The Icarus Twin

Book : The Icarus Saga

by Timothy Zahn

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Crime & Mystery; Space Opera

Synopsis

A NEW NOVEL IN THE ICARUS SERIES FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF THE ADMIRAL THRAWN STAR WARS NOVELS TIMOTHY ZAHN

For years Gregory Roarke and his Kadolian partner Selene worked as crocketts, combing through the atmospheres of uninhabited worlds for places that might be colonized or hold valuable resources. Now, they quietly work for the Icarus Group, a top-secret government organization hunting for portals created by a long-vanished alien race, portals that can teleport a person hundreds or thousands of light-years in the blink of an eye.

Roarke and Selene are searching one such possibility when they find that someone appears to be stalking them. They evade their pursuers and return to find that a man named Easton Dent has been searching the Spiral’s databases for the names Gregory Roarke and Icarus.

Roarke reluctantly agrees to meet with him. But that first contact is cut short, and hours later Roarke is arrested and accused of Dent’s murder.

More importantly to Roarke’s Icarus Group overseers, that brief meeting also confirms that Dent was in recent contact with a portal.

But the alien Patth are also searching for such portals, and they are also on the trail. It’s now a race . . . and the Patth have resources and ruthlessness far beyond anything Roarke and Selene can match.

Release date: December 5, 2023

Publisher: Baen

Print pages: 400

Sample

Chapter 1

 

The popular image of Trailblazers, when the populace thinks about us at all, is one of rugged, solitary figures flying among the stars, searching square-jawedly among the Spiral’s thousands of uninhabited worlds, braving tedium, pirates, and claim-jumpers, searching for places with the climate and resources to offer hope to the weary masses, triumphing in the end as they guide those same masses to their new worlds and their new lives. We’re probably assumed to sing hearty wayfarer shanties along the way, too.

As usual, popular culture has it completely wrong. Crocketts are almost never alone, given that the upper atmospheric launch and retrieval of bioprobes is nearly impossible for a single person to pull off. We aren’t any more square-jawed than the rest of the Spiral’s population, we certainly don’t find promising new worlds every episode, the pirates know we don’t have anything worth stealing, and the claim-jumpers don’t show up until a report and claim have actually been filed.

And as for the tedium—

The Ruth gave another violent lurch, this one throwing me hard enough against my straps to leave bruises and jolting me out of the tangent line of thought the previous lurch had jolted me into. “Selene!” I shouted toward the intercom.

“I know,” she called back, her normally soft and delicate Kadolian voice strained almost beyond recognition. “I don’t know where this turbulence came from. There was nothing showing until it was right on top of us.”

“Never mind how it got here,” I called back, setting my teeth as another gust of wind sent the Ruth skittering a few degrees to portside. Our two bioprobes were on their way up, and unless we did something fast they were going to run smack damn into this mass of swirling air. The little torpedo-shaped gadgets weren’t all that delicate, and while the air at this altitude wasn’t dense enough for even the mightiest gusts to damage them it was more than powerful enough to blow them way and hell off their preprogrammed courses. With their fuel tanks running toward dry, it wouldn’t take much of a delay to send them angling away and then plunging them and their hard-won samples to the surface far below.

But as my father used to say, Teaching the dog to fetch usually takes longer than just getting the darn thing yourself. “I need you to run us a sixty-degree down-pitch,” I told Selene, eyeing the status board and doing a quick mental calculation. “Keep us on that vector for eighty seconds, then pull up level again. Got that?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” I said. “How’s the ship doing?”

There was a brief pause, and I could visualize her nostrils working and her eyelashes fluttering as she sampled the ship’s air with her incredibly hypersensitive sense of smell. All of my displays and gauges were assuring me that the Ruth was holding up just fine, but systems that were about to go gunnybags often gave off a subtly altered scent that Selene could pick up, usually before the monitor programs figured it out. “We’re all right,” she said. “The starboard grav beam generator is running a little hot, but I don’t think it’s going to be trouble.”

I mouthed a curse. As if we weren’t going to have enough trouble getting the bioprobes back aboard without having to deal with a possibly balky grav generator. “If that changes, let me know,” I said. “We may have to try a grapevine.”

“All right,” she said, her voice suddenly cautious.

“Yeah, me too,” I agreed. Using a single grav beam to sequentially snatch both bioprobes was hard enough in calm air. It would be exponentially trickier with the Ruth bouncing around like a water droplet on a hot griddle. “But if it comes to that, we won’t have a choice. Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Gazing at the status board, I counted out three more seconds. “Go.”

The deck dropped out from under me as the Ruth’s gravity plates took a fraction of a second to adjust to Selene’s sudden maneuver. I watched the displays, focusing on the bioprobes rising up toward us, bracing

 myself for even more turbulence as we dipped deeper into the atmosphere. A small part of my mind noted the oddity that the buffeting we were receiving seemed to be easing up a little as we descended into thicker air.

And then the bioprobes lurched into sight, and I had no attention to spare for anything else. I watched as the Ruth’s computer pinged the probes’ transponders and locked on the tight-core grav beams. The starboard grav generator was still holding on, with no indication of imminent failure. Both bioprobes were angling up toward the Ruth now—

Without warning, the portside probe gave a violent twitch, twisted out of the grav beam’s focal point, and disappeared back into the swirling air below us.

“Gregory!” Selene snapped.

“I see it,” I shouted back from between clenched teeth. My first impulse was to tell her to go into another dive and chase after it.

But if we did that, we would lose the other bioprobe, still a few seconds from being reeled into its bay.

As my father used to say, A bird in the hand is worth a thousand up in a tree two towns over. “Just hold us steady until we’ve got the first one aboard,” I told her. “After that, if I can track the other one, we’ll go after it.”

“All right.”

The sensors were set for narrow beam; great if you were looking for bioprobes that were where they were supposed to be, less great if one of them had gone walkies. I switched over to a wider beam, boosted the power, and aimed them downward.

There, far below us, was the last thing I would ever have expected to see, out here in the middle of nowhere, in the atmosphere of an unnamed and—so far, at least—unwanted world.

Another ship.

It was already right at the edge of the sensors’ atmospheric range, dropping rapidly through the atmosphere, and I got only a glimpse before it disappeared from sight.

But that glimpse was enough. It was another Trailblazer ship, all right, poking around the same planet we were.

And if the signal from our wayward transponder was accurate, they’d just poached our bioprobe and its samples.

“What in the—? Gregory!”

“I see it,” I gritted out. But there was nothing we could do. With the single bioprobe we were still reeling in all we had left, it was more vital than ever that we bring it safely aboard. If we lost it, too, this whole trip would have been for nothing.

Of course, it had probably been for nothing anyway. But it was important to stay positive in these things. At least we were on salary now instead of doing our crockett trips at piecework rates.

Which didn’t make it any easier to swallow the fact that the poachers down there were going to get away with their crime and their prize.

But as my father used to say, Being angry doesn’t do you any good, or the other guy any harm. So I took a deep breath, ran through the whole list of expletives I wanted to say, and focused on getting our remaining

bioprobe back home.

For once, the universe smiled in our favor. Or, more likely, it got distracted and forgot we were here. As the poacher and our lost property vanished, so did the sudden turbulence that had plagued us for the past few minutes. The bioprobe was pulled in and locked in its bay exactly like it was supposed to, and a few minutes after that Selene had us pulling for space.

Thirty minutes later, once again in hyperspace, we suited up and headed to the Ruth’s clean room to see what exactly our most recent atmospheric jaunt had scored for us.

* * *

Once again, what it had scored for us was a big fat zero.

“I believe that makes seventeen in a row,” I growled as Selene finished packing away the ampules, now loaded with the seeds, spores, and other biological whatnot the bioprobe had scooped from the planet’s atmosphere. “Not exactly batting a thousand here.”

“It’s not that bad,” Selene soothed as she took off her exam smock and folded it into the laundry hamper. “There were at least three samples in this group that showed medicinal potential.”

“I suppose,” I conceded.

And really, up until recently that would have been more than enough to justify the trip. Most of the crocketts plying the spacelanes out there would be doing cartwheels, or at least cautious somersaults, over a haul like that.

But we weren’t looking for interesting biochemicals or even habitable planets anymore. Six months ago, we’d been handed a new charter: to begin a quiet search for more of the alien star portals that had first been found and identified by the ultrasecret Icarus Group.

No one knew who’d created the things or where they came from, and after almost seven years of trying the Icarus researchers had only barely scratched the surface of learning how exactly they worked. What we did know was that they were the biggest potential game-changer in the field of interstellar commerce and travel since the Patthaaunutth unleashed their fancy Talariac Drive on the Spiral two decades ago. With the Talariac four times faster and three times cheaper than any other stardrive on the market, it had quickly risen to dominate all the major trade routes and many of the smaller ones, a lofty position the drive and the Patth still held.

The only thing that had kept the Talariac from forcing every other drive into oblivion was the fact that the Patth were completely paranoid about their trade secrets leaking out. They’d set things up so that only their own pilots could fly the damn things, and only because they’d had critical parts of the access circuitry and visual display feedback systems surgically implanted into their faces and bodies.

Since there were only so many Patth pilots available for other people to hire, there was at least a little breathing space for everyone else who wanted to make a living flying between the stars.

But the Patth dominance would crash and burn if anyone could locate enough Icarus portals to create even a limited transport network. So far there were only three of them known, and all three were under the control—more or less—of the Icarus Group.

Unfortunately, the Patth had had a taste of the portals’ potential, and were hell-bent on starting a collection of their own. Their agents were out there, hunting quietly but furiously for hints or rumors, probably focusing on the portals’ unique double-sphere shape. The Patth Director General had the people, he had the resources, and he had the burning desire to keep his species on top.

What he didn’t have was Selene.

Portal hull metal gave off a faint but distinctive odor, a scent that even the Icarus Group’s best sensors couldn’t sift out of an olfactory background. But Selene could. She could sniff out even the most minute hint of the stuff.

Which was what we were doing out here. In theory, if there was a portal lying around on a given Planet X, sending a probe down to bring up a biosphere sample might also include a few of those hull-metal molecules, which Selene might then be able to sniff out.

There were a lot of ifs and mights in that theory, enough to make a reasonable person wonder if the approach was worth the effort and money. But the Icarus Group had been poking around alien artifacts for a long time, and they apparently had money to burn.

Still, seventeen failures in a row was bound to eventually attract the attention of whoever was handling Admiral Sir Graym-Barker’s budget. Sooner or later they would conclude that the Ruth was a money sink, and we’d be back to scrambling for clients who were just looking for habitable worlds and possible medical biomolecules instead of exotic alien technology.

“What is it?” Selene asked.

At the beginning of our relationship, her steadily improving ability to pick up on my mood shifts via the corresponding changes in my scent had struck me as rather creepy. Now, I just considered it a convenient conversational time-saver. “I was just thinking about how it used to be,” I said. “Us hustling for clients and fending off poachers trying to underbid us for contracts. That got me thinking about our other poachers back there.”

“I’ve been thinking about them, too,” she said, the pupils of her deep-set gray cats’ eyes showing puzzled thought. “I only got a glimpse of the ship, but it looked like it had four large bulges, one at each corner.”

“It did indeed,” I said, rather surprised she’d spotted even that much with most of her attention on keeping the Ruth flying straight. “Pretty sure they were tiltrotors.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought,” she said, her confusion deepening. “But I thought tiltrotor ships were designed for deeper atmosphere studies.” 

“They are,” I said. “Which means either they were minding their own business, heading up through atmo, and just happened to come up right beneath us and close enough to steal our probe—”

“Which seems unlikely,” Selene murmured.

“Which seems extremely unlikely,” I agreed. “Especially since we now know they were running a particularly delicate lift balance, probably using the center rotors spinning one direction to give them lift while the peripherals blew that wonderful windstorm in our figurative face to keep us busy.”

“All of which I assume takes a certain amount of preparation.”

“Preparation and foresight both,” I said. “Which takes us to Option Two: They were deliberately stalking us.”

A shiver ran through Selene’s body. “They know we’re working for Icarus.”

“Not necessarily,” I said in my most calming voice, knowing full well that fudging the issue was probably a waste of effort. “They could just be normal poachers. They could have tracked our vector from Billingsgate, waited out at a distance until we were in atmo and our attention focused below us, then slipped in somewhere else and moved underneath us. It could have nothing to do with Icarus.”

“Why would anyone have followed us from Billingsgate in the first place?” she countered. “We’re not important enough for anyone to keep tabs on.” Her pupils gave a little wince. “Anyone except Nask.”

I felt my throat tighten. She was right on that one, anyway. Sub-Director Nask, former head of the Patth Firefall project, had more than enough reason to keep us on his radar.

It was unlikely that he knew about the special portal scent we were searching for. But we were licensed crocketts, and it wouldn’t take a huge leap of logic on his part to guess Graym-Barker might have hired us. A quick search of the records to see how many samples we’d submitted to the Association of Planetary Trailblazers in the past six months—that number being zero—and he’d have a pretty good idea what we were up to.

Or he might not care about what we were doing at all, but was merely looking for a chance to extract a pound of flesh from each of us. We’d been instrumental in ruining his hoped-for moment of triumph and glory, and I was pretty sure Patth weren’t the forgive-and-forget types.

Of course, he did owe us for pointing out our former employer Luko Varsi’s private arrangement with someone high up in the Patth hierarchy. Still, given everything else, I doubted that would shift the balance scales much.

“I highly doubt it was Nask himself,” I soothed. “He must surely have better things to do than personally follow us around the Spiral.”

“Even if he knows

we’re working for Icarus?”

“Working with Icarus,” I corrected reflexively. I still refused to think of us as anything but independent contractors, no matter how big a monthly stipend Graym-Barker dropped into our account on Xathru.

“Working with Icarus,” Selene corrected, her pupils showing exaggerated patience. “I note you’re not answering the question.”

I sighed. “Yes, that might make a difference,” I conceded. “But whoever it was, there’s not a lot we can do about it. You put us on a course for Reichsbach, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Do you want to change that?”

“I think we need to,” I said, popping the clean room’s hatch and stepping out into the corridor. “Finish up here and meet me on the bridge.”

I was poring over the maps on the navigation console when she arrived. “Where are we going?” she asked.

I gave the maps one more look and came to a decision. “Marjolaine,” I said, keying it into the navigational console. “It’s close, it’s got a sparse enough traffic flow that we should be able to spot anyone following us, but it also has six StarrComm centers we can choose from. Even Nask can’t cover that many, at least not seriously.”

Selene didn’t answer. Probably thinking that a Patth sub-director could surely whistle up the resources to do damn near anything he wanted. “What about this?” she asked, holding out one of the ampules from the clean room.

“Is that one of the promising samples?” I asked.

“It’s the most promising sample, yes.”

I scowled. With visions of angry Patth and their nasty, corona-weapon-wielding Iykam lackeys drifting across my mind’s eye, I really didn’t have much interest in playing biomolecule roulette, no matter how promising the sample was.

But there were Icarus’s accountants to think of, plus whatever limits might be on Graym-Barker’s patience. Six months was already a long time for a single gig, and I’d be stupid to assume it would last forever.

And Nask’s hopes notwithstanding, it was still possible Selene and I would live to a ripe old age. Tucking away a little financial insurance would be only prudent.

“I guess we should take it along,” I said, pushing up my left sleeve.

The plasmic blast that had burned away my left arm below the elbow and simultaneously ended our bounty hunter careers still occasionally resonated in my nightmares. Still, the artificial replacement I’d been wearing for the past five and a half years was comfortable enough, and it did most everything the original flesh-and-blood model could do.

Along with one or two handy additions.

The smaller of the two hidden compartments, the one I’d carved out by pushing aside some of the internal wires and sensor clusters on the inner part of the wrist, was just big enough for a half dozen pills. Back

when I’d first been fitted with the arm I mostly kept painkillers in there, but since then I’d switched over to a set of potent knockout pills. With a good deal of practice, I was now able to pop the covering, pluck out a pill with the first two fingers of my right hand, and drop it in someone’s drink, all without being noticed.

But the larger compartment, the one situated in the inner forearm just below the elbow, was the real key. That one was the perfect size to hold a standard Trailblazer ampule, where it would be hidden from the prying eyes of customs agents, clients I wasn’t ready to share with, or just nosey bystanders. I popped it open, took the ampule from Selene and tucked it inside, and closed it up again.

“I assume you’re planning to call the admiral?” Selene asked as I pulled the sleeve back into place.

“First on our list of things to do,” I confirmed. “We need to warn him that someone may be on to us. Because if they’re on to us, they’re probably on to Icarus, too.”

“Nask is already on to Icarus.”

“That assumes he was our recent playmate,” I reminded her. “It still could have been a random poacher. At any rate, we need to keep our options open.”

She pondered while I double-checked our course and confirmed we were on the way to Marjolaine. “And second on our list of things to do?” she asked.

“We give him the rest of the good news,” I said. “As my father used to say, If your cloud has a silver lining, odds are someone else owns the mineral rights.”

“And the lining in the admiral’s particular cloud is . . . ?”

“That he gets to buy us a new bioprobe.”

 

CHAPTER 2

 

I’d never been to Marjolaine, but the place had a fair reputation for cultural refinement, an above-average one for restaurants, and an excellent one for tavernos and local whiskeys.

For a people who prided themselves on their weekly challenges as to who could remain conscious the longest during a drinking contest, their customs officials were unexpectedly alert and efficient. I transmitted our names and the Ruth’s ID as we approached and got a cheerful greeting and a landing slot assignment that was within a fifteen-minute drive of our chosen StarrComm center. Arriving along with the landing slot’s coordinates and approach vector was a colorful brochure with business and tourism highlights, top-rated places to eat and drink, and helpful tips on how to converse with the planet’s human, Drilie, and Saffi residents.

I had no intention of staying long enough to take advantage of any of those recommendations or advice, of course. But I appreciated the thought.

No one suddenly popped into space-normal behind us as we headed inward toward the surface. But that didn’t completely eliminate the possibility that we’d been followed. Luckily, as I’d pointed out to Selene, there were six StarrComm facilities to choose from, which we’d chosen among using a random toss of a die. Unless our hypothetical tail was very careful, following us to the right one without being spotted would be well-nigh impossible. If Nask or someone else was trying to chase us down, it seemed only sporting to make him work for it.

We’d ended up picking one of the busier centers, and as a result had to wait nearly an hour before we got a booth. But finally we were inside, secure from prying eyes and ears. I fed in the required number of bills—Graym-Barker preferred we use cash for our communications rather than something more convenient but also more traceable—and punched in the proper number.

I’d never figured out if Icarus had their own private StarrComm transmitter or if they were just playing some multi-transfer game that bounced the signals around beyond anyone’s ability to track. That system was hardly new—the Spiral’s biggest criminal bosses had been using something similar for decades. But given Icarus’s ultra-top-secret status, and with some of the best computer people presumably on payroll, I was guessing Graym-Barker’s system was likely the most protected one ever.

Unless the Patth had something better. Now that I thought about it, they probably did.

Usually our calls went through a receptionist who confirmed we were who the signal ID said we were and then routed us directly to the admiral. Today, though, things played out a bit differently. We were greeted by the usual neutral-faced young receptionist; but the face that replaced hers wasn’t Graym-Barker’s. It was, in fact—

“Finally,” Tera C said. Her expression and tone were a nicely balanced mix of relief and tension. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you for over two weeks.”

“In case you’d forgotten, we were out in the middle of nowhere in the lovely CR-207-T system,” I reminded her. “Not many StarrComm centers out—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Tera cut me off. “Never mind that. Do you know a man named Easton Dent?”

I frowned. “I don’t think so. Should I?”

“That’s the question,” Tera countered. “See if he looks familiar.”

Her image vanished and was replaced by a picture of a man in his thirties with tousled hair, a three-day beard stubble, and an irritated expression. “Don’t know the name or the face,” I said. “Why do we care about him?”

Dent’s face disappeared and Tera came back, her eyes boring into mine. “Because for the past four months he’s been doing identity and location searches for the names Gregory Roarke and Icarus.”

I sat up a little straighter, noting as I did so the little catch in Selene’s voice that usually meant surprise or uneasiness. “Combined or separate?”

“Some of both,” Tera said. “None of the searches has gotten him very far, though. Icarus has too many mythological and cultural connections, and I was frankly surprised at how common the name Roarke is.” 

“And you’re just noticing all this activity now?”

“Of course not,” Tera said patiently. “We noticed it when he first started poking around. We’ve just left him alone until now because he wasn’t making any headway and no one else seemed to have picked up on him.”

I felt my stomach tighten. “Only now someone has,” I said as the pieces started falling together. “Let me guess: the Patth?”

“Probably,” she said, her eyes narrowing slightly. “You don’t sound surprised.”

“We had a brief game of capture the flag on our last scoop,” I told her. “Someone sneaked up on us and snatched one of our bioprobes. Speaking of which, you need to get us a replacement—”

“They stole a bioprobe?”

“It’s all right,” Selene spoke up. “We retrieved the other one, and there was nothing of interest in it.”

“I see,” Tera said, her brief moment of heightened concern fading away. Though how she thought anyone other than Selene would be able to glean portal clues from a bioprobe I couldn’t guess. “And you think it was the Patth?”

I shrugged. “The Patth, or some random poacher.”

“Or perhaps Easton Dent?” Selene suggested quietly.

“That’s kind of a jump,” I said, frowning. “Or does he have a habit of walking off with things that aren’t his?”

“Actually, he does,” Tera said, peering at something offscreen. “Though nothing on that scale. Up to now he’s mostly been a fairly petty thief, though there are indications he’s moving up into smuggling.”

“Which he would need a ship for,” Selene pointed out.

“Yeah, but crockett ships come with some pretty specialized gear,” I countered. “You wouldn’t fork over the money for all of that if you didn’t need it.”

“Unless you were trying to deflect attention away from you,” Selene said.

That was a good point, actually. “What about it, Tera? Is Dent running enough high-end stuff to have extra money to burn on fancying up his ship?”

“Possibly,” Tera said. “But so far the packages he’s transporting are pretty small. He could get by with a midsize ship.”

“How big exactly are these packages?”

“Gems or other compact items from a thief or sometimes from a fence.”

“Small enough for him to carry in a travel bag?” I asked. “Because in that case, he wouldn’t need to bother with his own ship. He could just go with commercial transport.”

“Sounds risky,” Selene persisted. Clearly, she wasn’t ready to give up on her theory about our mysterious Mr. Dent being the bioprobe poacher. “What happens if customs or the liner’s own security catches him?”

“Actually, so far nobody’s security has been able to even spot him in the act, let alone tag him with any stolen goods,” Tera said. ...