The Icarus Hunt

by Timothy Zahn

  “All set,” he said, tapping his tunic. “I’ve got the papers right here.”

  “Let me see them.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not necessary. I’ll be aboard well before—”

  “Let me see them.”

  For a second he had the expression of someone who was seriously considering standing up and going to look for a pilot with a better grasp of the proper servility involved in an owner/employee relationship. But he merely dug into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a thin stack of cards. Maybe he liked my spirit, or maybe he was just running out of time to find someone to fly his ship for him.

  I leafed through them. The papers were for a modified Orion-class freighter called the Icarus, Earth registry, mastership listed as one Alexander Borodin. They were also copies, not the originals he’d implied he was carrying. “You Borodin?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” he said. “As you see, everything’s in order for a morning lift.”

  “Certainly looks that way,” I agreed. All the required checks had been done: engine room, thrusters and stardrive, computer, cargo customs—

  I frowned. “What’s this ‘sealed cargo section’ business?”

  “Just what it says,” he told me. “The cargo hold is situated in the aft-center section of the ship, and was sealed on Gamm against all entry or inspection. The Gamm port authority license is there.”

  “Came in from Gamm, did you?” I commented, finding the license on the next card down. “Quiet little place.”

  “Yes. A bit primitive, though.”

  “It is that,” I agreed, stacking the cards together again. I glanced at the top card again, making careful note of the lift and clearance codes that had been assigned to the Icarus, and handed them back across the table. “All right, you’ve got yourself a captain. What’s the up-front pay?”

  “One thousand commarks,” he said. “Payable on your arrival at the ship in the morning. Another two thousand once we make Earth. It’s all I can afford,” he added, a bit defensively.

  Three thousand in all, for a job that would probably take five or six weeks to complete. I certainly wasn’t going to get rich on that kind of pay, but I probably wouldn’t starve, either. Provided he picked up the fuel and port duty fees along the way, of course. For a moment I thought about trying to bargain him up, but the look on his face implied it would be a waste of time. “Fine,” I said. “You have a tag for me?”

  “Right here,” he said, rummaging around inside his jacket again, his expression twitching briefly with surprise that I had not, in fact, tried to squeeze him for more money as he’d obviously expected me to do. Briefly, I wondered which direction that had moved his opinion of me, but gave up the exercise as both unprofitable and irrelevant.

  His probing hand found what it was looking for, and emerged holding a three-by-seven-centimeter plastic tag covered with colored dots. Another Ihmis quirk, this one their refusal to number or in any other way differentiate the two hundred-odd landing squares at their spaceport. The only way to find a particular ship—or a particular service center or customs office or supply depot, for that matter—was to have one of these handy little tags on you. Slid into the transparent ID slot in a landing jacket collar, the tag’s dot code would be read by sensors set up at each intersection, whereupon walk-mounted guidelights would point the befuddled wearer in the proper direction. It made for rather protracted travel sometimes, but the Ihmisits liked it and it wasn’t much more than a minor inconvenience for anyone else. My assumption had always been that someone’s brother-in-law owned the tag-making concession. “Anything else you need to know?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him as I slid the tag into my collar slot in front of the one keyed to guide me back to the Stormy Banks. “Why? You in a hurry?”

  “I have one or two other things yet to do tonight, yes,” he said as he set down his cup and stood up. “Good evening, Captain McKell. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll be there.” I nodded.

  He nodded back and headed across the taverno, maneuvering through the maze of tables and the occasional wandering customer, and disappeared through the door. I took a sip of my vodkaline, counted to twenty, and headed off after him.

  I didn’t want to look like I was hurrying, and as a result it took me maybe half a minute longer to get across the taverno than it had taken him. But that was all right. There were a lot of spacers roaming the streets out there, but the overhead lights outside were pretty good, and with all that white hair he should be easy enough to spot and follow. Pushing open the door, I stepped out into the cool night air.

  I had forgotten about the Yavanni. They hadn’t forgotten about me.

  They were waiting near the entrance, partly concealed behind one of the decorative glass entryway windbreaks that stuck a meter outward from the wall on either side of the door itself. Recognizing a particular alien is always a dicey proposition, but obviously this bunch had mastered the technique. Even as I stepped out from the shelter of the windbreaks, they began moving purposefully toward me, the one in front showing a noticeable forward slouch.

  I had to do something, and I had to do it fast. They’d abandoned their previous territorial game—that much was obvious from the way they bunched together as they moved confidently toward me. I’d shamed them in front of the whole taverno, and what they undoubtedly had in mind was a complete demonstration as to why that had been a bad decision on my part. I thought about digging inside my jacket for my gun, realized instantly that any such move would be suicide; thought about ducking back into the taverno, realized that would do nothing but postpone the confrontation.

  Which left me only one real option. Bracing myself, I took a quick step partway back into the windbreak, turned ninety degrees to my left, and kicked backward as hard as I could with my right foot.

  In most other places windbreaks like these were made out of a highly resilient plastic. The Vyssiluyas preferred glass—tough glass, to be sure, but glass nonetheless. With three angry Yavanni lumbering toward me I was understandably in no mood for half measures, and the force of the kick seemed to shoot straight through my spine to the top of my head. But I achieved the desired result: the glass panel blew out, scattering a hundred pieces across the landscape.

  I caught my balance and jumped backward through the now mostly empty box frame. A large wedge of jagged glass that was still hanging tentatively onto the side of the frame scraped at my jacket as I went through. Trying to avoid slicing my fingers on the edges, I got a grip on it and broke it free. Brandishing it like a makeshift knife, I jabbed at the Yavanni.

  The Yavanne in front stopped short, generating a brief bit of vaguely comedic confusion as the other two bumped into him. For all their bulk and aggressiveness, Yavanni are remarkably sensitive to the sight of their own blood, and the thought of charging into a knife or knifelike instrument can give even the hardiest a moment of pause. But only a moment. Like most other unpleasantries, anticipation is often worse than the actual event, and as soon as their molasses minds remembered that they’d be all over me.

  But I wasn’t planning to be here when that happened. With the windbreak gone and the Yavanni bunched together, I now had a completely clear exit route at my back. Flipping my shard of glass at the lead Yavanne, I turned and ran for it.

  I got only a couple of steps before they set up a startled howl and lurched into gear after me. They’d eventually get me, too—in a long straightaway human legs couldn’t outmatch Yavannian ones. But for the first few seconds, until they got all that body mass moving, I had the advantage. All I had to do was find something to do with it.

  I knew better than to waste time looking over my shoulder, but I could tell from the sounds of their foot thuds that I still had a reasonably good lead when I reached the corner of the taverno and swung around into the narrow pedestrian alleyway separating it from the next building over. An empty alleyway, unfortunately, without what I’d hoped to find there. The Yavanni hove
around the corner; lowering my head, I put all my effort into getting every drop of speed I could out of my legs. They would probably get me, I knew, before I could circle the building completely. If what I was looking for wasn’t around back, I was going to be in for some serious pain.

  I rounded the next corner with the Yavanni uncomfortably close behind me. And there it was, just as I’d hoped to find it: a pile of half-meter-long logs for the taverno’s big fireplace, neatly stacked against the wall and reaching nearly to the eaves of the roof. Without slowing my pace, I headed up.

  I nearly didn’t make it. The Yavanni were right on my heels and going far too fast to stop, and their big feet slammed into the logs like bowling disks hitting the pins. The whole pile went rippling down behind me, and if I’d been a fraction of a second slower I’d have gone down right along with it. As it was, I came within an ace of missing my flying leap upward at the eaves when my takeoff log bobbled under my feet and robbed me of some hard-earned momentum. But I made it and got the desired grip, and a second later had hauled myself over the edge and onto the roof.

  Not any too soon, either. I was just swinging my legs up over the edge when one of the logs came whistling up past the eaves to disappear into the night sky. My playmates below, proving themselves to be sore losers. I didn’t know whether Yavanni were good enough jumpers to get to the roof without the aid of the woodpile they’d just demolished, but I had no particular desire to find out the hard way. Keeping my head down—there were plenty more logs where that first one had come from—I got my feet under me and headed across the roof.

  All the buildings in this section of the spaceport periphery were reasonably uniform in height, with only those narrow alleys separating them. With a little momentum, a gentle tailwind, and the inspirational mental image of irritated Yavanni behind me I made it across the gap to the next rooftop with half a meter to spare. I angled across that one, did a more marginal leap to the building abutting against its back, and kept going. Along the way I managed to get out of my jacket and turn it inside out, replacing the black leather with an obnoxiously loud paisley lining that I’d had put in for just this sort of circumstance. Aiming for a building with smoke curling out of its chimney, I located its woodpile and made my way down.

  The Yavanni were nowhere to be seen when I reentered the main thoroughfare and the wandering groups of spacers, townspeople, come-ons, and pickpockets.

  Unfortunately, neither was the white-haired man I’d been hoping to follow.

  I poked around the area for another hour, popping in and out of a few more tavernos and dives on the assumption that my new employer might still be trolling for crewers. But I didn’t see him anywhere; and the spaceport periphery was far too big for a one-man search. Besides, my leg was aching from that kick to the windbreak, and I needed to be at the spaceport when it opened at five-thirty.

  The Vyssiluyas ran a decent autocab service in their part of the periphery, but that thousand commarks I’d been promised weren’t due until I showed up at the Icarus, and the oversize manager of the slightly seedy hotel where Ixil and I were staying would be very unhappy if we didn’t have the necessary cash to pay the bill in the morning. Reluctantly, I decided that two arguments with large aliens in the same twelve-hour period would be pushing it, and headed back on foot.

  My leg was hurting all the way up to my skull by the time I finished the last of the four flights of stairs and slid my key into the slot beside the door. With visions of a soft bed, gently pulsating Vyssiluyan relaxation lights, and a glass of Scotch dancing with the ache behind my forehead, I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  The soft bed and Scotch were still a possibility. But the lights apparently weren’t. The room was completely dark.

  I went the rest of the way into the room in a half fall, half dive that sent me sprawling face first onto the floor as I yanked my plasmic out of its concealed holster under my left armpit. Ixil was supposed to be waiting here; and a darkened room could only mean that someone had taken him out and was lying in wait for me.

  “Jordan?” a smooth and very familiar Kalixiri voice called from across the room. “Is that you?”

  I felt the sudden surge of adrenaline turn into chagrined embarrassment and drain away through my aching leg where it could hurt some more on its way out. “I thought you’d still be up,” I said blackly, resisting the urge to trot out some of the colorful language that had earned me a seat in front of that court-martial board so many years ago.

  “I am up,” he said. “Come take a look at this.”

  With an amazingly patient sigh, I clicked the safety back on my plasmic and slid the weapon back into its holster. With Ixil, the object of interest could be anything from a distant nebula he’d spotted through the haze of city lights to an interesting glow-in-the-dark spider crawling across the window. “Be right there,” I grunted. Hauling myself to my feet, I kicked the door closed and rounded the half wall into the main part of the room.

  For most people, I suppose, Ixil and his ilk would be considered as much a visual nightmare as the charming Yavanni lads I’d left back at the taverno. He was a typical Kalix: squat, broad-shouldered, with a face that had more than once been unflatteringly compared to that of a squashed iguana.

  And as he stood in silhouette against the window, I noticed that this particular Kalix was also decidedly asymmetric. One of those broad shoulders—the right one—appeared to be hunched up like a cartoonist’s caricature of a muscle-bound throw-boxer, while the other was much flatter. “You’re missing someone,” I commented, tapping him on the flat shoulder.

  “I sent Pix up onto the roof,” Ixil said in that cultured Kalixiri voice that fits so badly with the species’ rugged exterior. One of the last remaining simple pleasures in my life, in fact, was watching the reactions of people meeting him for the first time who up till then had only spoken with him on vidless starconnects. Some of those reactions were absolutely priceless.

  “Did you, now,” I said, circling around to his right side. As I did so, the lump on top of that shoulder twitched and uncurled itself, and a whiskered nose probed briefly into my ear. “Hello, Pax,” I greeted it, reaching over to scritch the animal behind its mouselike ear.

  The Kalixiri name for the creatures was unpronounceable by human vocal apparatus, so I usually called them ferrets, which they did sort of resemble in their lean, furry way, though in size they weren’t much bigger than laboratory rats. In the distant past, they had served as outriders for Kalixiri hunters, running ahead to locate prey and then returning to their masters with the information.

  What distinguished them from dogs or grockners or any of a hundred other similar hunting partners was the unique symbiotic relationship between them and their Kalixiri masters. With Pax riding on Ixil’s shoulder, his claws dug into the tough outer skin, Pax’s nervous system was right now directly linked to Ixil’s. Ixil could give him a mental order, which would download into Pax’s limited brain capacity; and when he returned and reconnected, the download would go the opposite direction, letting Ixil see, hear, and smell everything the ferret had experienced during their time apart.

  For Kalixiri hunters the advantages of the arrangement were obvious. For Ixil, a starship-engine mechanic, the ferrets were invaluable in dealing with wiring or tubing or anything else involving tight spaces or narrow conduits. If more of his people had taken an interest in going into offworld mechanical and electronic work, I’d often thought, the Kalixiri might well have taken over that field the same way the Patth had done with general shipping.

  “So what on the roof do you expect to find interesting?” I asked, giving Pax another scritch and wondering for the millionth time whether Ixil got the same scritch through their neural link. He’d never commented about it, but that could just be Ixil.

  “Not on the roof,” Ixil said, lifting a massive arm. “Off of it. Over there.”

  I frowned where he was pointing. Off in the distance, beyond the buildings of the spaceport peri
phery and the more respectable city beyond it, was a gentle glow against the wispy clouds of the nighttime sky. As I watched, three thruster sparks lifted from the area and headed off horizontally in different directions. “Interesting,” I said, watching one of the sparks. It was hard to tell, given our distance and perspective, but the craft seemed to be traveling remarkably slowly and zigzagging as it went.

  “I noticed it about forty minutes ago,” Ixil said. “I thought at first it was the reflected light from a new community that I simply hadn’t seen before. But I checked the map, and there’s nothing that direction except a row of hills and the wasteland region we flew over on our way in.”

  “Could it be a fire?” I suggested doubtfully.

  “Unlikely,” Ixil said. “The glow isn’t red enough, and I’ve seen no evidence of smoke. I was wondering if it might be a search-and-rescue operation.”

  From the edge of the window came a gentle scrabbling sound; and with a soft rodent sneeze Pix appeared on the sill. A sinuous leap over to Ixil’s arm, a quick scamper—with those claws digging for footholds the whole way up—and he was once again crouched in his place on Ixil’s shoulder.

  There was a tiny scratching sound like a fingernail on leather that always made me wince, and for a moment Ixil stood silently as he ran through the memories he was now pulling from the ferret’s small brain. “Interesting,” he said. “From the parallax, it appears to be considerably farther out than I first thought. Well beyond the hills, probably ten kilometers into the wilderness.”

  Which meant the glow was also a lot brighter than I’d thought. What could anyone want out there in the middle of nowhere?

  My chest tightened, the ache in my leg suddenly forgotten. “You don’t happen to know,” I asked with studied casualness, “where exactly that archaeology dig is that the Cameron Group’s been funding, do you?”

  “Somewhere out in that wilderness,” Ixil said. “I don’t know the precise location.”

  “I do,” I said. “I’ll make you a small wager it’s smack-dab in the middle of that glow.”