And it was only then, in the back of the room beyond the flopping hoses, that I spotted Ixil.
He was lying against the line of equipment-storage lockers that made up the back wall, his torso half–propped up against the lockers, his eyes closed. There was no sign of Pix and Pax; odds were they were cowering in a nook or corner somewhere. If they were even alive. Ixil’s right pant leg was smoldering above his low boot, but otherwise the fire didn’t seem to have marked him.
But that bit of grace wasn’t going to last much longer. Even just since I’d started watching I could see that the hoses’ gyrations were swinging wider with each oscillation, and within a minute or less they would be twisting around to the point where the fire stream would be washing directly over my unconscious partner.
“God and hellfire,” a voice breathed in my ear.
I twisted my head around to find Nicabar standing just behind me, staring wide-eyed into the room. “I heard the commotion and smelled the fire,” he said. “Where’s the damn suppression system?”
“There isn’t one,” I bit out, jabbing my finger toward the bridge door. “There’s an extinguisher just inside the bridge to the left.”
He was off before I’d even finished the sentence. I turned back to the mechanics room, dodging back just in time as the semirandom fire spray once again did its best to take my eyebrows off. There was another extinguisher, I knew, just inside the door to my right; the question was whether I could slip into the room and get to it without incinerating myself.
Unfortunately, at that point came an even bigger question: What could I do with the thing if and when I got to it? Shipboard fire extinguishers used a two-prong approach, the foam smothering the air away from the flames while simultaneously pulling out as much of the heat as possible. But that acetylene fire had a lot of heat built up already, possibly more than a small extinguisher canister could handle; and given that the blaze had its own built-in oxygen supply, the question of smothering was even more problematic.
There was a breath of sudden movement beside me. “Got it,” Nicabar said, holding the half-meter-long orange canister ready in the doorway. “Straight in?”
“Straight in,” I told him. He squeezed the handle, and a stream of yellowish fluid sprayed toward the writhing hoses, its loud hissing joining the crackle of the flames. Joining, but not eliminating. For a few seconds the blaze faltered as the droplets sucked heat away from it, but then seemed to gather its strength again in defiance. The hoses twisted around in their unpredictable way, sending the tip skittering off the edge of Nicabar’s spray, and with an almost-triumphant roar the fire blazed fully back to life.
But those few seconds were enough. I jumped into the room and ducked to my right, grabbing at the bright orange object at the edge of my peripheral vision as I kept my main attention on the fire and Nicabar’s attack on it. The quick-releases holding the extinguisher to the bulkhead worked exactly as they were supposed to, though in the mood I was in I would have had the canister off the wall no matter how it was fastened there. I continued to my right, twisting the canister around into position in my hands as I moved. I got it lined up just as the hoses started to shift toward me, and squeezed the handle.
My spray joined Nicabar’s, and the tanks and hoses all but vanished into a roiling cloud of mist. But the fire itself was still clearly visible, diminished but a long way yet from being quenched. And with the gas pressure driving its erratic movements completely unaffected by the foam, it was still just as dangerous as it had been before.
There was only one chance, and I had to take it before the extinguishers ran dry and the flame roared back to full strength again. Squeezing the handle hard, keeping my stream of foam aimed as best I could, I charged straight in toward our adversary. Nicabar shouted something from the doorway, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying over the noise. The hoses finished their oscillation the other direction and started swinging back, and in about half a second the flame would get its chance to incinerate me on its way to doing the same to Ixil.
And at the last moment, with my best effort at the long jump since failing to make my college track team, I leaped over the flame and landed squarely on the end of the hoses, pinning them in place on the deck.
I heard Nicabar give an encouraging whoop, and suddenly the billowing mist from his extinguisher was flowing coldly around my legs, a sharp contrast to the backwash of heat that already seemed to be trying to cook my feet inside my boots. But for that final two seconds I didn’t care about either the fire or Nicabar’s efforts to put it out. Dropping my own canister onto the deck, I grabbed the valve handle on the acetylene tank and twisted for all I was worth.
And with one final indignant gasping wheeze from the hoses, the fire went out.
CHAPTER
8
“All I can say is that you were very lucky,” Everett said, shaking his head as he finished sealing the last burn pad around Ixil’s leg and picked up the medical scanner again. “Very lucky indeed. I know my hearing’s not up to picking up sounds that subtle, especially through two doors. If I’d still been on the bridge instead of McKell, I’d be pulling a blanket over your face about now.”
“Yes, I know,” Ixil said, his voice and manner the subdued humility of someone who knows he’s done something stupid that has put himself in danger and made trouble for everyone else. Glancing over at the med-room doorway, where Nicabar, Tera, and Chort were silently watching the procedure, I could see traces of sympathetic embarrassment in their faces, the normal reaction of polite people having to witness another person’s private shame.
I didn’t feel any such embarrassment myself. But then, I knew full well that this humility bit was completely out of character for Ixil, that it was all merely for show in the hopes of allaying any suspicions anyone might have about the sort of person he really was.
Vaguely, I wondered if one of the observers standing in the doorway was putting on a similar performance.
“Next time I suggest checking all the equipment before you start it up,” Everett went on sternly, running the scanner slowly along Ixil’s burned leg as he frowned at the readings. Not surprisingly, Cameron’s people had failed to include a Kalixiri module with their med computer, and I could almost guarantee the readings were like nothing Everett had ever seen before. Fortunately, Ixil had another, uninjured leg to use for comparison.
“I’ll second that,” I put in, throwing a glance at the other end of the room. Still strapped to the examination table, Shawn’s face—for that matter, his entire body—was practically dripping with impatience and a near-total contempt for Ixil and his injuries, a marked contrast to the solicitude everyone else was showing. Still, aside from a single sour question about what the hell was going on as we’d hustled Ixil inside, he’d kept his mouth shut. Maybe his borandis-withdrawal sarcasm was under better control than he’d implied, or maybe he was in the calm side of one of the mood swings he’d mentioned. Or maybe he’d seen Ixil’s expression and was possessed of a finer-tuned survival instinct than I’d thought. “The shape this whole ship is in,” I added diplomatically, turning back to Ixil, “it’s a wonder more of the equipment hasn’t fallen apart.”
“I know,” Ixil said again. “I heartily promise to be more careful next time.”
“We can all consider ourselves lucky the lesson wasn’t learned more painfully,” Everett said, shifting the scanner from Ixil’s leg to the impressively swelling bruise on his forehead where the torch head had slammed into him when it sheared apart, the impact throwing him back against the lockers and knocking him out cold.
He didn’t remember that last part himself, of course, having been unconscious at the time. But the ferrets hadn’t been injured in the accident, and once I’d coaxed them out from behind the row of lockers where they’d gone to ground Ixil had been able to sample their memories and confirm the entire sequence of events.
“At any rate, that’s all I can do for now,” Everett concluded, putting the scanne
r aside and smoothing the burn pads one last time. “Except for a painkiller or sedative, of course. Either would help you sleep.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll sleep just fine,” Ixil assured him. “There really isn’t all that much pain.”
Everett looked doubtful, but he nodded and headed for the sonic scrubber. “As you wish,” he said as he started cleaning his hands. “If you change your mind just let me know. I’m sure there’s something aboard that will work on a Kalix.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ixil promised, easing off the stool where Everett had been working on him and standing up.
Or more accurately, trying to stand up. His leg wobbled beneath him, and he grabbed at the wall for balance.
As cues went, it was one of the more obvious ones I’d ever been tossed. “Hang on, I’ll give you a hand,” I said quickly, stepping to his side as I juggled Pix and Pax around to free up one of my hands. The furry little beasts were less than cooperative—they’d gone back to Ixil’s shoulders long enough for him to get their version of the accident, but he was still in pain and they weren’t at all interested in sharing in it. But with a little creative shuffling I got them settled in on shoulder and forearm and was able to assist a limping Ixil out past the group at the doorway. “Excitement’s over for the night,” I told them as we made our slow way down the corridor. “Tera, I’d appreciate it if you’d take over on the bridge.”
“Consider it done,” she said.
Ixil had a lot of qualities that I admired, but a sylphlike body frame wasn’t one of them. Fortunately, the wounded-warrior act lasted only as long as it took us to get down the ladder and out of sight of any of the gallery that might have lingered behind after the show. Once on the lower deck, he made it the rest of the way to his cabin under his own steam.
“An interesting experiment,” he commented as he maneuvered his way onto the center bunk. “Not that it’s one I would have chosen on my own. Thank you for your help, by the way. I owe you one.”
“We’ll add it to your side of the ledger,” I said briefly, resisting the urge to bring up all the times he’d hauled me bodily out of similar predicaments. The Kalixiri way of handling injuries was to go into a deep, comalike sleep while healing, and from the looks of Ixil’s drooping eyelids he was three-quarters of the way there already. The fact that he hadn’t dropped off the second he hit the bunk implied there was something he wanted or needed to say to me before he went under, and it certainly wasn’t to go over our personal win/loss score sheet.
“I believe we can safely cross Jones off our suspect list,” he murmured, his eyelids closing completely and then opening partway again, like sliding doors with a bad feedback loop. “I didn’t just turn that torch on tonight without doing a complete equipment check, Jordan. I looked it over two days ago, just after I came aboard at Xathru. The sabotage has to have been done since then.”
I stared at him, something large and invisible taking me by the throat and gently squeezing. A cutting torch was a totally innocuous tool to have aboard a starship, and there was no reason whatsoever for anyone to sabotage it that way. Unless, of course, someone really, really didn’t want us cutting our way into the sealed cargo hold.
The only catch was that no one else should have known we were even considering such an action. That conversation had taken place less than an hour ago, with only Ixil and me present, in the privacy of my cabin.
Apparently, someone had taken it upon himself to listen in.
I opened my mouth to ask Ixil how this bit of auditory legerdemain might have been accomplished, closed it again with the question unvoiced. Ixil’s eyes were squeezed shut, his breathing slow and even. He’d delivered his message, was down for the count, and barring an extremely urgent and probably extremely loud catastrophe he was going to stay that way for however many hours it took to heal his leg and head.
And for that same number of hours, I was going to be on my own.
Ixil had made up the lower bunk for Pix and Pax, bunching the blanket up for them to snuggle into and putting their food and water containers where they could easily get to them. I spent a few minutes getting them settled there, then pulled the blanket off the top bunk and tucked it under Ixil’s mattress, wedging its center under the lower bunk beside the ferrets’ nest and letting the rest drape down from there onto the floor. Assured that they could get to the floor if they wanted exercise or to Ixil if they wanted company, I turned off the light and left the cabin.
There were no locks on any of the Icarus’s interior doors. Up till now I hadn’t really worried much about that; but up till now my partner hadn’t been lying comatose and reasonably helpless after what might or might not have been an effort to kill him. Pulling out my multitool, checking both ways down the corridor to make sure I was unobserved, I removed the cover of the release pad from the center of the door and pulled out the control chip. On the underside, snugged inconspicuously between two of the connector feet, was what I was looking for: the timing dial, which told the door how many seconds it was to stay open unless you overrode it by locking the door in place. Using the narrowest screwdriver from the multitool, I eased the dial from its preset position all the way to zero, then returned the chip to its socket.
Experimentally, I touched the release pad. Not only did the door open barely ten centimeters before slamming shut again, it did so with a startlingly loud clunk as the buffer mechanism that normally provided for a smoother closing failed to engage. For a moment I flashed back to the metal-on-metal sound I’d heard at least twice now aboard the Icarus, wondering if there could simply be a bad buffer in one of the doors. But even allowing for the sound to be filtered by distance, I knew this wasn’t it.
I put the cover back on the pad and went down the corridor to my own cabin. It was far from a perfect solution—anyone bent on unscrupulous deeds, after all, could presumably open the release pad himself and ungimmick it as easily as I had, assuming he knew about the adjustment dial, which most people didn’t. But for the moment it was the best I could do. At least this way any attempt to get to Ixil would generate a noise and vibration that I ought to be able to hear from my own cabin. Ixil himself, of course, with a completely separate touch-pad mechanism on his side of the door, could come out anytime he wanted. I reached my cabin, dithered momentarily about whether I should gimmick my own door as I had Ixil’s, decided against it, and went in.
The room was still as small and as unadorned as it had always been, but as I put my back against the door I found myself looking at it with new eyes. Somehow, someone had overheard our last conversation in here, and had overheard it clearly enough to nip up to the mechanics room and sabotage the cutting torch.
The question was how.
The wall separating the cabin from the corridor was solid metal, a good five centimeters thick. The bulkheads were even thicker, probably nine or ten centimeters, and on the side away from the corridor was the Icarus’s inner hull, with no more than another twenty centimeters between it and the outer hull. Outside the outer hull, of course, was the vacuum of space. There were, I knew, ways to hear through solid metal walls, but all of them involved fairly sophisticated equipment and even then success was not at all guaranteed aboard a starship where the whole frame was continually vibrating with everything from engine drone to voices and footsteps two decks away. The bunks were too simple and flimsy to conceal a hidden transmitter strong enough to punch a radio signal through that much metal; ditto for the lockers. After that tracker incident on Meima, I’d made it a point to regularly signal-scan both myself and Ixil for such unwanted hitchhikers, and had just as regularly found nothing. And finally, there was nothing on any of the walls that could camouflage any such listening device.
Except the intercom.
I unfastened the cover of the intercom with my multitool, swearing silently at myself the whole time. It was the oldest trick in the book: Sometime when I was out, probably during our stop on Dorscind’s World, someone had slipped in here and rearrange
d a few wires so that the intercom was continually on, at least as far as one other specific intercom was concerned. Someone who’d known what he was doing could have done it in three minutes. Still swearing, still feeling like a fool, I pulled the cover off the intercom and peered inside.
It was an intercom, all right. A simple, standard, bottom-of-the-line ship’s intercom. The kind you could buy for five commarks in any outfitter’s shop anywhere across the Spiral.
And it hadn’t been tampered with.
I stared at it for a good three minutes of my own, prodding wires aside with my screwdriver as I visually traced every one of them from start to finish at least five times. Nothing. No gimmicking, no crossed wires, no questionable components, nothing that shouldn’t be there. Nothing even left the box except two power wires and a slender coax cable—exactly the right number—which disappeared through a tiny hole in the inner hull to join the rest of the maze of wiring and plumbing laid out in the narrow gap between inner and outer hulls.
Slowly, I replaced the intercom cover, now thoroughly confused. Had we been wrong about an eavesdropper? Had the accident with the cutting torch been just that? Or if not an accident, then sabotage simply on general principles by someone who didn’t want the Icarus’s cargo examined, and not a reaction to our conversation at all?
I didn’t believe it for a minute. I’d had only a brief look at the torch head that had done its best to take off the top of Ixil’s skull, but that one look had been enough. The screw connector holding the head onto the connected hoses had had its threads badly crimped, probably with compression pliers, so that when the pressure built up enough it had come loose in that explosive fashion. As sabotage methods went it had been effective enough; but it had also been fairly clumsy and, more to the point, extremely quick and simple. Not the sort of job one would expect even an amateur to pull, at least not an amateur with the time to do the job more subtly.