things, I knew, that a competent actress could do with herbody, voice, and expression. But the last time I checked, the red flush thatrose to briefly color Tera's cheeks wasn't one of them. "We'd better not be," she said, the studied casualness in her voice a sharp contrast to the emotionimplicit in that reddened skin. "Though I doubt we'll find out for sureanywherethis side of Earth."
"If even then," I pointed out. "Whoever Borodin's got working that end isn'tunder any obligation to let us watch while he cuts the cargo bay open."
"No, of course not," she murmured, almost as if talking to herself. "I wonderwhy he lied to us about coming along."
"Who, Borodin? What makes you think he did lie?"
She shrugged. "You saw that note he left. He had to have written it before theIhmisits closed the port down for the night."
I thought about Director Aymi-Mastr of the Meima Port Authority and thatmurder charge she'd talked about. "Unless he just had it here as a precaution," Isuggested. "Maybe he fully intended to join us, but circumstances preventedhim."
She snorted. "Right. A full bottle, or a warm bed. Circumstances."
"Or a small matter of murder," I said.
She looked at me, her eyes narrowing. "Murder?"
"That's right," I said. "I was told there was a warrant out for his arrest ona possible murder charge."
She shook her head. "Hard to believe," she said. "He seemed like such anormal, upstanding man."
"That's exactly what I said when they asked me about it," I said approvingly.
"Nice to know there's at least one thing we agree on."
"Well, now, wait a minute," she warned cautiously. "I never said I thought hedidn't do it, I just said it was hard to believe. I don't know anything aboutthe man."
"Sure, I understand," I assured her. In fact, I understood far more than sheprobably realized. Just as her involuntary blush when talking about the Patthhad given me a glimpse into her emotional state, so, too, had the completelack of any such coloring when I told her about Cameron's murder charge. And thatdespite her alleged total surprise at hearing such shocking news.
Maybe she'd already used up all of her emotional reactions for one day. Ormaybeshe hadn't been surprised by the murder charge for the simple reason thatshe'd already known all about it.
"Computer Specialist Tera?" Chort's whistly voice came over the speaker. "Ibelieve I'm finished here. Shall I check the rest of the hull?"
I was still watching Tera closely, which was why I caught the slight butunmistakable tightening of her facial muscles. Perhaps she was thinking alongthe same line that had suddenly occurred to me: that it had been just as Chorthad set off on a similar check of the cargo and engine hulls his last time outthat the accident with the grav generator had occurred.
If it was, in fact, an accident. Perhaps someone aboard didn't want anyonetaking a close look at the outside of the cargo sphere.
For a moment I was tempted to tell him to go ahead, just to see if ourtheoretical spoilsport still had his same access to switches or junction boxesor whatever. But only for a moment. Ixil was sharing the hot spot with Chort, and the spoilsport might decide he didn't like Ixil any more than he'd likedJones. I had no interest in risking Ixil's life or health, at least not then.
Certainly not over a theory that hadn't even occurred to me until five secondsago.
"This is McKell," I said toward the speaker before Tera could answer. "Don'tbother, Chort—we don't have time for it. You and Ixil just get back in andbutton up."
"Acknowledged," he whistled.
"That was my job," Tera reminded me, throwing a brief glare in my direction.
But to my hypersensitive eye, the glare didn't seem to have the kind of firebehind it that I would have expected. Maybe she and I had indeed been thinking alongthe same lines, or maybe her chip-shoulder act was starting to wear a littlethin. "You're off-duty, remember?"
"Right," I said. "I keep forgetting. You can handle things here?"
She didn't even bother to answer that one, just gave me a look that saidvolumes all by itself and turned back to the monitors. Properly chastened, I floatedout of the bridge, maneuvered down the ladder well, and returned to my cabin. Iwas once again stripping off my jacket when the warning tone sounded and gravity came back on.
For a long time after that I just lay in my bunk, staring at the closed doorin the dim light, as I ran that last conversation through endless repeats in mymind. Tera was an enigma, and in general I hated enigmas. In my experience, theynearly always spelled trouble.
Unless I had been reading her words and her reactions all wrong. Or, worse, had somehow imagined them entirely. It certainly wouldn't be the first time I hadoh-so-cleverly Sherlocked myself straight down a blind alley.
But I hadn't imagined the mishap with the grav generator or Jones's death. Ihadn't imagined my brief detention on Meima, or the Lumpy Brothers, or theirunreasonably advanced hand weaponry.
And I certainly hadn't imagined Arno Cameron, amateur archaeologist and headof one of the largest and most influential industrial combines in the Spiral, sitting in a grimy Vyssiluyan taverno and all but begging me to fly the Icarusto Earth for him.
No, the facts were there, at least some of them. What they meant, though, Ididn't have the foggiest idea.
But a small group of unclearly related facts can chase each other around asingle overtired brain for only so long. Eventually, I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 6
THE PORT FACILITIES on Xathru had been a couple of steps above those on Meima.
The single commercial port on Dorscind's World, in contrast, was at least fivesteps back down again.
Not that the equipment itself was a problem. On the contrary, the landingcradle was the best the Icarus had seen yet, with the kind of peripheral and supportequipment that a place like Meima could only dream of. It was, rather, theport's clientele that put Dorscind's World well below the standards set by theSpiral's tour cruise directors. Planned by its developers as a high-classgambling resort, things hadn't quite worked out that way for the colony. Ithad been slipping since roughly day two, with the big money and high-spinnersfadingequally rapidly into the sunset.