Masada's Gate by Chris Pourteau & David Bruns

Author:Chris Pourteau & David Bruns [Pourteau, Chris & Bruns, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hip Phoenix Publishing, LLC
Published: 2019-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Stacks Fischer • Masada Station, Orbiting Titan

I left Erkennen’s protégé, but not until I’d heard that lock cycle. Bekah Franklin was a living, breathing dead man’s switch. If she died, so went the Company.

That weighed on my mind a bit, so I took a walk. I do some of my best thinking when my feet are moving and my mouth isn’t. I didn’t really have anyone ’cept my contract to talk to, and she’d be counting sheep soon. My only other options were a handful of geeks who spoke English but in a different language, and Bruno Richter, who preferred one-word grunts from Hunland to real conversation.

Well, that was just fine with me. Maybe it was professional competition or maybe it was his killing style—indirect, with poison—but every time Bruno Richter breathed, he rubbed me the wrong way.

I walked and thought and found myself comparing Richter to Daisy Brace. He came up short in every way. I chalked that up to my reaction to his reaction to my being on his turf. Defensive, offended, jealous. Something. But if Gregor Erkennen thought Richter could handle the job of keeping Franklin safe, he’d never have brought me here, right? I was playing nursemaid to his Number One Man. That had to curdle the milk in Bruno’s cornflakes. The looks he gave me were one trigger finger short of homicide.

I took my time, my steps clicking and clacking along Level 3’s lifeless corridor. They were the only sound around. I cocked an ear at the tiny apartments the crew would have occupied were they still in residence. Every single one was silent as the grave. Hell, the doors, labeled for their occupants who’d moved moonside, even reminded me of tombstones.

My joints had begun to ache, the left knee particularly. The air felt heavy in my lungs, like the cold of space was seeping through the walls. So the heat, like the lights, had been set to minimal function, part of Gregor’s distraction strategy. Plenty warm to ward off a need for a winter coat, but not warm enough for my old bones. If we’d been back on Earth, I could pretty much guarantee a thunderstorm was coming.

I favored the knee a bit as I slow-walked the habitat level. The light in the section I’d just left blinked out. The one in front flickered alive. Masada Station was big. Not as big as Adriana Rabh’s ornamented headquarters belt-buckling Callisto’s ring, mind you, but it felt bigger—the absence of the living will do that to a place. I’d counted thirty or so doors since I’d left Rebekah Franklin. Thirty or so vacant quarters, half the station’s complement.

Masada Station was more rigid in its design than Rabh’s HQ too, more clinical, which made sense given the tech-types that built it. I literally doffed my hat to Erkennen as I walked. He’d achieved something by dressing up Prometheus Colony as the actual prize. He’d managed to fool Cassie Kisaan sitting in her iron throne on Earth. Imagine how much data he’d had to fake to do that.

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