Hard Bargain by Blaze Ward

Author:Blaze Ward [Ward, Blaze]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644700747
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

13

Valentinian

Bohrne station was way down below them, astronomically speaking. Valentinian had specifically brought Longshot Hypothesis out of the overdrive well early. Enough so that they would have to bounce back in at some point, or spend the better part of two weeks riding the engines down to the planet. Not worth the headache.

Because he wanted silent darkness today.

Dave was in his starboard seat, looking professional. Kyriaki was standing behind them, just inside the hatch, watching.

“It’s beautiful out here,” she whispered in a voice probably not meant to be overheard.

Not that there was much space in here. She was almost breathing on his ear as it was.

At least she hadn’t thrown a punch at him in the last week. He still wasn’t about to let the woman have the passcode to the armory, though. She had Dave to protect her, if she needed something. Or him, technically, he supposed.

Shock pistols didn’t do any permanent damage, usually. She might still convince him to experiment. But she had kept her tart tongue to herself, for the most part.

They were all in new territory. How many people got to a place in life where they could never envision being allowed to go home, even if they wanted to?

Valentinian shrugged inside and brought up a system schematic on the main console, setting it to listening. Most of the traffic was one-way transponder. The station broadcasting lane assignments and current vectors of other ships, as you came out of warp and needed to know where to maneuver.

But they were more than two light hours away from the planet, trailing it as it dawdled around the orange-red star in the middle distance.

“Do we trust them?” Dave asked carefully.

“As much as we can anyone,” Valentinian grinned back.

They had all had to mentally move to a new place over the last week. Wanted outlaws, damned near anywhere, except maybe here and places the Widow hadn’t had a chance to raise an alarm yet.

Valentinian scrolled through the traffic. Bohrne wasn’t all that busy a station. Most of the transits were small freighters like Longshot passing through with loads of things, plus the occasional mega-transport hauling cargos the size of his ship, to be broken down in orbit and delivered by smaller vessels to specific locations on the planet below.

There. Hopefully, that was the message for him, and not a honeytrap designed lure him in and kill him.

Valentinian had a second course plotted, just in case it was. The benefit of taking the time to drop out of warp this far out. He could set another looping course as a backup and trigger it as soon as he decided he was nervous. This one would be even more fun. It was as exact a reciprocal for Cronus Prime as he could calculate from here.

Someone watching him go would look at his vector and their nav computer would spout apparent gibberish at them. Who returned to the scene of a crime?

Dominion-427, departure outbound on lane 27. Destination Meskle.

Just what it should read,

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