The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn Read Free Book Online

believe that between us we have indeed captured the essence of the situation. You flying with us?”
    “So I was told,” I said. “Jordan McKell, pilot and navigator.”
    “Jaeger Jones, mechanic,” he identified himself, sticking out his hand. “Boscor Mechanics Guild.”
    “Good outfit,” I said, shaking his hand. He had a good solid grip, the sort you’d expect of a starship mechanic. “Been waiting long?”
    “No, just a couple of minutes,” he said. “Kind of surprised to be the first one here, actually. From the way Borodin talked last night, I figured he’d be in as soon as the gates opened. But the entry’s locked, and no one answered when I buzzed.”
    I stepped over to the base of the stairway and touched the OPEN command on the keypad. There was a soft beep, but nothing happened. “You check to see if there were any other ways inside?” I asked, looking up at the ship again.
    “Not yet,” Jones said. “I went around that Trink’s bow first to see if I could see Borodin coming, but there’s no sign of him that direction. You want me to circle the ship and see what’s on the other side?”
    “No, I’ll do it,” I said. “You wait here in case he shows up.”
    I headed aft along the side, circling the rest of the small sphere, then walking alongside the engine section. Seen up close, some of the hull plates did indeed look like they’d been fastened on by Jones’s semi-trained chimps. But for all the cosmetic sloppiness, they seemed solid enough. I rounded the thruster nozzles—which looked more professionally installed than the hull plates—and continued forward along the starboard side.
    I was halfway to the smaller sphere when a pair of indentations in the engine section caught my eye. Thirty centimeters apart, they were about a centimeter wide each, and an exploring finger showed they were about two centimeters deep and five more down, running to an apparent point. Basically like the latch grooves for a snap-fit lifeline, except that I’d never seen two of them set this close together before. Peering upalong the side of the hull, squinting in the glare of the rising sun, I could see what looked like four more pairs of the slots rising in a vertical line to the top of the engine section.
    I mulled at it for a moment, but I couldn’t come up with any good reason to have a group of latch grooves here. Still, considering how unorthodox the rest of the
Icarus
’s design was, I wasn’t inclined to waste too much brainpower on the question right now. The ship’s specs should be in the computer; once we were off the ground, I could look them up and see what they were for.
    On impulse, I pulled out the now useless guidance tag and tore it in half. Loosely wadding up the pieces, I carefully stuck one into each of the lower two latch grooves, making sure they were out of view. The thin plastic wouldn’t block or impede any connector that might be put into the slot, but the act of insertion would squash the plastic down to the bottom of the groove, leaving proof that something had been there.
    I finished the rest of my inspection tour without finding anything else of particular interest. The wraparound tunnel/airlock we’d seen on the port side had no match on the starboard, as I’d thought it might, and there were no other entrances into the ship that I could see. By the time I returned to the stairway, there were four others and their luggage waiting with Jones: two men, a Craean male, and—surprisingly enough, at least to me—a young woman.
    “Ah—there you are,” Jones called as I came around the curve of the smaller sphere to join them. “Gentlefolk, this is our pilot and navigator, Captain Jordan McKell.”
    “Pleased to meet you,” I said, giving them a quick once-over as I joined the group. “I sure hope one of you knows what’s going on here.”
    “What do you mean, what’s going on?” one of the newcomers demanded in a scratchy voice. He was inhis early twenties,