The Icarus Hunt Read Online Free Page A

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 understatementof 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,