The Icarus Hunt (2 page)

“That makes sense,” I said, trying not to sound too
sarcastic. “What exactly
do
you need—a fourth for bridge?”

He leaned a little closer to me across the table. “I already have a ship,” he said, his voice dropping to a murmur. “It’s sitting at the spaceport, fueled and cargoed and ready to go. All I need is a crew to fly her.”

“Interesting trick,” I complimented him. “Getting a ship here without a crew, I mean.”

His lips compressed. “I had a crew yesterday. They jumped ship this morning after we landed for refueling.”

“Why?”

He waved a hand. “Personality conflicts, factional disputes—that sort of thing. Apparently, both factions decided to jump without realizing the other side was going to, too. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m not going to make my schedule unless I get some help together, and quickly.”

I leaned back in my chair and favored him with a sly smile. “So in other words, you’re basically stuck here. How very inconvenient for you. What kind of ship are we talking about?”

“It’s the equivalent of an Orion-class,” he said, looking like a man suddenly noticing a bad taste in his mouth. Revising his earlier estimate of me downward, no doubt, as his estimate of how much money I was going to try to squeeze out of him went the opposite direction. “Not a standard Orion, you understand, but similar in size and—”

“You need a minimum of six crewers, then,” I said. “Three each certified competent in bridge and engine-room operations. All eight specialty certificates represented: navigation, piloting, electronics, mechanics, computer, drive, hull/spacewalk, and medical.”

“I see you’re well versed in the Mercantile Code.”

“Part of my job,” I said. “As I said, I can cover nav and piloting. How many of the rest are you missing?”

He smiled crookedly. “Why? You have some friends who need work?”

“I might. What do you need?”

“I appreciate the offer.” He was still smiling, but the laugh lines had hardened a bit. “But I’d prefer to choose my own crew.”

I shrugged. “Fine by me. I was just trying to save you a little running around. What about me personally? Am I in?”

He eyed me another couple of heartbeats. “If you want the job,” he said at last, not sounding entirely happy with the decision.

Deliberately, I turned my head a few degrees to the left and looked at a trio of gray-robed Patthaaunutth sitting at the center of the bar, gazing haughtily out at the rest of the patrons like self-proclaimed lords surveying their private demesne. “Were you expecting me to turn you down?” I asked, hearing the edge of bitterness in my voice.

He followed my gaze, lifting his mug for a sip, and even out of the corner of my eye I could see him wince a little behind the rim of the cup. “No,” he said quietly. “I suppose not.”

I nodded silently. The Talariac Drive had hit the trade routes of the Spiral a little over fifteen years ago, and in that brief time the Patth had gone from being a third-rate race of Machiavellian little connivers to near domination of shipping here in our cozy corner of the galaxy. Hardly a surprise, of course: with the Talariac four times faster and three times cheaper than anyone else’s stardrive, it didn’t take a corporate genius to figure out which ships were the ones to hire.

Which had left the rest of us between a very big rock and a very hard vacuum. There were still a fair number of smaller routes and some overflow traffic that the Patth hadn’t gotten around to yet, but there were too many non-Patth ships chasing too few jobs and the resulting economic chaos had been devastating. A few of
the big shipping corporations were still hanging on, but most of the independents had been either starved out of business or reduced to intrasystem shipping, where stardrives weren’t necessary.

Or had turned their ships to other, less virtuous lines of work.

One of the Patth at the table turned his head slightly, and from beneath his hood I caught a glint of the electronic implants set into that gaunt, mahogany-red face. The Patth had a good thing going, all right, and they had no intention of losing it. Patth starships were individually keyed to their respective pilots, with small but crucial bits of the Talariac access circuitry and visual display feedback systems implanted into the pilot’s body. There’d been some misgivings about that when the system first hit the Spiral—shipping execs had worried that an injury to the Patth pilot en route could strand their valuable cargo out in the middle of nowhere, and there was a lot of nowhere out there to lose something as small as a starship in. The Patth had countered by adding one or two backup pilots to each ship, which had lowered the risk of accident without compromising the shroud of secrecy they were determined to keep around the Talariac. Without the circuitry implanted in its pilot—and with a whole raft of other safeguards built into the hardware of the drive itself—borrowing or stealing a Patth ship would gain you exactly zero information.

Or so the reasoning went. The fact that no bootleg copies of the Talariac had yet appeared anywhere on the market tended to support that theory.

The man across from me set his mug back down on the table with a slightly impatient-sounding clunk. Turning my eyes and thoughts away from the hooded Patth, I got back to business. “What time do you want to leave?”

“As early as possible,” he said. “Say, six tomorrow morning.”

I thought about that. Meima was an Ihmis colony world, and one of the peculiarities of Ihmisit-run spaceports was that shippers weren’t allowed inside the port between sundown and sunup, with the entire port sealed during those hours. Alien-psychology experts usually attributed this to some quirk of Ihmis superstition; I personally put it down to the healthy hotel business the policy generated at the spaceport’s periphery. “Sunrise tomorrow’s not until five-thirty,” I pointed out. “Doesn’t leave much time for preflight checks.”

“The ship’s all ready to go,” he reminded me.

“We check it anyway before we fly,” I told him.

“That’s what ‘preflight’ means. What about clearances?”

“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.