"Everett told me you were in the mechanics shop when he came to alert everyoneabout Shawn's escape," I said. "What were you doing in there?"
She regarded me coolly. "I was looking for a jeweler's screwdriver set," shesaid. "One of my displays was going funny and I thought it might need someadjustment."
"Ah," I said. "Thank you."
She gazed at me another heartbeat. "You're welcome," she said, turning againand making her exit.
I watched the door slide closed behind her, gave her and Nicabar a minute togetout of the corridor, then went over and locked the door open again. I like myprivacy as much as the next man, but if anyone was planning to go for a strollaround the mid deck, I wanted to hear them doing it.
Returning to my chair, I resumed my regimen of scowling at the displays. Teraand Nicabar had at least been up front about their suspicions about me. Howmanyof the others, I wondered, were having the same thoughts, only weren'tinterested in a confrontation?
I didn't care about being popular. Well, I did, actually, as much as anyoneelse, but I'd long since resigned myself to the knowledge that people wholiked me were going to be few and far between. The vital question right now, though, was not popularity but trust and obedience. If there was any chance at all ofmaking it through the ever-tightening Patth noose, it was going to require allof us working together.
All of us. Including our mysterious saboteur.
It would help enormously if I could figure out what exactly he was going for.
But while I could hammer any three or four of the incidents into a workabletheory, trying to put all of them together simply refused to work. If someoneknew what was in the Icarus's cargo hold, and if it was as valuable as we allthought, why hadn't he turned us in to the Patth on Potosi and claimed thereward? Or had the gem-smuggling tip to Najiki Customs been an abortiveattemptto do just that? And how did the attacks on Jones and Ixil fit in?
Abruptly, I sat up straighter in my chair, my mind flashing back to what Imyself had said not ten minutes earlier to Nicabar about the hijackerspossiblyhiring a pilot for the occasion. The Patth might very well be doing justthat—they certainly had enough money to spread around, and I was the onepersonthey knew was aboard. A single well-placed shot could take me out of thepicturepermanently, and make it vital for the rest to find a new pilot.
And if the Patth were dangling high-denomination bills in front of ships'pilots, why not ships' mechanics as well? Our resident saboteur, no matterwhat his secret talents and certificates, probably couldn't fly a ship this sizeand shape by himself. But two such talented and certified men just might be ableto pull it off.
And if this second man was also a mechanic, then the simplest way to get himaboard was to create an opening in that slot. Our saboteur had succeeded ineliminating Jones; but I'd already had Ixil standing in line to fill thevacancy. Was the implied threat of cyanide poisoning a heavy-handed attempt toscare Ixil off?
If so, he was going to be sorely disappointed. Kalixiri in general didn'tscare very well, and Ixil was even worse at it than the average.
Which unfortunately still left the question of why the Icarus wasn't alreadyin Patth hands; and maybe I'd now come up with an answer to that one, too. UncleArthur had said the Patth Director General was personally calling the variousgovernments along our route; but what if he was not, in fact, speaking for theentire Patth government? I'd always assumed the Patth were fairly monolithic, at least insofar as their relations with other species were concerned. But whatif that wasn't the case?
In that event our saboteur might not have turned us in to the Patth simplybecause he hadn't yet run across the right Patth to turn us in to. Maybe thecustoms flap on Potosi had indeed been an attempt to alert someone, only theyhadn't gotten the message in time. Or else my maneuver with Antoniewicz's namehad gotten us out of trouble and off the planet faster than anyone hadanticipated.
The politics of the situation, I knew, I didn't have a hope of unravelingwithout more detailed information about the Patth, which I didn't expect to begetting anytime soon. However, with this assumption came an unexpectedopportunity. Unless our saboteur had been recruited on the spot at the Meimaspaceport—which seemed unlikely—it meant that he must have had previous tiesto the Patth. Ties that, if I was lucky, would show up in the background reportsUncle Arthur had promised to deliver to me at our next stop.
I looked over my instruments and displays again, and despite the extra fuelcost involved edged our speed up a little. Suddenly, I was very anxious to get toMorsh Pon.
CHAPTER 11
IT WAS AN eighty-four-hour flight from Potosi to Morsh Pon, eighty-four hoursthat went both smoother and more annoyingly than I'd expected them to. We hadto make only two stops along the way for Chort to repair more hull ridges, whichconsidering the Icarus's haphazard construction was not a bad showing at all.
Perhaps the main hull's spherical design, unlovely though it was, actuallystood up better against hyperspace pressure than the lean, graceful lines that I wasmore used to with starships. Or maybe it was just that all of our good luckwas being unidirectionally expended on our hull.
There were no more attempts at sabotage, at least none that came to light, butwe had plenty of other trouble. Successive doses of borandis were able tobringShawn back from the edge and ensure that he wouldn't have any permanent neuraldamage, at least this time around. Unfortunately, he'd apparently been farenough along that it took more of the medicine than normal to get him properlystabilized. Everett thought we would be okay to Morsh Pon and probably the stopafter that, but we were going to have to get hold of a new supply sooner thanI'd hoped.
Our archaic computer was another problem that reared its ugly head shortlyinto the flight. The glitch Tera had mentioned with her display turned out to benothing as simple as an adjustment problem. Once she opened the computercasingthe trouble was instantly obvious: thin layers of almost microscopic dustinside, dust that apparently had just enough electrical conductivity to createflickers of random havoc as the cooling fans blew it across the various boardsand components.
It was equally obvious, at least to Ixil and me, how it had happened. Shovedoff to the side somewhere in one of the underground chambers on Meima whileCameron's techs put the Icarus together, it had had plenty of opportunity tocollect dust through its various apertures. But of course none of the rest ofour crew knew the ship's history, and dodging the constant stream of questionsand complaints—most of the latter from Shawn, despite the alleged civilizingeffects of his medicine—wore pretty thin after a while. Ixil bore the brunt ofthat one as he spent the better part of seventy hours helping Tera and Shawndisassemble the system, clean it thoroughly, and put it back together again.
That all by itself scored as both a plus and a minus on my mental tally sheet.
A
plus because Ixil closeted with Shawn and Tera meant neither of those twowould be skulking around crimping torch nozzles or tapping into intercoms; a minusbecause it meant that for those same seventy hours I was robbed of Ixil'sassistance in anything I might want to do.
Which meant that by the time we had a chance to send Pix and Pax into the openarea between the two hulls for a thorough exploration, there was no longeranything in there for them to find. No footprints in whatever dust might havebeen present before the multitude of vibrations redistributed it; no leftovertool lying behind one of the supports where its owner might have missed it; notrace of the short-circuited intercom power lines, which had apparently beencarefully and unobtrusively fixed. About all the ferrets could come up withwas the odd fact that the outer hull didn't feel, smell, or taste like anythingelse they'd ever come across. It certainly wasn't any standard hull metal. At onepoint I actually wondered if perhaps the Potosi customs people hadn't been asfar off the mark as I'd thought, that all Cameron was doing was smuggling goldor iridium or some other exotic metal plated along the inside edge of theouter hull. But that seemed both too complicated and too petty for someone withCameron's reputation and resources. Besides which, it didn't even start toexplain the increasingly obsessive Patth interest in us.