"Sorry," I apologized, grabbing his shoulders to help him regain his balance.
I straightened his collar where the impact of my shoulder had bent it, at thesame time pulling a five-commark piece out of my pocket. "My personal faultentirely," I gave the proper Bunkrel apology as I offered him the coin. "Inpartial compensation, please have a meal or drink on the labor of my arms."
He snatched the coin, grunted the proper Bunkrel wheeze of acceptance andforgiveness, and immediately changed course toward the hospitality building.
Five commarks was about ten times the compensation the accident warranted, andhe was clearly bent on spending the money before the clumsy human realized hismistake and came looking for change.
With luck, he'd also be so busy spending it he wouldn't notice that while Iwas straightening his collar I'd left him a small present. I let him get a ten- meter head start, then followed.
The hospitality center straddling the main pathway thirty meters inward fromthe entrance gate wasn't much more than your basic Ihmis taverno, just built on alarger scale and with correspondingly higher prices. I walked straight acrossthe crowded dining area, past the line of small private dining chambers, andthrough the NO ADMITTANCE door into one of the storage rooms.
As I'd expected, the room was empty, the entire staff out serving the rush ofopening-hour customers. I crossed to the service door on the far side, shuckingoff my jacket and again turning it inside out. There was no ID slot on this side, but I could wedge the Icarus tag between the zipper and covering flapwhere the scanners could read it. Unlocking the door, I stepped out into thespaceport proper again and got onto the nearest of the guidelighted slidewaysmeandering between the various landing pads. We would see now just how alertthe Ihmisits were, and how badly they wanted to follow me.
To my mild surprise, they apparently didn't want it very badly at all. Seriousinterest on their part would have meant an actual, physical tail on hand toaugment the signal from the tracker; but I kept a close watch as I shiftedbetween slideways at the prompting of the guide-lights, and saw no indicationof anyone performing a similar dance. Either my jaunt through the hospitalitybuilding and jacket switch had caught them completely by surprise, or thetracker had just been a token reaction to a possible lead who might still beof interest but probably wasn't. Or else they had no particular reason to followme because they had no idea the Icarus even existed.
Or else they knew all about the Icarus and were already waiting for me there, and all of this was simply their helpful way of offering me the rope I wouldneed to hang myself. A wonderfully cheery thought to be having at six in themorning.
I'd been riding along the slideways in what seemed like circles for aboutfifteen minutes, and was starting to quietly curse the entire Ihmis species, when the yellow guidelights running ahead of me finally turned the pink thatindicated I was there. Taking one last surreptitious look around, I hopped offmy current slideway, circled the stern of a Trinkian freighter, and cameface-to-face with the Icarus.
To say that the first sight was a letdown would be to vastly understate thecase. The ship looked like nothing I'd ever seen before; like nothing I'd everimagined before. Like nothing, for that matter, that had any business flying.
The bow section was built along standard lines, with the necessary splay- fingerhyperspace cutter array melding into the equally standard sensor/capacitornose-cone arrangement. But from that point on, anything resembling normalstarship design went straight out the window. Behind the bow the ship swelledabruptly into a large sphere, a good forty meters across, covered with thesame dark gray hull plates as the nose cone. The usual assortment of maneuveringvents were scattered around its surface, connecting aft to the ship's mainthrusters via a series of conduits running through the narrow space betweenthe inner and outer hulls.
Behind the large sphere was a smaller, twenty-meter-diameter sphere squashedupinto the aft section of the larger one, with a saddle-surface cowling coveringthe intersection between them. Behind the second sphere, looking almost likeit had been slapped on as an afterthought, was a full-size engine section thatlooked like it had come off a Kronks ore scutter, and one of the moredisreputable ones at that. Hugging the surface of the small sphere here on theship's port side, running from the aft part of the large sphere to the forwardpart of the engine section, was a hard-shell wraparound space tunnel. Near thecenter of the wraparound was the entryway, currently sealed, with a pair offloodlights stuck to the wraparound just above the top two corners. Acollapsible stairway extended the ten meters from the red-rimmed hatch down tothe ground, with an entry-code keypad on the handrail near the bottom. There was a landing skid/cushion arrangement propping up the engine section somewhat, but the bulge of the larger sphere still forced the bow cone to point up into thesky at about a ten-degree angle.
The overall visual effect was either that of an old-style rocket that hadsuddenly lost hull integrity in vacuum and bulged outward in two places, orelse some strange metallic creature that had become pregnant with twins, one ofthem a definite runt. I hadn't been expecting something sleek and impressive, butthis was just ridiculous.
"Looks like something a group of semitrained chimps put together out of a box, doesn't it?" a cheerful voice commented at my side.
I turned. A medium-sized man in his early thirties with wavy blue-streakedhair and a muscular build had come up beside me, gazing up at the Icarus with amixture of amusement and disbelief. "Succinctly put," I agreed, lowering mybagto the ground. "With one of the chimps having first spilled his coffee on theinstructions."
He grinned, setting his bag down next to mine. "I believe that between us wehave indeed captured the essence of the situation. You flying with us?"
"So I was told," I said. "Jordan McKell; pilot and navigator."
"Jaeger Jones; mechanic," he identified himself, sticking out his hand.
"Boscor Mechanics Guild."
"Good outfit," I said, shaking his hand. He had a good solid grip, the sortyou'd expect of a starship mechanic. "Been waiting long?"
"No, just a couple of minutes," he said. "Kind of surprised to be the firstone here, actually. From the way Borodin talked last night, I figured he'd be inas soon as the gates opened. But the entry's locked, and no one answered when Ibuzzed."
I stepped over to the base of the stairway and touched the OPEN command on thekeypad. There was a soft beep, but nothing happened. "You check to see ifthere were any other ways inside?" I asked, looking up at the ship again.
"Not yet," Jones said. "I went around that Trink's bow first to see if I couldsee Borodin coming, but there's no sign of him that direction. You want me tocircle the ship and see what's on the other side?"
"No, I'll do it," I said. "You wait here in case he shows up."
I headed aft along the side, circling the rest of the small sphere, thenwalkingalongside the engine section. Seen up close, some of the hull plates didindeed look like they'd been fastened on by Jones's semi-trained chimps. But for allthe cosmetic sloppiness, they seemed solid enough. I rounded the thrusternozzles—which looked more professionally installed than the hull plates—andcontinued forward along the starboard side.
I was halfway to the smaller sphere when a pair of indentations in the enginesection caught my eye. Thirty centimeters apart, they were about a centimeterwide each, and an exploring finger showed they were about two centimeters deepand five more down, running to an apparent point. Basically like the latchgrooves for a snap-fit lifeline, except that I'd never seen two of them setthis close together before. Peering up along the side of the hull, squinting in theglare of the rising sun, I could see what looked like four more pairs of theslots rising in a vertical line to the top of the engine section.