The Icarus Hunt (29 page)

“Interesting,” Ixil murmured from beside me. “Where is everyone?”

I frowned, looking at the scene with new eyes. He was right. I’d already noted the dark buildings and empty landing-pad cluster directly in front of me; now, leaning partially out of the entryway, I could see that
none
of the nearest landing clusters was occupied. In the distance I could see what might have been the curved hulls of a pair of ships, and a couple hundred meters off to my right I could see a single taverno with its doorway lights on. But that was it. Virtually no ships, virtually no open businesses, no vehicles except for the fueler I could see heading our way along an access road, and no pedestrians at all. It was as if we’d landed in a ghost town.

“Hey, Everett, I thought you said this place was crawling with murderers and pirates,” Shawn said accusingly. “So where are they?”

“I don’t know,” Everett muttered behind me. “Something’s wrong. Something’s
very
wrong.”

“Did Landing Control say anything when you checked in?” Nicabar asked. “Disease, plague, quarantine—anything?”

“Not a word,” I said, studying the single lit taverno I could see. We were too far away for me to read the nameplate, but knowing Uncle Arthur I was willing to bet it was the Baker’s Dozen, the place he’d named in our last conversation. “Maybe they can tell us something in there,” I suggested, pointing to it. “Anyone want to join me for a little stroll?”

“Not me,” Everett said firmly. “If there’s some disease out there, I don’t want to catch it.”

“Landing Control’s legally required to alert incoming ships about medical dangers,” I reminded him.

“And this is Morsh Pon, where they use laws for
place mats,” Everett countered firmly. “Thanks, but I’ll stay here.”

“Me, too,” Shawn seconded.

“I’ll go with you,” Tera said. “I need to get out of this ship for a while.”

“Count me in, too,” Nicabar added.

“Sure,” I said, completely unsurprised by this one. Neither Tera nor Nicabar would be nearly as concerned about possible germs as they would be that I might sneak off and do something they wouldn’t approve of. “Chort? Ixil?”

“I will come,” Chort said. “Perhaps the taverno will have a bottle of
kompri
for sale.”

“They might,” I said, wondering what
kompri
was. Some Craean drink, probably. “What about you, Ixil?”

“I want to get the fuelers started first,” he said. “I’ll try to join you later.”

“Okay,” I said, pretending to believe him as I swung around and started down the ladder. He most certainly would not be joining us; he would be staying here and watching Everett and Shawn like an iguana-faced hawk. “We won’t be long.”

It was an eerie walk down the deserted access walkway, our footsteps sounding unnaturally loud in the silence. I looked into each doorway and alley as we passed it, half expecting to see dark men or aliens waiting in the darkness to ambush us. But the doorways were just as deserted as the rest of the place.

We reached the taverno without incident, to find it was indeed the Baker’s Dozen. The others close behind me, I pulled open the door and looked inside.

The place was quite large, a bit on the dark side, but otherwise surprisingly homey, with heavy wooden tables and chairs, a traditional Earth-style wooden bar running the length of the left-hand wall, and even a sunken fireplace, currently unlit, in the center of the room. It was also severely underpopulated. There was a group of a dozen scruffy-looking aliens gathered
around three of the tables near the bar, a pirate gang if ever I’d seen one; a pair of young human females sitting together at a table near the right-hand wall; and three robed and hooded figures with faces hidden hunched over a table in the far back corner. And that was it. Behind the bar, a furry-faced Ulkomaal was leaning on the countertop gazing morosely at the dead fireplace. He looked up as I walked into the room, his bony eyebrow crest turning a faint purple with surprise. “So that
was
another ship I heard,” he said, straightening up. “Welcome, patronae, welcome.”

“Thanks,” I said, glancing around at the other customers. The pirates had looked up as we entered, but after a quick assessment had turned back to their drinks. The two women were still eyeing us; the robed threesome in the back hadn’t even bothered to turn around. Maybe they were already too drunk to care, though the collection of empty glasses traditionally associated with sleeping drunks wasn’t in evidence. On the other hand, I could see that none of the tables had menu selectors, which meant the barkeep also doubled as a waiter, and from the looks of things he certainly wasn’t too busy to keep the place tidy. “You still serving?”

He sighed. “For what good it does,” he said. “Everyone else has already fled.”

“Fled from what?” Tera asked from behind me.

The barkeep sighed again. “The Balthee,” he said in a tone that managed to be both angry and resigned at the same time. “We received a report late this afternoon that they were on their way for another spraymarker raid.”

“A what?” Tera asked.

“It is an example of Balthee guilt-by-association law,” Chort spoke up as I led them to a table near the door and away from the other patrons. I took the chair that put my back to the wall, where I could watch the entrance and also keep the rest of the customers at least
within peripheral vision. Nicabar chose the chair to my left, which would put the pirates in his direct line of sight, while Tera took the seat to my right, where she couldn’t see much of anything except the door and me. If the two of them had been deliberately planning to corral me, they couldn’t have done a better job of it. “Consorting with known criminals is itself a crime under Balthee law,” Chort continued, easing himself delicately into the remaining chair.

“You are very knowledgeable,” the barkeep complimented him. “Knowing Morsh Pon’s reputation—which is wholly unjustified, I assure you—they periodically come and spray a molecularly bonded dye over all ships on our landing pads. Any such marked ship that enters a Balthee-run spaceport is immediately impounded and searched and its crew held for questioning.”

“I can see why your clientele wouldn’t want that,” I agreed, nodding toward the pirate gang at their tables. “They not get the message?”

“Their captain tells me they do not fear the Balthee,” he said, lowering his voice as he glanced in their direction. “However, another crew member confided that they plan to have all their hull plates replaced soon anyway.”

He gestured to the other two occupied tables. “As to the females, they are employees of one of the guesthouses, Shick Place. And, when the word came, the gentlebeings in back were already too inebriated to try to leave.”

He straightened up and cocked his head at me. “And what is
your
story?”

I frowned up at him. “What do you mean?”

“You are here,” he said, waving a hand at us. “Yet there is word of an impending raid.”

“Which we obviously didn’t know about, did we?” I said.

“Were no other ships leaving as you arrived?” the
barkeep countered. “Some must still have been on their way out. Did no one transmit a warning to you?”

“Yes, there were other ships leaving,” I said, putting some impatience into my voice even as a quiet warning bell went off in my ear. I’d never been on Morsh Pon before; but the criminal hangouts I
had
had occasion to visit had not been known for overly inquisitive waiters. This kind of interrogation was way out of character, even given that the barkeep was probably bored out of his skull. “And no, none of them bothered to give us a warning. Why do you think this is any of your business?”

“Don’t mind him,” a soprano voice came from my side.

I turned. One of the two women at the far table had gotten to her feet and was coming toward us. She was medium height and slender, and her step was just a bit unsteady. I wondered briefly if she could be Uncle Arthur’s information courier, but the skintight outfit she was wearing couldn’t have concealed a spare poker chip. At least, I thought incongruously, that also meant we didn’t have to worry about her being an assassin. “I’m sorry?” I said.

“I said don’t mind him,” she repeated, flipping her hand toward the Ulkomaal in the more or less universal gesture of contemptuous dismissal, the dim room light glinting momentarily off the large gaudy rings she was wearing. Now that she was facing us, I could see she was wearing the display scarf of a bar girl knotted around her neck, the particular tartan pattern advertising what services she offered and the charge for them. I wondered distantly whether Tera would know about such things; I rather hoped she didn’t. “Nurptric the Nosy, they call him,” the woman continued. “Mind if I sit down?”

“Business slow?” Tera asked, her voice frosty. Apparently, she knew all about the scarf.

The woman gave her a smile that was a good eighty
percent smirk. “Yours too?” she asked sweetly, snagging a chair from the next table and hauling it over. With a hip she deftly shoved Tera over, to Tera’s obvious consternation, and planted her chair squarely between the two of us. “I’m just being sociable, you being strangers here and all,” she added, dropping into the seat and swiveling to put her face to me and her back to Tera. “Any law against that?”

“Not too many laws against anything here,” Tera countered pointedly. “Obviously.”

“And like you say, business is slow,” the woman added, wiggling her hips and shoulders to carve a bit more room for herself. “I’m sure not going to get any decent conversation out of anyone else in here. My name’s Jennifer. How about buying me a drink?”

“How about you going somewhere else?” Tera said, starting to sound angry. “This is a private conversation.”

“Noisy, isn’t she?” Jennifer commented, an amused smile playing around her lips. “Unfriendly, too. You come here often?”

Tera half rose to her feet, sank reluctantly back into her seat as Chort put a gentle hand on her arm. “I’m afraid we’re pretty much broke, Jennifer,” I said diplomatically. “We’ve got barely enough money for the fuel we need. Nothing left over for incidentals.”

She eyed me speculatively. “Gee, that’s too bad,” she said, looking over at the Ulkomaal still hovering expectantly behind Chort. “Give me a small vodkaline, Nurp.”

His eyebrow crest turned a brief magenta, but he nevertheless nodded. “Of course. And for the rest of you?”

“Have you
kompri
, by any chance?” Chort asked.

“No, nothing like that,” Nurptric said. “We have no Craean drinks.”

“We might have some back at Shick Place,” Jennifer volunteered. “We cater to all sorts of vices there,” she
added, giving Chort a sly smile. “It’s not far away if you want to go see.”

Chort looked at me uncertainly. “If we have the time—?”

“No,” Nicabar said flatly, his tone leaving no room for argument. “As soon as the ship’s fueled, we’re out of here.”

“He’s right,” I seconded. I didn’t especially like the thought of spending any more time out in the gloom than I had to, and I certainly wasn’t going to let any of the group go wandering off on their own. “We’ll take three caff colas and a distilled water,” I added to the barkeep.

His eyebrow crest went a little mottled, either a sign of resignation or possibly contempt for such miserliness. “Yes, patronae,” he said and turned back to his bar, muttering under his breath as he went.

“Three colas and a water, huh?” Jennifer said, shaking her head. “You really
are
the big spenders.”

“As he said, we’re short on cash,” Tera said firmly. “So you might as well stop wasting your time.”

Jennifer shrugged. “Fine. You know, though, there’s an easy way to make some fast money.”

She leaned in toward the middle of the table, beckoning us in conspiratorially. “There’s a ship out there somewhere—no one knows where,” she said, dropping her voice to a murmur. “You find it, and it’s worth a hundred thousand commarks to you. Cash money.”

A matched set of Kalixiri ferrets with cold feet began running up and down my back. “Really,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “How come it’s worth that much? And who to?”

“I don’t know why they want it,” she said, half turning and snagging a folded piece of paper from the next table over that had apparently been left behind during the earlier mass exodus. “But it’s all right here,” she said, handing it to me.

I unfolded it. To my complete lack of surprise, it was
the same flyer James Fulbright had waved in my face back on Dorscind’s World.

With two unpleasant differences. First, as Jennifer had said, the reward had been jumped from the original five thousand to a hundred thousand. And second, instead of my old Mercantile Authority photo, there was a much more up-to-date sketch. An extremely good sketch.

“Sounds like a con to me,” I commented offhandedly as I folded the paper again and dropped it on the table in front of me, my skin crawling beneath the fake scars on my cheek. So that was why the Patth agent on Dorscind’s World had surrendered without even token resistance. Letting me get off the planet had been less important in his eyes than making sure he stayed alive to take back a proper description to his masters. Suddenly my disguise didn’t seem quite so comforting and impenetrable anymore. “So why show it to us?” I asked.

She waved a hand around. “You can see how it is,” she said, her eyes and voice starting to drift toward the seductive. “I’m stuck down here. But you’re not. You might run into this
Icarus
out there.”

Chort made a strange sound in the back of his throat. “What ship did you say? The
Icarus
?”

“I guess no one knows what it looks like,” she said, ignoring him, her eyes still on me and growing ever more seductive. “But they say that guy on the flyer is aboard it. You might spot the ship; you might spot him.”

“And then?” I prompted.

She leaned close to me. “Then you could call me here,” she said, breathing the words straight into my face now. The perfume mixed with the alcohol on her breath was definitely from the lower end of the price spectrum. “I know who to get the word to, and who to collect the bounty from.”