But if there was one thing certain about the Icarus, it was that nothing here ever approached what one might consider normal circ.u.mstances. And at this point, the latest express delivery of abnormal circ.u.mstances seemed to be whatever the nameless oddity was that existed around, under, or inside my bunk.

Plasmic still in hand, I eased carefully onto my stomach on the deck again and just as carefully wiggled my way under the bunk. It was a tight squeeze-a three-tier bunk hasn't got a lot of s.p.a.ce underneath it-but I was able to get my head and most of my upper body under without triggering any bouts of latent claustrophobia. I wished I'd thought to snag the flashlight from my jacket, but enough of the cabin's overhead light was diffusing in to give me a fairly reasonable view.

The problem was, as I'd already noted, there was nothing there to see. I was surrounded by a bare metal deck, a bare metal wall, and a wire-mesh-and- mattress bunk of the type that had been around for centuries for the simple reason that no one yet had come up with a better compromise between marginal comfort and minimal manufacturing cost.

I wiggled my way back out, got to my feet, and spent a few more minutes going over the entire room millimeter by millimeter. Like the area under the bunk, there wasn't anything to see.

Nothing obvious, at least. But I knew Ixil, and if he said his outriders had found something odd, then they'd found something odd; and suddenly I decided I didn't much care for the silence and solitude of my cabin. Replacing my plasmic in its holster, I pulled my jacket on over it and left.

I didn't expect there to be much happening aboard the Icarus at that hour, and as I climbed the aft ladder to the mid deck I discovered I was right. Tera was on bridge-monitor duty-with, typically for her, the door closed-Chort and Ixil were back in the engine room, and Everett, Nicabar, and Shawn were presumably in their cabins on the upper deck. I thought I might find someone in the dayroom, either eating or watching a vid, but the place was as deserted as the corridor outside it. Either everyone had felt more in need of sleep than food, or else the camaraderie temperature reading aboard the Icarus was still hovering down around the liquid-nitrogen mark. Somewhere in the same vicinity, I decided sourly, as my progress at figuring out what was going on.

Just aft of the dayroom was the sick bay. On impulse, wondering perhaps if Everett might still be up, I touched the release pad and opened the door.

There was indeed someone there, dimly visible in the low night-light setting.

But it wasn't Everett. "h.e.l.lo?" Shawn called, lifting his head from the examination table to peer across the room at me. "Who is it?"

"McKell," I told him, turning up the light a bit and letting the door slide shut behind me. "Sorry to disturb you-I was looking for Everett."

"He's on the bridge," Shawn said, nodding toward the intercom beside thetable.

"Said it was his turn to earn his keep around here and told Tera to go to bed.

You can call him if you want."

"No, that's all right," I said, suppressing a flicker of annoyance. Strictly speaking, Tera should have cleared any such shift changes with me, but she and Everett had probably thought I was trying to catch up on my own sleep and hadn't wanted to disturb me. And the ship's medic was supposed to be available for swing shifts if any of the regular crewers were unable to cover theirs. "How come you're still here?" I asked, crossing the room toward him.

He smiled wanly. "Everett thought it would be best if I stayed put for a while."

"Ah," I said intelligently, belatedly spotting the answer to my question. With the dim light and the way the folds in his clothing lay, I hadn't seen until now the straps pinning his arms and legs gently but firmly to the table. "Well..."

My discomfort must have been obvious. "Don't worry," he hastened to a.s.sure me.

"Actually, the straps were my suggestion. It's safer for everyone this way. In case the stuff he gave me wears off too quickly. I guess you didn't know."

"No, I didn't," I admitted, feeling annoyed with myself. With the unexpected entry of the Patth into this game dominating my thoughts, I'd totally forgotten about Shawn's performance at the airlock. "I guess I just a.s.sumed Everett had given you a sedative and sent you off to bed in your own cabin."

"Yes, well, sedatives don't work all that well with my condition," Shawn said.

"Unfortunately."

"You did say he'd given you something, though, right?" I asked, swinging out

one.

of the swivel stools and sitting down beside him. Now, close up, I could see that beneath the restraints his arms and legs were trembling.

"Something more potent at quieting nerves," he told me. "I'm not sure exactly what it was."

"And why do your nerves need quieting?" I asked.

A quick series of emotions chased themselves across his face. I held his gaze, letting him come to the decision at his own speed. Eventually, he did.

"Because of a small problem I've got," he said with an almost-sigh. "Sort of qualifies as a drug dependency."

"Which one?" I asked, mentally running through the various drug symptoms I knew and trying without success to match them to Shawn's behavior patterns. Ixil had suggested earlier that the kid's emotional swings might be drug-related, but as far as I knew he hadn't been able to nail down a specific type, either.

And Shawn's answer did indeed come as a complete surprise. "Borandis," he said.

"Also sometimes called jackalspit. I doubt you've ever heard of it."

"Actually, I think I have," I said carefully, the hairs rising unpleasantly on the back of my neck even as I tried to put some innocent uncertainty into my voice. I knew about borandis, all right. Knew it and its various charming cousins all too well. "It's one of those semilegit drugs, as I recall.

Seriously controlled but not flat-out prohibited."

"Oh, it's flat-out prohibited most places," he said, frowning slightly as he studied me. Maybe my uncertainty act hadn't been enough; maybe he didn't thinka simple cargo hauler should even be aware of such sinful things, let alone know any of the details. "But in most human areas it's available by prescription.

If you have one of the relevant diseases, that is."

"And?" I invited.

His lips tightened briefly. "I've got the disease. Just not the prescription."

"And why don't you have the prescription?"

He smiled tightly. "Because I had the misfortune to pick up the disease in a slightly illegal way. I-well, some friends and I went on a little private trip to Ephis a few years ago."

"Really," I said. That word wasn't the first thing that popped into my mind; the phrase criminal stupidity held that honor. "That one I've definitely heard of.

Interdicted world, right?"

His smile went from tight to bitter. "That's the place," he said. "And I can tell you right now that not a single thing you've heard about that h.e.l.lhole is hyperbole." His mouth twitched. "But of course, sophisticated college kids like us were too smart to be taken in by infantile governmental scare tactics. And we naturally didn't believe bureaucrats had any right to tell us where we could or couldn't go-"

He broke off, a violent shiver running through him once before his body settled back down to its low-level trembling. "It's called Cole's disease," he said, his voice sounding suddenly very tired. "It's not much fun."

"I don't know many diseases that are," I said. "Are the rules for interdicted planets really that strict? That you can't even get a prescription for your medicine, I mean?"

He snorted softly, and for a moment a flicker of the old Shawn pierced the fatigue and trembling, the arrogant kid who knew it all and looked down with contempt on mere mortals like me who weren't smart or educated or enlightened enough. "Strict enough that even admitting I'd been to Ephis would earn me an automatic ten-year prison sentence," he bit out. "I don't think a guaranteed supply of borandis is quite worth that, do you?"

"I guess not," I said, making sure to sound properly chastened. People like Shawn, I knew, could often be persuaded to offer up deep, dark secrets for no better reason than to prove they had them. "So how do you get by?"

He shrugged, a somewhat abbreviated gesture given the strictures of the restraints. "There are always dealers around-you just have to know how to find them. Most of the time it's not too hard. Or too expensive."

"And what happens if you don't get it?" I asked. Drugs I knew, interdicted worlds I knew; but exotic diseases weren't part of my standard repertoire.

"It's a degenerative neurological disease," he said, his lip twitching slightly.

"You can see the muscular trembling has already started."

"That's not just the borandis withdrawal?"

"The withdrawal is part of it," he said. "It's hard to tell-the symptoms kind of mix together. That's followed by irritability, severe mood swings, short-term memory failure, and a generally high annoyance factor." Again, that bitter smile. "You may have noticed that last one when I first got to the ship on Meima. I'd just taken a dose, but I'd pushed the timing a little and it hadn't kicked in yet."I nodded, remembering how much calmer, even friendly, he'd been a few hours later during Chort's ill-fated s.p.a.cewalk. "Remind me never to go into a s.p.a.ceport taverno with you before your pill," I said. "You'd get both our necks broken within the first three minutes."

He shivered. "Sometimes I think that would be a better way to go," he said quietly. "Anyway, if I still don't get a dose, I get louder and more irrational and sometimes even violent."

"Is that still a mixture of withdrawal and disease?"

"That one's mostly withdrawal," he said. "After that, the disease takes over and we start edging into neural damage. First the reversible kind, later the nonreversible. Eventually, I die. From all reports, not especially pleasantly."

Offhand, I couldn't think of many pleasant ways to die, except possibly in your sleep of old age, which given my early choices in life wasn't an option I was likely to face. If Shawn persisted in pulling stunts like sneaking onto interdicted worlds, it wasn't likely to remain one of his options, either.

Still, there was no sense in letting the old man with the scythe get at any of us too easily. "How long before the neural damage starts?" I asked.

He gave another of his abbreviated shrugs. "We've got a little time yet," he said. "Nine or ten hours at least. Maybe twelve."

"From right now?"

"Yes." He smiled. "Of course, you probably won't want to be anywhere around me well before that. I'm not going to be very good company." The smile faded. "We can get to a supplier before then, can't we? I thought I heard Tera say it was only about six hours away to wherever the h.e.l.l we're headed."

"Mintarius," I said, making a show of consulting my watch. In reality, I was thinking hard. I'd originally picked Mintarius precisely because it was close, small, quiet, and unlikely to have the equipment to distinguish our latest ship's ID from a genuine one. A perfect place to slip in, get the fuel our unexpectedly quick exit from Dorscind's World had lost us, and slip out again.

Unfortunately, Mintarius's backwater status also meant that illegal drug suppliers would be few and far between. And those who were there were likely to concentrate on the lowest common denominators like happyjam, not the more esoteric, semimedicinal ones.

I thought about that, and about the increasingly serious Patth search for us, and about the fact that Shawn's decision to go to Ephis had been a voluntary signing of his own death certificate anyway. But no matter how I sorted them out in the balance, there really wasn't any choice.

"It's actually a little farther than that," I told Shawn, getting to my feet.

"Don't worry, though, we should make it in plenty of time. a.s.suming things go as planned-"

I broke off suddenly, turning my head and stretching out with all my ears.

Barely heard over my own voice had been a faint dull metallic thud. The same unexplained sound, as near as I could tell, that I'd heard in the wraparound just after we'd left Xathru.

"What?" Shawn demanded, making no attempt to keep his voice down. "What's the problem?"

"I thought I heard something," I told him, suppressing the exceptionally impolite word I wanted to say. There might have been a follow-up sound, or evena lingering echo that could have given me a chance of figuring out its approximate direction. But both those chances were gone now, buried under Shawn's inopportune and overly loudmouthed question.

"What, you mean that thunking sound?" he scoffed. "It's nothing. You hear it every once in a while."

I frowned, my annoyance with his bad timing vanishing into sudden new interest.

"You've heard it before?"

"Sure," he said, some of that old Shawn arrogance creeping into his tone.

"Couple of times just while I've been lying here today. You want my opinion, it's probably something in the flush equipment in the head."

"Could be," I said noncommittally. He could have whatever opinion he wanted, but I'd been flying for half my life and there was absolutely nothing in a ship's plumbing that could make that kind of noise. "You said Tera went back to her cabin?"

"All I said was that Everett relieved her," he corrected me, his tone suddenly testy. "She could have gone outside for a walk for all I know." He waved a hand impatiently around the strap. "Look, what does any of this have to do with my medicine? Nothing, that's what. You are going to be able to get it, right?"

"I'll do what I can," I said, reaching down and swinging the swivel stool back into storage again. Clearly, the obnoxious stage of Shawn's withdrawal was starting, and I'd already had as much of that as I needed for one trip. "I'll see you later. Try to get some rest."

"Yeah," he muttered as I made my way to the door. "Sure-easy for you to say.

What a bunch of-"

The sliding door cut off the noun. Just as well. I started to turn toward the bridge; but as I did so I caught the soft sound and faint vibration of a heavy footstep from behind me. I turned to see Ixil come into the corridor from the wraparound, a toolbox in his hand. "Trouble?" he murmured.

"No more than usual around here," I told him, not wanting to get into Shawn's problems just now. "I thought I might as well go and relieve Everett on the bridge."

Pix and Pax twitched at that, Ixil no doubt wondering what our medic was doing on bridge watch when Tera was supposed to be holding the fort there. But he clearly wasn't any more interested in holding serious conversations in open corridors than I was, and merely nodded. "We found the problem with the modulator relay," he said, continuing on down the corridor toward me. "All fixed."

"Good," I said, lifting my eyebrows and nodding fractionally behind me and to my right, toward the door to the mechanics shop. He nodded back, just as fractionally. Now, when everyone seemed to have taken themselves elsewhere, would be an excellent time for him to see what kind of cutting equipment Cameron had left us.

We went the rest of the way forward together in silence, Ixil breaking off to the left to the mechanics-room door aft of the bridge, me continuing the rest of the way past the forward access ladder to the bridge door. I tapped the release pad, and the door slid open.

For a moment I just stood there, staring in disbelief at the sight before me.

Everett, his bulk nearly filling the small s.p.a.ce between the command console and nav table, was half-turned to face me, his arms and right leg lifted in whatlooked like a grotesque parody of some kind of ballet step.

For a moment we stared at each other, and behind those blue eyes I watched his self-conscious embarra.s.sment change almost reluctantly to a sort of stubborn pride. Then, very deliberately, he looked away and lowered his right foot back to the deck, his hands and arms tracing out a complicated design in the air as he did so. Just as deliberately, he moved his left foot around behind his right, his hands shifting again through the air.

And suddenly, belatedly, I realized what he was doing. Not ballet, not some odd playacting posturing, but a martial-arts kata.

I waited where I was, not moving or speaking, until he'd finished the form.

"Sorry about that," he said, breaking the silence at last as he straightened up from his final crouch and squeezed back into the restraint chair. "I was feeling a little dozy, and a bit of exercise always perks me up."

"No apology or explanation needed," I a.s.sured him, stepping into the bridge but leaving the door locked open behind me. Back when we'd first met, I remembered thinking his face had that slightly battered look of someone who'd done time with high-contact sports. Apparently, that snap judgment had been correct.

"What form was that? I don't think I've ever seen it before."

"It's not one usually put on display," he said, rubbing a sleeve across his forehead. Not that there'd been any sweat there that I could see. Maybe he kept it all inside the wrinkles. "Are you a pract.i.tioner or connoisseur of the martial arts?"

"Neither," I said. "I got a smattering of self-defense training when I was in EarthGuard, but there was no particular style involved and I was never all that good at it. But my college roommate was a certified nut on the subject, watching everything he could find, and I picked up some of it by sheer osmosis." I nodded toward the empty section of deck where he'd been performing. "Actually, what that reminded me of most was throw-boxing."

Everett lifted his eyebrows. "Very good. Yes, that was indeed a throw-boxing training kata. I did a bit of the professional circuit when I was younger." He snorted gently. "And in better shape, of course."

"Very impressive," I said, and meant it. I'd dealt with professional throw-boxers once or twice in my life, and knew the kind of tough breed those men and women were. "How long ago was that?"

"Oh, a good twenty years now," he said. "And you wouldn't be nearly so impressed if you knew my win/loss record." He frowned at me. "What are you doing here, by the way? I thought you were asleep."