Alpha Rises (Valyien Book 2) by James David Victor

Author:James David Victor [Victor, James David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fairfield Publishing
Published: 2018-06-19T22:00:00+00:00

10

Jumpers

The container units crackled with warp energy, a glow like a sun’s glare, although there were no large stars in this section of space. Suddenly, the light melded, mutated, and with a feeling like an explosion-wave underwater, the containers blipped out of existence.

This was a common occurrence here in the Lashar System, itself a fairly broad and barren space between the neighboring systems of Andis and Kuvalla. Only a few rocky planetoids and slow orbit asteroids passed through. That and the hundreds of thousands of container ships.

Lashar System was especially chosen for this purpose, as a transit site in the same way that you might find a monorail station or a starport hub on any of the Coalition home worlds nearby. Lashar was safely inside the confines of Coalition of space—secure from pirates and enemy raids—but also empty enough that large amounts of warp jumps could be performed without any associated hazard of gravitational waves or unintended accidents. The many mega-conglomerate companies of the Coalition had been using this space for a hundred years or more, and there was a steady string of container ships spread out like pearls on an invisible thread, weaving their way through.

It was also where the Andis gas-harvester had been destined, there to birth its own container ships from its metallic womb and pump them out into the line toward their destination.

“You found it?” the tense Captain Eliard muttered to the tense Cassandra beside him.

“Yeah. That one.” The blonde woman looked up from her cramped console beside the ship’s wheel. The cockpit was designed for the Mercury’s original purpose as a luxury racer, and not as a serviceable transport.

El followed Cassandra’s pointed finger out of the cockpit windows, to see the large steel box with the under-slung booster rockets, circular warp engines, and tiny personnel cab at the front making it look like some kind of horrible queen bug, pregnant with its offspring. What the captain knew it really was pregnant with, however, was stellar gases from the harvester.

“And you’re sure? I don’t want to end up at Earth now, right?” Eliard said through his clenched teeth. Cassandra could tell that he was already living on his very last nerve and there was a rather ugly vein popping from the side of his temple. It was from being there, this deep inside Coalition space—the very place she knew that he had fled from many years ago to live the life of a smuggler and a pirate, stealing the Mercury Blade along the way. That would be enough to put him into a lifetime isolation cube somewhere in Coalition space, but now that they were also wanted by Armcore for the theft of Armcore property, the House Archival Agent knew that they were probably all set for a firing squad somewhere on some terrible desert planet.

Yeah, it’s pretty clear why he’s tense, Cassandra thought.

The agent, however, had no such sign of stress about her. As a member of one of the Coalition noble houses, she was

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