Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE

  ICARUS

  TWIN

  TIMOTHY

  ZAHN

  Baen

  The Icarus Twin

  Timothy Zahn

  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.

  BAEN BOOKS by TIMOTHY ZAHN

  THE ICARUS SAGA

  The Icarus Plot

  The Icarus Twin

  The Icarus Job (forthcoming)

  Battle Luna (with Travis S. Taylor, Michael Z. Williamson, Kacey Ezell & Josh Hayes)

  Blackcollar: The Judas Solution

  Blackcollar (contains The Blackcollar and Blackcollar: The Backlash Mission)

  The Cobra Trilogy (contains Cobra, Cobra Strike, and Cobra Bargain)

  COBRA WAR

  Cobra Alliance

  Cobra Guardian

  Cobra Gamble

  COBRA REBELLION

  Cobra Slave

  Cobra Outlaw

  Cobra Traitor

  MANTICORE ASCENDANT

  A Call to Duty by David Weber & Timothy Zahn

  A Call to Arms by David Weber & Timothy Zahn with Thomas Pope

  A Call to Vengeance by David Weber & Timothy Zahn with Thomas Pope

  A Call to Insurrection by David Weber & Timothy Zahn with Thomas Pope

  The Icarus Twin

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2023 by Timothy Zahn

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-9821-9305-8

  EISBN: 978-1-62579-939-5

  Cover art by Dave Seeley

  First printing, December 2023

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Zahn, Timothy, author.

  Title: The Icarus twin / Timothy Zahn.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Publishing Enterprises, 2023. | Series:

  The Icarus saga ; 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2023036754 (print) | LCCN 2023036755 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781982193058 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781625799395 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Science fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3576.A33 I296 2023 (print) | LCC PS3576.A33 (ebook)

  | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20230817

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036754

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036755

  Printed in the United States of America

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CHAPTER ONE

  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.”