Free The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn

trying to key the camera for a better look inside the entryway. No good; Jones had turned the overhead light off and the shadow was too intense for the camera to penetrate.
    “No,” he called back. “What’s the—oh,
damn
.”
    “Yeah,” I bit out, my mind racing uselessly. With the entryway open to space, the wraparound was totally isolated from the rest of the ship by the pressure doors at either end. I could close the hatch from the bridge; but the way Jones was lying, his hand would prevent it from sealing.
    The only other way to get to him would be to depressurize one side of the ship so we could open the door. But we couldn’t depressurize the sphere—there were only two vac suits left for the four of us still in here, and I wasn’t about to trust the room or cabin doors to hold up against hard vacuum. And without a suit for Nicabar, we couldn’t depressurize the engine room, either. My eyes flicked uselessly over the monitors, searching for inspiration—
    “He’s moving,” Nicabar called suddenly. “McKell—Chort’s moving.”
    I felt my hands tighten into fists. The Craea’s body was starting to twitch, his limbs making small random movements like someone having a violent dream. “Chort?” I called toward the microphone. “Chort, this is McKell. Snap out of it—we need you.”
    “I am here,” Chort’s voice came, sounding vague and tentative. “What happened?”
    “Ship’s gravity came on,” I told him. “Never mind that now. Something’s happened to Jones—he’s not responding, and I think he’s unconscious. Can you climb up your line and get to him?”
    For a long moment he didn’t reply. I was gazing at the monitor, wondering if he’d slipped back into unconsciousness, when suddenly he twitched again; and asecond later he was pulling himself up the line with spiderlike agility.
    Thirty seconds later he was in the wraparound, pulling Jones out of the way of the door. I was ready, keying for entryway seal and repressurization of the wraparound.
    Two minutes later, we had them back in the ship.
    The effort, as it turned out, was for nothing.
    “I’m sorry, McKell,” Everett said with a tired sigh, pulling a thin blanket carefully over Jones’s face. “Your man’s been gone at least ten minutes. There’s nothing I can do.”
    I looked over at the body lying on the treatment table. The terminally sociable type, I’d dubbed him back at the spaceport. He’d been terminal, all right. “It was the rebreather, then?”
    “Definitely.” Everett picked up the scrubber unit and peeled back the covering. “Somewhere in here the system stopped scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the air and started putting carbon monoxide in. Slowly, certainly—he probably didn’t even notice it was happening. Just drifted to sleep and slipped quietly away.”
    I gazed at the hardware cradled in those large hands. “Was it an accident?”
    He gave me an odd look. “You work with air scrubbers all the time. Could something like this have happened by accident?”
    “I suppose it’s possible,” I said, the image of that massive search Ixil and I had spotted out in the Meima wilderness vivid in my memory. No, it hadn’t been any accident. Not a chance in the world of that. But there was no sense panicking Everett, either.
    “Hm,” Everett said. For another moment he looked at the scrubber, then smoothed back the covering and put it aside. “I know you’re not in the mood right now to count your blessings, but bear in mind that if Chorthad died or broken his neck in that fall, we’d have lost both of them.”
    “Blessings like this I can do without,” I said bitterly. “Have you looked at Chort yet?”
    He grunted. “Chort says he’s fine and unhurt and refuses to be looked at. If you want me to run a check on him, you’ll have to make it an order.”
    “No, that’s all right,” I told him. I’d never heard anything about the Craean culture being a particularly stoic one. If Chort