The Icarus Hunt (3 page)

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 periphery 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.”

“And why would you think that?”

“Because Arno Cameron himself was in town tonight. Offering me a job.”

Ixil’s squashed-iguana face turned to look at me. “You
are
joking.”

“Afraid not,” I assured him. “He was running under a ridiculous alias—Alexander Borodin, no less—and he’d dyed that black hair of his pure white, which made him look a good twenty years older. But it was him.” I tapped my jacket collar. “He wants me to fly him out of here tomorrow morning in a ship called the
Icarus
.”

“What did you tell him?”

“At three thousand commarks for the trip? I told him yes, of course.”

Pix sneezed again. “This is going to be awkward,” Ixil said; and then added what had to be the understatement
of the week. “Brother John is not going to be pleased.”

“No kidding,” I agreed sourly. “When was the last time Brother John was pleased about
anything
we did?”

“Those instances have been rare,” Ixil conceded. “Still, I doubt we’ve ever seen him as angry as he can get, either.”

Unfortunately, he had a point. Johnston Scotto Ryland—the “Brother” honorific was pure sarcasm on our part—was the oh-so-generous benefactor who had bailed Ixil and me out of looming financial devastation three years ago by adding the
Stormy Banks
to his private collection of smuggling ships. Weapons, illegal body parts, interdicted drugs, stolen art, stolen electronics, every disgusting variety of happyjam imaginable—you name it, we’d probably carried it. In fact, we were on a job for him right now, with yet another of his secretive little cargoes tucked away in the
Stormy Banks
’s hold.

And Ixil was right. Brother John had not clawed his way up to his exalted position among the Spiral’s worst scum peddlers by smiling and shrugging off sudden unilateral decisions by his subordinates.

“I’ll square it with him,” I promised Ixil, though how exactly I was going to do that I couldn’t quite imagine at the moment. “It was three grand, after all. How was I supposed to turn that down and still keep up the facade that we’re impoverished independent shippers?”

Ixil didn’t react, but the ferrets on his shoulders gave simultaneous twitches. Sometimes that two-way neural link could be handy if you knew what to look for. “Anyway, there’s no reason why Brother John should get warped out of shape over this,” I went on. “You can take the
Stormy Banks
the rest of the way to Xathru by yourself. Then he can have his happyjam and guns and everybody can relax. I’ll look at Cameron’s
flight path in the morning and leave you a message at Xathru as to where the most convenient place will be for you to catch up with us.”

“Regulations require a minimum of two crewers for a Capricorn-class ship,” he reminded me.

“Fine,” I said shortly. It was late, my leg and head were hurting, and I was in no mood to hear the Mercantile Code being quoted at me. Especially not from the one who’d ultimately gotten me in this mess to begin with. “There’s you, there’s Pix, and there’s Pax. That’s three of you. The details you can work out with the Port Authority in the morning.”

With that I stomped out of the living area—being careful to stomp on my good leg only—and went into the bath/dressing room. By the time I’d finished my bedtime preparations and rejoined Ixil I’d calmed down some. “Anything new?” I asked him.

He was still staring out the window, the two ferrets perched on his shoulders staring out right alongside him. “More aircraft seem to have joined in the activities,” he said. “Something out there has definitely piqued someone’s curiosity.”

“Piqued and a half,” I agreed, taking one last look and then heading for my bed. “I wonder what Cameron’s people dug up out there.”

“And who could be this interested in it,” Ixil added, turning reluctantly away from the window himself. “It may be, Jordan, that our discussion of Brother John’s cargo will turn out to be moot. You may reach the
Icarus
in the morning to find it already in someone’s hands.”

“Not a chance,” I said, easing my aching leg gingerly under the blankets.

“And why not?”

I lay back onto a lumpy pillow. Yet another lumpy pillow, at yet another lumpy spaceport, in what seemed to be an increasingly lumpy life. “Because,” I said with a sigh, “I’m not nearly that lucky.”