Chronicles of a Space Mercenary 0: Tanya by Ronald Wintrick

Author:Ronald Wintrick [Wintrick, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781470046309
Amazon: 147004630X
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2013-05-19T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 38

Tanya was waiting immobile in the total darkness of the warrens for more than forty-eight hours. Not moving, barely breathing, waiting. The patient hunter is always rewarded. Tanya was almost rewarded too well this time. There were three of them and they weren't taking chances.

Tanya caught sight of their thermal glow long before she heard a sound. They were far too good for that, but they weren't good enough to have forced themselves to keep wearing their thermal retardant suits. They carried no lights, counting on the assumption that Tanya would have given up her thermal retardant suit as well. They were mistaken. Lying prone inside a rotted crumbling place in the wall, and reducing her heart beat through rhythmic slow breathing, she wasn't even uncomfortable. A little warm at most, and impatient, but she didn’t let that impatience transfer to her body. It was in her mind alone.

The Simians began slowly to draw nearer. They were moving with the utmost caution. A limited intellect did not mean a limited cunning. Their simian enhancements reduced intellect but raised their reliance on their instincts. They were as wary as any animal, but they weren’t in their own forest and that was all that Tanya needed to even the odds. There were still three of them and only the one her, and who knew how many more were near enough to intercede if Tanya couldn’t silence them before they could react?

They were spread out. The first in line was meters ahead of the second, and the second meters ahead of the last. Tanya didn’t like the weapon the first in the group was carrying. It was an old style scatter-gun, although its manufacture would have been recent, and it was probably loaded with something much nastier than lead pellets. Tanya didn’t want to find out the hard way what it was packing. In all likelihood, some form of micro-flechette load. She should have thought of it herself, as it was ideally suited to the tight enclosed tunnels of the warrens; just swing it in your opponent’s general direction and pull the trigger. The Simian with the scatter-gun would have to be taken out first, negating her desire to let the last in the line pass before making her attack.

It seemed an eternity before the first of the three was alongside her crack in the wall, and for a moment, as it paused to sniff the air, Tanya thought for sure it had or would detect her, but the overpowering stench of the warrens confused whatever it thought it smelled and it slowly continued to move on past, its every sense on alert as some inner warning tried to make itself known, moving gracefully now as it stalked. Tanya shot it through the back, through the corrupted heart, closing her eyes as she depressed the actuator, to avoid the flash that would also momentarily blind the second two. Or so she hoped.

Tanya rolled free of the crevice and yanked the scatter-gun from the Simian’s now nerveless fingers before it could even begin to fall to the ground.

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