"Well..." He fumbled slightly. "I'm not exactly sure. The intercom still isn'tworking, so I had to go find them one by one. Chort was in his cabin, Nicabarwas in the engine room, and I found Tera in the mechanics shop."
"And then?"
"We went outside to see if he was still in the area of the ship. He wasn't, orif he was we didn't see him, so we split up and went looking for him."
"You all left together?"
"Except Nicabar," he said. "The fuelers had arrived, and he stayed behind fora few minutes to get them started."
One of the door's control wires was too tangled to connect properly. I cut offthe end, stripped it, and started wrapping it around its contact. "Whosebrilliant idea was it not to tell me?"
"Mine, I'm afraid," he said, his voice wincing. "I thought it would justdistract you, and you had enough to do at the time already."
I grunted. "Did you see any of the others while you were out hunting?"
"Of course not—we all went off in different directions," he said. "We kept intouch by phone, of course."
Which meant that any of them could easily have doubled back to the Icarus with murder on his mind and no one would have been the wiser for it. He wouldn't even have had to dodge the fuelers, who would have been busy on the opposite sideof the ship.
The last contact dropped into place, and I heard the faint transient hum asthe system integrated. I touched the pad, and the door slid open.
The room was dark. Bracing myself for the worst, I reached inside and turnedon the light.
Ixil was lying on the bunk just as I'd left him, Pix and Pax rousingthemselves sleepily from beside him in response to the light. Cautiously, I movedforward, studying Ixil as I approached. There were no marks of violence on him, atleast none that I could see from my angle.
And then, without warning, he inhaled sharply, like a sigh going in reverse, and his eyes fluttered open. "Hello," he said, blinking up at me.
I stopped short. "You're not dead," I said stupidly.
Ixil's face registered mild surprise. "Were you expecting me to be?" he asked.
His eyes flicked around the room, paused briefly on Everett standing in thedoorway behind me, then shifted down toward the deck. "What are those?" headded, extending a finger.
I followed the direction he was pointing. Sitting on the deck just inside theedge of the door were three objects. One was the missing control chip from thedoor release pad; the other two were small glass bottles the size and shape ofthose in the Icarus's limited pharmacopoeia.
I stepped over and picked them up. One of the bottles held a brown liquid, Inoted, the other a fine whitish powder. Both bottles had safety-seal lids; both lids were still securely fastened. "What are they?" I asked Everett, handingthem to him.
He frowned at the labels. "Well, this one is prindeclorian," he said, liftingthe brown liquid. "It's a broad-spectrum viral inhibitor. The other one'sqohumet, a parasite-control dust for feathered or scaled beings like ourfriend Chort. What they're doing here together I can't imagine."
"I can," Ixil said, his voice suddenly very thoughtful as he rose from thebunk and crossed over to Everett. "If you mix the two of them together and then setfire to the resulting mixture, you get something quite interesting."
The cold chill was starting up again. I knew that tone Ixil was using. Knew itfar too well. "And that is?" I prompted.
He took the bottles from Everett and gazed at the labels. "Cyanide gas."
"ALL RIGHT, THEN, try this," I suggested, scowling at the bridge displays.
There wasn't anything there worth scowling at—they were looking just fine—but I wasfeeling the need to scowl at something. "They were put there as a warning tous."
"To us?" Ixil asked pointedly from the swivel stool across from me, the wordsmangled by the enormous sandwich he seemed to be trying to line-feed into hismouth. Kalixiri healing comas were unarguably useful things, but they did come with a certain physical cost. That was already Ixil's second such sandwich, and he would probably demolish a third before his hunger even started to abate.
"All right, fine: it was a warning to you," I said, scowling some more. "Thequestion is, why bother? What did our saboteur have to gain by slapping a redflag across our noses? Sorry—across your nose?"
"If it was the saboteur," he said, breaking off a small piece of the sandwichand leaning over to give it to Pax. Both ferrets were on the floor: Paxcrouching where he could see the corridor outside the open bridge door, Pixcircling the room by the inner hull listening for any eavesdroppers who mightwander in from that direction. Ixil and I had already made sure that theintercom system, conveniently reactivated sometime during or immediately aftermy borandis search, couldn't be used against us again. "Maybe it was someonetrying to warn us there's a saboteur aboard."
"If it was, he should learn how to compose letters," I said sourly. "Let's tryit from a different angle. Who else aboard might know about that trick withthe qohumet and whatever?"
"Prindeclorian," he said around another bite of sandwich. "Hard to tell, unfortunately. It was a favorite of armchair revolutionaries twenty years ago, along with a host of other common-chemical concoctions, and it received a fairamount of word-of-mouth publicity. But it never really caught on, mainlybecause you either need a small area to contaminate or a large supply of the necessarychemicals."
"And because the fact that you have to set it on fire limits its subterfugevalue?"
"Definitely," he agreed. "Most people seeing a bright yellow flame spewing acloud of greenish smoke won't stick around to see what the smoke might do tothem."
"Unless the person in question is in a Kalixiri coma in a cabin the size of alarge shoe box," I concluded with a grimace. "You suppose there are otherequally handy chemicals aboard?"
Ixil paused to chew. "I imagine almost anything in sick bay would be lethal ina high enough dose," he said when he got his mouth clear again. "Unless you wantto throw all of it overboard, there's not much we can do about it."
"That might not be such a bad idea," I growled. "I'm starting to wonder if theonly reason you're alive is that Shawn's escape interrupted our would-bekiller in his work."
Ixil paused in the act of taking another bite. "Excuse me? I thought yourcurrent theory was that the saboteur released Shawn so that he could chaseeveryone else out of the ship while he came back and did his dirty work."
"That was the old theory," I told him. "This is the new theory. He'd gottenyourdoor open, but then heard the commotion on the mid deck and decided he'dbetter be found someplace else when they came looking for him. Not wanting to becaughtwith his pockets full of chemicals, he stashed them inside the room forsafekeeping, hied himself off to someplace innocent, and just never got achance to come back."
"And also put the control chip inside the room so that he wouldn't be able toopen the door again himself?"
I glared at him. "That's right, let yourself get mired down in facts. Never mind the simple elegance of the theory."
"My apologies," Ixil said, an odd look on his face as he set the remains ofhis sandwich on the nav table. "An idea. I'll be right back."
He left. I started another systems check, just for something to do, and didsome more glaring at the various instruments. Unfortunately, he was right: If thesaboteur planned to come back later, why take out the control chip? Not tomention the rest of the damage he'd done to the release pad.
Unless that had happened since we'd returned. Maybe he'd tried to come backearly and found the ship surrounded by Najik customs officers. He wouldn'thave had a chance to act after that until the Najik had come and gone, while therest of us were busy getting the Icarus ready to fly.