Free The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn Page A

said he was all right, he probably was.
    But whether he would stay that way was now open to serious question. With that phony murder charge someone had apparently succeeded in scaring Cameron off the
Icarus
, and the guilt-by-association bit had nearly bounced me, as well. Now, Jones had been rather more permanently removed from the crew list, and Chort had come within a hair of joining him.
    And all this less than eight hours into the trip. The universe was spending the
Icarus
’s quota of bad luck with a lavish hand.
    “A pity, too,” Everett commented into my musings. “Jones being the mechanic, I mean. He might have been the only one on board who could have tracked down what went wrong with the grav generator. Now we may never know what happened.”
    “Probably,” I agreed, putting the heaviness of true conviction into my voice. If Everett—or anyone else, for that matter—thought I was just going to chalk any of this up to mysterious accident and let it go at that, I had no intention of disillusioning them. “That’s usually how it goes with this sort of thing,” I added. “You never really find out what went wrong.”
    He nodded in commiseration. “So what happens now?”
    I looked over at Jones’s body again. “We take him to port and turn him over to the authorities,” I said. “Then we keep going.”
    “Without a mechanic?” Everett frowned. “A ship this size needs all eight certificates, you know.”
    “That’s okay,” I assured him, backing out the door. “Nicabar can cover for the few hours it’ll take to get to port. After that, I know where we can pick up another mechanic. Cheap.”
    He made some puzzled-sounding reply, but I was already in the corridor and didn’t stop to hear it. Cameron’s course plan had put our first fueling stop at Trottsen, seventy-two more hours away. But a relatively minor vector change would take us instead to Xathru, only nine hours from here, where Ixil and the
Stormy Banks
were due to deliver Brother John’s illegal cargo. We needed a replacement mechanic, after all, and Ixil would fit the bill perfectly.
    Besides which, I suddenly very much wanted to have Ixil at my side. Or perhaps more precisely, to have him watching my back.

CHAPTER
4
    The parquet dockyard on Xathru was like a thousand other medium-sized spaceports scattered across the Spiral: primitive compared to Qattara Axial or one of the other InterSpiral-class ports, but still two steps above small regional hubs like the one we’d taken off from on Meima. The Parquet’s landing pits were cradle-shaped instead of simply flat, smoothly contoured to accommodate a variety of standard ship designs.
    Of course, no one in his right mind would have anticipated the
Icarus
’s lopsided shape, so even with half its bulk below ground level the floors still sloped upward. But at least here the entryway ladder could be reconfigured as a short ramp with a rise of maybe two meters instead of the ten-meter climb we had had without it. Progress.
    Nicabar volunteered to help Everett take Jones’s body to the Port Authority, where the various death forms would have to be filled out. I ran through the basic landing procedure, promised the tower that I would file my own set of accident report forms beforewe left, then grabbed one of the little runaround cars scattered randomly between the docking rectangles and headed out to the StarrComm building looming like a giant mushroom at the southern boundary of the port.
    Like most StarrComm facilities, this one was reasonably crowded. But also as usual, the high costs involved with interstellar communication led to generally short conversations, with the result that it was only about five minutes before my name was called and I was directed down one of the corridors to my designated booth. I closed the door behind me, made sure it was privacy-sealed, and after only a slight hesitation keyed for a full vid connect. It was ten times as expensive as vidless, but I had