The Icarus Hunt Read Online Free Page B

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’sflight 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.”

CHAPTER
2
    The sky to sunward was gaudy with splashes of pink and yellow when I arrived at the spaceport at five the next morning. A crowd of spacers, humans and aliens both, was already milling around the gates, most of them impatient to get to their ships and head out on the next leg of their journeys. A few of the more impatient were making the standard disparaging comments about Ihmis customs; the Ihmis door wardens standing watch by the gates as usual ignored them.
    There were no Patth in the waiting group, of course. Over the past few years there had been enough of what the diplomats call “unpleasant incidents” around spaceports for most port authorities to assign Patth ships their own gates, service facilities, and waiting areas. Port authorities hate dealing with the paperwork associated with assault and murder, and planetary governments are even less interested in earning the sort of sanctions the Patth routinely dish out for any affront to their people, real or imagined.
    Which, come to think about it, made the three PatthI’d seen mixing with the common folk at the taverno last night something of an anomaly. Either they’d been young and brash, old and confident of local protection, or simply very thirsty. Distantly, I wondered if they’d run into any accidents on their way home.
    At 5:31 the edge of the sun appeared over the horizon; and at that moment the gates unlocked and swung open. I joined the mass of beings flowing through,