The Icarus Hunt Read Online Free

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 theother 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 spacesor 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