I looked first at the main overview, noting in particular the diameter of themain sphere that made up the forward section of the ship. The number listedwas forty-one-point-three-six meters—a strangely uneven number, I thought, but oneI trusted implicitly. Ship dimensions were critically important when landing-pitassignments were being doled out, and no one ever got them wrong. Not morethan once, anyway.

Two sheets down was the one I was most interested in: the schematic for the mid deck. Digging a pen out of my inside jacket pocket, I turned the first sheetover for some clean space and started jotting down numbers.

Even given the inherent problem of fitting mainly rectangular spaces into agiant sphere, the Icarus's various rooms were quite oddly shaped, and thesemirandom placement of storage lockers, equipment modules, and pump andair-quality substations only added to the layout mess. But I was in no mood tobe balked by a set of numbers, even messy ones, and I set to work.

And in the end, they all matched.

It was not the answer I'd been expecting, and for several minutes afterrechecking my math I sat in silence scowling at the schematics. I'd been sosure that Sherlock and I had finally been on the brink of figuring this one out.

But the numbers added up perfectly, and numbers don't lie.

Or do they?

One page farther down was the lower-deck schematic, the deck I was currentlyon.

A few more minutes' work confirmed that these numbers, too, matched just fine.

But that was just the theoretical part of this project. Now it was time tomove on to the experimental work.

A laser measure would have been the most convenient, but after what hadhappenedto Ixil I was a bit leery about scrounging tools out of the Icarus's mechanicsroom. Fortunately, I didn't have to. I'd seen the printer up in Tera'scomputerroom, and I knew the size paper it used. Laying the schematics out on thefloor, I set about using them to measure my cabin. It took just over two minutes, andwhen I was done I took a couple of the sheets out into the corridor andmeasured that, too.

And when I was finished, the numbers had stopped matching.

Each of the inner-hull plates was about a meter square and held in place bysixteen connectors. The average spacer's multitool isn't really the propergadget to use for removing hull plates, but mine was a somewhat better modelthan the average and had a couple of additional blades those missed out on. Bythe time I was down to the final four—the ones in the corners—I was gettingpretty adept at the procedure. I paused long enough at that point to dig outmyflashlight and set it on the deck where it would be handy; after a moment'sthought I drew my plasmic and put it down beside the light. Then I removed thelast four connectors and eased the plate out of place.

And there, dimly seen by the reflected overhead light from my cabin, was thegray metal of the outer hull. Not twenty centimeters beyond the inner hulllike it was supposed to be, but a solid meter and a half away.

Plasmic in one hand and flashlight in the other, I leaned my head cautiouslyinto the opening and looked around. The pipes and cables and conduits thatnormally ran through the 'tweenhull area were all in evidence, fastenedsecurelyto the inner hull just the way they were supposed to be. The rest of the spacewas completely empty except for the series of struts that fastened the twohulls together. Struts, I decided, that would provide a strenuous but workablejungle-gym walkway for anyone who wanted to move unseen about the ship.

As well as a convenient work platform for, say, someone desiring to tap intothe coax cable from an intercom. Specifically, my intercom. I turned my light onthe spot off to the left where the relevant wires emerged, but it was too far awayand my angle too shallow to see with certainty whether or not anything hadbeen tampered with.

The nearest support strut in that direction was nearly half a meter away.

Layingmy gun and light on the deck beside me, I gathered my feet under me, gaugedthe distance, and leaped carefully toward it.

And with a sudden stomach-twisting disorientation, I jerked sideways andslammed hard onto my right shoulder and leg against the outer deck.

It says a lot for the shock involved that my first stunned thought was thatthe Icarus's grav generator had malfunctioned again, shutting off at the precisemoment I jumped—this despite the fact that I was now lying flat on my sideagainst the outer hull. It took another several seconds before my brain caught up with the fact that I was, in fact, lying against the outer hull, the term"lying" automatically implying a gravitational field.

Except that this gravitational field was roughly at right angles to the oneI'd just left in my cabin. The only one that the Icarus's generator could create.

The only one, in fact, that had any business existing here at all.

Slowly, carefully, I turned my head to what was now "up" from my new frame ofreference. There was my cabin, a meter above my head, with my plasmic andlightclinging unconcernedly to what was from my perspective a sheer wall. Even morecarefully, I leaned my torso up away from the hull, half expecting that thismagic grip would suddenly cease if I let go of the hull and send me slidingdown to the underside of the Icarus.

I needn't have worried. Except for the total impossibility of its vector, thisfield behaved more or less like the one created by a normal ship's gravgenerator. I reached up toward my cabin, and because I was paying closeattention I was able to feel where the two gravity vectors began to conflictwith each other a few millimeters my side of the inner hull. At least now Iknew what the anomaly was that Pix and Pax had detected while scampering beneath mybunk, and why neither they nor Ixil had been able to interpret it.

It also explained how our mysterious eavesdropper/saboteur had been able tomove around so easily. No dangerous or athletic strut-leaping required; all he hadto do was crawl around like a spider on a wall. I snagged my light and gun andbrought them to me, nearly dropping the plasmic when its weight suddenlyshifted in my grip. It might not take great athletic ability to move around in here, Iamended, but it did take some getting used to. Holstering the weapon, Ishifted myself cautiously toward my intercom, still not entirely trusting thisphenomenon.

I was easing up to get a closer look at the wires when I heard a smallscrapingsound in the distance.

For a moment I thought I'd imagined it, or else that it had merely been somenormal ship's noise distorted by the echo chamber I was lying in. But then thesound came again, and I knew I'd been right the first time.

There was someone else in here with me.

Silently, I shut off my light and put it in my pocket, at the same timedrawingmy plasmic. Then, not nearly as silently, but as silently as I could manage, Iset off down the curving hull.

It was, in retrospect, probably not the most brilliant thing I'd ever done inmylife. However it was he'd discovered this cozy little back stairway, oursaboteur surely had a better idea of the lay of the land in here than I did, including knowing where all the best hiding places and ambush sites were. Hewas furthermore presumably already acclimated to the place, whereas I was stilldistracted by the nagging feeling that at any minute the hull's peculiargravitywould fail and I would become the cue ball in a giant spherical game of bumperbilliards. But at the moment all that I could think of was that I had a chance to nail him dead to rights, and I was going to take it.

I started off by scooting along the hull on my backside, but quickly gave thatup as not nearly quiet enough, not to mention being a posture that tended toleave me with my back to the direction I was going. I tried switching to astandard hands-and-knees crawl, but after a couple of meters decided that thatwas no good either, leaving my gun hand as it did too far out of line to getoff a quick shot if necessary. The only other option I could think of was the oneI finally adopted, a crouching sort of duck waddle that was hard on the kneesand undignified in the extreme, but at least had the advantage of leaving my gunand me pointed in the same direction.