"Yes," she said, another twinge of guilt crossing her face. "It's camouflaged, but up close it's pretty easy to spot."
"And Jones's death?"
"No," she said emphatically. "Neither Dad nor I had anything to do with that."
"So we can chalk that one up to our Mr. X," I said. "As we can, I presume, theanonymous smuggling tip to Najiki Customs?"
"That wasn't me, either," Tera said. "You think I would want to draw officialattention to us in the middle of a Patth spaceport?"
"Just making sure," I said. "And we've already established that your fatherwas the one playing with cutting torches and intercoms. And circuit breakers, Ipresume?"
"That one was me, actually," she said. "He'd gotten out of the 'tweenhull areaand was warning me that he might have been spotted when the intercom wentdead.
I was up in my cabin, and on a hunch I checked the breaker box. When Icouldn't get the one to reset, I guessed what you were up to. There wasn't enough timeto fix the short circuit, so I just pulled all the breakers and hid them."
"It was clever," I conceded. "Annoying, but clever. I presume it was yourcomputer-room intercom I'd gimmicked?"
She nodded. "The access panel we'd improvised in the wall wasn't quite square, and sometimes I had to bang it into place. That was what you heard the timeyoucame charging in on me."
"I also heard it from sick bay once when I was talking to Shawn there," Iremembered. "He'd heard it a few times, too. There's another job to pin on Mr.
X, by the way: loosening Shawn's straps or whatever he did that let the kidgetaway."
"You think that was deliberate?" Tera asked, frowning.
"Of course it was," I said. "Our Mr. X couldn't very well poke around Ixil'sroom with his toolbox and junior poisoner's kit while the rest of you were still aboard—too much risk someone would catch him at it. But I'd told you all tostayput, so he had to come up with a good reason to get you outside."
Ixil cleared his throat delicately. "I'm afraid you both may be missing themore important point here," he said. "Bear in mind that while everyone wasconveniently off the ship, Arno Cameron vanished. Not necessarily of his ownvolition."
I looked at Tera, saw her face pale. "But how could they have done it?" shebreathed. "How could they have even known he was there?"
"The same way I figured it out, maybe," I said, the ominous implications of aCameron kidnapping tumbling over each other like leaves in a brisk autumnwind.
"Or else he heard one of those clunks and discovered you two talkingtogether."
"Perhaps that was the true purpose for the customs inquiry, in fact," Ixilsaid.
"To delay the moment when his disappearance would be discovered. And to ensurewe left Potosi afterward as quickly as we could, so that by the time anyonedid notice we'd be long gone from the scene."
"But why would they take all his things with him?" Tera persisted. Clearly, this wasn't a scenario she was at all willing to accept. "He had a full campingsetup: food and water packs, a roll-up mattress, even one of those littlecatalytic waste handlers."
"Where did he get all that?" I asked.
"I bought most of it for him during our stopover on Xathru," she said. "He'dplanned to come out after the first stop, but after Jones's death we decidedhe should stay hidden a while longer."
"Ah," I said, remembering now all the bags she'd brought aboard at Xathru, andhow annoyed she'd been that I'd cut her shopping spree short.
"But why would anyone bother to take all of it along?" she asked again.
"Perhaps they wanted to eliminate any evidence that he was ever here," Ixilsaid. "Their contact would have told them that your father had kept hispresenceaboard a secret. At this point it would be basically your word againsttheirs."
"If it ever even came to that," I added. "They may have something else plannedfor you down the line."
She tried glaring at me again, but her heart wasn't in it. "You're a realcomfort to have around, McKell," she growled. "Both of you."
"Yes, well, we haven't exactly gotten what we signed up for, either," Icountered. "What I want to know is why this ship is still flying. We've beenhalf a grab away from them at least twice now. Why haven't they simply pickedus up?"
She sighed. "I don't know."
"Perhaps it would help," Ixil suggested, "if we knew what exactly thismysterious cargo is."
For a long minute Tera remained silent, her eyes flicking between our faces, clearly trying to decide just how far she was willing to trust us. Or perhapsjust trying to come up with a convincing lie. "All right," she said at last.
"The Icarus isn't carrying any cargo. The Icarus is the cargo."
She waved a hand around her. "This is what the team uncovered on Meima: two spheres, connected together, the larger one empty except for its radialgravitygenerator, the smaller one crammed with alien electronics."
"How alien?" Ixil asked.
"Very alien," she said grimly. "It was like nothing they'd ever seen before, with markings and notations that were also totally unknown. We still don'tknow whether it predates the Spiral civilizations, or is simply from outside knownterritory. That's why that old Worthram T-66 is aboard—it was the one thearchaeologists already had hooked up to study the small sphere, and when theybuilt the Icarus they just basically assembled the computer room around it."
"So that's where the spare gravity inside the outer hull came from," I said.
"I'd been planning to ask you how and why you'd set that up."
"We had nothing to do with it," Tera said. "And we have no idea what it's for.
All we know is that it runs about eighty-five percent Earth standard, and iscompletely self-adjusting, which is why it isn't fazed by the Icarus's owngravity generator."
She smiled wanly. "I understand it worked the same way on Meima. Even while itwas sitting there in a full planetary gravitational field, you could stillwalk all the way around inside the sphere without falling off."
"Must have been quite an experience," I murmured.
"Half of them loved it; the other half couldn't stand it," she said. "Anyway, that's why they built the inner hull so far away from the outer one—all themetal seems to inhibit the sphere's gravity field somehow, but if you put thetwo hulls any closer together you get a terrible disorientation at the edgeswhere the two grav fields intersect."
"And that's what the Patth are all hot and bothered over?" I asked. "The chance to get their hands on a new-style grav generator? Hardly seems worthcommittingmurder for."
She shook her head. "I'm not sure the Patth even know about the gravgenerator," she said; and there was something in her voice that sent a shiver up my back.
"I said the team couldn't decipher the markings on anything in the two spheres.
But the grav generator wasn't the only thing still working. A lot of theelectronics in the small sphere were on what appeared to be some kind of standby, and theywere able to take a lot of readings. Waveform analyses, pattern operations—
that sort of thing."
She took a deep breath. "They're not sure," she said quietly. "There's a lotthey still don't understand. Most of it, actually. But from what they coulddecipher of the patterns and power levels and even the geometric shapes ofsome of the components... well, they think this whole thing could be a stardrive."
I looked at Ixil. "What kind of stardrive?" I asked carefully.
"A fast one," she said. "A very fast one. From the readings, they think itcould be as much as twenty times faster than the Patth Talariac."
"And that," Ixil said softly, "is worth committing murder over."
CHAPTER 13
WE LEFT TERA to get back to her sleep, or at least what sleep she would beable to manage after that immensely cheering conversation, and reconvened ourprivatecouncil of war on the Icarus's bridge. Shawn, who'd been on duty, had voicedno objection at all to being relieved, heading off toward his cabin and bunk witha sort of dragging step that suggested he still wasn't fully recovered from hisrecent bout with Cole's disease. Or from straight borandis addiction, as thecase might be.