"And which is my side?"

"The side of getting the Icarus and its cargo to Earth intact," I told her. "Icould have turned you in on Dorscind's World, too. In fact, I risked gettingshot in order not to."

I waved a hand at Ixil. "And as for Ixil here, someone aboard—and I presumeit's all the same person—is apparently trying to scare him off the ship. While therest of you were out searching for Shawn on Potosi, he left the makings forpoison gas inside the door of Ixil's cabin. And then, for good measure, smashed the release pad to keep everyone else out."

Tera stared at me. "No. I don't believe it."

I shrugged. "You can ask Everett. He was there when we found the stuff."

"The point is that someone's been operating behind the scenes," Ixil said.

"But apparently, so have you and your father, for whatever reasons of your own."

"And the only way we're going to figure out who this other person is," Iconcluded, "is for you to tell us which were Cameron and Daughter Productionsand which weren't." No doubt about it, I decided, Ixil and I could be dazzlingin our logic when we wanted to be. "So: back to the beginning. How did you endup aboard the Icarus?"

If Tera was dazzled, she was hiding it well. But if she wasn't totallyconvinced, she was nevertheless convinced enough. "Dad was funding anarchaeological dig on Meima," she said, pulling off the blanket and swingingher legs over the side of the bunk. She was fully dressed, I noted, the sort ofthing that someone who's expecting trouble automatically does. She hadn'tneeded our arguments to know there was trouble aboard. "About three months ago theysent word that they'd found something big, something that could conceivablychange the course of history."

"Archaeologists do get a bit dramatic sometimes," I murmured. "Especially atfunding time."

"In this instance they may have understated the case," Tera said, droppingonto the deck and sitting down on the middle bunk. "Dad heard their description, and decided we needed to get it back to Earth as quickly and secretly as possible.

It took him a month to make the necessary preparations, after which he flew atech team in with the Icarus packed in pieces in shipping crates. Theyassembled the ship underground, the only place they could do it where they wouldn't beseen. A week ago Dad and I flew into Meima ourselves to oversee the final stages. He came in on his private ship, the Mensana, while I took a commercialliner under a false ID."

"Why?" Ixil asked. "Why did you come in by liner, I mean?"

"I was the ace up his sleeve," she said, a tight smile touching her lipsbrieflybefore vanishing again. "Or so he said. None of the others were to know I wasthere—as he pointed out, you can't leak information you don't have. My job wasto keep an eye on the Ihmisit authorities and try to get us a heads up ifanyonestarted showing undue interest in our activities."

"Having a starship suddenly appear out in the middle of nowhere would probablydo that," I said.

"It wasn't supposed to happen that way," Tera said, glaring at me. "Give us alittle credit. Dad had another team building a copy of the Icarus at one ofhis heavy construction plants on Rachna. The idea was for the copy to fly in, creating a nice official presence and data trail along the way, and get alllegally inspected at the Meima port. Then it would fly out to the dig, we'dmake a switch, and fly the original out. By the time anyone stumbled across thecopyhidden in the cavern, we figured we'd be on Earth."

"What went wrong?" Ixil asked.

Tera grimaced. "Two of those bumpy aliens that slut Jennifer was trying towake up at the Morsh Pon taverno sneaked into the dig somehow," she said bitterly.

"They got Dr. Chou before they could be stopped. It was horrible—I wasn'tthere, but Dad said their weapons burned him alive."

"Yes, I've seen them in action," I said, feeling my own stomach turning withthe memory. "It is definitely not pretty."

Her forehead creased. "That's right; she said you'd killed a couple of them, didn't she?"

"In self-defense only, I assure you," I told her, wondering what her reactionwould be if I told her that far from trying to wake the Lumpies up, Jenniferhad instead been dabbing them with soporific from an injector ring to make suretheir blissful sleep lasted until well after the Icarus was off the planet. "Ihope you did something similar with your batch."

She shivered. "We killed them, yes," she said quietly. "Like you, inself-defense."

"But you knew they would have friends?" Ixil prompted.

"Yes." Visibly, Tera shook the thoughts of death away from her. "We—they, rather—knew they had to get the Icarus out right away. So they mixed up aconcoction that would scramble the spaceport sensors, blew the roof off thecavern, and Dad and the Mensana's pilot sneaked the ship up and off theplanet."

"Why turn around and come back?" I asked. "Why didn't they put everyone aboardwhile they could and head straight out?"

"Because not everyone was ready to go," she sighed. "There were several keypeople out of the immediate area, and we didn't want to leave without them. Wealso knew that after the explosion the Ihmisits would come to investigate, andwe thought having the whole group still there would alleviate any suspicionsthey might have about the explosion."

She shook her head. "We never expected the official reaction to be sointense."

"That's because the Patth were already involved," I said, nodding heavily.

"Onlythere was no way you could know that. The Lumpies seem to be their hiredmuscle of choice."

"I guess so," she said. "Anyway, the Ihmisits descended on the dig like a packof jackals, found Dr. Chou and the two alien bodies, and arrested everyone insight. One of the techs managed to slip out of the noose long enough to get totown and warn Dad, but he was then picked up an hour later. They got Dad'spilot, too, and the rest of those who'd been off the dig site."

"Did the Ihmisits know your father was on Meima?" Ixil asked.

"Not at first," she said. "I'm sure that's what saved him. By the time theybacktracked the pilot to his ship, he'd already hired all the crewers heneeded.

Luckily, the computer the group had been using for their analysis—the WorthramT-66 down there—was one of the few computer systems I actually knew how tooperate, so he decided I would come aboard as the computer tech."

"Were you involved with the rest of the hiring?" I asked.

She shook her head. "He wanted me completely out of it. He still thought of meas his ace, and he didn't want to risk us even being seen in the same tavernotogether."

"Too bad," Ixil said. "It might have been useful to compare everyone'srecruiting story with an independent source."

"I can't help you there," Tera said. "Anyway, after everything was set he wentto ground somewhere for the night, and in the morning headed for the ship."

"How did he get in?" I asked. "I checked the time lock he'd set on the hatch, and it hadn't been opened."

"There's a secondary hatch on the top of the engine section," she said. "Justaft of the smaller sphere. He climbed up a collapsible ladder set into thestarboard side and went in, taking the ladder in with him. It and the hatchboth are hidden behind all that tangle of pipes and cables back there."

So that was what the twin lines of latch grooves I'd seen on the engineeringhull were for: anchor points for the ladder. "And since the guidance tags he'dgiven out would bring all of us to the ship from the port side, he figuredthat even if one of us got there before he was all the way inside he'd still be allright."

"You being the single question mark," she said. "I spotted you waiting at thesouth gate, ready to go charging in as soon as they opened up. Dad was goingin the west gate, but the south gate was slightly closer, and I was afraid you'dget there ahead of him."