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

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE

  ICARUS

  CHANGELING

  TIMOTHY ZAHN

  The Icarus Changeling

  Timothy Zahn

  AN EASY ASSIGNMENT INSTEAD TURNS HARD AND LEADS TO A STRING OF MURDERS, AND A RACE AGAINST AN ALIEN ENEMY

  Gregory Roarke—former bounty hunter, former Trailblazer, current agent for the ultra-secret Icarus Group—has received a new assignment: locate a suspected but as-yet undiscovered teleportation portal on the backwater colony world of Alainn.

  The rival Patth are also searching for the device, and have considerably more resources at their disposal. Fortunately, Roarke has Selene and her incredibly sensitive Kadolian sense of smell. On paper, it should be a straightforward enough job.

  But that was before there was a murder in the small town of Bilswift . . . and another one . . . and the discovery that the Patth are already on the scene and have narrowed the search to a heavily forested area in the hills and mountains east of town.

  Most disturbing of all is the discovery that one of Selene’s people, a Kadolian teenaged boy named Tirano, is working at one of Bilswift’s fish markets. A boy who may have lost his parents before his proper socialization was completed. A boy who may be connected to both the murders and the Patth.

  A boy who may be the potentially dangerous wild card that the Kadolians call changelings.

  BAEN BOOKS by TIMOTHY ZAHN

  THE ICARUS SAGA

  The Icarus Plot

  The Icarus Twin

  The Icarus Job

  The Icarus Changeling

  The Icarus Needle (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 Changeling

  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 © 2024 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: 978-1-9821-9348-5

  eISBN: 978-1-6257-9967-8

  Cover art by Dave Seeley

  First printing, July 2024

  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 changeling / Timothy Zahn.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Books, 2024. | Series: The Icarus Saga ;

  4

  Identifiers: LCCN 2024005427 (print) | LCCN 2024005428 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781982193485 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781625799678 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Science fiction. | Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3576.A33 I26 2024 (print) | LCC PS3576.A33 (ebook)

  | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20240207

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024005427

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024005428

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  As my father used to say, When you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, odds are you’re hunting someone, being hunted by someone, or been ordered there by someone. The first two someones probably aren’t any happier to be there than you are; the third someone probably doesn’t care.

  Alainn wasn’t exactly the middle of nowhere. I could grant it that much. Actually, the planet as a whole was a reasonably well-respected regional hub, with a couple of Spiral-1 Class landing fields in each hemisphere that ran a brisk traffic in transshipped goods from the planets around the system. When Selene and I had first been ordered there, I’d had visions of decent barbeque and better-than-decent Dewar’s scotch.

  Unfortunately, even the most advanced planet had patches of nowhere. On Alainn, that nowhere included the town of Bilswift.

  And like my father’s saying went, I was pretty sure Admiral Sir Graym-Barker had the third category pretty well covered.

  “Interesting,” Selene murmured as we walked down the zigzag ramp configuration from the Ruth’s entryway. The Spiral-1 Class fields had landing cradles that would let us reconfigure the zigzag into a ramp that much more conveniently led straight across to the edge of the cradle. The Bilswift field, unfortunately, was limited to four flat pads, which meant a lot more climbing if we wanted to get into or out of our ship.

  Still, I supposed I should be grateful that Bilswift had even that much. The nearest alternative was a good eight hundred kilometers away, with the nearest fancy Spiral-1 field five thousand kilometers farther than that, on the edge of the regional capital of Tranlisoa. Aside from the daily suborbital shuttle from Tranlisoa to Bilswift I had no idea what kind of long-range transport options the region had. Anyway, the thought of leaving our ship that far out of reach would have made me twitchy even at the best of times.

  Which, naturally, this wasn’t.

  “What’s interesting?” I asked, looking around as we continued downward. If the spaceport was no great shakes, the town stretching beyond it didn’t look a whole lot better. Bilswift’s collection of low, unimpressive buildings were laid out along a mix of wide and narrow streets, with patches of trees or other greenery popping up at seemingly random locations. It was hard to make definitive judgments from a distance, but it looked like the larger buildings—businesses and some light industry, the data files said—were concentrated along the wider streets while the smaller ones were private homes or small apartment complexes filling in the space along the narrower ones.

  “The mix of aromas,” Selene said. “I smell a lot of different cooking styles.”

  “Human or other?”

  “Mostly human.”

  “Reasonable,” I said, nodding. The Narchners and Ulkomaals had been putting colonies on Alainn for two hundred years, starting near the equator and spreading out in both directions, but other species hadn’t really gotten into the game until sixty years ago, with humans bringing up the rear ten years after that.

  But unlike most of the others, who were looking for comfortable living space, the human entrepreneurs had targeted locales with a mix of economic expansion possibilities. The Bilswift area had caught their eye, offering lumber, exotic seafood, and possible tourism. The tourism angle hadn’t worked out as well as the developers had hoped, but the other two were keeping the community’s financial head above water.

  Still, the city’s history meant it had remained very much dominated by humans, which fit with Selene’s analysis.

  Not that I could smell much of anything except the salty ocean air around us. But I didn’t doubt her analysis for a second. The breeze was light, but it was coming from the east, which meant it was carrying traces of the entire spectrum of Bilswift’s aromas toward us.

  I was used to Selene’s magic myself, of course. She and I had been together for many years, first as bounty hunters, then as crocketts, then as whatever the hell our official position was these days with the Icarus Group. But Kadolians were extremely rare in the Spiral, and their hypersensitive sense of smell was guaranteed to surprise the socks off most of the rest of the population.

  More than once I’d considered parlaying Selene’s talents into bar bets and free drinks. So far I’d resisted that temptation.

  “It’s the two unfamiliar ones that concern me,” she continued, an unhappy look in her deep-set gray cat’s-eye pupils. “One of them seems to be Patth.”

  “Seems to be Patth?” I echoed, frown
ing. It wasn’t like Selene hadn’t had plenty of experience smelling Patth cuisine, after all. Way more experience, really, than either of us had ever wanted.

  “Yes, seems to be,” she confirmed. “There are distinct Patth elements, but there are . . . variations from the ones I’m familiar with.”

  “Maybe it’s their version of gourmet cooking,” I said, feeling my stomach tighten as I eyed the low, tree-covered foothills to the east that ran between the higher mountains in the near distance right down to the edge of town. Add in the ocean to the west, a wide river bordering the city to the north, and more encroaching forest to the south, and Bilswift took on a definite sense of claustrophobia.

  I’d hoped we could finish the job the admiral had sent us here for and get out of town before the Patth arrived in force. Clearly, we were too late.

  Unless . . .

  “Any way to tell from the strength of the aroma how many Patth are chowing down?” I asked. “I’m wondering if what you’re smelling is just the advance team.”

  “You mean it might be an upper-class variant?” she suggested.

  “Exactly,” I said. “If we’re talking an organizer or conciliator, maybe even a sub-director if Nask has sent someone ahead, then the archeologists and diggers the admiral said were on their way might not have arrived yet.”

  “That’s possible,” Selene said, her eyelashes fluttering as she tried to sift the more elusive aromas from the air. “Either way, there’s no way to tell the number of Patth by the strength of the aroma.”

  “Either way, the clock’s ticking,” I said. “I’m thinking maybe we should hit the ground running. A quick drive up into the mountains as soon as we can grab a runaround and see if we can at least figure out whether there’s anything up there that was worth burning through hyperspace at plus-thirty for.”

  I peered off to the west. “In fact, with a good four hours of daylight left, we might even be able to finish off the whole thing.”

  “We can try,” Selene said, more cautiously. “Uh-oh.”

  I followed her pointing finger. A middle-aged and decidedly overweight Ihmisit was trundling toward us at a speed usually reserved for younger members of her species. She was carrying an info pad, and as her arms pumped up and down I spotted the spaceport logo on the back of the pad.

  I winced. So something both official and urgent.

  Terrific.

  We reached the bottom of the zigzag about three steps before the Ihmisit reached us. “Stop,” she puffed as she came to a halt. “No farther. You are”—she paused to look at her info pad—“Gregory Roarke?”

  “I am,” I confirmed, focusing briefly on the shiny PERRIFIL nameplate on her collar. “Is there a problem?”

  “Yes,” she said, gesturing up toward the Ruth. “You must vacate this spot immediately. It has been reserved.”

  “Absolutely,” I said firmly. “It’s been reserved by me. Six days ago, and I have all the proper paperwork.”

  “The promise of the paperwork has changed,” Perrifil said, her attitude starting to come back in proportion with her breath. As my father used to say, Never be out of breath if you’re trying to pull rank, especially if you’re a mid-level bureaucrat. It just makes people laugh. “A Patthaaunuth representative has requisitioned this spot for an incoming ship, which may be here at any time. Furthermore, a Ylpea ship is due in three days’ time. You must therefore depart immediately.”

  “I see,” I said. So whether the Patth cooking Selene smelled was just the advance team or the team plus some diggers, they had another batch of the latter on the way. I had no idea what the Ylps could possibly want in Bilswift, but unless the Patth had hired them for some reason they weren’t likely to be a problem.

  What was going to be a problem, as Perrifil had already pointed out, was that the Ruth was currently occupying the fourth of the spaceport’s four landing pads. If we got chased off, even if the Ylps took the slot away from the incoming Patth, the fact that the Patth were already here meant that us getting knocked that far out of position would likely lose us the race to the pot of gold.

  And that could be disastrous. Admiral Graym-Barker and his Icarus Group were currently locked in a quiet but furious race with the Patth to locate and grab more of the portals that had been left behind by a mysterious and long-vanished species Selene and I had dubbed the Icari.

  As far as anyone knew, the Icarus Group was currently ahead of the game. They had three full-range Icarus portals in their possession, huge double-sphere devices that could be set to instantly send a traveler to any of potentially thousands of other portals like it. They also had a pair of what we called Geminis, portals that were exclusively dyad-linked to each other. The Patth, in contrast, had only a single Gemini pair.

  The big caveat here was that those two Geminis were all we knew they had. There were indications that the mahogany-skinned little rotters had known about the portals and been hunting them a lot longer than the seven years or so since Jordan McKell and his band of misfits had stumbled across the Icarus and subsequently put humanity onto what had once been the Patth’s private playing field.

  But one way or the other, that score was likely to change in the next few days. Graym-Barker had intel that strongly suggested there was a new portal half buried in the forests east of Bilswift. The Patth had a team in place and more on the way.

  The Icarus Group, in contrast, had Selene and me. And as with any game, sheer weight of numbers would eventually win the day.

  But as my father used to say, If you can’t beat ’em at their game, change the game.

  Perrifil was still standing there, presumably waiting for me to apologize for inconveniencing her and the entire Bilswift Spaceport operations department and promise to get the Ruth out of there as soon as humanly possible. “I see,” I said again. “I presume both groups want the pad undamaged?”

  Perrifil’s insectoid antennae twitched at the odd question. “What? Yes, yes, of course they will. Why such a question?”

  “Because if I lift now, it won’t be,” I said. “Our portside thruster is on its way to losing a couple of collimator vents. If even one of them goes, so does this pad. And probably a couple of the others along with it. Not to mention the ships currently occupying them.”

  Perrifil looked up at the Ruth. “Why didn’t you report this before you landed?”

  “Because it didn’t flag until we were already on the ground and powering down.”

  “You did not report it then, either.”

  “Because I need to do a complete diagnostic before I can tell the mechanics what I need them to do,” I said, putting as much strained patience into my voice as I could manage. Ihmisits were better than the average alien at reading human vocal nuances, and I needed to impress on her the seriousness of the situation. “The diagnostic is running now. As soon as I get the full report I’ll go to the maintenance office and see what they can do for me.”

  She looked up at the Ruth again, probably wondering how she was going to explain this to whichever high-level Patth had ordered us kicked out. “Perhaps we could carry it elsewhere?” she suggested.

  “That might work,” I agreed, sifting rapidly through my options. If the supposed damage to the collimator vents had also run fracture damage to the longitudinal modulator feed line . . . “I assume Bilswift Spaceport has insurance that will cover any additional damage that might ensue?”

  Her antennae twitched again. “Additional damage?”

  “As in what lifting the Ruth could do to the longitudinal modulator feed line,” I elaborated. “And of course, if the portside thruster has a problem, chances are the starboard thruster has one, too, in which case that modulator line could also be damaged. Still, a lift and move would probably only run you seventy or eighty thousand commarks. I just want to make sure you’ve got that possibility properly covered before I sign off on it.”